Front Page Reviews & AIR

Everyone knows that musicians like to get plastered, smashed, bombed, sloshed, sozzled, sauced, lubricated, well-oiled, wrecked, juiced, blasted, stinko, blitzed, half-cut, fried, wasted, hopped up, gassed, polluted, pissed, tanked (up), soaked, out of one's head/skull, loaded, trashed, hammered, soused, buzzed, befuddled, besotted, pickled, pixilated, canned, cockeyed, blotto, blind drunk, roaring drunk, dead drunk, punch-drunk, ripped, stewed, tight, merry, the worse for wear, far gone, pie-eyed, in one's cups, three sheets to the wind.  In the UK, musicians get bladdered and lashed.  Literati-type musicians get crapulous.  Formal musicians get intoxicated, inebriated, impaired, drunken, tipsy, under the influence.  Am I forgetting any?  Ah, yes: taking the edge off. 

I do not, of course, want to stereotype musicians, rehash the cliché, or universalize the relationship.  There must be at least one musician out there who doesn’t love their alc. at or above 7.5% and paired with a jagged little pill or two.  I just haven’t met ‘em.  I am told that horn players are not big drinkers, but I happen to know that’s only because they prefer harder drugs.  So even though exceptions to the rule remain a strong, if theoretical, possibility, the undeniable fact is that for every turn of phrase we’ve come up with to describe that infamous state of being (stinko being the best), we can all think of scores of musicians who embody the expression.  The stinko musician!  I’m wondering why.

Exhibit #1: Bix, Atlas

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question.  If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

--Eugene O’Neil, Long Day's Journey into Night...

Iowa is not the state you think about when you think about Jazz, but that’s because you always forget about Bix Beiderbecke, Davenport, Iowa’s native son and quite the legend in early Hot Jazz circles in Chicago, Detroit and New York.  How did a white boy from a white town, from a non-musical family in a non-musical state, make his way into the pantheon of Jazz greats before dying of alcohol and pneumonia at age 28 in 1931, you ask?  Well, the thing is Davenport is on the Mississipi River and little Bix, who was by all accounts an overburdened young man, used to sneak out of his house and down to the riverboats at night to hear the Jazz musicians—up from New Orleans—play their sets.  He’d hide in the shadows on the docks or lay on the banks of the river and let the music wash over his troubled young mind.  Even before he could play his horn, or any instrument, he would invent melodies in his head to accompany the songs he heard rippling out across the river—and it kept his precocious sense of impending doom at bay. 

As a teenager, Bix became as obsessed with alcohol as he was with music, and he employed the two things in tandem to help him bear up under the weight of the world.  He played the cornet from sun up to sun down and from sun down to sun up he played and drank.  When he was expelled from school for drunkenness he began working full time as a musician—and he quickly became know for his signature, subtle-to-the-point-of-perfection melodies and for his gift as a soloist and improviser.  Along with Louis Armstrong, Bix ushered in an era in Jazz history that hungered for instrumental solos over ensemble pieces.  They say he was in a state of pure and palpable joy—of lightness—when improvising on stage.  Off stage, it was just the opposite; Bix wore a heavy cloak.      

By the late 20s, Bix moved to New York to play with the best Jazz bands around.  One day in 1930 he stood up to play an improvised solo during a radio show and his mind went blank.  He couldn’t play a single note.  Shortly thereafter, during a hot and muggy week, while Bix was in his apartment playing and drinking furiously into the night—which, I imagine, his neighbors loved and hated in equal measure—he died.  He died before Friday came around.  He died, as they say, doing the thing he loved: being a stinko musician.     

It’s a strange thing how some people, sometimes for no clear reason, come out as little Atlases, feeling always the need to shoulder more than their share of the weight of the world.  While most of us find the earth to be the solid ground beneath our feet, people like Bix experience it as a thing hanging over their head and pushing down on them with unbearable weight; they are a people of the “horrible burden,” as O’Neil says.  The way I see it, its no big surprise that a person like Bix is forced to gather to himself props that help him bear up—at least temporarily—under the global weight.  Why music and alcohol are so frequently paired as props, for Bix and other musicians, I am still unsure, but I know, from Bix, that it rarely ends well.  He was 28 years old.  Dead as a door nail.  Apartment #1G, 43-30 46th Street.  960 miles from Davenport.

Exhibit #2: Fred, Light

Fame don’t take away the pain/

it just pays the bills/

and you end up on alcohol and pills.

--Fred Eaglesmith

Stinko musicians like Bix feel the world pushing down on them, from without, but another subset of stinko artists tend to describe their pain as coming primarily from within.  Van Gogh, for example, said, “If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.”  Hemmingway described “hard drink as a worthy opposition to the battle inside raging.”  Singer/songwriter and farmer’s son Fred Eaglesmith spoke similarly about the artist’s internal hurt—the musician’s interior burning light:

“The thing that most artists realize, artists who are called, is that they have this light, this incredible light that burns.  And it burns way too bright.  And the art sort of helps dim the light.  When you’re younger, that light, I remember – I still have it a lot of times, but I don’t have it like I did – that light burns so bright and the only way to turn it down is with booze or drugs or sex or whatever is going to turn it down, something has to turn it down….The thing is, that light is pretty brutal.  And spirituality will turn it down if you can get that together, but that’s usually over time.  But booze, man, two whiskeys can take it off me just like that, and it’s like, ‘Oh, I can relax for a minute.’”

