When rock 'n' roll finally says 'no.'

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 1996 | by L. Brent Bozell, III

In the ongoing public conversation about what to do about the drug epidemic that has enslaved so many young people, one thing is certain: The romantic veneer of the 1960s drug culture has been stripped away. So destructive do we believe it was that a 1995 poll conducted for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. found the sixties drug mentality to be the most negative societal development of the past 40 years.

At the core of the sixties drug culture was the rock-music industry, which glamorized to an entire generation of young people the drug usage that ironically would kill one drug champion after another. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were just a few of its victims; Jerry Garcia joined the roll call last year. For 30 years, the music industry allowed the nihilism -- and annihilism -- to continue.

Until now. The fatal overdose last October of Blind Melon singer Shannon Hoon was the catalyst for two closed-door meetings at the headquarters of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS, and on June 21, it was announced that the heads of the Capitol, MCA, Virgin and Revolution record labels had agreed to help oversee an industry antidrug program that includes intervention, treatment referrals and financial assistance. Perhaps as noteworthy as the program itself is the bracing, bully-pulpit rhetoric of NARAS President Michael Greene. In the event drug use is discovered, Greene told USA Today, "anyone who profits off an artist has the obligation to stop whatever was going on -- touring, recording -- and put that individual into treatment." The aim, he said, is to "hold [industry executives] accountable" and "publicly humiliate" them when they fail to act responsibly.

The program has no testing provision, but a prominent force in this campaign, Aerosmith manager Tim Collins, backs a system under which artists could be dropped by their labels if they continue to test positive for drugs. (Aerosmith, devastated by addiction in the eighties, has enjoyed a renaissance since its members cleaned up.) According to Greene, though, "This is not about being the drug police. To contemplate any support of drug testing is just ridiculous."

Predictably, not everyone in the business is applauding Greene's declaration of war. Other labels -- Warner Bros. and Geffen among them -- have declined to join the program. Reasons for their nonparticipation reportedly include a preference for handling problems in-house and a fear that, Greene's statements notwithstanding, mandatory testing will become a reality.

But why not mandatory testing? Several years ago, the National Football League initiated mandatory testing (over the howls of protest from the players' union) for a simple reason: There was a drug problem in its ranks, professional athletes are role models for impressionable youngsters and the league wanted to project a positive message to young people by showing the courage to discipline its own. In short, while the right to privacy is important, a failure to control illegal, and very public, drug abuse within the business would constitute acquiescence. In that vein, Interscope Records did the right thing recently when it refused to sign to a contract the band Lifter until its singer went through detox and rehab.

Drug addiction continues to ravage the music industry. Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland was arrested last year for crack and heroin possession; in April, a judge ordered him into a treatment program for his ongoing addiction. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Brad Newell of the band Sublime died of a heroin overdose, and David Gahan of Depeche Mode was arrested for possession of heroin and cocaine just after he apparently injected a mixture of the two drugs.

An article by John Colapinto in the May 30 issue of Rolling Stone contains illuminating remarks from musicians about the lure of heroin and the power of role models. Colapinto quotes Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain, who said in 1992, "I've always admired Keith Richards and all those other rock stars who were associated with heroin. There had been some type of glamour element to it." Nirvana was the most popular of the so-called "grunge" bands, and Cobain's own heroin use was well-known. How many young people did he influence before he blew his brains out with a shotgun?

Colapinto's first-rate piece of journalism is sobering, but its message was somewhat undercut by editor Jann Wenner, whose obituary for Timothy Leary in Rolling Stone's July 11 issue heaps praise on the LSD guru and closes by asserting that "it's a poorer world without him." It is precisely that sort of romantic nonsense that has given men like Michael Greene and Tim Collins the courage to proclaim: Enough.