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1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 16, April 20, 1985)
DeBarge crosses over, Duran Duran detours, Prince drops a hint, and David Lee Roth goes full Vegas
Nobody said “420” in Lubbock in 1985. That was California slang, born in early ’70s Marin County, passed around among Deadheads, and finally hitting the mainstream sometime in the ’90s. Texas stoner culture back then was a different vibe entirely.
Texas came to the party early, introduced to marijuana by Mexican vaqueros back in the 1800s. Terry Southern, the DFW-raised author and screenwriter, wrote about smoking “gage” as a 1930s teenager with Black farmhands and blues musicians. The early ’60s Austin folk scene was ablaze with it, leading eventually to the strange and tragic arc of Texas’ first psychedelic rockers, The 13th Floor Elevators. Then came the outlaw country era — long-haired, anti-Nashville rebels like Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker, and of course Willie Nelson — who turned pot into emblem of hard-living, hell-raising freedom, thumbing its nose at small-town gentility.
By the time I hit my teens, the outlaws were so baked into Texas’ self-image that pot barely even seemed countercultural anymore. I was born in a small Panhandle town where my older siblings and their friends all smoked. In San Angelo, where my parents…
