Mike Edison, exceptionally 420 friendly
(Credit: Dave Allocca)
1. Sex magazines
2. Beer Magazine
3. Pot Magazine
Funny—he left out the wrestling. And the adult fiction.
At 22, Edison found himself in the particularly unconventional position of editor for mat-fan mag Wrestling’s Main Event. Know how he got the job? He beat his boss in a midnight match with what he refers to as his signature Heart Punch.
Edison, whose aforementioned book arrived May 13, details a life spent coming up through the lowbrow side of the magazine world. This was no mean feat, as he also authored 28 “adult novels” in nearly as many weeks; drummed his way through Europe in punk rock bands (and briefly for G.G. Allin); and penned articles for Hustler, Screw and Penthouse before taking over in 1998 as publisher for stoner rag High Times. (He left in 2001.)
We caught up with Edison on the eve of his book tour to discuss a quick history of illegal substances, the working environment of professional stoners and the near impossibility of a printed counterculture.
How long had you been planning to write this book? Were you keeping a journal? Considering most of what goes on, it’s amazing you remember anything.
Despite the pretty hideous amounts of drugs and strong liquor, my memory is really very solid. Of course, I talked to a lot of people who were around at the time—band members, ex-girlfriends who are still talking to me. Everyone remembers things the same sort of way. I didn’t have to embellish, to be honest. In fact, I had to leave some things out because I didn’t think that anyone would believe me.
Like what?
As I wrote the book, I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ, did we really drop that much acid? Were we tripping on acid every time we went to Madison Square Garden to watch wrestling? Every time it snowed, was that just an excuse to eat some more blotters?” I guess it was.
Maybe it’s me, but it seems like there’s just not as much acid around anymore…
Yeah, do people still drop acid anymore? I just don’t know. No one’s offered me any LSD in a long time [laughs].
Was it really that prevalent in the mid-’80s?
Paper acid was everywhere. And it wasn’t just the hippies; all my punk friends were doing it. I remember we dropped acid and went to see the Cramps. It was the night they recorded the Peppermint Lounge record. I think everybody there was on the same acid. Eyes like headlights. At a High Times party, a friend of mine was working the door, and she just ripped off a big sheet of blotter for me—there was something like 20 on there—and she says, “Do me a favor, take this for me. I’m getting in trouble because not enough people are eating it.”
And it was cheap, like only two or three bucks a tab, right?
Yeah. Maybe five. I remember it being pretty affordable.
Switching substances for a moment—in your book, you spend a few pages pondering the origins of the term “420.”
Well, 420 is so embedded in marijuana culture and in High Times culture, the prevalent myth being that it’s California police code for pot smoking.
But no such code exists, right?
It doesn’t really exist. But there’s a lot of really strange little occurrences. If you read various textbooks about drugs, some of that old propaganda, you’ll always read that there’s 420 different chemicals in marijuana. Weird, right? Also, that Bob Dylan song, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”? Twelve times 35 equals 420. What I think is most likely true is, there were these cats out in San Fernando, somewhere in Southern California. They met every day at 4:20 p.m. to get stoned, and that sort of became their little code. They’d put it on the flyers they’d hand out when they’d go out to see New Riders of the Purple Sage.
Even though you basically stopped smoking pot during work hours, how did a magazine like High Times function when everyone else was stoned?
Well, the thing is, it’s a fool’s paradise. You can smoke as much as you want, but you’re still at work. You can’t smoke yourself to the astral plane. You open your eyes and you’re still at a desk. No one says, “Oh I’ve gotta go, or I’ll be late for a party.” We worked really hard. That’s where I came from. I like things to be really sharp and real spot-on. A typo in High Times is much worse than a typo in the New York Times. At High Times, people will figure that you were stoned. At the New York Times, you put a paper out every day—there’s a million words in it, and a staff of 200 people—a typo’s going to happen once in a while. At High Times, you have 25 guys putting out a magazine once a month. If there’s an error, it’s because you’re asleep at the wheel.
Pornography is pretty easily defined by a magazine like Screw, but magazines like High Times are doing the same thing, just with pot.
It is pot pornography, and I think there’s a significant amount of hypocrisy there. They don’t like to think of it that way, but the magazine itself was based on Playboy. Unabashedly. High Times came out in 1974, which is ironic, considering that it wasn’t even a product of the ’60s. Screw started in 1968, and it was vociferous in protesting the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration. High Times came after all that, and Screw really paved the way for a lot of these things, especially what you could do in terms of free speech. But High Times just lost their nerve. Abbie Hoffman once said that “sacred cows make the best hamburgers.” Unfortunately, [editor] Steve Hager is a vegan.
In the book, you mention at one point that Hager replaced the High Times tagline with the milquetoast phrase “Celebrating the Counterculture.” Any ideas as to what sort of counterculture is left?
[Laughs] Print is kind of expensive for the counterculture. With blogs—and there’s just so many of them—at least they don’t have to answer to any kind of advertisers. But still, people aren’t reading as much. Information is so instantaneous. It’s like this: If you’re motoring down the highway at 100 miles an hour, how much do you really see? As things move faster and faster, they become worth less and less. At least the one good thing about books is that you still have to sit down to write them. You can write a blog in 15 minutes, but to sit down and write a book and maintain some sense of authority on your subject matter—it really does take time. You can also hit people over the head with a book. You can’t do that with a blog.
Mike Edison appears at Book Soup on May 19 at 7 p.m., with Sweet Joey Valentine on drums. A performance by the Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra to follow (perhaps) at a nearby watering hole. We’ll keep you posted.
George Ducker is a contributing editor for Metromix Los Angeles.