Fred’s philosophy gives a couple of clues into the preponderance of the stinko musician.  Taken in isolation his concept of the artist’s internal light might seem a bit too romantic, but in the context of Fred’s songs and in the face of his grizzled features, I assure you, its anything but.  Even if you remain unconvinced of the literalness of Fred’s image, won’t you at least be willing to accept that there is something light-like that burns too brightly within certain people, a light that is both a tinder box to their insides of straw and a fuel on the fires of their creative output?  Could it be that music and pills are the perfect combination for the person who suffers this light because the pills tamp down the fire just enough that it can be breathed forth in music from the mouth and nostrils—into the microphone and horn—making the internal temperature bearable, maybe just bearable enough to get you through one more hot and muggy night in Queens, New York?  Could be.  But let’s not miss Fred’s other point.  Its similar to Ogden Nash’s suggestion that “Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.”  In place of ‘Candy’ Fred puts spirituality—a slower, steadier way to keep the light from burning you to the ground.

Exhibit #3: Charles, Suicide

In a fairly cheesy book about how to get the creative juices flowing Steven Pressfield asks an interesting question. “Have you ever wondered why the slang terms for intoxication are so demolition-oriented?”  Smashed, hammered, wasted, blasted, plastered—we saw all these above, right?  We might follow Pressfield’s question up with another: what exactly is it that is being smashed and hammered when a musician goes stinko?  The light?  Some aspect of the personality? The ego, perhaps, the superego?  Some barrier to creativity?     

Charles Bukowski, the gnarly poet and spiritual begatter of Tom Waits, took it further than anyone I’ve know since Bertrand Russell when he called the stinko state a kind of proleptic self-killing.  Russell said, “Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”  Bukowski said:

"Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now." 

Bukowski goes on to say that the demolition of the self is necessary for the creation of something new.  Some part of the self must be demolished—wasted, blitzed, fucked up—in order to create space for the emergence of the new creation, the work of art, the song, the stanza, the single lyric.  It could be that alcohol and pills pair so well with musicianship because they are the most pleasurable form of self-destruction—probably the easiest and perhaps the laziest.  I am tempted to say that getting stinko is a form of unselfing that requires so little imagination that you can channel all of your creative energies into the work of art, but maybe that’s a stretch.

Exhibit #4: Charles, Vulnerability

Bukowski puts an additional spin on the ‘boozy self-destruction leading to creation’ thing when he starts talking about the little hollow-boned creatures in his chest. 

"There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out 
but I'm too tough for him, 
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you."

I read this line ten years ago and I’ve clung to it ever since as one of the most terrifying images for the consequence of our human inability to suffer our own vulnerability: a beautiful creature is trapped and a beauty is withheld from the world.  I think its entirely possible that a lot of artists are like Bukowski.  They are endowed with both a great capacity for vulnerability and a deep seated fear of the same.  The greater the capacity for vulnerability, the greater the potential to produce great art.  The greater the potential to produce great art, the greater the fear of one’s own vulnerability—for so much is at stake.  Its likely that wrapped up in Bix’s feeling of the world pushing down on him from without and Fred Eaglesmith’s sense of the world burning up from within is the commonly held foreboding at the call of vulnerability and the feeling of a perverse need to be tougher than a bluebird.  Alcohol and pills cut both ways in this scenario.  They help the musician attain a quick and temporary quasi-vulnerability (the bird cage is thrown open), but, as Fred suggests, they also weaken the capacity for attaining an unaided and sustainable form of vulnerability (the cage is rusted shut).

Exhibit #5: Madness, Genius

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. 

--Seneca

The line between sanity and insanity is a fragile and shifting construction.  Is Bix a madman for believing that the world sits on his frail shoulders?  Is Fred Eaglesmith a lunatic for believing that there is a light inside his chest?  Is it crazy for Bukowski to open up his heart to the world?  There has been all kinds of interesting stuff written about the links between artistic temperament and mental illness.  At this point in my life I am convinced that there is a deep kinship between the mental state of madness and that of artistic genius.  The artist—at least the artist who would bring something new into the world—has the difficult task of crossing back and forth over the borderline between madness and sanity.  It may be at exactly the points of crossing that the creation is most powerfully birthed.  I don’t have time to make the case here, but if you accept that there is perhaps a link between madness and creativity then I may be able to offer another clue into the stinko musician.  This isn’t some new-fangled idea either.  Its been around.  Seneca said it first and William Blake brought it to fruition:

“All pictures that's painted with sense and with thought / Are painted by madmen as sure as a groat; / For the greater the fool in the pencil more blest, / And when they are drunk they always paint best.”

The idea is that drunkenness—as a kind of temporary and voluntary insanity—allows the artist to enter into the strange state that is the prerequisite to artistic creation.  Alcohol provides the predetermined, easy to follow path, back and forth across the borderline.  And its out there in the hinterlands that you find the really interesting stuff.  Again, going stinko may be the lazyman’s way to get crazy, and may eventually impair the musician’s ability to make the crossing, but it works in a pinch.  But what exactly do we mean by crazy as it relates to artistic creation and musicianship?  I think it has something to do with a person’s ability to think and interact with the world in a way that is both germane and untenable at once.  At a social and cultural level, at a physiological level, and from the perspective of evolutionary biology, you’ve got to do things that don’t quite make sense—but could perhaps make sense, eventually.

Exhibit #6: “Bartender, give me a metaphor; make it a double.”

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

The final idea I want to throw into the mix is that of stinko as lived metaphor.  I’m talking about the notion that getting intoxicated with drink and pill can provide for the abstractness of the artistic process a concrete symbol.  Only if you have been quite drunk can you appreciate Robert Henry’s suggestion that “The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing he wants to express.”  Only if you have been sincerely inebriated can you really take in Ray Bradbury’s advice: “You must stay drunk on [your art] so reality cannot destroy you.”  Count it as one more reason why these musicians might be getting wasted all the time.  In addition to wanting something to prop up the world, tamp down the fire, offer temporary suicide, vulnerability and insanity, musicians like Bix want to be intimately acquainted with the most powerful metaphor of their craft: stinko.