The 60's were really screwed up

[bjornense]

Toxic indeed. The excessive use of drugs that began in the sixties and accelerated into the eighties is really frightening when you look at it from todays perspective. Peters problems are well known here but I've recently read some biographies of other musical heroes of mine from those days, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and David Crosby. I was in my teens during the sixties and had my fair share of softer substances, but I just couldn't imagine how big a part heavy drugs where in those musicians lives. It sometimes is almost painful to read about it, for example Clapton's years of seclusion, more or less alone in a house, spending all his days shooting up heroin, wasted in a sofa just watching TV.

But the most disturbing read is that about David Crosby’s decline from cheerful, brilliant, musically creative hippie icon to a addictive cocaine free-basing human wreck. He finally, after many years, most unwillingly to get rehab help and after repeatedly letting all his friends down and after spending time in prison now is sober. This quote from Crosby is especially horrific when you look back, it possibly apply to many other musicians in those days: ”…a student asked me, ’Were you ever onstage stoned?’ The answer to that is that never once, until I got out of prison, did I ever record, perform, or do anything any way except stoned. I did it all stoned.”