On my mission in Puerto Rico, I had a companion who was an ex-pothead. To be clear, he never bragged about it or anything; but whenever we encountered a toker on the streets, he always seemed to know just a touch more about marijuana than you would expect an LDS missionary to know. One day over lunch, I took a risk and straight up asked him—strictly out of curiosity—how long he had smoked weed for. He treated my personal question with more charity than it probably deserved, as he explained that the reason he started and the reason he eventually quit were one and the same: that the “high” feeling he got from marijuana was identical to the one he experienced with the Holy Ghost. (He alone of all missionaries I knew never snickered when he saw a Bob Marley bumper sticker reading “More people smoke herb, more Babylon fall”—for he well understood just how similar the “high” feeling was to a genuine religious experience). At some point in his late-teens, he explained, he slowly came to recognize that the marijuana high was in fact the counterfeit one, the chemically induced one. What’s more, the high always eventually wore off and left him stoned—whereas there was none such hangover from the groanings beyond utterance, the peace which surpasses understanding. He put in his mission papers shortly thereafter.
But he was also swift to add he’d never touched the “truly scary” stuff, like heroin.
The Velvet Underground’s 1967 standard “Heroin” would be a controversial song even by contemporary standards. There is no subtext here, no subliminal messages, nothing hidden. The words are as straight-forward as those 2 chords repeated relentlessly into your head. When you consider how that exact same year, The Beatles were lambasted for purportedly sneaking LSD into “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” or how The Doors were banned from the Ed Sullivan show for refusing to censor “Baby couldn’t get much higher”, or how Peter, Paul, and Mary took flack for “Puff the Magic Dragon” just 5 years earlier, or how even John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” was banned by some skittish radio stations just 5 years later, then the blunt obviousness of “Heroin” is almost jarring, even a little refreshing.
Which is weirdly comforting to me; in some ways, it’s reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (written clear back in the ethical stone age of 1729), with its satiric yet still horrific baby eating: it’s strangely reassuring to know there are certain things that, no matter how much time passes or mores may change, will simply never be OK. Crossing a line can be reassuring that there are still lines. But the Velvet’s “Heroin” is more than mere shock-for-shock-value’s sake.
It was while serving as a young missionary in Puerto Rico that my sheltered teenage self first encountered heroin addicts in real life. At the risk of stating the obvious, there is absolutely nothing romantic about heroin addiction; strolling down the side-walk in the outer suburbs of San Juan, my companion and I would witness those poor wretches hide under dark bridges at night, melt down their smack on either spoons or soda-can lids over lighters, then inject it while still boiling hot directly into their veins with a dirty needle. There is simply no way to feel good about yourself after seeing that. One day we biked past an addict stumbling zombie-like in the beating Caribbean sun; as I rode past him he suddenly and inexplicably leaned hard to his left, and my shoulder collided with his head with a sickening thump. Overwhelmed with guilt, I stopped immediately and offered a mortified, “¡Perdoname, perdoname señor!”, but he just kept on walking by, as though I wasn’t there, as though nothing had happened. It was the most heart-breaking sight I’d ever seen, and still leaves me unsettled to this day.
And maybe…I should’ve heard “Heroin” before my mission, in prep for that sight, I wonder? Seeing these addicts would still have been just as heart-breaking, but I at least would’ve understood why they were willing to suffer such a crippling, tragic addiction, what wells of emptiness drove them to such a brutal drug. Cause while I don’t think Lou Reed romanticizes addiction here, he does illustrate its euphoria, its almost religious ecstasy—and hence its attraction (like religion itself) to the broken and the desperate.
Over John Cale’s quiet violin drone and Maureen Tucker’s minimalistic percussion, two sparse chords are strummed slowly yet steadily, as they pick up in tempo to emulate the experience of that rushing high, then slow down again as the initial rush wears off and he settles into a sort of pleasant numbness. With his trademark deadpan delivery, Lou Reed narrates the story of a man trapped, desperate to feel good again, yet the very thing that “saves” him (for it makes him “feel just like Jesus’ son”)—is also what is destroying him. But then, are we not also supposed to lose our lives to save it?
Because that is exactly what Lou Reed has described in “Heroin”: in the absolute depths of his directionless life (“I don’t know where I’m going”), he decides that “I’m gonna try for the Kingdom if I can”. It’s transcendence he desires: transcendence from all those “politicians making busy sounds/and everybody putting everybody else down/And all the bodies piled up in mounds…” Simply put, that New York Jew, like his elder brother Christ before him, seeks after the Kingdom of God for the same reason you or I do: to transcend and escape the miseries and injustices and oppressions of this wicked world. To paraphrase Hamlet, “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make, with smack and a dirty needle?”
But in the absence of any sort of Holy Spirit, he is forced to manufacture that feeling for his own, wherein the best he is able to accomplish is to “thank God that I’m as good as dead/Then thank your God that I’m not aware/And thank God that I just don’t care”.
As with all things Velvet Underground, these lyrics are deceptively simple, yet work on multiple registers: “thank God that I’m as good as dead” of course functions most obviously as an expression of sheer junkie misery—but also as an acknowledgment of our final end, and our status as walking dead whether we are on hard drugs or not. This should not be a morbid statement to us Latter-day Saints, because we likewise must look towards our latter end; as Hugh Nibley often argued, what we share in common with the Ancient-Day Saints is that we are supposed to be behaving as though the world has already ended. It is always the Last Day for somebody.
Similarly, “Then thank your God that I’m not aware” refers of course to the radical unawareness one experiences while in the thrall of the drug, such that you do not even register a collision with a passing cyclist down the sidewalk—but once you remember how many terrible things there are to wish to not be aware of, then that “Thank your God” begins to feel sincere, even yearning. If you can’t cover a multitude of sins, you can at least obliviate them—and maybe the Lord will remember them no more, but you for sure won’t. In that context, “And thank God that I just don’t care” is not only the flippancy of the addicted, but the gratitude of those who have been spared—even if only briefly, counterfeitly, futilely—from the cares of the world (“Peace I leave with you, not as the world giveth it…”)
Don’t get me wrong, I am wary about reading too much help into a hymn to heroin; on balance, it is of course an absolutely despairing vision—but it is also motivated by an impulse we can, must, and should understand. It is the counterfeit sacrament when you can’t find the true one.
The song doesn’t make an ethical statement on heroin use, but then, Reed’s point isn’t to preach, but to show that he understands. Everyone needs to feel understood, everyone needs empathy, even—actually scratch that, especially—heroin addicts.