Are drugs less common in prog?

My guess is that you can tell which bands were doing drugs by how good the music sounds when you are doing them yourself. I can listen to Yes and Floyd (and most 60's psych) while stoned, but not Tull or Zappa.

I personally restrict myself to the occassional toke these days, but  saw Gong in the mid 1990's while on mushroom tea. A friend says he saw Panterra while on acid, but I dont believe him...

I took acid in Israel many years ago. this may sound like a wierd place to trip, but the tel-aviv beachfront is really cool in the wee hours. I fell in love with a sunflower...that was like tripping in teh f**king sixties man!!!!

Depends.  Do you distinguish between pot and acid and other "soft" drugs on one side of the fence and highly addictive drugs liek cocaine and opiates on the other side of the fence.  I personally think it is ridiculous to lump all "drugs" into one basket. 

You don't have to go far to see the impact that psychedelics have had on prog.  Just what do you think as in that tea that Gong and Daevid Allen were drinking?

I have heard the the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is really an allegory for overcoming addiction, where Rael is a junkie who passes out on a broadway street after shooting up, and everything that happens after that is a hallucinatory dream.  The references are all there -- the "spraygun" is really a syringe (why else would he "wipe" his gun clean and forget what he did?), Lenny Bruce, a famous morhine addict is referenced,"the children play at home with needles and pins." 

But Jon Anderson on cocaine????  I find that a little hard to swallow (or snort). 

Are you kidding me?

Quote Mojo Mag

""Me and Dikmik had been up four days on Dexedrine spansules, so we were pretty well bent", Lemmy explains. "But we had this gog at the roundhouse - the one where we recorded Silver Machine - so we had a couple of Mandrax to calm us down. Then it got a bit boring, so we had two black bombers each. We get to the roundhouse and somebody comes up with alot of Bombers, and we take 10 each - a lot. Then someone comes up with some Mandrax, and we were getting very twisted up by now, so we had at least three each to calm us down again. Then someone came up with cocaine, f**king big bags of it, and we thought we'd have some of that. All this time in the dressing room theres constant smoking - we were all blasted out of our heads from dope. And people were producing acid and mescaline. We all had some of that. By the time we come to go onstage me and DikMik are stiff as boards. I said I can't move can you? He went, 'no its great isnt it?' I said what are we gonna do when we cant play? He said ' we'll think of something...."

FUNNY sh*t!!!!

Pink Floyd( have you seen pompei), KC, Yes (Quote Squire "What can I say? We smoked alot of dope" Mojo)

Thats all I can be 100% sure on but I'm sure there are hundreds more.

I think its great - If more bands had done drugs the music would be even better

The Miracle wrote: King of Loss wrote: It depends on the band  But I'm 100000000% percent sure that Yes, King Crimson and Jethro Tull were big acid treepers! Yes were clean, and so were Tull. Not sure about KC tho. in general, prog bands use way less drugs than hard rock and metal bands.

Yes were complete dopeheads!

Anderson's gibberish lyrics came to him from smoking tea leaves (he actually jokes about this in concert). Squire was quoted recently as TFTO albums concept was due to too much toking!

Most musicians did something (beit alcohol or more elicit stuff) and the prog bands did not escape that anymore than others!

Tull and Zappa being a bit more of an exception...... Drugs were discouraged but those two leaders needed no drugs tobe trippy.... 21%O2 + 78% N2 did the trick for them!