I Just Smoked a Reefer (1973)

Genre: Novelty, accordion (AI Collaboration)

Even though I should know better, I’m not over my infatuation with artificial intelligence. For the past two months I’ve experimented with “prompt-based” AI: I came up with an idea for a song, then “prompted” AI to write me the first draft of some lyrics; I edited the lyrics to a final draft, then let another AI “write” the music.

This month I toyed with another use of AI that I would characterize as “robotic interpretation.” In this case, I wrote both the lyrics and the music and have an early (poor quality) recording of me performing the song on the accordion. By uploading the pre-existing audio, I was able to ask AI to come up with its own version of the song in whatever genre I specified. This is the method I used for “I Drive a Volkswagen.” I decided to let AI have a crack at another one of my teenage novelty tunes from 1973 called “I Just Smoked a Reefer.” A little explanation is in order…

When I was in high school, marijuana was just making its way into American suburbs. It was fairly easy to get and it became a defining part of our adolescent culture. It tended to divide our peer group into kids who got drunk on the weekends and those who experimented with pot. I was both an early adopter and (in short order) a reformed abstainer. (Unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale.)

In the early 1970s, the 1936 film Reefer Madness was re-released and became an underground cult classic. We got high with friends, went to see it at the theater, and laughed through the entire movie. Walt Disney’s Fantasia was also an amazing film to see under the influence. Considering how steeped we were in Disney culture as kids, that was a true act of rebellion. Those of us who partook of the weed found places to smoke it, disguised it from parents (who for the most part still favored alcohol), and tried not to get caught. I was one of the unfortunates who was apprehended in the act and spent the night in the local juvenile home. But, that’s another story.

Marijuana got me in enough trouble as a kid that I finally concluded it wasn’t worth it. In his Don Juan book series, Carlos Castaneda first introduced the idea of mind-altering plants as “allies” or teachers. I soon decided that pot was no friend of mine and the lessons it had to teach were soon exhausted. All my contemporaries who went on to use it on a regular basis seemed to be on a dead-end path. Besides the wonderful sound of music under the influence, it only wasted my time, made me silly, and more than a little paranoid.

In 1969, the satirical (but surprisingly comprehensive) book A Child’s Garden of Grass: (The Official Handbook for Marijuana Users) was published. It was a short encyclopedia on everything you needed to know about marijuana. I found most of the book amusing, but the section on listening to music while stoned ruffled me. It recommended listening to folk, classical, electronic, acid rock, and jazz while under the influence, but warned against ever listening to two musicians in specific. The first was Myron Floren (Lawrence Welk’s celebrity accordion player) and Dick Contino. Contino was one of the most popular (and showy) accordion players of the 1950s. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show more than any other performer (48 times) until the British Invasion basically killed off all forms of popular music except Rock. The accordion soon became anathema to any of our generation.

If you’re not supposed to listen to cheesy polka music when you’re high, then what do you do when you happen to be one of those teenagers who actually plays the accordion? Answer: you write a song about it.

I created a lead sheet in 1973, but the only recording I had was one very primitive version (on cassette) of me playing the accordion and singing, hamming it up as I was wont to do as a socially spurned squeezebox player.

Last month, I uploaded a digitized version of the cassette recording to Suno.com. With Suno, you can customize the response. There’s one slider that controls the percentage to which AI must remain faithful to the original recording and another that allows you to set the percentage of novelty (“weirdness”) you’ll allow AI to introduce into the song. I set the faithfulness slider to about 90% and the “weirdness” slider to 5%. Suno generated two versions of the song, and then, at my request, two more. I took the four versions, cannibalized them, and spliced them together like Dr. Frankenstein to create a “composite” of the four versions you now hear. I hope you’ll find it as amusing as I did. (And now I’m off to re-read the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman). I guess we’re all destined to “fiddle as Rome burns.”