How did this change happen? Blame
the music. Pop music brought Mary Jane to mass consciousness. And
through generations of jazz, folk, rock, reggae, country, and rap, pop
has played a massive role in winning mainstream acceptance for the
drug. To see this dramatic shift at work, one only need take a tour of
marijuana-themed music, of pop songs about pot, tunes about toking,
compositions about the chronic, if you will. Or even if you won't.
We
start, we do with most trends in American popular music, with Louis
Armstrong. Way back in 1929, he recorded perhaps the first song about
weed to reach a mass audience, "Muggles." Sorry, Harry Potter-ites, but it's true. Muggles" was a slang term
for marijuana before there ever was a Hogwart's. Satchmo was joined by
dozen of other jazz stars, like Cab Calloway singing about the "Reefer
Man" and Benny Goodman's "Texas Tea Party."
But
the straight world caught on, and pot was soon being portrayed in mass
media as an evil temptress—as with the unintentional camp of "Sweet Marijuana."
The faux-Busby Berkley production from a 1934 movie, Murder at the
Vanities prefigures 1936's propaganda film "Reefer Madness," and the
subsequent federal law, the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act that made cannabis
made illegal. Or "The G Man Got the T Man" as Cee Pee Johnson put it. Even St. Nick had to go underground in "Santa's Secret"—a song which does explain why the old elf is so jolly and his constant need for cookies.
Doobie
tunes snuck back into the public mind though folk music, with
innocuous-sounding titles like "Puff, the Magic Dragon," and Bob
Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." Dylan as folkie and later a rock star
probably did more to promote the use of marijuana than anybody outside
the Beatles. In fact, the so-cool-it-should-be-apocryphal story is that
Dylan himself first turned the Beatles on to weed in a New York City
hotel room.
Soon, coded songs about pot came fast, if not furious. The Byrds' "Eight Miles High," "Along
Comes Mary" by The Association, "Let's Go Get Stoned" by Ray Charles,
and Dylan's own annoying but inescapable "Rainy Day Women #12 &
35," with its deeply insidious refrain.
Soon, everyone had gotten stoned. They wanted more. Like Fraternity of Man, a one-hit wonder whose one hit was "Don't Bogart Me," alias "Don't Bogart That Joint," from the Easy Rider soundtrack. Or Brewer & Shipley whose 1971 track "One Toke Over the Line, Sweet Jesus" was publicly declared subversive by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who pushed the FCC to ban the song from public airwaves. A few weeks later "One Toke" was performed, before dropped jaws across America, on The Lawrence Welk Show—after which the ultra-conservative bandleader called the song "a modern spiritual" without the slightest hint that anything unusual had happened.
"Sweet
Leaf" by Black Sabbath showed that pot music doesn't have to be mellow.
John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" showed it doesn't have to sound
good. Toby Keith's later hit "Weed With Willie"
nicely sums up what Willie Nelson, along with Waylon Jennings, Charlie
Daniels, and a bunch more county boys were up to. In 1976, Bob Marley
and the Wailers released their US breakthrough album, Rastaman
Vibration. Over his too-short career, Marley subsequently did more to
promote marijuana use than anyone on earth—except maybe Dylan and
the Beatles.