Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
JONATHYNE BRIGGS
Abstract. The work of musical group Gong illustrates the connection be-
tween drugs and utopian thought following the failure of the protests of
1968. In their lyrics and interviews, Gong suggested the transformative
and revolutionary power of drug use to overturn Western society. More
than a political statement, drug use was preached as a method of mental
liberation. The band’s promotion of psychedelics and marijuana connect-
ed with many of the ideas operating within the French counterculture, in-
cluding anti-psychiatry, science fiction, and personal liberation. For Gong,
the French counterculture could achieve success through drugs. While
personal enlightenment of everyone would have the proper psychology to
create a new society. The group’s recordings between 1972 and 1974 of-
fered their fullest vision of the new worlds available through drugs. How-
ever, the drug utopias painted in the music of Gong eventually faded as the
group abandoned its revolutionary project by the mid-1970s due to politi-
cal pressure in France and disillusionment within the group.
One of the most important voices in the French countercultural scene in the
wake of the failed student uprising in 1968 was an Australian-born iconoclast,
Daevid Allen. His progressive rock group Gong exalted drugs as a method of
providing spiritual enlightenment, revealing a utopian vision of the good soci-
ety to come. In 1968, young people throughout the world openly questioned
the assumptions of their respective societies. Whether in the so-called First,
Second or Third World, youths rose in protest throughout the year, taking
to the streets in Paris, Prague, Turin, Chicago, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro
and elsewhere. Historical studies have emphasized the “revolutionary” na-
ture of these actions, although not necessarily clarifying what revolutionaries
had hoped to achieve.2 Among many of these works the interpretation of
“1968” as a cultural revolution within various societies has become a given.
In France, youths briefly aligned with other social groups in an attempt to
re-imagine postwar society outside of consumerism and to protest against the
government of Charles de Gaulle.3 But similar to responses elsewhere, the
protests in France came to an abrupt end with the success of pro-Gaullist
supporters rallying to a government threatened by the debilitating strikes that
Jonathyne Briggs is an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University North-
west.
SHAD (Fall 2008): 6-23
Briggs: Drug Utopias in the Music of Gong, 1968-1974 7
IMPORTING DRUGS
The continued fear of youth unrest had led the Gaullist state, under the lead-
ership of President Georges Pompidou after 1969, to seek expanded powers
to control drug trafficking. Seeing youths as the primary consumers of illicit
drugs, the state had already used a number of existent laws to thwart the ability
of young people to assemble in large crowds by canceling several music festi-
vals between 1969 and 1972, often citing concerns of illegal activities.21 Prior
to 1970 drug possession had not been not a crime, but the 31 December law
explicitly defined legitimate medical uses of drugs and effectively outlawed
all other uses, allowing municipal authorities to crack down on youth unrest.22
While blocking the importation of drugs into France – an effort famously
dramatized in William Friedkin’s film The French Connection (1971) – was
the main idea of the 31 December 1970 law, drugs, whether alcohol, tobacco,
marijuana, heroin, and caffeine, already easily traversed the threshold between
the industrialized and developing world.23 The government of Georges Pom-
pidou hoped to use this measure to keep young people under greater control
under the rubric of “L’ordre moral,” which in turn strengthened the symbolic
value of drug use in the French underground’s anti-establishment campaign.
The increased prohibition of marijuana, opium, and hallucinogens forced drug
trade underground and linked it with Western counterculture.24
Although illegality further imbued drug use with the aura of rebellion for
Western youth, even in prior to drug prohibition, young people during the
sixties were interested in illicit substances – marijuana and LSD – as the so-
called hippie subculture in France grew.25 The musical analogue of hippie
culture – psychedelia – had also made inroads into French culture during the
1960s, evident in a number of examples from French pop music from the
period, including France Gall’s “Bébé requin [Baby shark]” and the 5 Gentle-
men’s “LSD-25,” as well as the mid-sixties’ work of Serge Gainsbourg, Mi-
chel Polnareff, and Antoine.26 Perhaps the most obvious sign of psychedelia’s
growing popularity was that the iconic French pop star Johnny Hallyday had
clothed himself in hippie fashions and recorded a French-language version of
Scott MacKenzie’s famous anthem “San Francisco” in 1967.27 Henri Laproux,
proprietor of the famous Golf Drouot nightclub in Paris, also noted the ap-
pearance of hippies in France: “They [hippies] did not need to travel to collect
their folkloric trinkets: the baba panoply can found at the Puces [the Paris flea
market]. Behind this naïve and touristic fantasy, there were drugs.”28 But
psychedelia was more than drugs and fashion. It sought to replicate and create
new modes of perception to represent the transformations in postwar Western
society and to promote even further changes.29 While the music went silent
during the events of 1968, the presence of psychedelia would be an important
aspect of the emergence of the French counterculture after May.
