For an article in the December, 1979 edition of High Times, late, great counterculture correspondent Glenn O’Brien examined the connections between Santa Claus and a specific kind of psychedelic mushroom known as the fly agaric, aka the toadstool that conquered the universe. In fact, the existence of Santa could be related to a shaman in Lapland who ate Amanita muscaria. Even the government supports the compelling association between Santa and the fly agaric. Was Santa a mushroom eater?

This year, as usual, you’re going to get a lot of reminders on the subject of the Real Meaning of Christmas. And, as usual, these reminders will just be reminders. They will say, “And don’t forget the Real Meaning of Christmas.” They won’t remind you what the Real Meaning is, they’ll just remind you to remember it. They will assume that you know what it is. And you do, don’t you?

The Real Meaning of Christmas goes something like this: Christmas is not just a time for spending vast sums on lavish gifts, eating and drinking heavily and observing a complex of celebration scenarios derived more from the Druids and Vikings than from the apostles. No, it’s not just that. First and foremost Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ. For Christians it is the holiest of holy days, marking the birth of a Divine Man. The first Christmas was the day God was made Flesh.

Now that is certainly something to bear in mind as you make your Christmas rounds this year. But don’t let it put a damper on your shenanigans. For unlike most of those who would like to remind you of the Real Meaning of Christmas, we are not suggesting that you have a solemn, meditative or restrained little Xmas. No, not at all. Maybe all of the wild partying and gift giving and the artificially good manners that have sprung up around the day and all of those funky old neopagan trappings like the mistletoe and the Yule log and that old elf Santa are not really so far removed from the most holy Real Meaning of Christmas after all.

High Times wants you to remember to do both things this Christmas—get wild and high and ponder the significance of this highest holiday. There may be more of a connection here than meets the first two eyes. Maybe there’s a Real Meaning of Christmas that’s even more real.

Let’s start with the basic Real Meaning: All of a sudden God is a man. That’s the first Christmas. And a first-class mystery. How did man become God? A tough question. The traditional religious answer is that God became man. But supposing it was the other way around. How did man do it?

That’s a very tough question—especially because there is very little agreement as to how man became man. But maybe the answers to both questions are similar, if not one and the same.

Most docs think that man got to be man by evolution. From apes. Then again the apes are still around. The mystery hasn’t been totally solved by science. Some researchers seek the key to the evolution of intelligence in the DNA molecule, some suggest it drifted here in virus form from other worlds. One evolutionary theory that gets better every day suggests that man became man through his apprehension of God through the ingestion of psychoactive plants—a phenomenon still popularly known as seeing God. And who knows, maybe man got to be God, or vice versa, in a similar fashion.

The first Christmas was two millennia ago, give or take a bit. Stories can change a lot in a week. So our search for the secret, inside story of the Real Meaning of Christmas won’t be easy. We’ll have to look at the facts. We’ll even have to keep thinking, What’s a fact? Above all, we’ll have to keep our inspiration level high and hope for a perfect coincidence of the scientific method and shamanism or pharmacological Gnosticism. So keep your eye on the interstice at all times. If this works, it might disappear.

The Secret Funk Gospels

To rehash, the basic premise: If a man takes drugs, he may see God. If an ape takes drugs, may he see man?

The case for psychoactive plants as prime catalysts in the evolution of human consciousness (“creation”) has advanced remarkably over the last 30 years, and what not long ago was lunatic-fringe thinking in academia is now a heavyweight contender of a theory. Its first great proponent was R. Gordon Wasson, who rediscovered in the ’50s the Mexican psilocybe-mushroom culture. He later published a landmark of scholarship called Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), in which he sought to prove that another psychoactive mushroom, the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), was the lost drug of the gods mentioned in the Vedic scriptures.

Another significant contribution to the idea was made by Andrija Puharich, whose Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity (Doubleday, 1959) made an impressive case for a similar usage of the fly agaric in ancient Egypt—although Puharich, unlike Wasson, did not limit himself to traditional research methods, and most of his data came through a medium.

Although the questions raised by Wasson and Puharich may have been hot questions in certain academic circles, they didn’t bring about a full-scale furor, nor did they instantly revolutionize modem thought. But in 1970 John M. Allegro, a distinguished philologist and the world’s foremost authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, exquisitely blew the finely tuned minds of his academic colleagues—philologists and theologians alike—with the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (Doubleday).

R. Gordon Wasson, in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, had already presented a distinguished scientific case for the fly agaric’s being Soma, the God-Plant of the Rig-Veda. And the research of Wasson and others had already established the widespread role of mushrooms in other shamanistic religions. But Allegro’s serious, scholarly case for Christianity’s being the decadent and totally misunderstood remnant of a tremendously powerful magical fertility cult that used a mushroom called Christ-Crucified was quite simply too much for almost everybody. It was bad enough that Allegro smoothly traced the origin of Yahweh to “juice of fecundity,” but to interpret the life of Jesus Christ as an allegory concealing a drug cult was simply preposterous. But, as Jesus said, “the last shall be first.” Right? Maybe that’s true for theories, too.

Anyway, even if it’s preposterous, it’s great Christmas reading and it certainly sheds a whole new light on the whole Christmas story. Allegro’s key to the Gospels is built into the fact that Semitic writing before and after the Gospel writers is uniquely rooted in puns as conveyors of multiple levels of information.

Jesus and his followers are not walking mushrooms but priests who used the various divine plants to heal, anointing the sick with them and casting out demons or various illnesses in their names.

According to Allegro, the sacred mushroom is the manna that fell from heaven and fed the Israelites in the desert. It is also the sacrament, the body and blood of Christ, that Jesus fed his apostles. It is the unleavened bread.

The body of Christ was born in a stable—traditional birthplace of mushrooms. At night. Of a virgin. The virgin birth is of particular interest since it explains the peculiar form of reproduction in fungi.

And no less an authority than Pliny is quoted as characterizing the Magi as “the great drug peddlers of the ancient world.” (Their gifts to Jesus were medicines and drugs.)

Whether or not there was a historical Jesus remotely resembling the object of Christianity is besides the point this Christmas, as the stars glide by Bethlehem.

You can’t write everything down. You have to use your imagination. Keep your eyes on the crèche.

According to Allegro, the real Christians wrote the Gospels when their cult was imperiled by Roman repression of the Jewish revolt of A.D. 66. He wrote:

“Instigated probably by members of the cult, swayed by their drug-induced madness to believe God had called them to master the world in his name, they provoked the mighty power of Rome to swift and terrible action….The secrets, if they were not to be lost forever, had to be committed to writing, and yet, if found, the documents must give nothing away or betray those who still dared defy the Roman authorities and continue the religious practices.”

The Gospels were the secret handbooks of the cult, and Allegro describes their intent:

“To tell the story of a rabbi called Jesus, and invest him with the power and the names of the magic drug. To have him live before the terrible events that disrupted their lives, to preach a love between men, extending even to hated Romans. Thus, reading such a tale, should it fall into Roman hands, even their mortal enemies might be deceived and not probe farther into the activities of the cells of the mystery cults within their territories.”

Of course this literary plot failed miserably and the cultists were persecuted like nobody else in history. Until the secret had to be covered, until the whole thing was forgotten. Almost. The greatest cover-up in history. And the cover organization, the copy of the original cult, became the greatest religion in the history of the world and invented Christmas, the greatest religious holiday in history.

Sound farfetched? Of course it is. And so are you. Look at all the things you did this year. All the stupid, selfish, dumb things. Jesus, of course, will forgive you. But what about Santa?

The Santa Connection

When it comes to Christmas, Santa is the one cat who can give Jesus a run for his money. Christmas might be intended to commemorate the birth of Jesus, but for the kids it’s mainly the arrival of Santa.

Now who is this Santa Claus character, and what does he want?

Actually, Santa Claus, like most success stories of today, is a conglomerate personality. He is, of course, Saint Nick, the patron saint of Greek sailors. But his real popularity began in Holland, where, known as Santa Klaas, he was associated with Christmas because of his alleged generosity, and thereby inspired the custom of gift giving. But obviously the Santa of today bears virtually no resemblance to Saint Nicholas (bishop of Myra, persecuted by Diocletian), who remains one of the more obscure martyrs on the heavenly roster. But even the Saint Nicholas of today, the patron saint of Russia, bears little resemblance to the “jolly old elf” who runs Christmas.

Most of Santa Claus’s characteristics, in fact, seem to be derived from Thor, the thundering hearth god of ancient blonds, who also celebrates his birthday on December 25th. Santa Claus is a sort of Thor emeritus, who held the old pagan rituals together in Europe under Christianity. He rides through the sky on a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer. And, of course, he can levitate, after placing a finger to the side of his nose.

Santa’s workshop is located at the North Pole. And what would he be without his red and white Santa suit? And for that matter, where would the Salvation Army be?

The truth of the matter is that the Santa suit depicts the Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom mentioned earlier. For one thing, his suit looks more like this mushroom than it does the suit of any other person, actual or fictional. If that isn’t enough, consider that Santa is the world’s largest employer of “little people.” It is well known that elves, gnomes, leprechauns and other diminutive types are often seen in the vicinity of these mushrooms, in the field and in children’s literature and interior design. And if that isn’t enough, what about the flying reindeer?

Well, anybody who knows anything at all about reindeer knows that there are two things in the world that reindeer crave: human urine and mushrooms, particularly the fly agaric mushrooms of the sort resembling Santa’s suit. It would seem that reindeer like to get off on amanitas as much as their Mongol owners do. No sane reindeer owner would consider whipping it out in front of one reindeer, much less ten, because the urine of the amanita user has the same potency as the mushroom.

Anyhow, this constellation of amanita clues could be laid to coincidence if it were not for the flying and the levitation, both symptoms of amanita eating in reindeers and humans.

It is also likely that Rudolph’s red nose comes from amanita consumption. And his ability to guide Santa’s sleigh through the densest fog in Christmas history is perhaps not from the actual illumination of his nose but from a sort of psychic radar. This same ability is perhaps what enables Santa to know when you are sleeping, to know when you’re awake, and to know when you’ve been bad or good.

And let’s not forget that you never see Santa without his cap.

As for living at the North Pole: Santa denies any connection with Hollow Earthers, Theosophists, the Nazi Party and UFOs. His only human contacts are a few neighboring Eskimo who trade in amanita and reindeer. Every once in a while they all get high and eat golden snow cones.

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In the “Opinion” section of the December, 1978 edition of High Times, famed writer Truman Capote (1924 – 1984) chats with art-world legend Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) about what they want for Christmas.

Merry Christmas…

AW: So do you know what you want for Xmas?

TC: Well, first of all, I don’t want anything for myself at Xmas, I think that’s very selfish and what not. I know what I want for other people.

• For Jackie Kennedy I want a sex-change operation. The reason is that since the American people must have a Kennedy, I’d rather have a Jackie than a Teddy.
• I want for Timothy Leary justice at last, a ten-year full professorship at Harvard.
• For Richard Avedon, I hope his portrait of Kate Graham finally makes the cover of Newsweek. You know, they took a picture of him for the cover of Newsweek and then discarded it because I don’t know…the Pope died or something.
• For Gore Vidal, because of his great politics, I wish him an ambassadorship to Paraguay…and hope he stays there forever.
• For Larry Flynt, the newborn Christian, I want him to be made first ambassador to the Vatican.
• For Norman Mailer, I want a five-million-dollar contract to rewrite the old Tenth Amendment.
• For Mick Jagger, in his old age, the directorship of the Metropolitan Opera.
• For Andy Warhol, at all times, the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum and all its branches.
• For Anita Bryant, I want her to be appointed editor of the Advocate.
• For Steve Rubell [owner of Studio 54], I want him to be appointed ambassador to the court of St. James.
• For Muhammad Ali, I want him to be our first black president.
• For Ralph Nader, a wife at last, none other than little Anne Ford.

Joy to the World…

AW: Is high society really high?

TC: I wouldn’t know, I never met anyone from high society. I think high society is a complete myth, made up from the movies. When Joan Crawford died, so did high society.

Amen…

AW. Do you think everything in the world should be legal?

TC: Yes, I do, except murder.

<p>The post A Christmas Carol by Truman Capote, as told to Andy Warhol first appeared on High Times.</p>

The post A Christmas Carol by Truman Capote, as told to Andy Warhol appeared first on Paradise Found.

In the September, 1977 issue of High Times, Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) discussed Carter, cocaine, adrenaline and the birth of Gonzo journalism with interviewer Ron Rosenbaum. In honor of Thompson’s birthday July 18, we’re republishing it below.

The first time I met Hunter Thompson was back in 1970, at the America’s Cup yacht race where Hunter had chartered a huge power yacht and was preparing to sail it full steam right into the middle of the race course. (This was shortly after his spectacular but unsuccessful run for the office of the sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on a mescaline-eating “Capitalist Freak Power” ticket.) When I arrived on board the huge yacht, I found Thompson ensconced on the command deck, munching on a handful of psilocybin pills and regarding the consternation of the snooty Newport sailing establishment with amusement.

We never did manage to cross the path of the cup contenders and Scanlan’s magazine went bankrupt before Hunter wrote up the whole fiasco, but I did learn one thing: this is a guy who understands the importance of perspective. He rode with the Hell’s Angels—and got himself a nasty beating in the process of getting a unique perspective on them. He loaded his car, his bloodstream and his brain cells full of dangerous drugs to cover a conference of drug-busting D.A.s and turned that experience into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a brilliant exploration of the dark side of the drug scene at the peak of Nixon’s power.

When he covered the 1972 presidential campaign as national affairs editor for Rolling Stone, Thompson’s special deadline-and-drug-crazed “Gonzo” journalism—his own patented mix of paranoia, nightmare, recklessness and black humor—would fill nervous secret service agents with fear and loathing on the campaign trail. Ever since then, Thompson’s become a kind of national character with millions of people following the exploits of “Uncle Duke”, in the “Doonesbury” comic strip.

This year too, Thompson had another very special but very different perspective: he’s widely reported to have become close to Jimmy Carter and to Carter’s inner circle from the time back in 1974 when he heard Carter’s now-famous Law Day speech. But curiously, there have been more articles speculating about Thompson—his relations with Jimmy Carter and Jann Wenner—this year than by him. He’s never put his own role into perspective until now.

