I had blonde hair as a toddler when I caught a whopping dose of PTSD.
1952, my German grandmother mistakenly thinks I crossed the street without adult permission. She comes tearing out of our house, yanks my pants down in front of all my friends, and beats me savagely on the butt. I will have a recurring nightmare about dying in a car accident for a decade, stop speaking for a year, develop a crippling stutter, carried a blanket and sucked my thumb, was dyslexic and tone deaf. All from that one beating from someone who thought, this is the way to train kids. Well, it was the German way. I am able to cure the stutter at age 15 with cannabis and LSD.
Rebel with a cause.
1967, when my brother tells my dad that I am handing out LSD at his high school, he goes into a fury and attacks me. I wind up on the floor covering my head with my hands, just trying to survive the attack. But he gets on top of me and keeps pounding me on the back until my sister runs into the room and is able to pull him off. I move out, quit high school and get a job as a short order cook at a campus bar.
1998, I hired a former lover on my staff and she tried to initiate an affair and wanted to restart our relationship. Two years later, she made false allegations of sexual harassment against me. I was suspended without pay for one month. Although I was cleared of all charges, this info was never relayed to the staff by anyone, I never talked about the incident for 30 years, until I was forced to by the asshole whose name should not be mentioned.
We called him Bad-dad because he was such a bad-ass. Here he is in his red Lincoln convertible. He apologized later in life, and very late, even asked me do hold an OM circle at a family reunion. Everybody joined in. It was on Dad’s bucket list.
2000, after my first son is born, my wife is put on SSRIs without my knowledge. I had spent years trying to keep her off Prozac and Zoloft, and off all substances except an occasional toke. She is best while pregnant because she avoids all intoxication. But the SSRIs soon have her in a full meltdown and she gives our child to her bipolar sister right before checking in to a hospital. The crazy sister launches a case for full custody immediately and wins it before I even get to find out. It takes over a month to get my son back, and when I do, he hugs me really hard and doesn’t let go for a long, long time.
I was always a ringleader organizing stuff to do. One fall I created a touch football team that went undefeated. Paul was the star. We’d just hand him the ball and he would outrun everyone on the field. Shown here are Mark Wetzel (RIP), me, and Frank Garvey who would become a famous artist in San Francisco.
2007, because my wife has been having annual meltdowns with me being away at the Cup for two weeks every year (we have two kids now, and she couldn’t handle one without my help every day), I ask Cruella, please, let me stay home and care for my wife and kids. She says, no way, you are going to the Cup. Midway through the event I discover my wife is in the hospital and my children are in foster care. The company keeps me in Amsterdam. I am able to speak to my oldest son on the phone and he tells me his little brother was crying in bed all night. One of the reasons Cruella curbstomped me so hard is I had brought up this story with the other shareholders and said I deserved a good deal on my shares for the damage done to my family. Instead I got the worst possible deal they could give me.
Paul did start getting hip right after high school.
2014, after a decade of a constantly dwindling salary, and the killing of every project I get off the ground, I ask Cruella for a small raise to cover my kids new braces, which will cost five grand a year for six years, or 30k, and I am making 50k while the Cup is making millions. She says, no way, and makes fun of me. After decades of torture and gaslighting, I finally break and want out of the company and have to move everything High Times related into storage because it’s all a trigger.
2016, the asshole who name must not be mentioned puts out the false story that he discovered 420. He tells the Huffpost I had nothing to do with spreading it. This hater has already destroyed my legacy of creating the Bonghitters, and now he’s destroying my 420 legacy. Because I am disappeared, and he has a bully pulpit he easily brands me a whiner, as if the true facts of 420 don’t matter.
Jo around the time she saved my life. I could have easily suffocated with 200 pounds on me and my dad beating my back while in a rage. Shown here with the now-banned Chief Illiniwek, who was never a mascot, but held a true and honest ceremony that got banned.
2025, after 30 years of branding me a serial sexual abuser in private, the asshole whose name must not be mentioned, puts the slander into a Facebook post. It takes him a whole day to realize I can sue the pants off him. He takes it down and issues a weak, backhanded apology that really just calls me a whiner all over again.
Although I have devoted my life to searching for the truth on the biggest questions I could find, and uncovered a treasure trove of real info, I’ve been disappeared entirely, and nobody knows my name or what I did.
My expertise is hip hop history, East Village Art, how weed became legal, how Cruella stole High Times from the rightful employees, the assassinations of the 60s and 70s, the history of illegal drugs, how weed is at the root of most major religions, the history of the Illuminati.
Here’s just a taste of my research:
Cannabis was at the root of most religions and its trade built the Silk Road, not silk. Mani was the greatest Christian avatar and Constantine invented a version that excluded him while incorporating elements of his biography. In Mani’s religion, Jesus was the light of the moon and not a living person. The American Revolution adopted the flag of the East India Company and was largely run by Freemasons. The East India Company was famous for having masons in its executive ranks and made most of its profits through the slave and opium trade. The Civil War was sparked by the terrorist John Brown, who was funded by William Russell, a relative to the heir to the slave and opium cartel of North America who founded Yale University’s Skull & Bones, a masonic organization whose rituals mirror the Bavarian Illuminati’s. Communism was an op from day one, largely run by masons. Hitler’s biggest corporate booser, IG Farben, was created by Rockefeller’s cousin by marriage to be a mirror of Standard Oil through loans floated by Wall Street, and Standard Oil did business with the Nazis throughout the war. Percy Rockefeller was a member of Skull & Bones. Farben’s biggest investor in Germany was Max Warburg, and his cousin Paul ran Farben USA with Percy after setting up the private banking cartel known as The Federal Reserve. Most of the treasure stolen during WWII by the Germans and Japanese was secretly put into bank accounts around the world, an operation headed by Henry Stimson, a member of Yale’s Skull & Bones.
Despite all the fog and friction from Cruella, the 7-episode pilot remains amazing….
When I came back for a third shot at running High Times, I was amazed to discover all video operations had ceased during my two-year absence. Meanwhile, I’d worked on two documentaries, AKA Tommy Chong and Live in Amsterdam with Fishbone, and had been shooting and editing video for those two year.s
The dozens of videos and docs I had made for the company had all been scrubbed off the HighTimes website, which now offered zero video. Even my Cannabis Castaways spoof on Survivor was no where to be found unless you bought the DVD on Amazon. It was a miracle that project got produced and it only happened because Cruella couldn’t turn down the $20k the DVD company offered. I’d made a rough cut and pitched it around, and it was picked up, much to Cruella’s dismay. When she discovered I wanted half the money to buy a video editing studio to finish the edit, it made the whole affair even less interesting to her.
But the day I started filming my daily routine, the office went completely nuts. Most of them had already decided they needed to get rid of me just like they’d gotten rid of Stratton by playing secret defense against him, and they assumed it would only take a year to force me to walk the plank as well.
They acted like what I was doing (filming inside the office) was part of a devious plot designed to incriminate them and get them busted (a lot of them were dealing pot as their side hustle).
All I wanted to do was make them into famous pot stars, and grow the company into the Walt Disney of Weed. Danny Danko was especially hostile and I have video of him hate bombing me, similar to what happened at my last attempt to rejoin the Bonghitters. I asked Danny to sit out this one editorial meeting so I could get some footage.
