The tragedy of Anthony Bourdain’s favourite song of all time: “Opiates and regret”
“You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.” – Anthony Bourdain (1956 – 2018)
Anthony Bourdain was a romantic. He greedily dined on the buffet of life, seeking out culture – a tenet of civility he pretty much defined as anything humans take pride in – with ferocious appetite.
As a sullen teen who felt he was sheltered from the cutting edge of the zeitgeist while living in a stilted New Jersey suburb that his struggling family could hardly afford, Bourdain hungered to get out there and devour the feast of the happening world. However, as he hurled himself into the hustling life of heaving kitchens, he did so with a monkey on his back.
In shedding this, he paired his love for dining with a literary outlook, striking gold and a new lease of life with the travelling realisation that the way to grasp the world’s heart is through its stomach. In the process, he became not just a culinary inspiration but such a cool, clear communicator of style that you could even describe music, a novel, a restaurant, bar or a bathing house as having ‘a Bourdain quality about it’.
His tour diary was more akin to George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London than some highfalutin fancy guide to caviar coteries. In true counterculture fashion, he shunned elitism and sampled what really made the world tick, getting to the true proletarian tastebuds of the world at its most visceral. Frankly, sometimes even tucking into plates that perturbed the easily offended.
He had friends in the form of Iggy Pop and even started his culinary journey with a sort of rock ‘n’ roll kitchen outlook in mind. “[W]e recruited every young, pot-smoking, head-banging hooligan we’d ever worked with, filling their heads with dreams of glory,” he said.
Continuing, “‘We’re forming … like … a rock and roll band, man, an all-star group of culinary superstars … kinda like Blind Faith’,” he writes in Kitchen Confidential. His aim was “a faithful re-creation of the kitchens we’d grown up in: insular, chaotic, drenched in drugs and alcohol, and accompanied constantly by loud rock and roll music.”
What was Anthony Bourdain’s favourite song?
The song he said was his favourite encapsulates the highs and lows of Bourdain’s personal goal to burn up the fuel of life. “This was what Tony told me was his favourite song,” his friend David Chang reveals in the Roadrunner documentary before hitting play on the moody, sullen, druggy classic, ‘Anemone’ by the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
It’s a track that typified psychedelia to such an extent that the band’s leader, Anton Newcombe, once told Far Out that he was, in fact, the embodiment of psychedelia itself. He was tie-dye and sustain pedals made human. The chef dug it. But the undercurrent of Bourdain’s attraction to the song is one also touched by tragedy as well as a love for intoxicating sounds.
In a manner akin to Bourdain, the on-stage brawl that ended Newcombe’s 2023 tour rather abruptly proved that this mindset is prone to burnout. In Chang’s view, Bourdain’s intense love of ‘Anemone’ forecast the same fate for the travelling cook. “It’s a great song,” Chang agrees as the record spins, “but it’s heroin music.”
It’s postulated that more than anything else, Bourdain identified with the meaning of the track – one that seems alien to others. His own appraisal in a Rolling Stone piece in 2014, four years before his death, seemed to hint at that. Tragically, he wrote: “Drenched in opiates and regret, I heard this song once and became besotted by it. It sounds like lost love, past lives, unforgiven mistakes and transgressions.”
Sadly, those were things were clung to. He found himself entombed in the magnetic world of ‘Anemone’ and all that entails. It is, indeed, an opus, but it perhaps wasn’t the right one for Bourdain to fall in love with, and he seemed to know that.