High Times: How have your attitudes toward politics changed since you wrote about the ’72 presidential election in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail?

Thompson: Well, I think the feeling that I’ve developed since ’72 is that an ideological attachment to the presidency or the president is very dangerous. I think the president should be a businessman; probably he should be hired. It started with Kennedy, where you got sort of a personal attachment to the president, and it was very important that he agree with you and you agree with him and you knew he was on your side. I no longer give a fuck if the president’s on my side, as long as he leaves me alone or doesn’t send me off to any wars or have me busted. The president should take care of business, mind the fucking store and leave people alone.

High Times: So you developed a tired-of-fighting-the-White-House theory?

Thompson: I think I’ve lost my sense that it’s a life or death matter whether someone is elected to this, that or whatever. Maybe it’s losing faith in ideology or politicians—or maybe both. Carter, I think, is an egomaniac, which is good because he has a hideous example of what could happen if he fucks up. I wouldn’t want to follow Nixon’s act, and Carter doesn’t either. He has a whole chain of ugly precedents to make him careful—Watergate, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs—and I think he’s very aware that even the smallest blunder on his part could mushroom into something that would queer his image forever in the next generation’s history texts…if there is a next generation.

I don’t think it matters much to Carter whether he’s perceived as a “liberal” or a “conservative,” but it does matter to him that he’s perceived—by the voters today and by historians tomorrow—as a successful president. He didn’t run this weird Horatio Alger trip from Plains, Georgia, to the White House, only to get there and find himself hamstrung by a bunch of hacks and fixers in the Congress. Which is exactly what’s beginning to happen now, and those people are making a very serious mistake if they assume they’re dealing with just another political shyster, instead of the zealot he really is. Jimmy Carter is a true believer, and people like that are not the ones you want to cross by accident.

I’m not saying this in defense of the man. but only to emphasize that anybody in Congress or anywhere else who plans to cross Jimmy Carter should take pains to understand the real nature of the beast they intend to cross. He’s on a very different wavelength than most people in Washington. That’s one of the main reasons he’s president, and also one of the first things I noticed when I met him down in Georgia in 1974—a total disdain for political definition or conventional ideologies.

His concept of populist politics is such a strange mix of total pragmatism and almost religious idealism that every once in a while—to me at least, and especially when I listen to some of the tapes of conversations I had with him in 1974 and ’75—that he sounds like a borderline anarchist…which is probably why he interested me from the very beginning; and why he still does, for that matter. Jimmy Carter is a genuine original. Or at least he was before he got elected. God only knows what he is now, or what he might turn into when he feels he’s being crossed—by Congress, the Kremlin, Standard Oil or anything else. He won’t keep any enemies list on paper, but only because he doesn’t have to; he has a memory like a computerized elephant.

High Times: Did you ever have any ideology in the sense of being a liberal, a conservative…or were you an anarchist all along?

Thompson: I’ve always considered myself basically an anarchist, at least in the abstract, but every once in awhile you have to come out of the closet and deal with reality. I am interested in politics, but not as ideology, simply as an art of self-defense—that’s what I learned in Chicago. I realized that you couldn’t afford to turn your back on the bastards because that’s what they would do—run amok and beat the shit out of you—and they had the power to do it. When I feel it’s necessary to get back into politics, I’ll do it, either writing about it or participating in it. But as long as it’s not necessary, there are a lot of better ways to spend your time. Buy an opium den in Singapore, or a brothel somewhere in Maine: become a hired killer in Rhodesia or some kind of human Judas Goat in the Golden Triangle. Yeah, a soldier of fortune, a professional geek who’ll do anything for money.

High Times: You’ve received a lot of flak for your enthusiasm about Jimmy Carter’s Law Day speech in Athens, Georgia. Do you still like Carter?

Thompson: Compared to most other politicians, I do still like Carter. Whether I agree with him on everything, that’s another thing entirely. He’d put me in jail in an instant if he saw me snorting coke in front of him. He would not, however, follow me into the bathroom and try to catch me snorting it. It’s little things like that.

High Times: In that Law Day speech, Carter quoted Bob Dylan. Do you really think Carter cares about Bob Dylan’s music the way we do?

Thompson: I listened to Bob Dylan records in his house, but that was mainly because his sons had them. I don’t think he goes upstairs to the bedroom at night, reads the Bible in Spanish while listening to Highway 61.

High Times: Why haven’t you written anything about Carter and the ’76 campaign trail?

Thompson: I was going to write a book on the ’76 campaign, but even at the time I was doing research, I started to get nervous about it. I knew if I did another book on the campaign, I’d somehow be trapped.

I was the most obvious journalist—coming off my book on the 1972 campaign—to inherit Teddy White’s role as a big-selling chronicler of presidential campaigns. I would have been locked into national politics as a way of life, not to mention as a primary source of income….And there’s no way you can play that kind of Washington Wizard role from a base in Woody Creek, Colorado. I’d have had to move to Washington, or at least to New York…and, Jesus, life is too short for that kind of volunteer agony. I’ve put a lot of work into living out here where I do and still making a living, and I don’t want to give it up unless I absolutely have to. I moved to Washington for a year in 1972, and it was a nightmare.

Yeah, there was a definite temptation to write another campaign book—especially for a vast amount of money in advance—but even while I was looking at all that money, I knew it would be a terminal mistake. It wasn’t until I actually began covering the campaign that I had to confront the reality of what I was getting into. I hadn’t been in New Hampshire two days when I knew for certain that I just couldn’t make it. I was seeing my footprints everywhere I went. All the things that were of interest last time—even the small things, the esoteric little details of a presidential campaign—seemed like gibberish the second time around. Plus, I lost what looks more and more like a tremendous advantage of anonymity. That was annoying, because in ’72 I could stand against a wall somewhere—and I’d select some pretty weird walls to stand against—and nobody knew who I was. But in ’76, Jesus, at press conferences, I had to sign more autographs than the candidates.

Through some strange process, I came from the ’72 campaign an unknown reporter, a vagrant journalist, to a sort of media figure in the ’76 campaign. It started getting so uncomfortable and made it so hard to work that even the alleged or apparent access that I had to this weird peanut farmer from Georgia became a disadvantage.

High Times: You became a public figure?

Thompson: Thanks to our friend Trudeau.

High Times: Did Garry Trudeau consult you before he started including you as the Uncle Duke character in “Doonesbury”?

Thompson: No, I never saw him; I never talked to him. It was a hot, nearly blazing day in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I’d been inside in the press section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them saying, “Uncle Duke.” I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn’t seem to make any sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about. I had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I had no idea what this outburst meant. It was a weird experience, and as it happened I was sort of by myself up there on the stairs, and I thought: What in the fuck madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that morning.

High Times: So all this public notoriety was a burden in trying to return to the campaign?

Thompson: It was impossible because there was no way for me to stay anonymous, to carry on with what I consider my normal behavior, which is usually—in terms of a campaign—either illegal or dangerous or both….It was generally assumed that I was guilty—which I was.

High Times: So eventually you found that refuge in a kind of band of brothers?

Thompson: What? No, I have never had much faith in concepts like “a band of brothers”—especially in politics. What we’re talking about here is a new generation of highly competent professional political operatives and also a new generation of hot-rod political journalists who are extremely serious and competitive during the day, but who happened to share a few dark and questionable tastes that could only be mutually indulged late; at night, in absolute privacy….

Because no presidential candidate even wants to know, much less have to explain at a press conference, why rumors abound that many of his speech writers, strategists and key advance men are seen almost nightly—and sometimes for nine or ten nights in a row—frequenting any of the two or three motel rooms in the vortex of every primary campaign that are known to be “dope dens,” “orgy pads” and “places of deep intrigue.”

They simply don’t want to hear these things, regardless of how true they may be—and in 1976 they usually were, although not in the sense that we were running a movable dope orgy, right in the bowels of a presidential campaign—but it was true that for the first time, there was a sort of midnight drug underground that included a few ranking staff people, as well as local workers and volunteers, from almost every democratic candidate’s Staff, along with some of the most serious, blue-chip press people…and it was also true that some of the most intelligent and occasionally merciless conversations of the whole campaign took place in these so-called dope dens.

Hell, it was a fantastic luxury to be able to get together at night with a few bottles of Wild Turkey or Chivas Regal and a big tape deck with portable speakers playing Buffett or Jerry Jeff or The Amazing Rhythm Aces…yeah, and also a bag of ripe Colombian tops and a gram or two of the powder; and to feel relaxed enough with each other, after suffering through all that daytime public bullshit, to just hang out and talk honestly about what was really happening in the campaign—You know, like which candidate was fatally desperate for money, which one had told the most ridiculous lie that day, who was honest and who wasn’t.

In a lot of ways it was the best part of the campaign, the kind of thing I’d only be able to do with a very few people in 1972 and ‘68. But in ’76 we were able—because there were enough of us—to establish a sort of midnight-to-dawn truce that transcended all the daytime headline gibberish, and I think it helped all of us to get a better grip on what we were really doing.

I could illustrate this point a lot better by getting into names and specific situations, but I can’t do that now for the same reason I couldn’t write about it during the campaign. We all understand that, and the very few times I even hinted at this midnight underground, I did it in code phrases—like “tapping the glass.”

High Times: Tapping the glass. I wonder if you could explain that?

Thompson: Well, that’s one of those apparently meaningless code phrases that I use in almost everything I write. It’s a kind of lame effort to bridge the gap between what I know and what I can write without hurting my friends—sort of working on two or three levels at the same time.

High Times: So if you go back and read your stories, a scene where you talk about “tapping the glass” with Carter campaign staffer “X”…

Thompson: Right. That means chopping up rocks of cocaine on a glass coffee table or some mirror we jerked off the wall for that purpose—but not necessarily with one of Carter’s people. The whole point of this wretched confession is that there were so many people tapping the glass in the ’76 campaign that you never knew who might turn up at one of those midnight sessions. They were dangerously nonpartisan. On any given night you would meet Udall and Shriver staffers, along with people from the Birch Bayh and Fred Harris campaigns. Even George Wallace was represented from time to time; and, of course, there was always the hard corps of press dopers.

High Times: That’s amazing. You were covering this media-saturated presidential campaign during the day, then snorting coke at night with all those hotshot politicos?

Thompson: They weren’t very hotshot then.

High Times: OK. But since we’re talking about drug use during the ’76 campaign, it’s obvious we’re talking about people who are now in the White House, right?

Thompson: Well…some of them, yes. But let’s get a grip on ourselves here. We don’t want to cause a national panic by saying that a gang of closet coke freaks are running the country—although that would probably be the case, no matter who had won the election.

High Times: Times are definitely changing, eh? But since Carter won the election, let’s focus on him for a moment.

Thompson: Well, why not? Let’s see how thin a wire we can walk here, without getting ourselves locked up….Indeed, and meanwhile let’s rent a big villa in the mountains of Argentina, just in case my old friend Jimmy is as mean as I always said he was. Anyway, yeah, we’re talking about at least a few people in the White House inner circle; not Cy and Ziggy and that crowd, the professional heavies who would have gone to work for anybody—Carter, Humphrey, Brown. Shit, they’d even work for me, if I’d won the election.

High Times: The inner circle of Carter’s people are serious drug users?

Thompson: Wait a minute, I didn’t say that. For one thing, a term like serious users has a very weird and menacing connotation; and, for another. We were talking about a few people from almost everybody’s staff. Across the board….Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze or coke as we are—and we’re not weird, are we? Hell no, we’re just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?

High Times: Weren’t they nervous, or were you nervous, when you first started doing coke together?

Thompson: Well, I suppose I should have expected the same kind of difference between, say, the ‘72 and ’76 campaigns as I saw between ’68 and ’72. When I went to New Hampshire in ’68 I was a genuine unknown. I was the only person except for Bill Cardozo who would smoke weed, ever. I mean in the press. In ’72 it was a revolution in that sense, and people in the press openly smoked hash and did coke. So I should have expected it in ’76, but I hadn’t really thought of it. It stunned me a little bit in ’76 that coke was as common as weed had been in ’72 and almost right out in the open, used in a very cavalier fashion. As I say, in 1972 it was a fairly obvious consistent use of the weed by McGovern’s people, in ’68 it was McCarthy, but this time it was across the board.

High Times: In a way, what you’re saying is that it was a kind of truth-telling substrata of drug users, and that’s why you couldn’t write stories about it.

Thompson: Yes, for the first time I was really faced with the problem of knowing way too much.

High Times: Was this a good or a bad thing?

Thompson: I think it was good. It allowed people who would never under the circumstances have been able to sit down, get stoned and talk honestly about whether they should even be working there.

High Times: People are always asking how did you get away with it. Why aren’t you in jail with all the stuff you write about drugs on the campaign trail? Do you feel that the secret service was specifically tailing you after you started writing these articles about all the dope you had taken?

Thompson: No. I made my peace with the secret service early in ’72 when I went to a party in the Biltmore Hotel here in New York after McGovern’s primary victory, and there were about ten agents in a room. Three of them were obviously passing a joint around. The look on their faces when I walked in there…all of them turning to look when I walked in…it was a wonderful moment of confrontation. I didn’t want to be there, they didn’t want me in there. Immediately they just crushed the joint and tried to ignore it. But the room was obviously full of marijuana smoke.

High Times: And everybody knew that you knew.

Thompson: Oh yeah, of course. But I decided not to write about it—at least not right away.

High Times: Was there ever any kind of trouble with the secret service after that?

Thompson: No trouble at all, except when they tried to bar me from the White House during the impeachment thing. I called the guards Nazi cocksuckers or something, and in order to get in the White House I had to promise not to call anybody Nazi cocksuckers. I just waved my hand at the White House itself, you know, with Haldeman inside. I kind of got off that hook. And then I promised not to call anyone Nazi cocksuckers, and they let me in.

High Times: Some of your fans wonder if you ever make up some of the bizarre incidents you describe. You’ve said that all the outrageous drugs you did and things you did in your Las Vegas book were true, except the notorious incident where you supposedly paralyzed yourself with adrenochrome extract from live human adrenal glands.

Thompson: If I admitted that it was true, it was tantamount to admitting that I was a first-degree murderer of the foulest sort, that somebody would kill a child in order to suck out the adrenaline.

High Times: But in the book you didn’t say that you killed the kid. You just said that you got it.

