by Mike Edison
At some point, amid the cacophony of stoned High Times editors yammering on and on about all of this (imagine the sound of twenty geese fighting over the last piece of grain), it occurred to me that “Drug-addled Rock Star Pilfers Pot, Chaos Reigns at Stoner Photo Shoot” was an irresistible PR hook. Just like the entire stoner world, the scandal sheets (ditto Howard Stern) loved Ozzy, too, for all the great copy he has provided over the years for things like pissing on the Alamo in drag and committing various acts of onstage carnivorism. There was no way I was not going to exploit this. If I didn’t, I just wouldn’t be doing my job.
When the mag came out a couple of months later, I leaked the story to Page Six, the world’s most-read celeb gossip column in my favorite right-wing hate sheet, the New York Post. They had always been friendly to High Times, at the very least because people like to snicker at a goofy pot mag. I wrote up a one-page press release, exclusive for them, and fired it off. They loved it. I was very careful not to explicitly accuse Ozzy of swiping anything, and to make sure that the tone was humorous, in the spirit of good fun, and in no way accusatory or angry. I spent a lot of time crafting my sound bite. The success of the piece and how High Times came off looking would depend on how funny (and hopefully smart) we seemed. But mostly it was just ridiculous— two of the world’s most notorious (and absurd) institutions get together, and the weed goes missing. Duh.
The next day the story appeared on Page Six in a featured box with a photo I had provided of Ozzy chewing on a fistful of reefer, the same shot that was used on our cover. We had hit a home run—there we were, our cover on one of the most widely read pages in the entertainment industry. It didn’t get any better. A-list celebs pay professional ass-lickers like Lizzie Grubman twenty-five grand a month for coverage like this.
Under the head OZZY: STICKY FINGERS, the story read:
OZZY OSBOURNE sure had fun during his photo shoot for High Times magazine. The metal musician appears on the front of the pro-marijuana monthly holding two huge handfuls of pot. But at the end of the day, a prop skull that held the reefer was lighter than before Ozzy arrived. “Let’s just say the skull weighed about two ounces less when Ozzy left the studio than it did when he came in,” chuckles publisher Mike Edison.
Aside from the fact that I do not chuckle (fat people chuckle, I laugh), I could not have asked for more. Howard Stern was talking about it on the air, and the phone lines were exploding: every radio station in the country, it seemed, wanted an interview with me, and I was glad to reply. That week, I did almost thirty interviews, hitting every media market in the country. I kept it light and a little goofy, denied knowing what really happened (“man, it was like sooo smoky in that room”), and made jokes about sticky buds. The day before, people were wondering if High Times was still being published. After that, everyone knew we were the “Most Notorious Magazine in the World.”
But the rank and file at High Times were less than happy. “Why’d you have to drop a dime on Ozzy, man?” “Why did you say he stole the pot?” Whoa! Where did I say he stole anything? The office was buzzing with mutiny. Hager was howling at the moon. I had committed a capital sin, and they were calling for my head, which meant everyone was calling uptown directly to the law offices of Michael Kennedy, one of the owners of High Times and the de facto Capo. He had hired me and would presumably fire me if there was enough pressure from the staff.
Except that Michael was fed up with being bothered by staffers every time the publisher made an unpopular decision—which, of course, is part of the job. But there was zero respect for authority at High Times, and trying to do an end run around the publisher had become thoroughly entrenched in the politics of the place, which were ruthless. Truly, this was an asylum run by the inmates.
One of Michael’s honey-voiced proxies called me in my office. “Mike,” she intoned, like a cross schoolteacher who was going to have to mete out some discipline. She sounded like she had nice legs. “What is going on down there? Everyone is calling us about this Ozzy fellow.” I explained what happened, omitting no details. “We understand,” she said, “that this man bites the heads off of bats.”
“Yes, I have heard those rumors,” I deadpanned.
”Then I wouldn’t be worrying too much about his reputation,” she said. “Thanks, Mike. Good job.”
The Ozzy issue was one of the bestselling issues in High Times history.
