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Blag Dahlia is lead vocalist for The Dwarves. Burger and Recess just re-issued three of his band’s previous releases – Free Cocaine, Lick It, Younger & Even Better Looking – and the previously unreleased Penetration Moon. He’s taken drugs before. Check out thedwarves.com.
Do you consider yourself an acid aficionado?
Yeah, I mean we used to take it all the time, and I would take it before shows. It was almost like I was doing it deliberately to confuse myself and make things crazier, you know? I was really influenced by the Butthole Surfers in the mid ‘80s who were a big acid band and they would just come out and it was just crazy. They didn’t really have that much of a musical influence on me but their show was so incredible, and it was just so acid-y, you know? With lights flashing and everything going crazy. But we were like a very low-production-value band, so it was like, “we’ll just take the acid” and go out and do it ourselves.
What is it about acid that you like, that makes it a performance aid?
Well, I dunno. I think what makes it different is that the kinda standard drugs are uppers and downers, those are the original rock ‘n roll drugs, right? Just popping pills. And it was generally like, “hey we gotta long drive to the next town, we’d better take some of these pills!” or “I took too many of those pills, better take some of these so I can go to sleep!” So it wasn’t really an intellectual pursuit, you know? But when acid came into it, in the psychedelic years of rock, people could sort of fool themselves that it wasn’t “recreational drug use,” it was “mind expansion.” So there was this whole weird element to it, where really you were just getting fucked up.
On the other hand, your brain actually does some interesting stuff while you’re on acid. You know, mentally primitive societies would take this seriously. Like a shamanistic thing where you’d go into some crazy altered state. So I think that was what we were kinda doing. Like maybe we hadn’t found it musically yet, but if you’d get into this kind of altered state you’d get up onstage and feel like you were setting the world on fire and changing everything.
I remember taking acid once when I was in high school, I was a senior in high school, and we were playing at the Cubby Bear Lounge in Chicago – which is still there, it’s been there for many many years, but it used to just be an old man bar for people coming from Wrigley Field. And right around 1983 when I started playing shows, they made it a rock ‘n roll bar. We were one of the first bands that played there, when we were called Suburban Nightmare, and we were opening for a band called The Occupants, this kind of weird new wave band. And my brother for some reason was gonna pick me up from this show. And one thing led to another, and I ended up having to drive the car on acid. And I’ll never forget, I was talking and gesticulating, and moving my arms, and my brother at one point just reaches over me, and yanks the wheel cause I was about to drive straight off a cliff from a 30-foot median and just fuckin die. Just rights the car.
And I’m just like, holy shit, you know? So you know, driving on acid is a bad idea.
But it’s not bad when you’re onstage?
It really just focuses you in a more extreme way. You know, like “I’m a living, breathing organism, my lungs are going in and out.” I don’t really hallucinate with it onstage, though I know people who do. It’s just all about the kinetic motion of it, just getting a really high and confused kinda show.
Does it suck? Like, have you ever just totally blown it cause you were too clouded?
Oh yeah. I mean, probably. There was a lot of that. When I look back at old Dwarves footage, I’m surprised that we ever wound up getting popular. Because some nights, it’s just so terrible, you know? And acid was a part of that. But it sort of evolved to a point where I would just do one hit of coke and then play. It didn’t make me worse, in fact it might’ve just made me slightly better.
I wouldn’t recommend to any young musician that they take a lot of drugs and play music. But it does give you some amusing stories afterward. There was an incident up in Seattle, where one night we were hanging out, and I took some acid and we were gonna play. I was with Mudhoney’s manager, Bob Whittaker, and we were talking, and everything was cool, and then it got into my head that I was late, and I was supposed to be up onstage, and why the fuck were these Seattle guys keeping me from playing, and suddenly I grabbed Bob by the neck, and was like “What the fuck man, I gotta show.” And he was like “Shit man, what’s your problem?” At that point I was all confused like, ‘Where the fuck am I? Where the fuck did they take me?’ But then I looked up, and right above us was the marquee. And there’s our name. Just really stupid.