Thompson: That’s right. I said that my attorney had gotten it from a client of his. What I was doing was taking what you normally feel from shooting adrenaline into the realm of the extremely weird.

High Times: Have you ever had that feeling? Shooting adrenaline?

Thompson: Oh, yes. Whenever it was necessary. Sometimes nothing else works. When you really have to stay up for the fifth day and fifth night…and nothing will work, not even black beauties. Then you shoot adrenaline. But you have to be very careful with it. First, don’t ever shoot it into a vein. That’s doom. But even then, you’ve got to be very careful because you can drive yourself completely berserk, and I’m sure it would be just the way I described it in Las Vegas.

High Times: I always thought you were talking in metaphorical terms when you said, “I like to work on the adrenaline.”

Thompson: Yeah, but usually my own. I’m really an adrenaline junkie; I never get anything done without the pressure of some impossible deadline.

High Times: How would you describe the adrenaline high?

Thompson: At its best it’s one of the most functional of all the speed sort of drugs in that it has almost no rush unless you overdo it, and almost no crash. I never considered speed fun. I use speed as fuel, a necessary evil. Adrenaline is much smoother and much more dangerous if you fuck up. I fucked up one time in a motel in Austin, Texas. I was very careless, and I just whacked the needle into my leg without thinking. I’d forgotten the vein thing, and after I pulled the little spike out, I noticed something was wrong. In the bathroom the tile was white, the curtain was white—but in the corner of my eye in the mirror I looked down and saw a hell of a lot of red. Here was this little tiny puncture, like a leak in a high-powered hose….You could barely see the stream. It was going straight from my leg and hitting the shower curtain at about thigh level, and the whole bottom of the curtain was turning red.

I thought, oh Jesus Christ, what now? And I just went in and lay down on the bed and told the people in the room to get out without telling them why; then I waited 20 minutes and all I could think of was these horrible Janis Joplin stories: you know, ODing in a motel…Jim Morrison…Jimi Hendrix…needles. And I thought, oh fuck, what a sloppy way to go—I was embarrassed by it. But after 20 minutes nothing happened. Then I really began to get nervous and I thought, oh God, it’s going to come all at once. It’s a delayed thing, like those acid flashbacks they’ve been promising all these years.

High Times: When are we going to have them?

Thompson: I’ve been waiting for a long time.

High Times: Once I asked a friend of yours why you are so attracted to Carter, and this guy says, well, Carter’s basically in a lot of ways a conservative good old boy and so is Hunter. Do you think that’s true in some ways, or that you’re a good old boy that’s gone weird?

Thompson: That sounds better. Good old boy gone weird. That’s a good line anyway. I wouldn’t deny that; I would just as soon admit it.

High Times: You had a fairly straight upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, didn’t you?

Thompson: Well, I was a juvenile delinquent, but a straight juvenile delinquent. The kind that wore white bucks, buttoned-down Oxford cloth shirts, suits. It was a good cover to use to rob crowded liquor stores. I discovered then that it helps to have a cover. If you act as weird as you are, something terrible is bound to happen to you, if you’re as weird as I am. I mean if I looked like I thought, I wouldn’t be on the streets for very long.

High Times: Were you ever busted?

Thompson: Yeah, repeatedly. I learned about jails a lot earlier than most people. On about ages 15 through 18 I was in and out of jails continually. Usually for buying booze under age or for throwing 55-gallon oil drums through filling station windows—you know, those big plate glass windows. And then I was expelled from school once—for rape, I think. I wasn’t guilty, but what the hell. We were in the habit of stealing five or six cases of beer on weekends to drink. That night was the Friday night after my expulsion. We did our normal run and stole about five or six cases. We took one of them and put it on the superintendent of schools’ lawn at one o’clock in the morning and very carefully put 20 whole bottles right through every pane in the front of his house. We heard them exploding inside, and they must have gone mad—you hear them in the bedrooms, in the living room, every window was broken. I mean, what kind of thugs would do that? Twenty-four hand beer bottle grenades…to wake up and hear the whole house exploding! Which window is going to be hit next? We deliberately took about ten minutes to put them through there because we knew they’d never get the cops there in ten minutes.

High Times: Makes you feel someone’s out to get you. Twenty-four bottles of beer, that’s heavy. So you were into overkill when making statements?

Thompson: That wasn’t overkill. It was massive retaliation, the court of final resort. I was expelled for something I hadn’t done or even thought about doing.

High Times: What is your favorite drug experience?

Thompson: Well, there are very few things that can really beat driving around the Bay Area on a good summer night—big motorcycle, head full of acid—wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and getting on that Highway 1 going 120 miles an hour. That’s a rush of every kind—head, hands—it’s everything put in a bundle. Because first of all, it’s a rush, and also it’s maintaining control and see how far I can go, how weird I can get and still survive, even though I’m seeing rats in front of me instead of cops. Rats with guns on…

High Times: How do you handle something like that?

Thompson: I never know. It’s interesting, always a different way. Mainly it’s figuring out real fast whom you are dealing with, and what their rules are. One of the few times I ever got in trouble, I wasn’t drunk or pumped up. I had a loaded .44 magnum in the glove compartment, a bottle of Wild Turkey open on the seat beside me, and I said, well, this is a good time to try that advice a hippie lawyer gave me once—to pull down the window just a crack and stick out my driver’s license. So I started to do that. I was just getting it out, when all of a sudden the door on the other side opened. I looked around, and here was a flashlight glaring right in my face, and right beside the flashlight was a big, dirty .57 magnum pointed at me. They didn’t give a fuck about my license. They jerked me out of the car and pushed me up against the side. I said something about my constitutional rights, and they said, “Well, sue us” or something and kicked my legs. So I gave it up and eventually I paid a $35 fine, because it’s easier than arguing. I had just bought the car. It was a Saab. The night before I had pushed my English Ford off a cliff in Big Sur, 400 feet down to the ocean, to get even with the bastard for all the trouble it caused me. We filled it with gasoline and set it on fire just before it went over the edge.

Ever since then I have made it a point to be polite to the California Highway Patrol. I have a National Rifle Association sticker on the back window of my car, so that any cop on the driver’s side has to pass that and see it. I used to carry a police badge in a wallet, and that helped a lot.

High Times: I reread Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas last summer. I loved it, but I felt it was really a sad book filled with regret for the passing of the San Francisco scene.

Thompson: No, not really. But I think almost any kind of humor I like always has a touch of melancholy or weirdness in it. I seem to be alone, for instance, in considering Joseph Conrad one of history’s great humorists.

High Times: Were you also down on the drug experience in that book?

Thompson: No. I kind of assumed that this was sort of a last fling; that Nixon and Mitchell and all those people would make it very soon impossible for anybody to behave that way and get away with it. It wouldn’t be a matter of a small fine. Your head would be cut off.

High Times: So it’s a real exploration of terminal paranoia.

Thompson: Well…It was kind of a weird celebration for an era that I figured was ending.

High Times: Maybe you can tell us the true story of the birth of Gonzo journalism. It was the Kentucky Derby story you did for Scanlon’s magazine in 1969, right?

Thompson: I guess it’s important to take it all the way back to having dinner in Aspen with Jim Salter, a novelist who had sort of a continental style. It was one of those long European dinners with lots of wine, and Salter said something like, “Well, the Derby’s coming up. Aren’t you going to be there?” And I thought, well, I’ll be damned. That’s a good idea.

I was working at the time for Warren Hinkle at Scanlon’s magazine. So I immediately called Hinkle and said, “I have a wonderful idea, we must do the derby. It’s the greatest spectacle the country can produce.” It was 3:30 in the morning or something like that, but Hinkle got right into it. By that time I’d learned to hate photographers; I still do. I can’t stand to work with them. So I said we’ve got to get an illustrator for this, and I had Pat Oliphant in mind. Hinkle said fine, you know, do it.

In an hour’s time the whole thing was settled. Oliphant wasn’t available, but Ralph Steadman was coming over on his first trip to the U.S. and it was all set up that I would go to Louisville and do the advance work, and Ralph would meet me there later.

I think I took off the next day. The whole thing took less than 24 hours. I got there and of course found that the place was jammed, there were no rooms and it was out of the question to get a press pass. The deadline had been three months earlier. It took me about two days to get two whole press kits. I’m not sure exactly how I did it. I traded off the outrage, which was so gross, that somebody from a thing called Scanlon, which we told them was an Irish magazine famous all over the world, was sending a famous European artist to illustrate the derby for the British Museum, weird stuff like that. They agreed to give me two of everything except passes to the clubhouse and the drunk tank—I mean the blue-blood drunk tank at the center of the clubhouse. That’s where Goldwater and all the movie stars and those people sit. The best seats in the house. They wouldn’t give us those. So I think we stole those.

In any case, we got total access to everything, including a heavy can of mace…Now this is bad, this is ugly. The press box is on the roof, directly over the governor’s box. And I had this can of mace, I’m not sure why…maybe for arguments; mace is a very efficient way of ending arguments. So I’d been fondling the can in my pocket, but we couldn’t find any use for it—nobody threatened me. I was kind of restless. Then just before the derby started we were standing in the front row of the press box, up on the roof, and just for the hell of it I blasted the thing about three times about 100 feet straight down to the governor’s box. Then I grabbed Ralph and said let’s get out of here. Nobody maces the governor in the press box. It’s not done. It’s out of the question. I have no idea what the hell went on in the box when the stuff hit because we took off. That was sort of the end of the story.

About two days later. Ralph had all the drawings done, and I stayed on to write the story, but I couldn’t get much done. That goddamned Kent State thing happened the Monday after the derby; that was all I could think of for a while. So I finally flew up to New York, and that’s when the real fear started. Most of the magazine was either printed or on the press out in San Francisco—except for my story, which was the lead story, which was also the cover story, and I was having at the time what felt to me like a terminal writer’s block, whatever the hell that means.

I would lie in the bathtub at this weird hotel. I had a suite with everything I wanted—except I couldn’t leave. After three days of not writing more than two pages, this kind of anxiety/depression syndrome builds up, and it really locks you up. They were sending copy boys and copy girls and people down every hour to see what I had done, and the pressure began to silently build like a dog whistle kind of scream, you know. You couldn’t hear it but it was everywhere.

After the third day of that horrible lockup, I’d lie in the tub for three hours in the morning drinking White Horse scotch out of the bottle—just lying in the tub, feeling like, “Well, I got away with it for a while, but this time I’ve pushed it too far.” But there was no alternative; something had to go in.

Finally I just began to tear the pages out of my notebooks since I write constantly in the notebooks and draw things, and they were legible. But they were hard to fit in the telecopier. We began to send just torn pages. When I first sent one down with the copy boy, I thought the phone was going to ring any minute, with some torrent of abuse from whoever was editing the thing in the New York office. I just sort of sat back and watched TV.

I was waiting for the shit to hit the fan….But almost immediately the copy boy was back and wanted more. And I thought, “Ah, ha, what’s this?” Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe they’re crazy, but why worry? I think I actually called Hinkle in San Francisco and asked him if he wanted any more pages and he said, “Oh, yeah. It’s wonderful stuff…wonderful.’’ So I just began to tear the fucking things out. And sometimes I would have to write handwritten inserts—I just gave up on the typewriter-sending page after page right out of the notebook, and of course Hinkle was happy as 12 dogs. But I was full of grief and shame; I thought this was the end, it was the worst hole I had ever gotten into. And I always had been almost pretty good about making deadlines—scaring people to death, but making them. This time I made it, but in what I considered the foulest and cheapest way, like Oakland’s unclean touchdown against Miami—off balance…they did it all wrong…six seconds to go…but it worked.

They printed it word for word, even with the pauses, thoughts and jagged stuff like that. And I felt nice that I hadn’t sunk the magazine by failing to get the story done right, and I slunk back to Colorado and said oh fuck, when it comes out I’m going to take a tremendous beating from a lot of people.

But exactly the opposite happened. Just as soon as the thing came out, I started getting calls and letters. People were calling it a tremendous breakthrough in journalism, a stroke of genius. And I thought, What in the shit?

One of the letters came from Bill Cardozo, who was the editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine at the time. I’d heard him use the word Gonzo when I covered the New Hampshire primary in ’68 with him. It meant sort of “crazy,” “off-the-wall’’—a phrase that I always associate with Oakland. But Cardozo said something like, “Forget all the shit you’ve been writing, this is it; this is pure Gonzo. If this is a start, keep rolling.” Gonzo. Yeah, of course. That’s what I was doing all the time. Of course, I might be crazy.

High Times: Is it sheer intelligence?

Thompson: Well, it’s more than that…Let’s not forget now I’ve had at least ten years of paying dues. I know I have some talent, whatever that means. Some people are good at money and some people are good at basketball. I can use words to my advantage, which is a great trick to have.

High Times: Are there some things in your notebooks you can’t put in your stories?

Thompson: All the best stories are unwritten. More and more I find that I can’t tell the whole truth about events. I have one book I’d like to write, and the rest will have to be done to pay the fucking rent. That’ll be the one where there’ll be no question if anybody’s lying. Well, there will be some question, but the truth is usually a lot weirder than anything you can make up. I’ll make sure that it dooms as many people as possible—an absolutely true account, including my own disaster and disappearances. To hell with the American Dream. Let’s write it off as a suicide.

Photo: Hunter S. Thompson by Lynn Goldsmith

The post High Times Greats: Hunter S. Thompson first appeared on High Times.

The post High Times Greats: Hunter S. Thompson appeared first on Paradise Found.

Among American intellectuals, Susan Sontag is probably the only Harvard-educated philosopher who digs punk rock. Sontag became famous in the Sixties when her series of brilliant essays on politics, pornography and art, including the notorious “Notes on Camps,” were collected in Against Interpretation—a book that defended the intuitive acceptance of art against the superficial, cerebral apprehension of it, then fashionable among a small hand of extremely powerful, rigid intellectuals who, for example, dismissed such American classics as Naked Lunch, Howl, On the Road, Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, etc., as trash. With the impact of her concise arguments, Sontag was immediately labeled the Queen of the Aesthetes, the philosophical champion of pop art and rock and roll.