He ran straight to Mary McEvoy and demanded to be reinstated to the meeting immediately. Mary came and pulled me out of the meeting and instructed me I had to reinstate Danny. I told her I would not do that. She looked at me and realized she had no leverage at all and could not force me to do anything, much less suffer that much humiliation in front of my staff. She shook her head and went back to her office, the mission a total fail, but the friction between me and her was just getting started. No doubt she called Cruella and dropped a dime.
Pot Star had come back after he heard I was in the saddle again. He made it through the pilot as one of the stars. That took several months, but he left soon after the pilot was over and returned to Texas because he saw how untenable my situation was, what with all the hostility I was facing, and the vibe in the office was nothing like the old days when it was so much fun, so he bailed.
Bobby Black, Chris Simunek and Craig Coffey were interested in giving the show a shot. The pilot is really where Bobby crystalized his persona and became perhaps the coolest dude in America after Johnny Depp. The Hound had once called me the coolest dude in New York City, but that vaporized when I dropped my punk rock band and became a post-modern shaman doing Improvisation Ritual Theater.
Most of the episodes are age-restricted and can’t be viewed here, just follow the links to watch them on Youtube. Two of them you can watch here. One episode is missing and I’m still trying to track it down. It is possible Youtube scrubbed it entirely.
The great Phase 2, inventor of bubble letters, arrows and wild style.
It all started because Phase thought Fred didn’t have the right to put fab five in front of his name because he wasn’t one of the original five.
When my book came out, Fred exploded. This was certainly a major blow to his integrity as an artist.
When I’d first met Fred, I could have bought a dozen of his paintings on canvas for under a grand. I’d just paid Futura $100 for a signed and framed copy of his “Break” train. Why it didn’t occur to me to pay Fred the same for a copy of his Warhol train, I’ll never know. I just focussed on Futch because I thought he was out in front of all the others.
Many, many times in my life I have let a fortune slip though my fingers. All those Fred paintings I could have had for $100 are now probably worth $10 or $20 grand each.
Fred came to see me and presented his defense.
He was the biggest fan of the original fab five, but they were no longer writing. It was just Lee alone and nobody even knew who he really was. So Fred went on a quest to find Lee. And when he found him, told him he was a grandmaster and it was time to saddle up and ride into fame and glory, and if he inducted Fred into the Fab Five and they restarted the vibe, this goal could be achieved. Lee was like, who is this guy so amped up about me? But he shrugged and went along, and next thing he knows he’s the star of the first film on hip hop, and Fred is a major character, playing Phase 2, only Fred changed it to Phade. Fred had never met Phase, although he was like a god to Futura.
Michael Holman, one of the first hip hop impresarios.
Michael Holman was a major player. He knew how important Phase was and they formed a company and signed up the best breakers to form The New York City Breakers, as the alternative to the Rock Steady Crew, who were already signed up by Blue, a recent arrival from England who started the first downtown hip hop shows. Technically, the first was Bam at the Mudd Club, something Fred arranged, but Blue made it a weekly event, and quickly moved it to the Roxy roller rink near the West Side highway. Soon Phase and Holman go different ways as Phase concentrates on publishing the definitive fanzine on graffiti, and Holman gets involved in Beat Streat and MTV.
About a decade ago, Holman was going through his archives, reading a pretty much unedited and extensive interview with Bam that had been published by the East Village Eye and discovers the words: “hip hop.” He calls up Leonard Abrams and tells him, “You’re the first person to put hip hop into print!”
Leonard Abrams, founder of the East Village Eye.
For decades, that honor had fallen to me. But Abrams has a bit of a vendetta against me, as I only worked for his paper for a year before I quit to found a downtown weekly that was competing against his quarterly newspaper that had no regular schedule and he only paid the art director and not the writers and photographers. New York Beat paid everyone, except me. I didn’t need money as my film deal with Orion had gone through to make the first big budget Hollywood hip hop movie. I also had the first hip hop book coming out on St. Martins with the title: Hip Hop.
Holman was also doing books, TV, and films. His book was designed to look like a comic, his TV show was called Rap Attack, and nowhere did he use the words hip hop for maybe a decade.
So Abrams was pulling the rug on my legacy, claiming he put “hip hop” into print first as his greatest crowning achievement. It was so absurd, yet, he managed to sell this story to the NY media. It was pretty insulting and when Abrams held a promotional event blowing the horn for his taking credit for something I’d done, I decided to attend.
Later it would turn out a that community newspaper in Philadelphia had beat the East Village Eye by a mile. But nobody in media but me understood the importance of the words, and I was the first to move it from being buried in small type onto the front page of the Voice as a headline and cover story and making a big deal about changing the culture from “rap” to “hip hop” because there was a lot more than rap going on.
The same way I started a legalization campaign around the number 420 because that might be enough to get us religious rights protections.
Fred Brathwaite, aka Fab Five Freddy, immortalized in a song by Blondie. He was the man responsible for bringing hip hop downtown.
I could not resist attending this event with my video camera and getting a front row seat. There were a couple cameras there, and many reporters, and Fred was the main attraction. Leonard was managing everything and told me to turn off my camera. I wasn’t allowed to have any footage on what was about to happen.
A tall figure dressed in black entered the room, his face completely obscured by a veil. But I instantly knew Phase had arrived and wanted to continue his vendetta with Fred, but in public for the first time.
The first time Phase snorts at something Fred says, Fred whips around and snarls angrily and lets Phase know he will not stand for shade, however slight. Phase has already hurt him deeply.
The guy Abrams had brought in to film this promotional event has a meltdown halfway through and his camera malfunctions, so there might not be any tape on this confrontation because Abrams wouldn’t let me film it.
It was just a silly feud between two of the greatest figures in hip hop history, and so similar in many ways to the feud between me and the asshole whose name must not be mentioned. Only that feud revolved around the fact this dude did not have the right to call himself Mr. 420, and pull the rug on my legacy.
What was probably bugging Phase was the fact he got disappeared, while Fred rode into glory. I know that’s exactly what was bugging me about the asshole whose name must not be mentioned.
The intellectual godfather of Punk was Lou Reed. Fairies had always been celebrated in music, but only at the gay clubs. When the Warhol scene grabbed the center of gravity, Lou became their troubadour.
I always explain it this way: Andy Warhol and Ken Kesey were the greatest artists in America, one started in painting, the other in literature, but they both ended up in Improvisational Ritual Theater.
Kesey recruited the Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, for his happenings. Warhol recruited the Velvet Underground, led by Lou Reed.
Something very powerful happened in the Haight and East Village in the sixties. A lot of runaways were fleeing domestic abuse. I was one of them. A large number of these runaways were LGBTQ.
We all landed in a magic world, where you could dress and talk anyway you wanted. No pressure to conform to anything. And there were crash-pads and communes where every type of person was allowed to swagger their stuff. The most famous were the Cockettes in the Haight.
Larry, Carole and I went to see Fellini Satyricon. The three of us saw lots of movies together at the time. All the Warhol films. She loved snuggling between the two of us. Somewhere deep in my mind was probably the thought, maybe they will break up. But I was loyal to Larry to a fault and knew Carole loved him truly.
