Heroin and music in New York City, by Barry Spunt, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 278pp, ISBN: 978-1-137-30856-6
In the final line of Heroin and music in New York City, Barry Spunt quotes the comedian Lenny Bruce, who said of his own use: “I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.” It is a poignant way to end the book but also strangely at odds with one of its main conclusions. Many of the musicians discussed in this study died young but few have good things to say about heroin’s effect on their professional careers or relationship with music. Keith Richards comes about the closest: “in certain cases it helps you to be more tenacious about something and follow it further than you would have…, on this stuff you would just nag it and nag it.” It does not sound much like divine inspiration and Richards is much more representative of the general tone in remarking that “It’s certainly not the road to musical genius or anything else.” (p70)
The impact of heroin on New York musicians’ “playing, creativity and careers” is one of three main questions addressed in the study which also explores the motivations for and circumstances of use and asks why the drug has been more commonly used in certain musical genres than in others (p1). The analysis is organised by musical genre with a chapter dedicated respectively to jazz, rock, R&B, Folk and Latin and Caribbean Music, topped and tailed by the introduction and conclusion. Within each of these case studies, the lives of musicians who have used heroin are described in more or less chronological order, followed by a summary discussion of the evidence and its significance in terms of the research questions.
The book read to me as a labour of love and is a model of scholarship. The first-hand accounts pieced together to tell the story come from academic texts, newspapers and magazines, autobiographies and biographies, media interviews, blogs, online archives, etc. It feels as if no stone has been left unturned and 47 pages are needed to list the huge array of sources consulted. As such, it is a fine example for students of the imaginative use of secondary data and, rather like the board game Monopoly, is a methodology that could be copied to another big city, only with a comparative dimension to boot. For this reader at least, it was a real education in the history of music in New York City (and beyond), heroin or no heroin.
This is also a slight weakness. Three quarters of the sample of 69 heroin using musicians identified in the study come from just two genres, rock and jazz, and at times the focus on heroin seems slightly forced. The story of R&B and Latin and Caribbean music is largely one of non-heroin use and it feels that some of the content of these chapters, for example, on drug trafficking networks, is there because there are so few musician-users to write about. Having clearly identified a hole in the literature – there are literally no comparable studies Spunt tells us in the introduction – he is mostly content to stay in it and these rare forays into other aspects of the bigger world of drugs and crime only seem to happen when there is little in the hole to chew on.
On the other hand, the relative absence of the drug in some sub-genres of the New York music scene compared to others gives weight to the book’s central thesis that heroin use is best understood as a sub-cultural phenomenon and that the extent of use was contingent not so much on availability, which is not really an issue, as on the identity individuals aspire to and seek to promote. “Thus, a main reason to use for many young bebop musicians was that they wanted to be part of a hipster culture” and the “subcultural identity of the musician-user was seen to be a very attractive one to have”, whereas “the 1980s–1990s street subculture of New York rappers had a very different view of heroin. Being a successful dealer might bring status and street credibility, but the drug had a bad image and rappers didn’t use” (p175--6).
The roll-call of heroin using musical heroes encountered in the book is impressive. Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Lou Reed, Dee Dee Ramone, Iggy Pop, Sid Vicious, Debbie Harry, Ray Charles, Dr John, Chaka Khan, and James Taylor; they would make a good band. Ever enigmatic, Bob Dylan makes for an entertaining, “did he, didn’t he”, cameo. The roll-call of premature deaths impresses in a different way. Holiday died aged 44, Parker aged 34; so it goes on and whilst Richards, Pop and Harry and many more have lived to tell the tale, it is not a happy one. For most of the more and lesser known musicians we hear about and from, their heroin use was a descent into hell. Moreover, whilst criminalisation certainly exacerbated their problems, the consensus amongst Spunt’s talented sample is that the buck stops with the brown sugar.