by Max Décharné
Via tape, the aural magic carpet, the show roamed the United States to bring listeners such unique material as the sounds a crazed New Orleans dope addict makes while being driven into a frenzy for lack of the drug, a purchase of dope being made by radio reporters in Chicago, kids in Central Park showing off their vocabulary of narcotic slang (horse, mainliner, reefer, pusher) and the entry of an addict into the government hospital at Lexington, Ky., for treatment.
These were early days for the use of the word horse for heroin – the OED’s first recorded entry is from the previous summer – but it caught on fast. A June 1951 report in Life magazine about drug-taking in schools informed its readers that ‘horse. . . is traded and sniffed in some classrooms under the eyes of lecturing teachers’, and later that decade it could be found, for example, in hard-boiled crime novels such as Ross Macdonald’s The Doomsters (1959), which also employed the term cold turkey to describe heroin withdrawal. A year later, his near-namesake, John D. MacDonald, included this description of a girl and boy heading off from school to a teenage drug party in his crime novel The Neon Jungle:
‘I got some sticks [reefers],’ he said softly.
‘How many?’
‘Enough. Ginny’s got some caps [capsules of heroin]. A hell of a lot of them. Bucky is all set with the car. How about it?’
‘They want us along?’
‘So why not? They want to pop. They want company. Ginny got the sticks and the horse. She says they’re both real george [OK].’
It was not for nothing that the heroin-addicted Puerto Rican gang in John Frankenheimer’s film of New York turf wars, The Young Savages (1961), were called The Horsemen, or that Len Deighton’s follow-up to his best-selling debut novel The Ipcress File (1962) was named Horse Under Water (1963), which told the murky tale of a heroin-packed U-boat wreck submerged off the coast of Portugal.
Here comes the man with the jive
OF COURSE, WHETHER ANY of this esoteric vocabulary came as a surprise to those who were not narcotics users might well depend on their taste in music, since blues and jazz musicians had been including slang drug terms in songs for several decades by that stage. The Storyville district in New Orleans, where many jazz pioneers worked in the early years of the 20th century, was a free-living legalised brothel district of thirty-eight city blocks, established by official edict in 1897, in which drugs were an everyday fact of life. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who began playing at sporting houses around the district at the start of his teens, later recalled the variety of addicts found in those circles in 1902:
. . . some were habitual drunkards and some were dope fiends as follows: opium, heroin, cocaine, laudanum, morphine, et cetera. I was personally sent to Chinatown many times with a sealed note and a small amount of money and would bring back several cards of hop. There was no slipping and dodging. All you had to do was walk in to be served.
One supposed explanation of the origins of the jazz term hip was that it derived from the practice of lying around on your side all day in opium dens, so that your hip joint eventually deteriorated over time. Thereafter, the story goes, other regular users could tell you from the uneven way you walked – ‘He’s on the hip, he’s a hip guy’. For all its appeal, it may just be a fanciful explanation nailed on after the fact.
In 1917, Storyville was closed down on the insistence of the military authorities on the grounds that it might have a corrupting influence on the delicate flowers of the armed forces before they marched off to the joys of the First World War, but many of its services simply went underground.
The release of Mamie Smith’s 78 rpm single ‘That Thing Called Love/You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’, and in particular her ‘Crazy Blues’ (both 1920), signified that the US phonograph industry had finally caved in after three decades and deigned to allow African-Americans into studios to record the music which had been developing in honky-tonks, gin joints and brothels since the late 19th century. In the blues and jazz boom which followed, especially during the 1930s, lyrical references to drugs, along with sex and alcohol, were a regular feature in the vast number of songs recorded. For instance, in the summer of 1927, Luke Jordan wrote and sang a song in Charlotte, North Carolina, with the admirably direct title ‘Cocaine Blues’. Three months later, up in New York City, Victoria Spivey cut a number of her own called ‘Dope Head Blues’, and it is a fair bet that its target audience would have been aware that the substance under discussion was probably not the ‘preparation of pitch, tallow, and other ingredients’ which 19th-century Americans had applied to the undersides of snow shoes in cold weather.
