When Yes Is Wiser Than ‘Just Say No’

I’ve always considered it a primary duty of a parent, right up there with teaching the kids to say “please” and “thank you,” to introduce them to great music.

Some of this is self-serving, I confess. If my daughter and son are going to crank their CD players to full blast, I’d much rather have Wilco or Shawn Colvin or Lucinda Williams pouring from their rooms than the latest Disney Channel bubble-gum pop.

Many a night I’ve cuddled with Emma and Nathaniel in their beds, listening to a handful of songs as they drift off to sleep, trying to steep them in artists who, I hope, will provide a rock-solid foundation on which they will build--Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, et al.

On a recent run to Amoeba Music in Hollywood, I decided it was time for Emma, a budding guitarist at 13, to hear a little Hendrix. My choice was the 1967 release “Are You Experienced?”

Then, as I flipped over the disc, something caught my attention: Jimi looks completely stoned.

I again reflected on the inextricable link between music and drugs when I read Sean Howe’s absorbing essay on “Cisco Pike”--a movie, he writes, “in which the optimism of the 1960s slips into the disappointing loneliness that Los Angeles can cultivate like no other city” (“The Celluloid Time Capsule,” page 22).

The film, in which Kris Kristofferson plays a down-on-his-luck-musician-turned-pot-dealer, captures a period when it seems as if practically everybody in L.A. “is a dope fiend, from hotel doormen to hairdressers to country-club bluebloods.” But it’s the denizens of the rock world who are in especially deep.

“We were dropping acid at least once a week,” Crystal Brelsford, who was in the thick of the L.A. music scene in the late 1960s, recounts in Michael Walker’s new book, “Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll’s Legendary Neighborhood.” Over time, Walker notes, the psychedelics and marijuana gave way to “a blizzard of coke.”

All of which has left me wondering: How do I encourage my kids to glory in the music without glorifying the culture that often goes with it?

I’m not foolish enough to think that my young ones may not experiment at some point. And I certainly don’t believe in the effectiveness of “just say no.” So I called Jon Anderson, the lead singer for Yes.

A father of three, the 61-year-old Anderson recalls the night he met Jimi Hendrix at a party in Munich in ’67. “The first thing we did was smoke a joint,” he says. The ubiquity of drugs was simply “part of the idea of trying to break down the norm,” to challenge conventions.

But eventually--”it took me 20 or 30 years to figure it out”--Anderson says he learned some things that he imparted to his children through word and deed. First, if you’re going to partake, remember “everything in moderation,” including alcohol. Second, it’s hard work, not hard substances, that makes creativity flower.

Such advice shouldn’t be wasted, even if the band is.