This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

The Indie Rock Fag is Zack’s Thursday music and culture column. Please be kind to it.

I certainly felt stoned. Florence and The Machine will have that effect on a guy. The fog, the wind machine, the shawl/floppy hat/theatrical-flourish combo that suggested Boy George and Stevie Nicks had a baby 22 years ago that was just now being unveiled into a crowd of 930 Club devotees. Songs like “Dog Days are Over” being performed to their full, gorgous effect, bouyed by,  yes, a light show but also Florence Welch’s voice, which counts among the best I’ve ever seen live. But the fact is that I wasn’t stoned. And it’s concerning me that that might be the thing separating a merely amazing live show from the kind of  music experience that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

I had some time to kill on the bus recently, and I was getting sick of iPhone tetris, so I made a mental list of the five best live shows I’ve ever seen. (St. Vincent, LCD Soundsystem, New Pornographers, Animal Collective, Royksopp, w/ an honorable mention for Yelle, in case you’re wondering.) And I realized that one factor united them. They came with their own fairly unique sounds, visuals and stage setups, and from different genres, but the common uniting factor is that I was baked. Like a potato. We’re talking staring at my hands, clutching a glass of water, halfway to Amsterdam stoned.  These are all bands I could spend hours listening to alone in my room or on headphones, but I know that their live shows had a little something extra that made them special. But did it come from them, or from what I smoked beforehand?

Pot and music have gone hand in hand since our cave-dwelling ancestors first haphazardly threw some green leaves on a fire and muttered “Ook never before notice how pretty pteradactyls sound. Ook now download greatest hits while wishing Ook was advanced enough to understand Flintstonian puns about ‘rock’ music.” The entire black light industry was based around this simple fact: Music, on it’s own, is art. Music plus drugs, however, is an experienc. The world around you becomes a show that complements the band itself. The way the lights and music combine with the room and the weather and your state of mind to make something both greater and more illusory than the sum of its parts.

The marketability of rock concerts is predicated on their inability to be reproduced at home, and the one-time nature of the band + pot experience means that it can never happen quite that way again. You get a show and a memory. Two for the price of one. It’s like the difference between a Renoir and a hologram of two wizards fighting a dragon. The Renior will stand for eternity as a beautiful work of art, but it might not make that little 6 year old in you say “Whoaaaaa!”

Need is a powerful word, but there are already several chemicals whose indispensability in my life goes far beyond the realm of want. I need to take antianxiety medication to not walk around all day feeling like I left a stove on somwhere. I need coffee in the morning so I don’t wake up on the couch in my pajamas at noon from an 8:30 a.m. “resting my eyes” session. THC, however, functions as more of a spice than a life support. It’s a fun addition to a Sunday afternoon, but I never lie awake at night jonesing for that one last spliff that will bring me into the blessed realm of sleep. The only place in my life where I actually feel I need it is at rock shows.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that I get squirmy at the prospect of seeing a show normal, without the benefit of anything to smoke or sip beforehand. And if I do fortify myself, its never guaranteed to go right. Too little weed can make a Beach House show seem like a nap. Too much and I’m staggering to the bathroom, trying to avoid an ignominious (though fitting)  loss of consciousness during Neko Case’s “Star Witness.”

There are enough areas of my life where the prospect of becoming an adult loom large and frumpy, wagging a finger at my silly, college-holdover bad habits. Even though music might not ever sound the way it did when I was 16 — Belle and Sebastian, then vs. now, is like comparing a sunset to a fried egg in terms of emotional impact — I hate to think that concerts may someday stop sounding like they did when I was 23.

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