Drug Free Roundtable

In my recent post Blessed Are The Drug Free Paul McCartney said that getting high during the recording process is a bad idea because “tuning up is a bit of a chore when you're stoned” (MYFN p.192). Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne makes a similar point

I try to remind people, that when [creative] people are willing to do drugs, it’s just another way of saying “F**k man I don’t have any limits. I’ll try things and see what happens.” Making music is such an internal, psychic connection that people have. When you have to collaborate with people, I don’t know too many people that would want to be [high]. We would want to do the drugs and then go out and have fun. We wouldn’t want to sit in our studio and struggle with what the kick-drum is going to sound like. Speakeasy 

Film director John Waters agrees with Ringo who said “we found out very early on that if you play it stoned or derelict in any way it was really sh**ty music - so we would have the experiences and then bring that into the music later” (SOL p.110).

Everybody said, “Oh, you must've been on drugs when you made those movies”. No, we weren't on drugs when we made them. I was on drugs when I thought them up, and I was on drugs when we showed them. But I was never on drugs when we made them because it was too hard [to work when you're high]. NPR

Even when they were high the Beatles benefitted from straight engineers and producers. George Martin observed “There's no doubt that, if I too had been on dope, Pepper would never have been the album it was” (AYNIE p.206). Lennon wasn't so lucky during his solo career however

Drummer Jim Keltner “John was exercising all his bad habits, as were we all, including Phil [Spector], the only problem with that was that Phil was the producer, and somebody had to be sane.” The article notes that Spector would often dress as a surgeon, karate instructor or cowboy, shooting the ceiling and chasing Lennon with a loaded revolver. Ultimate Classic Rock


Lennon expressed doubts about crediting drugs as the source of his creativity asking “Did Dylan Thomas write Under Milk Wood on beer?... the beer [and] the drugs are to prevent the rest of the world from crowding in on you. They don't make you write better”. Beatles Interviews

In an interview with Slate, comedian Marc Maron calls such crediting “romanticizing and unfair”

Slate: I’ve heard literary scholars suggest that mind-altering substances helped certain artists do their best work? 

Maron: What people forget, English professors included, is that those artists were probably geniuses—so to give that much credence to a substance is romanticizing and unfair. Would we not have that art if it wasn’t for drugs? I don’t know. But I guarantee you that at that moment in time, most of them … weren’t thinking, “I’m a genius. If I take this medicine or if I get strung out on this s**t, that’s when I’m doing to do my best work.”...Whatever the relationship was between their mental health and their addiction, you can speculate all you want, but it’s not a system built to generate brilliant things.

Arjune Rama: What Marc Maron Taught Me About Addiction



Read the full Blessed Are The Drug Free post here 

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The Benefit Of Limitations - A Virtual Roundtable

In my post Blessed Are The Limited I talked about the creative advantages of reducing your available options especially in terms of equipment and time. Many other creative types agree and here are three more (each audio clip is under 3 minutes).

Singer/Songwriter Derek Webb talks about the restrictions of label/network censorship forcing more creative work. (Hear the full interview on Seminary Dropout Podcast).




Jack White speaks eloquently about limiting himself in just about every way possible in the DVD Under Great White Northern Lights

And author Neil Gaiman suggests mixing periods of work rigidly defined by others with more solitary work. (Hear the full interview on the Nerdist podcast).




Check out other Be-Atletudes here

Tom Morello on Limiting Yourself

In Blessed Are the Limited I wrote about the power of deliberately reducing your number of creative options, a point I revisited in Blessed Are The Mundane when I noted just how little gear (and coworkers) the Beatles had.

I've found supporting testimony from an unusual source on Graham Cochrane's excellent blog The Recording Revolution - Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello. 'Unusual' because Tom has a reputation for pushing new boundaries and creating new sounds on the electric guitar. And yet he's been using exactly the same guitar rig for over 20 years! He says

I’ve had the same rig since prior to Rage Against The Machine. It’s the same [amp] head. It’s the same cabinet. The newest piece of gear that I have on my board is a pedal that I got in 1991. There’s a sense of comfort in not worrying about gear anymore, I’m [now] going to worry about trying to get sounds and music out of the gear that I have.

In a Feb 2000 interview with Guitar One Magazine Tom said

In order for me to be able to let my musical imagination run to extremes, I like to have a lot of the variables, like gear, locked down. I like to know it's always going to be that amp [and] those effects pedals. It's always going to be these guitars as the cornerstones of the physical end of the music-making. Because that stuff is locked down in place, it allows me the freedom to explore ... just the thought of all that chaos caused by constantly bringing in new gear makes me nervous. 

Graham comments

We might find that it’s actually the gear... that we truly love. Writing and having songs to play and record simply are the fuel for our gear lust.

Whether 'gear lust' is our real motivation, or simply a giant distraction, it's good to take stock of what we actually need, reduce 'equipment drag' to the bare minimum and get back to writing songs!

Read Graham's full article here

Read more on limiting yourself creatively from Nicholas Tozier, Hugh MacLeod and Paul McGuinness
Check out more 'Be-atletudes'

Randy Newman On Being Prolific

In Blessed are the prolific I said that the Beatles always had a reason to finish their songs, whether they were substandard or not.

Randy Newman at Performing Songwriter thinks this is a good thing...

One thing that you can never let happen to you is to become more of a critic than you are a writer, where you actually choke yourself off. I tend to get that way...where the critic in you stops everything. Finish some stuff. You know, you look at some of the Bach inventions, well Bach finished everything. Sometimes it’ll be just like no kind of idea at all, but he’ll go right to the end and something will happen. Finish your stuff.

Nicholas Tozier On Limitations

In Blessed are the Limited I said that a key to the Beatles productivity was that they had far less options than even your average independant musician circa 2011. Songwriter/blogger Nicholas Tozier agrees -

Constraints lead to creativity. Restrictions often lead to ideas—they force us to stretch, to grow, to improvise, to tap new resources and to work around the limitations. I think as much about new, interesting constraints as I do about new song ideas. I love throwing a wrench in my own gears, defying my usual creative habits. A new kind of process leads to a new kind of song.

Listen to Nicholas Tozier: How the Haiku can Improve Your Songwriting or read the transcription.

Hugh MacLeod And Paul McGuinness On Limiting Yourself

The Beatles were incredibly prolific because they were severely limited by the technological options at their disposal. Here are two more witnesses on the advantages of limiting yourself

Hugh MacLeod (Artist)

The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. There's no correlation between creativity and equipment ownership. None. Zilch. Nada.

Actually, as the artist gets more into his thing, and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. He's a man on a mission. He's got a deadline. He's got some rich client breathing down his neck. The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn't need to.

How To Be CREATIVE (Free eBook Download)

Paul McGuinness (U2 Manager)

[The ‘Pop’ album] was the first time I started to think that the technology was getting out of control. When people are trying to choose between mix 26 and mix 27…the sheer range of possibilities [creates] a form of paralysis.

(U2 by U2 p.270)

Related Post: Blessed Are The Limited