I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  The last night we were there, one of our Japanese friends had gone to great lengths to score us some weed—they knew we liked it, so once again it was the honorable thing to do. This was no trifling feat. The drug laws in Japan are brutal, even for reefer. When Paul McCartney got busted bringing in a Ziploc’s worth of grass in 1980, they made an example of him.

  “I was taken to the narcotics headquarters, handcuffed and a rope tied around me, led along like a dog,” McCartney said at the time. “It was like Bridge Over the River Kwai.”

  They kept him “in a box” for nine days and didn’t spring him until United States senator Ted Kennedy intervened. McCartney was facing seven years.

  If that’s how they treat the Beatles, you can imagine what they might do to one of the Raunch Hands. But there we were in the Star Hotel with a big ol’ baggie of the stuff, fashioning pipes out of cigarette packs, beer cans, weird Japanese tampon applicators, whatever. They may have found the herb, but rolling papers remained elusive.

  Someone told me that the Japanese were “very hungry for marijuana.” I believed it. Every one of our rooms was filled with young punks dying to try the stuff. Which is why I found myself entertaining a dalliance in the hallway. There was no other place to go.

  There were high-quality drugs in Japan, smuggled from Thailand, but that wasn’t the weed we were smoking. This was some sort of homegrown, or it was found growing in the wild somewhere on a hill in Hokkaido. Whatever it was, it was by far the worst marijuana I have ever smoked. It tasted like peat moss stir-fried with miso paste and dung. It had zero psychotropic effect, but we smoked it and complimented our hosts on their good taste. It would have been rude not to.

  When we got back to New York a few days later, I had the idea that the story of our trip, ending with the irony of the lousiest pot in the East, might play well in High Times. I called Holmstrom and gave him the pitch. He told me that since it was basically a story about a band, I needed to talk to Steve Bloom, who was, to the chagrin of people of taste everywhere, the music editor.

  I knew Bloom from hanging around the office, and we were always friendly enough, but he was one of those anachronistic lemmings who still thought that the Grateful Dead was a happening band. Doubly embarrassing, he was the only journalist in the world who thought that punk was a passing fad and that disco was cool.

  But he gave me the green light to scribble the story, and as usual, I was very proud to be working for America’s Premier Doper Rag.

  Three months later, when I read my story in the magazine—High Times, like most monthly magazines, has about a ninety-day lead time—I began to experience a swimming sensation in my head. I knew that Bloom was a bumptious hippie, but what I didn’t know was that he was the bungling vivisectionist of decent prose.

  My story had been put through some type of remedial stoner Cuisinart and had come out as pothead pabulum. Where once there had been descriptive and well-crafted sentences that amplified the exigencies of Japanese drug quests and hallway trysts, all lovingly cast to capture the rhythm and ecstasy of a rock ’n’ roll orgy, there was now baby talk. Bloom had destroyed any meter or cadence and had chopped any complex or compound sentence into grade-school declaratives. Noun, verb, object. His linguistic hegemony was astonishing. High Times was once famous for publishing autodidacts like William Burroughs and Ken Kesey, but Bloom’s idea of literary rebellion was an independent clause. I’m not saying that my piece was ever going to be a benchmark in counterculture journalism, but when I filed the story, it was pretty good, and now it read like a Dick and Jane primer for first-graders. I couldn’t even show it to my friends without fear of them laughing at me. My porn novels stood up better.

  I was not the only one whose prose would suffer for his ham-fisted editing style—good writers gave up on High Times rather than deal with Bloom, and he scared off a lot of new talent whom he could send off crying with his uninformed dogma and strict adherence to a set of rules that would baffle squares, let alone druggy literati.

  But wait. There was another problem.

  Remember how our Japanese friends risked life in a labor camp to score us what turned out to be the positively crappiest reefer ever smoked by an American? When the story came out, somehow the locus of the situation had changed to New York City, and I was buying them the world’s worst pot.

  I was mortified. It didn’t make any sense. I called Bloom right away.

  “What happened to my story?”

  “It’s better this way.”

  “It reads like it was written by someone who is having a hard time grasping English. And now it’s not even true. If there is one thing I know, it is how to cop drugs in New York City. There is no way I would be buying dirt weed, and even if I did, even if this actually happened the way you rewrote it, I certainly wouldn’t be bragging about it in High Times. I look like an idiot. Don’t you think you should have consulted me on this?”

