It’s silly to assume that any song where someone mentions weed in the lyrics is a good song to listen to when you’re high. Nothing could be further from the truth. What makes a song capable of enhancing your high is its ability to sync with your altered state. That’s it. So with that as our guiding principle and without further ado the team at the 710 Pipes head shop in Denver presents seven songs to enhance your high. Enjoy.
1: The Doors – Riders on the Storm
Jim Morrison was an extremely reluctant rock star. Maybe that’s what made him such a great one. He fancied himself a poet, not a rock-n-roller and he wound up leaving the band that made him rich and famous when they were at the top of the world. Mostly because he wanted nothing more to do with touring, press conferences, and “journalists” going through his trash to dig up dirt for tabloid consumption.
As he exited the rock stage he left behind his musical magnum opus: Riders on the Storm. The song entered the Billboard charts the same week he died under mysterious circumstances in Paris, where he’d gone to get away from the LA spotlight. Riders on the Storm is a spare, ethereal meditation on life and includes subtle rain and thunder effects that bolster the narrative while engaging the spirit. It’s an outlier on an album of otherwise straightforward blues/rock and the lyrics “Into this house we’re born, into this world withdrawn” seem eerily prescient.
2: The Beatles – Rain
Over the years countless millions have promoted the idea that Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band represented the pinnacle of psychedelic rock and the zenith of the Beatles’ experimental period. But that notion ignores Revolver. Revolver preceded Sgt Pepper and is, in just about every way, a superior effort, and the first single the band released from the Revolver sessions was the revolutionary “Rain”.
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this tune or the effect it had on popular music worldwide. Its deliberately slow-down rhythm track creates a sense of surreal unease, while the droning bass line carries the listener (especially the stoned listener) along as if on a cloud while the backward lyrics at the end (the first time that technique had ever been used in a pop song) complete the mindf**k. John Lennon admits to being high while he wrote “Rain” and the lyrics’ insistence that the world is an illusion dovetail nicely with the stoner experience.
3: Pink Floyd – Us and Them
Dark Side of the Moon is a legendary recording for several reasons. Not only did it cement Pink Floyd’s status as the true heirs to Beatlesque musical surrealism, but it also spent a mind-numbing 981 weeks on the Billboard album charts, sold 45 million copies, and made the band members fabulously rich.
Us and Them is a full 7:49 long and weaves a hypnotic spell over the listener that’s only enhanced when one partakes of some high-quality herb before playing the tune. It’s a song that influenced an entire generation of progressive rockers, none of which were up to the task of matching its subversive genius or innovative chord progressions. If you want to be transported to a more satisfying dimension, get high, put on your earphones, lay back, and listen to Us and Them.
4: Jonathan King – Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
Jonathan King was a one-hit-wonder who would go on to have a long and fruitful career as a record producer in the UK. That one hit was a little ditty entitled “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” and it’s as creepily intoxicating today as it was when it was released in late 1965. The lyrics are pure stoner gold:
Cars full of motors, painted green
Mouths full of chocolate, covered cream
Arms that can only, lift a spoon
Everyone’s gone to the moon
If you’ve been pulling some monster hits off your bong all afternoon see if you can locate this song, queue it up, close your eyes, and prepare to be transported to an alternative dimension.
5: REM – Radio Free Europe
For more than 30 years REM was one of the most popular bands in the world. Wildly influential and innovative the band was a college radio favorite in the early 80s and gained worldwide, mainstream fame following a series of multi-platinum albums. But in the early days, they were known primarily for their unadorned post-punk sound and the dense lyrics and hypnotic delivery of singer Michael Stipe.
Radio Free Europe was the band’s first single ever and set the tone for much of their musical career. Countless people in the 80s spent countless hours attempting to decipher the lyrics to Radio Free Europe, but most stoners understood instinctively that the words were secondary to the sound stew Stipe was creating. Listening to it today you’re still struck by the fact that it sounds “important”, even though no one’s quite sure what’s being said.
6: Sheryl Crow – Leaving Las Vegas
Before she adopted a slicker, more video-friendly, mainstream persona Sheryl Crow produced some of the most engaging alt-rock of the early 90s. Leaving Las Vegas paints a picture of a dusty, world-weary cultural prospector who is panning for spiritual gold in Sin City and winds up being run out of town into the endless desert beyond.
The beat is hypnotic, the lyrics are colorful and wry, Crow’s voice sounds like she slept in a whiskey bottle the night before and the spare production will conjure a desert landscape in your mind even if you’ve never been to the desert. You will find yourself tapping your foot to the beat. There is simply no way to resist.
7: Bob Dylan – Visions of Johanna
In 2016, Bob “the Bard” Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature. When the Nobel committee’s choice was announced many were taken aback. But the fact is there is popular music before Bob Dylan and there is popular music after Bob Dylan and they are not the same thing. Dylan was the first to entertain the notion that lyrics could be more than simple, sappy declarations of love or sexual prowess. By elevating rock lyrics to an art form he completely changed the way musicians approached songwriting and that change continues to be felt to this day.
Dylan created moody, surreal narratives that were full of ironic humor, piercing insight, and timeless observations about the human condition. Visions of Johanna off the double album “Blonde on Blonde” is one of the best examples of his idea of lyrics as literature. As he noted in his Nobel acceptance speech, Shakespeare wrote words that were meant to be spoken on stage by actors, yet no one denies that “Macbeth” is literature. Why can’t the same be said of words meant to be sung on stage? Touche Bobby.
Conclusion
Great stoner songs typically have little to do with the act of smoking weed and everything to do with enabling the stoner to take full advantage of their high. Here at the 710 Pipes pipe shops, we understand everyone will have their list of songs that make being high even more awesome, and that’s fine. It’s not a competition after all.
Check Out Our Online Head Shop
If you want to make sure you’re able to enjoy the full benefit of the above-listed songs stop by our brick-and-mortar headshop in Northglenn or peruse our online smoke shop where you’ll find everything you need to optimize your buzz.