Celebrity Anti-Drug PSA's WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Celebrity Anti-Drug PSA's, Part Four

Under the pretext of drug control suppressive police states have been set up throughout the Western world. The precise programming of thought feeling and apparent sensory impressions by the technology outlined in bulletin 2332 enables the police states to maintain a democratic facade from behind which they loudly denounce as criminals, perverts and drug addicts anyone who opposes the control machine. Underground armies operate in the large cities enturbulating the police with false information through anonymous phone calls and letters. Police with drawn guns irrupt at the Senator's dinner party a very special dinner party too that would tie up a sweet young thing surplus planes.

"We been tipped off a nude reefer party is going on here. Take the place apart boys and you folks keep your clothes on or I'll blow your filthy guts out."

We put out false alarms on the police short wave directing patrol cars to nonexistent crimes and riots which enables us to strike somewhere else. Squads of false police search and beat the citizenry. False construction workers tear up streets, rupture water mains, cut power connections. Infra-sound installations set off every burglar alarm in the city. Our aim is total chaos.

Loft room map of the city on the wall. Fifty boys with portable tape recorders record riots from TV. They are dressed in identical grey flannel suits. They strap on the recorders under gabardine topcoats and dust their clothes lightly with tear gas. They hit the rush hour in a flying wedge riot recordings on full blast police whistles, screams, breaking glass crunch of nightsticks tear gas flapping from their clothes. They scatter put on press cards and come back to cover the action. Bearded Yippies rush down a street with hammers breaking every window on both sides leave a wake of screaming burglar alarms strip off the beards, reverse collars and they are fifty clean priests throwing petrol bombs under every car WHOOSH a block goes up behind them. Some in fireman uniforms arrive with axes and hoses to finish the good work.

William S. Burroughs / The Wild Boys

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt, which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and, late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.

Robert Louis Stevenson / The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Now, as I languish in a drug-addled haze on my vacation, the WFMU robot blog servants are publishing this message, written months before this; and I gloat in advance at the continued hilarity and horror of another round of seven Nineteen-Seventies Music Celebrity Anti-Drug PSAs, from an unknown-dated GET OFF radio-only PSA record.

As usual, some of the personalities would rather not preach the message, but instead promote figuring things out for yourself, such as Dave Mason, here, who probably didn't scare anyone away from hard drugs; two members of Fleetwood Mac offer us an original limerick of dubious value, and Herbie Hancock reminds us what the "best high of all" is. In the next installment, number five of five, we'll wrap up the last eight files in this batch, and I'll be sorry to see them go. I still have the whole pile of Mel Blanc Anti-Drug PSA's to put up as well, but I'll save those as a Christmas Gift for you beloved readers. Perhaps I can get someone with another volume of the GET OFF series to trade me discs, and we could present a bunch more of these useful warnings here on the blog--hint hint.

This week's salvo:

Amy Fleetwood Fleetwood Mac Al Green Herbie Hancock The James Gang Gladys Knight Dave Mason