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50. Skip Spence – Oar
The place where this list had to start, essentially the Rosetta Stone for drug-induced madness, this is an archive of excess. Spence was a founding member of both Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape, who spent months howling at the walls in Bellevue after epic runs of windowpane LSD. Just after his release he was cynically recorded, releasing Oar, which is a mix of shambling nonsense and haunting ballads, soul-baring and childish in turns. The despair is palpable. This album has been passed around for years among giggling heads, serious collectors, and those in recovery looking for inspiration or something to truly fear. Everyone had a piece of Spence but Spence, who spent the rest of his life in one institution or another.
49. Spacemen 3 – Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To
You’d have to figure when it’s spelled out so blatantly they’re probably pure-veined Mormons pulling off an elaborate inside joke. Nope. This fuzzed-out squeamish throb of an album begs for either Jesus or rehab in every other line, each of which is held uncomfortably long, the vocal equivalent of a mescaline freak staring at the wrinkles on their palm: have you ever noticed how your hand looks like a highway overpass? So what if the other songs often sound embarrassingly like all of the Velvet Underground compressed into one scorched spoon? What matters is that each track smells like a week crashed in a Manchester apartment trying (and failing) to have sex with Jesus and Mary Chain groupies on a velour couch covered in cigarette burns and drool.
48. David Bowie - Heroes
Station to Station would be the obvious choice from the Bowie discography, if only because even amongst his other slabs of space oddity and forced outrageousness, Station is notoriously hunkered in a blizzard of cocaine of the quality usually reserved for Bolivian generals and DuPont heiresses. It’s a landscape of head-shaved, locked-door madness in which a thin white duke might spend six months grinding his jaw, whispering epic gibberish into a cheap microphone. Each song sounds gargled and twitchy, run through a filter of back-of-the-throat gak. And yet the choice here is Heroes, if only because it was recorded in Berlin, where Bowie and Iggy went to clean up, trading powder for midgets and sex clubs and random Prussian decadence. There the high was a tantalizing memory, and the resultant album even more amazing for it’s utterly bloodless inflections. Heroes is a nut-cutting, blue ice, deep Arctic void of an album. As well as totally brilliant.
47. Eddie Cochran – C’mon Everybody
Is there any more powerful drug than unfocused teenage sexuality? Either through orgasm or chemical rush, Cochran’s raspy bass voice and “fuck ‘em all” lyrics lit an intoxicating pyre under the first 50′s wave of rockabilly crossovers, which were absolutely dripping with the primal frustration and random anger unmatched by later, more overtly sexual acts. Cochran’s filthy twang, which ruled the radio waves when panties were still pure, can be heard in nearly every rock band since, from Led Zeppelin to the White Stripes, decades of ready bobby-soxers mainlining shuffle rhythm to get their rocks off. Cochran died in a car crash at age 21.
46. The Replacements – All Shook Down
Widely hated by most Replacements fanatics, All Shook Down is a grim slog through the wreckage of the band that is austere and revealing in turns. It’s pre-rehab but post-realization, a dissipated reprieve where stock must be taken and hard decisions made. Paul Westerberg sounds nearly bereft, the money spent, the bottles broken, the giddy buzz ten years gone. The rest of the band is surly and indifferent in turns. Founding guitarist Bob Stinson had already been “fired” for his erratic behavior and clumsy leads, left to deal (and die) with his addiction and mental illness alone—and the resultant karma is palpable. That said, the album is a slab of unwitting truth that has been more or less ignored since its release.
45. JJ Cale – Naturally
This album, released in 1971, is mostly known for the song “After Midnight,” which would be butchered a few years later by Eric Clapton–a fact Cale was completely unaware of until he heard his own song on the radio, transformed into a 70′s radio staple and moneymaking pow(d)erhouse. Whether Cale continued to abuse white lines, or just sound like he did, this album is like a sunny afternoon in a hammock with a beautiful girl, a joint, and decades of easy living ahead. Cale’s signature laid back virtuosity is in evidence track-by-track. There’s a reason Neil Young called Cale and Jimi Hendrix the “best electric guitar players I ever heard.” And that reason is because Cale managed to make every single song he ever recorded sound like 2am in downtown Tulsa, standing outside a bar that serves free hot dogs.
44. Nick Drake – Pink Moon
The final studio album recorded by Drake, it is the only one of the three without a backing band, and the stripped-down quality of the songs palpably reflects his mental state at the time, one of harrowing depression. Drake overdosed on pills at age twenty-six, but left this album as a legacy, one mostly ignored at the time but now rightly regarded as brilliant– a collection of delicate and starkly personal statements that makes no concession to anything but simple expression and sheer despair.
43. Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
Here Davis purposely and irrevocably destroys his legacy as Cool Birther and icon of be-bop by recording an incendiary slice of rock-tinged funk jazz, replete with upper register wah-trumpet, John McLaughlin’s fusion licks, and enough pimp stroll overtones to soundtrack the entire output of Iceberg Slim. The fact that Davis was aware that Jimi Hendrix was repeatedly dalliancing with his wife (the Funk/Diva legend Betty Davis) must have had an affect on the direction of his groove. Or maybe it was just the heroin. In any case, this is an absolute monster of an album, an unrepentant middle finger to jazz snobs, and a down-on-the-corner statement that throbs and wobbles and ultimately refuses to resolve itself in any context. It’s one of the most towering musical statements of the 20th century, a composition of 70′s black street life, the madness, the drugs, the hustle, the humanity. This is Proust in eight sides, four albums, one vision.
