No. 13 - Sex + Drugs + Rock 'n' Roll edition 💑 💊🤘
Jim Morrison was a drunken buffoon posing as a poet
Growing up, the Doors were paragons of cool. The L.A. band embodied the sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll archetype while carrying a dark, dangerous mystique, one that seemed purposely cultivated by Morrison. You could throw a stick and hit dozens of bands influenced by them - The Cult and Tea Party probably most directly. But I was only ever a greatest hits level fan of the group (though God knows I’ve tried to dive deeper). For reasons that I’ve been trying to put my finger on, by the mid-2000s their influence appeared to be on the wane. Today, the most visible sign of the band’s influence is the guy who goes to Nepal over summer break and comes back wearing a sarong but no shoes.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve accidentally marinated myself in the musical history of L.A.’s Sunset Strip. It started with Greg Renoff’s book Van Halen Rising and continued through the 2012 doc Sunset Strip, Stephen Davis’s Watch You Bleed, and the Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time miniseries. The common thread that runs through each (besides the Strip itself) is the spectre of the Doors and Jim Morrison.
Their fade from view can be partially attributed to the natural passage of time - with each successive generation fewer and fewer bands from their era are seeing their legacy passed on to successive generations. But it’s also tied to changing values. The sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic that is so wrapped up with their mythology, feels woefully out of touch today.
A modern spin on the adage “wine, women and song,” sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll as a common saying kicked around in various permutations for a number of years, used as a shorthand - not necessarily in approval - for the late-60s/early 70s counterculture values.
Ian Dury and the Blockheads recorded a track of the same name in 1977. In the decades that followed, the phrase became a rallying cry, both celebrating and condoning debauchery and hedonism, all in the name of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
But it’s total bullshit.
Viewed through today’s lens, “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” not only rings false, but it also condones dangerous behaviour.
In the 60s, free love and psychedelic drugs were said to be mind-expanding experiences that also broke away from the stifling mores of previous generations. Bands from San Francisco’s psychedelic rock scene, like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company certainly espoused this view and rock in general soon became synonymous with radical social shifts.
The Doors, who had cut their teeth as the house band at the Whisky a Go-Go, embodied this ethos more than any of the bands who were part of the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene. But by the 1980s, sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll had devolved into hedonistic rebellion, exemplified by Sunset Strip glam-metal bands like Quiet Riot, Motley Crue and W.A.S.P., who treated Morrison’s Lizard King persona as a kind of spirit animal. You could hear Guns ‘n’ Roses Appetite for Destruction - a nasty record that I nevertheless love - as a morality tale about the consequences of adopting the sex, drugs and rock lifestyle.
In retrospect, the mediocre Doors biopic Oliver Stone made in 1991 marked the beginning of the end of Morrison’s deification. Any piece of history on 80s hard rock will include at least one musician bitterly complaining about how grunge and the AIDs epidemic ruined their good time. It’s not that 90s rock bands were chaste teetotalers, but their self-seriousness made the L.A. hairbands look like cartoons. As the decade wore on and sex and drugs took a back seat (though publicly frowned upon, both remained prominent features of the music biz), Morrison was starting to look less and less like a sage shaman and more and more like a drunken buffoon posing as a poet.
The sexual revolution of the 60s, brought about by both changes in science (the birth control pill) and culture (the feminist movement), was very much real. But while women’s rights were certainly expanded in the 60s and 70s, free love was often a one-gender affair; in light of her relationships with artists like Graham Nash and Jackson Browne, Rolling Stone infamously named Joni Mitchell “Old Lady of the Year” the same year she released her landmark album Blue. If the past few years of revelations of sexual assault, coercion and abuses of power have taught us anything it’s that the patriarchy remains firmly entrenched placing rich, white rock stars fucking anything that moves on the wrong side of history.
Ditto the drugs that were supposed to enlighten a generation. Weed is now legal in Canada and in many states, but we’re also in the midst of a deadly opioid epidemic. If Morrison’s (and Joplin, and Hendrix, and Cobain, and Winehouse…) death wasn’t a wake-up call that mindless self-indulgence is dangerous business, I don’t know what is.
