About The Tin Whistle

In 1967, I was recruited into the Knight Riders as their new bass player, having recently purchased a red Gibson SG, like my mentor in Cream, Jack Bruce. It was the preferred style of the San Francisco bands, which made it so cool. Sadly, the best musician in the Knight Riders, Donnie Perrino, was cruelly cast aside. He would immediately switch from bass to Hammond organ to prove his mastery, but I don’t think he ever fully recovered from the slight of being the band’s best musician to be replaced by someone who could barely play. Donnie was a great teacher, and taught me how to play a blues progression in C on the piano in a few minutes, my first encounter into improvisation.

I was recruited based solely on looks. I often looked like I’d stepped from the back cover of a Traffic album with my Cabretta double breasted black leather jacket, long-sleeve cashmere mock turtleneck with thin sailor stripes, the tapered-to-the-knee and then stove-pipe blue velvet corduroy pants with the cords running horizontal, and the blue suede Beatle boots. Those electric pants anticipated the soon-to-dominate and soon-to-disappear bellbottoms.

The songs we practiced included Light My Fire, with John Knight on organ (we were the first in town to learn the song), Gimme Some Lovin’ with John Wilson on vocals, Midnight Hour. Train Kept a Rollin’.

Blowup had recently come out and the Yardbirds were the kings of kool. Within a month, the band leader (John Hayes) discovered I had taken acid. He called an emergency band meeting where I was offered the choice to rebuke LSD and other drugs or depart the band. I opened my satchel and offered everyone a free hit of acid. In unison, they lurched back at my depravity. Another issue was Hayes’ dad, a lawyer and prominent member of Revilo Oliver’s local John Birch Society lodge had reported me as a suspected Communist sympathizer. Likely that lodge had a few LEOs in the ranks.

Very soon, I created the only underground newspaper in America founded and run by a teenager. The Tin Whistle. Still operating online, and still blowing whistles. But within weeks, a team of State Narcotics undercover agents targeted me with an elaborate entrapment scheme that took me out of action for over a year until they dropped the case and I left town for San Francisco.

I moved to New York City in 1978 and became the first journalist to start documenting the origins of hip hop.

In 1988, while editor of High Times, I created the Cannabis Cup and produced the event for two decades.

In 1990, I published the first and only national magazine article on the CIA assassination of JFK.

In 1991, I began organizing the first 420 ceremonies outside Marin Country through the activist group I founded, The Freedom Fighters.

Eventually, I exposed the Weather Underground as a CIA plot to destroy the peaceful counterculture revolution. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were avowed Communists (as was their secret leader, the lawyer who stole High Times, Michael Kennedy). Communism in Russia was funded by Wall Street while in the USA, the party was run in secret by our National Security State from inception. The founder, John Reed, was a spy.

This website address is: http://stevenhager.net.

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it.

The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that inforVisitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.