by Mike Edison
Copycatting counterculture tactics from the past wasn’t just uninspired and boring, it was embarrassing. The Provos were influenced by the Dadaists and the Situationalist International before them, but the Provos moved forward—adopting the spirit of smart-ass rebellion fomented by their predecessors—and created an original movement that was of their own time.
The sixties birthed a very real, powerful revolution, the urgency of which was dictated by a brutal period in American conservatism that demanded people of conscience to rally together to create a civil rights movement and protest not only a particularly ugly war but a military draft. The original hippies blossomed because the times demanded it. You can’t re-create those conditions, and why would anyone want to? More important, you can’t react the same way to different sets of circumstances. If they ever bring back the draft, I’ll join the Freedom Fighters in a flash, but you can bet I’ll be rewriting the rule book.
Holmstrom was named publisher soon after Hager’s self-penned hagiography appeared in the magazine. Before Holmstrom, one High Times publisher lasted almost ten years—a record for a company legendary for infighting and rapid staff changes—and then quit abruptly, his exit shrouded in mystery.
The next guy walked into the office only to be greeted by a U.S. government attempt to shut down the magazine. He headed for the hills after just a couple of months.
The government operation was called Green Merchant, and it stemmed from the far-fetched idea that High Times, along with indoor pot growers, pot writers, and gardening-supply companies who sold hydroponic growing equipment, grow lights, and the like, were part of a vast criminal conspiracy. The Drug Enforcement Agency went hog wild, using High Times as their address book to find gardening-equipment suppliers and manufacturers who had recently discovered a new market selling to indoor pot farmers. But the truth of it was that most of these garden-supply companies wanted nothing to do with pot; they had nice legit businesses selling to tomato growers and equally mundane hobbyists. Sure, the extra dough was nice, but when the fuzz came calling, they cut and ran like Reagan in Beirut, and with them, a whole lot of High Times advertising dollars.
The DEA was ruthless in its intimidation, allegedly posing as bikers, Vietnam vets, and “the medically needy”; coming into gardening stores, the majority of which never advertised in High Times, asking how to grow pot and then seizing assets under questionable laws that declared perfectly legal products (like run-of-the-mill grow lights) illegal if they were somehow “intended” for illegal use. It was shady and overzealous—one report claims that the DEA raided NASA’s horticultural research lab because its name was on a list of customers receiving indoor growing equipment—but it nearly put High Times out of business. They never came after the magazine directly, but with the possible threat of criminal conspiracy charges swirling in the air and a Republican administration not terribly keen on playing by the rules in their “War on Drugs”—let’s just keep in mind that when they couldn’t bust Al Capone for bootlegging, they came in the side door and snagged him for tax evasion.
Much to the credit of the High Times ownership, they kept on publishing, filling pages with whatever content they could whip up as advertisers dropped out. It was a heroic effort in the face of an archaic but no less nasty campaign to keep marijuana smokers at the fringes of society. Never forget that the War on Drugs is a war on people.
There was another new publisher after that, but he flamed out pretty quickly, allegedly after getting a good dose of Hager, who has always seen the publisher as a slave to Mammon whose sole goal on Earth was to crush the promise of Hippie Utopia with the lethal tools of Capitalism.
Holmstrom was the perfect man for the job. He had run Punk and worked with Forçade, and he had been a High Times editor for years. His guts and dedication to the cause were unimpeachable. He lived through Green Merchant and didn’t budge an inch.
It took a while, but Holmstrom finally earned the ire of his old friend Hager, if for no other reason than that Holmstrom was now working on the evil business side. Six years later, Hager and Holmstrom, according to the locals who were there to witness this circus, were at each other’s throats constantly. The timbre at the office was described as “unbelievably bad.”
Hager, for all his revolutionary bluster, had clearly lost his way. Sales were starting to slip. The magazine was redundant and uninspired. His most recent cover had been a photograph of a clog—yes, a wooden shoe—stuffed with pot. Just in case you still didn’t get the Dutch connection, there was a windmill painted on the shoe.