42. Jeff Simmons – Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up
Former member of the Mothers of Invention, Simmons left to go record a pair of albums for the Straight label, Lucille being anything but. It sounds like every 15-year-old’s room in 1970–black lights, bongs, riffs, solos and Zap-boogie arrangements with plenty of guitar noodling to shore up the tweaked lyrics. This is the album I Dream of Jeannie would be humming to if she’d lived in a bong instead of a bottle.
41. Dead Boys - Young Loud and Snotty
Cleveland’s own answer to The Stooges and The New York Dolls, the Dead Boys were a dumber, drunker slice of the distorted NY thrash-cake. Featuring the rude spasm of Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome, this album was produced by Ten Wheel Drive’s Genya Ravan (formally of one of the first all-girl bands ever, Goldie and The Gingerbreads–real name: Goldie Zelkowitz). The Dead Boys owned CBGB for a while, trading on their combination of anthemic stupidity, surly brilliance, and rivers of cheap booze. Listening to this album is like soaking in bourbon-flavored Palmolive: an absolute joy.
40. Bobby Fuller – Let Her Dance
Most famous for the early-sixties hit “I Fought The Law”, which has been covered by every punk band in history, and which he originally recorded (but was actually written by Sonny Curtis–who wrote the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show), The Bobby Fuller Four’s “Let Her Dance” is a genius example of throwback fifties rock run through an echo chamber of surf-reverb. The effect is both intoxicating and disconcerting, like the best moments of being high in any context. Having once appeared in the movie The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini with Nancy Sinatra and Boris Karloff, Fuller was found dead in the front seat of his car, soaked in kerosene. It was initially ruled a suicide, but many people think he’d been taking acid the night before at a party with members of the Manson family, who ran away after almost being spotted burning an overdosed Fuller, in order to hide evidence of his death.
39. Legendary Pink Dots – Shadow Weaver
Producers of over 40 albums, this band, led by the magisterial Edward Ka-Spel, is a mix of Skinny Puppy, King Crimson, and a massive dose of tainted mescaline. Shadow Weaver itself is a tributary of prog-madness and lysergic atmospheres. “City of Needles”, “Leper Colony”, and “Ghosts of Unborn Children” are utterly demented and terrifying highlights.
38. Meat Puppets – Meat Puppets II
Listening to the Meat Puppets is like hanging onto the end of a length of cyclone fencing being swung in circles by your unstable older brother. No other band has ever captured the musical axis of evil (dueling country-fried guitar licks, heroin/punk sensibility and ghostly soprano vocals) quite as capably as the Kirkwood brothers. Legendary for their addictions, instability, and multiple rehabs, they still play like runaway geniuses. Curt Kirkwood sings like a wounded squirrel, his piercing warble the perfect compliment to the desert-inflected marching cowpunk anthems. Too High To Die would have been a fine choice for an album in this spot, but “Split Myself In Two” is such a perfect metaphor for drug lust/disgust that it could not be avoided.
37. Serge Gainsbourg – Rock Around The Bunker
This bizarre coke-fueled Nazi inflected rock drama is so drowning in weird intentions and barely understood metaphor that it’s like snorting a doomed line of Borax. Still, Gainsbourg’s smooth baritone and in-jokey French Asshole delivery totally delivers. One of the least scrutable albums ever recorded, the kind of thing that could only have made sense on the high wire of huit straight days of very, very expensive accelerants.
36. Elliott Smith – Either/Or
Elliott Smith died at age 34 of two stab wounds to the chest, which was ruled a suicide but is still inconclusive by many accounts. A heavy user of drugs and alcohol, as well as a sufferer of mental illness, Smith nevertheless put out six albums before his death, many of which are now acclaimed by cognoscenti as among the best of their generation. But it is Either/Or in which his greatest strengths and vulnerabilities are showcased. Using a spiderweb-thin delivery, over quavering and vulnerable chords, his songs are raw and simple and unusually affecting.
35. Bud Powell – The Amazing Bud Powell
The eccentrically brilliant co-inventor of bebop, and percussive rapid-tempo keyboard daredevil had already been committed to Bellevue by the time he recorded The Amazing, in which he can be regularly heard doing his signature growling and mumbling along with the rhythm. After being arrested for public drunkenness (during which he was likely sober and manic) and being beaten by the police, enforced electroshock therapy made him alternately violent and despondent. Soon after, his beloved brother Ritchie would be killed in the same car crash as the genius trumpet player Clifford Brown. Powell eventually died of TB and neglect, one of the greatest piano players of the twentieth century. This album is a legacy of his pain and brilliance.
