For: Sport, Music, Identities
Love is the drug: Performance-enhancing in sport and music
Jed Novick, University of Brighton
Rob Steen, University of Brighton
Todd admits he got lucky; he had a good trip. ‘I had a peyote button in my mouth. Drugs were a mental tool. I found a certain equilibrium.’ A single album clocking in at 19 tracks and 56 minutes, [A Wizard, A True Star], as Todd’s liner notes record, ‘exceeded the practical norm by at least six or seven minutes per side’. The reminder prompts a hearty snigger: ‘Music people say, “What do you have the right to play?” I wanted to do any damn thing I wanted.’ Yet for all that, Wizard has a formidable sense of structure.[1]
‘Is your doctor on drugs? If not, perhaps they should be.’ Thus ran the introduction to a story published in the Sunday Times in October 2011. The subject was a study led by Lord Darzi, professor of surgery at Imperial College London and a junior health minister under the previous Labour government, one prompted by concerns about caffeine, the fatigued surgeon’s traditional drug of choice, and its potential for causing hand tremors. Barbara Sahakian, professor of psychiatry at Cambridge University, and her research colleague, Charlotte Housden, gave sleep-deprived surgeons modafinil, a brain stimulant known to boost memory and brain power, then tested their capacity to think clearly, solve difficulties and execute simulated operations. Although the drug had yet to undergo long-term safety tests, Professor Sahakian proposed that it could be sold over the counter: ‘We found that when surgeons had taken modafinil they saw sharp improvements in their ability to solve problems and think flexibly. In fact, their performance was very good.’[2]
Ah, performance. They may not ply their trade in front of audience or cameras but surgeons are still engaged in one. While it might be pushing a point to argue that our surgeons should take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), the question of who can and who can’t is one that has and continues trouble us.
For many athletes, life is preparation for a single moment. They train, they wait, they sleep, they train, they wait. For that moment. They do everything they can to prepare for that moment, to make themselves the best they can possibly be. For that moment. But consider this. Imagine you’re that athlete. What if you could make yourself better than you could possibly be? No one would know – it’s new, undetectable. Imagine the temptation. You could be everything you ever wanted. You could go beyond where you imagined. You could push and push and push. Imagine the temptation. There’s fame and fortune, sure, but there’s something else too. There’s the achievement, the performance.
Take it away from the sporting arena for a minute. Take the idea into the arts. That’s a world where you don’t have to imagine that temptation. You can succumb to it. And plenty have – with often quite extraordinary results (and not just the Bradley Cooper character in the 2011 movie Limitless, a blocked writer who suddenly takes wing with a little help from his friend NZT, a clever little pill that allows him to access memories instantly and concentrate as never before). Would Byron and Shelley have been the creative artists they were if it hadn’t have been for laudunum? Would David Bowie have made Station to Station if he hadn’t been caught in a cocaine blizzard? Would John Lennon have written ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ if the strongest thing he’d taken was a cup of coffee? Would Aldous Huxley have been the writer he was if he hadn’t been given the keys to the doors of perception? It’s hard not to think of Harry Lime from Graham Greene’s The Third Man: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
Different people, Different worlds
Of all life’s simple pleasures, there is none more simple or more pleasurable than watching someone do something really well. To see mastery at work, technical expertise, artistic perfection: this is the food of life. A Roger Federer backhand, a Michael Clark dance, a Peter O’Toole film, David Bowie singing… We could go on, but just consider that list: a Swiss tennis player, a Scottish dancer, an Irish actor, an English singer. Different people, different disciplines, different worlds. But despite those differences, there’s more that unites than divides. They’ve all been at the very top of their particular tree. All not just good, not just the best, but the best with a flourish, with style, with grace. With that singular desire to do things their way. There’s something else too. They’re united not only by their common genius, but also by their unanimity of purpose – to entertain, enlighten and excel. One thing though separates them – us. Our attitude towards them separates them.
We’re interested in them, intrigued by them, even fascinated by them. We want to read about them, we want to know who they are and what they do. We follow their careers and await their new works. We care about them. We make judgements about them. Actually…cancel that. We only make judgements about some of them.
Of the four people mentioned, one is a gay former heroin addict, one is a reformed drunk, one created some of the most innovative music of the late 20th century while strung out on cocaine, and one is a Swiss tennis player. No one would care if Clark was the gay former junkie, the reformed drunk or the ex-cokehead. And if anyone did care, they’d care in a caring way, a worried way, a ‘Is he going to be OK?’ way. They wouldn’t care that he might upset his fellow dancers, that he might scare off the sponsors, that he might encourage impressionable young dancers to stray off the straight and narrow. Now imagine the scenario if Federer was the gay former junkie, the reformed drunk or the ex-cokehead. Well, you can probably forget those ostentatiously yet stylishly logo’d headbands for a start.