It was by an odd series of events that Daevid Allen found himself in Paris
during the eruption of student protests and workers’ strikes that threatened the
perceived stability of Gaullist France. Allen, an Australian who had been liv-
10 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)
ing in Great Britain since 1961, had come to France to perform as a member
of the progressive rock group The Soft Machine, in which he played guitar.
The Soft Machine was part of the burgeoning progressive rock scene in Can-
terbury, which was growing in significance within British popular music by
1967.30 The Soft Machine had also become an integral part of the London
psychedelic scene centered at the UFO club, as the band served as a replace-
ment house band once the previous act, Pink Floyd, had achieved commercial
success.31 Part of the bill of a psychedelic festival held in St. Tropez, the Soft
Machine was touring in France in the summer of 1967. But Allen was refused
re-entry into Britain when the group attempted to return, due to the British ef-
forts to bar foreign “militants.” Exiled in France, Allen was an alien in Paris
at a dangerous time, as French authorities were seeking to remove all foreign-
ers who appeared to have any sympathy with the students creating havoc in
the French capital. He subsequently left the city to escape the French police,
ending up in the village of Deya in the south of Spain.32 Allen quickly settled
into a quiet, communal life typical of the hippie subculture of the late 1960s.33
But while there, Allen had a vision that he was to return to France and use
his music to articulate a new consciousness of which the events of May had
offered only a brief glimpse. In recounting his experiences and revelations,
Allen set forth the ideals of Gong:
I was living in a turning point in the history of world consciousness. That I was
one of the many human – and thus flawed – instruments creating a cultural and
spiritual revolution… Absurdity was the ideal shield. Behind a smoke screen
of silliness the cosmic joker could infiltrate anywhere wile [sic] teaching un-
hindered the “heresy” of gutsy spiritual transformation. Clearly this was a time
when LP records could be glad-wrapped in code… as an initial preparation for
survival throughout the approaching world changes.
arrived in Britain with the Beat Poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall in
1965.37 Allen presaged the Beats’ effect on the European counterculture in his
collection of poetry from 1964, If Words Were Birds, which shares the playful
aesthetic of Beat poetry.38 Gong embraced the experimental attitudes of the
Beats concerning drugs, especially psychedelics. Ginsberg and other Beats
praised these as “truth drugs,” as a method of self-discovery.39 Acid ingestion
would help to move the revolution in France by forcing the counterculture into
self-examination, and for the Freak Left drug intake would help to create the
atmosphere that would allow new social order to germinate.40 Gong played an
important role in articulating these ideas within the framework of pop music,
which provided another “path of revolution” according to the band.41
The group’s initial recording, 1969’s Magick Brother/ Mystic Sister, reveals
Gong’s spiritual concerns and introduces critical elements of their mythology,
which would develop into a more sophisticated picture of utopianism. For
example, “Gong Song” presents for the first time the Pot Head Pixie, an alien
whose insights come from drug-induced visions:
Once upon a time on a far off planet
There was a little green man who came down by comet
I first met him in a London taxi
Told me his name was Mr. Pot Head Pixie
Told me he came from a planet called Gong
Sang me this small green song
Why do you feel so good?
Why do you feel so bad?
Why do you think you should?
Why do you ask your dad?
