Rock ‘n’ Roll: Going to Pot

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

They’ll stone ya when you’re try’n to gohome,

Then they’ll stone ya when you’re there all alone.

But I would not feel so all alone,

Ev’rybody must get stoned.

A caveman’s lament? A paranoid’s fantasy? Could be, but then the convoluted verses of Rainy Day Women, like most Bob Dylan songs, are open to a variety of interpretations. In any event, some radio stations have banned the record because, they say, the song is an obvious paean to the joys of smoking pot. In the shifting, multilevel jargon of teenagers, to “get stoned” does not mean to get drunk but to get high on drugs. But what cinched it for the radio men was the title: a “rainy-day woman,” as any junkie knows, is a marijuana cigarette.

The controversy whipped up by Rainy Day Women in recent weeks has caused disk jockeys to comb through lyrics like cryptographers. What they have found is a spate of new songs dealing with all kinds of taboo topics, many of which, veiled in hip teen talk or garbled in the din of guitars, are being regularly aired over the radio. POP MUSIC’S ‘MORAL CRISIS,’ screamed the front-page headline in Variety recently; Dylan discipes countered by adopting a line from his new Ballad of a Thin Man as their nose-thumbing rallying cry: “Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” What is happening is that the folk-rock movement, heady with the success of its big-message-with-a-big-beat songs (TIME, Sept. 17, 1965), has been prompted to try racier, more exciting themes. It is no longer down with the P.T.A. and conformism, but—wheel—onward with LSD and lechery.

In-Group Game. It is all in the name of kicks. “The adult world,” says Marty Balin, 23, lead singer for San Francisco’s most popular rock ‘n’ roll group, the Jefferson Airplane, “pays us all this money to play at their political benefits and society parties, and then we throw out this jargon and watch them be revoked. That’s kicks.” The Jefferson Air plane flies on weekends at a discotheque in Fillmore Auditorium, where projectors flash quivering, amoeba-like patterns on the walls to induce the dancers “to take a ‘trip’ [an LSD experience] without drugs.” One of the Airplane’s “trip songs” is Running Around the World, an abstract number that, says Balin, celebrates the “fantastic experience of making love while under LSD.”

But not all the rockers are as ready to explain their “hidden meanings.” That would destroy the mystique. As a result, the pop-music audience has become divided into two camps: the Dirties, who read debauchery into the most innocuous lyrics (they see Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night, for example, as a song about a homosexual pickup), and the Cleans, who would argue that Ray Charles’s Let’s Go Get Stoned is a call to take part in a Mississippi freedom march. To the Dirties, such songs as Straight Shooter (junkie argot for someone who takes heroin intravenously) and You’ve Got Me High are, of course, fraught with double entendre. Scanning for hidden meanings, in fact, has become something of an in-group game for many teenagers. Take the ditty I Love You Drops. “It’s probably pretty innocent,” says a Washington rock ‘n’ roll fan, Anne Williams, 17. “But he could be getting high on nose drops. You can, you know.”

Decapitated Dolls. For variety, high-schoolers can also contemplate the problem of suicide in A Most Peculiar Man or search for the supposed reference to an unwed mother in Little Girl or a whorehouse in Doll House. But the real snigger is in decoding the sexual innuendos. Sometimes it is easy: Lou Christie’s Rhapsody in the Rain, for example, was banned by many radio stations because, as the program director for WLS in Chicago, Gene Taylor, explains, “There was no question about what the lyrics and the beat implied—sexual intercourse in a car, making love to the rhythm of the windshield wipers.” A tougher test is the Rolling Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, which has sold 4.5 million copies, with Lead Singer Mick Jagger wailing, “I’m tryin’ to make some girl.” Difficulty was, Tagger’s diction is so slurred that many stations unwittingly played the record; others bleeped out the offending phrase. But, gloats Jagger, “They didn’t understand the dirtiest line.” That is the one where the girl pleads: “Baby, better come back later next week ’cause you see I’m on a losing streak.” Says Jagger: “It’s just life. That’s what really happens to girls. Why shouldn’t people write about it?” Why, indeed. Says one record promoter: “The kids with the clean songs are having a hard time coming up with hit songs.”

Perhaps so, because the latest group to get into the act is the true but hitherto-never-blue Beatles. One of their recent releases, Norwegian Wood, has been interpreted by some as the tale of a man trying to seduce a lesbian. Another, Day Tripper, can be interpreted as the lament of a man who finds out that his girl is a prostitute (“She’s a big teaser . . . she only played one-night stands”). If that doesn’t shake up the Beatles’ fans, then the cover of their latest album would. It is a photograph of the famous four wearing butchers’ smocks and laden with chunks of raw meat and the bodies of decapitated dolls. The first reaction to the cover in the U.S. was so violent that Capitol Records pulled it off the market, explaining that it was a misguided attempt at “pop-art satire.”

Scatological Satires. But when it comes to sheer shock value, no one can match the Fugs. The Fugs have no use for innuendo: they lay it right on the line. While such ditties as Wet Dream over You and Group Grope (which features two simulated orgasms) are obvious even to the grown-up squares, the Fugs’ scatological satires have gained a steadily growing audience on the college campuses. Says Chief Fug Ed Sanders: “There are too many taboos in society, and we want to eliminate them. Being a Fug is better than being on a peace walk.”

While the Fugs have unquestionably extended the trend to extremes, not everyone has gone to pot. Kicks, a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, warns so effectively about the evils of drugs that the composers were given an award by Synanon, the self-help group for narcotics addicts.