Why are our attitudes towards the behaviour of professional sportsmen so different to our attitudes to musicians, artists, actors, poets… just about everyone else really? If what you do, if how you express yourself, is artistic then you have licence – artistic licence – to be what you want, be who you want. If you want to drink or take drugs, fine. Survive and we’ll call you a national treasure. Don’t survive? Never mind. You’ll be a tortured genius and we’ll make a fortune repackaging your back catalogue.
A large part of this difference in attitude comes down to the view that, somehow and for some reason, sports figures are considered ‘role models’. For Simon Barnes of The Times, this has become a recurring source of tempered fury. In May 2011, in response to the lifting of the superinjunction Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer, had obtained in order to prevent his marital infidelity reaching the public domain, he wrote: ‘Behaviour we wouldn’t blink an eye at in a film star, still less a rock star, is considered shocking and worthy of vast newspaper space when it’s a sports star.’[3]
What ‘disturbed’ him was ‘humbug’ of it all, ‘the great rush to attribute to athletes in general and footballers in particular virtues that they don’t possess and don’t really aspire to. When I hear the term Role Model I release the safety catch on my Browning. Likewise Ambassador. Likewise Great Servant of the Game. I don’t wish to jump too heavily on Giggs, no matter what he has done. I just loathe the stench of the Humbug Industry that he has been part of for 20 years.’ For a definition of humbug, he invoked Matilda in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: ‘I’m speaking of making claims to a degree of virtue, purity, anything you like to call it – morals, politics, the arts, any field you prefer – which the person concerned neither possesses nor is seriously attempting to attain. They just flatter themselves that they are like that.’[4]
‘Pop stars get a much better deal from our red-tops, or, rather, from our set of social prejudices,’ argued Barnes. ‘Look at Mick Jagger: a lifetime of sexual scandals, conspicuous bad behaviour and a fair amount of drugs, and now he’s Sir Michael. [Keith] Richards, his Rolling Stones co-writer, wrote an autobiography full of sex and drugs, and he’s a national treasure: what a wonderful old geezer, surviving all those drugs. But if sports stars are to reap the rewards of fame, they must be conspicuously virtuous. It’s part of the package, which is why sports stars are so uniquely vulnerable to, ah, exposure. The problem is not with sports stars, or even with newspapers, it is in our need to see sports stars as morally admirable people.’[5]
Further grist to the Barnes mill arrived at summer’s end when a comparatively tame visit by members of England’s World Cup rugby union squad to a bar in New Zealand – where the main entertainment was the highly dubious pastime of ‘dwarf-throwing’, in which the players took no part – fuelled a week’s worth of front- and back-page headlines. This inarguably excessive reaction, born of flagging sales, was primarily attributable to the fact that the captain, Mike Tindall, who had been photographed cavorting with a young woman, had recently wedded a prominent Royal, Princess Zara. ‘We have higher standards for professional athletes than we do for estate agents, accountants, journalists, butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers,’ contended Barnes. ‘That counts double when they are representing England or Great Britain, and you can turn that doubling cube once and once more when you’ve established a royal connection. Turn it all the way up to 64 if you can bring in a dwarf.’ Professional sportspeople, he concluded, have become the ‘naughty vicars’ of the 21st century, obliged to bear a ‘moral burden’ and set an example for which they have ‘no inclination and little enough aptitude’.[6] If a rock star had indulged the way that the England rugby players did, the very least they could expect would be a boost to sales and a cover story in the music press.
Altered states
Nowhere is the gulf between musician and athlete more starkly apparent than in the sphere of drugs. Quincy Jones warned that cocaine ‘separates you from your soul’ and it most certainly helped separate Marvin Gaye from his.[7] There is no need here, moreover, to name those musicians whose creative flow was slowed, stemmed and ultimately destroyed by what they elected to ingest. It would be blinkered, nonetheless, to ignore the benefits.
It was in the mid-1960s, attested Paul McCartney, that the link between music and mind-altering substances became more overt, and even respectable:
[Once] pot was established as part of the curriculum you started to get a bit more surreal material coming from us, a bit more abstract stuff. It was just the first time I’d been exposed to all these new influences and had the time and inclination to bother with them all. I always have to give marijuana credit for that. It was Bob Dylan that turned us on to pot in America and it opened a different kind of sensibility really; more like jazz musicians.[8]
The influence of drugs on The Beatles’ development from mop-topped popsters to boundary-shifting explorers has often been noted, ad nauseam in the case of ‘A Day in the Life’. Suffice to say that ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ was actually McCartney’s ‘ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret’.[9]
To learn that Todd Rundgren, one of modern music’s most inventive forces, attributed what is now widely held to be his finest achievement to mind-altering substances – and the creative advances of his previous two albums, The Ballad of Todd Rundgren and Something/Anything?, to marijuana and Ritalin respectively - is merely to underscore a cultural tradition. The Doors’ first, game-changing album was fuelled by acid, as were Brian Wilson’s finest flights of fancy, albeit at severe cost to his sanity; Eric Clapton wrote ‘Layla’ while addicted to heroin.