  Bloom exploded. Besides having no respect for his writers, he also had a serious anger-management problem. I backed off. It wasn’t worth getting into a fight with a guy who was potentially so stoned that in five minutes he’d forget what we were arguing about in the first place.

  It would do me well to keep all this in mind years later, when I became his boss.

  When the tour started up again, hitting Berlin was kind of homecoming. Some of my old pals from the Sharky’s Machine days showed up to see the Raunch Hands, and just for nostalgia’s sake, I snorted a nice bump of bright yellow crank from the end of a Chinese butterfly knife. The adventure was off to a lovely start.

  But we were exhausted—we had played Tokyo on a Saturday, had done a one-off show in New York, and now were on our third continent in less than a week. On the second night of the tour, a Sunday, we were stuck in some German cow town playing a jugen Centrum—a community youth center. These were the kind of gigs we sometimes booked on off nights, Sundays and Mondays. We’d get paid and fed, and we’d have a place to stay. It beat not playing.

  It wasn’t so bad. The youth center served beer and catered to teenagers and twenty-somethings who had no better place to go at night in a small rural town. A lot of people would come out for the shows. We did all right, plowing our way through a good set for an appreciative if not overwhelmed crowd of punks who probably would have preferred a hard-core thrash band. They dug the energy, but the James Brown and Dick Dale covers meant nothing to them.

  Within five minutes after playing, Mariconda was asleep in the backstage area. Everyone was wasted tired, but there were still a few cute girls fluttering about, eager to talk to the Americans, and George and I hate to disappoint. Plus sometimes kooky shit happens in small towns. You can have a perfectly mundane weekend gig in Paris and a Wednesday-evening bacchanal in the backwoods. That’s the thing about being on tour—you never know.

  “This place is closing soon,” the cute girls told us. Sisters, I think. They liked us, that’s for sure. “You should come with us. Our friend has a pub, and we have the keys.”

  “Huh?”

  “We have the keys to the pub.”

  Every time someone in Germany says something like that to me, I am more and more inclined to forgive them for the War. I took her by the hand and brought her to the backstage area, where Chandler was now also sleeping on a couch, catty-corner to Mariconda, and snoring vociferously. The poor lads, they were so tired. They really needed their rest. I wasted no time in waking them up.

  “Tell them what you just told us.”

  “We have the keys to the pub.”

  One thing is for sure, you don’t have to tell these guys twice that when pretty girls say they have the “keys to the pub,” it is best in every circumstance to follow them. And they had friends.

  The pub turned out to be the one bar in town, a superbly well-stocked tavern turned after-hours club for five Raunch Hands and five of their newest and bestest pals. Chandler was climbing the walls. Literally. There was a ladder used to get the vintage brandy off the very top s
helf behind the bar, and he was on it like a duck on a June bug, tossing bottles down to me like Nerf footballs. I have never been to ancient Rome, but I imagine this is what it was like on a good night.

  The next morning, I was interrupted in the Raunch Hands van by the sound of Chandler pounding on the door. It was hard to hear him over the ruckus we were making, and for a while we pretended that he wasn’t there. But he was very insistent. I rolled down the window. I tried to tell him that I was busy, but he graciously handed me two cups of hot coffee and my day’s per diem. “C’mon, Sharky, we gotta go. You’ve got five minutes.”

  Now this was how to run a tour. I’m holding everyone up, turning the van into my personal rumpus room, and Chandler rewards me with catering and cash. Even the girl was impressed. I liked traveling with these Raunch Hands. And this was only day two of a two-month tour.

  It wasn’t long before we were fully into the rhythm of the road. One night in Belgium, George set a pizzeria on fire. At the time, Mariconda was dancing on the table, reliving Japan, and I was hacking away at a version of “Night Train” on a piano I had dragged in from the barroom. I guess George thought some flames would add a little panache to the act and hadn’t quite realized just how much damage could be done with a standard-issue Zippo.

