Retro: Blow-Top Blues

“. . . dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn . . . angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection . . . who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness . . . contemplating jazz . . .” —Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Decades prior to Rock ‘n’ Roll’s official emergence in 1955 (when “Rock Around the Clock” topped the charts, conclusively ending the Big Band Era), marijuana enveloped American culture and its rebellious, mostly urban subcultures. Authoritarian laws and policies tried to do away with all that jazz.

And it literally revolved, at first, around Jazz.

For the longest time Jazz music, which became mainstream in the 1920s, was perceived by parents, preachers, politicians and the police as the red-hot soundtrack for a subterranean “underground,” youth culture where all the races mixed. These negators believed that marijuana inspired the music and then the inevitable interracial sex.

In Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, & Drugs (2017, Da Capo), independent historian and cultural commentator Martin Torgoff writes a sweeping account of how much of America’s marijuana debate was scripted eons ago.

America’s new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is hardly the first to make bold anti-marijuana pronouncements. A quick trip in Ye Olde Time Machine reminds us of the career and agendas of Harry Anslinger, who back in the Jazz Age loomed large while heading the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Dubbed “The Paranoid Spokesman,” Anslinger spearheaded a mass-media anti-cannabis campaign as the 1930s unfolded. That multifaceted campaign went beyond making outlaws of anyone who smoked weed. It aimed to forbid by law any and all freedoms regarding marijuana, premarital sex (interracial sex in particular), and the devil-may-care hedonism associated with the Roaring Twenties and its failed Prohibition laws. Torgoff explains:

“Anslinger became convinced that the only way to ensure against any possibility of a recurrence of what had happened with Prohibition—the phenomenon of a significant percentage of the American population wantonly and brazenly breaking an unpopular law they found obnoxious, living as virtual criminals until the law had to be repealed—would be through a national campaign

BOP APOCALYPSE by Martin Torgoff

against the weed.”

Anslinger and his Federal Bureau of Narcotics used the mass media of the day (major magazines, movies, plus newspaper articles). Torgoff explains:

“Before 1935, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature lists not a single article about marijuana in any major national magazine. From July 1935 to June 1937, four appeared; between 1937 and 1939, there were seventeen.” Those stories spotlighted crimes and murder sprees committed by individuals who were allegedly high. Demonizing weed, at the precise cultural moment when alcohol was again legalized, sparked a crusade that’s still in effect.

As the Swing Era uplifted millions of Americans’ hearts and had their dancing feet flyin’ high, the racially-biased links between dangerous weed and dangerous music would become clear. Swing would invite Jazz right into America’s living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms (or wherever else radios blared). No matter how white the Swing Era appeared, the music was still rooted in the Blues and black culture, integrating America long before baseball did.

“King of Swing” Benny Goodman was warned by managers and promoters about hiring masterly black musicians like Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian. Goodman broke “the color line” and Tommy Dorsey followed when he hired arranger-composer Sy Oliver to write classics like ”Swing Time Up in Harlem” and “Opus One.”

It’s no accident that one of drummer Gene Krupa’s biggest hit records was “Let Me Off Uptown,” “Uptown” a code word for Harlem. It was no accident that Krupa was eventually framed for marijuana charges, or that “Let Me Off Uptown” incited controversy because white vocalist Anita O’Day and black trumpet-man Roy Eldridge sang the lyrics as a fl irty, jive-like duet.

In Bop Apocalypse, Torgoff connects the dots:

“Anslinger was prepared to put forth a number of signature images to isolate what he saw as the greatest threats being posed to American civilization. If the fi rst image was that of an axe murderer and the second that of a degenerate schoolyard pusher, the third was equally threatening and pernicious: a Negro jazz musician.”

When the Swing Era tipped into the Forties, the all-American craze for alcohol was again fast supplemented by the rise of marijuana. By then a new generation of young writers had consolidated around Columbia University: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others bonded there, having endless encounters and escapades long before the media puffed them up as Fifties Beat Generation archetypes.

Kerouac’s writings, were in many ways his prose attempts to capture and replicate his unconditional love for Jazz. Torgoff says that when “Kerouac sat down in April 1951 and spewed forth… On the Road… the manuscript contained a dithyrambic evocation of the history of jazz in America, later published as ‘Jazz of the Beat Generation’… that used Lester Young as its central driving force and inspiration and that epitomized the essence of Kerouac’s developing spontaneous prose style.”

At the same time, young Norman Mailer (whose best-selling debut novel The Naked and the Dead was published in 1948) fell in love with cannabis. Writing in his trademark third-person mode later in the 1970s, Mailer looked back with fervor: “It started in the winter he was fi rst smoking marijuana. He smoked it with all the seriousness of what was then his profoundly serious heart. It was 1954, and the drug was more important than any love affair he had ever had. It taught him more. …. It was the arena of the particular sensation he chased, as though he had been given a lovely if ineluctable emotion while watching . . .” Well, you get the picture.

Like jazz, cannabis remains a blissful harbinger of unbounded freedom in American culture. No wonder the powers that be persist in their pathological efforts to demonize it.

Gene Krupa's LET ME OFF UPTOWN with Roy Eldridge and Anita O'Day

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