There’s a scene in the movie that involves a woman in a covered wagon whose hands are tied. Apparently she is a nymphomaniac who can’t be satisfied and requires constant sex. I guess her hands are tied to keep her from attacking strangers in the street or to keep her from tearing scars in the backs of those who service her constant desires. Carole grabbed both our arms as a jolt of sexuality shot through her while watching this scene. That’s when I figured out some girls like to be tied up for sex. The idea had never occurred to me, and I certainly didn’t want anybody tying me up during sex.
Delmore Schwartz
Lou Reed turned me on to Delmore Schwartz, and I read In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and it had such an impact on me that when I made my first biography twenty years ago, I titled it In Ceremonies Begin Responsibilities. It charted my evolution from punk to hippie to punk to post-modern shaman.
Lou was a masochist who married his dominatrix. He could write songs expressing many forms of sexuality because they were all inside him. He made stars of Warhol groupies, who had flocked to audition to his movies, just by dropping their name in a song, and they knew the wilder and crazier they were, the more likely to get cast and get mentioned by Lou, but mostly the most sexual and beautiful and charismatic, they became the stars.
Holly Woodlawn came from Maimi fla, hitched across the USA.
Holly Woodlawn starts off the song Walk on the Wild Side. And she was wild, very wild, and took LSD everyday and a whole lotta other drugs. She introduced Jean Michel to heroin. They hung together daily for weeks before Jean became famous.
Holly was best friends with Frankie Crocker’s girl friend, and they adopted Jean when they discovered him living in a box in Washington Square Park. He was making what he called junk art on paper. Just constantly practicing his craft because creativity flowed out of him like water down a hill and he couldn’t stop it.
Frankie Crocker around the time he met Jean.
Frankie’s girlfriend was always getting invitations to fly off for a week on some yacht. She would get paid in jewelry. She didn’t have to have sex unless she wanted to. She was expensive eye candy for Sheiks and Counts galore, the first blonde with dreadlocks. Her picture was taken everywhere she went.
Frankie introduced Jean around the music world as the black Picasso. After meeting one of his idols, Bob Marley, Jean began growing dreads.
This is the world Jean got exposed to as a young teenager. When I interviewed him, he said while shaking his head, “taking acid everyday got pretty stupid.” Or something like that. I have to check the transcript to be sure….
There was a huge fascination with S&M just after Punk took off, which was right after glitter and glam had exploded, largely due to the Cockettes getting world famous.
The Cockettes.
The Cockettes were masters of Improvisational Ritual Theater. They used no stinking scripts. They did as they liked and made up song and dance out of thin air and tried to outshine and out-swagger each other on stage.
Punk was a revolt against hippies. But thanks to Lou, there was a crack in the door that allowed gays, however small. And Dee Dee did turn tricks on 53rd and Third although he regretted letting that out late in life.
One of the most be beautiful girls I ever dated worked at Psychedelic Solution, the gallery I often hung around at because it was having the best art shows in New York City at the time.
I think she got bored with me because she had grown up on rough stuff and I was always pretty gentle. Her first boyfriend was a rock star who slapped her around, hard. She thought this is what everyone must be doing.
Her older sister also dated rock stars and maybe that’s how she met so many of them. When I met her, she was just starting to think about writing some songs and maybe putting a band together. I helped her get her first guitar and showed her a few easy chords she could play around with.
She was a natural and could compose 3-chord songs immediately, and none of it based on a blue progression or standard formula, because she had no training.
Lennie Kaye and Patti Smith.
I knew her as Paulette, but once when we went to a show in the East Village and ran into Lennie Kaye, the undisputed king of garage rock and Patti Smith’s lead guitar player. “Debbie!” he said, super happy to see her.
That’s when I discovered her real name.
Lennie was the first lead guitar player I recruited for the Cannabis Cup Band and he had fun but left likely because Gabe wanted him to play the lead runs note for note for the Bob Marley Tribute. The intro to Bunny Wailer’s version of Get Up, Stand Up (my fav, I picked that) was particularly complex, but Lennie nailed it easily when he had to, he just preferred more improvisation. I had hired a bunch of perfectionists who took immense pride in their chops and it took a while to get them into Improvisational Ritual Theater. Lennie was already on point.
Paulette was pursued by every big-shot on the Lower East Side, but her true love became The Atomic Elf, who looked like a bit like Davy Jones, think smoldering, and he had a sexy British accent to boot. The Elf once complained to her that he’d tried to connect with me, but I was only interested in her. That wasn’t true so I made a point of seeking him out and chatting with him. After that we became friends.
Dee Dee and his trophy wife.
Dee Dee Ramone started asking Paulette out. He went gaga over her, like me and so many others, and proposed. She accepted immediately and they started a band together….with the Atomic Elf on lead guitar. The chemistry between the Elf and her was so much higher than the chemistry between her and Dee Dee that it drove Dee Dee mad, and he blew up the band and divorced her.
D Generation: Michael Wildwood, Danny Sage, Jesse Malin, Howie Pyro, Atomic Elf.
The Elf went on to join Jesse Malin’s D-Generation, whose single No Way Out hit the East Village like the second coming of the Clash and soon D-Gen was touring big venues and attracting an army of teenage groupies wanting desperately to expose their privates. The drummer, Michael Wildwood, was the best looking, although his brother Danny and the Elf were close. I started going to the same hair cutter as them just to pick up some of their swagger. They were the biggest thing since the Ramones and had successfully merged punk with glam and garage.
My band almost got famous, well famous for one night anyway. Max’s Kansas City closed down, and one of its house bands, The Senders, moved to Continental Divide. They had a regular Monday Night thing. Man, the Assassins loved the Senders! They had a similar style as ours, except we had dueling guitars. Their lead singer Phillippe was French and girls creamed their pants when he went off because he looked and acted like a French movie star. But the force of his voice was no competition for Flick Ford, our lead singer and also the High Times art director. Flick was also better on the harmonica, having been trained by Gordon Spaeth of the Fleshtones before Gordon drank himself out of the band. Like Lou, Gordy also had some issues with speed.
Phillippe had seen us play the Divide and wanted us to be his new opening act. This was likely because he was entranced with the Assassinettes as he was quite a mover, but I also think he genuinely liked our band. Sadly, Phillippe passed away recently. He and Legs were close.
The first Sender/Assassin gig was written up in New York Magazine as the event of the evening, and the Assassins were anointed “the next big thing.”
Malcolm Forbes was always on the look-out for the next big thing. He drove up on a Harley and parked next to my Kawasaki 650 with Muni carbs and street-racing handlebars. I was never a Harley man.
Two other motorcyclists were with Malcolm. One a girl with long blonde hair once she took off her helmet.
Michael Wildwood from D-Gen came. Afterwards he invited me to a reading his best friend was giving, a guy named Chris Simunek. After hearing Chris read from his first novel, No Easter, I immediately hired him to be a full-time humorist, but soon had to shift him into the grow section as Cruella wanted more and more grow every year. She was so out-of-touch with the culture.
The Hound was there as I recall. And so was the founder of Crypt records, Tim Warren. I never saw somebody get so drunk so fast. He was seated at a table with two girls and perfectly coherent. When our 20-minute set was over I was handing out drink tickets, and started to offer one until I noticed he was falling out of his chair drunk. “He doesn’t need any more,” said his companion.
