Music

RIP, Syd. And RIP, 'Cid.

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"To complement its foulness, sulphate users needed to find a new type of music as rough-edged and disgusting as the drug itself. What they came up with was punk rock -- simple, fast and angry. Leftover acid-heads were still telling us to love the world. Newly amphetamised punks demanded that we trash it. The names of the new groups seemed endless -- the Stinky Toys, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Slits, the Vibrators, the Damned, the Clash, the Buzzcocks -- all driven by buckets full of foul speed sniffed through unpleasant little tubes. The best known, of course, were the Sex Pistols...After the group got into a fight during a gig at the Nashville and beat up a member of the audience, Johnny Rotten told a reporter, 'Actually, we're not into music. We're into chaos.' The truth was even simpler. They were into amphetamine sulphate, like everyone else."

At about the same time, other, prettier people in far more glamorous surroundings were sticking gold-plated coke spoons up their noses and boogie-oogie-oogiein' down to the sounds of KC and the Sunshine Band, Gloria Gaynor and the Bee Gees on one side of the musical spectrum and glam rock and hair metal on the other. At its best, this coke music had the same euphoric rush the drug had, but like cokeheads, the music was also smug and ignorant. It talked loud and didn't say much.

Along came ecstasy and crack in the '80s, and Ex combined acid's love of the world with coke's shallowness and gave us bands like Wham -- well-meaning, but vapid. And crack gave us primal rap like "It Takes Two" -- the ultimate manic crack anthem. It sounded like disco on, well, crack. And at least around here, codeine has emerged in a big way, and as with all opiate drugs, the music is slowed down and not too concerned with what's going on around it.

But none of those drug booms had anything like the scope or power or beauty of the LSD boom, which continued to echo in the '80s and early '90s and was still fairly widespread in the underground, as can be heard in the comedy of Bill Hicks, Sam Kinison and Steven Wright and the music of bands like Nirvana, the Butthole Surfers and many more of the left-of-the-dial legions. Most of them gave either their bands or their albums some kind of trippy name -- think Rembrandtpussyhorse, Camper Van Beethoven, the Jesus Lizard. And then there was acid house, acid jazz, trip-hop and the whole rave movement where disco used to be a couple of decades before.

And that was where it came to a screeching halt. In 2000, the feds arrested two chemists -- William Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson -- who were said to be the kingpins of acid distribution worldwide. According to the DEA, since those arrests, LSD sales are down a full 95 percent, and speaking from my experience in hanging around lots of bands during that period, that number seems about right. You just don't hear about the stuff as much as you used to, though it just so happened that I was at a club and heard about some for sale the night after Syd Barrett died. The asking price was $20 -- four times the going rate back in the early '90s.

And you can definitely tell it's gone from the music. Pop today is just as vapid as it was in 1961, albeit better produced. Mainstream rap is bottoming out in a nadir of hedonistic, materialistic stupidity -- and hell, you could say the exact same thing about most radio-friendly country these days, too. So-called alternative rock speaks only to prescription-drug-addled suburban mallrats, while far too much indie rock is made by sober and polite kids whose idea of a cosmic experience is to quaff two or three Pabst Blue Ribbons and stand and listen to a DJ mash up Neutral Milk Hotel with Ciara.

"There's a definite lack of expanding from indie rock in the last six years," Brennan agrees. "A definite lack of progression."

Nope, Syd, today's world is one you never made.

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