Nineteen sixty-eight. Let me tell you about 1968. Martin Luther King was shot in April. Bobby Kennedy was shot in June. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a war zone. Half the country was on fire and the other half was pretending it wasn't. Vietnam was eating boys alive. And I was in Washington Square Park singing a song called I Like Marijuana.

That's the context. That's the year Elektra Records put out my first album. Have a Marijuana. A street musician from the Lower East Side with an acoustic guitar and a crowd of whoever showed up. And Elektra Records put that on vinyl and sold it in stores. In 1968. When the word marijuana on an album cover was enough to get you arrested in most states.

Elektra Records. Same label as the Doors. Same label as Love, Tim Buckley, the MC5. Real artists. Important artists. And now there's me. A guy who plays in the park for free. A guy whose biggest song is about smoking pot. And Elektra says yes. We'll record this. We'll press it. We'll put it in stores next to Jim Morrison.

You know how they recorded it? Basically live. That was the whole point. You couldn't studio-produce what I did. What I did was stand on a patch of concrete and yell at people until they sang along. That's not something you can fix in the mix. Either the energy is there or it isn't. The energy was there.

The album had songs. Real songs. "I Like Marijuana." "Here Comes a Cop." "God." "Mother, Where Is My Father?" Every one of them was something I'd been singing in the park for years. The park was the demo. The park was the audition. The park was the rehearsal space, the recording studio, the focus group, and the release party all at once. Elektra just pointed a microphone at what was already happening.

Here's what people don't understand. I was the first. Not the first person to smoke pot. Not the first person to sing about it. But the first person to put out a rock and roll album that treated marijuana like it was a perfectly normal, perfectly good thing. No winking. No code words. No hiding it inside a metaphor about Lucy in the sky. I said marijuana. I said I like it. I said have some. On the cover. In the title. In every song.

Before me, you had jazz musicians who everybody knew were getting high but nobody said it out loud. You had Bob Dylan being cryptic. You had the Beatles putting backward messages on records. After me, you had Cheech and Chong making it comedy. You had Willie Nelson making it country. You had Snoop making it hip-hop. But in 1968, it was just me and a guitar saying the quiet part loud. To a crowd in Washington Square Park. On Elektra Records.

The album sold. Not a million copies. Not a hundred thousand. But it sold. It sold enough that Elektra said do another one. So I did. The American Revolution. Nineteen seventy. Us running through Manhattan in Revolutionary War costumes on the cover. That one was louder. Angrier. The country was angrier. But it was the same thing — street music on vinyl. The park on a record.

You want to know what a record deal changed? Nothing. I still played the park. I still played for free. I still played for whoever was walking by. The record deal meant my voice was in two places at once — on the corner and in the store. But the corner was always first. The corner was always real. The store was just a copy.

Three years after Have a Marijuana, John Lennon walks into Washington Square Park. Jerry Rubin brings him. Lennon hears me playing the same songs I'd been playing since before Elektra, before the album, before any of it. And he says let's make a record. Just like that. From Elektra to Apple. From a label to THE label. The Beatles' label. Because of songs I wrote in a park.

And it all goes back to 1968. To Have a Marijuana. To the decision that the most honest thing I could do was sing about what I actually did, which was smoke pot and play guitar in the park. That's not a career plan. That's not a marketing strategy. That's just a man telling the truth with a guitar.

Fifty-eight years later they legalized it in half the country. Dispensaries on every block. Billionaires selling edibles. Senators who used to lock people up for a joint now investing in cannabis companies. And I'm still in the park. I'm still the guy who said have a marijuana in 1968 when it could get you ten years. They built a whole industry on what used to be a crime. They made fortunes on what I gave away for free.

But I was first. I was first and I said it loud and I said it on Elektra Records in 1968 when the world was on fire and half of America wanted me in jail for it. That's the origin story. That's where it all started. A park, a guitar, a song about pot, and a record label crazy enough to press it.

See also: The Apple — three years later Lennon walks into the park and signs me to the Beatles' label. The Pope Smokes Dope — the album Lennon produced, banned from every radio station. They Legalized It and Forgot — fifty-eight years later they legalized it and forgot who started it. They’re Throwing Me a Party — nine years dead and somebody’s putting my name on a flyer. The First Song — the song before the album. The Fish Cheer — Country Joe taught half a million people to spell a four-letter word. The Vote — Texas voted eighty percent yes. The song outlived the law. The Chorus — have a marijuana. Three words. The chorus that everybody in Washington Square Park could sing after one time through.

David Peel

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