It's interesting to find out that Roger wasn't drunk. At the time, the late 60s, it was every parent's fear that their kids would listen to rock and roll and be lured into the drug culture.
Country music had a much more wholesome reputation. Although drinking was acceptable, drugs were not. Country fans were different from the hippies because the hippies did drugs. A natural enmity developed between the straight country fans and the drug-addled rock fans, as evidenced in these lyrics:
We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don't take our trips on LSD
We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.
It's ironic that the country stars were as heavy into drugs as the rockers, without the country fans really being aware of it.
Okay, you said... It's ironic that the country stars were as heavy into drugs as the rockers, without the country fans really being aware of it.
You know what this means, don't you? Oh, the irony. It means we get to laugh at our parents and their naïveté.
The long-haired residents of Hippie Hill and Woodstock were tokin' on joints to "mellow out," rationalizing their drug use by saying they were "expanding their minds." Meanwhile, back in Nashville, the buzz-cut honky-tonkers on Music Row rationalized their drug use by saying they were just "taking their medicine," when in truth, they were gulping down handfuls of diet pills to stay up all night and go "roarin'." (How far is it from Nashville to Woodstock as the crow flies?)
Before reading this book, I thought Roger Miller was the pill-popper. After reading all these stories, I've decided that half the short-hairs in the Nashville music industry were walking around with pocketfuls of black mollies and old yellers. (Except Bobby Bare, who somehow stayed clean in the midst of all that madness). If I had read this book cover-to-cover in one sitting, my mind would have started seeing the city of Nashville proper as something akin to a big, yellow "Happy-Pill" jutting out of the Tennessee landscape.
My parents probably knew & just didn't tell me.
There's one thing I'll say in the short-hairs' defense: The mid-1960s was a time before the health dangers of amphetamine ingestion were well understood.
Other than that, I got nothing.
I think ol' Merle must laugh to himself when he sings "Okie".
Growing up in a Catholic school and later a minor seminary, my parents and teachers would tell me how I'd be going to hell for listening to rock music because "all rock stars are drug addicts". And when it came to music, they always had the country radio station on. Meanwhile, the country boys are the ones who invented the rock and roll lifestyle and were into way more trouble than the rock stars. As Rick Marcelli told me "they just hid it well". Rick was one of my favorite interviews in the book because he really chats about that side of things and how he was blown away because he used to work for the Rock Stars, then he started to work for Roger and couldn't believe all that was happening.
That said, I was told back then 'everyone' was doing a lot of that stuff out there (doctors, dentists, writers, musicians, etc). I don't believe that entirely but I do believe that it was a big thing in certain circles.
It really opened my eyes up as to what was going on and it opened my eyes as to what caused a lot of problems for these guys. It taught me to stay away from that stuff, more than all those commercials on TV did. I imagine a lot of the old timers have a hard time sleeping knowing the thousands upon thousands of dollars that were blown on that stuff.