Since then she has written many more essays, a second novel, edited the works of Antonin Artaud (founder of the Theater of Cruelty and an early mescaline user), made two films and undergone radical surgery and two years of chemotherapy for a rare and advanced form of cancer. Thus Susan Sontag continues to live on the edge of life and death, an unusual address for an intellectual essayist but essential for anyone who aspires, as she does, to tell the truth about the present.

Her first book in seven years, On Photography, was greeted this winter with the familiar violent controversy. Most reviewers treated it as an uncompromising attack on photography itself—everything from photojournalism to baby pictures— and a complete desertion of her Sixties art-for-art ’s-sake position for the lofty ground of analytical moralism. As Sontag makes clear for the first time in this interview, On Photography is not about photography at all, but the way it is put to use by the American system. Thus On Photography remains true to Sontag’s main idea of her task as a writer: to examine the majority opinion and expose it from the opposite point of view, putting emphasis on her “responsibility to the truth.” The method has proved explosive.

Sontag decided to give us an interview instead of attending a Ramones gig at CBGB’s because she thought it would be fun. She spoke intriguingly for hours about famous dopers she’d known (Jean Paul Sartre, a surprise lifelong speed freak, among them), grass, booze, punk rock, art, the Sixties and—always—truth.

High Times: I’ve been told that you don’t give very many interviews.

Sontag: No, I don’t. Sure.

High Times: Why are you giving this one to High Times?

Sontag: Well, I’m giving this one because I haven’t published a proper book in seven years. I’m giving an interview because… because it’s High Times. I was intrigued by that, sure. I thought, well, that’s odd. I hadn’t thought of that. And also because I’m going away, so it’s a little bit hit-and-run. And I suppose in a way I have been hiding.

There is a crisis you go through after a certain amount of work. Some people say after a decade, but when you’ve done a lot of work and you hear a lot about it and discover that it really does exist out there—you can call it being famous—then you think, well, is it any good? And, what do I want to go on doing? And, of course, you can’t shut out people’s reactions, and to a certain extent you do get labeled, and I hate that.

I find now that I am being described as somebody who has moved away from the positions or ideas that I advocated in the Sixties, as if I’ve reneged. I just got tired of hearing my ideas in other people’s mouths. If some of the things that I said stupidly or accurately in the Sixties, which were then minority positions, have become positions that are much more common, well, then again I would like to say something else.

High Times: Do you feel you have any responsibility for the effect of what you have to say on other people?

Sontag: No, I feel I have a responsibility to the truth. I’m not going to say something that I don’t think is true, and I think the truth is always valuable. If the truth makes people uncomfortable or is disturbing, that seems to me a good thing.

I suppose unconsciously I’m always making an estimate when I’m starting some kind of project of what people think. And then I say, well, given that people think this, what can be said in addition to this or what can be said in contradiction to that? There’s always some sense of where people are, so I do in a way think of my essay writing as adversary writing. The selection of subjects doesn’t necessarily represent my most important taste or interests; it has to do with the sense of what’s being neglected or what’s being viewed in a way that seems to exclude other things which are true.

But I find myself absolutely baffled by the question of the effect or influence of what one is doing. If I think of my own work and I question what effect it is having, I have to throw up my hands.

Beyond these baby statements like “I want to tell the truth” or “I want to write well,” I really don’t know. It’s not only that I don’t know, I don’t know how I would know, I don’t know what I would do with it. I’m always amazed at writers who say, “I want to be the conscience of my generation. I want to say the things that’ll change what people feel or think.” I don’t know what that means.

High Times: Do you think that the Sixties concept of a new consciousness changing things is rather lightweight?

Sontag: Yes. In a word.

High Times: And yet, drugs are now more a part of our society than they were in the Sixties.

Sontag: Absolutely. There was an article in the New York Times the other day about people smoking pot in public in the major cities, and that being absolutely accepted. That’s a major change. I have a friend who spent three years in jail in Texas for having two joints in his pocket. As he crossed from Mexico into Texas he was arrested by the border police. So these changes are important.

High Times: Do you have any feelings about an increasingly widespread use of drugs?

Sontag: I think marijuana is much better than liquor. I think a society which is addicted to a very destructive and unhealthy drug, namely alcohol, certainly has no right to complain or be sanctimonious or censor the use of a drug which is much less harmful.

If one leaves it on the level of soft drugs, I think the soft drugs are much less harmful. They’re much better and more pleasurable and physically less dangerous than alcohol. And above all, less addictive. So as far as that goes, I think fine. What bothers me is that a lot of people are drifting back to alcohol. What I rather liked in the Sixties about the drug use was the repudiation of alcohol. That was very healthy. And now alcohol has come back.

High Times: Do you think drugs encourage consumers?

Sontag: What I prefer about soft drugs as opposed to alcohol is that it seems to be more pleasurable; maybe it just has to do with my experience. I’m not terribly interested in soft drugs, but I certainly would prefer a joint to a whiskey any day. I think that I rather like the fact that soft drugs tend to make people a little lazier, and they don’t, at least in my experience, encourage aggressive or violent impulses. Of course if you’ve got them, nothing’s going to stop you from acting them out.

But I don’t feel that drugs are any more connected with consumerism. It’s just a historical phenomenon that the drug culture became widespread at a moment when the consumer society was more developed. And, on the contrary, in North Africa, in Morocco, which is a country that I know pretty well, the new thing for the past 20 years among the younger, more Westernized Moroccans is alcohol. They think of hashish as the drug of their parents, their parents being lazy and not interested in consumption and getting ahead and modernizing the country. So the young doctors and lawyers and movers and groovers in Moroccan society tend to prefer alcohol.

High Times: I think it’s interesting that in this society we take drugs a lot, and in other societies they don’t take drugs at all. What’s the difference?

Sontag: I think what interests me now, the little I know about it, is that this is now becoming a mature drug society, in relation to, let’s say, Western Europe. This is because we have enough time that people have been taking drugs in different strata of the society; that we’re getting different kinds of drug cultures and even a kind of naturalization of the drug thing; that it’s not a big deal. Whereas in a country like France or Italy, which I know pretty well, they’re about where we were ten years ago. It’s still a kind of spooky thing, it’s a daring thing, it’s a thing that people use in a rather violent or self-destructive way.

High Times: Do you do any of your writing on grass?

Sontag: I’ve tried, but I find it too relaxing. I use speed to write, which is the opposite of grass. Sometimes when I’m really stuck I will take a very mild form of speed to get going again.

High Times: What does it do?

Sontag: It eliminates the need to eat, sleep or pee or talk to other people. And one can really sit 20 hours in a room and not feel lonely or tired or bored. It gives you terrific powers of concentration. It also makes you loquacious. So if I do any writing on speed, I try to limit it.

First of all, I take very little at a time, and then I try to actually limit it as far as the amount of time that I’ll be working on a given thing on that kind of drug. So that most of the time my mind will be clear, and I can edit down what has perhaps been too easily forthcoming. It makes you a little uncritical and a little too easily satisfied with what you’re doing. But sometimes when you’re stuck it’s very helpful.

I think more writers have worked on speed than have worked on grass. Sartre, for instance, has been on speed all his life, and it really shows. Those endlessly long books are obviously written on speed, a book like Saint Genet. He was asked by Gallimard to write a preface to the collected works of Genet. They decided to bring it out in a series of uniform volumes, and they asked him to write a 50-page preface. He wrote an 800-page book. It’s obviously speed writing. Malraux used to write on speed. You have to be careful. I think one of the interesting things about the nineteenth century is it seems like they had natural speed. Somebody like Balzac…or a Dickens.

High Times: They must have had something. Perhaps it was alcohol.

Sontag: Well, you know in the nineteenth century a lot of people took opium, which was available in practically any pharmacy as a painkiller.

High Times: Would opium be good to write on?

Sontag: I don’t know, but an awful lot of nineteenth-century writers were addicted to opiates of one kind or another.

High Times: Is that an interesting concept, the relationship between writers and drugs?

Sontag: I don’t think so. I don’t think anything comes out that you haven’t gotten already.

High Times: Then why is there this long history of writers and stimulants?

Sontag: I think it’s because it’s not natural for people to be alone. I think that there is something basically unnatural about writing in a room by yourself, and that it’s quite natural that writers and also painters need something to get through all those hours and hours and hours of being by yourself, digging inside your own intestines. I think it’s probably a defense against anxiety that so many writers have been involved in drugs. It’s true that they have, and whole generations of writers have been alcoholics.

High Times: Is it possible to say what it is that makes someone want to write?

Sontag: I think for me it’s first of all an admiration of other writers. That’s probably the greatest single motivation that I have had. I’ve been so overcome by admiration for a number of writers that I wanted to join that army. And even if I thought that I was just going to be a foot soldier in that army and never one of the captains or majors or generals, I still wanted to do that thing which I admired so intensely. But if I’d never read so many books that I really loved, I’m sure I would not have wanted to be a writer.

High Times: You recently said that artists should be less devoted to creating new forms of hallucination and more devoted to piercing through the hallucinations that nowadays pass for reality. Do you think artists have a responsibility to arrest decay?

Sontag: Artists are no different than anybody else. They are first of all creatures of the society that they live in. I think one of the great illusions that people had—and that I shared to a certain extent—was that modern art could be in some kind of permanent adversary, critical relationship to the culture. But I can just see more and more of a fit between the values of modern art and the values of a consumer society.

I don’t think any of this can be described in the simple way people used to do in the Sixties, talking about being co-opted. It’s a much more organic relationship. It’s not that things start out being critical and get taken up by the establishment. It’s that the values in a great deal of avant-garde or modern art are values that fit perfectly well in a consumer society, where everyone’s supposed to have pluralistic taste and standards are subjective and people really don’t care about the truth.

High Times: Do you see punk as a moral movement?

Sontag: I really don’t know how to answer that. One is so suspicious of what one’s reactions might be because one is ten years older. I remember when I first heard the Rolling Stones. When I went to their very first concert in New York at the Academy of Music, I was absolutely thrilled. But I was ten or twelve years younger than I am now. I haven’t gone to any punk rock concerts, but I have some records. And I find in the lyrics something rather different, a kind of despair that I didn’t feel with the Rolling Stones. I mean, I don’t feel offended, I don’t feel outraged, it’s nothing like that, but I feel a sort of bleakness. I agree that the society that is so nihilistic at its core does not deserve a sanctimonious art which simply covers up the inner bleakness of the society, so in that sense, of course I’m not against…

High Times: It releases a lot of energy when someone suddenly puts their finger on the pulse of the time. I know from being in England in ’62 when the Beatles broke. It simply made everyone feel good.

Sontag: I’d like to believe in the comparison you’re suggesting, and I try to think that way too because I’m horrified by this kind of sanctimonious moralistic reaction to everything, and I remember exactly what you’re describing. I remember saying to myself, to my son and to friends, I’ve never felt so good. I felt a physical energy, a sensual energy, a sexual energy, but above all a feeling in my body…

But you see, I think the Sex Pistols and the other groups would be quite acceptable if they seemed more ironic to people. And I think they are very ironic. But I think they’re not perceived as ironic, and once they are perhaps that will be their form of domestication. Then it will be perfectly all right. You see, listen, I didn’t want to be labeled the Queen of the Aesthetes in the Sixties, and I don’t want to be the Queen of the Moralists in the Seventies. It’s not as simple as that at all.

High Times: I think you’re being forced into that position.

Sontag: Well, I see that now, I see that in everything that I have dared to read about myself that thing comes up. Something that interests me less and less is the narcissism of this society, is the way that people just care about what they’re feeling. And it isn’t that I think there’s something wrong about caring about what you feel, but I think that you have to have some vocabulary or some stretch of the imagination to do it with, and it seems that the means are shrinking.

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, well, I’m feeling fine. I’m very laid back, er wow, terrific.”

What is being said about feelings is less and less. It’s awfully primitive. You do your thing and I’ll do my thing. That kind of attitude seems very shallow. It seems as if an awful lot of complexity has been lost. If one can keep the debate going between the aesthetic way of looking at things and the moralist way of looking at things, that already gives more structure, more density to the situation.

If I seemed to be championing the aesthete’s way of looking at things it’s because I thought the moralists really did have it all their way at the time I started writing in the Sixties. If I seem to be championing a moralistic way of looking at things it’s because there seems to be a very shallow aestheticism that’s taken over. It’s certainly not the aestheticism that I was associating myself with.

Oscar Wilde remains one of my idols. I haven’t changed. I don’t repudiate what I said then, but I hear echoes of a kind of superficial nihilism that seems associated with an aesthetic position that drives me up the wall. It seems that people have become so passive. When you mentioned the word energy, of course if I can see punk rock in that way I can feel it, and of course it’s not possible to get it by playing a couple of records on this inadequate stereo; you have to be in an audience. I remember the Academy of Music in 1964. What it was like to be in that audience that day was incredible.

High Times: You should go down to CBGB’s, that club on the Bowery.

Sontag: Yeah, I wanted to go down and see the Ramones.

High Times: You’ve said that what you’re personally looking for is art that would make you behave differently.

Sontag: Yeah, I’m looking for things that will change my life, right? And that of course will give me energy. And I don’t mean moral lessons in this dry sense, but something that would give me energy, that would also not simply provide me with this kind of fantasy alternative but would be an alternative that could be lived out, that would make my way of seeing things perhaps more complicated rather than less complicated.

See, I think a lot of what we get most pleasure out of is essentially simplifying. First of all, most of art in the last hundred years has been saying everything is terrible, and then it says the only thing one can do is resist the temptation of suicide, if that, or forget it, lie back, go with it, enjoy it, it doesn’t matter. It seems to me that one should be able to go beyond those alternatives. I don’t know how exactly.

High Times: How do you feel about the future of the planet?

Sontag: Terrified.

High Times: But people say that: “Terrified.” But I mean do you live in a state of fear?

Sontag: No, I don’t live in a state of fear, but I live in a state of desperate concern. I lead a life which is incredibly privileged. We were talking earlier about why I don’t make much money, but still just by virtue of being an American, by virtue of doing work that I want to do, that I would do whether I’m paid for it or not, by virtue of being white. I am in a tiny minority of people on this planet. So I don’t live in a state of terror; it would be presumptuous of me to be terrified, since I’m always so infinitely privileged just by being: one, American: two, white; and three, someone who’s not a wage slave. But how can one not be full of dread?

