Search Results for: Detroit

Shelved: Dr. Dre’s Detox

Chelsea Lauren / Getty Images for BET

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March, 2021 | 6 minutes (1,743 words)

 

Dr. Dre’s Detox might be the best-known album that no one’s ever heard in its entirety. The legendary hip-hop producer’s supposed third album persisted in the public’s mind for 13 years, kept alive by rumors, leaks, and revised release dates. After first announcing the record in 2002, Dre finally admitted in 2015 that Detox was shelved because he “didn’t like it.” It’s probably just as well, because no album made by actual, fallible people ­— no matter how talented — could live up to such breathless, protracted hype.

Detox didn’t begin as an empty promise. We do have a few singles from the project to listen to, including “I Need A Doctor,” featuring Eminem and Skylar Grey, released in 2011.

 

 

Dre has apologized for physically abusing female partners — something that goes beyond the misogyny common in early ’90s hip hop — but only in a career as accomplished as his could such an epic dashing of hope become a footnote. Responsible for dozens, if not hundreds, of millions of records sold, Dre is a rapper, producer, actor, and music industry entrepreneur — a musical architect who defined a generation of expression. He was a member of seminal rap group N.W.A. in the 1980s. He co-founded Death Row Records after that — almost single-handedly inventing the West Coast G-funk style in the process — produced Snoop Doggy Dogg, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, and Eminem, to name a few, and founded Aftermath Entertainment and Beats Electronics. Responsible for game-changing albums The Chronic (1992) and 2001 (1999), Dre has nothing to prove by producing the rumored Detox.

The most interesting thing about Detox is not what it would have sounded like had it been released, but its relationship to its creator. What compelled Dre to keep working on it year after year? How, for a record that was probably never even completed, much less issued, did it become so monolithic in the minds of his fans?

Born Andre Romelle Young in Compton, California in 1965, Dre had his first local hit with the World Class Wreckin’ Cru at age 19.

L.A. is the place for you to be

To witness Dr. Dre in surgery

He has a PhD in mixology

To cut on the wheels so viciously

One year later, in 1987, Dre helped design gangsta rap with N.W.A.. Songs like “Fuck Tha Police” from 1988s Straight Outta Compton talked openly about police brutality. Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy E did most of the rapping. DJ Yella and Dre designed the beats. The music was apolitical, explicit, angry, hedonistic, and unrepentant. It set up California as home to the most innovative hip-hop of the next decade.

Dre left N.W.A. in 1991 and formed Death Row Records with Suge Knight the following year. His debut album, The Chronic, made with the help of Snoop Dogg and The Lady of Rage (among others) went triple platinum. Dre won a Grammy for “Let Me Ride.” He also was Death Row’s in-house producer, responsible for Dogg’s massively successful Doggystyle as well as acting as the supervising producer for the Above the Rim soundtrack.

Parting ways with the notorious Knight, Dre formed Aftermath Entertainment, a boutique rap label, in 1996. After a shaky start, the label signed Detroit rapper Eminem. His The Slim Shady LP was certified quadruple platinum. Dre’s second solo album, 1999s 2001, sold at least six million copies.

Flush with capital to write, produce, and record anything he wanted, Dre announced the Detox project in 2002, referring to it as his “final album.” It was going to be the story of a hit man. Rumor had it that Denzel Washington would narrate.

“I had to come up with something different but still keep it hardcore, so what I decided to do was make my album one story about one person and just do the record through a character’s eyes,” Dre told MTV News in April 2002. “And everybody that appears on my album is going to be a character, so it’s basically going to be a hip-hop musical.”

“I’ve been blueprinting, getting ideas together for the past six months or so, just trying to figure out which direction I want to take and how I’m gonna present the project,” Dre continued. “Just gathering sounds and what have you. I want this one to be really over the top.” He predicted Detox would be released in 2003.

Less than a year later, Dre admitted to giving “the cream of the crop” of his Detox beats to 50 Cent for his album Get Rich or Die Tryin’. It has never actually been confirmed that the beat for what became 50 Cent’s single “In da Club” was intended for Detox, but that cream of the crop beat helped this song go to No. 1 for the rapper. 

 “Dre, he’ll play dope beats…they’re automatic,” 50 said of those sessions. “[He’ll say], ‘These are the hits, 50. So pick one of these and make a couple of singles or something.’”

Having abandoned its original concept, Detox’s release date was pushed back to late 2004. “I’d describe it as the most advanced rap album musically and lyrically we’ll probably ever have a chance to listen to,” co-producer Scott Storch told MTV News. “Dr. Dre always tries to top his last one. That’s why he spends so much time putting [albums] together and they don’t come out every five minutes. He puts a lot of time, energy and genius into the stuff.”

Dre told XXL that the album would have 12 or 13 singles. So I’m really taking my time with each one. No album fillers or nothing like that. No fast-forwarding.” But by May 2004 he’d changed his mind, telling the same publication that he wanted to concentrate on his Aftermath artists. (Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, released in 2000, sold in excess of 10 million copies.)

Years passed. Collaborators hinted at an unreleased masterpiece in other magazine interviews. “I’m thinking of making the album like a movie,” producer Imsomie “Mahogany” Leeper said, “like having 16-bar jazz pieces, live instruments.”

“I was really hoping to have it out this year, but it’s going to have to be pushed back a while because of some other things I’ve got to work on,” Dre told the L.A. Times in 2007. The following year, Snoop Dogg confirmed Detox was finished. “That record is real, it’s coming,” Dogg told Rolling Stone. “I was starting to doubt it myself and then I went up in there and he played so much music for me it knocked my head off.”

The first official release of anything from Detox came during a 2009 Dr. Pepper commercial. “For me,” Dre says, “slow always produces a hit.” He then shows a flailing young DJ how to slow a record down by putting a soda can on the turntable.

By then, Detox’s release date was scheduled for that year And indeed, singles purportedly part of the mix for Detox’s track listing dropped  — “Under Pressure,” “Kush,” and “I Need a Doctor.” The last single went double platinum. The album, however, did not come out.

More Detox songs were leaked in 2011 — “Mr. Prescription,” Chillin’,” and “Die Hard.” In a long-ranging interview with The Fader that year, Dre announced he was ready to take a break from music, mused at how successful his Beats by Dr. Dre line of headphones were, and said nothing about Detox. In 2015, he confirmed that the project was dead.

“Over the years Detox has become the most long-awaited album in hip-hop history, a project that has taken on mythical proportions, and with good reason,” Nathan Slavik wrote for DJBooth. “In addition to launching several of the biggest rappers of the last two decades — Snoop Dogg, Eminem, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar — Dre’s first two headlining albums, The Chronic and 2001, were classics. It was completely reasonable to be excited about Detox until it was completely insane to think it would ever drop.”

In 2015, Dre released the soundtrack for Straight Outta Compton, a collection of tracks by N.W.A. and its former members. He also released Compton, his third solo effort, and first in 16 years.

But the story wasn’t actually over. When asked by reporter Chris Haynes in 2018 if Detox was permanently shelved, Dre replied, “I’m working on a couple songs right now. We’ll see.” As if on cue, more musical snippets from the project leaked in May of that year.

The best way I’ve found to think about Detox is that it was a catch-all name for, essentially, most everything Dr. Dre was working on for 15 years. Even noted perfectionists like Dre release material. Instead, as Detox became more mythic in the hip-hop community, it served, whether Dre intended to or not, as a useful publicity tease even as the hype proved impossible to live up to. Between 2009 and 2011, the best of the hundreds of song snippets he worked on were released. In such a rapidly changing musical universe, nothing recorded for Detox, no matter how inspired, was going to remain stylistically relevant over more than a dozen years.

It’s also possible that Dre buckled under the weight of expectation. “I worked on Detox,” DJ Quik told DJBooth. “Just, in theory, Detox is a super smart-ass piece of music, but it’s all music, you know what I mean? That’s what could be the stumbling block for the record. Because it’s all music, and you got so many people to please. If you’re off with one, it won’t be a classic record. So, I understand Dre’s concerns about putting it out. But, some of the tracks I heard, oh my God, get the fuck out of here… Sound-wise, it was gonna be better than Chronic and 2001, and idea-wise.”

“By all accounts — and believe me, I heard every account there was — it seemed like the album had become any creative person’s nightmare,” Slavik wrote.

Given an unlimited budget and no deadline, could you spend the rest of your life locked in a perfectionist’s jail, constantly terrified that the music you’ll make next will be better than the music you’ve made so far, each passing day only becoming further justification to take your time, the pressure of expectation becoming suffocating until one day you realize decades have gone by and you’re even farther away from the finish line than when you started? You seemingly could, and Dr. Dre was living proof. 