Because you never notice where you really really come from
You never noticed who you really really are
You never know just who’s been fooling you
You know I never thought that all that acid I brought
Would make it seem so strange in here42
The character of the Pot Head Pixie challenged the assumptions of Western
society and its methods of self discovery. The Pot Head Pixie’s alienation and
confusion echoed other psychedelic songs, and “Gong Song” questions the
modes of perception, a defining characteristic of 1960s psychedelia.43 “Gong
Song” asserts that the assumed reality of Western society can be easily (and
beneficially) disturbed through drug intake, and in the song the Pot Head Pixie
emphasizes this point to show how Allen (and the vicarious listener) should
not accept normality. Expressing the unusual nature that lay beneath quotid-
ian life was one of the major ideas of psychedelic music, a conclusion often
understood under the influence of hallucinogens.44 In the context of the song,
by altering one’s perception drugs played an important role in illuminating
what the groups believed to be the specific causes of alienation in modern cul-
ture, with the joke being that an alien is telling Allen this information. “Gong
Song” signaled the direction that Gong would take in referencing drugs in
their lyrics – from being a humorous detour to being a path to transcendence
– with the evocation of transcendence revealing the connection between drugs
12 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)
INSANITY AS UTOPIA
While drugs provided a vehicle to transport people to a different mental space,
the ultimate goal in the advocacy of their usage was to reconstitute the idea of
normalcy. By undermining the cohesion of social norms, new social norms
could theoretically be introduced as part of the ongoing revolution in France.
Yet the French counterculture found another possible avenue for reconfig-
uring normalcy: the anti-psychiatry movement. Gong’s next album, Flying
Teapot, explicitly dealt with the theme of mental normalcy. The group was
interested in not only exploring the meaning of sanity, again a common theme
in psychedelia, but also in challenging the scientific notions of psychology as
a pathway to normative behavior. Instead, Gong asserted that drugs should
serve as the therapy for seventies’ France.
The relationship between psychotropic drugs, such as LSD, and mental
health was one of the initial focal points of research conducted by the United
States’ government in the 1950s, resulting in the mental health boom in the
postwar period.54 Drugs were believed to offer a form of treatment for men-
tal patients to create normative behavior to combat schizophrenia and other
disorders. However, for many leftist philosophers in France, the phenomenon
of schizophrenia became a framework for understanding society and the prob-
14 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)
lems that arose from capitalism during the late 1960s. Intellectuals as diverse
as Jacques Lacan, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze employed criticized psy-
choanalytic theory as a method of creating the so-called “natural” conditions
of the modern world.55 Indeed, Guattari’s and Deleuze’s 1972 work Anti-Oe-
dipus sketched out many of the themes concerning the vitality of schizophre-
nia as a method of dealing with the prohibitions of modern society and drew
connections between anti-psychiatry and the ideals of ’68, especially in their
emphasis on the importance of unfettered desire.56 These various philosophi-
cal strands coalesced into the anti-psychiatry movement of the early 1970s.
Centered on the experimental practices as the Clinique de la Borde, the anti-
psychiatry movement valorized the experience of mental patients as healthy
and normal responses to modern society. Many of the intellectuals of the
period – Jean-Paul Sartre, Foucault, and Guattari – saw the revolutionary ele-
ment of play at work in the experiences of mental patients, again reinforcing
the link between mental states and the utopian spirit of May.57 The cultural
underground embraced such views and sought to politicize the treatment of
mental patients in French institutions.58 In an interview, Allen and Malherbe
both challenged the classification of schizophrenia as a disease and instead
asserted that it was a form of awareness on a different psychic level: “When
one is conscious of one’s own duality and one’s own contradictions, one then
accepts them.”59
This perception of the relativism and duality of mental health was rein-
forced on many songs on Flying Teapot. On “The Pot Head Pixies,” the nar-
rator tells Zero,
Beware
Be Aware
Somebody somewhere has got to be high
I am
You are
We are crazy.60
And on “Radio Gnome Invisible,” the alien transmission tells Zero to explore
his inner world and listen to the voices there:
Everything you think shows
Hanging round your head
Underneath your long hair
Tell me what you feel there
What’s that in the sky now?
