Who needs drugs when you've got music?

Wolf, perhaps you are exagerating for effect. I've heard drug-fueled improvisations that would not have happened otherwise. Better than straight? Very rarely, and never, really, if clean, error-free playing is what you're after. But sometimes something new and different comes out.

Is the answer to the OP, probably the people who made the music?

Drugs/booze and music are linked. Both in the creation and observation of it. It is about finding boundaries and removing them. Finding new ground or a new interpretation or a new language or even courage. Removing boundaries is sometimes about removing ones self. Hense drug use in music.

Obviously you do not need them, but isn't it odd that so many great pieces of music or creative movements were created under the influence of the fashionable drugs of the time?

You can smoke pot and noodle all day, but few other drugs allow that...sort of speaks to the "lumping together" nonesense of the term "drugs." The image of the "creative stoned musician dude" is a lame parody to most pro musicians who have experience and chops, and can force the overuse of quotation marks.

"Really? Is Alice In Wonderland the only novel ever written?"
That was fiction?

Wolf_garcia,

Probably best not to mention the lame parody. The parody is a parody because that image became over used and filtered down to the average. Lame is lame of course.

But musicians with vision and skills are a very different thing. The guys that learned their chops and put life experience into their performance is what I suspect left their mark on us. Not the navel gazers...

Sure the word "drugs" covers too many things. Acid, speed, coke, pot, ecstasy, and so on all effected the various specific musical movements of their time. It's a paradigm shift from what went before.

We could probably draw a simplistic table or flow chart. I.e

Ecstasy = Dance music

Speed = Punk etc etc.