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath; Fact-checker: Matt Giles

Notes for a Post-apocalyptic Novel

Photo courtesy of Len Necefer via Instagram

Len Necefer, as told to Frederick Reimers | Longreads | August 2020 | 3,211 words (12 minutes)

It’s early March, the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, and I-25 in downtown Albuquerque is nearly deserted at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. It feels like a risky time for a road trip. After filling morgues in Italy, the virus is propagating across the globe and countries everywhere are closing their borders. No one seems sure exactly who transmits the disease or even how it is spread. Every day feels like living on a knife ridge. A light rain is falling and the signs hanging above the highway that normally display traffic times instead read: Stay Home, Save Lives.

I’m trying to save a life by dashing across five states. Driving eastward from Tucson, where I’m an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, I’m bound for Lawrence, Kansas, where my 72-year-old dad lives. He’d retired from teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University there four years ago, and has been living alone since. “I’ll be fine here,” he says, but when I ask him who can do his grocery shopping or who would take care of him if he were to fall ill, he can’t think of anyone. All his friends there have moved away or passed away. I can’t bear the thought of him riding out a pandemic alone if cities and states are locked down, and don’t really trust my older parent to take precautions against the virus. I’m going to get him.

I throw in some N95 masks and nitrile gloves I have from tinkering with the van engine, clean sheets for the van’s bed, and food to cook on the camp stove. I don’t want us eating in restaurants, and figure we can share the bed instead of risking a hotel. I notify my students that class, already moved online, is canceled for the week, and drive out of Tucson just before dark on a Tuesday.

* * *

The next morning as I’m driving through Albuquerque, I call my mom, who lives there with my stepdad Dan. I tell her that I am on my way to Kansas to bring dad back. “Was he open to the idea, or did you have to convince him?” she asks. My mom, who is Navajo, knows that like a lot of white guys of his age, Dad has trouble accepting help. He agreed to shelter with me for a couple months, I tell her, though I’m planning on him staying much longer. She invites us to stay with them on our way back through, and it’s good to think that at least right now, I’m within a few miles of her. This road trip has already gotten a little weird.

The night before, I’d driven until I was tired, past one a.m. I pulled off the highway to camp at a spot I knew in the open desert in western New Mexico — just a clearing in the saltbrush and sage flats off the side of a dirt road, earth packed down by the tires of successive car campers. I’d been surprised to see the broad white side of RV after RV appear in my headlights at each potential turnout. I had to drive a few extra miles to find a vacant spot. Other campers always make me uneasy when I’m pulling in late at night, and I really couldn’t understand what all these people were doing out here in the middle of the pandemic.

Their attitude towards the pandemic is, ‘It’ll work out,’ because for them, things always have.

Then in the morning, I’d been awakened by texts from friends in Salt Lake City, where there’d been a 5.7 magnitude earthquake. No one had been hurt, but the shaking had knocked the trumpet out of the golden hands of the Angel Moroni perched atop the highest spire of the principal Mormon temple; my friends noted wryly that the Latter-day Saints were counting on Moroni and his trumpet to herald the second coming.

Finally, two hours past Albuquerque, I pull off the highway to cook lunch at a place called Cuervo, New Mexico, that turns out to be a ghost town. Standing beside the van, waiting for the water to boil, I scan the crumbling husks of houses and a fenced-off stone church. Thinking of The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel about a father and son traveling together through abandoned towns after an unnamed apocalypse, I laugh to avoid thinking of this rest stop as an omen.

That afternoon, driving Highway 54 through the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, more cars began appearing. I’m surprised to see a bowling alley and then a restaurant with full parking lots. Somewhere in western Kansas, I pass a group of high school kids playing full-squad basketball. At a gas station, people look at me strangely as I operate the pump wearing my mask and gloves, and it is obvious the residents and I are listening to different news sources.

* * *

In Kansas, I pass signs pointing to Haskell County, which I recognize from a podcast I’ve been listening to about the 1918 flu pandemic. The Spanish Flu is believed to have originated in Haskell County where it jumped from pigs to humans before hitching a ride to Europe with some local kids who joined the army to fight in World War I, where it mutated into the deadly strain that eventually killed 50 million people worldwide. It’s ironic: that so much vitriol is already being directed at China and towards Asian Americans, when the biggest pandemic in modern history began just miles from here, in America’s heartland.

The 1918 pandemic also hit my people hard, taking as much as 24 percent percent of the Navajo population. It was a population just a little more than a generation removed from an even larger trauma — the Long Walk of the Navajo. In 1864, the U.S. Cavalry forced the Navajo from their homeland in North Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern Utah, and marched them 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the winter, with only what they could carry. Hundreds died from starvation, hypothermia, or execution when they couldn’t keep up. By the time they left Sumner four years later,  more than 2,000 had died. We are taught not to talk about Hwéeldi — “the place of suffering.” Normally when I drive to Kansas, I detour far around it, but in this case, it lay along the fastest route; I’d passed signs for it in the morning. Late that night, I pull into a campsite at Pratt Sandhills, a vestige of remaining tall grass prairie spread atop ancient sand dunes. The dirt road is a pair of parallel puddles from a recent storm and the van loses traction here and there. When I finally turn off the ignition, it’s a day I feel glad to let go of.

* * *

I make Lawrence the next afternoon, embracing my dad, Edward, on the walkway to the small house where I’d spent much of my youth. He has the easygoing demeanor of a good teacher: attentive, warm, a mischievous sense of humor. He grew up in Detroit in the ’60s then joined the Peace Corps, teaching English and math in Liberia. Once home, he meandered through a series of jobs in the Bureau of Indian Education, and eventually got a gig teaching math at Haskell, where he met my mom.

“Have you thought about what you’ll bring to Tucson?” I ask.

“I’m all packed,” he says, and it’s a relief. I’d been worried we’d waste a few days wrangling over his belongings. But when we pull out of Lawrence in the morning, we’re in two vehicles, not just my van. He says it is because he doesn’t want to leave his car parked on the street while he is gone, but I’m sure he just isn’t ready to give up that independence. I’m frustrated because I know it will slow us down and leave us more exposed. It means more breaks — I assume he’s no longer capable of driving more than six hours at a shot — and more gas stops, since his Volkswagen GTI has less than half the range of my van.

At the first, just past Wichita, I say, “Let me gas up both cars, so we only have to use up one set of gloves.” He says “Okay,” but when I turn around after getting the second pump started, I see the back of him disappearing into the store.

We’d talked about staying out of buildings — paying at the pump, going to the bathroom behind a tree. Just a few hours in, and he’s already broken that. I stew angrily at the pumps waiting for him to return, trying to keep panic at bay. If I get upset, I think, he’s not going to hear anything I say.

“Dad, I thought we talked about this,” I say when he returns. “We have to make these decisions together. You have to take this seriously.”

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s talk about it. I can stay out of gas station restrooms, but I’m going to need to get a hotel tonight. My back is already stiff.”

I can’t budge him. “Okay,” I say, “but we’ll have to scrub it all down with Clorox wipes — every surface. Let’s try for the Kansas border,” I say. “The town of Liberal should have hotels. We’re exposed in Trump country, but at least we can take comfort in the name,” I joke.

A few hours later, I still feel we the need to lighten the mood, so during a stretch break beside the highway, I show Dad a few quarantine videos people are posting on Instagram — the sock puppet appearing to eat traffic on the street below, and people “rock climbing” across their apartments with ropes and harnesses. “We should make one,” I say. “How about ghostriding the whip?” I explain the concept of the meme, grooving to music alongside, or atop, a moving vehicle without anyone in the driver’s seat. I show him a few examples, and Dad is game. I crank up some music on the van stereo — the Snotty Nose Rez Kids — put the emergency brake on halfway, and put it in gear. Dad does the rest, strutting alongside the open door of the slowly moving van with his sunglasses on and his cap turned backwards under the bright blue Kansas sky, always happiest staying loose.

I post the video on Instagram with the caption, “My dad has ascended to the throne of Quaranking.”

Except that he hasn’t. He won’t give up on the hotel idea. In Liberal, I manage to convince him to drink a can of cold-brew coffee from the van fridge and drive a little longer. Two hours later, at sunset, we gas up in Dalhart, Texas, and I propose we shoot for Tucumcari, New Mexico, an hour and a half further — and in a state where the governor has put some precautions in place. Ironically, when we get there, those precautions keep us from finding my dad a bed. Hotels are only allowed fifty percent occupancy, and there are no vacancies. At the fourth and last hotel we try, Dad holds the door open for a woman also entering the lobby and she gets the last room.

He is dejected and exhausted. Driving for 12 hours has taken its toll. We cook a pot of ramen in the parking lot, huddled inside the van against the windy night.

“What if we just sleep here in the van?” I ask.

“I need my own bed,” he says.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I say.

“I’m going to have to get up to pee in the night a few times,” he says, now irritated, “and I don’t want to disturb you.”

“It won’t,” I say, but he’s not having it.

We decide to try to push through the last 175 miles to Mom’s house, but after 100 of those, I can see Dad’s headlights dropping further back.

“How ya doing?” I ask over the phone.