Among many other examples, there followed the Harlem Hamfats with ‘Weed Smoker’s Dream’ (1936), and the same year also brought ‘Here Comes the Man with the Jive’ by Stuff Smith & His Onyx Club Boys, in which the singer urges his companion to light up and get real high. The word weed – which dates back over a thousand years to Anglo-Saxon times in its original sense denoting a wild plant of no value or benefit, and then also served as a way of referring to tobacco from the start of the 17th century onwards – had been used in US blues and jazz circles as a term for marijuana since the mid-1920s. When Bea Foote cut her succinctly titled ‘Weed’ (1938), she sang that she was going to send herself, and claimed to be the queen of all vipers, the latter being a term for a drug smoker probably best remembered from the Fats Waller tune, ‘Viper’s Drag’ (1934). Waller’s recording was an instrumental, but Fats later made things abundantly clear in ‘Ihe Reefer Song’ (1944), in which he dreams ‘about a reefer five feet long’ and also uses the phrase bust your conk, signifying getting high.
Jive, meanwhile, in the black community, had signified a way of talking since just after the First World War, probably deriving from the English word jibe, and in the 1930s also came to be an alternative name for swing music. However, in the Stuff Smith song, it specifically means marijuana, as it also did when Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy recorded ‘All The Jive Is Gone’ in 1936, the tale of a party when there’s only booze left, but no reefer. ‘Hit That Jive, Jack’ (1941), by the Nat Cole Trio, was all about a dealer on the corner who ‘wants to make you high’, in which the narrator is off ‘to see a man’, anticipating the basic scenario of Lou Reed’s classic Velvet Underground song ‘I’m Waiting For My Man’ (1967) by a quarter of a century.
Other then-current drug slang words appeared in songs like Trixie Smith’s superb ‘Jack, I’m Mellow’ (1938), in which she sings of having blown some gage (smoked marijuana), or ‘Wacky Dust’ (1938) by Ella Fitzgerald with the Chick Webb Orchestra (1938), a homage to cocaine, thinly disguised as a song about the uplifting effects of music, which has the singer ‘kickin’ the ceiling apart’. Buck Washington, meanwhile, informed his listeners in ‘Save the Roach for Me’ (1940) that he had been in his backyard smoking tea (marijuana), and also threw in references to gage and jive, in case anyone required further clarification. Calling the remaining end of a reefer itself a roach probably sounds to modern ears like a quintessentially 1960s word, but it was actually a product of the US jazz scene of the 1930s. Mind you, in terms of smoking something, gage goes all the way back to the Canting Crew dictionary of 1699:
Gage, a Pot or Pipe. Tip me a Gage, give me a Pot or Pipe
The righteous bush
IN CASE IT MIGHT BE THOUGHT that such records with drug references were somehow under the radar, and reaching only the black community, it is worth noting that Cab Calloway and His Orchestra could be seen performing their 1932 single ‘Reefer Man’ in the Paramount Pictures film International House (1933), which starred a winning combination of W. C. Fields and Bela Lugosi. The lyrics, written by the great Andy Razaf, include references to being high, and its variant, sailing. On Broadway that year, the musical revue Flying Colors, which ran for 188 performances at the Imperial Theatre, included a song written by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz entitled ‘Smokin’ Reefers’. An entirely different view of such behaviour was later taken by the makers of the defiantly low-bud
get anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness (1936), originally released under the slang-free title Tell Your Children, which in later decades became an unintended hit with the turned-on generation. Conceived, as the foreword at the start put it, as a warning for concerned citizens about the ‘new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers’, it issued a handy – if eccentrically punctuated – description of the inevitable effects of smoking this ‘unspeakable scourge’:
Its first effect is sudden, violent, uncontrollable laughter; then come dangerous hallucinations – space expands – time slows down, almost stands still. . . fixed ideas come next, conjuring up monstrous extravagances – followed by emotional disturbances, the total inability to direct thoughts, the loss of all power to resist physical emotions. . . leading finally to acts of shocking violence. . . ending often in incurable insanity.
One man who was blithely ignoring all such warnings at the time was white jazz player Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow, whose hugely enjoyable 1946 autobiography Really the Blues was hardly coy about his drug-related activities, as the back cover blurb of the original paperback edition boasted:
Call it the modern Odyssey of an old-time jail-happy jazzman who spiked beer for Al Capone, smoked opium with the Purple Gang, peddled marijuana in Harlem (the law got him for that), played clarinet in dives high and low, married across the colour line, today heads a jazz record company!
