“Have a puff”: The Rush song about favourite stoner spots
Drugs and alcohol have been a continued source of inspiration for artists and musicians, going back hundreds of years and stretching across virtually every genre and style. Back in the 1960s, however, the impact of substances like LSD and, maybe most notably, marijuana came to the forefront of the musical mainstream. The hippie counterculture scene, which dominated North American rock during the decade, was irrefutably linked to drugs, and almost every songwriter seemed to dabble at one point or another – even prog rock progenitors Rush.
Although the Canadian band first got together in 1968, during the peak of the hippie era, it took them a few years to hit their stride. It was not until 1974 that the group released their debut album, but it took even longer than that for Rush to reach their distinctive sound and definitive line-up once drummer Neil Peart was recruited into the group. By this time, rock music had largely moved on from the time of ‘peace and love’, and many of the groups that had dominated that scene had moved on to new pastures, so Rush were forced to do the same.
Initially, the band grew an audience with a unique blend of hard rock and progressive rock, but Rush came to define something much greater than that. Few other bands could construct such intense, complex and largely timeless compositions with such regularity. Of course, part of the band’s prolific nature was down to their ever-growing body of songwriting inspirations. Although they were hardly on the same level as artists like Grace Slick or Jim Morrison, Rush even took occasional inspiration from the drug world.
Most notably, the band drew upon the influence of drugs on their 1976 track ‘A Passage to Bangkok’, which took inspiration from the growing business of drug tourism. Opening up side two of their seminal 1976 album 2112, the song details trips to places like Colombia, Jamaica, Morocco, and Thailand in order to sample the local produce – namely, marijuana.
The fast-paced, complex hard rock of Rush hardly seems to fit in with the landscape of marijuana. Usually, songs about the drug are pretty laid back, reflecting the experience of smoking a joint, but that kind of music was never really in Rush’s repertoire. Instead, the band took direct inspiration from the out-and-out hard rock of Led Zeppelin and their defining track ‘Kashmir’, which set the tone for their hard rock ode to weed.
Speaking on the inspiration behind the song, guitarist Alex Lifeson once remembered, “This piece is about a fun little journey to all the good places you could go to have a puff,” explaining, “We thought it would be kind of fun to write a song about that, and Neil did it in a very eloquent way, I think.”
Although the song detailed all these faraway exotic lands, the reality of its recording was much more lo-fi. “That song was probably written in a farmhouse, on an acoustic guitar, in front of a little cassette player of some sort,” Lifeson recalled, “We would record like that and then go down in the basement and rehearse it.” Given the song’s content, though, it seems pretty likely that the band had a little something in their system to help negate the Canadian farmhouse surroundings of their DIY recording studio.
Given its lyrical content and theming, it is no surprise that ‘A Passage to Bangkok’ wasn’t released as a single. However, 2116 became a breakthrough success, particularly within American rock circles. Its commercial success both in Canada and the USA led Rush on a path to rock greatness where they stayed for many years – not a bad return on investment for a little bit of weed.