Warren disapproved of us playing Down at the Nightclub by one of my favorite Swedish garage bands, the Creeps. He wrinkled his nose as if a bad smell had invaded the room. “Jazz,” he said contemptuously. He was such a purist. It had to be rock and nothing but rock, or it was shit. I thought the jazz interlude at the end was great.
Years later, Flick would bitterly complain he saw Phillippe visit the soundboard at the start of our set and turn down Flick’s mic. If that’s so, it was certainly a sly move because he was following Flick on that same mic.
Stacy and Paulette became good friends once she hooked up with the Elf and was no longer a rival. They liked each other and would have long conversations on the phone for a brief time. Stacy was a promoter booking my band the Soul Assassins, and Paulette was a fan and always came to see us.
I just remember Paulette complaining about the Elf always eating potato chips in bed watching TV and getting crumbs in the bed. That was about the only complaint she had about him.
There seemed to be a little static between her and D-Gen, like they were rivals for the Elf’s attention.
This is just a taste of the sort of life I was leading. Meanwhile, the asshole whose name must not be mentioned, was watching this go down from his office next to mine. He couldn’t let laid and the frustration was driving him crazy.
It just wasn’t fair. I had so many girls, and he had none. So he began developing such a hatred for me that he would spend the next 30 years bashing me in private and online, doing anything he could to torment me and always looking for ways to kill my swagger, a dude with so much hate in in heart, it’s scary.
John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil, founders of the Punk movement. Photo by Bob Gruen.
Holmstrom moving to publisher quickly demolished our relationship just as Holmstrom had predicted, when he had told Cruella seconds after being installed at a summit.
“I see problems with Steve ahead,” he’d said, sitting in a lounge chair at a 5-star resort in Anguilla, drunk on his newfound power.
That comment hit me like a ton of bricks.
Cruella always used the summits to take long luxurious vacations at world famous resorts, all expenses on High Times. The company was no more than Cruella’s personal piggy bank. She would stay for ten days or however long Cruella wanted. There was typically some event in New York, the Hamptons or Palm Beach that required her attendance. She rolled with Bianca Jagger and Ivana Trump…up until the divorce that is, as Micheal had botched that case, dragged it out and charged a fortune, and never made a dent in Roy Cohn’s ironclad prenup. Worse, Cruella was caught gossiping about the case at Manhattan dinner parties, something documented in a critical piece in New York magazine titled “Ivana’s avenger.” You didn’t see Ivana attending Michael’s 60th birthday at the Armory. Bianca blew in late, and did a double take on me when she entered the room.
I only saw Michael scared once. He had such a polished, elegant manner, but really, that was a front, and I saw it crack twice.
“There’s a reporter from New York magazine working on a hit piece on me, and no one in the office should take his call,” said Michael, who seemed uncharacteristically disheveled. “It’s a hit piece ordered by Donald Trump.”
Cruella and her puppet by Flick Ford.
What really worried Michael, however, was the reporter was digging into a bomb in San Francisco that had killed a policeman. The Weather Underground connection had been glossed over, as well as Micheal’s role as the leader of that terrorist group. At the time of the bombing, Cruella and Bernadine Dohrn were meeting secretly at a doctor’s office by scheduling appointments that coincided, a fact noted by the FBI. Cruella was deep in secret shit with Dohrn, who was on the most wanted list and had just dismantled and destroyed the SDS.
Kennedy sent off a letter threatening New York with a lawsuit, reminding them he was a private, not a public person. They probably didn’t use half the dirt they dug up, fearing the sort of lawsuit Kennedy would file and run for years and cost a million to fight.
The only other time I saw the facade of supreme confidence crack was at a company dinner held to celebrate solving a pissing war between the ad director (who replaced Harry) and Clint Baker (the nephew of Tom Forcade). The real purpose, however, was mostly to chart the future of High Times without me on board so they could deploy my five-year plan without me.
The “strategic meeting” was an intelligence brainwashing session run by John Goodson, who started with: “This information is classified, I hope there are not any Communists or fascists in the room who will spread this to the enemy, are there?” and he raised his hand to indicate all Communists and fascists in the room needed to come clean now.
Strange, Michael had not yet entered the room. He was a famous life-long Communist, but maybe John knew that was part of his military intelligence work.
Goodson was interrupted by Cathy Baker, who would soon dethrone Cruella in a bold and audacious move. Cathy used the same game plan as the one fomented by me and Harry two years earlier. She rounded up all the other shareholders in secret and plotted a coup.
Cruella was blindsided and never spoke to the Bakers again. After winning this stunning victory and getting control, Cathy was dumped by her girlfriend, a well-known and popular professor in Phoenix, Arizona. She took out an order of protection against Cathy which set Cathy off. Cathy took out an order of protection against the professor. That didn’t quell her rage, however, so Cathy drove over to the professor’s house and beat her to death with a baseball bat, drove home, and committed suicide.
The entire 2-day brainwashing session conducted by Goodson was shot by me, and the highlights put into a playlist called “The Strategic Meeting.” My favorite highlights are Edison challenging me to a duel, Holmstrom praising the Soul Assassins and telling everyone I used to be a punk before I became a politically-correct hippie, and, best of all, the moment when Michael had to explain why the “Trans High Charitable Trust” was no longer charitable. He tap danced and double-talked and barely made it through.
Michael burst into my office early one morning. He never had come to my office before, and never would again. I had moved from being next to the publisher into an old shipping room so as to get as far away as possible from the publisher, Bob Aronson, who was an accountant who took the throne after all the people above him were fired, first by Tom’s widow, and then by the lawyer who stole High Times, who was a puppet for Cruella. Aronson was intensely jealous of the success I achieved upon arrival as it made him look bad, like he was incompetent, which he was.
When allowed at summits, I would fly in for two days and be placed in a “no view” room. There were a half dozen summits with both me and John in attendance delivering dueling annual reports on what the problems were. I have twenty years of these reports, and I doubt anyone else does.
The problem now was that in order for John to become publisher, I made a condition he could not be involved in editorial meetings or editorial matters. No publisher had ever attended editorial meetings during my tenure because that usually devolved into friction, fog and clogs.
My meetings were usually fun, and so was creating editorial and art content, especially the sort of content Holmstrom produced. But he gave it all up to put on a suit and tie and run the advertising, circulation and promotion departments.
There is one great thing that came out of this, however. Holmstrom reconnected with his most bitter rival in Punk history, Legs McNeil, who had stolen John’s thunder, grabbed most of the Punk groupies, and become the Punk icon, not John, who deserved it more. They are the co-founders of Punk and anointed the Ramones as the archetypical band. They were first to put the Ramones ahead of everyone else.
There was a million dollar policy on Legs as the key guy because he was the face of the brand. John was in his own pressure cooker, and powerful forces had descended to crush Punk. He struggles today. He writes a fantastic Substack, so sign up and support him. Lots of great story telling and reflections on a golden time.
But John’s also driven by forces he doesn’t understand, and when he floated the idea of hiring a hit man to kill Legs to get the million to save the company from all the oppression, he likely really didn’t think that was a viable option. Just said it out loud. Maybe he was having dreams about killing Legs. Their issues got even more contentious than me and Bloom. They just don’t play it out in public like Bloom insists on doing with me.
But suddenly, they are buddies again, and guess what? Legs suddenly doesn’t act so chummy with me. I sense I have become a rival. He and Holmstrom are launching a new magazine that will blow High Times out of the water.