He was out of ideas and publishing the same magazine month after month, a meandering hodgepodge of pot photos and cultivation tips underscored by the endless bleating of his retro rainbow revival. Not only wasn’t it relevant, it wasn’t even fun.
The most damning evidence of Hager’s departure from objective reality appeared in the November 1997 issue. In an article titled “Whee! The Hemp People,” Hager tells the story of how he organized the Hemp World’s Fair in Oregon, an event whose “focal point was to be a silent meditation on Sunday, from dawn until noon.” Six hours of hippie time-out is not my idea of a party, but then again, I am not the mastermind behind Doggie Village.
Doggie Village is the canine gulag where Hager locked up all the bad dogs that the Hemp People had brought to the fair. At one point in this saga, a couple of children take mercy and free the pups. Thankfully, Hager was on it. “We got a jailbreak at Doggie Jail,” he announces over his walkie-talkie. You can bet that when they read that, the collected High Times staff had a hearty bow-wow-wow at Hager’s expense.
Although not to his face. It’s a good thing I wasn’t working there at the time—I probably would have left him a box of hemp dog biscuits, or maybe a chew toy shaped like a joint. But no one is allowed to tease Steve Hager. Like Steve Bloom, and a few other hypocrite pot smokers at High Times who preached the mellow, Hager had an anger-management issue, and he held grudges.
At one point during the festival, Hager the Hippie Enforcer tried to banish a hot dog vendor in an RV to Bus Village, “where he belonged.”
“Nobody wants your Babylon food,” I said finally. “Why don’t you go solar and sell organic food, or better yet, pack up and leave?” Of course he was making plenty of money and had no intention of leaving . . .
This was about as sound a tautology as when Yogi Berra said, “No one goes there anymore, there are too many people.” Anyway, who doesn’t love a hot dog? Aside from Steve Hager, that is, self-appointed arbiter of all that is “Babylon.”
This is the best part: about halfway through this drama, Hager shifts his point of view from first person, as in “I sometimes had two or three meltdowns standing around yelling,” to the third person, and begins calling himself Phoenix, as in, “Phoenix had a sudden urge to test his wings and fly.” It’s never really explained, but it’s obviously the result of some sort of contrived psychedelic epiphany. At the end of the story, Phoenix hallucinates seeing the Beatles hanging out with Bob Dylan and the Tin Man. When he wakes up on a riverbank, he is talking to a dog, just a regular old pooch, although wise.
With all the feuding and bad craziness, the High Times ownership demanded that Hager and Holmstrom both step aside. I felt bad for Holmstrom—who’s a loyal guy and believed strongly in High Times both as a company and as a political statement—and how he was marginalized by Hager, whose antiauthoritarian views never left much room for hierarchies and bosses. Except for himself, of course, since like all great dictators, he sees anyone not subordinate to him as a personal threat.
Pushed out of the publisher’s office, Holmstrom opted to run the company’s then-fledgling Internet site, which was in sore need of attention. Hager, neutered but still on the payroll with the new and largely honorary title of editorial director (he had no office and did not come to meetings), went home to lick his wounds.
And so High Times was looking for both a new editor in chief and a new publisher.
“I hope you get
the editor’s job. I think you’d be great at it,” John told me, although it didn’t quite work out that way. “Just don’t blame me when you’re miserable. It’s a real snake pit up there. But you’ll find out soon enough.”
14
NEVER MIND THE DEADLINES
Time was so hopelessly amorphous a concept at the High Times Park Avenue office as to defy Einstein’s freakiest models of the continuum and dwarf even the most far-out Native American philosophies. To get the three-o’clock editorial meeting started by 3:30, one would have had to fold the fabric of the universe onto itself and lead the staff through some sort of cosmic wormhole.
As publisher, the figurative leader of this gang, I worked hard to instill temporal concepts that had already been adopted by most of the modern world: except when you begin to reach the speed of light—a velocity not likely to be achieved by a staff who did everything adagio and nothing con brio—time moves forward at the same rate for everyone. And so deadlines came and went every month with maddening consistency, just as they had at High Times for the better part of twenty-five years. Editorial meetings, too, came with mundane regularity, held every week at the same time in the same place. If you had a watch and a calendar and a vague idea of where the conference room was, you should have been able to nail it with little difficulty.