“I probably need to stop,” he says, and we pull over at a rest area, just an hour from Albuquerque, to sleep till morning. There are a dozen others there doing the same, towels tucked into their windows for privacy. Dad sleeps in his car. I can’t talk him out of it.

* * *

We spend two nights recovering at my mom and stepdad’s house in Albuquerque, knowing Tucson is just a day’s drive away. They are all friends and Dad has stayed with them before; any tension is on my end. Over dinner, I’m surprised at how much Dan and Dad minimize the pandemic, and how they assume things will get quickly back to normal.

“Guys,” I say, “it’s gonna be at least 18 months before there’s a vaccine, and because of your age, you’re both in a high-risk demographic.” I never expected to be parenting my folks so soon. “In fact,” I say, “if something does happen, I’m probably going to be the one who makes all the arrangements. I should probably have copies of your wills.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” says Dan.

It comes to a head the next day. I’d watched Dan come home from the grocery store, toss his mask on the key rack, and settle in without washing his hands.

“Dan,” I say, “if you really care about my mom’s health, you have to take this seriously.” He assures me that he is, but I can tell I’ve pissed him off. Later, I have an aside with mom.

“I’m pretty frustrated with Dan,” she says, “and I can imagine you are frustrated with your father, too.” I tell her I really did need their last directives and will documents. “I’ll get that for you today,” she says, “and we can talk it through.”

It’s not surprising that my mom’s approach to the pandemic has been markedly different from my father and stepfather’s. Both of the men are white baby boomers, members of a generation who’d had the freedom to live exactly how they wanted. Their attitude towards the pandemic is, “It’ll work out,” because for them, things always have.

My mother was born in Red Valley, on the reservation near Shiprock, New Mexico. She grew up trailing her family’s sheep herd to high camp each spring and back again in the fall. It was the same journey that my great-grandparents made twice a year, and the same one that my cousins and I tagged along on as kids, walking alongside the herding dogs, and running into roadside stores to buy candy with cash my grandfather or uncle would slip us.


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Mom’s family have always been planners. It comes from migrating with the sheep, and from the cultural trauma of the Long Walk. In the summer of 1864, life was as it had been in Navajo country for hundreds of years. Then, in September, Kit Carson burned the crops, and in January an entire people were being force-marched across New Mexico. “You know, when society collapses, we need to be prepared,” I’d hear my grandfather say.

I’ve inherited that affinity for being prepared. I took my education all the way to a Ph.D., fulfilling the idea that it’s better to be overqualified for a job. I take pains to cultivate my relationships, knowing it leads to more social resilience. Before I drove to Kansas, realizing I hadn’t met all my neighbors yet and that such connections might be critical in the coming months, I knocked on every door to introduce myself and left notes at the doors no one opened. Even my van, fully outfitted for camping adventures, is subconsciously a backup home.

Which is why it is frustrating, and even a little scary, to watch my father resist my guidance. I’m sure it’s how a parent feels watching their teenage children make brash choices in a bid to establish their independence. I realize that all I can do is continue to offer support, and to remain patient myself. Which isn’t all that hard when you love someone, I realize that night as the four of us sit around the kitchen table sipping on whiskey and enjoying each other’s company.

* * *

On the last day we get on the road early, and with just a seven-hour drive to Tucson, I feel relaxed. When we stop for lunch, I can’t find the utensils to spread the peanut butter — Dad had stashed them somewhere after our parking lot dinner nadir — so I use a 19 millimeter wrench. If I were Cormac McCarthy this is the kind of thing I’d put in my post-apocalypse book, I think.

I’m excited to get home. “Maybe you should look at this quarantine as a trial run for moving to Tucson full-time,” I’d suggested to Dad the night before, glad that he seemed open to the idea. It should be a pretty easy sell — few places compare to southern Arizona in March, with mild temps and the Sonoran desert in bloom. Then fittingly, just around Wilcox, I see that the entire desert is carpeted with yellow and orange fiveneedle pricklyleaf. Clumps of the daisy-like flowers have erupted from the desert in a superbloom, spreading for miles across the basin southwards towards the blue ramparts of the Chiricahua and Dragoon ranges, storied strongholds of the Apache people who were some of the last Native Americans to resist white settlement. I pull off the highway, and Dad pulls in behind me. “Let’s take a little walk,” I say.

“Let’s keep going,” he says. “We’re only an hour away.”

I realized he isn’t seeing the flowers. “Dad, take off your sunglasses and look out there,” I say.

He lifts them up, looks around, and just says, “Oh.”

We walk out among the flowers on a faint gravel road, taking in the blooms and the tiers of mountains reaching southward clear to the Mexico border. We wander, just breathing and releasing the tension of driving. “How long do they last?” Dad asks.

“Only a week,” I say. “We’re lucky to be here.”

* * *

The next months are bittersweet. Dad loves Tucson’s ample cycling opportunities and is a good houseguest. Wary of culinary skills atrophied by two decades of bachelorhood, I do most of the cooking, though he does help pack the van for my next road trip. By May, Covid-19 has torn through my Navajo Nation homeland, inflicting the highest per-capita infection rate in the United States thanks to underfunded health resources and food deserts that have increased health risk factors. A Natives Outdoors fundraiser provides masks and hand sanitizers to communities on the reservation, which a friend and I make two separate trips to deliver.

By the time we return from the second, Dad has decided to move to Tucson for good. We’ve found a place for him to rent and a moving company to pack up his house in Kansas. I’m pleased of course, but also sad that our time living together again will soon be over. We’ve bonded over these strange quarantine times, but there’s also a real feeling of accomplishment to having successfully adapted our lives to each other. Multigenerational living is becoming rare — it challenges the supremacy of freedom and convenience, but in that we also lose something, additional layers and complexity to our most foundational relationships.

* * *

Len Necefer is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. His writing and photography have been featured in the Alpinist, Outside, Beside magazine, and more.

Frederick Reimers is based in Jackson, Wyoming, and contributes to Outside, Bloomberg, Men’s Journal, Ski, Powder, and Adventure Journal magazines. Follow him at @writereimers.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

Smoking: A Legal Weed Reading List

AP Photo/Richard Vogel

It’s always 420 somewhere, especially here in Portland, Oregon, where a cannabis dispensary seems to stand on every other corner. I smell weed while biking with my daughter through quiet residential neighborhoods. I smell weed while driving with my windows closed. I smell it at the food carts and on the clothes of college students whose papers I used to help revise at Portland State University. Last year I was skating a park around 8 am one morning, and I smelled weed. No one was walking a dog. No one was playing Frisbee golf. I swear the squirrels must have been blazing in the trees. It’s easy to feel like I’m part of a small minority of Portlanders who don’t get stoned. But legal cannabis is more than easy stoner jokes and giggly good times. Legalization is decriminalization, and that’s a very important distinction in a nation that both disproportionately incarcerates people of color for minor offences and clings to an ineffective, military battle approach to the social and health challenge of addiction. Weed is far less harmful than heroin and alcohol, but it can still be harmful when habitual. And arrests have ended too many lives.

In 2016, to celebrate Pennsylvania becoming the 24th US state to legalize medical marijuana, Longreads editor Cheri Lucas Rowlands compiled a marijuana reading list, called Weed Reeds. This list is an extension of that, featuring stories that have come out since other states decriminalized recreational and medical cannabis, and since advocates have started reframing marijuana as cannabis. Still, as serious as legalization is, people still puff, puff, puff on porches, pass the pipe at picnics, and drop tincture in their beers to lighten backyard parties. Legal weed ain’t all science and medicine. It’s a huge lucrative industry, and that makes for dramatic stories, personalities, and trouble.

* * *

Grow Industry” (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Walrus, March 12, 2013)

In 2013, when two U.S. states had legalized recreational marijuana, there were signs that Canada would end its nine-decade-long marijuana prohibition. People were wondering how to capitalize on this historic opportunity, to become, as The Walrus put it, ”the Seagrams of weed.”

There are certainly parallels. Like the marijuana ban today, the prohibition against alcohol—much stricter in the US than in Canada—did not eliminate the drug. It just created a grey market with shortcuts and loopholes, easily exploited if you were someone like Samuel Bronfman, a canny Canadian businessman who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. The Bronfmans were hustlers, Russian Jewish immigrants who set up a string of “boozariums” along the Saskatchewan–North Dakota border, ferried alcohol across the Detroit River, and shipped it into the US aboard schooners. In 1928, they expanded their empire by purchasing Seagrams, the Montreal-based maker of such popular brands as Seven Crown. When Prohibition ended, they were in the perfect position to solidify their hold on the market, and Seagrams became the largest distilling business in the world.

Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed” (Ben Schreckinger and Mona Zhang, Politico, May 24, 2020)

The spectacular explosion of cannabis’ ambitious startup MedMen is a tale for the tech era. The company themselves couldn’t always figure out if they were a tech company or a cannabis company. They just knew they were rushing to capitalize on the lucrative opportunity presented by legal cannabis. They modeled their stores after the Apple Store. They published a glossy culture magazine called Ember that ran articles like “Is CBD the New Tylenol?” In an attempt to reach the masses and normalize cannabis consumption, they ran an expensive ad campaign where they’d cross out the word ‘stoner’ and replace that loaded term with words like ‘Grandmother.’ “One image,” the story says, “featured a uniformed police officer.”

This is the story of how the cannabis industry comes down from its high.

In some cases, vendors, unable to get cash for the product they have supplied to the company, have instead been taking payment in MedMen stock. As of mid-May, its stock price was down more than 95 percent from its late-2018 high, according to data from the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Normally, a business in such dire straits could seek federal bankruptcy protection. Because of weed’s legal status, that option is not open to MedMen.

MedMen was faring worse than most, but the rest of industry was also coming down hard from its high. There were too many entrepreneurs trying to blaze the same path as Bierman, competing for a pool of legal sales that was not growing fast enough, with too much regulatory uncertainty hanging over them. In the year leading up to March 21, the United States Marijuana Index, which tracks top cannabis stocks, fell by more than four-fifths.

Canada’s Saddest Grow-op: My Humiliating Adventures in Growing Marijuana” (Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail, May 19, 2019)

When one of The Globe and Mail editors suggested writer Ian Brown grow weed as an experiment, Brown borrowed a high tech, automated grow device called a Grobo and set his operation by his office desk. From the dizzying number of varietals to choose from to the sensitive environmental needs of the plants, there are many reasons professional grow cannabis. But could technology like Grobo really democratize and simplify cannabis production?

“I think people will come to love growing,” Mr. Dawson said as we neared the end of our factory tour. “But it’s a much more complex problem than we anticipated.” He was enthusiastic, but wary, because he knew the secret behind the popular misconception that cannabis is a weed anyone can grow anywhere. The truth is, growing good cannabis is way, way harder than it looks.

Eventually, we loaded the Grobo into the hatch of my car. I drove to Toronto and dollied the hulk up to my desk at work. I felt like a revolutionary. There it stood for three weeks while I tried to find something to grow in it.

Reefer Madness 2.0: What Marijuana Science Says, and Doesn’t Say” (Dave Levitan, Undark, January 21, 2019)

By now, many Americans are at least faintly aware of the comical mid-century progoganda waged against marijuana consumption, which included slogans like “The burning weed with its roots in Hell!“ The rhetoric has cooled, but myth and pseudoscience still shape many Americans’ view of cannabis use, and propoganda takes many forms. In this piece, Levitan takes a look at the untruths, fear-mongering, and logical fallacies that inform the case that the book Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence makes against cannabis. He also indicts New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell for his piece, “Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” which, even when justified, is a modern sport in itself. “Combined,” Levitan writes, “these two works offer a master class in statistical malfeasance and a smorgasbord of logical fallacies and data-free fear-mongering that serve only to muddle an issue that, as experts point out, needs far more good-faith research.“ It must also be said that science is still trying to understand the way cannabis works on, and that weed is not harmless, even if it isn’t from HELL.

An important piece of Berenson’s argument is that rates of marijuana use have risen at around the same time as an increase in diagnoses of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. For example, separate studies from Finland and Denmark show an increase in such diagnoses in recent years. The authors of both studies wrote that the increases could be explained by changes to diagnostic criteria, as well as improved access to early interventions. In both cases, the authors do not rule out an actual change in incidence. But Berenson makes that possibility seem a firm reality, and that the rise in marijuana use is responsible. There is no real evidence that he’s right.

Berenson’s connection of marijuana to violence seems even more tenuous. He writes that violence has increased dramatically in four states that legalized marijuana in recent years: Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. He notes that the number of violent crimes in those states has increased faster than the rest of the country between the years 2013 and 2017. On its face, he’s not wrong, but this is a great example of the liberties one can take with numbers.

Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, January 7, 2019)

Medicaid, Marijuana And Me: An Ex-Opioid Addict’s Take On American Drug Denial” (Janet Burns, Forbes, February 18, 2018)

A journalist shares what her experience with prescription painkillers taught her about the value of decriminalization.

Current federal leaders have said repeatedly that cannabis is not a medicinal substance at all, just as members of many administrations did before them. In doing so, it seems, they chose to reject the clear definitions and determinations that have been agreed upon by a majority of medical experts and regular citizens in the U.S. and a growing number of nations around the world.

At the same time, the U.S. assigns more favorable legal status to around 50 different opioids than it does to cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms, all but a handful of which are manufactured prescription drugs (think “opium poppy straw”; heroin, originally a prescription drug, has been retired). As of last year, the U.S.was also producing more opioid prescriptions than it has residents. And according to recent statistics, another American dies from opioid abuse every 10 minutes.

Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun” (Sean Howe, Longreads, May 13, 2019)

Before he founded High Times, Tom Forcade was a renegade journalist willing to throw a pie — or a lawsuit — in the face of anyone restricting his constitutional freedoms.

Much as the underground press provided a forum for the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, High Times served as the national message center for the 1970s movement to bring marijuana to the mainstream. During Forcade’s four years publishing the magazine and funding the marijuana lobby, possession of small amounts of cannabis was decriminalized in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Oregon. The first Americans began receiving marijuana for a medical condition. High Times editorials from those days seem almost prophetic now: warning against the corporate interests that would descend upon legalized weed, and noting the ways in which international drug wars could serve as cover for imperialist adventures. (Forcade’s own extralegal activities have a legacy as well, but that information has mostly lurked in government agency records, in the memories of tight-lipped collaborators, and in the research files of my forthcoming book about him)

Tangled Up in Bob Stories: A Dylan Reading List

Bob Dylan playing on the Olympia stage, France, May 24, 1966, on his 25th birthday. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Music legends from Tom Waits to Joni Mitchell immediately heard Dylan’s genius in songs like “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,“ but not me. It took me two decades to warm to Bob Dylan. It’s a common story. He’s one of those artists that people say will “grow on you,” or, in more patronizing terms: You’ll understand when you’re older. No young person wants to hear that, but people I knew in high school loved Dylan, so I gave him a try.

Compared to all the loud, cutting-edge guitar bands my friends and I listened to in the ’90s, like Bad Brains and Meat Puppets, Dylan seemed to belong to what my naive teenage mind characterized as ancient rock dinosaurs like The Rolling Stones and The Who: historically interesting but obsolete. I was in high school. Shows what I knew. Dylan and The Who were nothing alike. As cool as Dylan looked in old photos with his cigarette and sunglasses, folk music could not have seemed less cool. My friends and I skated and moshed in the pit. Acoustic guitar didn’t move me. Then I heard about Dylan’s legendary 1966 concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall, from the tour where he played controversial electric sets. As a die-hard fan of live recordings, a legendary rock show seemed a great place to start with Dylan.

In the early ’90s I found a bootleg CD of the Royal Albert Hall show at the record store next to my high school. Swingin’ Pig released it. I had other Swingin’ Pig bootlegs, so I trusted it as much as you can trust black market record labels. When I played the album at home, it left me cold. This was what people fawned over? “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”? Compared to power chords and fuzz petals, Dylan’s rock sounded tame. His nasally voice grated, so I shoved the CD in a box where my unloved albums went.

In college, I spotted the CD buried in a drawer. I wondered how it would sound now. Even as a more worldly college undergrad who listened to Miles Davis and twinkly New Zealand underground like The Clean, Dylan’s music still bored me, so it went back in the drawer. This was my pattern during my 20s and 30s. I’d play the CD every few years, dislike it, and squirrel it away. As big of an idiot as I was, something about Dylan demanded respect. He was too venerated to just throw his CD away. Albums are like that. Sometimes your favorites find you at the time in your life and you love them upon first listen. Sometimes they grow on you. Dylan also seemed like the kind of artist you needed in your collection, to provide variety and a sense of history, as well as something mainstream to compliment all the adolescent statement albums by Misfits and Slayer. So that album came with me to different states and through different stages of my life. Even when I didn’t enjoy listening to old music, I always appreciated music history.

Jacques Haillot/Apis/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images

In 1999, my then-girlfriend wanted to see Paul Simon, Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan play. I was all in, because I loved The Beatles and knew these legends could die at any minute. Ringo was eh. Simon was fun. Dylan blew me away. He came out in some kind of clean, country music suit, a big hat, and tore through a rocking set that was more honky-tonk than the rambling folk-rock I expected. I watched, enraptured. The set rolled like a train that never slowed at crossings. Turns out, he was touring for his best new album in ages, Time Out of Mind. Dylan’s performance completely changed my mind about him. I never laughed him off again. But the experience didn’t turn me into a devotee. I didn’t buy that double album, and when I played Royal Albert Hall 1966 again, I still heard no magic. When I met the woman who I fell for immediately in my late 30s, my musical taste had grown so broad that when she played me Dylan’s 1976 album Desire, I finally heard Dylan’s peculiar magic. “Hurricane” and “Isis” were masterpieces. How had Dylan sounded so different to the younger me? How could I not like this? When I went to play her my old live bootleg, the CD case was empty. My last girlfriend had lost it and forgotten to tell me. No problem. In the intervening years, Dylan had officially released a better-sounding version of the concert as part of his official Bootleg Series, so I bought that, and the circle was complete. Now I listen to his live 1966 acoustic performances of “Visions Of Johanna” and it gives me chills. One good thing about taking this long to come around is that his most familiar songs still sound fresh to me. That familiar acoustic strumming can still elicit tears. Turns out that the Royal Albert Hall show I had was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. It’s a famous show and famous error. At least the bootleggers got the year right.

