Sopors and 'Ludes: Creem 1972
My first Creem cover story from the October 1972 issue
As you may have heard, Creem magazine is back, as a brand name, anyway. It's an online zine, plans to debut a print magazine in the fall. Personally, I wish they had let sleeping dogs lie, you know, not poked the bear. The archives are online, though I certainly have claimed and maintained ownership of copyright to all of the well over 100 reviews and features you can find there. The archives are shown in the form of photocopies of the original pages, an arduous task, I would imagine. I wish them well.
Though I was often published elsewhere, Creem was my coming of age as a young writer. I began contributing in 1971 while still an undergrad at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I was added to the masthead in 1972, and had the official/unofficial title of New York editor for the next few years until I became Creem’s editor in 1975.
Where I really fit in starting in 1972 was overseeing the short articles- section at the beginning of the magazine under the heading I named "Creemedia." My mandate was to expand from short music articles to include other aspects of pop culture that fit the Creem ideal. Typical, though longer and run as a feature story, was about Roller Derby, which I reported from San Francisco, where the Bay Bombers played, and Oakland, where I spoke with the head of the family-owned company that had created the depression-era sport. Slasher movies, skin flicks, Mexican wrestling, new alcoholic beverages, cartoon shows, other weird magazines, were all part of Creemedia.
Quaaludes, also known as Sopors, had come into vogue my senior year (1971-1972) of college. Just after graduation, in May 1972, in one of our regular phone conversations, Lester Bangs acknowledged that he had been on sopors when he wrecked yet another car on a highway divider between Detroit and the suburbs. We were defiant. We should do something about those highway dividers! I took the idea and penned what became my first Creem cover story. I think if you look closely for a single frame, you can see a copy of the that cover story on the floor of Phillip Seymour Hoffman-as-Lester Bangs' office in Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous."
The story was meant as a satire about identity politics, while seeking the right note about the cultural "values" Creem meant to represent. Some of the characters are fictional. The Phenobarbitol Kid was an alias I used to describe rowdy hecklers at shows in Boulder if the acts were too mellow. "Play 'Surf City'," the Phenobarbital Kid might shout at Brewer & Shipley, of "One Toke Over the Line," notoriety.
SINCE HE got out of the army, my friend Tony has been getting by wheeling vats of boiling liquid from one tank to another in a plastics factory in Long Island's Denton Avenue industrial park. He played drums with the New Generation, in high school, where he usually slept before leaving early for his job at the Big Apple supermarket on Hillside Avenue. Tony was a pretty neat guy, even if his grades weren't so hot. By mid-October of any given school year, his locker was so filled with empty terpinhydrate bottles there was no room for books.
A few weeks ago Tony was driving home from a party in his green 1963 Ford Falcon, tires bald, brakes sometimes. He had taken two reds and a sopor, a pretty regular dose for a weekend night. Then, the way he tells it, "that fuckin' caveman song came on the radio." He grunts out the words — "gottafindawoman, gottafindawoman" — like a baboon in heat. [The song referred to was “Troglodyte (Caveman)” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, a gold single in 1972].
"I hate that fucker," says Tony. "But do you know what it's like driving wrecked late at night when that song comes on? It's like insane man. You just go screeching into turns, even if there ain't any turns to make."
The turn Tony made that wasn't quite there was where Southern State Parkway connects with the Meadowbrook. He spun off the ramp, the Falcon doing a marvelous figure-8 pirouette before landing safely on the lawn between parkways. Stuck in the muck and completely fucked at a quarter to three.
Tony had a choice. He could either nod out and wait for the parkway police to wake him (he was holding). Or, he could blow three days pay on a tow truck, because even if he could push it out of the ditch, the thing wouldn't have turned over if he'd shoved a spoon of meth in the starter. He chose the latter.
"You know," he said to me a few days later, "there oughta be some way to keep from getting fucked-over like that. Bummers always seem to happen when you're on downs."
