Check out all the people chewing around the 4:00 minute mark of the video at right. I don't get this. Close ups of people eating are disgusting, yet they form a fairly reliable trope in LSD movies.
If you've suffered through the entire Magical Mystery Tour movie, then the infamous spaghetti scene is traumatically imprinted in your mind (if you dare, go to the thirty minute mark at the video here). Or consider the Mad Hatter scene of the Ringo Starr directed T-Rex documentary where the band's tamborine/conga drum player and a group of nuns masticate wildly to the T-Rex's Jeepster. Yuck. Why? Why? Why? Or consider the amount of gratuitous eating in Easy Rider, the old man's farm, the commune, and the diner with the rednecks that end up beating Jack Nicholson's character to death.
Interestingly, the pivotal scene in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas also occurs in a diner. Benicio Del Toro's character's bullying of the waitress completely changes the tone and reality intrudes on what had to that point been an absurdist escape. Fear and Loathing isn't really a drug movie in the sense of classic LSD movies, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (Vitamin B injections). In classic drug movies, some large subset of the performers and off-camera people are abusing the substance themselves. Unfortunately, this tends to eliminate the aesthetic distance necessary for making something non-horrible. Clearly, Gilliam gets this, and thus we can see that the food scene in his movie works as an implicit critique of the trope and its associated genre.
This still leaves a number of questions unanswered. How could drug-addled people make such great music in the 60s while simultaneously making such shoddy films? Why did LSD seem to promote worthwhile musical creativity while cocaine so systematically destroyed it?
On the latter, consider the precipitous drop-off from John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album and Imagine to everything between those and his triumphant return to form in Double Fantasy. From Tony Visconti's auto-biography we know just how bad the cocaine use was during that era. Visconti writes about getting high with Lennon and May Pang and Lennon being so paranoid that he hides in the bathroom in between snorts. Visconti also recounts every single not very good Bowie album that he produced where Bowie just showed up with a bag of cocaine and no songs written. The autobiography is weirdest in that at no point does Visconti betray any awareness that this is in general a bad way to treat one's muse.
There have long been rumors that Bowie subsisted for a couple of years (post Ziggy, pre-Iggy/Berlin) on milk and cocaine, and that this explains why he looks so cadaverous during the time period where he did the medley of songs with Cher at right. Definitely watch to the 1:25 moment, where the true horror begins. These 1970s medlies are a perfect tribute to cocaine in the music industry. Nobody had the attention span to get through an entire verse and chorus of any song.*
I think in some ways Bowie and glam rock killed the sixties before the advent of punk. T-Rex's Marc Bolan and Bowie illustrate the transition, Bolan still in that era where you had to have close ups of yourself chewing food, and Bowie's milk diet a staunch refusal. This paved the way for the Clash with all of the food fights reported by Lester Bangs, as well as the Sex Pistols, who knew the value of a good English breakfast and were secure enough in that knowledge not to have make videos of themselves partaking.
As we move forward in the punk revolution, we see Black Flag era Henry Rollins and the routine he did on the old IRS The Cutting Edge television show where claimed that as a child he always thought that singers were saying "lunch" instead of "love." Madonna was going to give us all of her lunch. Led Zeppelin had a whole lot of lunch. John Lennon assured us that all we need is lunch. I can attest that the wonder working powers of lunch was a comforting message for a poor elementary school kids like me and Mr. Rollins as we were bussed across town.
The Beatles pretty much only wrote lunch songs until they discovered LSD. At which point (with notable exceptions, such as the song at right) they confined themselves to making not very good movies about it.
[Notes:
*Just as the sixties really began in 1968 and ended in the early 70s, 1981 really happened in the 70s. That was the year that the Beatles' Medley (for some reason called "Stars on 45") hit number one and started a craze for this kind of thing, a craze only stopped by Nancy Reagan's war on drugs and associated new federal sentencing guidelines, at which point the 80s began.]
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