Legs wrote extensively about his love affair with Sinead. Their first date was a restaurant downtown, and JFK, Jr slipped her his phone number. She showed it to Legs and tore it up in disgust. Legs knew he’d found someone who truly loved him, more than the sexiest man in America. That’s a whole lotta love.
Funny thing is, it could have. The magazine was called Nerve, and it was pure genius, and 90% Legs, and it should have been given a shot. I was working on a garage band movie called The Runaways, and that was having auditions and readings and the vibes on that project were huge. I got a reading at the Living Theater attended by film people brought by John McNaughton.
Judith and I were old friends and she was a hardcore wake-n-bake stoner. When I arrived early, she insisted we get high together. That’s the last thing I needed to do, but I couldn’t offend the Queen of Street Theater, especially since I was using the theater for free. I engineered that by giving Judith a small role in the script, but she complained she needed more lines.
Judith always had top shelf. The joint is already rolled. We go down to the basement to smoke. I take a sip.
Ten minutes later, when the high-powered casting agent arrives with the underage actor who is playing the lead, she pulls John aside and complains, “what’s that smell?”
John shrugs but soon pulls me aside and goes into a bit of a meltdown. This all happens seconds before the reading starts.
Much to my surprise, Richard Stratton shows up, and stays in the room for the rap session I have with the film people. His comments are not complimentary. “It might work if you can get past all the cliches,” he says. That was a problem. Me and Chef Ra versus Smitty was real, but that dynamic of jocks versus heads started to dissolve within a year. Linklater was the first to show how some jocks were heads and some heads were airheads.
Nerve is dropping dimes, going after bullshit, but also going hard for salacious celebrity gossip, while tripping behind the scenes in the highest halls of rock. I loved reading it, and was only sad they hadn’t invited me to participate because my conspiracy research was the perfect thing for them to get a harder edge. But I realized this is some sort of competition, and Legs doesn’t like my swagger even though his is clearly bigger.
Legs accuses me of stealing his look because I wear faded Levi bluejeans and jacket. If I stole his look, then so did Chris Simunek because when he arrives, Harry Crossfield goes, “who is this clone who looks just like Hager?”
Harry Crossfield by Frank Max. Harry was in the line of succession to the Spanish throne. His mother was a famous Cuban model. His father owned, among other assets, a swanky restaurant/bar on the Upper East Side, which was Harry’s primary watering hole and where he never saw a check. Harry was popular in the highest social circles, loved for his entertaining rants after consuming a few drinks. He was always the loudest voice in the room up until he shouted himself hoarse. I still hear his distinctive laugh.
Harry was on the Nerve team, and selling ads was no problem. But Cruella is whimsical, and the company just a toy for her to play with, and one day decided Nerve wasn’t taking off fast enough, so she killed it. She was always wildly out-of-touch with the culture.
Meanwhile, Legs and Holmstrom quickly reverted back to hating on each other with purple passion.
I view these vendettas as a great opportunity. There is no more powerful ceremony than burying a longtime psychic knife fight. It lifts an anvil off both parties.
Legs and Holmstrom can do that ceremony anytime they can muster up the courage to forgive each other. Time is running out, brothers. Bury the hatchet, and then get Bloom to drop the hatchet he keeps planting in my back.
Aside from going through the painful process of dredging up the memories of a false accusation against me made 30 years ago, which I had to document in minute detail online, which no doubt has been even more painful for the other party to read than Bloom’s attack on me was for me, I can only compare Bloom’s attacks on me with the home crowds chanting “No means no!” to Terrence Shannon at the foul line.
Terrence was branded by a false accusation and found guilty in the court of public opinion before any investigation, just like I was.
Bloom’s response was: “blah, blah, blah.” Like our situations aren’t identical. Terrence showed his character by never talking about the incident, which is what I tried to do. And he never bashed the girl who falsely accused him, and neither have I. But he has gone after the police and the newspaper who branded him an abuser.
After a couple years, though, no one is talking about Terrence being an abuser anymore. No one would dare after all he’s suffered. Well, I suffered too, but Bloom won’t stop talking about it for 30 fucking years!
Terrence wants $11 million and $500k for his mother in damages from the District Attorney’s office.
Why won’t Bloom drop the hate and stop defaming me? I’ve never badmouthed him except to combat lies he was spreading about me. He’s never given me credit for anything, and cares zero about collateral damage to others.
I just need a couple people to verify he’s been calling me a sexual abuser because one deposition added to the slur he posted online recently is enough to get my defamation suit off the ground. It’s too late for me to clear my name since he’s dragged that through the mud for decades spreading his lies to hundreds, no doubt.
This should have been dead and buried long ago if Bloom had any brains or empathy. But it can’t get buried until Bloom stops his campaign of unbridled hatred against me and admits I started the 420 campaign and he never supported it until I got curbstomped and disappeared and he got a megaphone for bashing me. Then I was no longer the center of gravity on 420 anymore. And 420 wasn’t about peace anymore.
There wasn’t room for me in Bloom’s 420 narrative, which was that he “discovered” 420 and that flyer in High Times is the only thing important. The flyer had little impact other than getting the Mt. Tam ceremony banned forever. Nothing like the hundreds and hundreds of 420 Ceremonies I organized from 1991 to 2001. I have video footage on many of them to prove it, and a lot of it is on my Youtube site.
After putting the flyer in the news section with no commentary beyond a goofy Frank Max cartoon, Bloom did nothing for decades, made no contributions to 420, until he planted an article in the HuffPost claiming I had nothing to do with spreading 420 and it’s really all about him and the flyer. Even though the San Fransisco Chronicle beat him to the story by a month.
When that article came out, I was justifiably outraged. And when I complained, Bloom used his megaphone to brand me a whiner and began to bully me mercilessly.
So I’m hoping someone will read my story, reach out to me and confirm Bloom’s slander, doesn’t matter what date. Your support might provide enough solace to help me live long enough to see a grandchild or two.
Bloom’s insidious decades-long campaign has resulted in me getting untreatable hypertension, you see, and when he bashes me with lies, I can drop dead while sitting in a chair.
Dohrn proudly accepts the non-prestigious and completely phony Michael J. Kennedy Award for Social Justice at the 2019 NORML conference. It was presented by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine.
And then something truly spectacular happened. Michael died and NORML made an award in his name and gave it to…..Bernadine Dohrn, leader of the most notorious terrorist network in America, the American version of Bader-Meinhof Gang, who conspired with North Vietnam, Cuba and Russia. And Cruella.
The Patti Hearst kidnapping was a Weather Underground op.
“It wasn’t unanimous,” Dan Viets later told me. Dan might be my cousin. He’s the most righteous dude on the NORML board.
Maybe Michael forced that on Keith as a dying request, maybe Cruella made it happen.
It was such a bold move considering I’d already done a documentary exposing the Weather Underground as a CIA op while Michael was alive, and this bizarre award to a terrorist bomber, and LSD orgy leader, who never lifted a finger to legalize cannabis, at a cannabis event and treating a terrorist like a heroine was truly bizarre and so revealing.
And nobody called foul, except me.
I have to start thinking about a plan for my demise. I want the service at Avalon Beach Club inside the Temple of the True Story of the Holy Grail, which is filled with the spiritual icons I made. And I want my album of Psyop-Busting Ballads to be played.
