by Mike Edison
After three years of rock ’n’ roll warfare and chemical prevarication with the Pleasure Fuckers, I had zero interest in getting back in the van, metaphorically, existentially, or any other which way. No gigs, no pressure, no album to write, no more reindeer games. It was nice just to tool around on the guitar and bang merrily on the piano for no other reason than I felt like it. Eventually, people stopped calling. Which of course made me feel that I was no longer wanted. I suppose you can’t have it both ways.
Perhaps that had something to do with why, a year after my return from Spain, I agreed to come out of my premature retirement. The fellow on the phone gave me a sob story about his drummer’s having broken his wrist and how they were going to miss their Big Gig at Coney Island High, and how much they loved the Raunch Hands and GG Allin, blah, blah, blah. Well, all right then. But just one rehearsal and one show, and I’m out. Unless Led Zeppelin suddenly decided to re-form, I really had no desire to join a band.
The following week, there I was, waiting outside the rehearsal studio on Avenue B in the bitter cold, cursing myself for agreeing to this gig, when I saw her. She was wearing a tapered red wool jacket with wide lapels (later I would discover that she made it herself); tight blue jeans; and mod, square-toed boots. Her eyes sparkled, even at night. Her dirty blond hair looked as if she had it styled in London, in 1966. She was carrying a guitar. I can still hear the voices in my head— angels singing, harps, fireworks going off, all that good shit. No amount of LSD ever made me that goofy.
When the boys in the band showed up, I reluctantly followed them into the building. I smiled at her, wanly. She smiled back knowingly and walked through the door ahead of me. Zoinks! Turns out she was part of this drummerless gang of punks!
I acted like a complete idiot, stepping all over my tongue, showing off on the drums, acting like a schoolboy who had never seen a pretty girl before. When we took a break, I hammed it up a little on the battered upright that had been pushed into the corner of the studio and got another smile out of her by warbling my way through “Sloop John B.” I was like, gone.
The gig sucked. They weren’t a very good band—I probably should have auditioned them first. _____, the princess who had captured my heart, was an especially lousy guitar player. Lost right from the start, she got tangled in her own cord, accidentally unplugged her guitar, and spent most of the show trying to figure out why there was no sound coming out of her amplifier. She was twenty-four years old and in just thirty minutes had reached the same aurum stratum of “failed rock musician” that had taken me years to achieve. I was gaga for her.
After the show we flirted with each other at the bar and took turns buying each other drinks. I lied and told her she was great and not to worry about the show, it could happen to anyone. And then she left with the lead guitar player.
I love the beginning of The Postman Always Rings Twice, when the drifter, who narrates the story, gets a glimpse of the bombshell behind the counter at the greasy spoon he stumbles into, then goes outside and pukes up his breakfast. “I wanted that woman so bad,” he declares, “I couldn’t keep a thing on my stomach.” That is exactly how I felt. I was out of breath for a week.
About a ten days later she left a message for me on my voice mail up at Ally Alpacka’s House of Mirth, where she had assiduously tracked me down. She was asking for a date. When I heard the message, I actually swooned.
Turns out that the lead guitar player was her boyfriend, but they were done, and she had been thinking about me, too.
I went Camel Walking down the halls of Soft Drinks & Beer. I did the Hucklebuck, the Hully Gully, and the Hand Jive, too. I did the Freak, the Freddie, and the Frug. I nearly knocked over a cubicle doing the Locomotion.
Frank looked at me as if I had just lost my mind. It was a fair assessment. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded before screaming at me to get the hell off his desk, where I was now getting busy with the Mashed Potato.
“Sharky Dance of Joy!” I told him. “She digs me!”
“Well, you look like an escaped mental patient. Knock it off before Ally’s dog takes a bite out of your ass.”
