The British Invasion Next Brought- DRUGS!

If the page freezes refresh. Pop music was turning from holding hands and being loved, to heightened consciousness through drugs!

Some groups hid their drug use behind metaphors and symbolism. Some put it right in your face. The Pretty Things perform L.S.D.:

When The British Invasion started to come to fruition, the Rolling Stones couldn't exactly be called choir boys or anything. Being crafted as the nastier version of what the Beatles were supposed to be, the songs of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had a lot more menace in their delivery, whether that be about sexual frustration on Satisfaction or the dark outlook on life in Paint it Black. There are countless drug songs in their arsenal, but Mother's Little Helper is actually more of a cautionary tale.

Written right when Mick and Keith were starting to leave the blues covers behind, this song tells the story of a mother needing a bit of help keeping everything together each day, resorting to taking uppers and giving her the energy to keep going throughout the day. The whole thing seems almost like an advertisement, but things start taking a turn halfway through the song when you see her getting hooked on them, leading to the final verse where she gets an overdose and passes away with them still in her hand. Via What Culture . com

In 1964, The Beatles were formally introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan who, after being left red-faced for thinking the ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ included a reference to pot, offered the foursome their first joint. It was an experience that many have pointed to as a pivotal moment in the group’s career. It opened up their minds (McCartney even proclaimed to have worked out the meaning of life while high) and enhanced their viewpoint for songwriting — Rubber Soul, the following album, was referred to by Lennon as their “pot album.”

But after Dylan reintroduced the group to cannabis, The Beatles were all in, often using the drug throughout the filming of Help! and during the recording sessions for Rubber Soul. But the earliest nod to drugs probably came in late 1964 on the single ‘I Feel Fine’.

If there was one song that pointed directly to The Beatles increasing drug use then the image of Paul McCartney, the straight man of the group, writing an ode to marijuana is about as definitive as you get.

Speaking in 1994, Macca said of the track: “I’d been a rather straight working class lad, but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting. It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana and to me it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.

“So ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ is really a song about that. It’s not to a person, it’s actually about pot. It’s saying, ‘I’m going to do this. This is not a bad idea.’ So it’s actually an ode to pot.”

But pot wasn’t the only drug around.

Timothy Leary was promoting LSD everywhere:

The drugs were hitting U.S. pop as well. Not always the same drugs as the British were singing about. In 1967 The Velvet Underground put the song HEROIN on an album, this version from 1969 is live and rare:

But the anthem of the drug era I believe was this song:

“White Rabbit” was penned by Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick when she was still a member of the band The Great Society. She borrowed the song’s trippy imagery from Lewis Carroll’s timeless children’s books, Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Slick explained to The Guardian how she wrote “White Rabbit” on a piano that cost her around $50. “It had eight or 10 keys missing, but that was OK,” she said, “because I could hear in my head the notes that weren’t there. I used that piano to write several different songs.”

“White Rabbit,” in particular, was a product of its time. Appearing on Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 sophomore album Surrealistic Pillow, the first with Slick as a vocalist, the song closely resembled the decade – its ethos and the counterculture – and would soon become synonymous with it.

“The 1960s resembled Wonderland for me,” Slick told the outlet. “Like Alice, I met all kinds of strange characters, but I was comfortable with it.”

The song’s mind-expanding meaning came with the help of mind-expanding substances. “In the 60s, the drugs were not ones like heroin and alcohol that you take to blot out a terrible life, but psychedelics: marijuana, LSD and shroomies,” Slick said. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities. You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realizing that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”

She admits the tune is darkly tinged. “It’s not saying everything’s going to be wonderful,” she added. “The Red Queen is shouting off with her head and the White Knight is talking backwards. Lewis Carroll was looking at how things are run and the people who rule us.”

But the main message comes with the closing line feed your head, wailed in repetition. “[It is] both about reading and psychedelics,” she said of the lyric. “I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”

The song explores psychedelics in their fundamental form, the band’s bassist Jack Casady echoed in the same interview. “The idea of taking psychedelic drugs to open you up and make you more receptive,” he added. Many people during that era took psychedelics, he explained. “That was part of the environment of the time and ‘White Rabbit’ reflected that.”

Coming next, drugs hit everywhere. From The Beach Boys to Bob Dylan, Quicksilver Messenger Service to the Dead, to a backlash from Merle Haggard.

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For a week, 5,000 students had occupied five buildings on the Morningside Heights campus, protesting the university’s connection to the military industrial complex and it plans to build a gym in Morningside Park, a public park in the mostly African-American neighborhood next to campus. Police had forcibly removed the strikers from the buildings the days prior to their arrival, but the entire campus was in a sort of “lockdown” with police and guards denying access to the majority of the campus. This gave legendary tour manager Rock Skully an idea. Never one to shy away from confrontation and always the promoter, he got ahold of the strike organizers and offered to hold a free show on the campus. Knowing the police would never permit this, the band and their equipment had to be smuggled in. “Just think of the publicity,” I’m sure Skully thought. ” San Francisco’s Grateful Dead fooling the cops to play for New York student radicals.”

The band members, also not ones to shy away from the spotlight of the fuzz, Merry Pranskter blood running through their veins, thought this was a great idea. Both the Grateful Dead and their equipment made it from the outskirts of campus to Low Library Plaza in the heart of campus in the back of a bread delivery truck, and they were already set up and playing before the security and police could mobilize to stop it. But some of the radicals wanted to take the opportunity to make speeches using the band’s PA system, which the group has explained was only for music. At one point, Bob Weir actually kicked one of them in the ass when his view of Jerry and Phil was obscured; however, the show was deemed a rousing success.