  In France, Chandler was trying to pick up a beautiful French-woman—and her barely legal daughter—when suddenly she was clomped in the chest with an orange that had come sailing across the club, which exploded on impact. She looked as if she were going to die. More sticky citrus shrapnel came flying in all directions, along with rock-hard bits of baguette and gooey lumps of Brie, the results of a food fight Mariconda had sparked backstage that was now spreading like nuclear fallout. Ten minutes before, he had threatened to kill an incompetent soundman (“You don’t know me, I’m from New York, and I will cut you”), and in another ten, the place would be covered in vomit and broken glass. Everyone fled to safer ground. Two nights later, the woman—and her daughter—came back, undeterred, and tried once again to charm Mr. Chandler, but by that point he had wisely written them off as a couple of psychopaths.

  On that tour I also got another chance at opening for the Ramones, at a five-thousand-seat sportatorium in Rennes, France. It went a lot better this time. There was a local band on before us who took the heat from an impatient crowd. We were second-billed as “Special Guests from New York City,” and we killed. I watched the Ramones from the side of the stage and realized that the famous “1-2-3-4!” count-offs shouted at the top of each number had absolutely nothing to do with the tempos of the songs themselves. The Ramones lived in their own world.

  Things really reached a peak of decadence and absurdity when we played at a pink stucco spaceship on the beach near Alicante, in the south of Spain.

  At dinner before the show, we were warned, “Eat well, because after this you will not eat again, or sleep, for two days.” This from a guy whose favorite stunt was snorting speed off the hoods of moving cars, so we listened to him.

  It was our driver’s birthday that night, and it was the first time I had seen “Feliz Cumpleaños” written out on a large mirror with cocaine. That was a trick that never got old.

  The “spaceship” was a monstrosity of a discotheque that looked like an extraterrestrial birthday cake that had crash-landed on the beach at the peak of Franco’s regime and had been abandoned ever since. Inside, it was covered in dust and cobwebs, bottles everywhere, the detritus of a party that had ended years before. It must have been one hell of a fiesta. And now, even though they had reopened the place and it was about ten o’clock and we were supposed to play at midnight, there was still no one making any move to clean up.

  Aside from the guy who claimed to be the promoter—and there was no reason to believe that he was who he said he was except that he gave us dinner and some drugs—the place was empty. There was no sound system and no sign of the band that was supposed to play before us. The “promoter” shrugged. “Relax. If they feel like playing, they’ll come. Everything will be all right. Have another line. Have a drink. Welcome to Spain.”

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, a few people showed up with brooms and began cleaning off the dance floor and clearing the stage. Like a bizarre outer-space ballet, speaker columns floated in, the bar opened, and people began drifting toward the mother ship a few at a time. All that was missing was the waltz-time sound track by Strauss. By 1:00 a.m. the first band was on. By 3:00 a.m., when we finally played, the place was packed and rocking. By 6:00 a.m. we were out on the beach playing baseball—Chandler and I always brought gloves and a ball on tour—and smoking cocaine cigarettes, because it was too windy to snort powder.

  Leaving Alicante and heading back north toward Madrid, we had a pretty good drug collection going. Mariconda consulted the kit bag: there were a few tabs of acid, a golf ball–size chunk of hash, various white pills . . . and, dang! No more coke or speed.

  “How the hell am I going to stay awake then?” I asked him.

  “Maybe you should think about getting some sleep,” he told me sternly, like a TV doctor. “Take some of these codeine pills. They’ll help.”

  “They bother my stomach. Do you think they’ll work if I crush them up and snort them?”

  “Nah, I already tried it.”

  I took a pass on the codeine, but after two days of partying on the mother ship, I didn’t have much trouble passing out. I may even have dreamed.

  Far flung from the colony of extraterrestrials that were running things in Alicante, Madrid was under the control of a group of Earthlings who called themselves the Pleasure Fuckers.

  The Pleasure Fuckers were Spain’s premier rock ’n’ roll band, the Raunch Hands’ Iberian counterparts in a universe of punk rock excess and hedonism. Their reputation for eating, drinking, snorting, smoking, fucking, fighting, and playing harder and louder than anyone else on the peninsula was well earned.