The throes of new love, those first few weeks of excessive drinking and fucking, made me feel as weightless and giddy as a Spanish astronaut. Every night after work we’d meet for dinner and wind up sitting at the bar for hours, drinking and talking, falling for each other over and over again, and then going back to my place to roll around on the hardwood floor and have some more of that Brand-New Sex. Sometimes we didn’t wait to get home and would orchestrate a stealth bathroom tryst between rounds of icy vodka gimlets. We were soaring. On one of our first dates we went to Venice, Italy.
I had to go to Munich on SD&B business, a hit-it-and-quit-it trip to attend a press conference and introduce myself to a few captains of industry. I had to be there for only one day and one night, so I said to _____, “Come with me. Munich is a nice old town, we’ll drink some good beer, eat a schnitzel, and then we’ll get on a train and head through the Alps to Italy or something.” She loved the idea and chose Venice as our destination, a six-hour hop from Munich.
Before getting on the train, we stocked up on Bavarian sausages; ripe cheese; some of those gorgeous, oversize, pillow-soft pretzels they use for bread; a few jars of toothy, spicy mustard; a couple bottles of cold, dry Riesling; and lots of heavyweight German chocolate. We had a second-class compartment all to ourselves, and by the time we were ready to tuck into our picnic basket, we had hit the Alps, clickety-clacking across Austria through the Brenner Pass at Innsbruck, and it began to snow. After years of scribbling porn, I had finally scripted a storybook romance.
Venice looks like something from a Jules Verne novel. There is no other place on Earth remotely like it. Perhaps on Mars. There are no automobiles, no scooters, no buses, just water taxis on the bigger canals, and of course the gondolas. For once, the advance press was true: Venice is as off-the-charts romantic as promised.
It was on our second day there that the darkness struck. We had taken a ferry across the lagoon to one of the small islands that float off the coast, and suddenly I found my new love silent and grim. If she were in a comic strip, she would have had an ominous-looking rain cloud drawn over her head. It turned out that she suffered from manic-depressive disorder, and this was my first experience seeing her on the downside.
“I get like this,” she told me blankly. “I just want to die. I can’t feel anything.”
It was overwhelming. Her pallor infected everything around her. Just standing next to her, my fingertips felt cold and my feet were numb.
“You can’t do anything,” she explained flatly. “You can’t cheer me up. Just ignore me.”
It was heartbreaking. Eventually, she told me, it would pass. And by the time we got back to New York, it had. Those last few days were rough, but there was no way I was going to bail out on her. She had more brains and more talent and more good logic than anyone I had ever met. I was awed by her unguarded insight into the world around her. There didn’t seem to be anything she wasn’t interested in learning. A conversation with her could be an adventure.
The dark shadows could swarm over her quickly, but the good times were positively buoyant. We were loving New York City, bouncing between dive bars and cozy restaurants. When it was time to get out— and the secret to living in New York is to leave once in a while, before the noise and skyscrapers begin to close in on you—we took a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Cruising down their precious Protestant Main Street, blasting Public Enemy and Ice Cube on the stereo—past the overpriced, nautical-themed gift shops selling scented candles and schmaltzy quilts and crafts—we scared the shit out of the pink Izod shirts and Topsiders.
When the sublet on my apartment was up, I moved in with her. It felt right. I put my books on the shelves next to hers—she was delighted that I didn’t immediately try to carve out my own space. She began listening to my collection of post-bop noise and insisted that I take her to jazz gig
s. She turned me on to some punk rock bands that I had overlooked. She had a large collection of 45s, and sometimes we would stay up all night spinning them. Even our cats got along famously.
_____ began taking antidepressants and went every week to talk to someone, and it really helped. We were growing closer together, and it seemed as if she was leveling out. She had been toying with the idea of going to law school and was beginning to get the confidence that she could do it. She just needed someone to believe in her.
