Heroin. Classic or Dud?

All in all, it seems immature and melodramatic - a hipper cousin to The Doors' "The End" - but that doesn't make it bad rock & roll. Just bad advice.

As a drug SONG, "Waiting For the Man" is a bazillion times better. As a template for what music could be (conceptually, artistically, refuting what passed as "pop music"), though, "Heroin" is priceless. (It's a microcosm of that entire album, really, mixing the teenybopper bits with the dusty library bits.) Much better in the context of the album than by its lonesome, without a doubt. (And, come to think of it, the slow-fast-slow movement of the song isn't much different than what Otis Redding accomplished in "Dock of the Bay". Hmm...wonder if there's some correlation?)

I don't actually have the album on me - does "Waiting for the Man" preceed "Heroin"? It would make sense if it did, having the jovial, anticipatory chug of the pre-smack purchase come before the dirty highs & lows of shooting up.

...does "Waiting for the Man" preceed "Heroin"? It would make sense if it did, having the jovial, anticipatory chug of the pre- smack purchase come before the dirty highs & lows of shooting up.

I don't have it in front of me, either, but I seem to recall that being the case.

Yes.

That's right. I couldn't remember if it was Otis Redding or Marvin Gaye who did it originally. And you're right about the Stones version; the intro and chorus sounds nearly identical to VU's later song.

That said, I wish "Heroin" would have been my first VU introduction. Instead it was some odd track off "Loaded", which turned me off the band for 10 years. Then I heard the former being played when I first started at KUCI, then that changed.

A most appropriate response, considering the song's title and subject matter.

I don't have it in front of me, but I think there's a song on the new Charley Patton boxset called like "Spoonful Blues" (or something to that effect) that's about cocaine.

I agree that drug addiction as subject matter has gotten overdone, but aren't there more overused things you could say that about? Like love, for example? Just because "Heroin" opened the floodgates for, say, "Chinese Rocks" doesn't mean that the former is necessarily bad. (For the record, I've got nothin' against "Chinese Rocks," I just wanted to use it as an example of a drug addiction song that "shouldn't exist" because Burroughs did it first, or something.)

I suppose this personal bias explains why I don't like Spiritualized either.

Er, well I don't have the experience (nor would I want to) to say that doing it is "boring." Personally, the idea of delineating which topics of "discussion, art or songwriting" are acceptable or not is pretty silly to me. Any topic could and should be fit for use (although that doesn't make it necessarily worthwhile).

Anyway, I see your point, and Mark's, but I think it's kinda silly to say that all songs with the same subject matter, be it love or drug addiction, are trite or boring or what have you. Some are, some aren't, and it's more interesting to sort out which ones belong in each column than to say "all songs about x are lame."

It was the first VU song I heard (The Doors Motion Picture Soundtrack, d00d). I didn't hear the Velvets for another 4 or 5 years.

http://newschoolers.com/web/forums/readthread/thread_id/539252/page/1/

Entry 1:
Every town has its man. You don’t always recognize him when you see him on the street, or in a café. He comes in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes, the man is brash and ostentatious, and these men usually end up in prison or gasping their last breath in a gutter. Sometimes they listen to the voice inside their head that says “enough is enough,” and they disappear as quietly as they came.

For a little while, I was one of these men in Manhattan’s lower east side, and heroin was my trade. I figure I’ve reformed enough at this point to tell my story, not out of pride or remorse, but simply a sense of hazy wonderment that yes, this was the person I used to be. This is the story of how I sold drugs to New York’s young and elite; my rise and fall.

All the names and many of the places have been changed.

The first person I ever sold heroin to in New York was a fat girl named Amanda. Two of my close friends, Paul and a guy we called Van the Man directed her to me, and eventually they would go on to help me find many of my clients. Paul was a WASP-y type who had dropped out of SUNY to be a day trader. Van the Man was a dreadlocked “homeless” teenager with rich parents. He would bum around the NYU dorms and attend classes on an infrequent basis. Both were pretty heavily into the stuff when I met them, but were still functional at that point. They were well ingrained into the scene, and later I gave them sizable discounts in exchange for new clients, which—god bless the addicted fuckers—they had no trouble locating.

Anyway, back to Amanda. She was my first, as you would say, and I recall the scene pretty well. I remember looking on with detached curiosity as she examined her arm, tracing a delicate finger along its fleshy underside, her veins still bright and viable. The belt wrapped around her bicep made them puffy, a muted blue like sky before sunset. She was really nervous. Her boyfriend had started her on the stuff and now he was out of town for a month and she was getting antsy. It was clear she’d never shot up by herself before.

A funny detail sticks out in my mind, Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” playing softly from my stereo. I remember Amanda’s insane focus on the glint of the needle, the dirty amber liquid eddying inside the syringe. She pressed the point to her vein with a hesitation that would decrease exponentially with time

“Pull back the plunger before you inject,” I advised her. “You want to make sure you get some blood in there so you know you’ve hit the vein.”

Amanda wasn’t in any rush—not yet—but she pulled back the plunger and a thin stream of crimson swirled into the cloudy brown. She injected. The needle slid out and for a second nothing happened. Then, she closed her eyes and sank deep into my sofa as if a cresting wave has submerged her. Her mouth opened, her face contorted in ecstasy. A small line of drool ran down her chin.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I love this song.”

Continued on the link.

omg the punk in scare quotes is spreading! run for your lives!

look i'm not really into the song heroin, i dont think it sounds that great, but the lyrics, the story, the perspective of the story (which feels totally realistic to me), and the PACING of the song, with the ups and downs, all that shit make it classic as HELL.

This is an amazing, timeless, original, and oh-so-classic track - the jittery vocals, the unsparing realism of the lyrics, the sometimes-frenzied, sometimes-relaxed tempo changes, the screetching viola, the heartbeat percussion, the originality, the influence.

But you already knew that. I'm really just bumping this because i'm amused that the C/D threads for both Morphine and Codeine were revived today, and thought we might as well get all of the opiate-drug C/D threads in one place....

I prefer "Kicks" from Coney Island Baby.

When you cut that dude with that stiletto
You did it so, uh, smoothly

It's as close as Reed gets to being Burroughs.

Along with everything else that makes it so brilliant, "and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds" is as subtle (in that it's such a casual line in a song about something else) an evocation of Vietnam as anything from the era.

I love this juxtaposition so much:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M--oHOn4a0U