Chef Ra’s Rasta Pasta Pesto should be served along with Heinekens and Mexican Coke.
I want the serial haters blocked from this ceremony. Since you devoted so much energy to bashing me, kept it up for decades, and never had a kind word for me ever, why should I allow you at my final ceremony so you can wash your karma clean by finally showing some respect after I’m gone?
I’d rather see the asshole whose name must not be mentioned tarred and feathered than attend my memorial service. He’s hurt me that bad.
1) High Times Cannabis Cup, a comedy feature following Steve Hager, Chef Ra, Coke La Rock, and the rest of the Temple Dragon Crew driving a psychedelic bus around Amsterdam as they gather strains for the annual competition while practicing improvisational ritual theater 24-7, manifesting creative energy and 420 Ceremonies. A teenage scientist arrives with a lab-grown strain called Chocolate Cherry. Script has a green light from Lion’s Gate with a $2 million budget.
2) The Story of Tom Forcade by Steven Hager, John Holmstrom and Albert Goldman, a book ready to be released.
3) Ookie Kabuki, a Borat-style comedy starring an egotistical bipolar weed grower entering a strain in the Seed Cup who arrogantly challenges all the biggest names to a smoke-off to prove his strain is best. Nobody knows he’s just an actor, except the High Times staff, who are greatly agitated and feel the integrity of the event is in peril. The shoot goes off spectacularly well considering the immense hostility this innocent comedy provoked.
4) Kesey and Mountain Girl are so pleased by WHEE2! that they ask me to move it to Mountain Girl’s farm.
5) Soil or Hydro: Arjan versus Soma, the great debate. Two of the most famous and successful growers in Amsterdam discuss the benefits of their approach. Finished film, ready and scheduled to be released. Instead, release was dropped, and $60k spent to make a completely different video starring Nico, who was not well-known. Cruella dumps a finished film with stars that cost nothing (all footage came out of my archives). It had already been approved by Mary McEvoy and she invested $800 in a polish edit. But suddenly, it’s pulled and a new, expensive project put in its place.
6) Documentary film on Tom Forcade. Shown at the Cup featuring Tom, known as the Smuggler’s Cup. Finished and ready to release, but never released. Much of the footage ends up in “Origins of High Times,” a decade later.
These are but a few of the many projects I put immense energy into that failed to launch even though they were in the can. And the killing was always done at the 11th hour, which was extra torture, teasing me into thinking I might be able to put out some content.
No wonder I felt suffocated. Cruella was trying to get me to cough up my shares and quit. But I had a family and two kids, and had been made unemployable by my CIA investigations.
You can’t imagine the hostile work environment I was in for years after I got thrown under the bus, kneecapped, and locked in a basement. Cruella was always the real power at High Times. Michael was but a puppet on a string. She was everything Michael desired, sophisticated, sensuous, glamorous, mile-long legs. He was putty in Contessa’s hands and Michael her greatest creation.
The same dynamic that almost drove Lady Diana and Meagan crazy was based on hostile work environment. It’s a pressure cooker and it crushed my mental health and ability to eat and sleep. I was doing my best work, but like Chef Ra benched by Smitty, never got off the bench again.
And then something truly spectacular happened. Michael died and NORML made an award in his name and gave it to…..Bernadine Dohrn, leader of the most notorious terrorist network in America, the American version of Bader-Meinhof Gang, who conspired with North Vietnam, Cuba and Russia.
The Patti Hearst kidnapping was a Weather Underground op.
“It wasn’t unanimous,” Dan Viets later told me. Dan might be my cousin. He’s the most righteous dude on the NORML board.
Maybe Michael forced that on Keith as a dying request, maybe Cruella made it happen.
It was such a bold move considering I’d already done a documentary exposing the Weather Underground as a CIA op while Michael was alive, and this bizarre award to a terrorist bomber, and LSD orgy leader, who never lifted a finger to legalize cannabis, at a cannabis event and treating a terrorist like a heroine was truly bizarre and so revealing.
Everything happens for a reason. 30 years later, Bloom still can’t drop the hate.
He’ll be calling me a serial sex abuser who had nothing to do with 420 while he’s doing his death wheeze.
I’m making this into a movie and it’s a comedy for sure. Grumpy old man gone mad with jealously gets megaphone and uses it to bash the dude who stole his girl, his job and takes a dump on that dude every chance he gets.
For 30 fucking years.
I would be laughing too if I wasn’t the victim.
When a link to the first ever positive story written about me in America appeared on my page, Bloom began making comment almost immediately to take a dump on that story because it refuted his claims the code spread through the Dead and not through my efforts.
I tried to grab a screen shot, but halfway through he erased it and decided my front lawn was not the place to take this dump.
Every previous time Bloom has come to my page to throw shade, I’d flame him crispy with my dragon roar, and he’d quickly delete his comment, so as to remove my response, meekly backing away all blackened. He can’t really do flame war against me because he can’t compete with the truth against his lies.
So I did something I never did before, I went over to his group CelebStoner, and, sure enough, the link to the story pops up, posted by Bloom and headlined, “Poor Steve Hager, always whining.”
Thing is I wasn’t even interviewed for the story. I haven’t done interviews since I departed the realms of cannabis many years ago. So how am I whining? Lots of people chimed in, yeah, Hager’s a whiner. That comment had zero to do with the link. It was just his way of taking a dump on the first story to praise me in American history. If you don’t believe me, find another.
Bloom knows I have PTSD and he knows 420 is a trigger, and he pulls it every chance he gets. And he gets it every 420.
It’s become life-threatening for me as he has given me uncontrollable hypertension that can’t be treated by meds. But what that does is give me energy to fight back. So I start defending myself coherently, with reasoned debate and real facts, and Bloom’s only response in real time is “blah, blah, blah.”
So I defend myself more, and he responds with the same three words.
For his third repartee, he drops the bomb on me. He was obviously very frustrated by his inability to spar with me intellectually, so he blurted out his trump card, something he always plays in private, but when I confront him in real time on his own Facebook group in front of his toadies, he is on the spot, so he decides to go dragon and roars: “Hager was suspended numerous times for sexual harassment.”
Something like that is enough to push my blood pressure to 220, and it did. And I have been in a PTSD crisis every since. Writing these rants is one of the tools I use to help me wind down, along with drinking water and riding my pedal boat.
My big fear is Bloom is going to give me a heart attack, and the narrative he has salted, “Steve Hager is a serial sex abuser who had nothing to do with spreading 420,” will go down in history as the real story.
And few people seem to comprehend what’s going on. This is not two equals squabbling over minor shit. Bloom is attacking me and destroying the beautiful vibes I had laid down for 420, which is now a cloud of smoke and nothing more. Just like he yanked the spirituality out of the Bonghitters, he has successfully yanked it out of 420.
It’s not too late to do something to swing things back the way they were when I was the center of gravity on 420, and it wasn’t about me, it was about having a moment of silence.
Why does this matter? Because cannabis is spiritually charged and 420 is the manifestation that caused legalization.
I saw the flyer the same time Bloom did. I had a satori moment and said, we can use this to help legalization and get religious rights. Bloom just thought it was stupid and something to make a joke out it. I thought it had Pythagorean implications. Bloom likely has zero concept of who Pythagoras was or what he did to bring Zoroastrian magic to Greece.