High Times is a family business. Founder Tom Forçade left the magazine to his immediate family, who lived in Arizona, and his New York lawyer, Michael Kennedy. It was Michael to whom, on Holmstrom’s recommendation, I had sent my résumé, and he had interviewed me in his office a few days later.
Michael Kennedy is very smart and very tough. When I met him, he was about sixty years old and wore his gray hair brushed back. For an infamously radical lawyer, he had relatively conservative taste in suits and ties, but he was still a very intimidating presence. At one time Nick Nolte could have played him in a movie.
Michael had been Tim Leary’s attorney and had worked closely with Yippie leaders, and he had defended Jim Mitchell, the famous porn producer who shot his brother and fellow pornographer, Artie Mitchell. Later Michael became known in more polite circles for representing Ivana Trump during her divorce from The Donald.
One of the stories he loves to tell is about the spoils of one of Tom Forçade’s legendary smuggling runs. Tom was somewhere in the swamps of Florida making a transaction, when the police crashed his party. Tom grabbed the profits—a suitcase full of dough—and took off into the woods. Lying low in the mire, he somehow managed to escape the cops and their bloodhounds. After hours of hiding in mud, he buried the dough and got the hell out of there. Days later, when the cops had finally split, he went back and retrieved the suitcase, which he brought to Michael. Of course the money was caked in filth and had to be washed and dried. Michael took a look at the mess and declared, “Tom, we’ve got a serious money-laundering problem here.”
For my interview with Michael for the editor’s job at High Times, I put on my best suit and painted my chest with a silk tie, circa 1949. I was—as Philip Marlowe says at the beginning of The Big Sleep—“neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”
After fifteen years of jockeying with loudmouth porn kings, ranting from my soapbox and proselytizing like a hopped-up preacher on the fundamental American birthrights of protected free speech and unfettered hedonism—after the shopping bags filled with knockout weed and the sheets of brain-twisting acid, after all the insanity and rock ’n’ roll, after four continents of gonzo mythmaking and drug-fueled pranksterism, magic buses, political outrage, and tasteless comedy— this was where I belonged. I was uniquely qualified to lead this magazine into the future. I was sure of it.
I had done my due diligence on High Times. Not only had I scoured their current issue—the one with Pancho Villa on the cover—but I had gone to the New York Public Library Periodicals Room and made a pretty thorough study of the last few years of the magazine as well.
I was shocked. I had not looked at High Times with any regularity since I’d stopped writing my column about ten years prior, in 1989. The later issues seemed unfocused. Not only was there little flair in the writing, but the actual type was unnecessarily small and hard to read. Later I would find out that this was because stories were going into the magazine without being edited, and they were often too long for the space. Sometimes the layouts were confusing—giant bursts of color without much rhyme or reason. Too often the best photographs were tiny—one piece about a fairly exciting summer rock festival droned on and on pointlessly, squeezing out photos that were no bigger than thumbnails. They had taken a story with a little bit of giddyup and slashed its tires.
And then there were the covers. Before Pancho Villa (seriously, Pancho Villa??) and the wooden shoe stuffed with pot, the most recent celebrity cover had been George Carlin, who in 1998 wasn’t much more than a warmly regarded relic. He would enjoy a much-deserved career renaissance, but it
certainly was not on account of High Times—he couldn’t even be bothered to have a new picture taken for the cover. They ran a tired publicity shot. To say it was amateurish would have been kind. The magazine looked like a souvenir program that someone had left under their chair after one of his shows—in 1974.
I went to meet Michael Kennedy with my copies of High Times flagged with Post-its. I didn’t want to reinvent the roach clip; there was a reason it had been around for almost twenty-five years. The brand name was indelible and widely respected, but its value had been diluted by retrograde editorial policy and indifference that left it hopelessly dated and listless. High Times had become an anachronism. It was the lava lamp of the publishing industry.
One of the worst things about the magazine was that it had become tame. What happened to the fuck-you attitude?
