Couldn't Resist the Devil's Music

Song 202: This week's playlist song is The Pusher by Steppenwolf, written by Hoyt Axton. When figuring out what to post for last week, I originally thought of this week's song and last week's song around the same time, and decided to do them back to back. The two seemed possibly related in some way, and both do have the word damn in the chorus, but I didn't realize until I started writing last week's post that Hoyt Axton, the songwriter who wrote The Pusher, also wrote Greenback Dollar, which explains a lot of the similarities between them, despite the two very different eras in which they emerged. Growing up in a Christian fundamentalist home, I didn't hear the word damn from my parents, and they sure didn't want to hear that word come out of my mouth. This song, however, set up an even greater tension in my teenage soul. From the moment I first heard it, I couldn't deny its power over me -- I loved to hear it, and wanted to hear it again and again, but I also felt an intense sense of guilt for my enjoyment of it. My parents probably never heard it, for if they had, they surely would have made this song, with the words God damn repeated many times in the chorus, their Exhibit A as absolute proof that rock and roll was the devil's music. At the time, I would have had no defense, and a part of me feared the thought that my parents might actually be correct, but I loved RnR so much, not only did I have to hear it as often as I could, but I wanted to spend my spare moments writing, singing and playing it myself. Lucky for me, within a couple of years, no longer living under my parents' roof, I came to conclude that RnR was not at the center of some great moral conflict between warring eternal spirits, and I could freely enjoy it at my pleasure, to the extent that I could afford to buy the records I wanted. Not too long after that, President Nixon declared a new war on drugs, and I remember him saying the war was designed to target the pusher and not the user. Four decades and millions of arrests later, his lie couldn't be any clearer, especially to the millions who have had their lives ruined by his ill-conceived war. Nixon being the political animal that he was, no doubt he queried his advisors beforehand about the best way to sell his bogus war to the young people, and I wonder if one of those advisors hit upon the pusher angle because of knowing about this song. Maybe someday someone will find a reference to it while digging through those old Nixon tapes. I would bet there are at least a few smoking guns and steaming heaps in those tapes, if you know where to look and you understand the context. Bravo to the folks at nixontapes.org for all their work in digitizing the tapes and making them available to the public, and good luck to the diggers.