My old nemesis Steve Bloom was always the last to arrive at these meetings, usually eating a pile of cookies and getting crumbs everywhere. Bloom was, like Steve Hager, hovering near fifty years old. Whereas Hager, through some miracle of lysergically mutated genetics, had kept a fairly youthful countenance, Bloom looked more like Grandpa Simpson. He had stringy red hair, which—clinging to some hideously outdated concept of tonsorial protest statements—he insisted on wearing in an anemic ponytail.
After Bloom settled in with his snack, I could begin.
“The next person who suggests putting Bob Marley on the cover is gonna be looking for a new job.” I measured the room and waited for a new idea.
Crickets.
Finally, with crumbs all over the place, Bloom said, “I think we can get David Crosby.”
Are you fucking kidding me? David Crosby? And here I had my heart set on Joan Baez.
It was one of those rare moments of real-life deus ex machina when Ozzy Osbourne’s publicist called moments after the meeting broke up. Bloom fielded the call, actually put the woman on hold, and came into my office.
“Ozzy Osbourne wants to be in the magazine.”
Ozzy? Seriously? Black Sabbath has got to be the Number One Classic Stoner Band of All Time. This was perfect. While Ozzy didn’t have the star power of Zep or Floyd (this was before the Osbournes’ MTV show), everyone loved Black Sabbath. They might have just as well given away their records free with every pack of Big Bambú. Ozzy was our very own Elvis.
“What are you waiting for? Tell them yes.”
Bloom came back a few moments later. A chocolate chip fell from his mouth. The publicist was back on hold. “They say they want the cover.”
Ozzy’s publicist was smart to call us. At this point Ozzy was just a fucked-up old hangover playing oldies for a souped-up county-fair circuit. Ozzfest was a successful summer touring festival, but no magazine in the world would even consider putting him on the cover in 1999. Except High Times.
“Tell them we’d love to have Ozzy on the cover, but he’s got to pose with pot. Those are the rules here.”
I didn’t think they’d go for it; after all, aside from being a notorious drug fiend, Ozzy was notoriously in rehab. He wasn’t supposed to be near any drugs, let alone pose with them on the cover of a national magazine. But you’ve got to ask. Unbelievably (after being put on hold for another twenty minutes), they said okay. This was great news. Clear the decks, Big Story in the works.
For a change, there was some real energy in the office. People were genuinely excited. Except for Steve Hager, who, although on forced leave, was not exactly confined to a Fortress of Solitude. He was still contributing to the magazine, calling constantly, and as a longtime favorite of the High Times owners (he really did do great things for the magazine before he lost his mind), he had their ear. “Putting Ozzy on the cover,” he told them, “will kill the magazine. We’re a hippie magazine. Ozzy Osborne is heavy metal. We’ll lose all of our readers. Edison is destroying High Times.”
Hager’s megalomania could never tolerate anyone else editing his magazine, and with Ozzy he saw an opening and began a vicious campaign lobbying for his old job back. This was the beginning of a whole world of trouble.
Meanwhile, the photo shoot went great. The studio was dressed beautifully with red velvet curtains, all manner of skulls, daggers, and chalices, a ridiculous throne perfect for the singer of Black Sabbath, and, of course, the “veggies.” We had even commissioned a “sweet leaf” pendant to be made by the artist Robin Ludwig, a handcrafted silver pot leaf for Ozzy to wear.
To people in the trade, having your weed in the centerfold is like winning an Oscar, and their stock skyrockets once their product goes prime time, so it isn’t as hard as you might think to find a couple of pounds of good-looking pot that can adopt the come-hither pose common to centerfold models everywhere.