Teapots can fly now
Voices in your head
Tell me what they said61
In this context, the Radio Gnome not only evokes the central concerns of
much of psychedelic music – understanding the inner world and its relation to
the human experience – but also points to the importance of the inner world
in preparing one for enlightenment. The Flying Teapots, the mystical devices
that can transport Zero to the Planet Gong, serves as a device for personal
exploration. But the inner world cannot be understood normally, as Radio
Briggs: Drug Utopias in the Music of Gong, 1968-1974 15
sage and change the world: “Give a little wink/ You know just who the Pot
Head Pixies are.”65 Awakened to the true meaning of the Planet Gong – to
provide Earth with the tools for building a new society – Zero leaves the Plan-
et Gong at the end of Angel’s Egg with lessons learned from “pixies green/ that
sends us kisses in the brain.”66
The “insanity” of Planet Gong is offered as a healthy mode of living, suit-
able for rebuilding a human society that has failed to evolve after May ’68.
Mental play and the rejection of a static inner life serve as the greatest meth-
ods of discovering the meaning of life. Angel’s Egg is the fullest expression
of Gong’s utopianism, combining drugs, aliens, and insanity in an effort that
suggests the possibility and importance of overthrowing the existing men-
tal order. The anti-psychiatry movement in France had pushed itself to the
logical point of seeing patients at La Borde as a new form of revolutionaries,
but this perception was encountering the stiff resistance of the real medical
problems experienced by the patients at the clinic, showing how “craziness is
a dead end.”67 And by the album’s release, Allen’s decision to come to France
to challenge Western thinking was encountering greater resistance. Problems
with the group’s French record company had led Gong to release Angel’s Egg
on a British record label, Virgin Records. During the recording of the final
album of the trilogy, Gong would leave France and abandon the utopian ideas
that characterized their previous work.
revolution and change. But he was nagged with questions of existence and
truth, which paralyzed him. Again the Pot Head Pixies provided Zero with
the pathway to answers:
Question number one
If you’re a believer
what do you believe?
Why do you believe it?
Doncha [sic] ever wonder...
If it’s really true...
Do you? Question number two
Really... that’s the mystery
Let a pothead pixie tell you what to do
And this is what he’ll tell you...
If you gotta [sic] problem
to know who you are
Here now
this is what you do
Remember you are me
I am you
all of us together69
Allen’s lyric explored the meaning of truth, one of the fundamental spiri-
tual questions that Timothy Leary postulated in his work. Leary linked these
questions – What is life? Who is man? Who am I? How do I escape? – to the
religious potential of drugs in so much as he equated this search for answers
both as part of religious dogma and as a by-product of psychotropic experi-
ences. He mapped the ability of certain drugs to bring one to different states of
consciousness, which was precisely what Gong’s work implied.70 Leary was
influential in Britain with the establishment of the World Psychedelic Centre
in Chelsea, and Gong would bring his ideas into French music. Through the
character of the Pot Head Pixie, Gong argued that a new type of community
was needed to bring harmony to society and that drugs could quickly create
the proper environment.
Nevertheless, in the story Zero fails to spread the Pixies’ gospel to Earth.
Distracted in a pub, he misses the aliens’ signal that would have brought man-
kind together in harmony through Flying Anarchy. Downtrodden, Zero ques-
tions his revelations, and Radio Gnome tries to reassure him:
And if things don’t change for
better or worse
well man you must be dead
but cha don’t have to give up hope
and ya [sic] don’t have to give up dope
you just have to
be what you are my friends
today
that’s what the Octave Doctor says71
The failure to bring Flying Anarchy to Earth was not the end of Zero’s
visions of Planet Gong, but the group did close the trilogy here. Allen’s fi-
nal reference to dope obfuscated his own changing position on the potential
of drugs for creating a better society. The increased drug use among Gong
18 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)
members eventually broke the group up shortly after the release of You in
1974. As Allen noted in a later interview, the slapstick ending of Zero missing
his opportunity because he is too stoned reflected his own changed stance on
drugs. When asked why he left Gong, Allen replied, “I wanted to stop smok-
ing dope and find a band who didn’t smoke [dope].”72 Despite the recognition
of Gong as a French analog to the American group the Grateful Dead,73 Gong
by this point had already left France due to its conservative atmosphere, which
continued after the 1974 election of the right-wing candidate Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing. Allen subsequently retired from music for a number of years, per-
forming sporadically during the late 1970s. The members who continued as
Gong moved away from the drug fantasia of the Radio Gnome narrative to-
wards instrumental jazz-rock, abandoning the utopianism of drugs.
