Waiting for the Man: Story of Drugs and Popular Music

Shapiro, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749302070 ISBN 13: 9780749302078

Publisher: Mandarin, 1990

In this book Harry Shapiro examines the time-honoured association between drugs and popular music. He begins with a brief discussion of Western drug-taking before drugs were made illegal in America by the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, but the twin rise of jazz and marijuana in the early 1920s heralds the real start of his survey. Each development in popular music has brought with it a new fashion in drugs; Shapiro catalogues these trends and relates them to sociological factors such as race, class and society's attitude towards musicians. He tells in detail the stories of many famous victims of drug abuse, from Charlie Parker to Sid Vicious, and provides evidence of collusion between the drugs and music industries. Shapiro also examines contemporary press accounts of well-known drug arrests, such as those of the Rolling Stones and Boy George, and considers with some irony the 1980s phenomenon of pop stars crusading against drug abuse. Throughout it all, organized crime plays an intermittent but sinister part.

Review:

"One of the twenty greatest music books of all time." -- BBC's Music for the Millennium, December 1999

From the Publisher:

Updated classic study of macabre links between drugs and pop
Drugs and pop have been inextricably intertwined since marijuana and jazz flourished in mob-controlled 1920s prohibition speakeasies. Shapiro documents the origins and progress of each new development in drugs and pop and tells in detail the stories of music's most famous drug casualties - Bird, Hendrix, Morrison, Moon, Vicious et al - while examining the collusion of the billion dollar record industry. First published in 1988, this edition is fully revised and now covers the rise of crack and rap, ecstasy and the dance culture and the return of the wasted junkie rock star.