I got to the studio a few minutes before Ozzy shuffled in, and when I say “shuffled,” I mean it. When he walked, he made the same sound as one of those old Apollo Theater soft-shoe dancers made when they threw a little bit of sand on the floor to get that good scratching thing going. This was about a year before The Osbournes, but if you’ve seen that show, you have an idea of just how damaged Ozzy is. He is the picture-book definition of “drug casualty.”
His entourage was a couple of Spinal Tap–looking roadie dudes who were trying to keep him on a short leash, but of course when Ozzy saw a chrome skull filled with bright green buds, he flipped. “Fuck! Is that real?” You bet it is, Oz. Wanna try some? His handlers weren’t too crazy about Ozzy’s getting stoned, but they couldn’t stop him from taking a few hits from a beautifully handblown glass pipe.
I took a giddy toke on it myself. I wasn’t much for getting stoned at the office, but on photo shoots, loitering around a kilo of bright green bud, it was pretty hard to resist. Anyway, as my high school English teacher told me somewhat cryptically after I got snagged for smoking pot out in the woods behind the parking lot lo those many years ago, “There is a time and a place for everything.” I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to bust corn with Ozzy.
Ozzy put on the “sweet leaf” and posed with handfuls of reefer. He sat in the high-backed throne and talked to the skull filled with pot. Like a heavy metal Hamlet. It was beautiful. Despite the fried synapses, he was a total pro, very nice, good-humored, and easy to deal with. Tony Iommi, Sabbath’s nine-and-one-half-fingered guitarist, came by and pushed some weed around for the cameras. It was a dream, the perfect High Times photo shoot.
It wasn’t long before Ozzy began to get a little claustrophobic (and paranoid) in a room filled with people (and two pounds of illegal drugs), so I herded all nonessential staff and hangers-on to a neighborhood bar.
It was the next day when I got socked with the bill for the pot. Normally, the “product” is “rented,” which means “borrowed,” with the understanding that someone will buy a few ounces (at about $700 per) and pay for what I call “shrinkage.” The dealer weighs the product that is going to be photographed, and at the end of the day he weighs it again. You can expect that a little bit is going to be smoked (don’t forget we already bought a couple of ounces for that purpose, but when everyone is getting a little buzzed, they kind of forget that and start confusing the props with their personal stash). And naturally some gets lost after being moved around, from, say, the brainpan of a skull that looked as though it were on loan from Dr. Evil to a tableau of appropriately heavy pipes and bongs. Sure: shrinkage. A bit of shake weed, a few small nuggets.
But not ounces of superbly intact buds, the kind of buds you could club a dinosaur over the head with. I think it was t
he Design Dude, who informed me that I would have to come up with sixteen hundred dollars to cover the bill.
Sixteen hundred fucking dollars? What, was Ozzy eating the shit? The guy has a rep for biting the heads off of bats and snorting ants, so I wouldn’t be surprised. What the fuck happened? It better have not been any of our guys . . .
No, no. It was Ozzy’s entourage, I was told. They were stuffing their pockets with weed when they left. Fuck, why didn’t they just ask? Boosting the stash was pretty square. No class. We would have pretty much given them whatever they wanted out of pure respect for their boss.
Well of course, now I had to hear it from Wanda the Evil Accountant. Nothing at High Times happens without the Evil Accountant getting involved. She is a scandal whore and a busybody of the worst sort, a human speed bump who lives to monkey-wrench the works and shut down the machine. This is the woman who, on the morning of 9/11, screamed at me to “get back to work” while I was trying to locate missing staffers and let families and friends know that we were okay. Now she would have to come up with a check, which someone had to turn into cash to give to the bereft supplier. We did this all the time. It wasn’t a big deal, but nothing at High Times happens without drama. You’d think I was diverting funds to a Republican fund-raiser.
Hey, I was steamed about going overbudget on the shoot, but shit happens, especially when you’re working in a cloud of smoke. At the end of the day we’re just going to have to suck it up. Of course, now everyone in the office is talking about the stolen pot (and not getting any work done) and I’m getting the blame, even though I wasn’t even there. Whatever, I’m the publisher, I can deal with it. We just scored a major coup with Ozzy Osbourne. Everyone should be tickled fucking pink.