I wasn't referring to you in the money and songs comment, Ed.

Being very familiar with pretty much the whole body of Dylan's recorded work, and being a songwriter myself, I frankly doubt that drugs influenced his songwriting other than giving him the energy to work long hours at it. Virtually everyone took drugs back then (just myself and Joan Baez excluded?)(smile), and the standard assumption at the time was to find supposed drug references lurking in everyone's song lyrics. That was tiresome nonsense as far as I was concerned. People were making drug use glamorous...and that's about as dumb as making alcholism or tobbaco smoking glamorous.

In Dylan's case, I don't find much at all to suggest drug references in his songs...rather he seems to be talking about almost everything else under the sun, but not wasting his time indulging in surreal crowd-pleasing lyrics about "getting high".

A lot of musicians fell for that sense of being supercool by playing the "bad boy", showing off their familarity with drugs, and playing that role like it was somehow heroic. They figured it would please their fans. And it did. I see little evidence that Dylan ever followed that common line. He took drugs, all right, but I don't think he regarded them as anything significant in connection with increasing artistic creativity.