Just consider the demographic figure that India is adding 14,000,000 every year. That is to say, a hundred million people every six years. That’s when you subtract the deaths from the birth rates. More and more people go to bed hungry every night. More and more people are born than should be born. The environment is becoming more and more polluted, more and more carcinogenic. All kinds of systems of order are breaking down. Lousy as they may be, it’s not very likely that one’s going to replace them with a better one.

One of the few ideas that I formulated in a very simple way is that however bad things are, they can always get worse. Well, I got very tired in the Sixties with people who were saying that things couldn’t be any worse. The repression of the State, fascist America….Things were terrible, the Vietnam War was an abomination; but all kinds of terrible things have happened in this country, and things can always get worse. It’s wrong to say that things can’t get any worse. They can.

I think there are long-range ecological and demographic factors that don’t seem to be reversible, so that one thinks there will just be a series of catastrophes of one kind or another—world-wide famines or breakdowns of social systems, increasing amounts of political repression. That, I think, is the fate of most people in the world. I think the United States is in a very special position. I don’t think the breakdown of this system is imminent at all. But at what a cost to the rest of the world! I mean, the United States has 6 percent of the population of the world, and we’re using 60 percent of the resources and creating 60 percent of the garbage.

High Times: Does it annoy you?

Sontag: No, it doesn’t annoy me, it outrages me.

High Times: Yeah. I just find it hard to deal with those kinds of words, like terror and outrage. Because you’re outraged by this and yet, excuse me, but your latest book is—I find it a very interesting book— but it’s about photography.

Sontag: It’s not about photography!

High Times: Ah! Fair enough…

Sontag: (Laughing) Now you’ve got me. I said it, and I didn’t mean to say it. It’s not about photography, it’s about the consumer society, it’s about advanced industrial society. I finally make that clear in the last essay. It’s about photography as the exemplary activity of this society. I didn’t want to say it’s not about photography, but it’s true, and I guess this is the interview where that will finally come out. It isn’t, it’s about photography as this model activity which has everything that’s brilliant and ingenious and poetic and pleasureful in the society, and also everything that is destructive and polluting and manipulative in the society. It’s not, as some people have already said, against photography, it’s not an attack on photography.

High Times: I think you’re a great celebrator of photography.

Sontag: Well, of course it’s been one of the great sources of pleasure in my life, and it seemed to me obvious that that was the origin of the book. It’s about what the implications of photography are. I don’t want to be a photography critic. I’m not a photography critic. I don’t know how to be one.

I have gotten immense pleasure out of photographs. I collect them, cut them out, I’m obsessed by them; to me they’re sort of dream images, magical objects. I go to photography shows, I have hundreds of photography books. This is an interest that antedates not only the books, but it’s part of my whole life. But I think one can’t think about photography. This is a book that’s an attempt to think about what the presence of photography means, about the history of photography, about the implications of photography.

High Times: Do you think we’re going to see any extreme changes in this country within the next ten or fifteen years?

Sontag: I ask myself that all the time. A couple of years ago I would have said yes right away. Around ’73-’74 it seemed that things were changing very rapidly and for the worse. It seemed to me that there was obviously an immense reactionary current in the country, that things were going to be very depressing. One thing I want to disassociate myself from, although I’ve said some things that could contribute to it, is this facile repudiation of the Sixties. I mean the Sixties were a terrific time. It was the most important time in my life. If perhaps in the end we were too busy having a good time and thought things were a little simpler than they turned out to be, it doesn’t mean that most of what we learned isn’t very valuable; and we want to hang onto that and not be seduced by some kind of new simplification or this kind of pervasive demoralization of the Seventies.

I feel very irritated by the way people are so demoralized. What has gotten lost in the past few years is the critical sense. I mean what people finally took from the Sixties was that it was okay to do your own thing, that a lot of what seemed to be political impulse was in fact just some kind of pyschotherapeutic effort, and that what one thought or hoped was the growth of some kind of serious critical political atmosphere in the country proved to be an illusion. And so you have the same people who went to Vietnam demonstrations becoming the slaves of gurus and psychiatric quacks a couple of years later. That was disappointing. But it was on the whole a very positive change, I think.

High Times: Then your answer to the question is that at least at the moment you don’t see anything that suggests that we’ll see extreme changes here in the near future?

Sontag: I think the first thing to say is that this society is immensely powerful and that this regime, this system is immensely powerful, immensely successful, immensely entrenched, is very clever, has tremendous capacity for absorbing criticism and using it, not just silencing it but using it. And that there have to be real structural changes to make a difference, otherwise I think people are going to go on in this consumer way, riding along with things as far as they can, being drugged by consumer goods and averting their eyes to the pending catastrophe.

This country is so rich and so powerful and so privileged. I don’t think the present mood is anything other than transition. What I worry about much more is the growing force of reaction. That’s why I hate to be labeled as a moralist, because I think that an awful lot of bad things are going to happen in the name of moralism, and one has to be very suspicious.

High Times: How do you feel at this point about your future?

Sontag: I want to be a better writer. It seems it would be about getting better. To go on.

High Times: But you must feel that there are totally undiscovered things in front of you?

Sontag: If I didn’t feel that I could discover things that would be very different from what I’m doing, or if I didn’t feel that the work I’m doing is part of an approach to something… but I do feel that it’s always going somewhere. And yet there must be something wrong with that attitude, too. One could go on and on. Say I beat this rare illness and have a long, long life, would I then just go on forever saying I’m getting there, I’m getting there, I’m getting there, until one day my long life would be over?

The post From The Vault: Interview With Susan Sontag, The Dark Lady Of Pop Philosophy (1978) first appeared on High Times.

The post From The Vault: Interview With Susan Sontag, The Dark Lady Of Pop Philosophy (1978) appeared first on Paradise Found.

A conversation between Lesley Morrissey and an unnamed individual who said he was JFK’s weed dealer, first published in the Fall, 1974 issue of High Times.

The man who claimed to know the Kennedys leaned over his pâté and confided to me.

“Before I contacted you, I investigated a bit to see if High Times was legitimate.”

Across his suite, he assayed the departing waitress from room service.

“Yes, we had you checked out, too,” I said. I told him how I’d been making discreet inquiries for a week to determine if he did indeed move in the Kennedy circles and had only then confirmed the interview. We agreed to meet at his suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. I was met by a dapper, politely tanned man in his mid-forties. He greeted me unhurriedly and began what was a fluent, one-sided conversation.

“You see, I feel that what I know about Jack, Bobby, and Ted is in no way harmful to their reputations. In fact, I’m willing to wager that, had Jack lived into a second term or Bobby been elected president, the marijuana laws would have been stricken.”

He paused, reached inside his corduroy sport jacket, produced a tortoise shell cigarette case and flipped it open.

“Like to turn on?” he asked, smiling.

“Sure,” I said.

I asked him to give me some background: how he had come into the Kennedy circle and how he related to their lifestyle. He stared down at his cuff and then looked up.

“Well, I can’t really be considered part of the inner circle. You know about people like Kenny O’Donnell, Paul Fay, Dave Powers, Joey Gargan and the rest who were always by the Kennedys. That’s not my people. My background is like a lot of those fellows, but it’s taken me a long way from the power plays and inner workings of the family. I graduated from Harvard in 1954.”

“Did you turn on at Harvard?”

“No, not at Harvard. Somewhere along the line I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and after graduation I took a job with a major news magazine. By 1957, I had gotten myself assigned to Havana. That’s where I first turned on. Batista’s regime was at its rottenest, but the place was rife with dope, gambling and colorful characters. In fact, it was going to Cuba that brought me into contact with the Kennedys again.”

“What was Cuba like in those days?”

“If you remember, the late ’50s saw Fidel Castro’s star rise. We all felt sympathetic toward Castro—it was the romantic thing to feel in those days—but we never dreamed he’d get in. As it happened, I was among the first to be booted out.”

“But I had made the right contacts in Cuba, especially in the black market and government—there was little difference—so when I returned to the States, I was considered something of an authority on Caribbean affairs. At this time I was thirty years old, smoking a lot of excellent grass, dealing a little to my less well-connected friends, and becoming a surprising success. And I made sure to maintain all my contacts, too.”

“But how does this bring you to the Kennedys?”

“At Harvard I knew Ted Kennedy; we ran in the same circles, were both rather jockish as undergraduates and our fraternities mingled at parties and things. I remember I supported Jack’s candidacy for the Senate in 1952 and worked the campus trying to drum up votes.” He laughed ruefully. “I would run into Ted around the commons doing the same thing. Hell, I even remember the flap when Ted was caught cheating in a Spanish final.”

“So I wasn’t really surprised when, several months after I returned from Cuba and Jack was president, I was contacted by a friend of Ted’s at the White House and asked to submit a report on my work down there and any recommendations I had. I knew the President had a love for fine Cuban cigars, so I took down a beautiful handmade humidor full of a custom blend of Cuban tobacco, hand-rolled in Jamaica. It turned out the meeting wasn’t private but a debriefing of four journalists who had covered the Cuban revolution. After the meeting, I handed him the cigars and he thanked me. Then he took a good look at the cigars and when he did, he invited me to stay and smoke one with him.”

He sucked on his Scotch and leaned back.

“You know, Jack’s back was always giving him trouble. He had been seeing a doctor who was later written up in New York magazine as “Dr. Feelgood”, getting shots that were a combination of speed, vitamins, cocaine and cortisone. His back was bothering him the day we met and I suggested he try something to ease his pain that wouldn’t dull or agitate him like the drugs he was taking. I gave him a quick rundown on marijuana: its effects, its history, my experiences with it and the archaic laws surrounding its use. He was genuinely curious. It was something to which he had never given much thought, even during his investigative days in the Senate.”

“Do you mean that he was completely ignorant about pot?”

“Oh, of course not. You couldn’t possibly party with the show business types and international celebrities that the Kennedys favored and not know something about grass. And, of course, he was always sharp as hell and wasn’t easily buffaloed by anti-pot propaganda. The late fifties saw a lot of drastic changes in lifestyles… beatniks, avant-gardists, abstractionists and movie stars like Brando and Dean who cashed in on rebellion. Jack was a consummate politician; he was aware of all these changes in taste. He’d just never tried pot until I turned him on. At least as far as I know.”

I had visions of handsome John Kennedy toking away behind his captain’s desk, easing his back pain, while a dour Lyndon Johnson is kept cooling his heels with Mrs. Lincoln in the antechamber.

“Of course, I didn’t turn on with him. I just arranged to have the weed delivered to him,” he added.

“How much did you give him?”

“At the time I had old friends from my Caribbean days sending me a few pounds a week, in fact, they still do! I’d joined the international bureau of a large weekly news magazine and in those days a package from Mexico City or Bogata wasn’t cause for undue suspicion….”

“Early one evening I received a phone call at my apartment in Georgetown. It was one of Jack’s most trusted press liaisons, who informed me the President was planning a short vacation. He was taking his boat out with family and friends, and I was asked if I could provide him with the memos I had drawn up in accordance with our conversation two weeks earlier. Could I have everything ready by ten o’clock that night? I knew exactly what was meant by the call, because the President hadn’t asked me to draw up any memos. By ten I had prepared a manila folder full of blank paper. Inside was an ounce of fresh Panamanian from a shipment I’d received the day before. At ten on the dot I answered the door to find a familiar press officer who took my ‘notes.’ You know, Red Fay wrote about Jack’s habit of taking late night rides through Washington. I think he overlooked one very important ride, because I swear Jack was inside the black limousine parked at my curb.”

“Did the President ever contact you again?”

The gentleman’s face sagged slightly. “No, not exactly. I received a letter shortly after that night, thanking me for my cooperation and expressing hope that we might meet again for an informal chat. The limousine came several more times, but I’m not really sure who was getting the stuff. His stay was so short you know, one thousand days they say, that many of us caught only the quickest glimpse of the real John Kennedy… the Kennedy who was so open to life that he was willing to expose himself to a virtual stranger and try something he knew the public might find horrifying.”

“Would you know if Jackie turns on?”

“I can’t really say for sure that Jack smoked the dope, though I assume he did, considering my later contacts with Bob and Ted. I’ve never met Jackie, but you know I’ve heard talk that Onassis made some of his fortune smuggling cocaine and heroin after the war.” A pâté finished, he was now drawing heavily on his second Scotch. “Of course, you can hear anything down in the islands.”

“You just mentioned your later contacts with Bobby and Ted. Could you tell us about them?”

“Do you remember Allen Ginsberg’s account of his talk with Bobby in 1968, where he asks Bobby if he had ever smoked pot and Bobby refuses to answer him directly, but keeps evading the question?” he asked.

“The interview when Ginsberg chanted the Hare Krishna chant in Bobby’s office?”

“Correct. Well, Allen thought Bobby was being insensitive by not giving a direct answer. He didn’t understand Bobby’s style, the intensity at which Bobby worked. By 1968, I think Bobby had decided the pot laws should be changed, but he wanted to approach the issue when it could be won and he was storing up all the impact of his decision for the right moment.”

“I first met Bobby in Los Angeles at the 1964 Democratic Convention. Earlier in the year I had lost my job—drinking—and I had driven down to the Convention, knowing I could get freelance assignments. Like many others, I expected Bobby to be chosen as Vice-Presidential candidate. And I was absolutely awestruck by his reaction to the crowd. Understand, the public impression of Bobby had always been one of ruthlessness—the little fellow who tore after the Teamsters, miffed Lyndon Johnson, and shoved civil rights down the racist throats of America. But there he was, absolutely vulnerable and in tears at the accolade.”

“Later, at a cocktail reception, I spoke with him for about two minutes. I told him if I could be any help in the future, to let me know. What was unnerving was his spontaneous recognition of me. When I approached him, I expected that Kennedy coolness, especially to someone on the fringes. I didn’t cruise the same circles as, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Joseph Kraft, Murray Kempton or the others who were coming on board for his New York Senate campaign. We were introduced, I think by Pete Edelman, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t know who I was. He said he’d be glad to have my help.”

“Did you speak about grass?”

“No, but I suspect part of his interest in me was a result of my contact with his brother. He seemed overeager to meet me, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t until 1966, when I moved to New York that I saw him again. That was at another party; all the society mavens were there: Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Pete Hamill, that type, and I didn’t get to speak to him. However, Ted was there and we had a dandy conversation about the days at Harvard. Around that time Ted had just returned from a trip to Vietnam and we talked about that a bit and made some conversation about his bad back and his marriage, which always seemed a bit haunted. He invited me up to Squaw Island for a few days and I told him I’d try to make it some time. He promised we’d go sailing; I remembered Jack’s vacation “sailing” trip, but all I did was joke that I hoped his sailing was better than his flying.”

