5 Songs Everyone Thinks (Incorrectly) Are About Drugs
Sex and drugs go hand-in-hand with rock and roll, and there are plenty of songs written about both, but probably not as many as you think. As shocking as it may seem, stoners are wrong about many of the songs they believe to contain coded messages about the virtues of drug use. Such as…
‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed
It’s understandable to assume any given Lou Reed song is about heroin — the man literally wrote a song called “Heroin.” Its prominent use in Trainspotting didn’t help matters. But no, Reed insisted in 2000, the song really was just about having a nice day with his wife. Can’t a man pioneer the nihilistic avant-garde music scene and also enjoy a nice sangria in the park?
‘There She Goes’ by the La’s
Similarly, there aren’t a lot of women who go around pulsing through people’s veins, so there seems to be a deeper chemical meaning to Lorelei Gilmore’s theme song, but songwriter Lee Mavers claimed he didn’t even try heroin until two years after the song was released, so it would have been pretty hard to write a song about it. “There She Goes” isn’t about anything, really; Mavers recalled toying around with his guitar when the melody and words just came to him, pointing out that they’re not exactly complicated.
‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ by the Beatles
Because the song can be initialed as LSD and definitely sounds like a hallucination, just about everyone assumed Lucy didn’t get up there with those diamonds by sober means, but the song was inspired by a picture John Lennon’s young son had drawn of his classmate, Lucy. As for the lyrics, Beatles songs stopped having any meaning as soon as they realized fans were looking for it. They spent the last half of the ‘60s just messing with us.
‘Lookin’ Out My Back Door’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival
It turns out the audience for surrealist music is equal parts drug users and children. John Fogerty was shocked to learn that proponents and detractors of LSD alike interpreted his song about watching “all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn” as a drug ballad because a) he was staunchly anti-drug, and b) he’d written it for his three-year-old son. It was inspired in part by a Dr. Seuss book, though again, those are just as appealing to people who have fried their brains.
‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Tom Petty never confirmed or denied that having a “last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain” was about quitting weed, but we do know the song didn’t even have that line in its first incarnation. It was called “Indiana Girl,” and the first line of the chorus was “Hey, Indiana Girl, go out and find the world.” More than that, however, the idea betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Tom Petty as both a person and an artist. Tom Petty would never quit smoking weed.