I was ready for a career change, too. After consecutive championship seasons snorting weasel dust for Team Pleasure Fucker, SD&B had been the perfect gig to get my head screwed back on. I sharpened up my magazine skills and absorbed every bit of wisdom imparted to me by the marketing wizards who had turned the sugar-flavored bubble-water business into powerful international cartels. Actually, if it had not been for Ally Alpacka’s utter lack of couth and guile, I might have stuck around for a while longer. I liked hopping around Europe, and I was becoming pretty slick at the confidence game of balancing editorial integrity with the shameless hucksterism it takes to sell ads. I could have evolved in this job—there was certainly a lot of money to be made running a beer-and-soft-drinks trade mag. Unfortunately, I had hit the glass ceiling as a mid-management chimp. There were no orangutans at Soft Drinks & Beer, Ally Alpacka would not allow it. She was the Lawgiver, and she wanted to keep at least a genus and a species between her and the next-closest ape.
After a night of hard drinking with John Holmstrom that saw me railing to him against Ally Alpacka and the SD&B experience and ranting about my lust to be behind the editor’s desk at the right magazine, John encouraged me to contact the High Times owners about the newly opened editor in chief position. I should have listened to him more carefully.
Since my column-writing days, John had been promoted from executive editor to publisher of High Times. Actually, “promoted” may not be accurate. More like “sentenced.”
Most people don’t know what the publisher of a magazine actually does. The common perception is that the publisher owns the business. Which is true as far as the “publisher” is the parent company—Condé Nast, Hearst, Advance Media, etc. are all magazine publishers. But what we are talking about is the person with the title of Publisher who is responsible for running the business side of the magazine and is a paid employee. Usually the publisher comes from advertising sales— many publishers were ad directors who came up from the trenches working as salespeople. The publisher is not only in charge of the ad department but also has the final word on circulation, subscriptions, marketing, events, and any nuts-and-bolts issues regarding the actual process of getting the book to the printer and then to subscribers and the newsstand.
There is also an old model of “editor-publisher,” where the name at the top of the masthead—such as Flynt or Hefner or Guccione—was also the magazine’s founder. You don’t see that so much these days, especially in mass-market titles. The entry barrier to get onto the newsstand is just too great; there are too many titles put out by a handful of superpower publishers who will always have the upper hand with distributors. And there is too little rack space to accommodate new titles; it’s a finite resource and one of the business’s most valuable commodities.
You’d be shocked at how many people who have the publisher’s job could not write even the simplest headline. They began as Gorillas and worked their way up to Orangutan but never really quite lost the pronounced eyebrow ridge that defines their primitive skulls. As much as they have climbed the evolutionary ladder professionally, there is almost always something indefinably vulgar about these beasts.
Top editors are extremely business savvy. They know the machinations of every department, and they work closely with the publisher to grow the brand and keep the revenue streams flowing and create new opportunities for advertisers. The publisher is responsible for a magazine’s profitability, but the editor is responsible for sales. If the magazine isn’t selling, you can bet the owners and the publisher will have something to say about it.
Holmstrom was named publisher of High Times after the three previous publishers walked out the door in relatively quick succession, thanks at least in part to the efforts of High Times editor in chief Steve Hager and the United States government.
I don’t want to suggest that Hager and the government were working in concert. Even the paranoid conspiracy freaks who breed at High Times would blanch at that idea, although one of the persistent rumors that has surrounded the magazine since its inception is that it is secretly owned by the feds—founder Tom Forçade was often accused of being a CIA operative.
Once upon a time, Hager was a charismatic and talented editor with real vision and had in fact saved the magazine from near ruin in the 1980s by chasing the hard drugs out of the book. Back then the centerfold was just as likely to be a cordilleran vista of shiny cocaine as it was a slab of North African hashish. Hager made it a positive-vibe pot magazine with an emphasis on cultivation. There is no question that he ushered in the magazine’s Second Golden Age after the nascent years of Forçade. But Hager was also not so subtly using High Times as a platform to launch his own cult of personality, à la Mao Zedong or Kim Jong Il.
