June 30, 2008
Given the theme of our book, “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery” (also newly available at Barnes and Noble, Tower Books, and other fine retailers), we here at the SharkGuys.com have focused most of our postings on that most legal of intoxicants, booze.
But does that mean that we are against other substances that are capable of lifting one from this mundane world into a place that is much improved by chemicals, or that we would cast aspersions on those who enjoy the pleasures of say mescaline, or a bite at the ole gypsum weed (you can remember the effects of the latter using this handy mnemonic device courtesy of Wikipedia: “blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, red as a beet, hot as hell, dry as a bone, the bowel and bladder lose their tone, and the heart runs alone”)? Of course not.
And what do you do after a night on the lager when you feel as if one more beer will leave you putting on a colorful display of emotion over the nearest gutter? Well, if you are in a place that has the right level of sleaze, you can simply wink to some likely individual and enjoy a line off the back of your house key in some dank alley. Spirits lifted, the night can go on.
Cocaine of course has had a significant impact on popular music. While booze is far more likely to result in sloppy work and an unsightly beer gut in middle age, coke leaves you wired enough to ensure that you will produce a whole lot of something, and thus ups the odds that you will actually produce something good.
Keith Richards may have fallen out of a tree in Fiji while out of his gourd on other than vitamin supplements, but he is what rock n’ roll is all about: debauchery. And, while a sober Eric Clapton was quoted as saying, “I hate listening to my old records, which I did stoned or drunk,”he’s alone in that camp as most fans of his music hate listening to anything that he’s done straight.
Keith Richards entire career, Neil Young’s coked out performance at “The Last Waltz”, Stevie Nicks having built up such a tolerance to cocaine that she had to have it blown up her rectum to get a high (this never happened, apparently, but is nonetheless one of the more entertaining urban legends), cocaine use is an integral part of the rock-star lifestyle. It’s what young boys dream about: One day, if I practice enough and work on perfecting my skills as a singer-songwriter, I too will be able to snort cocaine off of the breasts of a vacant-eyed stripper whose name I’ll forget before I’m back on the tour bus and liquidating a savings account by mobile phone to settle debts with unsavory characters.
Here we have compiled a list of the Top 10 Cocaine Songs of all time — songs about, influenced by, and more than likely written on clouds of Peruvian marching powder:
10) “Bales of Cocaine”, by The Reverend Horton Heat: In this one, the good Reverend regales us with the modern day parable of a farmer out in his field pulling corn and carrots “when two low-flying aeroplanes, ’bout a hundred feet high/dropped a bunch o’ bales o’ somethin’, some hit me in the eye”. The farmer cuts the bales open and notices a mysterious powder inside. Being a rube, for whom presumably white lightnin’ is still the biggest thrill in town, he has no idea what it is and brings it to his “Crazy Brother Joe”: “He sniffed it up and kicked his heels, said, ‘Horton, that’s some blow!’” Our lucky farming friend then heads into Dallas, becomes a millionaire by selling his find, ditches his farm in Texas and buys another in Peru. Think of it like the Bill Paxton movie “A Simple Plan”, only a whole lot happier and without Billy Bob Thornton in the role of a mouth-breather. We can safely assume that at some later point in this farmer’s life the drug dealers whose fortune he stole would have tracked him down and introduced him to the latest in Columbian necktie attire, however, for taking a different angle on the cocaine song and for its appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit, we salute the Reverend Horton Heat and include “Bales of Cocaine” on our Top 10 Cocaine Songs of All Time list:
Bales of cocaine, fallin’ from low-flyin’ plane
I don’t know who done dropped ‘em, but I thank ‘em just the same
Bales of cocaine, fallin’ like a foreign rain
My life changed completely by the low-flyin’ planes
9) “Lit up” by Buckcherry: This is a song that needs to wipe its nose before returning to the dinner table. With two founding members who met in a tattoo parlor and bonded over their mutual love of AC/DC, Buckcherry exemplifies the type of hard rockin’ lifestyle that has enriched many a well-connected roadie. A song meant more for the mosh-pit than for lyrical analysis, this one is interesting though for the number of places in which the narrator gets “lit up”. They include: a plane, his couch, his bed, on a train and backstage somewhere with a groupie knocking, “Crack the door for the curious girl cuz she’s waitin’ she’s been waitin’…” And fulfilling the age-old maxim that all bands who look like this will eventually do something that reminds one of Spinal Tap, we get a replay of the classic, “It goes up to 11″ bit of dialogue in the following bit of verse: “I’m in touch love, from this crutch/Well you’re on ten but buddy I’m on eleven”.
“I’m on a plane With cocaine And yes I’m all lit up again”
8) “My Michelle” by Guns ‘n’ Roses: “I don’t do cocaine anymore. Well, only occasionally,” GNR guitarist Slash, 1992. Long before the band broke up and Axl Rose set about attempting to strangle whatever bit of fan support they had with the “Chinese Democracy” debacle, the Gunners were at the forefront of cocaine-fueled hard rock with Appetite For Destruction, and “My Michelle” was one of their best. The Michelle in the song actually existed. She knew the band and asked Axl to pen a tune for her. She did not get “Sweet Child Of Mine” treatment. This one tells a story of a hard-living woman whose “daddy works in porno/Now that mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin/but now she’s in the ground.” The song and the real-life story both have a happy ending, as, according to Slash’s biography (which would no doubt require a snort of something illicit to get through), Michelle has since moved across the country and cleaned up her act.
“So you stay out late at night And you do your coke for free Drivin’ your friends crazy With your life’s insanity”
7) “That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynyrd: Though better known for penning that motet Sweet Home Alabama, heard if a case of Amstel Light, a $150 Yamaha guitar, a group of white people, or a campfire are within a 100-yard radius, Skynyrd is also known for this thoroughly unpleasantly titled opus: ‘What’s that smell?’ being one of the worst questions you can ever hear uttered, along with ‘Is anyone here a vegetarian?’ A well-worn refrain when it comes to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, members of the band were killed by over-consumption, but in this case, it was of fuel, at least according to the National Transportation Safety Board, who determined this caused their plane to take a nosedive into a Mississippi forest. This song references an earlier and less-killing crash involving guitarist Gary Rossington, whiskey, coke and an oak tree that would just not get out of the way.
“Whiskey bottles, and brand new cars
Oak tree you’re in my way
There’s too much coke and too much smoke
Look what’s going on inside you
6) “Life in the Fast Lane“, by The Eagles
With an obstructed view concert ticket to one of their performances costing in the range of your average eight-ball, The Eagles certainly know a thing or two about life in the fast lane, a song inspired by a road trip Glenn Frey took with a dealer named ‘The Count’. In ‘Hotel California’, (a song so ubiquitous you can be wandering the rugged mountains of northern Laos and hear a villager who’s otherwise had no contact with modernity, humming a few bars) there were ‘mirrors were on the ceiling’, and in this song, their paean to hard-living, they served a dual purpose other than a means to admire your feather mullet and creepy mustache.
“They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills
There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face”
CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO — THE TOP FIVE COCAINE SONGS OF ALL TIME!