Stories like this abound in Dylan lore and fan circles: stories of transformation, reinvention, and musical progress. Those themes define Dylan himself. He’s always changing, putting listeners and scholars off the trail, to keep us guessing about who he is, about songs’ meanings, and what he’ll do next. That’s one reason Dylan scholarship and journalism constitute their own body of literary work. Here are a few of my favorite Dylan stories, written by everyone from Ellen Willis to Greg Tate. You can appreciate these stories even if you don’t dig Dylan’s music. Maybe you’re curious about the man himself, or you enjoy hating someone enshrined by so much hype. Like Dylan’s music, these stories will be here if you find yourself ready for them, though remember, you don’t ever have to be ready. His voice can still be pretty annoying.

* * *

Dylan” (Ellen Willis, Cheetah, 1967)

It all starts here: the Dylan literary cannon, and Willis’ writing career. Sure, in 1961 Robert Shelton wrote about Dylan for The New York Times, but few people wrote about Dylan with such intelligence, electricity, and insight until Willis did. The Dylan cannon was still relatively small when his 1967 album Blonde on Blonde came out. The 7800-word exploration that Willis took five months to write set the proverbial bar, marking a literary high-point against which all subsequent Dylan pieces, even rock criticism itself, can be measured. Willis created Cheetah, and it proved to be the kind of smart scrappy magazine that published solid stories before quickly fading into obscurity after a year. It was of its time, but in that short time, it launched careers. After Willis’ Dylan piece published, a New Yorker writer convinced editor William Shawn to cover modern music, and said Willis was the person to do it. Based on the strength of this Dylan piece, Shawn hired her to be the magazine’s first pop music critic, and the rest of her life is history. Pick any paragraph and you’ll see why.

“His masks hidden by other masks, Dylan is the celebrity stalker’s ultimate antagonist,” Willis writes. “And in coming to terms with that world, he has forced us to come to terms with him.” Willis was an astute observer and listener. Long before Dylan’s knack for invention and reinvention became well-known parts of his appeal, she spotted the push and pull between his public and private lives, the artifice and the art, and how it reflected modern culture. “The tenacity of the modern publicity apparatus often makes artists’ personalities more familiar than their work, while its pervasiveness obscures the work of those who can’t or won’t be personalities.” That’s as true 50 years later. Cheetah closed the year after her piece came out, but she’d made the leap from obscurity to The New Yorker, where she applied her brilliance to iconic underground artists like the Velvet Underground and The New York Dolls, before turning her back on music and this phase of her writing life all-together.

A Trip to Hibbing High” (Greil Marcus, Daedalus, Spring 2007)

When he first saw Dylan perform with Joan Baez at an outdoor stage in 1963, Marcus was 18 years old, and Dylan seemed to have no age, no sense of origin or identity. Dylan only had two albums out at the time, and already, he exhibited a unique, sui generis aura. “When the show was over, I saw this person, whose name I hadn’t caught, crouching behind the tent,” Marcus wrote in the introduction of his book Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, “so I went up to him.” This pivotal moment marked the beginning of Marcus’ writing career. He had witnessed one of the most influential musicians in history before his moment of emergence. This meeting also marked Marcus’ emergence. “Along with a lot of other things,” Marcus wrote, “becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer.” Five years after that 1963 performance, Marcus published his first Dylan piece. He has since written enough about Dylan to literally fill books, but this piece always stood out because it addresses Dylan’s origins. To try to understand how childhood shaped Dylan’s genius, Marcus visited Hibbing High School, where Dylan graduated, and whose legend centers around the school’s striking architecture, lavish decoration, and creative influence. Speaking of origins: What’s the appeal of Dylan for Marcus? His answer could apply to many Dylan fans: “I don’t think about it, I just do it, or rather can’t help it.”

Climbing the enclosed stairway that followed the expanse of outdoor steps, we saw not a hint of graffiti, not a sign of deterioration in the intricate colored tile designs on the walls and the ceilings, in the curving woodwork. We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest and the emerging towns. It was strange, the pristine condition of the place. It spoke not for emptiness, for Hibbing High as a version of Pompeii High—though the school, with a capacity of over 2,000, was down to 600 students, up from four hundred only a few years before—and, somehow, you knew the state of the building didn’t speak for discipline. You could sense self-respect, passed down over the years.

We followed the empty corridors in search of the legendary auditorium. A custodian let us in, and told us the stories. Seating for 1,800, and stained glass everywhere, even in the form of blazing candles on the fire box. In large, gilded paintings in the back, the muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards. “No wonder he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a visitor the next day, when the bus tour stopped at the school, speaking of the talent show Dylan played here with his high-school band the Golden Chords. Anybody on that stage could see kingdoms waiting.

Tangled Up in Dylan” (Mark Jacobson, Rolling Stone, April 12, 2001)

Dylan has generated an entire field of study called Dylanology. Universities offer courses. Scholars publish books and discuss him everywhere from Inside Higher Education to The Wall Street Journal. Long before Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature generated an international discussion about whether his writing was even literature and why, as Richard F. Thomas’s book puts it, Bob Dylan matters, and fans knew the answer.

“If Shakespeare was in your midst, putting on shows at the Globe Theatre,” one Dylanologist tells fan and reporter Mark Jacobson, ”wouldn’t you feel the need to be there, to write down what happened in them?” Jacobson spends time with fanatics to address that question, and he studies the line between appreciation and fanaticism, scholar and obsessive. Dylan fanatics are people who have collected 20,000 live recordings. They’re people spend their time comparing differences in individual songs performances, who even want to clone Dylan’s DNA. “Rock is full of cults,” Jacobson writes as he goes down the rabbit hole, “but nothing—not collecting the Beatles, not documenting Elvis—rivals Dylanology.” What was the limit? Jacobson writes: “I was looking for the limit.” The problem, he discovers, is the issue of accessing Dylan himself.

Here’s the kind of photo that impressed me as a teenage Dylan hater. Blank Archives/Getty Images

Intelligence Data,” (Greg Tate, Village Voice, September 25, 2001)

Greg Tate is a musician and prose stylist whose love of music and critical eye earned him a title as one of “the Godfathers of hip-hop journalism,” but he writes widely about music and culture. As a staff writer for the Village Voice from 1987 to 2005, Tate covered enormous territory and built a unique body of work. Here he offers a fresh perspective on late-period Dylan, around the release of Love and Theft, Dylan’s follow up to the masterful album Time Out of Mind. Tate hears not only genius, but an “impact on a couple generations of visionary black bards has rarely been given its propers,“ from Curtis Mayfield and Tracy Chapman to Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley.

The codger’s got plenty kick left in him yet. Feel like a fightin rooster, feel better than I ever felt, but the Pennsylvania line’s in an awful mess, and the Denver road is about to melt. Plenty parables too. There may be no second acts in American life, but at 60, Dylan could care less. Like Miles Davis and his shadow, that asshole Pablo Picasso, Dylan has given us one long act to chew on, and one long song: a peerless and exquisite display of craft, nerve, and wit. His riddle-rhyming trail is marked by the silence, exile, and cunning of the hermetic populist—Joyce, Pynchon, Reed, Clinton. Occasional lapses of taste and crises of faith, periods of doubt, self-derision, and personal revival too. Rare among American artists, he shouldered the burden of a great and precocious gift. He crashed but did not burn out after the ’60s. Now contemporary evidence, a new release called “Love and Theft,” suggests that the poet of his generation is once again prophet of his age.

How I Changed My Mind About Bob Dylan” (Catherine Nichols, Jezebel, September 16, 2016)

Unlike me, Catherine Nichols loved Dylan the first time she heard him. She was 16 and driving in the car with her dad. He’d introduced her to a lot of good old American music, but Dylan’s song “felt like a searchlight had been switched on shining directly into my eyes, an almost unbearable sense of significance,” she writes. “That’s how I became the last person on the planet to discover that Bob Dylan is really, really, really good. Then she wonders why: “The mystery I’ve wondered about ever since: what’s so good about him.” Her essay is my favorite kind of music writing: personal and analytical, driven to examine both the music and the particular way it works on her as a listener.