The story of how it began, how it spread, are of utmost importance to get correct for future generations because cannabis is the sacrament of peace culture and holy.
Chiefrocker Busy Bee, the first rapper who wasn’t also a deejay.
My plan for the first day of trial is to hold a press conference on the courthouse steps. I won’t say much, just introduce Coke La Rock, Grandmaster Caz and Chiefrocker Busybee, the founders of hip hop. They will speak on my behalf because they got on my peace train, became Temple Dragons, and manifested improvisational ritual theater at numerous events I produced before and after I got fired from High Times. And they know how healing my ceremonies were.
After High Times fired me, I didn’t need a big audience to keep my art going. And I had no problems organizing successful events in Aspen, Denver and San Rafael and selling tickets to cover the cost. I never cared to make money off my ceremonies. It wasn’t about the money. Everything I reaped was put back into the ceremony.
Busy Bee got so caught up in the peace vibe that he followed me into Rainbow, not once, but twice. We always went in my Roadtrek, the Phoenixmobile.
The first time was hilarious. I camped across the trail from NY Purple Gang and ended up bonding with two 12-year olds who began following me around, helping me fix problems. They were my Junior Temple Dragons, and they were soaking up my magic. Think Laurence of Arabia.
Most people avoided me at Rainbow because I was a constant whirlwind of work, always trying to determine, where is the best place to focus my boundless energy and spotlight mind?
One shitter I built had a sunset view across a creek from a high point. It had complete privacy from the trail down the hill, but a great sunset view. It had lime, hand washing station, TP in a coffee can, and some sort of disinfectant. I also liked to put camping mirrors in my shitters.
The sign I painted on poster board and planted with a stake was a masterpiece. I must have carried 30 sheets of poster board as making signs was something I did constantly. That was the easiest way to fix problems. I also had my paint box filled with day-glo waterbase paints.
Imagine my surprise when I build my ubiquitous recycling center which appeared at all my events and festivals….it was the only recycling center on site. The core principle had eroded.
The Temple Dragon Jr. squad and me fixed a huge problem. It was the morning of the fourth, the day of the big ceremony, and Fairy Camp had held a huge drunken blow-out the night before. That was another new thing. Suddenly, there was alcohol everywhere, not just at A-camp.
I figured out I could harvest the moss-covered bark off dead trees, and cover some of the worst mud pits. I didn’t anticipate a 100-yard bridge over the mess created by the drunken blow-out. I never would have done it. But when I started to cover the biggest pits with bark, my squad arrived and started imitating me, filling in holes.
It was a blast building the bridge, and so much more fun because the kids were into it. Those mud holes had hidden all sorts of nasty thorns. When the barefooted people started making their way to circle, they walked on a plush moss rug bridge. And not a soul cried ouchy ouch.
Second time we went, I decided to make a welcome home camp because the scene at the gate had been taken over by an A-camp shake-down scene.
They wanted people to park at their camp and walk two miles in. I camped on a hill overlooking their scene, and when cars parked and people began walking up the hill, Busy Bee and I jumped on our electric bikes and zoomed down there to tell them there was parking two miles in and real close to the entrance. The locals were day-tripping, so slots opened up every morning.
Lugging your gear, water and food two miles when you don’t have to in 90 degree heat is no joke.
A-camp started going nuts on me. They actually said they were going to beat the shit out of me and one brandished a baseball bat. “That’s not the way you’re supposed to talk at Rainbow,” I said before blasting back up the hill on Bucephalis, my fat tire e-bike.
When I held my first Munchie Cup in Denver, and got some national publicity, an anonymous person threw shade on the article saying, “why doesn’t he stop and go away?”
I knew this was the publisher of High Times, Mary McEvoy who was frustrated by the million dollar hole she dug trying to do the Cannabis Cup in Colorado. This was now the rap on me in the High Times office, “why doesn’t he just go away?”
The encounter is enshrined on my facebook page. I remember John McNaughton, one of my closest and oldest friends, and a famous film director, chimed in and said, “sounds like she’s jealous.”
I started a movement for to get religious rights for cannabis users. The key for religious rights is holding regular ceremonies so I told everyone to hold a peace prayer on 420 at 420, and I was on ABC news on 420 explaining this mission. But after I got curb-stomped, my campaign disappeared, and 420 became just about getting high. Not about a peace prayer.
I had been alarmed by the spread of violence, school shootings, violence porn, synthetic drugs (which amplify violence) and was crushed my once highly successful campaign to spread peace consciousness had been abandoned.
This is not an attempt to grab fame, and it is not coming from my ego. It was always an honest attempt to get marijuana recognized as the legitimate sacrament of peace culture which it had been for thousands of years before reefer madness, which would have allowed thousands out of jail immediately, and would have legalized weed for religious use early in the 1990s.
I am perplexed. I keep saying this over and over, and yet so many people seem confused. Who cares?
I care very deeply about trying to shift 420 back to the peace prayer I wanted it to be when I started the movement. After I was disappeared, and Bloom built his click-bait website, he claimed he discovered 420, even though it had been written up in the San Francisco Chronicle before he published that flyer.
I had told him to put my plans into his coverage in the news. He ignored me and just printed the flyer and made it seem as goofy and stoner stupid as he could. It was a joke to him, and nothing more.
Whee! ceremony for world peace.
Bloom had no clue as to the potential of what I was doing. So he was no help. Holmstrom, on the other hand, put a reference to 420 in every Pot 100, while I began doing hundreds of college lectures promoting my 420 peace prayer, and also began using 420 as the keystone for all my events, especially the Cannabis Cup, and WHEE! which were the largest cannabis events of their type for years.
Bloom thought the flyer was stupid. He thought 420 was stupid. He refused to participate in my daily 420 ceremony, and he bashed my claim 420 was evidence of the spiritual power of cannabis to manifest ceremony.
He did not discover it, he did not promote it, but he had the gall to tell the Huff Post that I had zero to do with spreading it.
Maybe if I keep talking about this long enough and loud enough, some people will actually start to comprehend what I am saying. We need more peace prayers to help recover from the terror and violence. They work. We just don’t do them.
Or maybe I will just keel over tomorrow and die and you all can forget about me and my campaign and Bloom’s version goes down in history. That’s my biggest worry.
Bloom’s entire defense is based on character assassination. Over the last few years, he has successfully branded me a “whiner” for venting my extreme agony in watching his almost pathological campaign to blot me out of 420 history.
Somewhere deep inside, he must know I started the movement, and both he and Edison ridiculed it openly, and the evidence is in the revenge-book Edison wrote after he was fired. They were the tag team hassling me at the time and neither had any interest in working with me. A good magazine has a lot of talented people working in harmony. Edison was smothering talent through demotivation. Didn’t matter what you wrote, it was all going to be re-written by Edison. When he had time. He became the choke point for every word and didn’t want anything released until he had time to “polish” it.
I was brought in as Edison’s executive editor after he was editor/publisher for one month because the wheels were falling off. “Go fix it,” said Cruella.
The managing editor (who loved Edison as they both worked at Screw), didn’t have the strength to deal with the production problem created by Edison’s insistence on rewriting every word. No writer was spared having sentences re-arranged. He had written countless porn novels, in a wide variety of fetishes, and is certainly witty and talks like a speed freak, but he also seems a bit sweaty and smarmy, and his mind never seems to rise much higher than the gutter.
