I could have been a contender

During the late 1980s and 90s, I had a shot at becoming famous. That was thwarted by the lawyer who stole High Times, who refused a 60 minutes request to interview me twice. I should have ignored him and let him fire me for insubordination. The excuse was he claimed I would be destroyed on the show.

The emotional abuse he heaped on me became obvious to everyone in the company as he engineered a poisonous atmosphere, where staff meetings were held with everyone but me for the purpose of finding someone to takeover whatever project I’d just initiated in order to reap the benefits without me getting any credit for the idea.

After I pitched making hemp denim jeans with my High Times phoenix logo, he rejected that idea, but soon spent millions on a hemp magazine and hemp store in Manhattan. All this bombed entirely and lost millions. One wonders how the hemp denim jeans might have faired. Thirty five years later we still don’t have them made of 100% hemp like I wanted. True denim must have a mix of white and colored threads, which is why it fades with time.

Obviously, he wanted me to depart the company, but I was an impoverished single dad with two kids trying to get by in Manhattan on a constantly dwindling salary while the company profits were booming. He tried to shut down all my events, claiming it was taking up too much time and I needed to concentrate on the magazine, which was his primary source of money. I wanted to use the events to jumpstart the High Times TV network, which is why there were 4-camera live-mix shoots at them, footage that was easily streamed to the internet.

My video content took over the website, so they scrubbed all of it. The most successful merchandise sold by the online store was stuff I’d created with the phoenix logo. He dumped it all and banned any further use of the logo, replacing it with a bland knock-off of the Time logo in red that screamed “corporate.”

I created the WHEE! festival with the help of the Merry Pranksters. They just put their toe in the first year, but went gung-ho the second, and then offered to stage WHEE3! at Mountain Girl’s farm. That meant I could easily get the Dead on board. But when I conveyed this information to Michael Kennedy he went into a rage.

I had a green light from Lion’s Gate for a million dollar film on the Cannabis Cup, using a script that detailed the Temple Dragons and my attempt to get religious rights for cannabis users. Kennedy controlled the rights and refused to let it happen. After I accused him based on the fact the producers told me what happened, he denied everything. Of course, he’d been gaslighting me for decades. But that’s when he finally broke me. 

I had to remove everything regarding High Times from my apartment. It was all a trigger. I owned 10% of the company and just wanted true value, which I estimated at $2 million. I had eight shares and had set up sales of 1 share each to four people for a $250,000 or $1 million and took my kids out to dinner at a 5-star restaurant for the tasting menu. But Kennedy responded by firing me and showering me with litigation threats. There was no way he was going to allow me anything close to true value. In a few years the company was drowning in debt and sold for $40 million, but the buyer only paid half. The rest was worthless stock. So my estimate had been spot on, which is amazing for a dyslexic like me.

The good news is that even though he gave me a whopping case of PTSD, the biggest part of my healing process became researching who he really was. Turns out he was the secret leader of the terrorist Weather Underground, which was obviously part of the CIA’s Operation Chaos, which was intended to paint hippies dangerous. Aside from the Weathermen, the biggest Chaos operation was constructing Charles Manson, who was lauded as a culture hero by the phony Weathermen leaders.

I lay out the facts out on my recent song “The Ballad of the Weather Underground.” Have you got four minutes to spare?