When she looks at two versions of one song — Dylan’s version and the version by The Animals — you get a knockout taste of her crystalline vision and the poetry of her sentences. “The Animals’ version should feel more exciting — it has a bounding and rolling melody, Eric Burdon’s voice is stronger and clearer. He lets the song build; he works up to a big roar of sincere misery, vigor and regret. The Dylan version, on the other hand, is snarled virtually at a monotone. The chain that hobbles him is not his own hedonism but the hopelessness and despair he can’t escape. *And yet one track feels like a beloved teddy bear and the other like the touch of living skin. There’s more person in Dylan’s voice than anyone else’s; his voice transmutes the unnerving sensation of being wholly, troublingly alive.”

Although Dylan may have, as her father believed, taught “a generation of white boys with terse WWII-vet fathers how to connect to their own emotions,” Nichols didn’t initially find or need any lessons from Dylan. After she read his memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, she found a musician with many literary talents who could offer her insight as a female writer.

Bob Dylan’s Secret Archive” (Ben Sisario, The New York Times, March, 6, 2016)

There are few things are as exciting to Dylan fans as the prospect of new unreleased material. More home demos. More vintage concert footage. Hope endures for a reason. Lost treasures still surface, like the previously unknown recording of Dylan playing Brandeis University in 1963, found in the basement of Rolling Stone magazine cofounder Ralph Gleason. And new footage from the reels D.A. Pennebaker shot on Dylan’s 1965 tour. Dylan has always been notoriously protective of his private life and his creative process, but for Dylanologists, who want to know how he creates, their dreams have come true.

For an estimated $15 to $20 million, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa purchased Dylan’s personal collection, which includes footage, written correspondence, film, and lyrics — 6,000 pieces in total — dating back to his formative years. This material will be displayed for the public, and for study, at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Bob Dylan Center’s crown jewel: The notebooks that contain Dylan’s sketches for his album Blood on the Tracks. This was once the holy grail among fanatics, rumored but not confirmed. Now there are three. Why Tulsa? The connection to Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s early influence and an Oklahoma native. Also, opportunity: a respected archivist approached the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa, and the Kaiser Foundation had the money. “Portland wasn’t always cool,” George B. Kaiser said. “Seattle wasn’t always cool.” Dylan could help revitalize Tulsa. It’s the motherload fans have waited for, and as The New York Times announced in 2016, “it is clear that the archives are deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter’s work.”

Bringing Some of It All Back Home” (Clive James, Cream, September 1972)

Cream was the loudest rock magazine of the 1970s. Based in Detroit, they covered the big names like Zeppelin and the ignored ones like the Stooges, and rereading this Cream piece, you can hear its time. It is a thorough, thoughtful examination of Dylan’s creativity and approach to songwriting. ”What Dylan has exhausted is not any kind of subject matter,” James writes, ”but a specific kind of approach to the song: the approach that relies on the indiscriminate imagination.” But this piece is also one of those very thinky, early rock pieces that examines the larger rock culture as much as Dylan. It’s fascinating to hear what people thought of his body of work in 1972, since he kept producing more music for decades, yet James can say that ”a critical estimate of Dylan comes within reach.” Ha! Dylan himself said it would take people 100 years to really appreciate his work. The clock keeps ticking.

Bob Dylan, the Wanderer” (Nat Hentoff, The New Yorker, October 24, 1964)

Nat Hentoff is largely known as a jazz writer, but in 1964, he profiled a young Bob Dylan. And it’s good. The subhead describes this early Dylan as “A fusion of Huck Finn and Woody Guthrie, the musician writes songs that sound drawn from oral history.“ Thankfully Dylan became so much more.

Dylan and the Nobel” (Gordon Ball, Oral Tradition, 2007)

Speaking of Dylanology: After Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, a slew of think pieces and scholarly articles debated the prize and Dylan’s work. Was it worthy? In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Evan R. Goldstein asked a deeper question: “Why are intellectuals so besotted with Dylan?” Long before Dylan won the prize, fans and scholars were making the case for the award. Scholar Gordon Ball specializes in Beat Generation literature, but he saw Dylan perform at his famous 1965 Newport Jazz Festival show, where Dylan shocked fans by first playing electric. “In 1996 I first wrote the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy,“ Ball writes in the journal Oral Tradition, “nominating Dylan for its Prize in literature.“ To get a sense of what Dylan scholarship is like, this makes for an interesting read. “My point,“ Ball writes, “is rather modest: that poetry and music share time-honored ground, that the two arts are often bound closely together, and that Dylan’s great gifts may be appreciated within such a performative lineage. Poetry and music aren’t mutually exclusive.“

The Wanderer” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker, May 10, 1999)

Following Dylan on his now famous 1998 tour of Time Out of Mind, Alex Ross realizes how much the music matters more than the messenger, which is what the Dylanologist often miss.

Discussions of Dylan often boils down to that: “Please speak. Tells us what it means.” But does he need to? He had already given something away, during the ritual acoustic performance of “Tangled Up in Blue.” This dense little tale, which may be about two couples, one couple, or one couple plus an interloper, seems autobiographical: it’s easy to guess what Dylan might be thinking about when he sings, “When it all came crashing down, I became withdrawn / The only thing I knew how to do was keep on keeping on / Like a bird that flew . . .” See any number of ridiculous spectacles in Dylan’s life. But the lines that he shouted out with extra emphasis came at the end:

Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint

We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a different point

Of view

Tangled up in blue.

Suddenly the romance in questions seemed to be the long, stormy one between Dylan and his audience. Dylan is over there and the rest of us are over here, and we’re all seeing things from different points of view. And what is it that we’re looking for? Perhaps the thing that comes between him and us—the music.

What Didn’t Kill Her

Photo illustration by Longreads

Bernice L. McFadden | Longreads | June 2020 | 8 minutes (2,024 words)

My brother never calls just to say hello.

On that warm, blue-skied, beautiful May day, I was sitting in the backyard of my cousins’ home, the sun warming my bare legs.

“Hello?”

He didn’t sound frantic, but his words were halting. It was clear that he was upset.

“Mommy fell and hit her head,” he said. “The ambulance is on the way.”

My chest tightened.

“Let me speak to her.”

You sounded a little out of breath and a tad bit embarrassed that he was causing such a fuss. You couldn’t explain exactly how you’d ended up on the floor. You did remember that you were standing at the bottom of the stairs watching my brother and his friend carry a love seat to the second floor apartment and then, the next thing you knew, my brother and his friend were standing over you calling your name as they shook you back to consciousness.
Read more…

The NHL’s Lacrosse Takeover

Bill Armstrong, who played a single NHL game in the '90s, is often overlooked as the originator of the "lacrosse-style" goal. Photo courtesy of the author.

Sam Riches | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,399 words)

During the third period of a late October game between the Carolina Hurricanes and the Calgary Flames, Andrei Svechnikov, a right-winger for the Hurricanes, corrals the puck deep in Calgary’s offensive zone.

Sensing the presence of the 19-year-old Russian, Flames goaltender David Rittich seals his body against the post. It’s textbook positioning, a preventive measure in case Svechnikov — the second overall pick in the 2018 NHL draft — attempts a centering pass or a sneaky shot from a bad angle. Unfortunately for Rittich, who has seen, studied, and saved a lot of shots in his life, there is no playbook for what’s about to happen. Read more…

Snapshot of Canada: An Accidental Reading List

ürgen Schwenkenbecher/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Cleaning our basement recently, I found a box of old Canadian magazines. The covers were crisp, the bindings intact. Published between 2011 and 2013, I’d gathered these issues of The Walrus and Maisonneuve as research for an abandoned book project. Curious about what was inside, I sat down with them and a pot of very British black tea — the kind The Empress Hotel serves with tiny sandwiches in Victoria, British Columbia.

People call The Walrus the Canadian New Yorker. Maisonneuve was named Magazine of the Year in 2005, 2012, and 2016. Between their striking glossy covers I found the stylish, substantial writing these magazines are still known for, and stories both evergreen and of their time: stories about food, sex, drugs, immigration, politics, Indigenous rights, art, and the environment.

Thumbing through old magazines can be fun. Dated advertisements reveal bizarre worldviews and outdated thinking, like the doctors who famously preferred Camel cigarettes, and a mid-century ad I found featuring two poodles smoking the Old Gold brand. Those were the days. Back issues also capture a country’s struggles, its psyche, mythology, and national narratives, and these Canadian issues returned me to a particular time in my own life.

Years ago, I pitched an idea for a book called Canphilia to a literary agent. Philia is a suffix denoting love or an affection for something, and I loved Canada. The title was too scientific for a first-person narrative travelogue in search of the Canadian national identity, but I was younger then, and that was the best I could come up with.

