Of Melissa and Madonna, and Marijuana

UPDATE: Barbra Streisand's new memoir also mentions marijuana. Read more.

Melissa Etheridge, who is currently performing a one-woman show on Broadway, is out with a book, her second memoir titled "Talking to My Angels." She reads the audiobook, which features groovy guitar breaks and a performance of her book-title song. 

Etheridge, our 2015 Tokin' Woman of the Year, starts the book in Chapter 1 with a description of eating a "heroic" dose of cannabis via a batch of chocolate chip cookies baked by a girlfriend. She called it, "an experience that jump-started me into a wholly new way of living a daily practice that has helped me heal." 

"We were kicking back, listening to music, and enjoying the cookies. Then I began to feel a shift—not an earthquake. More like a slow inner spin. I began to laugh as the room slowly melted away and I felt keenly present....I'd enjoyed cannabis before, but this night was different. Something big was happening....

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

I expected the new documentary about Joan Baez, "I Am a Noise," co-produced by Tokin' Woman Patti Smith, to be a celebration of Baez's stellar career. 

That it is, but with an unexpected twist: Baez opens up in the film about how she has suffered from severe anxiety attacks all of her life, including when she burst on the international stage at the age of 18 as a voice from heaven, practically the new Virgin Mary.

Replete with footage of Baez's performances and actions as a folksinger and activist, the film also features excerpts from hours of audiotapes, home movies of her childhood, her drawings, and her diaries. 

Her connection with Bob Dylan, who supplied the protest songs that her voice demanded, is covered, including how deflated she felt when she was basically rebuffed by him while touring Europe, as documented in the 1967 film "Don't Look Back." 

As Baez tells it, she "couldn't" participate in the drug taking that the Boys in the Band were doing on the tour, and she was soon excluded in other ways. Since Dylan turned the Beatles onto marijuana, one wonders why he didn't do the same for Baez. Perhaps because she was a woman, she wasn't invited to the boys' pot parties.  

Frances Marion and Marijuana

After writing an obituary for Judy Balaban, who tried LSD back in the day when Cary Grant was doing it, and co-wrote an article interviewing Grant’s wife Betsy Drake and others for Vanity Fair in 2010, I looked up her co-author  Cari Beauchamp, a film historian currently at the Mary Pickford Foundation. 

Beauchamp’s book: “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” details Marion’s illustrious career during the years of the Fatty Arbunkle trial etc. and the coming of the Hays code.

After Marion (who was also a painter and sculptor) painted a portrait of actress Kitty Gordon showing off her much-admired back to promote Peg O’ My Heart, posters for the play were vandalized and leaflets signed by “Conscientious Citizens" went out shouting, “We must protect our innocent little children from seeing such pictures of half-nude women. And we keep them away from the evil influence of the nickelodeons and the lawless people who have forced themselves upon our beautiful city to make what they call movies. Only if we all unite can we drive them out.” Marion and a friend attended a meeting of the group, dubbing them “The Constipated Citizens.” (p. 27). 

Marijuana is mentioned twice in the book: 

RIP Judy Balaban: Early LSD Experimenter and Chronicler, and Human Rights Champion

"Her father was head of Paramount, she was one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids, and she shared an LSD experience with Cary Grant," ran the obituary in the Hollywood Reporter for Judy Balaban, who died on October 19 at the age of 91.  

Balaban was Hollywood Royalty in more ways than one: a member of the prominent Balaban family, she dated Montgomery Clift for six months in the 1950s when she was 18, and was married to Kelly's agent Jay Kanter—who made his client Marlon Brando best man at their wedding—when she was the youngest of six bridesmaids at Kelly's wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Balaban later married actors Tony Franciosa and Don Quine.

A 2010 article Balaban co-wrote with author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp for Vanity Fair documents the experiences of a group of Hollywood heavyweights who took LSD therapeutically in the late 1950s, among them Cary Grant and Balaban herself. 

Setting the stage for the article, she and Beauchamp wrote that at the time, "Almost everyone smoked carton-loads of regular cigarettes, but a 'joint' was a body part or a lower-class dive. If people were 'doing lines,' you’d have guessed they were writing screenplay dialogue or song lyrics. And if you mentioned 'acid,' you’d mean citrus juice or a stomach problem. Nobody in Hollywood—or almost anywhere else in the United States—had ever heard of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide. Timothy Leary wouldn’t even pop his first mushroom until 1960. So it was very out of character that against this background a group of more than 100 Hollywood-establishment types began ingesting little azure pills that resembled cake decorations as an adjunct to psychotherapy." 

Balaban relates in the article that she didn’t know much about LSD when she started taking it, but, she laughingly says, “I figured if it was good enough for Cary Grant, it was good enough for me!” 

Jimmy Buffett: A Pirate Dies at 76

Buffett in a pot-leaf-motif jacket with Jenny Lewis at a 2016 concert in Nashville.

UPDATE: Paul McCartney has posted about playing bass on Buffett's song, "My Gummy Just Kicked In," which was inspired by a phrase uttered by McCartney's wife Nancy. "Then the 60s came alive and she yelled 'Let's Rock!'"

