Part
3 of 15
Bill liked to talk about the positive benefit of drugs, take the
Beatles for example. And he made some great points, especially how all drugs get lumped together. But sometimes
I think people on both sides of the issue like to exaggerate
either the positive or negative arguments to make their own
point. Crediting drugs for the genius of the Beatles assumes that those songs would never have been conceived without the aid of drugs. Now that may be true, but just to play devil's advocate, Beethoven created works of genius without drugs, as did many other creative artists.
Would Hemingway been a great writer without his drinking? What would make the argument that the Beatles would have been just as great with or without the drugs? Yellow submarine might not have been written, but something else just as great might have been. As a woman asked Bill on one of his CD's, if he got so much benefit out of them, why did he stop? Would Bill have been the comic genius that he was without the drugs and drinking?
Well first of all, I thought Beethoven snorted tons of cocaine, maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I always thought. I am going to get burnt on all of my Beethoven albums now that you said that. No, I mean, definitely, it was a tool. There was this guy who was like a channeler, called himself Bashar that we saw. He was a 21-year-old surfer boy out in California and he channeled the spirit by the name of Bashar that was supposed to be from some other universe. Bashar used to say that drugs could be used as a tool of being able to change your vibration. One thing that you really have to understand is that Bill was sober as a judge when he was doing what is considered by everybody to be his best material. I do not think there is any commercially available stuff of Bill when he was drinking or drugging. I take that back, there are a couple of things,
but mostly not.
When Bill was on Dangerfield's he was still drinking, but it was a lot lighter then. I definitely think the experiences that we all went through on drugs were very sentimental, very key to who Bill turned out to be. It was all a part of his up bringing, which is important as any step in his evolutionary chain. I think he lived through it and did it and took from it and then he hit that point where it was just a dead end. That was maybe what I look back on as the sadder years. The years when we couldn't get anything done for we'd be hunting down a bag of cocaine instead of trying to make a recording. But you know, we are all guilty of the same thing; all of that energy still there, but suddenly it was all for the drugs and not for the project that was being worked on.
When Bill did overcome alcohol, all that energy was lifted and he was able to be a powerhouse of resolve and he was able to finish all the things that he started. Without drugs, would the Beatles have written amazing music? I mean I am sure there are ways, but I do not know if there were any other ways for them to have gotten that level of conciousness without being chemically induced. I am sure that would be possible, but then there are other ways of looking at it too. Our bodies are almost 80% water and the earth is almost 80% water thus basically, as far the physical plain goes, we are all nothing more than just a big sack of walking chemicals and so is this earth. But, maybe in some other distant galaxy, where Bill is right now, maybe Twinkies are illegal drugs that people sell on corners and you can buy crack out of a vending machine, I don't know, I doubt it.
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"I think he lived through it and did it and took from it and then he hit that point where it was just a dead end.
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But the other thing besides just the drugs being the keys in unlocking certain conscious and/or subconscious locks, I think something else it can do, especially in terms of the Beatles' or other bands, is that it can synchronize everybody. I think part of what drugs can do for a collective group of people is to, kind of like, tune everybody's mind into the same frequency response and therefore, those people could create similar music or comedy.
Bill was a comedian, but more like a jazz musician. I hear all of the time. "Hey Kevin did you hear this one recording of Bill doing this?" We'd have to come back and go, "No I didn't hear that, but I heard him a thousand times and let me tell ya, it was different every night." I have an easier time comparing Bill to Miles Davis than with whatever, dumb comics. My point being is that with Bill, he brought to comedy the experiences that he went through with drugs and alcohol and all that. It wasn't just him as an island, parked away in some corner. It was him going through, I guess, collective conscious experiences much like musicians that had been through this, but he was the one able to bring it into the world of comedy for the first time. This is why I always think he will go down as the Hendrix of comedy. Because he was a loner and yet not a loner at the same time. He was like a group person, a group player, but you know, a stand alone.
