Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted December 14, 2007)

Cleveland (AP) — In a stunning announcement today, Bud McDowell, education director of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, said new investigations into rock music have revealed that famous musicians have used performance enhancing drugs in the creation of thousands of beloved songs and that such abuse has gone on throughout the last 50 years while rock’s promoters, managers, producers and commercial sponsors did little to check its pernicious influence.

“This represents a cataclysmic, collective failure of those in the music business to clean up the music and keep it the harmless entertainment we all enjoy,” he said of the rock music inquiries, which are similar to those in Major League Baseball. “I can honestly say that this report casts a pall on the music and makes all of the feelings and sensations it causes suspect.”

Among those named in the report are such luminaries as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, James Taylor, and the Mamas and the Papas, among many, many others.

Armed with 200,000 pages of evidence — including government documents, warrants, canceled checks, telephone records, photographs, 8mm film and video recordings, e-mails, signed confessions by the stars themselves, willing confessions by the stars themselves, explicit boasts to the media by the stars themselves, biographies and numerous autopsy reports naming drugs as the cause of multiple rock star deaths — McDowell has built up an almost irrefutable case.

“I just don’t know what to say,” said Des Moines housewife Molly Gooch. “‘Strawberry Fields’ is one of my favorite songs, but to think that it was made under the influence of anything other than good-old-fashioned human inspiration, well I don’t know how I could ever really enjoy it again.”

Among the drugs suspected in the Hall of Fame report to have been used in the creation of some of America’s most loved songs are hash, cannabis, peyote, psilocybin, amanita muscaria fly agaric, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), morphine, fentanyl, tweak, meth, nose candy, bennies, tuinals, dexies, white crosses, red devils, Doriden, smack, Paris 400s, ludes, snow, crack, crank, downers, dolls …

Black beauties, dummy dust, Hillbilly Heroin oxycodone, MDMA, Rohypnol, goofballs, GHB, Easy Lay, Special K, Vesperax, valium, Surgical Nubain, wack, tears of the poppy, rainbows, yellows, X, speed and sticky icky.

As a result of the findings, rock’s gatekeepers and regulators have cautioned that it may be necessary to re-examine and perhaps dismiss many of the ideas and experiences fomented by the drug-polluted music.

“Now that we know such classics as “Visions of Johanna” and “Good Vibrations” were written under that same scourge that waylaid the Lotus-eaters,” said McDowell, “it is sad, but inevitable, that we can no longer be entertained by them, conceived as they were in a surreal idiom that rational man finds repugnant and anathema to his higher functions of mind and being.”

“I once cheered as Barry Bonds hit a record number of career homers and as Jimi played the guitar strings with his teeth on ‘Little Wing,'” said McDowell. “But come on. Showing rare human athletic ability and raising consciousness to a new level of spiritual and cosmic awareness is no good if you cheated.”