Then there’s rock itself. I’ve written about rock’s slow decline before. Its progressive outlook, the one that catapulted groups like the Doors into the cultural stratosphere, has calcified and. The sex and love that artists today enjoy - and sing about - is much different. Gender binaries are breaking down at a rapid pace, while openly queer, trans, and gender-non-conforming artists, as well as women, are increasingly visible on the charts, bringing new perspectives to rock and pop lyrics. The drugs have changed a lot too though we have a much better understanding of the toll that self-destructive behaviour can take, both physically and mentally, on artists and the people around them. But rock’s slow fade has taken many giants with it and at the end of the day, this is probably the primary reason the Doors have faded from view (that tour with the Cult’s Ian Astbury taking Morrison’s place probably didn’t help).
This isn’t the end, my friends - the Doors place in music history remains unchanged. They’re part of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, their albums are considered classics and they managed to influence a swath of second-generation bands both musically and aesthetically. But the band’s image as an archetypal 60s rock group, decadent artists indulging in every primal whim, now looks and feels like a relic from another time.
Kool Kids Music Self-promotion Club
Wrote a little blurb about Elio for Exclaim’s March New Favs list.
I also reviewed the new dad sports EP for them.
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
Michelle Zauner’s been relatively quiet lately. We didn’t hear much from her after 2017’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet. But she re-emerged last year with Bumper and now she’s set to drop a new Japanese Breakfast record in June as well as her memoir, Crying in H Mart, about growing up as a Korean-American and the loss of her mother (whose battle with cancer was a catalyst for JBrekkie in the first place). “Be Sweet” the first single from the new JBrekkie record splits the difference between the more immediate indie rock of 2016’s Psychopomp and the electronic elements of Soft Sounds.
Detroit’s The Armed remind me a lot of Toronto’s own Fucked Up. Not that the two bands sound much alike mind you. But like FU, The Armed seem intent on pushing the boundaries of punk and hardcore - two very conservative genres in terms of their tolerance for musical exploration - into bold new territory. They’ve been around for more than a decade now, but (ahem) armed with cleaner production (once again courtesy of Converge’s Kurt Ballou) and more hooks than on their previous three records, Ultrapop, out April 16, seems poised to break the “punk rock collective” big.
Though the name suggests something on the extreme end of the metal spectrum, Skullcrusher is actually Helen Ballentine, a Los Angeles musician whose work is more in line with Phoebe Bridgers’ sad-girl indie-folk thing. “Storm in Summer” is the first track off her (very good) forthcoming EP of the same name, which ups the audio fidelity from last year’s debut EP. Yet the production upgrade hasn’t erased the creaky, lived-in quality to her music that I really dig. You can hear her hands moving across the guitar strings, even as the music hits like an aural and emotional tidal wave.
At first blush, Los Angeles songwriter Petey seems like an odd pick for social media stardom but something about his short, folk-pop tunes with an existential edge have struck a chord with the folks doing whatever people do on TikTok. The biggest nod to the platform on the new track with fellow L.A.-based artist Miya Follick (whose “Stop Talking” was one of my fav songs of 2018) is the total lack of an intro and outro - the whole thing is basically various interpolations of Petey’s (very catchy) vocal hook. I dig it.
When I wrote about Toronto sister act Triples a while back, I didn't realize that Madeline Link had another band, slacker-rock crew Pax. Now re-branded as Packs (pronounced the same, spelled differently) the band recently signed with Fire Records (Royal Mountain here in Canada) and announced their debut take the cake, out May 21. The collection includes first single “Hangman,” as well as “Silvertongue,” whose Beaches shot clip you can check out below.
Did someone just dig through my record collection and start making me bespoke content? I’ve written about both Field Medic and Samia in the past. Now Samia jumps on this track from last year’s Field Medic LP Floral Prince. Her high voice is a great counterpoint for the stripped-down ballad. In other Field Medic news, FM-mastermind Kevin Patrick Sullivan recently became an unlikely TikTok star when his 41-second track “song i made up to stop myself from having a panic attack just now,” which is just that, took off on the platform. He dropped it and a remix featuring someone named Rich on streaming platforms last week. Not to be outdone, Samia released The Baby Reimagined back in January.
Laura Les was already making music as osno1 before hooking up with Dylan Brady as 100 Gecs. To the best of my knowledge, “haunted” is the first music she’s released without Brady since the duo blew up. The groove is slightly less scattershot than much of Gecs, but the hooks and nightcore vocals (sped and pitched up) and the 8-bit beats put it squarely in hyperpop scene in which she made her name. I’m not sure if this is a loosie or the first taste of some bigger project, but even at under 2 minutes in length, I’ll take what I can get.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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