http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002651415

 

June 12, 2006

Bottom line: A vivid, comprehensive and historically accurate overview of the narcotics culture and the times they've shaped that's as grandly entertaining as it is incisive.

 

9-10 p.m.,
June 12-15
VH1

Recent American pop cultural history continues to be Job 1 at VH1, which has somehow managed to transform nostalgia and the camp framing of its ideals and icons into a growth industry and a hook on which to hang the fortunes of a TV network's entire focus. The net has found great success with such shows as "I Love the '70s" and "I Love the '80s," which were not only labors of love but also authentic historic narratives.

But it is safe to say that "The Drug Years" -- a four-hour documentary airing in hourlong nuggets Monday-Thursday nights at 9 -- exists at a whole other level. The first two hours supplied for review are something like classic television, packed as they are with magnificent archival footage and consistently profound insights about the role that illicit drug use and abuse has had in shaping our nation and its social fabric since the 1950s.

Produced by filmmakers Dana Heinz Perry (who directed) and Hart Perry -- the team responsible for numerous projects for VH1 including the acclaimed 2004 docu "And You Don't Stop: 30 Years of Hip Hop" -- the show has a definitive feel to it. It takes no sides other than to detail the true impact of weed, LSD, uppers, downers, speed, coke and the rest on impressionable youth, on a disapproving and uncomprehending older generation and on how it influenced everything from art to politics to interpersonal relations. It's alternately funny and sad, surreal and enlightening, strange and sobering -- not unlike the drug culture itself.

"The Drug Years" kicks off in Hour 1, "Break on Through" (1950s-67), with a detailed and expertly woven look at how it all began for a country whose narcotics use was essentially nonexistent before the 1960s -- aside from a few beatniks and poets. That would all change, of course, with the '60s and the explosion of the marijuana culture and ultimately psychedelics like LSD via Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. The clips are superb, framing the way drugs played into a youth rebellion and a counterculture revolution that manifested itself in music, sexual freedom and the ideals of a generation that wanted to be anything but like their parents. The Perrys make effective use of now laughable old educational films about the horrors of grass and LSD and vintage interviews with Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend and many others.

The second installment, "Feed Your Head" (1967-71), details the acid craze and rise of San Francisco as America's hippie capital as well as the reverberations on the antiwar movement, drugs and idealism. The other two hours deal with the way drugs played out through much of the '70s and the coke and crack infiltration of the '80s onward. Based on the book "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age" by Martin Torgoff (who is a guiding presence in on-camera interviews as well as writer and consulting producer of the docu), "The Drug Years" serves up a sublime potpourri of impressions and contextual anecdotes.

It's a kick to see film of people stoned and tripping out of their minds swaying in Human Be-ins, of Kesey's magic bus immortalized in Tom Wolfe's classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," and of Jimi Hendrix wigged out on acid while performing at the famed Monterey Pop Festival in '67. Lending their recollections are such eyewitnesses as Ray Manzarek of the Doors, Peter Coyote, Jackson Browne and Tommy Chong. I never knew that it was Bob Dylan who first turned the Beatles on to pot in 1964 and that it was over a lyrical misunderstanding: He thought the line in "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was "It's such a feeling that my love ... I get high" instead of what it really was, "... I can't hide."

From such errors are cultural rebellions born. "The Drug Years," produced as a joint venture between VH1 and the Sundance Channel (where it repeats beginning Friday), documents an earth-shifting movement and its ongoing aftershocks with perceptiveness and candor.

The Drug Years
VH1
Perry Films Inc., VH1 and the Sundance Channel
Credits:
Executive producers: Brad Abramson, Shelly Tatro, Michael Hirschorn, Laura Michalchyshyn, Lynne Kirby
Producers: Dana Heinz Perry, Hart Perry
Supervising producers: Ann Rose, Audrey Costadina, Stephen Mintz
Associate producer: Salimah El-Amin Director: Dana Heinz Perry
Teleplay/consulting producer: Martin Torgoff
Director of photography: Hart Perry
Art director: Guy Walker
Editor: Richard Lowe
Story editor: Pam Widener
Original music: Matt Hauser
 

return to Ida's LA Woman Confidential home page   

 for more Doors news and reviews