34. The Libertines – The Libertines
A side of raw crack with a heroin chaser. An absolutely loathsome album in its oblivious self-involvement and rampant narcissism, and yet sort of a genius slab of pop drenched in undeniable hooks and hopeless dissipation. The studio tales are lurid, the tour debauchery even worse. Junkie lore in ’77 Detroit is one thing, white-Brit junkie 2003 with a side of Kate Moss is something else entirely. Still, “Can’t Stand Me Now” or “The Man Who Would Be King” pushed past third-form dorm angst and proved worth every ounce of navel gaze hatred.
33. Iggy Pop – Kill City
The musical equivalent of Death on the Installment Plan. Iggy in mental hospital for junk withdrawal. James Williamson takes over, who everyone hates, and starts barking orders. The absolute end of the Stooges, launch of Iggy solo, a memento of junk-trash-bravado, barely listenable but breathtaking in its nihilism and lack of talent. A pure historical statement: this is your band on drugs.
32. The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
It is well known that Keith Richards shot a genuinely protean amount of heroin during the Stones’ debauched encampment at Ville Nellcoté in the south of France during the recording of Exile on Main Street. Gram Parsons spent a (un)healthy amount of time hanging about as well. It got so bad that Mick and Bianca rented an apartment a few hours away and only showed up to lay down the occasional track while the rest of the boys hung out in the basement practicing “Ventilator Blues” while waiting for Keith to rouse from his opiate coma long enough to fuck up another guitar line. And yet, somehow, Exile is by far the greatest Stones record, and one of the greatest rock records of all time–despite each and every note being dipped in pure molten poppy.
31. Johnny Thunders - So Alone
There are addicts, and then there are fiends. Johnny Thunders’ hero was Keith Richards, an emulation he took very seriously. Post-NY Dolls, his band the Heartbreakers were simultaneously a kickass rockabilly NY trash rock outfit as well as a traveling dimebag circus (add Jerry Nolan, minus Richard Hell, etc). And Johnny was the worst purveyor, both the lead-slinging hero and the stumbling shit-veined clown. So Alone features relatively crappy Ventures knockoffs (actually the Chantays) as well as Zappa-esque 50′s pop recreations and the reasonably affecting “You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory.” This album is essentially a dried cotton ball, a clogged spike, a foul-smelling pair of leather pants left at the corner of Lexington and 53rd. His bizarre and relatively unexplained death in New Orleans only adds to the mystique of this excellent but reeking album.
30. Harry Nilsson and John Lennon – Pussy Cats
Notorious for his epic appetites, and justly lauded for his first few albums, 1974 found Harry Nilsson in the studio with friend and fellow debauchee John Lennon. The two had caroused at length around LA, regularly being kicked out of clubs and restaurants for absurd behavior, finally deciding to cut an album together. Nilsson, whose beautiful and delicate vocals had highlighted earlier releases, got into a coke-fueled competition with Lennon about who could scream their parts louder and ruptured a vocal cord. His voice was never the same. This album is one blurry inside joke after another, with unusual and surreal arrangements of songs from Jimmy Cliff to Bob Dylan that is steeped in a fortnight of hard drugs and harder lessons.
29. Shuggie Otis – Freedom Flight
Conceivably the most pleasantly baked album ever recorded. Funky, smooth, and with sweetwater vocals by Shuggie himself, son of strident bandleader Johnny Otis. Bad trip? This is your listen. Pot cookies and lemonade? You’re right there too. This is a Manhattan balcony, a sunny August, a mellow blunt, a cookout with pals, and a dalliance with horns. If a more chill album ever existed, especially before the word chill ever existed, I’d be terrified to hear it: you might be lulled into a short, blissful nap you’d never wake up from.
28. Suicide - Suicide
Without question one of the seminal albums of the 70′s, and possibly one of the greatest anti-rock opuses ever. Manhattan streets plus No Wave plus Jukebox Teardrop. You wanna take a swing by Deuce Avenue? Minimalism? Psychobilly? Yellow speed plus acid? Pure stoned synesthesia: genius. Also the third best album ever recorded to randomly ingest half of your mother’s medicine cabinet to.
27. James Ramey – The Baby Huey Story
At over 400 pounds and an unrepentant junkie, it’s not much of a surprise that Baby Huey died of a drug-related heart attack at the age of twenty-six. What is a surprise is how his sole album remains one of the best and most obscure slabs of funk recorded in the 70′s. With incredibly tight horn arrangements and a throbbing spine of a bass, Ramey’s truly raw and expressive voice carries each track well beyond the usual. What really propels the album though, in the end, is the other-worldly screech Ramey often released, part James Brown, part Grace Jones, part deeply wounded man. It pierces as it funks, and skunks it’s way through high after dirty backbeat high
26. Arthur Brown – The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
The God of Hellfire was a histrionic showman often lowered onstage by a rope wearing a flaming metal mask. Which sometimes required being doused by beer to keep from being badly burned. One of the few people ever kicked off of a tour with Jimi Hendrix for outlandishness and chemical excess, Brown continued to wear a colander on his head while reaping the royalties from the hit “Fire.” The rest of the album is a surprisingly sturdy blues rehash, stealing bits from James Brown and Screaming Jay Hawkins and then forcing them through a psychedelic mash of bravado and pure methanol.