He continued. “Also at the party were Steve Smith and Peter Lawford, who were both married to Kennedy women. Now I’d met Lawford at parties before and he really believes in high living. Steven Smith, on the other hand, is a real tight ass, Mr. Park Avenue Associates. I noticed them looking very friendly, very stoned in fact, and I excused myself from Ted, who was wandering in the direction of Joan. I wanted to talk to Peter and Steve. I was surprised to find them talking about dope and both seemed to agree that Bob should make a motion to decriminalize marijuana. I was especially shocked at Steve, who was touted as the no-nonsense moneyman of the Kennedy clan. Then I realized that first impressions do count. They were both, ah, stoned. I felt surrounded by history’s hidden heads; Ted and his sailing trip, Peter and Steve with their talk of decriminalization. All this at a party for Bobby, the Senator from New York.” We both paused to take quick bites at the last of our hors-d’oeuvres.

“I met that crowd several times after that night and got high with them, so I wasn’t surprised when they wondered aloud if I was able to obtain some good weed. I still had my connections in South America, and I was dealing a little of my best to friends. Soon after that I began receiving calls from people I knew were close to Bob and Ted asking if I could perform small favors. This was about the time Bob was being challenged by Eugene McCarthy for the right to topple LBJ in 1968. McCarthy’s appeal was to the leftish upper-middle class, mobile American student pot-head. Bob probably felt the need to commit himself to try what his brother had tried. To Bobby, you had to feel deeply toward a topic to support it. When he decided to soften on marijuana, as everyone in the press was aware, it wasn’t an intellectual exercise like Jack tried. I think it was because he had tried it and liked it, and believed it was not harmful.” Sitting back in his chair, he sipped the last of his Scotch. We poured another round and I sensed that time was getting short. He had glanced at his watch several times.

“And you think it was grass that began the changes in Bobby Kennedy?”

“Could be. I find it more than a coincidence that shortly after I sold some exceptional grass to Bobby’s acquaintances, Arthur Schlesinger was pushed into the pool at Hickory Hill (the Kennedy home in Virginia), that Bobby decided to enter the primaries, and that later, he decided to hire prankster Dick Tuck as an aide.”

“Did many of the people around Bobby get high?”

“Ask Frank Mankiewicz, Jimmy Breslin, or Andy Williams on that question. They would be better able to answer it than me.”

“But you’re certain that Bobby turned on?”

“Definitely. It’s just that with so many kids of his own he wasn’t going to force the legalization issue and exhaust it before he became President. It is ironic that he was killed by a Palestinian.”

“Did any of your friends deal with the Kennedys?”

“Well, most of us who worked the South American or Middle Eastern regions for the government or press in the early ’60s were continually turned on to excellent grass and hash. Some of us have made some profit from our experience. I know many of these people were in a position to deal with Kennedy people.”

“Have you ever dealt to Ted Kennedy?”

“Funny enough, not as closely as one would assume from our early acquaintance. I’ve followed his rise, though. He’s quite a go-getter—loves to party—and generally I admire his politics, but we’ve never gotten together and been high. However, I did hear an interesting story from a reliable dealer friend of mine who works at the Agriculture Department.” He cleared his throat.

“Ted has always been pretty free with his good times. His best ability has always been to pull together when he had let go too much. But I suppose the Chappaquiddick incident at the Dike Bridge was the first time his ability, and his integrity, were ever really tested.

“From what I was told, and despite what Paul Markham and Joey Gargan say, Ted was thoroughly wasted on something the night of the incident. It was a bad habit he’d had since Bob’s assassination, when his back began hurting him and the pressure of being the last male Kennedy became too heavy to handle. This friend of mine swears Ted was dosed with some of his sunshine in Edgartown before the party at Lawrence Cabin. It was his first trip, and they figured the cabin was the best place for it.”

“The party was perfectly innocent, just old friends getting high and trying to loosen up after a hard year. But Mary Jo got unhinged and Ted offered her a ride back to town with him; he, too, was several sheets to the wind and was getting claustrophobia. After the accident, Ted tried repeatedly to save the girl, but there was no way. The reason he didn’t go straight to the authorities was because it took several hours for him to come down.”

My host suddenly stood up, and I asked one more question.

“As far as heads go, some of the Kennedy children seem the genuine article. What do you think?”

“All I can tell you is that they are beautiful, independent children who love to get high in as many ways as there are kids. But keep an eye on John Jr.; with his taste for rock, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turns out to be a bigger head than Bobby’s two oldest sons. I just hope that all of the kids live to fulfill the potential of their fathers, who were great heads in more ways than one.”

It was obvious that our chat was at an end. We shook hands and I thanked him for the story—which amounted to a beguiling explanation of over a decade of American history. If true.

“Listen,” I said, “you’ve given me a great story, if it checks out.” Maybe we could get together some time again, and talk things over, in general, you know.” He smiled.

Well, I’ll say one thing for him. His dope was indeed Commander-in-Chief in quality.

Cover image: Wikimedia Commons

The post From The Vault: ‘I Was JFK’s Dealer’ (1974) first appeared on High Times.

The post From The Vault: ‘I Was JFK’s Dealer’ (1974) appeared first on Paradise Found.

For the June, 1980 issue of High Times, Liz Derringer interviewed Mick Jagger, who celebrates his 77th birthday on July 26.

Mick Jagger is more than just a singer in a rock n’ roll band. He has been one of rock’s most fascinating and mysterious personalities. The Jagger mystique has been fueled in large part by his lyrics, which range from moon-June love plaints to discussions of Faustian mysticism, all delivered in a deft yet offhand manner that makes the singer seem credible in the song. His feel for interpreting black American blues singers has helped the Rolling Stones make their reputation as one of the best white blues bands. His extramusical exploits, from affairs with models and socialites to his history-making liaisons with Marianne Faithfull and Bianca Jagger, have always been top-line news for the gossip pages. Even when the Rolling Stones are out of the public eye Jagger is ever-present—socialite, sex symbol, the man everyone recognizes, Jagger’s multifaceted talent has also enabled him to translate his persona to film roles—in Performance and Ned Kelly—with ease.

Despite the notoriety and social graces, Jagger is an extremely private person who has consistently refused over the years to open himself up in interview situations, preferring to adopt a mocking tone when journalists turn on their microphones. In order to get a truer picture of the real Jagger, the man who shows himself to his friends in private moments, High Times sent Liz Derringer, wife of guitarist Rick Derringer and a personal friend of Jagger’s, to visit Mick and his girl friend, model Jerry Hall, in their New York town house for an exclusive interview. As the champagne flowed, Liz drew Jagger out, and a more complete picture of the rock star emerged. Recounting the experience, Liz found Jagger “conservative, very human, always joking, making faces like a little boy, hardworking, always up, yet not-fucked-up on drugs.’’ A good friend, she seems to have had to fight off the temptation to linger on his sexuality, while frankly discussing affairs. “As he speaks,” she recalls, “his focus is intent. His blue-green eyes are characterized by a spark of brown in his left iris that looks like a sunspot and is just one of several alluring aspects of his uninhibited sexuality.”

Here then is the result the private Jagger, the Stone at home, the man behind the mascara.

High Times: Why do you move around so much? I know you live in L.A. for a while, then you live in Paris and then you live in London.

Jagger: I don’t know. If you can do it—and most people these days can do it if they really want—it’s just nice. And I like Paris, London, New York. Tehran—I like Tehran.

High Times: What do you like about New York?

Jagger: What I like about it is—tranquility.

High Times: Manhattan? (Laughter.) High above the streets of Manhattan on the second floor?

Jagger: On the second floor only, we’re working our way up. New York is a nice town. You get used to the “duh” in New York. You don’t see it anymore. You don’t worry about going out late. You don’t worry about dressing up so much. I don’t, anyway.

High Times: What’s your day like, let’s just say, a day in New York?

Jagger: A day in New York, oh my God. (Laughter.) You can’t talk about a day in New York.

High Times: Well, what do you usually do during the day? Sleep?

Jagger: Sleep late, get up. Play the piano.

High Times: Do you brush your teeth first?

Jagger: Yeah, obviously, I’m leaving out some of the details. Have a shit. (Laughter.)

High Times: Take a bath? Do you take a bath during the day or at night?

Jagger: In the morning.

High Times: Do you like taking a shower or a bath better?

Jagger: Shower.

High Times: Why?

Jagger: Uses less water.

High Times: So what else do you do during the day? Do you go out shopping and all that kind of stuff?

Jagger: No, I never do shopping and all that stuff. Rock-singer stuff.

High Times: Rock-singer stuff?

Jagger: We used to do that in the ’60s—or ’50s, was it? Go shopping. I used to shop for antiques for my apartment.

High Times: Who does your shopping for you, gets your clothes, if you don’t do it?

Jagger: Oh, I do the clothes. I don’t buy any clothes, hardly. I’ve given up buying clothes. I’ve become a mess.

High Times: That’s how come you look like a maniac?

Jagger: Oh shit. That probably is it. I don’t know where to buy clothes in New York, that’s quite true. I never bought any here. It’s always French clothes. You buy them at Bloomingdale’s, don’t you? That’s what they tell me. Every time I go to Bloomingdale’s, I run out because there’s lots of ladies trying on hats. Drives me nuts. (Jerry Hall enters with little exploding holiday favors and gifts.)

Hall: Do you all want Christmas crackers?

Jagger: Oh God. Thank you, Jerry. (Laughter. Jagger opens gift.) What did I get? There you go. I got a funny hat. And I got a purse from Gucci. How nice. It didn’t go bang. Give that purse to one of the kids that wants it. Men don’t use purses, only faggots.

High Times: How do you get around to writing an album? Is there any kind of atmosphere you have to create?

Jagger: Not really, no, the atmosphere is in your head. Writing a song is like—you’re writing a song all the time. It’s just when it pops out. It’s been there all the time. It’s not something that suddenly you do it. It’s always there. Suddenly, it’s in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you’re writing on the piano or a guitar, you don’t write in lyrics, on their own. To me it’s… very boring.

High Times: So you write music and lyrics at the same time.

Jagger: Yeah, at least the idea, and then afterwards tidy up the lyrics, write more verses. But the whole idea of the song should come, in the best way, together.

High Times: So there’s nothing that has to be inside you—like if you read a book or a play—there are certain pieces that…

Jagger: Yeah, you could do, like a character, for instance. You might take a character out of a novel you’ve read or a play. And then you might get something around that, even unconsciously. Or consciously, it doesn’t really matter. Sometimes you do it half consciously and then you realize, oh, you molded it on this character. Sometimes you feel, Oh fuck, I wish it was really my own. You know, I wish I hadn’t stolen it. But then, well, fuck it, it’s not really like it was in the book or play. It’s mine now, it’s like I’ve changed it anyway.

High Times: It’s really hard to come up with something original.

Jagger: There is nothing new under the sun, dear.

High Times: It’s true. I remember we were at a Led Zeppelin concert…

Jagger: Certainly they’re not new. (Laughs.)

High Times: Robert Plant said, “We’re still alive and well.” Led Zeppelin’s still alive and well. And that’s why Rick wrote the song for Johnny Winter “Still Alive and Well.”

Jagger: “Steal Alive and Well,” you mean. Why do you think that Led Zeppelin album sold so many records? And what was so good about it? What songs were the good ones that people liked? There’s a couple of good ones on it.

High Times: “All of My Love”—because they haven’t done many things like that before, pretty love songs.

Jagger: It’s not my kind of music.

High Times: It’s probably the biggest selling record this year. That and the Eagles.

Jagger: I know. But the Eagles sold very well. That’s not really my kind of music either.

High Times: What other bands do you like, anybody special?

Jagger: Naw.

High Times: You like the Rolling Stones?

Jagger: Naw. (Laughs.)

High Times: What’s the new album like? It’s all right?

Jagger: I haven’t finished it, so I’m not going to go on about it. Oh, I should, because I’m supposed to be hustling the album, right?

High Times: What’s the title?

Jagger: So far it’s called “Emotional Rescue.”

High Times: Who thinks up the album titles, you?

Jagger: Well, this one I did. Not always.

High Times: You’re the businessman in the group…

Jagger: I’m not the businessman. I don’t deal with the business at all. Not anymore. Occasionally, every four years or five years, they tell me I’ve run out of money, I have to go and make some more.

High Times: What do you like to spend your money on?

Jagger: I don’t know. Where does it go, Flo? I don’t know. Limousines, Checker cabs, airplanes.

High Times: That can’t be more than a hundred bucks a day. For limousines, right?

Jagger: It probably costs more than that, you know. They’re twenty-five dollars an hour now. Keith [Richards] keeps one twenty-four hours a day.

High Times: He does? Put that in, right? And Mick takes Checker cabs.

Jagger: I take Checker cabs. (Laughs.) But the thing is, I don’t spend money on anything. I don’t collect anything. I don’t spend it on furniture.

High Times: You don’t even collect houses. Everywhere you are, it’s rented. Do you own…

Jagger: Millstones.

High Times: Do you still own a house in England?

Jagger: Yeah. But I don’t live there. It’s my house but I don’t live there. I haven’t lived in it since 1970.

High Times: So there’s nothing that you like to go out and buy?

Jagger: I’d like to buy a house.

High Times: You would? What’s your dream house?

Jagger: (Falsetto voice, New York accent.) My dream house in New Jersey. In Queens they’ve got this beautiful house, wall-to-wall carpets. (Laughs.) No, I’d like a small house in the country.

Want a glass of champagne?

High Times: Yeah. What do you do when you’re alone?

Jagger: Phone a girl up. When I’m alone? (Champagne flows.) Play.

High Times: Do you like to be alone?

Jagger: Yeah. Very much.

High Times: What do you do?

Jagger: Play. Music.

High Times: Take drugs?

Jagger: No.

High Times: Never?

Jagger: Very rarely take drugs. I don’t like drugs. I think cocaine is a very bad, habit-forming bore. It’s about the most boring drug ever invented. (Laughs.) I mean, it’s very bad and very debilitating. I can’t understand the fashion for it. ’Cause it’s so expensive.