Covering 3,854,085 square miles, Canada is the second-largest country in the world. Canada and the United States share the world’s longest international border, yet few Americans can name half of the 10 provinces let alone name beloved Canadian icons or defining cultural characteristics. “To outsiders,” my proposal said, “Canada seems like the perfect country: scenic, peaceful, friendly, progressive. Its national parks are the envy of the developed world. The country has one of the highest standards of living on earth, a functioning public health system, and it’s the only G8 country with balanced books. Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, outlawed the death penalty, and operates North America’s only federally authorized drug injection site. Naturally, when people talk about it, most utter some variation of, Ah, I love Canada. But beyond vague notions of Britishness, hockey, and maple syrup production, what do we really know about it?” One thing I knew was that living next to one of the most loud-mouthed, aggressive, arrogant countries in history could make any neighboring country appear quiet, peaceful, and humble. Or maybe their voice was drowned out by all of our patriotic, idiotic, saber-rattling nonsense.

The vast majority of Canada’s 38 million inhabitants lived in larger urban centers within 125 miles of the US border, so I planned to drive, hike, and ferry across the entire country, from west to east, sticking to the border, to investigate. “More importantly,” my proposal said, “do we even know what makes a Canadian a Canadian? What they stand for? How they think and act? And what do they think of us, anyway?”

I was ambitious and slightly bananas, and I wanted to do for Canada what Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones did for China, and Ian Frazier’s The Great Plains did for the American Midwest: write a vivid, nuanced, humorous portrait of a people and their homeland, that would appeal to a general readership and enlighten myself as much as my fellow Americans. In addition to Canada’s national character, I would interrogate my own interest, search for the reasons so many of us disgruntled Americans fall under the country’s spell. Obviously Canada wasn’t perfect, with its clear-cut logging and historically egregious treatment of Indigenous people. I wanted to examine Canada’s contradictions, and debunk popular stereotypes. I wasn’t interested so much in defining “constitutional monarchy” or “parliamentary democracy” for American readers, or helping them reconcile Canada’s independence with its connection to the Queen. I was interested in profiling the personality of the Canadian people and their culture while trying to figure out why I longed to live somewhere I knew so little about.

The agent loved the idea, but we never shopped it to publishers. I couldn’t afford to take enough of the trip to write any sample chapters, and supposedly, Americans don’t care enough about Canada to read books about it. I filed “the Canada book” away in the back of my mind as I developed other niche book ideas that never sold, because that’s the kind of writer I am. As I moved around, my Canada books and back issues came with me.

After reading these issues, I thought it’d be fun to assemble some of their stories, which reveal new sides of Canada to outsiders like me (and maybe you). This is not meant as a definitive Canada reading list. It’s a sample of what I pulled from one stack of issues from 2011 — 2013. That makes this collection more of a tiny time capsule, an incomplete portrait of a particular place in time. Actual Canadians can gather more wide-ranging, complete lists that capture the totality of Canada, its breadth and depth. These older stories also provide an interesting baseline to compare Canada now with Canada then. After reading them, I wondered: Has Canadian secondary education improved? Is Kraft mac ’n cheese still Canada’s national dish? What happened to that hyped comedy troupe Picnicface? Here they are in chronological order, with their subheads included as description. None of these stories feature hockey or The Tragically Hip, but one is about Labatt beer. Part of Canada’s identity involves outsiders’ reliance on cliché. Enjoy, eh?

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Going Viral” (Maisonneuve, Kaitlin Fontana, Summer 2011)

“This fall, the sketch comedy group and online-video machine Picnicface will simultaneously launch a feature-length movie, a TV show, and a book. Can eight nerds from Halifax resuscitate Canada’s ailing comedy scene?”

In Halifax, far from the showbiz machine, Picnicface has been free to both develop a unique voice in front of a warm audience, and to cultivate a show without fear of high-profile failure. McKinney likes that the group is from Halifax—it reminds him of his early days in Calgary, before he moved to Toronto. “If they’d been born in LA, they’d have all been poached before they could create this voice that develops between like-minded people, this ecosystem that happens in smaller places,” he says. Halifax, for Picnicface, is an incubator. Little goes further: “We’ve done some garbage here, but I’m really happy we did, because it helped mold us.”

Canada’s Most Unwanted” (The Walrus, Jasmine Budak, December 2011)

“Domestic adoption is rarely the first choice for prospective parents. But with rising infertility rates and the availability of foreign infants declining, some 30,000 children in government care have a better shot at finding a family.”

Canadians have long adopted from abroad, but largely for humanitarian reasons, in spurts and small numbers: orphans of the Irish famine, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; and, later, in the mid-’70s, from orphanages in Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Latin America, through Ottawa’s newly established national Adoption Desk. But over the next two decades, as adoption became normalized and the supply of domestic infants began to wane, inter-country adoption became less about finding parents for destitute babies and more about finding babies for hopeful parents. It was no longer motivated by goodwill, but rather became a transaction in the business of fulfilling the developed world’s growing demand for infants.

Visions of the Future” (Maisonneuve, Chandler Levack, Summer 2012)

“A twenty-four-year-old singer named Grimes is the world’s hottest independent pop star, and her fame has cast Montreal into the spotlight yet again.”

Grimes’ success and the exposure she’s brought her Arbutus label-mates—Sean Nicholas Savage, TOPS and TONSTARTSSBANDHT, among others—have made Montreal a high-profile indie-rock hotspot once again, reminiscent of the time, several years ago, when Arcade Fire attracted the world’s attention to the city. Although Montreal has plenty of other worthy independent labels, like Secret City and Alien8, the rise of Grimes has made Arbutus a litmus test for the promise of the city’s young musicians. Today’s tastemakers are fickle, and too much hype can cause a community to cannibalize itself—especially one as small and tight-knit as Montreal’s music scene. As Morrissey once said, “We hate it when our friends become successful.”

Calgary Reconsidered” (The Walrus, Chris Turner, June 2012)

“Six truths about the city that’s no longer, simply, Cowtown.”

Even if you love the city deep down, you sometimes feel as if you’re merely putting up with it, waiting for it to grow all the way up and become what it pretends to be. Calgary is an overnight millionaire fresh from the sale of a gas exploration company, complaining about the greed of all those farmers who jacked up the lease rates. Calgary is the home riding of the prime minister abutting the home riding of the premier, and still insisting that it doesn’t get a fair shake in Ottawa or Edmonton. Calgary is the highest per capita income in Canada in a province with no sales tax, indignant that its property taxes are going up. Its conservatism sometimes scans as a youngster’s I-got-mine insolence. Its emerging power and prominence come across from some angles as pure teenage bluster.

The Hunter Artist” (The Walrus, Sarah Milroy, July/August 2012)

“In Cape Dorset, Nunavut, a new generation is redefining Inuit art, preserving northern traditions as it adapts to southern ways of life. One of these artists is Tim Pitsiulak.”

Whites imagine Inuit, and Inuit imagine whites; Inuit art is where their fantasies meet, but the interface is changing. Kinngait continues to release its annual portfolio of about forty prints, as it has for more than fifty years. Despite stars like Kenojuak, prices for the prints have remained fairly consistent and modest, in the $500 to $2,500 range. But one-of-a-kind drawings are gaining a following and, as with the prints, the prices are regulated by Dorset Fine Arts, the co-op’s Toronto distributor, which sends the art to dealers across Canada and around the world, who then charge what the market will bear. Pitsiulak’s largest and best drawings can now sell for as much as $12,500, making him one of the most successful artists in the North. His aunt Kenojuak’s best works sell for around $16,000. Shuvinai Ashoona’s prices are close behind Pitsiulak’s and rising fast. This phenomenon of individual artists’ commanding widely differing levels of remuneration could someday lead to a break with the old co-op way of doing things, in which the revenue from higher-priced artists supports the costs of maintaining the studio and distribution, helping to fund the production of those artists who are less likely to sell. Inuit artists in Cape Dorset may hesitate to abandon a system that has afforded them predictable prices for pieces on completion (as well as studio space and material costs), irrespective of the vagaries of the southern art market.

Manufacturing Taste” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, September 2012)

“The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner — a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are.”

The point is, it’s nearly impossible to live in Canada without forming an opinion about one of the world’s first and most successful convenience foods. In 1997, sixty years after the first box promised “dinner in seven minutes — no baking required,” we celebrated by making Kraft Dinner the top-selling grocery item in the country.

This makes KD, not poutine, our de facto national dish. We eat 3.2 boxes each in an average year, about 55 percent more than Americans do. We are also the only people to refer to Kraft Dinner as a generic for instant mac and cheese. The Barenaked Ladies sang wistfully about eating the stuff: “If I had a million dollars / we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft Dinner / But we would eat Kraft Dinner / Of course we would, we’d just eat more.” In response, fans threw boxes of KD at the band members as they performed. This was an act of veneration.

John Cage’s Canada” (Maisonneuve, Crystal Chan, Fall 2012)

“The twentieth century’s most important avant-garde composer may have been American, Crystal Chan writes, but he found his greatest inspiration north of the border.”