Bill Flanagan was fascinated by all this. In Written In My Soul – Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters he interviewed rock royalty from Chuck Berry to Bono and almost invariably asked whether their drug habits enhanced their work. James Taylor freely admitted to penning ‘an awful lot of songs stoned’. Drugs eventually ‘turned’ on him, but ‘I certainly wrote a lot of songs during that period’.[10] While making On the Beach, his first overtly political album, Neil Young remembers ‘doing a lot of honey slides’ (‘marijuana and honey fried on a plate’), which altered how he sang - ‘Close you right down, make your voice lower.’[11] Pete Townshend concurred with Flanagan: it really was a ‘dangerous’ question:
People who discourage people from experimenting with narcotics mustn’t lie. They mustn’t say it makes you feel bad. It doesn’t. It hooks you because it makes you feel so good. Interestingly enough, during my honeymoon period with heroin I wrote nothing… So I think it’s not so much alcohol or drugs themselves which are the keys to creativity, but the fact that for certain individuals suffering and discomfort start you off on some new pursuit for understanding and possibly even for the different kind of pleasure release which the adrenaline rush of creativity produces.[12]
Much of the Rolling Stones’ most memorable and accomplished work was achieved under the direction of Keith Richards and his unslakeable thirst for anything that would get him high. Adamant as he was that the impact on the creative process, in a positive sense, was negligible, there can be little doubt that he used drugs to enhance performance. After all, as he saw it, it was a practical imperative:
Usually drug taking in music starts off on a very, very mundane level, just keeping going to make the next gig. It starts with popping a few white crosses just to be able to stand up after driving 500 miles across the desert…It’s the truck driver mentality: ‘Do you want me to crash this sucker or do you want me to stay awake?’… I started taking stuff in order to be able to get to the gig and actually be in a conscious state to play and do the job that I was getting paid to do. This is when most musicians get into it.[13]
Rundgren felt differently. By the time he began creating and recording A Wizard, A True Star in 1972, he had developed a taste for all manner of psychedelics, including DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, mushrooms (but not acid). The result was a musical smorgasboard spanning Broadway, Motown, Philly Soul, Krautrock, heavy metal, glam-rock, anthemic pop and piano-led ballads – all this while anticipating the rise of electro. Upon release the following year it made sense to few, admittedly, and scuppered his future as a chart-troubler, but time and musical evolution have elevated its reputation; bright young things such as Animal Collective and Hot Chip have hailed it for the way it expanded the possibilities of popular music and broadened their own horizons. Rundgren has never tried to separate input from output:
I became more aware of what music and sound were like in my internal environment, and how different that was from the music I had been making. My new challenge was to try to map, as directly as I could, the various kinds of chaotic musical element in my head. There were sounds that make you think of things like frickin’ dogs fighting, laughter or song fragments that don’t complete themselves. All these little musical instrumental bits that are essentially supposed to create some sort of imagery without the benefit of lyrics. It was very ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder – over-activity, hyperactivity), actually, and I wouldn’t dwell on whether a musical idea was complete or not. In that way, it sort of resembled the arc of a psychedelic experience.[14]
Whether we cite F Scott Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, Georgette Heyer popping amphetamines, Van Morrison rapping about ‘Wordsworth an’ Coleridge, smokin’ up in Kendal’ or Charlie Parker’s audience exhorting him to ever-greater flights of polyrhythmic invention knowing full well that he used heroin to attain them, drugs have not only long been tolerated in the creative arts but encouraged, even demanded, and not solely as creative inspiration but as prima facie evidence of a life on the edge, full of unorthodoxy, defiance and rebellion, glamour, thrills and danger. When they finish an album, concert or tour, the only drug-testers hovering in their vicinity are looking for a sale.
The unwritten code
No prominent British sportswriter openly advocates the decriminalisation of performance-enhancing drugs. To do so would be to break an unwritten code and risk the readers’ opprobrium. Short of advocating match-fixing, for which there can be no credible argument, suggesting that the so-called war on drugs is not only unwinnable but unnecessary is the sportswriter’s last taboo. Why is this the case? Why are performance-enhancing drugs illegal? As Mathew Syed says in Bounce: The Making of Champions, ‘The question is worth considering for at least one simple reason: the battle against drugs in sport is failing.’