The book included an extensive slang glossary, listing weed, hay, tea, grass, grefa, the righteous bush and muta for marijuana, hop for opium, snow for cocaine, and white stuff as a general term for cocaine, morphine and heroin, while a junkie was defined as a ‘dope fiend’. J. K. Rowling enthusiasts might like to note that muggles were cigarettes of marijuana’. while Mezzrow’s own name and activities as a drug seller gave rise to a slang term denoting marijuana of the finest quality, mezz.
The close association in the public mind between jazz players and drug taking as a source of inspiration and day-today lifestyle choice was perhaps best summed up in John Clellon Holmes’s Beat Generation novel The Horn (1958), whose musician character Edgar was partly based on the life of sax man Charlie Parker:
. . .everyone repeated with awe Edgar’s famous remark, delivered with a Promethean sigh: ‘Man, I got to get high before I can have a haircut. I got to get lifted before I can face it!’
Joss Ackland’s spunky backpack
ALTHOUGH SOME SLANG WORDS in the drug lexicon inevitably fell out of fashion, many of the ones popular in the hippie era were already in place before or during the Second World War, and remain common today. Newly synthesised or developed drugs, of course, require new names, while in other instances specialist slang has travelled to the UK and US from other English-speaking countries, such as those of the Caribbean. For example, the word spliff for a marijuana cigarette appeared in the Jamaican newspaper the Daily Gleaner alongside another local term for the weed: ‘Here is a hot-bed of ganja smoking. . . and even the children may be seen at times taking what is better known as their “spiiff”.’ With the initial wave of Caribbean immigration to the UK, and the early popularity of Jamaican music in the form of ska, blue beat and rock steady, such words spread along with them, appearing, for instance, in the novels of Colin MacInnes. Spliffs are smoked in Absolute Beginners, while in City of Spades the boxer Jimmy Cannibal has a greenhouse for growing marijuana: ‘my greatest enjoyment’, he says at one point, ’ever since when a boy, is in charging with weed’. Later, with the global popularity of reggae music in the 1970s, the formerly local words ganja and spliff travelled with it.
The problem for anyone wishing to keep up with the street expressions for drugs, as with slang generally, is of course that new words appear all the time, sometimes made up by users, or invented as a marketing tool by the people trying to sell them. There are literally hundreds of slang terms for long-standing staples of the drug market like heroin and cocaine, while even the more recent entrants to the marketplace have multiple names. Drug users attempting to buy PCP, popularly known as angel dust, might also ask for it under a wide variety of names including k-blast, amoeba, snorts or gorilla biscuits, while those with a crack habit would be looking for some fish scales, bonecrusher or kangaroo, and then be said to be smoking the devil’s dick (crack pipe). Rave-culture ketamine users might know it as kit-kat or vitamin k, and the drug’s frequent legal use in veterinary surgery for anaesthetising horses gave rise to a popular UK T-shirt slogan aimed at clubbers with a sense of irony:
KETAMINE – JUST SAY NEIGH
Films, music, television and now the internet all help spread the ever-expanding lexicon of drug terms, yet despite the ease with which their meanings can be checked, there remain ever-present pitfalls for public figures who either wish to campaign against some new drug horror or simply appear down with the kids, who are usually far enough away from street level that they are unable to distinguish genuine contemporary slang from made-up nonsense. This situation was exploited magnificently by the satirist Chris Morris in an episode of his 1997 TV series Brass Eye, simply entitled ‘Drugs’, in which he lured a selection of public figures into making statements about the supposed dangers of wholly imaginary new substances which he claimed were terrorising British youth. Initially, Morris is shown late at night asking a confused dealer if they have any yellow bentines, explaining, ‘I don’t want something that makes you go really blooty,’ and that he didn’t want his arms to feel ‘like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon’.
