Prior to cable, there were three primary networks on VHF channels and possibly one two other networks on UHF. All went off the air by about two in the morning and then they would run some jingoistic swill but with a three-minute song. Then the sound would go off and the glorious test patterns would appear.
When TV went 'round-the-clock, they felt an obsessive need to fill it with something and one of the formats was twenty-four hour news. Since there isn't enough news in the whole world to fill twenty-four hours or modern reporters are too lazy and incompetent to find it, they started make it up. Welcome to the (cough) modern time and the era of stooge news with zero real content.
One of the many reasons the test patterns were better was that TVs had physical controls for adjusting the image. If you put the test patterns together with those physical controls then you get a stoner game show only it was often more a tripper's game show in those days. You could do things with those controls which would make it look like the TV was going to explode and that looked too, too cool ... at least to stoners.
Today there's Wolf Blitzer talking about nothing versus a tripper's game show back then so ... I rest my case.
It was so much better. Today it would be even better yet because you can practically get to trippin' from the super-improved quality of the ganja. Millennials have no idea how good they've got it since, in the early time back then, ganja often came in 'matchboxes' for about five dollars for maybe a couple of grams ... of utter rubbish ... but it started a revolution which the Feds are still trying hopelessly to stop.
In their cleverness, the War on Drugs likely gave rise to the current terror of opiate addiction since we heard hardly any of that back then. There was very little heroin addiction except among the most impoverished Americans and some hare-brained musicians.
That heroin was so prevalent in the ghettos back then raised an important question in "Boyz in the Hood" in which they asked how all that heroin got there.
"Black man don't got no jetplanes."
How, indeed, did it get there.
We can still work with that opiate addiction because they need help, education, and support as they get well. I've used many, many drugs but I've never been addicted to anything, possibly because the impact of this song from Steppenwolf was so strong:
I've seen a lot of people walking around with tombstones in their eyes
but the pusher don't care if you live or if you die.
Goddamn the pusherman.
The song was recorded in the sixties and the encouragement to get fucked up is all through it, right.
"The Pusherman" was a huge hit and I damn sure never forgot it. There was no real education anywhere else about this so we took what we found.
That's the basis for giving people a real education about drugs rather than the ridiculous hoax which is presented now and is greatly exacerbated by the willful dissemination of opiates in 'pain' medication by Big Pharma.
For the conspiracy theory aspect of this, how did all that heroin come to the ghettos. Why does Big Pharma manufacture so much more opiated 'medication' than serves any legitimate requirement for it.
The conspiracy is the twenty-four news which gulls people into a false sense of enlightenment and away from any real analysis of anything. Everything they ever hear is pre-digested hogwash. In going to twenty-four hours, TV, ironically, put much of the populace to sleep which allowed the state a free rein to increase militarism in every possible way and that's exactly what they have done to today's horrific global effect.
7 comments:
You are are as addicted to weed as any junkie. I have watched you do the I got to get my weed dance just like they do.
You of course will disagree. But the time I have seen you without weed is when you had no money
The only reason arent a junkie is because in Scotland you didnt like the high heroin gave you.
Big Pharma makes because there are Drs will sell thier soul to sell it in so called Pain Clinics that prescribe Oxycontin for a backache.
Or the Rehab Clinics that accept cash only and sell Subutex prescription for $200 a visit.
Heroin was also at epidemic proportions in the late 70s. I would assume that overdoses were lower then because the pushers cpuld not add Fentanyl to the heroin
I'm not sure of what drove that addiction when you saw for yourself it wasn't the music.
The first comment is loaded with judgment calls but I imagine that's shaped quite a bit by current experience. I'm not sure what a reefer dance may be but I don't have any ganja now and my hands aren't exactly shaking (larfs).
As to trying heroin in Scotland, that was suicidal stupidity which I suppose is why a great many people do it. I've known multiple people who were addicted to narcotics but I've outlived all of them (or they dried out) since, as you know, I always backed off on too much of that and I was terrified of addiction. It wasn't that I didn't like the heroin as it was more like I hated it since the result had to have been an O.D. or as close to it as I would ever want to get. I was sick for three days or so which may have actually been a blessing.
It was shameful weakness in trying it and there's no cop for that.
I have no idea what addiction you speak of in your first line
The increase in the 70's. Coke was getting some airplay with "Cocaine" by Clapton and others by that time but I never heard any reverence to heroin. I'm not sure if cocaine gates to heroin but it wouldn't surprise me to go up and go down but I don't personally know anyone who fell into that.
Wild Horses. Sway. Brown Sugar Needle and the damage done to name a few.
Or Johnny is in the basement mixing up the medicine
But I dont think they became junkies because they heard it on the radio
Me either since the only lyrics which really impressed me that much about dope were from Steppenwolf since that one drilled right to the center and it held for forty years or so.
I do take your point about those songs and that confirms all the more the seventies aspect when things started to darken from the highlight with Surrealistic Pillow which was all about trippin' from start to finish and it was banned in Cincinnati for singing about dope but narcotics had nothing to do with it. That one may be the earliest and most famous, definitely mid-sixties.
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