  The Pleasure Fuckers were fronted by a three-hundred-pound Basque man who went by Kike Turmix. (Kike, pronounced KEE-kay, is a common nickname, short for Enrique. Turmix was the name of a popular line of blenders.) Turmix was legendary not only for inhaling vast amounts of drugs and superhuman amounts of vodka, but also for his gastronomic proclivities. In Basque country in the north of Spain, where Turmix was from, everything was Bigger than Big—the people, the steaks, the drinks. For sport they had boulder-throwing contests.

  Turmix also carried a reputation in Spain for being an early adopter, the first to play new American bands on a radio show he once hosted, and later booking them into the territory before anyone else had the bright idea. The Raunch Hands were part of that wave.

  Upon arriving in Madrid, we were greeted by Turmix and the Pleasure Fuckers and immediately whisked to a neighborhood bar and fortified with a banquet of tapas—not a “real” meal, just something to sharpen our incisors before the entrecot we would enjoy after the sound check. Nothing in Spain was ever done in half measures.

  Lavished before us were delicately fried baby squid; inch-wide anchovies that had been vacationing in olive oil and garlic for what must have been weeks; roasted red peppers stuffed with tuna; jamón serrano, paper-thin ham carved from the leg of an overnourished pig that sat right on the bar (just the leg, not the whole pig); gambas a la plancha, shrimp that had been covered in salt and seared on an open grill; plus bits of chorizo, Manchego cheese, ripe olives, and bottles of voluptuous Rioja wine.

  Then we got around to the carajillos.

  A carajillo is something of a miracle, a blood-confusing speedball of a coffee cocktail, the true Breakfast of Champions but also the perfect riposte to any of life’s little hiccups, day or night.

  The proper carajillo, the carajillo quemado de coñac, involves some tricky pyrotechnics. First, the cognac is poured into a glass, usually a wide, thick-bottomed job, and then a goodly amount of sugar is added. The cognac is steam-heated on one of those well-appointed, brushed-metal coffee-making contraptions—just as you would steam the milk in
a café con leche—and then set on fire. Thick black coffee is dripped slowly onto the burning cognac without extinguishing the flame. The result is one hell of a sugar, booze, and caffeine jolt, and the whole thing tastes like a dream.

  While Turmix was a study in corpulence, albeit one with sharp sideburns, the other Pleasure Fuckers were tall and thin. Norah, who pounded rhythm guitar, was sexy and tough and could drive all night long, navigating the van through the Pyrenees on a head full of hashish and God knows what else. She threw a mean punch and could drink even harder than Turmix.

  Norah, like Mike (our Spanish friends thought every other American was named Mike), the lead guitar player, was from Southern California, and the two of them together brought some sunshine—no matter how aggressive it was—to a down-and-dirty high-energy band. Mike was six feet plus, blond and blue-eyed, and a jubilant guitar player who tore spectacularly musical riffs out of an old Gretsch rockabilly box played through a Marshall stack.

  Barnaby played bass. Barnaby is from London, and suspiciously posh, but he plays it down. He is suave and charming and obviously didn’t pick it up slumming in Camden Town. Clearly somewhere in his lineage was a peer of the realm, or at least a member of the Drones Club, but he preferred the Pleasure Fuckers’ hedonistic lifestyle of wanton rock ’n’ roll stupidity, sex, and drugs. They were a formidable team.

  The only weak link in the chain was the drummer, who could play but was clearly not one of them. You got the idea he was slumming it— he had some obvious prog rock tendencies, like needlessly peeling off triple flamadiddles and quarter-note triplets in the middle of straight-ahead garage punkers—and was only Pleasure Fucking for the perks. What they obviously needed to complete the package was an ass-kicker from New York.

  After dinner we were treated to snootfuls of Dexedrina, which came in bright orange amphetamine capsules that could be legally obtained at a farmacia with some odd sort of doctor’s script that was given only to truck drivers. There was also a guy who sold them in Retiro Park. The genius of a Dexedrina cap was not only its high-octane oomph, which rivaled anything in Berlin, but the insidious fact that it was time-released. Drop a Dexedrina, and you could drive from Spain to Sweden in a straight shot, with a fresh bump of chemical zoom being pushed into your bloodstream every two hundred kilometers. And you could crush them up and snort them, and they worked like magic, although you’d have to be careful not to get orange powder on the outside of your nose. It made you look stupid.