Hager had always embraced old-fashioned hippie dreams and 1960s-style activism. His heroes are Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters— they of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fame—and the Dutch Provos, a proto-Prankster anarchist group that came out of Amsterdam in the early sixties and innovated performance art as street protest. The Provos were famous for baiting policemen into overreacting to absurdist pranks and letting the cops expose themselves as violent and brainless reactionaries. What the cops never got was that the Provos saw them as “essential noncreative elements for a successful Happening.” The Provos were a lot like the Yippies in that regard. A lot of the unrest that fueled the Provos’ rise to fame as a national movement for antiwar intellectuals and punks could have easily been stymied by just ignoring them.
Which is pretty much what happened to Hager’s own troupe of propot activists, the Freedom Fighters.
Often cited as the first sign of Hager’s madness was an interview with him that ran in High Times in 1990, according to local legend conducted by himself—there is no byline, the interviewer is only identified as “High Times.” Basically an advertisement for Steve Hager and the Freedom Fighters, who would later be featured on the cover of the magazine as well, it was a glaring error in judgment and a laughable paper monument to Hager’s ego, which would soon enough swell to megalomaniacal proportions. What would be next, a Steve Hager statue in the lobby? A giant, doobie-puffing Steve Hager float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? When I was hired seven years later, people were still cracking jokes about it.
The Freedom Fighters were a good-natured-enough organization— they rode around the country dressed up in vaguely psychedelic Revolutionary War–era costumes and promoted the use of hemp for food, fuel, and fiber. They were harmless and fun and well-meaning, and naturally were embraced by stoned college students and leftover hippies, unfortunately not the sort of constituency that could effect a major policy shift in the upper echelons of government.
The “hemp cause” is an important one. It is nothing less than an American shame that it is illegal to grow industrial hemp, the kind that has little or no THC content. I am not sure that it would save the planet, as Hager and his ilk like to claim—it certainly hasn’t beaten swords into plowshares in the parts of the world where it is legal to harvest—but it is an astonishingly useful plant with the potential to make an enormous positive impact on the environment. You can make paper and cloth out of it (the Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper), and it could be an important source of bio-fuel for an ailing planet. The U.S. government actually encouraged farmers to grow it during the Second World War and even produced a propaganda film called Hemp for Victory.
Growing hemp was made illegal, along with every other sort of cannabis, in large part than
ks to the efforts of an ex–railroad cop named Harry Anslinger who became the first “drug czar” and introduced the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Marijuana had been linked by sensationalist newspaper magnates such as William Randolph Hearst to “murder, insanity, and death” and was largely seen as a way to arrest Mexican laborers who were taking jobs during the Depression. Marijuana-puffing African Americans were equally disparaged as wild animals by Hearst’s yellow journalism. All of this much to the delight of cotton growers, petrochemical companies, and paper producers— who also had Anslinger’s ear—who would directly benefit from the eradication of hemp as an industrial competitor.
No matter what you think about marijuana as a drug, there is absolutely no good reason why growing hemp, which has no psychotropic properties, should be illegal. It is ludicrous to the point of being criminal. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t care. Hippie textiles are never going to be a hot topic, no matter how many potheads put on powdered wigs and tricornered hats and run around complaining about the evils of Industry and holding hokeypokey hippie happenings in homage to the Merry Pranksters.
I’m a huge fan of the Pranksters and the Provos. I get it. I embrace certain hippie values. I believe that psychedelic drugs are not only a hoot, but can be a legitimate ticket to mystical experiences and are an invaluable tool to help people examine their values and show themselves parts of their minds—and a reality—that without the trip they would never have had access to. I think Aldous Huxley made a lot of sense. So did Tim Leary on occasion. But he was deluding himself and his would-be followers if he thought LSD was the planet’s only hope. I also believe in civil disobedience. But then again, I am not a hopeless pacifist, either. Just take a swing at me and see what happens.
On the cusp of the twentieth century, I would have hoped that someone who spoke as enthusiastically about progressive politics and change as Hager did could have come up with something new instead of simply stealing riffs from his heroes. The sixties were over. Didn’t anyone read Go-Go Boy’s thesis?