Tampa Calling

It’s 420. Another chance for a songlist. This one I think should be kinda special, since there’s been 420 songlists since the dawn of mankind. Or since people started making lists and smoking pot and using “420″ as code for pot-smoking. Ironic that by the time I get this thing up, it will actually be right around 4:20 p.m.

For those who are curious, the origins of the number 420 are smoke-shrouded in urban legend. I found a few things today in honor of the unofficial holiday, but my fave is the thoughtful piece by the Huffington Post on the meaning of 420. Not so surprising that the Grateful Dead were at least partially responsible for 420’s propagation into pot culture. Here’s an excerpt:

It was Christmas week in Oakland, 1990. Steven Bloom was wandering through The Lot – that timeless gathering of hippies that springs up in the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert – when a Deadhead handed him a yellow flyer.

“We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais,” reads the message, which Bloom dug up and forwarded to the Huffington Post. Bloom, then a reporter for High Times magazine and now the publisher of CelebStoner.com and co-author of Pot Culture, had never heard of “420-ing” before.

The flyer came complete with a 420 back story: “420 started somewhere in San Rafael, California in the late ’70s. It started as the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress. After local heads heard of the police call, they started using the expression 420 when referring to herb – Let’s Go 420, dude!”

Bloom reported his find in the May 1991 issue of High Times, which the magazine found in its archives and provided to the Huffington Post. The story, though, was only partially right.

It had nothing to do with a police code — though the San Rafael part was dead on. Indeed, a group of five San Rafael High School friends known as the Waldos – by virtue of their chosen hang-out spot, a wall outside the school – coined the term in 1971. The Huffington Post spoke with Waldo Steve, Waldo Dave and Dave’s older brother, Patrick, and confirmed their full names and identities, which they asked to keep secret for professional reasons. (Pot is still, after all, illegal.)

Check out the rest of that here.

Now, onto the real reason for this post — music about smoking pot.

Being a connoisseur of pot … music, I can tell you there are plenty of classics — pretty much most songs by Bob Marley (his album, Kaya, is a Jamaican word for cannabis); “Smoke Two Joints” (first done by the Toyes in ‘83, then covered famously and with much radio play by openly pot-loving Sublime); Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with the classic declaration of “Everybody must get stoned”; Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” (don’t criticize it!); the ever sexy, soulful “Mary Jane,” by Rick James; “Panama Red,” by the New Riders of the Purple Sage, about the sticky icky that used to come from Latin America; Dash Rip Rock’s “(Let’s Go) Smoke Some Pot,” which I’m particularly fond of since 98ROCK played it once a week every week during the hour I listened while getting ready in the wee hours for school in the mid-90s; “One Toke Over The Line,” a Top 10 hit in ‘71 that put Brewer & Shipley on the map while landing them on Nixon’s Enemies List and getting them banned by the FCC. All these are great and known by us all to a certain degree.

I will say this before I share my list — a few days ago, after hearing Afroman’s “I Got High” for the first time in several years, I decided that, by and large, it’s a lame excuse for a pot song. More than anything, it’s representative of a small portion of pot smokers — the slackers who’d slack with or without smoking pot — and not the 90 percent of the rest of the population of regular imbibers. I’m sorry, but you can’t blame smoking pot for being a loser, and that’s just what this very song does.

Here are some of my own favorite 420 songs. Enjoy. Add your own. Play some on your way home. Or, more appropriately, while when you get home and are getting ready to hit a fatty. And in case you were wondering, I excluded Cypress Hill altogether because frankly, those guys are annoying as fuck, no matter what they rap about.

1. “Makisupa Policeman” by Phish, a classic reggae number with a different weed reference in every version. My personal favorite: “Woke up this morning. Looked at the clock…. It was 1:11. Rolled over. Kadafi, in my bed……. So I smoked a joint a with him.”

2. “I do not sniff the coke (I only smoke Sensimilla!)” by Pato Banton, his long lyrical story about being offered cocaine, and a pretty fun number I got to see when he played Skipper’s Smokehouse in February.

3. “I Got Stoned (And I Missed It),” by Shel Silverstein. A bit like the Afroman song, but more playful and innocent. Nothing about missing child support payments or running from the cops or having to sleep on the sidewalk. Geez, Afroman, you really know how to bring a person down…

4. “Don’t Bogart Me” aka “Don’t Bogart That Joint,” originally by the Fraternity of Men, appeared on the Easy Rider soundtrack, and was re-done by Little Feat and Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise. Couldn’t make a list like this without it. Could have been included in the aforementioned classics, but I like it so much, I had to snag it for a fave.

5. “Burn One Down,” by Ben Harper. Not my favorite artist in the world, but I like his peace-loving sentiment and this song is particularly good. Favorite lyrics: “My choice is what I choose to do / And if I’m causing no harm / It shouldn’t bother you / Your choice is who you choose to be / And if your causin’ no harm / Then you’re alright with me / If you dont like my fire / Then don’t come around / ‘Cause Im gonna burn one down / Yes I’m gonna burn one down.”

6. “We Don’t Stop,” by Michael Franti, more political than Harper and with a stronger activist message, an end to the drug war, and the beginning of drug pea. : “The war on pot is a war that’s failed / A war that’s building up the nation’s jails/ Bush war one and Bush war two/ They got a war for me, they got a war for you!”

7. “How to Roll a Blunt,” by Red Man. The title is self-explanatory. And so’s the song.

8. “(I’m in Love With) Mary Jane,” by Coolio (which rips off Rick James’ original love song to Ms. Mary Jane.

9. “Marijuana Boogie,” by Manu Chao. ‘Cause I like this dude, he pretty much references smokin’ weed in every song, and this one’s a real fun number

10. “Marijuana in Your Brain,” by Lords of Acid. Had to includes something industrial, right? I grew up with it (yeah, I was once a Castle regular, so what?), so I just couldn’t avoid including it.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a tongue-in-cheek marijuana propaganda video so scandalous that YouTube took it down. (It’s really not scandalous at all, but I guess if you complain to the right people…)

Marijuana is evil

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