Jimmy Buffett's Parrothead fans are more known for enjoying their margaritas than their marijuana, but Buffett, who died this week at 76, was a Pothead too who named his son for Bob Marley and launched a marijuana brand named "Coral Reefer" after his band in 2018.

In his autobiography A Pirate Looks at 50, Buffett describes himself as a hippie and tells tales of hanging out in various parts of the world (Key West, Cuba, Jamaica, Costa Rica, etc.) with drug smugglers and other interesting characters. 

In the beginning of the book where he writes about his traveling toolkit, he discusses backpacks and bags:

There has been a lot written about the good and the bad effects of the revolutionary sixties, but no one ever mentions the destigmatization of men carrying shoulder bags. Along with the emotional baggage of being a flower child, you had to carry around to the love-ins a lot of shit that just wouldn't fit in a wallet or the pockets of bell-bottom jeans. There were necessary items for the hip and infamous—rolling papers, pot, Richard Farina and Richard Brautigan paperbacks, bags of granola, extra headbands, bandanas, hash pipe, patchouli oil, fruit, and that damn Swiss Army knife. My bag of choice was a woven straw Guatemalan original that I bought at the local head shop in New Orleans. It definitely was cool, and served me well right up until the day I had some kind of a short circuit in my thinking patterns and decided that I had to get married and settle down. 

In his book, Buffett recounts that when he went to France in 1974 to write a soundtrack for a film about tarpon fishing, it was "with an incredible sense of wonder, two hundred bucks, and a Glad bag full of Colombian pot that I first set foot on French soil." 

Speaking of his song "Growing Older But Not Up," Buffett wrote, "I have carried my childish ways with me from altar boy to hippie, from hippie to husband and father. More than the music and the politics of the sixties, I think what made Woodstock the legendary event that it became was the fact that a whole generation was able to act like kids again. That's what I think happens at our [Coral Reefer Band] shows as well. They've always been known as  opportunities to escape for the evening and just has fun, but you should see what happens when it rains." 

75 Years Ago: The Pot Bust of Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds

Leeds and Mitchum with their lawyers at their 1949 marijuana trial. 

On the evening of August 31, 1948, movie star Robert Mitchum went to visit 20-year-old starlet Lila Leeds at her bungalow at 8334 Ridpath Drive in Los Angeles. "Unbenownst to them, two officers, A.M. Barr and J.B. McKinnon of the Los Angeles Police Department's Narcotics Division, were hiding in the yard. The two had been conducting surveillance for eight months on members of the film industry and their hangers-on," writes George Eels in his biography of Mitchum. 

Mitchum frequented after-hours clubs in LA that served grass, according Eels. "His use of grass earned him membership in a group that considered themselves hip and scorned nonusers as square johns and janes....Yet even they were taken aback by Mitchum's increasing boldness. Never before had they seen a prominent star make himself such a high-visibility risk, strutting around as he did in a straw Stetson and cowboy boots, with a reefer tucked behind each ear or carrying a package of cigarettes in which the regular ones were alternated with hand-rolled joints." 

"When Mitchum arrived [at Leed's house], he flopped on the sofa and tossed a pack of cigarettes onto the coffee table," Eels continues. "Barr claimed Leeds picked it up and looked inside. 'Oh, you've got brown ones and white ones too,' she said, 'I want some of the white ones.' She took two joints from the pack, lit them and gave one to Mitchum." Barr and McKinnon were let inside by Leeds's roommate and made their high-profile arrests. 

Mitchum poses for cameras in jail. 

At L.A. County Jail, the laid-back actor, who had just turned 31, greeted newspaper reporters and photographers with, "Yes, boys, I was smoking a marijuana cigarette when they came in," adding, "I knew I'd get caught sooner or later." When the booking officer asked his occupation, Mitchum replied, "Former actor." Sergeant Barr chilled Hollywood with his statement, "We're going to clean the dope and the narcotics users out of Hollywood! And we don't care who we're going to have to arrest." Mitchum, meanwhile, was stripped and shackled, and left stark naked to be questioned by a psychiatrist. The next morning he cancelled a speaking engagement scheduled for the steps of City Hall to celebrate National Youth Day. 

Republican Candidates Fall Over Each Other on Fentanyl

Candidates at the first Republican presidential debate (sans Trump) were falling all over each other to say they would fix the fentanyl problem by toughening up border enforcement and even going over to Mexico to take out cartels. DeSantis said he'll shoot and kill anyone bringing fentanyl across the border; also on Day 1 in office he'll use US Special Forces across the Mexican border to go after fentanyl labs. "Would I treat cartels as foreign terrorists organizations? You bet I would." Pence also said he will "hunt down and destroy" drug cartels, and Tim Scott mentioned fentanyl too. 

Former DEA chief and Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson was a surprising voice of reason, talking about how he negotiated with then-Mexican-president Vicente Fox over drugs. He called for education and treatment, as others have. Hutchinson was also the only candidate who didn’t raise their hand when asked if they would support “the elephant not in the room” for the nomination should he be criminally convicted. He pointed out that Trump might not be constitutionally eligible to take office, and Christie, who said he raised his hand reluctantly, then said, “We need to stop normalizing Donald Trump’s conduct. It’s beneath the office of the Presidency.”