Later, the likes of Bernard Manning, Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds are seen looking suitably concerned as they warn of an alleged ‘new legal drug from Czechoslovakia called cake’ – ‘made from chemicals, by sick bastards’, as Manning helpfully puts it. Harris speaks of a side effect called Czech neck, in which the throat swells, leading to asphyxiation, and warns that it might be offered under alternative names, such as Joss Ackland’s spunky backpack, while Noel Edmonds helpfully advises listeners that an active ingredient in the drug ‘stimulates a part of the brain called Shatner’s bassoon.’ The icing on the cake was perhaps the contribution of the then MP for Basildon, David Amess, who – in addition to informing viewers that dealers refer to cake buyers as custard gannets – outside the confines of the programme, went on to raise a question about this fictitious drug in the House of Commons, which received the following answer, as recorded in Hansard:
We are not aware of any reports of misuse in the United Kingdom of the substance known as ‘cake’ but the advisory council nevertheless has under review the question whether this and a number of similar substances should be brought within the scope of the act.
Names may change as the decades pass, but, it appears, the war on (non-existent) drugs never sleeps. . .
EIGHT
DIG THAT SOUND
Bowsing and nigling in the Old Kent Road
SLANG AND POPULAR MUSIC are inextricably linked – indeed, imagine the opening lines of the Rolling Stones song ‘Honky Tonk Women’ (1969), if rendered in the more formal language of earlier times: ‘I met a Memphis lady of questionable virtue, much given to imbibing juniper-based spirits / Who attempted to persuade me to visit her chamber for the purposes of fornication’. Not only does it fail to scan; without the street phraseology, it also dies on its feet. Of course, many musical genres have names which began as slang terms in the first place: jazz, punk rock, heavy metal, rock’n’roll, the blues. The lyrics and titles of songs, centuries before the advent of recorded music, employed slang, and through live and eventually studio performances, that language has spread worldwide.
For example, the Victorian music hall performer Albert Chevalier had great success on the London stage in the character of a costermonger, with his self-penned songs full of Cockney rhyming slang such as ‘My Old Dutch’ (1892) and ‘Wot Cher!’ (1891, later known as ‘Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road’). As a result, generations of people who had not been born within a hundred miles of the Bow Bells learned from the former tha
t old dutch meant wife, and that someone talking a lot was a-jawin’. The latter song was even more awash with London vernacular, with its talk of coves and toffs, and other expressions such as popped off (died), but that did not stop Californian child star Shirley Temple performing it on two separate occasions during the film The Little Princess (1939), tap-dancing as she went.
Chevalier’s ‘Wot Cher!’ was rounded up soon after its composition by John S. Farmer for inclusion in the pioneering work Musa Pedestris – Three Centuries of Canting Songs and Slang Rhymes, 1536 – 1896 (1896), placing it firmly in the tradition of 17th-century songs such as ‘The Beggar’s Curse’, which began with some fine vagabond argot:
The Ruffin cly the nab of the Harmanbeck
[The devil take the constable’s head]
This song first appeared in Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet Lanthorne and Candle-light (1608), which dealt thoroughly with cant language and vagabond speech. A few decades later, a fine slang-heavy ballad was sung on the London stage, in Richard Brome’s comedy A Jovial Crew, Or the Merry Beggars (1641). It was entitled ‘A Mort’s Drinking Song’ (1641) – mort being the word for a woman used among the itinerant poor. Brome introduced the tune by means of the following stage directions: ‘Enter Patrico with his old wife with a wooden bowle of drink. She is drunk. She sings:–
‘This bowse [ale] is better than rum-bowse [wine],
It sets the gan [mouth] a-gigling,
The autum-mort [wife] finds better sport
In bowsing than in nigling [fornicating].’
Having sung this touching rhyme, her exit is then signalled by the author as follows: ‘she tosses off her bowle, falls back and is carried out’.
None of this kind of behaviour would have been likely to impress the puritan killjoys in Parliament at the time. The play ran at the Cockpit in Drury Lane until 2 September 1642, when the government closed all theatres by decree, just a month after Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham at the beginning of the English Civil War, effectively killing off Brome’s career as a dramatist. The theatres would not reopen until the Restoration, eighteen years later – too late for Brome, who died in poverty in 1652, or indeed for that humble man of the people Oliver Cromwell, whose salary of £100,000 a year as Lord Protector (roughly £7.5 million in today’s money) barely kept the wolf from the door of his various palaces until his own demise in 1658.