Can’t Find My Way Home: America In the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000 (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
After working steadily for seven years in the film and television end of the music industry, I longed to undertake a serious large-scale work of non-fiction. I was clean and sober for a year and struggling to put the past of my own personal drug use into context when I got the idea for Can’t Find My Way Home. The book that I envisioned would not only take my own generation’s experience with illicit drugs into account, but also show how they shaped the whole landscape of American popular culture during the post-war era. It was the beginning of a twelve-year odyssey during which the book became my life and my life became the book. At one point the manuscript was 1,300 pages long and I was only a third of the way through the story. The book entailed massive research and hundreds of interviews, combining autobiography, journalism, oral history, and cultural history to weave a narrative together that begins with the arrival of heroin to the streets of Harlem and the lives of seminal be bop jazz musicians in 1946-47, and goes all the way to Ecstasy and the rave culture of the 1990s.
Martin reads from Can't Find My Way Home at Barnes & Noble, New York City, in July of 2004.
“Four stars…an epic recounting of the history of the drug culture in modern America”
“Well researched and superbly written.”
“A brave book…in many ways as pleasantly and as richly intoxicating as a double hit of Humbolt Country, California’s finest…”
“If you pick up this book and read a few pages, you will be hooked. It is that exciting, that alluring, that—OK, one more drug oriented play on words—addictive. Fast-paced, well-organized, and written with punch and pitch, this is a book to go on the shelf with those worn copies of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool Acid Test, and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night.”
“An exuberant chronicle of ecstatic inebriation, delusional utopianism, wretched excess and chastened nostalgia for lost highs.”