I was introduced to the Chi-Lites’ transcendent “Stoned Out of my Mind” by the Jam, who included a cover of the song on a double 7” of their final single “Beat Surrender,” released in the U.K. in November of 1982. The Jam had recorded it a month or so before at Marcus Studios, and I’ve learned only recently in Dennis Munday’s book The Jam & Paul Weller: Shout to the Top that, in a highly uncharacteristic move, the band employed a drum machine on the track, “to underpin Rick [Buckler]’s brushes.” When Munday discussed the track with Weller, the frontman was “scathing about the feel of the song.”
The rhythm section is too much on the beat, and they needed to be more laid-back to fit with the more soulful vocals and brass. Paul was never happy with the finished version and this tune perhaps epitomises why The Jam wasn’t working for him, and where he wanted to go.
I dug the Jam’s version at the time, and yet to discover that a metronomic beat lurks beneath the track felt as if I’d been told something I didn’t know that I knew; listening to the Jam’s version, the impression is of the lads wearing ill-fitting jackets. The track’s more respectful than grooving. A month after the single’s release, Weller dissolved the band.
The original performance of the song by the Chi-Lites is sublime. Written by Eugene Record and his then-wife Barbara Acklin, released as a single in August of 1973 and as the disconsolate final track on the Chi-Lites’ self-titled album, “Stoned Out of my Mind” fairly floats in a haze of loss and desire, neither hunger canceling out the other. If you wandered into a club or a party or someone’s bedroom just as the song started playing, you might check the dance floor vibe and think that the night’s headed in a great direction, the fat, thumping bass, chatty, grinning guitars, dancing bongos and percussion, and inviting, light-as-air horn lines casting a smoky party vibe—irresistible. Then, Record, in his keen falsetto, aching but still proud, enters with the bad news: he found out that she’s been lying. Now, in retrospect, it feels like that seven-note descending horn line in the opening bars was letting down its smiling mask, defeated. The singer’s crying. The mood has shifted now.
Yet the party goes on. Such is the grace of this brilliant, poignant song: as the singer suffers, his cohort and band steady the groove, hopeful that he might some redemption, maybe some solace, in the music that they’re making. What sounds like a clavinet has discreetly entered in the left channel, another keyboard arrives in the right, complementing those funky guitar lines, the smooth syncopation in the playing impossible to say No to even if the singer might feel the need to say it. But the affecting move into the pre-chorus (“I was just a backseat driver in a car of love…”) suggests that the band’s more sympathetic and knowing than not—everyone’s trying to keep their head up now, moving among the wandering, inconsolable changes. (In the second pre-chorus, the singer’s all but out of words, reduced to plaintive questions without any immediate answers: Where can he run? Where can he hide? Who can he talk to? What can he do?)
Record’s control of his falsetto in the midst of this hurt is remarkable, and powerfully moving. The singer stares at his misery in the mirror (“Don’t know why I put up with the pain”) as his his falsetto climbs higher, finally dropping us into the chorus, which solves nothing, unless you feel that giving vent to an aching cry is a solution. Perhaps the simple frankness of his admission, stripped bare, helps, but the arrangement suggests otherwise. Record, Marshall Thompson, and Robert Lester share the title phrase in the chorus, Thompson and Lester’s reading of the word stoned at the end of the second and fourth lines dragging to the song’s surface the sorrow that’s at its core. There’s real anguish there. A touch of reverb’s added to their lines, giving an eternal, spooky tone to the sentiment, as if they’re all enacting suffering that’s as old as dirt.
Eugene Record’s credited with producing, arranging, and directing this beautiful song. Though I know what his “directed” credit means, I like to think that he directed “Stoned Out of my Mind” as a filmmaker might have, sending a location scout to his hurt, beating heart, creating a tableau of loss in sound, the singers morphing into eternal outlines, and no less familiar for that.
I recently picked up the 45 of “Stoned Out of my Mind” (video below) and was just floored by the warmth of the original pressing, released on the Brunswick label; the dynamic range is striking, the high end bright and glinting, the low end round and propulsive even on a mid-tempo, distracted head-hanger such as this. (Listening, you can both brood and dance, stoke melancholy and groove.) The overall mood is languid and laid-back, which suggests that maybe the singer took solace from another source.
