Legendary rock journalist, performer, novelist and countercultural gadfly since the 60s, Mick Farren discusses his newest book, Speed-Speed-Speedfreak (Feral House). Elvis Presley, The Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, the Beatles, Hank Williams, the Manson Family, Jack Keroauc, Johnny Cash, JFK, Adolph Hitler: all of the above were, at one time or another, to put it bluntly, speedfreaks.
 

This guy is a pop culture equivalent of a shaman or medicine man, these people need to be treasured with the oral traditions they pass on, books aside, these discussions should be saved and archived. Because that guy has the deepest wracking cough.  I liked how Richard is talking about his spa experience in Palm Desert contrasted with tweakers geeking everywhere.  HA

Thank you for this.

Yeah,

Wow, I had honestly never heard of Mick Farren until I, at complete random, picked up a copy of “Jim Morrison’s adventures in the Afterlife” from the Seattle library years back. Just thought it sounded like an interesting concept. Ended up being brilliant, and I’ve read several of his books since (need to read more here), even a vampire one (darklost), which actually ended up being cool, despite the fact that I normally can’t stand vampire shit.

Even read the entire DNA cowboys trilogy which was also great. I actually thought better than say, the Illuminatus Trilogy by the RAW. Dude is crazy underrated. I’d literally completely forgotten about him and basically heard nothing of him before this interview. Thanks for reminding me. He has a butt load of books I still could catch up on including this one. Never even checked out his music.

[...] Video: Mick Farren discusses ‘Speed-Speed-Speedfreak’ [...]

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amphetamine addendum excerpted from new yorker review writing under the influence by john lanchester There are a number of valid responses to these arguments. One might be: They sure don’t make public intellectuals like they used to. Another might be: I’m not sure Sartre’s arguments constitute more than a footnote to his work in “L’être et le Néant.” A third might be: What was he on?

It’s a good question. When he wrote the “Critique,” Sartre, a lifelong caffeine fiend and serious drinker, was also frying his brains on corydrane, a form of amphetamine mixed with, of all things, aspirin. The philosopher was using corydrane on a daily basis, first to cut through the fug of the barbiturates he was taking to help him sleep—and he was having trouble sleeping not least because of all the corydrane he was putting away—but also to keep him at his desk, churning out the “Critique.” “To put it briefly,” he told Simone de Beauvoir some time later, “in philosophy, writing consisted of analysing my ideas; and a tube of corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analysed in the next two days.’ ” Or, as the Ramones used to put it, Gabba Gabba Hey.

We hear a lot these days about drug abuse, but there is also such a thing as drug use—a utilitarian attitude to our body chemistry in which drugs are simply aids to productivity. That’s how Sartre treated them, and Marcus Boon argues that “several of Sartre’s works show the influence of speed,” including “The Idiot of the Family,” his incomplete and close to definitively unreadable five-volume study of Flaubert, and “Saint Genet,” which, Boon relates, “began as a 50-page preface to Genet’s writings, and ended up an 800-page book.” Sartre was therefore a recognizable type of speed freak, the type dedicated to obsessive, unfinishable, and, to the neutral observer, pointless toil—the sort who, several hours after taking the drug, can usually be found sitting on the floor, grinding his teeth and alphabetizing his CDs by the name of the sound engineer.

Sartre is probably a bad advertisement for the effect of amphetamines as an aid to composition, but he is by no means the only example of a writer who used speed to help him work. For sheer quantity, Boon notes, it is hard to beat Philip K. Dick, who from 1963 to 1964, under the influence of the methamphetamine Semoxydrine, wrote “eleven science fiction novels, along with a number of essays, short stories, and plot treatments in an amphetamine-fuelled frenzy that accompanied or precipitated the end of one of his marriages.” (That “accompanied or precipitated” nicely captures how little fun it must have been to be Mrs. Dick.) If Philip K. Dick does not entirely convince on grounds of literary merit—and the books in question aren’t quite his best material—then how about Graham Greene, who was pounding Benzedrine when he wrote his 1939 travel book about Mexico, “The Lawless Roads,” and the novel that came out of his Mexican travels, “The Power and the Glory”? (The paranoid and menacing atmosphere of that superb novel, which describes a whiskey priest being hunted by Communist revolutionaries, surely owes something to Greene’s pill-chugging.)

Perhaps the finest writer ever to use speed systematically, however, was W. H. Auden. He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a “labor-saving device” in the “mental kitchen,” with the important proviso that “these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down.”