Hello Again, Mary Jane

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Drugs have long been viewed as part of the culture of rock music. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. Live fast, die young. In-a- gadda-da-vida, baby. But throughout the just-say-no '80s, rockers and rappers held their collective breath. When would it be safe to inhale? Now, with the '90s, many musicians feel that the cultural tide has shifted -- so they're going public about marijuana use and celebrating the weed in song lyrics. Once again, pop music is going to pot.

Listen to the rap group Basehead on its new song I Need a Joint: "So how to get over, how to get by?/ I wish I had a joint to get me high." The Seattle band Supersuckers has a song called Tasty Greens, which does not refer to spinach. The title of a new album by gangsta rapper Dr. Dre, The Chronic, is the name of a particularly potent strain of marijuana. More obliquely, the hard-rock band Living Colour celebrates Hemp (another of the virtually interchangeable terms for marijuana) in lyrics that read like something a junior-high burnout might carve on his desk during detention: "How carefully I've shaped you in the solitude of days./ How peaceful is my mind entwined in cord around my fingers."

Many pro-pot songs simply represent a renewed candor about musicians' long- standing use of the drug. "I'm not trying to say, 'I smoke weed, so everyone else should,' " explains Basehead leader Michael Ivey. "It's more a form of honesty. It's part of my life." Onstage, the Southern rockers the Black Crowes perform under a 48-ft. by 24-ft. banner emblazoned with a marijuana leaf. Says the group's lead singer, Chris Robinson, who posed for the cover of High Times magazine smoking a joint: "Pot is an essential part of life on the road."

Marijuana use is also becoming more open among music-industry executives, for whom, according to some, it's replacing "harder" drugs such as cocaine. Says John Scott of Rush Management, who works with such performers as Positive K and De La Soul: "I like smoking pot before press interviews, and so do some of the acts. It makes the session more interesting. And when you have a lot of bands staying in the same hotel, they almost always end up in the same room, smoking."

Like every other trend in pop music, the new pot proselytizing has inspired its own paraphernalia. Some aficionados hollow out Phillies Blunt cigars and fill them with dope. (For those unsure of the technique, rapper Redman's new song How to Roll a Blunt provides instructions.) PHILLIES BLUNT T shirts have gone mainstream, sometimes topped off with the marijuana-leaf baseball caps that have replaced X caps as the hot hat on the street.

To baby boomers, today's marijuana music may seem just another reworked '60s social trend that was created by their generation. Actually, says Richard Cowan, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, it has roots in several decades. Steve Bloom, music editor of High Times, points to the bebop-jazz musicians of the '40s as influences on many pro-pot hip-hop performers. Re-Hash Records has released Marijuana's Greatest Hits Revisited, new versions of reefer songs written between the '30s and '70s. "We didn't start this," acknowledges B-Real of the rap group Cypress Hill, who says he smokes pot almost every day. "We're the newest to hit with it. We're revitalizing the pot movement."

It's a movement only in the loosest sense of the word, and its members are disparate. A philosophical base of sorts has been laid by Jack Herer's book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, an investigative history of marijuana and its uses. Groups like the Cannabis Action Network have brought youth and an environmentalist ethic into the trend. And the new film The Money Tree, about a pot grower, gives hempsters a movie to call their own.

Law-enforcement officials say pot advocates are just blowing smoke when they talk about the comeback of the weed. "Perhaps because of the change of administrations, the marijuana lobby is out in full force," says Robert Bonner, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The fact is, they're losing the battle." In 1985 more than 23% of youths ages 12 to 17 said they smoked marijuana; in 1991 that figure was 13%, and Bonner says it is still falling. Bonner also offers a reminder that studies confirm such marijuana health risks as destruction of nerve cells in the brain and lung damage.

The reply from musicians? Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! At least for them. "If it's not your bag, don't get into it," says Robinson of the Black Crowes. "((But)) would ((French writer)) Jean Cocteau have been as good if he hadn't been an opium addict?" Maybe not. Then again, he might have been better.