Michael Zadoorian’s 2018 novel Beautiful Music is set in Detroit in the early 1970s. Music soundtracks the city. In one scene, the narrator Danny is sitting with his mother whiling away the evening watching television—Adam-12, Banacek, Kojak—and frequently refilling his mother’s Canadian Mist and Uptown (“her version of a 7 and 7”). He wished she didn’t drink so much, because when she does she loosens up and directs uncomfortable questions his way, about school and dope and the kids at school and Is he doing dope? (“‘I’m sure you’re fine. I told you that the good kids find each other,’ she says, taking a sip of her drink. I don’t tell her that the good kids are not finding me.”) Things get more awkward as the eleven o’clock news comes on and his mother’s racism comes alive with it, her disgust with a local Black mayoral candidate as thick as the smoke from her lousy cigarettes.
In bed later that night, rattled, Danny turns on the radio.
Danny’s got his mom’s censorious voice in his head, of course, and for a while will likely sweat out hearing and seeing references to drugs in anything. Maybe he’s tried drugs, maybe he hasn’t. Before long he’s drifting off to sleep, clinging yet to other anxieties. But still, I love his question, and his answer, his moving between possibilities, the narrow difference. Is “Stoned Out of my Mind” a love song or a drug song, or both?
When we think of “drug songs” the obvious candidates spring to mind, but the net cast by narcotic use is vast indeed. In song, drugs can tell an affirmative or a dispiriting story, behave as a raw document or a moral fable, be alluded to or be grippingly reenacted. While there’s no explicit allusions to drugs and drug use in “Stoned Out of my Mind,” the song does create a heavy-lidded haze, from its unhurried pace to that trippy reverb and moody cadences in the haunting, haunted chorus. In the second verse, the singer laments that he drank so deeply from the source to which his woman led him, and now that she’s in possession of his mind and body, she wants to take his soul, also.
“Love is a drug,” yeah, I know—it’s a sturdy enough metaphor to have calcified into cliché long, long ago—yet must we ignore “stoned” in the title? The song is of the era, to be sure, and can be forgiven for reflecting that era’s pop culture dalliances with the imagery of and references to drug use, of both the recreational and life-altering kind. Fortunately, Record and Acklin were proud and deeply imaginative songwriters, pros who wouldn’t have resorted to obvious drug references even if they wanted to. Maybe here, writig about loving and losing, they’re evoking the headiness of a trip (good, bad, or otherwise), or the disorientation and Ego loss that can accompany hallucinogenics and might plague a user who’s unprepared for the descent. Maybe they’re likening a graphic love affair to the rush of a pill, a spike, a snort, and heartache to a rough comedown. (It’s 3 a.m. “Who can I talk to?”)
Or maybe I’m guilty of too much enthusiasm here. Maybe, like Danny, I should come around to “Stoned Out of my Mind” as simply a love song, or an anti-love song, anyway. But maybe there’s yet another level on which the song is working. The actor Bryan Cranston, who knows a thing or two about immersion, once remarked that “It’s mind-altering when you slip into someone else’s shoes,” adding, “That’s psychedelic, man.” The trippy magic trick of the first-person point-of view. Listening to Eugene Record and the Chi-lites sing about loss and regret, ache and desire, I can slip into the poor guy’s shoes, inhabit his world, see old-as-the-bible things through fresh eyes, shift into his shape. Go wherever it takes me, if only for three minutes. Maybe all love songs are drug songs.
Great piece, man. Probably my all-time favorite Chi-Lites jam, and that's saying something. It amazes me that the song actually got AM pop radio airplay with that title; even by early 70s standards (and its love song realities notwithstanding), it's pretty provocative. It also amuses me greatly that Weller thought the rhythm section was the big problem with The Jam's version, given how uptight and stiff he sounds while singing it.
I apologize for dragging this off-topic, but I can’t hear or read Chi-Lites without being haunted by a question I’ve not been able to get satisfactorily answered in 20 years: how in the world did Fuzz-Tone end up prominently featured in “Have You Seen Her?” when it was mostly used in country in the early 70s?
Again, sorry. I enjoyed the piece, as always. Some itches just can’t be scratched.