High Times: That’s where you spend your money? (Laughs.)

Jagger: No, but I see people that do. I mean, I know what people spend on drugs. I mean, you’ve got to look it up in High Times. It’s a fortune. Grass is a hundred dollars an ounce, a hundred and fifty dollars for an ounce of grass. It’s unbelievable. But cocaine, forget it. Anyone that buys cocaine at those prices… If you want to take it, fine, but if you’re spending money on it, Jesus. What a boring drug.

High Times: Do you like mushrooms?

Jagger: Yeah, mushrooms. Only under medical supervision. No, but mushrooms are more interesting. You really can’t take them like cocaine. I think drugs should be used only occasionally.

High Times: You sit around and smoke grass.

Jagger: Sitting and smoking grass is different.

High Times: And drinking champagne.

Jagger: And drinking champagne. Okay, more or less—it’s New Year’s fucking Eve, after all. (Laughter.) Happy New Year. (Toast.) But anyway, I just think it’s boring. But who buys it? How much do people spend, a fortune on cocaine?

High Times: Isn’t it amazing?

Jagger: It amazes me. I find it just unbelievable. Drugs are very debilitating.

High Times: Do you like to be debilitated?

Jagger: No. Certainly not.

High Times: You always like to be yourself.

Jagger: Well, you hope to be. You’re supposed to be, at least, I think. To get, like, where you can’t function is ridiculous.

High Times: Do you have any trouble going out in New York anymore? I heard that’s why you grew your beard. Is that true?

Jagger: It did help, actually. I mean, it got me thrown out of all the best discos.

High Times: Why?

Jagger: I couldn’t get into Hurrah’s one night. They said, “Get off the street, the likes of you.” (New York accent.)

High Times: Has it been a change for you? Jagger: That was the idea, you know. It was very good, actually.

High Times: ’Cause I’ve been out with you and I know that people do really bother you sometimes.

Jagger: But people don’t really bother you. People are very nice in New York, actually. It’s very similar to London. They just say hello to me on the street. “Hi, Mick,” they say, and walk straight on. That’s kind of nice, really.

High Times: So you enjoy being famous.

Jagger: No. Not really. If you mean like in a gossip column item, no. It’s terrible. It’s disgusting.

High Times: You like the benefits of people knowing who you are.

Jagger: Well, I guess people always say it’s bullshit when people say they don’t want to be famous. But when you start out by playing music—this is going back years now, I can hardly remember it myself, it’s so long ago—the idea of being famous isn’t the thing that comes into your mind, to be honest. I mean, famous in the right way—’cause there’s no right way—and you’ve got to take what comes. You can be like wanting to be a ballet dancer and turn into a chorus girl, but you still have a good time. So you can’t choose the kind of fame or notoriety that’s thrown at you. ‘Cause once you set yourself up, you can be fucking knocked down.

But what I was saying was, starting off in music, the purpose of it was not to become like well-known on the street and be famous. You know, I didn’t even think about that part of being famous. Famous for making records, yes, but famous face in a woman’s magazine, I never thought of that. I didn’t want that. You just have to take it. You can’t complain too much.

High Times: You like it when it happens.

Jagger: No, not really. I don’t give a shit if they publish my picture or not. I don’t care what anybody says as long as the records are good.

High Times: Do you care when people say bad things about you?

Jagger: Sometimes they’re very rude, but you get so used to that after all these years. Meanwhile, there’s not much anyone can say about you that hasn’t already been said. Do you know what I mean? It sounds so horrible when I read these things. I sound like the most horrible person. Because it’s just bullshit.

High Times: Aren’t you glad I’m doing this interview, and I love you, and I’m saying such nice things about you?

Jagger: Aiii! Aiii, it’s so nice. (Laughter.) They’re so boring. They’re so pathetic, all those journalists. Most of them are. Most of those kind that write gossip stuff, and most of it’s gossip. Do you know what I mean? I don’t really mind criticism in music or in shows and stuff like that at all. I mean, it doesn’t really worry me even if it’s like out of place. At least it’s relevant, you know. Things are just invented about your personal life and you just have to take that. It’s bullshit. People believe it, though. They just believe everything they read. (Marcia Resnick enters the room.)

High Times: Jerry, Mick, Marcia’s a photographer from High Times, if it’s okay.

Jagger: No, you can’t take any pictures. You should have asked me.

High Times: I did. I said, “Can I bring a photographer?” And you said, “Do I have to have a photographer?” And I said I’d bring a girl so you wouldn’t be uptight.

Jagger: Nope, nope. I said nope.

High Times: Marcia, we can’t take any pictures.

Jagger: You want a drink? We’ll give you a drink, though. No, the reason is, I just shaved my beard off, just now. And I all got covered in a rash and I haven’t even shaved. You know what I’m saying? That’s the reason. Otherwise, I’m not gonna make a big number of it. But you didn’t ask me. (Screams.)

High Times: Mick, I swear.

Jagger: (To Jerry.) Can I fuck her now? (Laughs.) You thought you asked me.

High Times: No, no, no, no. I did.

Jagger: Apart from asking me impertinent personal questions, she wants me to do sexy pictures. Get the whips, Jerry, and I’ll do the pictures. (Laughter.) We’ll get Liz and tie her up and put her on the saddle. That’s what I do when I’m alone, actually. “What do you do”—she’s putting her hand inside my legs—she says, “What do you do when you’re alone, jerk off?” That’s what she said to me. Can you believe that? (Feigns shock.)

Hall: He reads books and plays the guitar. That’s all.

Jagger: Okay, thank you, darling. That’s sweet. Anyway, I have all these pictures. Millions of them. Who cares?

High Times: I did an interview with Francesco Scavullo last week and we talked about religion.

Jagger: Well, isn’t he Italian or something?

High Times: He doesn’t speak Italian, though. People think he should, with a name like Francesco Scavullo.

Jagger: Well, yeah, it’s a bit much being called Francesco. He can’t even order a plate of spaghetti in Italian.

High Times: You can call him Frank.

Jagger: (Mocking.) Frank. Maybe Catholics are like that, they sort of put crosses all the time everywhere. And they just think that’s what you’re supposed to fucking act. It’s amazing. You’re not Catholic, right?

High Times: Are you Catholic?

Jagger: No. We’re very staunchly anti-Catholic. We’re very much so. But I couldn’t believe—I used to go into people’s houses in South America and Brazil, they’d have these statues of this wooden saint. They collect them, you know. The women particularly. And a whole table. You go into a room dominated by this huge table with big—they’re quite big, a foot tall—and they name them and tell about them. It’s absolute bullshit, I mean, all these saints. It is. Everyone knows it.

High Times: I think so too.

Jagger: Most of these saints—that particular religion turns me right off.

High Times: I think religion starts trouble.

Jagger: Well, everyone knows that, you know, killing for ideas is the most dangerous form of killing at all. Being willing to die for your ideas rather than your country is another concept, but dying for an idea, like in religion, is absurd.

High Times: Would you fight for your country?

Jagger: You have to sometimes because people come and try to take it away from you. You can’t have that going on. It’s very upsetting.

High Times: How about crimes of passion?

Jagger: I think men should get away with it and women shouldn’t. (Laughter.)

High Times: Women get their noses cut off in Iran for adultery, prostitution.

Jagger: Men get their cocks cut off for being a prostitute.

High Times: Perish the thought.

Jagger: That’s because all the Iranian men are gay.

High Times: So you’re not a religious person.

Jagger: Well, yes. I’m very religious. But all I meant was the danger of fighting for religion or killing for it is very, very bad. It’s worse than territory. If someone wants to walk into New York and make it into something else and break it apart, we don’t really want that. But I’m not going to fight for fucking Catholicism or Islam or any other fucking thing like that. That’s ridiculous. I mean I don’t particularly want to fight for New York. If I had to, I would. You know what I mean. I could understand that. (Laughter.) Territorial rights.

High Times: What strikes you funny? What kinds of things make you laugh?

Jagger: Oh, get out of here. The dope list in High Times, for instance. And all the drugs you can get. You just run it down there, right? You work for the magazine. Here’s about $2,000, right? Take it down there and tell them I’ll have one of everything on the list. Why don’t they have heroin on the list? Is that a kind of snobbery?

High Times: That’s disgusting.

Jagger: I think that’s total snobbery because I think a lot of those things are all debilitating, including heroin, which is possibly the worst. But why don’t they put heroin on the list with all those other awful things that you shouldn’t take on the list? I think it’s disgusting. I think that you shouldn’t encourage young people to take drugs anyway. I think that’s just awful. High Times and all that.

High Times: So why are you doing an interview with High Times?

Jagger: Because you asked me to. You’re an old friend of mine. But I just thought I’d say that. I do really believe in that.

High Times: Keith did an interview with High Times in the middle of all that drug stuff.

Jagger: Yeah. But I really do believe in that. I really think it’s bad to encourage kids. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to take all drugs, but it’s bad for kids picking that list up and saying… Twelve-year-old kids. I know they do in California. Eleven- and twelve-year-old kids, it’s disgusting. How much Quaaludes are—come on. It’s a lot of rubbish. Okay, that’s said. We’re going to sound more funny.

High Times: What’s more funny?

Jagger: Liz, have a Quaalude. You were so fucking uptight when you got in here.

High Times: You know what I love to ask pop stars? I swear to God, it’s one of my favorite things to ask about.

Jagger: What is it?

High Times: It’s what kind of…

Jagger: Sex they like.

High Times: Yeah. (Laughter.)

Jagger: That wasn’t really what it was.

High Times: No. What kind of feelings you get onstage. ’Cause that’s really exciting.

Jagger: The love and warmth of the audience, rolling towards me in waves.

High Times: I don’t know if you are teasing…

Jagger: Sure I am.

High Times: But for me to go to a rock concert—my whole life is rock ’n roll. When I was a kid, all I ever wanted to do was marry a rock star.

Jagger: So did I.

High Times: And you did, right?

Jagger: I tried.

High Times: But I swear to God, that’s all I ever liked was rock ’n’ roll. And just to go up there and see rock stars was the most exciting thing in the world for me.

Jagger: It seems a rather very narrow life.

High Times: Yeah, very. I do other things, too. But I love going to concerts and watching rock stars. And I know the feelings that I get when I see you up there. What kind of feelings do you get when you…

Jagger: See you down there? (Laughter.)

High Times: Down where, Mick?

Jagger: Down my trousers. She’s a pocket battleship.

High Times: Do you love being onstage?

Jagger: Yes, it’s very nice. It’s my whole life, though. When I was your age—no, when I was like seventeen or eighteen…

High Times: I’m not much younger than you, honey.

Jagger: I know you’re not. Chicken. Listen, when I was really young, I felt the same. Getting onstage, it’s very funny. It’s very difficult to explain. I suppose you get some good one-liners from people. I’ve never been able to come up with a good one-liner for that question. ’Cause it’s such a complicated feeling.

I think schizophrenia is the main problem there because you can see yourself playing this part. ’Cause it’s going on the stage with your act. It’s all an act, obviously. You don’t want to be really like that in real life. You know, coming out in all these costumes and going—and all that crap. But I mean, you’re looking at yourself. It’s very dangerous if you find yourself looking at yourself. But you can’t help it. In other words, you’re examining what you’re doing. The other thing is, you get the feeling after a while that it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. Which in reality it’s not. It’s abnormal, because it’s abnormal psychosis you’re putting yourself through. In other words, you’re becoming another character. Not only that—which is worse than being on Broadway, being an actor, which you’re very aware is a play— in rock ’n’ roll, you’re not, people don’t think consciously you’re an actor. You’re not the guy that’s playing a part, and you know it’s not really him, bah-bah, bah-bah. They actually think you’re like that. That’s the whole illusion in rock ’n’ roll music. That you’re really like that, that’s you.

High Times: Is there any certain image that you’d like to project about yourself?

Jagger: No.

High Times: People have this image of you as being like a somewhat evil, sullen-type character, but you’re not.

Jagger: That’s the thing of going onstage. That’s one sort of facet of being on, doing a part or a song. Because you’re not like that all the way through the act. Sometimes you’ve got to be the happy, smiling person, sometimes the fool, you know. And that’s what it’s all about, just music-hall entertainment, rock ‘n’ roll, really, it’s very basic. And it’s rather dull, actually.

High Times: Dull?

Jagger: Very dull. Most onstage acts, most stages are really dull.

High Times: But you’re not.

Jagger: All bands are. It’s a very dull medium, you know.

High Times: Yeah, but I don’t think it’s dull.

Jagger: Well, you don’t ’cause you’re a kind of groupie. (Laughter.) But it’s obviously a very limited form of entertainment. Obviously it’s got a lot of appeal ’cause it’s lasted a long time. Which is incredible when you think about it. ’Cause the first rock acts that I saw when I was like fifteen or something were almost the same as what people do now onstage. Nothing’s changed, you know, not really. Four blokes with guitars running about the stage, I mean, really, in two lines, that’s it, isn’t it? How much smoke you use, how good you sing, or whatever—all the details—it’s still that. As a form of entertainment, it’s amazing it’s survived.

High Times: Yeah, but I just get so sexually turned on by seeing a rock star.

Jagger: Well, that’s what it’s about. It’s getting sexually excited. Why do all these boys get sexually turned on who are not homosexuals?

High Times: ’Cause they want to be doing it—what you’re doing—and have girls getting off on them.

Jagger: But that’s there, they do want to be doing it, but it’s still a sexual turn-on. I’ve never been able to discover the reason because we always had at least half the audience boys. And some points in my life, it’s been more.

High Times: Do you rehearse a lot before a tour?

Jagger: That’s the trouble with rock ’n’ roll. It’s not rehearsed properly.

High Times: When you go out there, do you just sort of improvise?

Jagger: The music’s rehearsed a lot. You see, all people think about is, they think, in rock ’n’ roll, they get the music off right and they think it’s okay standing, looking macho. Well, it’s not. That’s boring. If you want to be a performer you’ve got to do a lot more work than that. Obviously the music’s got to be right. But you’re not playing in a recording studio. You’ve got to go out there and entertain and all that. It’s too much improvisation in rock ’n’ roll. That’s what’s wrong with it. People think it’s enough just to stand there, and for most it is enough. I think it’s amazing that people put up with it.

