Rick James wasn’t exactly known for his subtlety. Case in point: He Mary Jane Girls—the early-’80s R&B/funk group he assembled with one of his backing vocalists, JoJo McDuffie, and several other ringers—after a slang term for marijuana, since he was such a fan of the wacky weed. Despite the lark of a moniker, Mary Jane Girls had several hits (including “In My House” and the often-sampled “All Night Long”), perhaps because James himself wrote the act’s music. While the band name didn’t cause much controversy then—as McDuffie put it in an interview, “We had to say, ‘It was [named after] the shoes (Mary Janes) and the candy, because we’re sweet.’”—the group itself is still contentious today: In late 2013, James’ estate two members, Kimberly “Maxi” Wuletich and Cheryl Ann “Cheri” Bailey, after the pair toured under the Mary Jane Girls name, allegedly without its approval.
Kramer—i.e., Mark Kramer, the professionally single-named musician and producer, not the Seinfeld character—formed Bongwater in 1986 as a musical showcase for actress-monologist Ann Magnuson’s spaced-out musings on wanting a Nick Cave doll, having “an afternoon of incredibly hot sex” with “the big fat lead singer from Canned Heat,” and wanting to put “a bullet in Jesse Helms’ pea brain.” The stoner-friendly name was particularly apropos for a band that, as the previous avalanche of cultural and political references suggests, sought to fuse downtown ’80s attitude with the freeform trippiness of the ’60s. The collaboration ended in 1991, after Magnuson and Kramer entered into a romantic relationship, which Kramer broke off when he decided to return to his wife. The two then traded lawsuits until the legal costs took a major financial toll on Shimmy Disc, the indie label Kramer had founded, further harshing everyone’s buzz.
Of all genres—or perhaps sub-genres—both stoner and doom metal are packed to the brim with bands that seem to exist purely to bolster drug culture. Of these, Chicago’s Bongripper has done so both with its name and with its 2006 album, The Great Barrier Reefer, which mixes metal’s dual love of mythology and marijuana for the album’s entire 80 minutes. Despite being an instrumental band, Bongripper’s lengthy dirges go hand-in-hand with the substances they pay homage to, and with such witty turns of phrase such as Hippie Killer’s “Reefer Sutherland,” the band can still make a wink to its audience while allowing its crushing riffs do the heavy lifting.
Richmond, Virginia’s Municipal Waste is often considered to be one of the forebears of the thrash renaissance, but that doesn’t mean its members are one-note in their desires. Take, for instance, Waste’s bassist, Phil Hall, better known as Landphil to the heshers of the world. Though Cannabis Corpse is a play on death-metal legends Cannibal Corpse, the band re-contextualizes Hall’s manic energy in a way that’s a little danker. Coupled with the fact its album titles cleverly extend its homage to Cannibal Corpse (Blunted At Birth, Tube Of The Resinated), the band is playful with its tributes, making it a constant source of lightheartedness in a genre that often dwells in disfiguring carnage.