The point is that I just kinda switched personalities on the guy in my confusion. And that was kind of a part of the early Dwarves, just being angry and confused. And I think acid contributed to that.
So is that the highest you’ve been?
I can’t remember the highest I’ve been. The acid years of the Dwarves were crazy ones.
That’s in the past tense. Is there a reason why you quit?
I mean, I didn’t quit in any official way. Nor did I quit alcohol in any official way, even though I quit drinking 20 years ago. If there was one drug I had to keep, and quit all others, it would be pot. So for me, when I couldn’t find pot, I would drink. But pretty soon, I looked around me at everyone getting all bloated and ugly and nasty and ridiculous, and so I was like, fuck booze you know? But I’d still have a drink every once in while.
But then I was in New Orleans about 20 years ago and it was my birthday and I was drinking, and I just didn’t stop because there’s no “stop drinking time” in New Orleans. You can drink all day and night if you want there. And I ended up wandering into someone’s house, like a Robert Downey Jr. thing, just puking in their house. And fortunately they were nice and walked me back out to the street where I was reunited with my friends but I never wanted to have a drink again after that night. It poisoned me so badly, I just look at booze and I have no desire at all for it. Downers just paralyze me. So acid and ecstasy are really the only kind of Big Trip I would like to have every two or three years. Something comes up and I’ll end taking some.
You haven’t mentioned mushrooms yet.
I got arrested for selling mushrooms as a kid. So I always preferred acid because you could just swallow it and not get caught. And mushrooms taste like shit and give you kind of a pukier feel. Acid to me is just kind of the ultimate psychedelic experience. You know, people say that mushrooms are ‘natural’ compared to acid. But uranium is ‘natural’ too. Just because something’s natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you. It’s still warping your brain, making you see things that aren’t there.
Do you have a thought on Adderall, and its use a PED?
I haven’t taken it before. But everyone says it’s just like doing meth. I mean, it all comes back to what you’re taking drugs for. Meth came about because soldiers needed to stay up longer on their bombing runs and shit. The Germans were using it, the Japanese were using it. I think it’s really sad that drugs went from, in the ‘60s being a mind-expanding thing, to more like the ‘80s when people were saying ‘I’m gonna impress everybody that I can afford this coke,’ to now where it isn’t even recreation, it’s ‘how am I gonna get through my exams and still go to my dayjob?’ You have drugs for that. It’s kinda pathetic, you know, that things have gotten so bad economically for regular people their drug use is no longer to expand their mind, it’s to keep on working their dayjob.
If you’re good at what you do, you don’t need shit. When I go out onstage, I’m not on anything most of the time. And I do it very well. I remember when I was young, and I was trying to prove a point about how badass I was, and how badass my band was, taking acid was a challenge. It put you in this weird place.
Did that weird place get you to reach any kind of conclusion?
That’s a good question. I’d basically split it into two parts. Part One: Human beings, in order to be creative, need to see alternatives. If you eat the same thing every day, you’re not gonna be very creative with your food. If you stay in one spot and never go anywhere, you’re not going to be very creative with your location. To be creative, you need to pull yourself out of where you are, and think about what might be an alternative. In a general sense, hallucinogenics are a boon to mankind – They make you say, hey, maybe things can be different.
As far as their effect on a musician, or a baker, or anyone trying to do an act, they pretty much always make you worse at it. I play music worse when I’m high. I fuck up. If you’re trying to be a good musician, don’t do any drugs or alcohol. If on the other hand, you wanna create something, then some drug experiences might make you open your mind and be more interesting.
Or they might do the opposite. You might say, “Fuck man, this shit just makes me paranoid and takes me away from my art, and I don’t want any of this.” And I can totally sympathize. You realize after a while that all this shit is just a mind trip. But it does give you some stories to tell after the fact.
The post LIGHT AND PLEASANT CONVERSATION WITH BLAG DAHLIA ABOUT ACID AND OTHER PERFORMANCE-ENHACING DRUGS appeared first on Buddyhead.