High Times: Well, Tom Petty gets up there and just stands there and just sings his songs.

Jagger: Does he really? I’ve never seen him. I like the record.

High Times: Oh, I love him. I love to watch him ’cause he just emanates charisma.

Jagger: Yeah, but if you’ve got that thing, “emanates charisma’’—put that down in journalistic, cliche claptrap. (Laughs.)

High Times: No, I was going to say them both in two sentences, but he emanates sex and has a lot of charisma just by standing there.

Jagger: I know what you mean. I’d suck his cock afterwards. (Laughter.)

High Times: He might give you a hard-on, I don’t know. (Laughter.) No, he’s real sweet.

Jagger: Does he give you a hard-on? (Leers.)

High Times: Yeah, he does.

Jagger: Do you get a hard-on just watching the guy standing there? I just think—I don’t mean it too sexually, I must admit. I forget about that, you know. I don’t think about the sexual part of it very much. I mean, not when I’m onstage. I just start rubbing my cock, say I’ve got to do this. I’ve seen other people do it.

High Times: Just to get off?

Jagger: Makes their cock get harder.

High Times: Why? From looking at a girl in the front?

Jagger: Yeah. Stuff like that.

High Times: Have you ever had like a real embarrassing moment where it was like…

Jagger: Like show up onstage and die forty-five minutes later? (Laughter.) That was embarrassing.

High Times: Have you accomplished everything you’d like to do? Are you bored?

Jagger: No.

High Times: What do you want to do with your life? Are you bored?

Jagger: I’m not going to tell you.

High Times: Creep, are you bored?

Jagger: No.

High Times: Do you get bored?

Jagger: Of course, everybody does. You have to try new kicks to alleviate the jaundiced appetites.

High Times: What kind of kicks? Drugs? Sex? Rock ’n’ roll?

Jagger: Writing for magazines.

High Times: Hey, would you like to write for a magazine?

Jagger: No, I’d rather write a historical novel.

High Times: Do you really hate journalists?

Jagger: No, I don’t hate them. You can’t hate a class of people. It’s wrong to say that. But I do think they’re a bit like poison. Never trust them. You can’t trust them as a class of people. It’s their job not to be trusted. I don’t mean you. There are a lot of journalists that are such shit, it’s unbelievable.

High Times: Well, a lot of journalists are trying to get you. They get jealous.

Jagger: Let me tell you what they do. They’re like policemen, right? They’re very nice (and they are actually nice) and they may really like you, may have things to talk about, but they save up these little things, right, until they write some stupid book. I can’t remember it actually happened to me, but it’s happened to other people. And it’s kind of happened to me. It’s a two-way thing, being in show business and all that crap. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Everybody knows that. But there’s certain rules that people are not supposed to break. If you say, “Look, don’t print that,” and they don’t. But then ten years later, they write some book about you. They use everything. “I came in the door and you gave me a glass of champagne.” Things like that. You see them a month later, they wonder why you don’t say hello to them. That’s the amazing part. They wonder why, they just can’t understand where they went wrong after writing this book putting you down and saying this shit. You did this and you fucked this girl and you screwed this person’s life up. And then they wonder why. They see you at a cocktail party and they say, “Hi, how are you? Did you like my book?” It’s unbelievable how thick-skinned they are. That’s why I don’t like them. That’s why they’re like policemen, ’cause they save up things in their little file. Not all of them, but an awful lot.

High Times: A lot of times I show people what I write before I submit it. Do you think it’s a bad policy?

Jagger: I think you should show them if you know them, because there are a lot of things in there that don’t even matter. For instance, taxes. You’d say, well, Don’t say I’m working, writing all my songs in New York. Because they’re so stupid, they’ll take that, because it’s the printed word. The IRS and the Inland Revenue, they believe—and I don’t mind if you use this, because it’s quite interesting—but they believe what they read. They use everything you read in newsprint. Once it’s printed and typed out, it’s supposed to be the truth. Whether she makes it up or not is another matter. So that they get these articles out and say, “Look, it says here that you write all your songs in your apartment. Therefore, we want all the money. Of all your songs, half of the money you earn, we want it.” But I said, “I don’t write them all…” “But you said you did, and it says so in this magazine, High Times. And it also says it in the Daily News gossip column.” There’s no good denying that you were in Paris that week. It’s written down, and it’s amazing they believe it. ’Cause they’ve got nothing else to go on. But still they want the money. They’re desperate. We have to pay for the missiles somehow, you know.

High Times: So do you want to see this before I write it?

Jagger: The answer is yes.

High Times: Would you like to have some sons?

Jagger: Yeah.

High Times: Why don’t you?

Jagger: Well, maybe in a couple of years.

High Times: Nowadays can’t you somehow determine the sex of a child?

Jagger: You can only control it, I think, you can help it along, like fifty percent, some say seventy percent. It’s a lot of work. But I mean, we’ve got so much more advanced than we were about genetics in the last ten years. Just a choice of sex for a child is only a beginning. Obviously you can choose to have whatever kind of temperament child you want. Why not? I mean, that’s what you’re doing when you choose a mate, after all, you’re looking for the qualities in her or her family. Don’t you think?

High Times: Yeah.

Jagger: But people don’t do that. Especially in America, it’s very unfashionable. After Hitler and all that. But people always used to try and do that. It resulted in some very bad inbreeding.

High Times: Is that vain?

Jagger: It’s not vain. You want to have a child—you just take it, right?

High Times: You want a child like yourself?

Jagger: No, I don’t want a child like myself at all. I want someone that’s going to be far better than me.

High Times: Do you prefer women or men’s company any more than the other?

Jagger: No, I don’t think so. I find women a lot easier to talk to a lot of the time. Men are rather taciturn a lot of the time. They’re very defensive where women aren’t.

High Times: I love having platonic relationships with boys, but the only problem is, it’s hard not having sex sometimes, and it’s fun.

Jagger: Well, you don’t always with all of them. I don’t always wind up having it. That’s not maturity. I think if you can get it over with, and you can get back to the conversation, I think that’s one way of getting it done. Wait till next week.

High Times: Do you go through periods where you don’t want to have any sex?

Jagger: No, not really. I mean, not any at all, you mean? No.

High Times: Are you “into” anything mystical? What birthday sign are you?

Jagger: You want me to do that crap. Come on man, it’s 1980.

High Times: But there are a lot of interesting people born on your birthday.

Jagger: This is 1980, you know, I don’t believe in astrology. It’s a lot of crap. I just think that’s another thing you should throw out the window. Mysticism. Cheap.

High Times: People live by the stars and all, you know.

Jagger: Cheap. It’s amazing that people still hang on to that after all these years.

High Times: Would you ever wish for a more stable lifestyle? Like living in England, and just sitting there with your kids? Like Paul McCartney.

Jagger: No, of course not, otherwise I would do it.

High Times: You can do anything you want, can’t you, Mick?

Jagger: Yeah.

High Times: You could just do anything you fucking want.

Jagger: Fucking could, but I ain’t gonna be like that. Paul’s very nice. Some people would thrive in that kind of environment. And I don’t. It’s just not what I like. I prefer to live in a rented house. No ties. Nothing around my neck. Just the minimum kind of bare comforts of home. Let me go, ’cause I’ve got to… design a house.

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Though Howard Stern claims to no longer smoke pot and use other illegal drugs, they have always been a favorite subject of his. In 1993, he devoted radio airtime to such pothead guests as David Lee Roth, Richard Belzer, Chip Z’Nuff of Enuff Z’Nuff and Phil Rind of Sacred Reich. Marijuana minstrel David Peel and Mickey “The Pope of Dope” Cezar were longtime Stern regulars. Private Parts, the shock-jock’s bestselling biography, was written with the help of former High Times editor-in-chief Larry “Ratso” Sloman. For the April, 1994 edition of High Times, Steve Bloom compiled a series of blurbs that illustrate Howard Stern’s progressive stance on drugs. In honor of Stern’s birthday January 12, we’re republishing them below.

On The Radio

November 29, 1990
Guests: Mickey “The Pope of Dope” Cezar and David Peel

Cezar: There are people out there suffering, people who are dying who need grass. The government says no. What kind of government is this who doesn’t give a good goddamn what happens to its citizens? To support some laws that to me are unconstitutional, inhuman and unjust…
Stern: So you actually distribute the pot to them free?
Cezar: Some of them, yes. If they can afford, they can pay. If you can’t, well…
Stern: Wow. You really are the Pope. Quickly, I’ll say hello to David Peel. Do you sell marijuana like the Pope?
Peel: I don’t sell it, I sing it.
Stern: Do you wanna sing a song?
Peel [sings]: Free the Pope, free the Pope/ The Pope smokes dope/ God gave him the grass/ The Pope smokes dope…
Stern: I gotta get outta here….

After Cezar and Peel leave and a commercial break.

Stern: Remember that song? Mari-marijuana, mari-marijuana/ We like marijuana, you like marijuana, everyone likes marijuana too/ Up against the wall, motherf-er…. Remember that one?
Jackie Martling: That was the big hit!
Stern: David Peel wrote that, right?
Martling: I know he sang it for years and years on the same street corner.

April 19, 1993
Guest: David Lee Roth

Stern: I know that good pot is four hundred dollars an ounce. So for ten dollars you probably just got a joint!
Roth: It’s the most creative ten dollars I ever spent!
Stern: Hey, normally when you buy ten dollars’ worth of pot you don’t have to do anything, but now all of a sudden that it’s David Lee Roth they could make a whole big deal out of it and really bust his balls for a couple of years.
Roth: Guys, I’m outta here. Have a really good day.
Stern: Didn’t it sound like he was rolling a joint while we were talking? I was almost up before a grand jury one time. I started making some jokes about coke. We don’t even do any drugs. We don’t even go to Washington Square Park and buy pot. I gave all that up like a hundred years ago. So we were talking about it and this DEA guy hears it and goes: OK, let’s get him up before the grand jury, joking is an offense! Jackie, would you ever buy pot in Washington Square Park?
Jackie Martling: You have to be crazy. Of course, he’s probably an old hippie who thinks it’s not a crime.
Stern: Everyone to Jackie who smokes pot is an old hippie.

October 23, 1993
Guest: Phil Rind

Rind: There are a lot of uses for hemp that people aren’t aware of.
Stern: You can put it in a bong. You can put it in brownies. Put it in a hash pipe.
Fred Norris: You can replace fossil fuels.
Stern: You can cure cancer.
Norris: You can build a house with it.
Martling: Smoke your house.
Stern: And you can feed Somalia with it.
Norris: You can take the leaves and fold it like origami.
Martling: What about breast implants?
Stern: Yeah, hemp breast implants. My mother has ’em.
Norris: You can make pot meatloaf.
Rind: Let’s grow hemp and stop cutting down the rainforest for paper. The original Constitution was written on hemp paper.
Stern: That’s convincing Sen. Jesse Helms.
Martling: They have clothes made out of hemp.
Stern: Pot clothes. You can smoke your jacket.
Rind: The first American flag was made out of hemp fiber. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp.
Stern: Du-ude—I wipe with pot. Talk about a stereotype. Not a real good spokesperson. You can get better people. It’s cool if I came out to legalize pot because I don’t even smoke pot. You listen to the guy and go, “Well, he has selfish motivations.”

October 29, 1993
Guest: Richard Belzer

Belzer: I need your advice, Howard— I’ve never smoked marijuana…
Stern: Please! Belzer’s like a marijuana addict. He shoots it! Belzer loves to smoke pot.
Belzer: Say it again, Howard.
Stern: Belzer love to smoke pot. I assume he smokes pot because all he does is talk nine hours a day about pot. So, Belzer says to me: Do you think I should go judge the Cannabis Contest in Canada?
Belzer: No, in Amsterdam, where it’s legal! Should I do it, Howard?
Stern: Do they pay you?
Belzer: They’re flying me and my wife there, five star hotel. See, I’ve never tried it so I figured I’d try it in a country where it’s legal. What do you think?
Stern: Yeah, try it.
Belzer: OK, thanks.
Stern: So you dudes are gonna go over and smoke a bunch of cannabis for three days and try to decide what is the best?
Belzer: What if I cover the event for you?
Stern: Sure, give a call—definitely.
Belzer: We’ll call you from Amsterdam.
Stern: Call in high, after you’ve sampled everything.

December 6, 1993
Guest: Chip Z’Nuff

Stern: High Times magazine sent Chip out to cover the Cannabis Cup. He was a judge. You love weed, right?
Z’Nuff: It’s fun to partake. If you think about it, Howard, there’s like thirty thousand uses for grass.
Stern: I’m for legalizing marijuana. Why pick on those drugs? Valium is legal. You just go to a doctor and get it and overdose on it—what’s the difference? Prozac, all that stuff, so why not marijuana? Who cares? It’s something that grows out of the ground—why not? Go smoke a head of cabbage. I don’t care what you smoke. I don’t really care. I’m not a smoker anymore, but I don’t care. I say anything that calms people down I’m all for, because people are all hyped up. But every time you speak to these guys who dedicate their lives to legalizing marijuana, they go, “Hey dude, you can make rope out of marijuana.” I go, “Dude, don’t we have enough rope in this country?” So anyway, it’s totally legal over there [Holland]?
Z’Nuff: The grass out there is a lot different than here. Everything’s hydroponic.
Stern: You didn’t know Chip is a chemist. Everything is hydroponic, man! Whenever I read all the pot magazines hydroponics is, like, a big thing….

Between The Lines

Howard On Howard: “I would smoke dope and cigarettes up in my bedroom, blowing smoke out the window, while my parents were downstairs thinking I was doing homework…. I love my in-laws. They even smoked pot once with Alison [his first wife] because they wanted to experience what their children were going through…. When Paul McCartney got busted in Japan and imprisoned for grass, I called Tokyo to protest.” —from Private Parts

Jackie “The Joint Man” Martling on Howard: “Howard did everything—pot, LSD, whatever. He stopped slowly. Now he’s down to mineral water and jerking off.”

High Times on Howard: “Back in the early Eighties, Howard was the most irreverent person in the media. Almost no one would talk to him. He was scum. I could relate to him. Now he’s a big deal. He rides around in a limo. Now I can’t relate to him.” —John Holmstrom, Oct. ’90

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