Search - David Peel & The Lower East Side :: Have a Marijuana

Sometimes Clever and Funny, But Ultimately Stupid

Kurt Harding | Boerne TX | 10/19/2002

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I bought this album way back when it was first issued and I was a lad of 13. Why? It was noisy, ostentatiously rebellious, and it angered our parents.
I listened to it again recently after 30 years and heard it with new ears. I have to laugh when I think of how cool we thought the band's in-your-face guerrilla-theater attitude was. The album is sometimes clever, often funny, but ultimately stupid. Nevertheless its fun to listen to because it takes you back to the days when people of my generation and a little older thought they had all the answers.
The songs are anti-war, anti-authority of any sort, pro-drug and pro-runaway. The best songs are the anti-war Mother, Where Is My Father, the pro-drug I Like Marijuana, and the parents-hating runaway song, Happy Mother's Day.
The negative aspect of the album is that some kids really took this stuff to heart and ruined their lives and relationships by following Peel's nihilistic philosophy.
The album is worth having if only because it is a sort of cultural artifact of the sixties AND because it gives the listener a chance to remember how earnestly stupid those days sometimes were."

Sweet

Carl Slim | the factory | 05/28/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a relatively short recording, Peel plays guitar and sings (mainly about marijuana), it's all live, as much of a an attempt to get the raw sound of the band on tape as "Kick Out the Jams" by MC5. Fugs parallels are hard to avoid, and there is the same type of parody here-"I Like Marijuana" actually got kind of popular, I've heard it on Rock stations (!), it's a parody of "I Like Peanut Butter", and no ways near as bad taste as the lesser known "I Like Diarrhea" by MT Heads...anyway, Peel & co. have had a tendancy to rehash the same riffs over & over on subsequent albums (with admittadly different musical contexts), but this is the firstest and the rawest of the batch, "Show Me the Way to Get Stoned" is a killer, nothing bad on here at all, a great piece of underground wildness caught on tape before the majors realized the market was too small to get rich on."

A statement of the 70's

Kurt Harding | 08/17/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Good cleaan fun The only reason you would be reading this is the fact that you are trying to acquire it. Hilarious. Definately a drug culture thing, but can be used as entertainment anytime."