It seemed to me that it was one of the very few national publications that had carte blanche to say whatever it wanted without fear of reprisal. Isn’t that what the readers expected? They were outlaws—it was a drug magazine, for chrissake. If you look at the early issues, it was all there. Every issue felt like trouble brewing. But under the warm and fuzzy hippie hoodoo that Hager had been cultivating, the Easy Rider ethos had turned into politically correct gruel for the tofu-and-wheat-germ crowd. What I wanted to know was, did these crusty Rainbow types Hager was courting even have five dollars to buy a magazine?
Michael nodded in agreement.
He asked me about my politics and what I thought about drug laws. “I think all drugs should be legal,” I told him. “I just don’t think this country is ready for it.” I went on about the absurdity of locking up potheads, of locking up anyone just for getting high. It was the government’s job to protect us from bad people, not from ourselves. “And anybody who has the audacity to take a joint away from someone who is dying,” I added, “ought to be strung up in the town square and beaten with a stick.”
When I was called up for my second interview, I was offered a job—although not the one I thought I had been interviewing for. Apparently, impressed with my marketing plans and passion for taking the magazine forward, they thought I’d make an ideal publisher. At first I demurred. I was an editor; I had never been on the business side.
“But, Mike,” Michael reasoned, “you know how to work with an advertising department, right?” I did. “You’ve managed several magazines, and you have a good track record. You know every job on the floor.” It was true. Since I’d knocked Jeremy out of the ring to take over Main Event, I had watched everyone I had ever worked with like a hawk and had asked a million questions, and mostly everyone was eager to teach me what they knew. If I had to, I could write a story, lay it out, sell an ad on the facing page, and get the whole mess to the printer on time. I’m not saying I could ever be the art director of a magazine or the production director, but I knew the nuts and bolts. I loved magazines. Aside from playing music, it’s all I really ever wanted to do. This was an offer I could not refuse.
High Times would be celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in just over a year, and they wanted to ramp up business and take advantage of this mitzvah. The twenty-fifth anniversary issue needed to be the biggest and best issue in High Times history. I was up to the challenge.
And I would have support staff on the business side. John Holmstrom, who had been the publisher for the previous six years, told me frankly that it wasn’t rocket science and I would pick it up quickly. Mary McEvoy, the interim publisher after John and Hager were pushed out of the top slots, would still be on staff to help me crunch numbers.
Mary was a fish out of water at High Times: she was a publishing professional. A suburban mom who had enjoyed a good career in the magazine racket, mostly as a circulation and distribution expert, she had worked at Condé Nast and had helped on the start-up of maverick Sassy, the coolest teen mag ever until it got shut down for its frank shoptalk about masturbation and other “sensitive” topics. All of which gave her plenty of juice in my eyes. Mary was nice, knowledgeable, levelheaded, and without ego. She knew what the fuck she was doing and was happy to share her expertise, in direct contrast to our so-called Marketing Witch.
The Marketing Witch was a square who wanted desperately to be accepted by the hippies and, typical of High Times, put an undue premium on personal alliances. She was a Hager loyalist and yearned for his approval, and since I was a friend of Holmstrom’s, she was hostile to me from my very first day. A mean girl, steeped in a watercooler office culture of treachery and backstabbing, she was pure poison. It would have done me well to shit-can her on the way in.
Michael Kennedy was very clear in my mandate to be “hands on” with the new editor-in-chief they had hired, Paul DiRienzo, who had never worked as an editor of a magazine before. DiRienzo was an unrepentant anarchist-hippie with no clue about how to sell magazines, or why, for that matter, that was even important. His background wasn’t even in print journalism, it was in nonprofit news radio. Michael and the High Times owners felt that his super-serious commitment to hard left-wing politics would balance my damn-the-torpedoes approach to putting out a rock concert of a magazine.