The story of Gong’s French period between 1969 and 1974 illuminates a
nexus between utopian thought, the various intellectual strands of the French
counterculture, pop music, and above all the centrality of drugs in achieving
the ideas of ’68. The turn away from drugs in the music of Gong suggests
the abandonment of the utopianism of the early 1970s, which was a common
occurrence throughout the French left. Drugs had failed to light the path to
freedom or liberation in France despite the efforts of Gong to inject them
with greater social and political meanings. Although drug usage continued in
French popular music after the breakup of Gong in 1974, it lacked the ideal-
ism displayed in the lyrics of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy. Drugs were
still a challenge to the system – French punks favored amphetamines – but
their usage was no longer linked to the creation of a better world.
ENDNOTES
1. The author would like to thank David Courtwright for his comments and advice on early
drafts of this article, James B. Lane for sharing his knowledge of the American counterculture
and his editing skills, the readers of the Social History of Alcohol and Drugs for their critiques of
previous drafts, and W. Scott Haine for his suggestion to write it in the first place. All translations
from the French (unless otherwise stated) are by the author. Any and all errors belong solely to
him.
2. The works on the events of 1968 range from autobiographical observations that emphasize
the importance of particular groups or cultural milieus to sociological analyses that focus on
how the events of 1968 (however defined) reveal the shift in the meaning of culture in specific
national contexts. The quasi-violent reaction of students representing a generation operating
against specific national issues has been a dominant interpretation of the various protests. For
some examples, see Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Ban-
tam, 1989); Michael Long, Making History: Czech Voices of Dissent and the Revolution of 1989
(Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005); Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian
Students and Worker in 1968 (New York: Berghahn, 2004); Eric Zolof, Refried Elvis: The Mak-
ing of a Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Hervé Hamon and Pat-
rick Rotman, Génération, 2 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1987 and 1988); Luisa Passerini, Autobiography
Briggs: Drug Utopias in the Music of Gong, 1968-1974 19
of a Generation: Italy 1968, trans. Lisa Erdburg (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1996); David Burner, Making Peace with the ’60s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Keith Reader, The May 1968 Events in France: Reproductions and Interpretations (New York:
Routledge, 1993); Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 1971); Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative,
trans. Arnold Pomerans (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2000); Angelo Quattocchi and Tom Nairn, The
Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 (London: Panther Books, 1968); and Charles Reich,
The Greening of America (New York: Bantam Books, 1972) among others. For critiques of this
approach, see Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002); and Scott MacFarland, The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Countercul-
ture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2007). Other scholars have examined the phenomena
of protest in 1968 within a broader, international context; some examples include Martin Klimke
and Joachim Schlaroth, eds., 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977 (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain,
France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Washington
D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1998); Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2004); Ronald Frazier, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1988) and Theodore Roszak The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections
on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969)
among others. For the purpose of this article, May ’68 will act as shorthand for the events in
France between March and June, 1968.
3. See Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism; and Alain Touraine, The May Movement: May
1968 – The Student Rebellion and Workers’ Strikes – the Birth of a Social Movement, trans.
Leonard F.X. Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971), 55. However, workers united in Italy
during 1969 in the “Hot Autumn” strikes; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
(New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 415-16.
4. This slogan comes from one of May more iconic posters; for a collection of the various post-
ers and graffiti found in Paris during the student revolts, see Writing on the Wall, May 1968: A
Documentary Anthology, ed. Vladimir Fišera, trans. Nicholas Ainsworth (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1979).
5. Vincent Geoghean, Marxism and Utopianism (New York: Routledge Press, 1987), 136. For
a contemporary report concerning the relationship between Marxism and the events of 1968 in
France, see Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, trans. Alfred
Ehrenfeld (New York: Modern Reader Library, 1969).
6. Frederic Martel, The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968, trans. Jane
Marie Todd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13-47; and Michael Bess, The Light-
Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2003), 76-92.
7. Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 7-8; and Frank E. Manuel and Fritze P. Manuel,
Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 805. Winter ar-
gues that a molecular revolution is just another form of utopianism, albeit operating on a smaller
scale than the failed grand projects of the twentieth century. Focusing on the phenomenon of
minor utopias in the twentieth century, of which 1968 was an example, Winter posits that utopian
thought was deeply embedded in the reality of the present while seeking to fashion a future based
on the realization of expectations.