On a Thursday night in August 1961, Cage took the podium at Montreal’s Théâtre de la Comédie-Canadienne and moved his arms in a circle, imitating the hands of a clock. In response, eighteen musicians began to play. The piece, called Atlas Eclipticalis, was Cage’s first Canadian premiere, and he had written it by matching notes to star positions in an astronomical atlas. At the time, the whole world had its eyes on the stars; earlier that spring, a Soviet cosmonaut had beaten the Americans to space. Composing music with the help of astronomy was still an eccentric method, though, and one that marked an important shift in Cage’s career. After Atlas Eclipticalis, Cage moved away from writing music with notes, rests and other conventional symbols. Instead, he went on to create graphic scores—essentially, drawn music—and write textual instructions. He started to see himself as a creator of experiences through sound, rather than a composer of music.

The Place Where Art Sleeps” (Maisonneuve, Chris Hampton, Fall 2012)

“The vast majority of the art gallery of Ontario’s priceless collection isn’t on display — it’s tucked away in high-security, top-secret vaults.”

Of the AGO’s eighty-five-thousand-piece permanent collection, only about 3,900 works are on display right now. At any given time, 95 percent of the collection is in storage. Paintings, sculptures and installations account for roughly eleven thousand pieces in the vaults, while photography and works on paper make up the other seventy thousand. This isn’t unique to the AGO. Art institutions are a bit like icebergs; the public sees less than a tenth of their holdings. But that may finally be changing. While security and conservation remain top priorities, galleries are beginning to experiment with new ways for the public to engage with their broader collections. Visitors increasingly want to see everything—including what’s behind the scenes.

Doppel Gang: Why Canada Needs Quebec” (The Walrus, Mark Kingwell, January/February 2013)

“Why Canada needs Quebec.”

Yes, there it is. Quebec is Canada’s familiar-strange double, a return of the repressed, so like the rest of the country and yet so minutely, eerily different. Are they plotting something large and secretive, some kind of surprise secession? Probably not. No, they probably just want things to go on like this more or less forever, teetering between passive entitlement and passionate outrage, sketching a glorious future free of any reality principle.

Unmasked” (Maisonneuve, Andrea Bennet, March, 2013)

“Before the 2010 G20 Summit in Toronto, police infiltrated activist communities as part of a massive, costly campaign that resulted in high-profile arrests and prosecutors. Who were these undercovers, and how did they avoid scrutiny?”

Guelph was also home, in the lead-up to the G20 summit, to a branch of one of the largest undercover police operations in Canadian history. The $676 million security bill for the G20 summit and its G8 counterpart—which was held on June 25 and 26 in Huntsville, Ontario—included funding for an eighteen-month-long infiltration of activist communities, from January 2009 through June 2010. The Joint Intelligence Group, a well-staffed network of OPP and RCMP officers based in Barrie, Ontario, carried out this investigation. According to the JIG Operational Plan, the effort included twelve “trained covered  investigators,” as well as commanders, managers, and technical and office support. Over the course of those eighteen months, JIG made $8 million worth of capital purchases and had a $297 million operational budget. It set up commander offices, a project room, workstations—and, during the G20 summit itself, an operational “War Room.”

Fight of the Bumblebee” (The Walrus, Sasha Chapman, March 2013)

“Honeybee colonies are collapsing around the world, putting food production in danger. We may need Canada’s indigenous pollinators to save the day.”

South of Detroit and Windsor, sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair, the flat lines of Essex County farmland carve the southern tip of Ontario into tidy rectangular parcels of fertile, well-drained soil. When you approach Leamington from Highway 401, it is difficult to imagine this area as the nearly impenetrable forest it once was, or that the fires lit by would-be farmers to clear the land once burned so brightly they could be seen 500 kilometres west in Chicago. Today the aerial view looks more like a semi-industrial park, because the area is dominated by gunmetal grey–framed greenhouses. With some 355 hectares under greenhouse vegetable production, more than anywhere else in North America, the region’s output is larger than the entire industry in the US, and growing much faster than other types of agriculture.

First Do No Harm” (Maisonneuve, Ann Silversides, April 2013)

“Are doctors and drug companies to blame for the opioid-abuse crisis? After two shocking deaths in small-town Ontario, Ann Silversides reports from one of the largest coroner’s inquests in Canadian history.“

Under the Influence” (The Walrus, Matthew J. Bellamy, June 2013)

“Beer is to Canada as wine is to France. How Labatt and its allies brewed up a nation of beer drinkers.”

Before the Black Christmas of 1936, Mackenzie approached J. Walter Thompson Co., a major global advertising agency. Mark Napier of the Toronto office had an uncanny feel for the cultural logic of the age, and wanted to portray brewers like Labatt as instrumental, not detrimental, to the nation’s development. In a series of advertisements published in the national monthly Canadian Homes and Gardens, he highlighted Labatt’s long, influential past. “It really all began 70 years ago,” read the text of one ad in 1937, under the tag line “Then As Now.” In others, he linked the company’s evolution to watershed moments in our history, such as Confederation and the Boer War, when “soldiers knew good ale.” As Canadians searched for uniquely Canadian ideas, events, experiences, and commodities—the makings of a national identity—Napier served up Labatt’s product as an age-old piece of Canadiana.

The Marineland Dreamland” (The Walrus, Craig Davidson, July/August 2013

“Deconstructing memories of a scandal-ridden theme park.”

I worked at Marineland for eight summers. Brendan Kelly, six years. Phil Demers, twelve. It paid our rent and put beer in our fridges. Best summers of my life. To a man, we spoke those words.

It makes you wonder. What if, rather than fabrication, “The Tale of the Frozen Sea Lion” was an act of erasure? My unconscious mind embarking on a sly mission of disburdenment, of purposeful forgetting? If I forget enough, if my own story fills with holes, I can tell myself it’s a lie. And that’s easier, overall. Easier than holding on to the knowledge for twenty-plus years, doing nothing meaningful about it. Easier than remembering how I laughed as my supervisor kicked a dead sea lion.

On Vanishing

Getty / Catapult

Lynn Casteel Harper | Catapult | excerpt from On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear | April 2020 | 18 minutes (4,925 words)

 

I have officiated only one memorial service in which I thought the dead person might come back. Dorothy was 103, and she was known for surprise reappearances. Dorothy had resided in an independent living apartment at the retirement community, and I had visited her on the few occasions when she had come to the Gardens to recover from an illness. I had learned over the course of these visits that as a teenager, she had left home to become a stage assistant to Harry Houdini—against her parents’ wishes, of course. What did a nice Methodist girl, a preacher’s daughter, want with an older man—a Vaudeville magician, no less—rumored to be a Jew, the son of a rabbi? Only after Houdini and his wife, Bess, visited Dorothy’s parents and promised to care for her as their own daughter did her parents relent.

In Houdini’s shows, Dorothy would pop out from the top of an oversized radio that Houdini had just shown the audience to be empty, kicking up one leg and then the other in Rockettestyle extension. Grabbing her at the waist, Houdini would lower her to the floor, where she would dance the Charleston. In another act, she was tied, bound feet to neck, to a pole. A curtain would fall to the floor, and voila!—she would reappear as a ballerina with butterfly wings, fluttering across the stage. At the end of each night’s performance, Dorothy stood just off stage next to Bess to witness Houdini’s finale: the Chinese Water Torture Cell. A shackled Houdini was lowered, upside down, into a tank of water from which he escaped two minutes later. Dorothy knew how he accomplished this stunt—what was often deemed his “greatest escape”—but she never broke confidence.

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In Pocahontas County, Deep Divisions and a Gruesome Discovery

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Hatchette Books

Emma Copley Eisenberg | Longreads | excerpt from The Third Rainbow Girl | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,877 words)

It starts with a road, a two-lane blacktop called West Virginia Route 219 that spines its way through Pocahontas County and serves, depending on the stretch, as main street and back street, freeway and byway, sidewalk and catwalk.

It is June 25, 1980, just after the summer solstice, and a young man named Tim is driving home for the night. He had driven to Lewisburg, the big town almost an hour away, and is coming back now, with fresh laundry and groceries.
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Jersey Girl

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Mako Yoshikawa Story | Summer 2019 | 23 minutes (4,676 words)

 

When my mother first came to America, she wore a pink coat with a rounded collar and four beveled black buttons. A farewell present from her parents and by far the most expensive garment she’d ever owned, the coat was wool, custom-made, and heavy enough to withstand the winters of Boston. It was March 1959; she was 22 and had never been outside of Japan or on a plane, and she’d not seen my father, Shoichi, for a year, but she wasn’t nervous, at least not much, or at least less nervous than excited. In her carry-on was a copy of A Little Princess, a pocket Japanese-English dictionary, and a daikon, a Japanese turnip, that she planned to grate, douse with soy sauce, and share with Shoichi for their first meal together in America.

The story of the eighteen months that followed, when my mother lived with my father in Boston, also sounded like a fairy tale.

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