Which Led Zeppelin member introduced David Bowie to weed?
Drugs have long been intertwined with rock ‘n’ roll, and for David Bowie, they became part of his life even before he tasted fame. However, with success and wealth, his use of substances escalated dramatically, eventually reaching problematic levels.
Bowie was open about his history of drug use, especially after he got clean in 1993. By then, he had experimented for nearly three decades, tried everything he could, and was determined to close that chapter for good. Once sober, he was there to support others facing similar struggles, offering guidance and advice to figures like Slash and Trent Reznor as they sought their own paths to recovery.
Once he quit drugs and alcohol, Bowie was never tempted to go back, telling NME in the 1990s: “Y’know, that’s the trouble it’s like having this huge great oyster with this pearl in the middle and you could get the pearl but you do risk having your arms snapped off. Well, do we do it or not? I would suggest that possibly the best thing is just to not bother.”
Like many people, Bowie’s drug journey dates back to his days as a teenager. The singer claimed to have first started taking pills at around “thirteen or fourteen”, which was his entry point. Surprisingly, it wasn’t until he was much older that he first experimented with marijuana, which is typically the starting point for most. However, rather than trying it behind the bins at school during lunchtime, Bowie was introduced to weed by a pre-fame John Paul Jones, who would later form Led Zeppelin.
Bowie made the admission about his history with cannabis during a 1976 interview with Playboy. Notably, the conversation took place during the same year that he and Iggy Pop were arrested in Rochester, New York, on a charge of possessing the same drug. Talking about his history of drug use before first smoking weed, Bowie professed: “I’d done a lot of pills ever since I was a kid. Thirteen or fourteen. But the first time I got stoned on grass was with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin many, many years ago, when he was still a bass player on Herman’s Hermits records.”
While it sounds like a glamourous introduction to marijuana, Jones was yet to become the iconic giant of rock music that he’d later inhabit, and the surroundings were far from opulent.
Bowie explained: “We’d been talking to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot somewhere and Jonesy said to me, ‘Come over and I’ll turn you on to grass’. I thought about it and said, ‘Sure, I’ll give it a whirl’. We went over to his flat—he had a huge room, with nothing in it except this huge vast Hammond organ—right next door to the police department.”
Even Bowie was confused that he was a late adopter of weed, admitting, “I had done cocaine before but never grass. I don’t know why it should have happened in that order, probably because I knew a couple of merchant seamen who used to bring it back from the docks. I had been doing it with them.”
Bowie then explained that the merchant seamen he got high with “loathed grass”, which is why he refused to touch it, but it all changed thanks to Jones. He added: “So I watched in wonder while Jonesy rolled these three fat joints. And we got stoned on all of them.”
It was a new sensation for Bowie, who came down with a bout of the munchies and found himself extraordinarily peckish. The singer remembered: “I became incredibly high and it turned into an in-fucking-credible hunger. I ate two loaves of bread. Then the telephone rang. Jonesy said, ‘Go and answer that for me, will you?’ So I went downstairs to answer the phone and kept on walking right out into the street.”
After consuming two loaves of bread, Bowie’s night came to a premature end: “I never went back. I just got intensely fascinated with the cracks in the pavement,” he said.
Rather than return to the apartment to smoke more weed and consume spectacular quantities of bread, Bowie somehow found a way back to his home despite being worse for wear. Although Bowie’s penchant for drugs would eventually morph into an uncontrollable habit, those early days were treasured memories for the musician. His friendship with Jones not only opened his eyes musically, but his joyful first experience with cannabis was also a night that Bowie would never forget, even if he couldn’t remember the full details of his walk back.
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