THE OHIO CONNECTION?
RON IS A clean looking, blue-eyed Ohio State freshman with clear features and sandy hair. He's a friend of my brother, and a nice kid; cheerful, easy-going, and like virtually every person he knows in Columbus, Ohio, he is a stone sopor freak.
When I met him he was wearing bluejeans, ratty sneakers, and an orange t-shirt with the letters AS on the front, with two half circles divided by a line on the back. For those who've never seen one, that t-shirt is a precise representation of young America's favorite new obliterator: the sopor. [The trade name for another brand of the sedative/hypnotic methaqualone, known as “Quaaludes” had a “714” stamped on the pill. ]
"You see these t-shirts all around Columbus, the sopor capital of the world," says Ron. The company that produces sopors is based in Columbus, he said. "Once somebody in the dorm came up with a handful of sopors and they were actually warm — hot off the line at the pill factory." In spite of their ready availability, the price per hit is relatively high, usually ranging from fifty to sixty cents.
It's such a heavy scene in Columbus, according to Ron, that the Free Press started an anti-sopor campaign. One cartoon showed a guy with an empty bird cage for a head. The caption read "sopors: the chickenshit's heroin." They even got Ohio citizen Jerry Rubin back to town, and he made a "sopors keep you fucked up so you can't fight the revolution" speech. [Typical was this announcement, which came with the original Creem story]:
"Quaalude is only the newest drug used by the Amerikan control addicts in their attempts to destroy the energy and life of our newly emerging rainbow culture!" (Reprinted from the Ann Arbor Sun.)
He does have a point, of course, as do those who believe that the easy availability of downers is aided by agents of repression from Nixon and the CIA on down. They pose the question: how many people do you know who were ever busted solely for possession or even sale of barbiturates?
Sopors would be the perfect tool for that kind of diffuse-the-revolution-with-downs conspiracy. Compared to reds, which can make you nasty, and which people drink with cheap wine to get psychopathic, sopors are the definitive pacifiers. The name itself is a contraction for "soporific," or sleep inducer.
Ron got busted on sopors in Kent, Ohio, where the pills are less a diversion than a way of life. While visiting a friend who went to Kent State, they did up quaaludes, which are white tab sopors that take a good deal longer to come on than the preferred AS oranges. Ron didn't know that. He took two, which was plenty, then took two more when he hadn't gotten off after an hour. Naturally, the first two hit about three minutes later.
"We were in somebody's house and I completely lost my memory. I was talking absolute gibberish. The only coherent words that came out of me were an occasional 'man, I'm really high'."
"We walked towards the door and I was the last one out. I was stuck at the door... couldn't think of how to open it. Somebody finally called to my friends — 'hey, you forgot something.' They were already halfway down the block."
"We're walking down the main street of Kent. I'm still walking a few steps behind the others, flapping my arms like an airplane and making engine noises with my mouth. This cop grabs me by the arm, and doesn't say a word. I don't know what I was thinking, whether we were playing a game or I was on a TV show. I turned around and saw the police car, so I walked over, leaned my body up against it and put my arms on the roof, just like on TV, virtually demanding to be frisked."
"And nobody had said anything?"
"The cops just looked at me, opened the door. I crawled in. Then my friend comes over and mumbles 'heyyy, whuttz goin' awnnn..." They put him in the car too.
At the police station Ron says the cops were real chummy. "It was like moving from one scene to the other, like it didn't make any difference." One of the cops smiled. "Okay, how many sopors did you take?"
"We didn't take sopors," they lied, "we drank tequila."
The police filmed them walking a straight line and everyone, cops and kids, cracked up laughing. Ron and his friend were put in a cell and released an hour later on $50 bond, which they forfeited to avoid trial. They were charged with public intoxication.
Ron got off lucky (was it luck?) but still he complained. "You know, there should be some kind of set-up where people shouldn't have to hassle with bail and getting booked and all that. Like, it was fun, but next time probably won't be. And stuff like that always happens when you're on sopors."