In DiRienzo’s worldview, selling magazines was for capitalists, and capitalists were pigs. My edict to start thinking about High Times not so much as a pot magazine, but as a magazine, like a business, was written off as part of a crypto-fascist plot to get in bed with Exxon and McDonald’s, arms contractors, strip miners, Walt Disney, and all the other traditional enemies of The People. He was blissfully unaware of where the money even came from to keep High Times running, why we needed ads, or how we got the book to the readers. I think he assumed that the magazine ran on good vibes and fairy dust and was delivered to newsstands by our team of magical unicorns and dancing bears. He was remarkably lax with editors, contemptuous of deadlines, and bordering on juvenile in his blanket disregard for authority. I can’t really blame him for failing so spectacularly—he was completely unequipped to run a day-care center for potheads, much less one that put out a four-color magazine every month.
For his first act as editor, DiRienzo put Dennis Peron on the cover, an elderly gay pot activist who was running for governor of California on some sort of hemp ticket. Dennis was a good guy, definitely the kind of alternative politician we supported, but he wasn’t exactly Jimi Hendrix in terms of reader response. Still, you want your editor to edit, and you have to give the new guy enough rope. Not surprisingly, the issue sold miserably. His next brainstorm was to follow up with former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop killer now doing time on death row, where he had spent most of his time hurling invective and incendiary rants about injustice at the society who incarcerated him. Although he would never say what actually happened the night of the alleged murder, Mumia always maintained his innocence and had become something of a cause célèbre for the radical left.
When I balked at the wisdom of putting a convicted cop killer on the cover, DiRienzo started blabbing to his anarchist pals that High Times had been taken over by a suit.
A suit? Well, at least I owned one.
Personally, while I was never part of the “Free Mumia” crowd (like most people, I was never convinced of his innocence), I am all for shoving it up whitey’s ass. But I also had a responsibility to the owners of High Times to not run the magazine into the ground.
One day, there was even a protest in front of my office—a bunch of DiRienzo’s squatter pals picketing High Times’s “new fascist regime” or some such anarcho-twaddle. Instead of rallying support for his cause, DiRienzo had embarrassed the entire company by encouraging this rabble. It didn’t take long for the story to get out to the mainstream press, who were having a good laugh at our expense.
Michael Kennedy was livid. John Holmstrom brokered a meeting between DiRienzo and me in the hopes that DiRienzo would settle down. Holmstrom had lived through the Publisher-Editor Wars once with Hager, and he didn’t want to see it happen again. “Learn to get along,” he told us, “or neither of you
will last.” It didn’t work. The next day DiRienzo tried to foment an uprising at an editorial meeting by calling me “the capitalist mutherfucker in the publisher’s office.”
I was given permission to fire DiRienzo. It didn’t take long for the story to show up on Page Six. Under the headline “Smoked Out,” DiRienzo was quoted as saying, “I was trying to make it better, but they want a cult magazine.” I responded in the same article: “What is he talking about? All we’re trying to do is make High Times a magazine about getting high, not about getting busted.”
I was now publisher and editor in chief, and although the latter title would never be bestowed upon me, I was unambiguously stationed at the top of the masthead with the blessings of Michael Kennedy. I felt very positive. Finally, this was our chance to turn things around.
What was once the Voice of a Revolution was now perceived as nostalgia, a pamphlet for moldy fig potheads, the punch line to a thousand stoner jokes, and the de rigueur set dressing for low-budget reefer comedies.
But High Times was still an American icon, and when we took stock of our bona fides, it was immediately clear that the big gun in our arsenal was our large-caliber Don’t Fuck With Us Outlaw Attitude. What other magazine could say with a fair degree of certainty that its readership by and large consisted of unconvicted criminals?
As contraband, porn mags were passé. It might be embarrassing to be caught with a copy of Plumpers on Parade, but it wasn’t a Big Red Flag that said you were doing something illegal. No matter how much marijuana had become part of mainstream American culture, taken for granted, laughed at, and considered a key part of the daily diet for University of Florida freshmen, it was still against the law to possess it, smoke it, trade it, sell it, grow it, bake it in brownies, or make Day-Glo suppositories out of the stuff and gently insert them for even the most benign medical necessities. Generally speaking, the U.S. government is a humorless bunch of cocksuckers, and they do not care that you are not hurting anyone by getting high. They put you in jail for that shit.