The Mod scene in Great Britain would become the next generation of what could now be called amphetamine youth culture. This time around it arrived in the form of a musical revival movement that found expression on the sprung wooden floors of basement clubs of northwest England. Though little known in America, the musical component of the Northern Soul movement of the sixties and seventies was lifted from 1950s Motown and temporally and geographically transplanted to the British working-class towns of northern England.
Made up of aficionados of dated Motown rarities pressed in vinyl, this peculiar child of the Mod scene would, on the surface, seem antithetical to the sentimental and backward-looking Northern Soul crowd. Disciples spent hours poring through warehoused crates of never-released Motown forty-fives in search of a specific sound they intuitively and collectively recognized as pure. What they had in common with the Mods was conceptual – an appreciation of an extremely specific brand of music and pill culture. Again, amphetamines were the drug of choice, as they enhanced the dance and music. One of amphetamine’s hallmark characteristics, of course, is its ability to propel the body in compulsive, repetitive motion.
But the Northern Soul movement consisted of a very different class of Englishmen. According to Rowdy Yates, Northern Soul aficionados, as a group, would have thought the idea of scooters as stupid. “As far as they were concerned, scooters were what middle class grammar school boys rode around London on. People into Northern Soul were more like garage mechanics. It was the working class remnant of Mod culture, if you like.”
To Yates, their choice of amphetamine is also significant. “If you’re working in a garage under a railway from eight till eight, weekends become important. It’s the time you do your courting, it’s the time you do your dancing, and let off steam. And if you wanted a drug to get you going on these three routes, you wouldn’t look for an introspective drug like cannabis or LSD.”
Dave Grodin, the man who gave the Northern Soul movement its name, was one of the central figures in establishing the British arm of Motown. In the late sixties, he noted that Northerners preferred soul to its cousin, funk, the latter of which was popular in the south of England. The spirit of the movement was more than mere amphetamine-laced nostalgia. Northern Soul D.J.s became regional celebrities, and clubs like The Twisted Wheel, the Wigan Casino, and The Blackpool Mecca became revered landmarks. At its height, the Wigan Casino was said to have had 100,000 members. Of the tunes to have been resurrected were “Born a Loser” by Ron Day, “Here I Go Again,” by Archie Bell and the Drells, and “All For You” by Earl Van Dyke – all of which were rediscovered after exhaustive culling. In many cases the tunes were recorded years, if not decades, before they became renowned in this unforeseeable movement of the Old World. By this circuitous route a great many of the songs would find their way to the top of the singles charts in England.
But the movement became troubled. A number of the clubs eventually fell upon hard times as widespread use of Methedrine spurred crime endemic to amphetamine abuse for patrons and owners alike. Some of the owners found ways around restrictions by hosting “all-dayers,” as opposed to all-nighters. Diurnal or nocturnal, law enforcement authorities recognized them as the same amphetamine-driven dance sessions.
Northern Soul’s legacy is chiefly that of a remarkably vibrant musical revival of obscure artists. But it has an ancillary legacy as the precursor to the rave scene – the all-night, seemingly spontaneous dance parties in warehouse districts in England and America that would come a generation later. “Ravers,” however, didn’t inherit the beautifully esoteric musical tastes of the Northern Soul movement, but rather tediously throbbing techno-pop. What the rave scene did inherit was amphetamine in the form of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or, as some call it, MDMA. What many of the millions who take the drug don’t know is that the MA in this abbreviation represents methamphetamine. MDMA, of course, is more commonly known as Ecstasy.
In the U.S. during the late sixties, amphetamine was undergoing a transformation that nearly extinguished it as a popular idea among the burgeoning hippie movement sweeping the country: It was thought to be a mom-and-dad drug. Amphetamines, and pills in general, ran counter to the mellowed-out philosophy common to pot-smoking vagabonds and LSD users who dropped out of school to follow their bliss. In the hazy dominions of the hippies, vapid sedation reigned supreme over teeth-gnashing; edginess in any form was decidedly unhip. People with amphetamine jitters do not follow swamis; amphetamine was a thoroughly bourgeois drug taken by people who wanted to get something done – law students and housewives, and perhaps some of the proletariat such as truck drivers and shift workers. Of course not everyone in San Francisco with long hair was a hippie at heart, and there were hippies and non-hippies alike who thought nothing could be more pleasant than injecting tremendous amounts of liquid amphetamine.
The idea of amphetamine was also still alive, if not thriving, in an unlikely nook of mainstream America. The cork-lined music studios of Nashville saw country greats recording through consecutive days and nights. Some developed habits. Johnny Cash was arrested in El Paso, Texas for attempting to smuggle an acoustic guitar packed with prescription amphetamine into the country from Mexico. He later explained how he initially got hooked on the drug while hanging out with the truckers who drove musicians and all their gear to the Grand Ole Opry. Before he was done with amphetamines he would be hallucinating regularly and his health would be wrecked.
Cash’s contemporary, Elvis Presley, found a darker fate, as he alternated between amphetamines and barbiturates prescribed to him by his personal physician to help him with his chronic nightmares and insomnia. While in the Army he began stockpiling pills, and later found amphetamines helpful in dealing with a brutal performance and filming schedule. Between 1973 and 1977 he entered into serious drug withdrawal treatments at Baptist Hospital in Memphis, and a makeshift clinic was actually installed in his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel in order to keep his addiction out of the press. Much of the while, however, he was near death. Finally, in August of 1977, he suffered a heart attack at his Graceland estate, bloated and irrevocably caught up in the oscillations of a ruthless pharmacological pendulum.
Of course, some are blessed in all endeavors and mysteriously made immortal. Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy Magazine, coasted through this contentious time in his pajamas surrounded by beautiful women, sustained by Pepsi, candy bars, and substantial doses of Dexadrine, a particularly potent form of amphetamine. In the eighties he suffered a stroke, but recovered, never to touch amphetamines again.
The significance of Hugh Hefner’s, Johnny Cash’s and Elvis Presley’s use and abuse of amphetamine lay in their place in the social spectrum of their times. During the civil chaos of the sixties and seventies these personalities were decidedly mainstream, whereas hippies were not. The elder generation preferred the formality of a prescription (if it could be obtained) or at least pharmaceuticals, however illicitly gained, while the younger counterculture went with freelancers who grew their own drugs wherever they could find suitably obscure acreage. But amphetamine culture was about to undergo a critical transformation with respect to how it was come by. Now that it was generally illegal and rigidly controlled as a prescribed medication, the adamant user and addict would have to forego the reassuring formality of a physician’s approval or a pharmaceutical company’s expertise.