The Sopor Liberation Front (SLF) got its start after Ron met Tony in Hempstead, L.I., in June, when some college kids from Boulder, a major pivot on the sopor axis, brought back that town's unique contribution to the downer movement: the sopor party. The idea is to get say 50 people in a room with at least 100 sopors.
"What happens then?" asks L. Bangs of Walled Lake, Mich.
"Not much. They wait till morning to see what happened."
"What a culture!" exclaimed Mr. Bangs.
Actually, sopors are to the seventies what mescaline and Mateus were to the sixties, what beer and Spanish fly were to the fifties — the leading aphrodisiac of the self-destruct generation.
"For chicks it's better than booze for getting uninhibited. Something just clicks and you've got all this energy," says Boulder Judy, a badass Ms. known to Coloradans as the "sopor queen."
"It does the same thing for guys, except sometimes they get so loose they can't get it up. I guess it depends on how many you take. The thing about sopors is that nobody gives a shit about anything," says the queen.
Anyway, the Sopor Liberation Front will be having its first open convention this fall, possibly in Disneyland. "Imagine, man, we'll all get haircuts, right? So we won't have any trouble gettin' in. We'll have 5,000 kids on downs taking over the park. It'll be the biggest sopor party ever!"
Delegations from major sopor centers will meet in caucuses to put together a platform with a list of demands. What exactly will be presented remains to be seen. Tony began to tell me some of his ideas, but he passed out in the middle of a particularly unintelligible stream of syllables. His friend Freddie, who everybody calls the Phenobarbitol Kid, was there and mentioned some ideas, some that made sense and others which seemed to be the words of a man in the latter stages of barbiturate toxicity. Freddie's list included:
• 24-hour free towing service.
• no fault auto insurance. "If there's no fault, they can't fuck you for plowing into a block of parked cars." Freddie said it happened to him last summer on Second Avenue. He was driving a cab. He'd taken seven nembutols. He lost his job.
• foam rubber sidewalks in downtown areas of all majors cities and campus towns.
• tent camps, mattresses, and first aid stations placed strategically along every American highway, which could develop into a system of sopor youth hostels.
• credit at all bastions of Sopor International Youth such as Holiday Inns, jai alai frontons and water bed stores.
• sopor dispensors in all bus and gas station restrooms, all-nite diners and Jack-in-the-Box drive-ins.
• banning of compulsory English and gym courses in high school.
• creation of a Sopor Free State, either on Levittown, Long Island, in Boulder, Colorado, Miami Beach or the exurbs of Detroit.
• replacing the stars on the U.S. flag, which the SLF considers "psychedelic revisionism" with 51 pill capsules to reflect a truer, more modern national consciousness.
These and other matters will be taken up at what promises to be, as Tony says, "the counter-culture's greatest moment since Altamont." Entertainment lined up includes filmed highlights from sopor TV shows like McHales Navy, Superman, Edge of Night, American Bandstand and Let's Make a Deal. The late Zita Johann, star of Terror in A Girls Dormitory, will deliver the keynote address. And sopor-rock acts like the Astronauts, Flash Cadillac, Yoko Ono, Charley Pride, the Sha-Weez, Vito and the Salutations, and Johnny Paycheck, are being contacted to provide entertainment.
Whether all this will really come off is anybody's guess. Your local sopor-ed out FM rock non-personality should have access to more specific information as to time and place within the next few weeks. The one thing that seems to be definite now is the catch phrase for the movement, which I hear more and more everyday. ("Right on is dead," says Tony.) Now it's a powershake and "Learn to Forget." •
© Wayne Robins
All rights reserved. Reprint rights administered by Rock’s Back Pages library. For syndication information, please contact www.rocksbackpages.com.
wayne your stories never cease to amaze me. thanks for the memories.. regards, eileen