8. Seidman, Imaginary Revolution, 7-8. A defining feature of May 1968 in France was the
activities of groupuscules, small political organizations of a few members dedicated to specific
goals, which again emphasizes the fragmentary nature of the counterculture.
9. The most notable examples of Maoist groupuscules would be Vive La Révolution and
Gauche Prolétarienne. Their efforts of GP would end tragically with the death of Pierre Overney
in 1972; Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and The Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 17.
10. Thomas Ekman Jørgensen, “Utopia and Disillusion: Shattered Hopes of the Copenhagen
20 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 23, No 1 (Fall 2008)
Counterculture,” in Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European So-
cieties, 1960-1980, ed. Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006),
334-38.
11. Actuel par Actuel: Chronique d’un journal et de ses lecteurs, 1970-1975, (Paris: Dire/
Stock, 1977).
12. “La Revolution pour le plaisir,” Actuel 7 (April 1971): 3.
13. “La Drogue,” Actuel 20 (May 1972): 2-4.
14. French progressive rock encompasses a broad category of bands but all share the desire
to combine the electric power of rock music with the sophistication of jazz and classical com-
position. Different groups would combine these musical traditions in different ways, but all
French groups operated from these aesthetic bases. See Jonathyne Briggs, “Anarchie en France:
Hypermodernity and French Popular Music, 1958-1981” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2006),
chapter 4.
15. Norman Cohn recognizes the connection between the promotion of drug intake during the
1960s and the millenarian mystics of the medieval period, again reinforcing the utopian aspect
present in the work of Gong. See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary
Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970), 286.
16. Jaap van der Bent, “‘Holy Amsterdam Holy Paris’: The Beat Generation in Europe,” in
Beat Culture: The 1950s and Beyond, ed. Cornelis A. van Minnen, Jaap van der Bent, and Mel
van Elteren (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999), 55.
17. Ginsburg provides a critique of Western consciousness in the face of its inability to recon-
cile itself with altered states of being, which the Beats often invoked in their poetry and prose;
Allen Ginsburg, “Gnostic Consciousness,” in Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Con-
sciousness, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974). For a broader discussion of the
Beats’ relationship to drugs, see Jay Stevens Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
(New York: Grove Press, 1987) and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA,
LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985).
18. These groups instead sought to emphasize the seriousness of rock music as a method of
creating a new type of culture. In their music, the attempted to make cultural connections with
the modernist composers and jazz pioneers, in turn creating complex musical forms (which music
critics and historians have dubbed “progressive rock”). While utopian in a sense, as they sought
to undermine class divisions through musical transgressions, their approach offered little humor
and in many ways serves as a musical example of the New Left in France. See Briggs, “Anarchie
en France,” chapter 4.
19. For many French policymakers, the “outbreak” of drug usage was a public health concern
rather than a threat to the political structures of the Fifth Republic, and much of the legal frame-
work created by the developing drug laws operated on this premise. See Pierre G. Coslin, Les
adolescents devant les déviances (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), chapter 4.
20. Tim Boekhout van Solinge, Dealing with Drugs in Europe: An Investigation of European
Drug Control Experiences: France, the Netherlands and Sweden (The Hague: BJu Legal, 2004),
43 and 68; and Marie Jauffret-Roustide, Les drogues: Approche sociologique, économique et
politique (Paris: La Documentation française, 2004), 49-50. While the focus in this particular
work is on Gong and their early recording output, the connection between drugs and French
music remains an open question for exploration, especially in consideration of the peculiar con-
text created by anti-drug legislation. I hope that the police records of this period, often attained
through the lengthy derogation process, will attract scholarly interest.
21. Briggs, “Anarchie en France,” 141-43.
22. “Loi no 70-1320 31 Decembre 1970” at http://cafdes2004.free.fr/dwld/toxicomanie/
loi%20de%2070.htm [accessed March 20, 2006]. Tim Boekhout van Solinge argues that the in-
tensification of French drug policy was a direct response to ’68; Tim Boekhout van Solinge, “Can-
nabis in France,” in Cannabis Science. From Prohibition to Human Right, ed. Lorenz Böllinger
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 1997), at http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.france.
html [accessed January 31, 2008].
23. David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cam-
Briggs: Drug Utopias in the Music of Gong, 1968-1974 21