The managing editor soon quit rather than watch her friend go down in flames.
I could have actually helped Edison but he was too contemptuous of me. He was always bashing me in editorial meetings, and refused to let me do any conspiracy stories. It was torture until they demoted him. Boy, was I happy I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. He stuck around for a few more years, a useful tool for Cruella to play off against me, working on promotion and special projects. He was all ga-ga about getting a cameo in a low-budget film he wanted to put High Times’s name on. I read the script and told Cruella the truth: it was total trash. Boy, was Edison steamed. He thought it was a masterpiece. Go watch it sometime. It’s called Potluck. The author-writer had good intentions and the concept could have worked if the script hadn’t been so weak, and the casting so terrible. He was married and having a midlife crisis, and made the film about an older dude like him shacking up with a hot babe from the Lower East Side. Nowhere in your wildest dreams would you imagine these two people as a couple. But the writer-director had similar plans for a girl I also had the hots for and had some dates with. Jesse Malin stole her away from me and they were a regular item for a long time.
You can see all the inside drama at High Times by watching my Youtube playlist; “The Strategic Meeting.” It has amazing scenes, like Edison challenging me to a fight during a company dinner party. He had just recently been replaced by Ski, who was easily the best publisher HT ever had, so of course, they fired Ski fast on some trumped-up bullshit. That’s when the wheels fell off the circulation as a complete novice was brought in who didn’t know jack shit, but wanted to make a lot of business changes. People started quitting, including the circulation manager, who slyly fucked the situation over just as she went out the door.
Ski’s only problem was that he was working really well with me, and we were pumping out videos and books galore, and the products took off on my ideas, like the Cup Judge’s kit. The internet was already killing the publishing world, but we were doing great compared with most magazines.
After Ski was fired, I was handcuffed again and while I continued producing great books and videos on zero budget, HT didn’t want any of it published anymore. They were worried something might be successful and they wouldn’t be able to get rid of me. They planned to slowly throttle me until I was so broke I’d sell them my shares for pennies on the dollar. Either that or I would quit.
Before Bloom made himself Mr. 420, Edison had made a similar move on Wikipedia. He posted a quote from his book bashing my 420 campaign. That was to get publicity for his just-released revenge book, but in a few years that quote began looking really stupid, and someone erased it. There has always been a contentious fight around what gets on Wikipedia’s 420 page.
But my contribution is glossed over, and the story keeps shifting about how it spread, but nobody talks about me being the one doing it for a decade before it really caught on.
There was a super smart publicist who worked for many super big rock stars and she was super popular downtown.
I was attracted to her immediately, and at an event noticed she and Bloom were old friends. Bloom was a terrific schmoozer of corporate reps. That was his primary role in fact.
When I got back to the office, I asked Bloom for her phone number. “You can’t have it, she’s mine.”
I guess I should have respected that but I knew there was no way in hell Bloom was ever going to land a date with this woman.
So I called her anyway, and after she accepted the date, immediately went to go “ha,ha” Bloom. This happened after he drove me out of the Bonghitters and could have been psychic retaliation.
Low and behold, twenty minutes later, the publicist calls and with wavering voice, cancels the date.
Never thought much about it, until I was at Charlie Ahearn’s opening at PPOW in 2017. I’m hanging with Busy Bee and Carlo McCormick strolls in. We chat about the old days and when he’s about to break off to check out the show, Carlo suddenly stops and says: “Man, that was horrible what Bloom did to (name removed.)
A few hours later, after I processed that info, I realized the quivering voice was an indication she had been traumatized by Bloom who must have pulled every trick and lie to convince her I was a cad and a scoundrel and she had to cancel the dinner date. And applied so much psychic pressure she had to do it despite the fact she liked me and really wanted the date.
And decades later, she was still talking about it.
I now believe that this is where and when Bloom’s vendetta began and what was driving it.
In retrospect I wish I had been kinder and respected his wishes because it didn’t matter that much to me. But we’ll never know what might have happened between me and her because I got cock-blocked and Bloom obviously didn’t score either so it ended up he cock-blocked himself.
Maybe if Bloom hadn’t driven me away from my own team I might have shown respect and not called her. But the way he did it, so demanding and arrogant, invited my response.
He could have said, Steve, I really like her, can you please not ask her out? You have so many girls. I have none. It’s not fair. Can’t I have one?
But he didn’t approach it like that. He tried to bully me away from her.
Origins of the Bonghitters
I always considered the Bonghitters one of my greatest accomplishments. And it was by far my most successful attempt at teaching counterculture spirituality and improvisational ritual theater.
Chef RA (formerly Jim Wilson) was the pitcher and the most flamboyant among us, not to mention the most gifted athletically having taken second place in the high jump in the state finals his senior year.
He had dreadlocks past his ass, and was a gifted dancer whose energy could turn on a party like a light switch.
RA and I had been fired in the crucible of being on the front lines of the culture war in 1968, and led a campaign against systemic racism in our high school. The summer after graduation, we bumped into each other at Woodstock. He saved my ass by handing me a lid of weed. I smoked half and bartered the other half as weed was the primary currency at the original Woodstock.
From there RA went to Jamaica and came back fully Rasta, except for his love of beer and whiskey.
Dreddy Duck by Flick Ford
We had a mascot named Dreddy Duck. When Cruella stepped in and tried to make it High Horse so as to get credit, we had to explain how difficult it would be because horses don’t make very good cartoon characters, which is why there aren’t any. Cruella’s ideas were always so wildly out-of-touch with the culture.
Dreddy was lead-off batter. It was very hard to see from inside the costume so Dreddy usually had a few swings and misses. He almost got on base once when we were playing the New Yorker. Roger Angell, the most famous baseball essayist in America, was pitching and he took pity on Dreddy and lobbed him softballs and Dreddy made contact and started waddling down to first base. We all howled, “Go, Dreddy, go!!!”
If only Dreddy could have made it that one time. It was close.
It was like Halloween for the team in that you could wear anything. I always carried my water-base psychedelic paint box. Everyone got face-painted, some got the full treatment, all three symbols I was using: heart, peace sign, spiral.
My outfit was heavily customized with painted patches, and my cleats were psychedelic. I had a range of ceremonial hats that included the Freedom Fighter tricorn and others. I passed them around for others to put on during the rally.
The rally chant always worked. It was like magic. We’d be losing. It would be the third or fourth inning and we hadn’t yet scored a run.
Hey nana ho nana, earth is our mother and we must take care of her….
The opposition would smirk at first at the crazy gypsy chorus line. I always brought four or five drums with me and tons of percussion equipment, so once we turned on the drumming to get our first runs, it was like a jack-in-the-box opening.
The chants and drumming would get louder and louder and the vibe coming out of the dug-out was immense.
The opposition started making error after error while we edged ahead.
During my time leading the team, we never lost a game.
But strangely, Holmstrom, who I had appointed manager, became publisher, put on a suit and tie and quit the team, but made sure to place Bloom in charge.
I suddenly went from scoring the most runs to never scoring again. I felt like Chef RA when Smitty let him suit up but never put him in a game because he hated black power activists.
So I left the team and did not return until around 2000 in order to make a video of one game I didn’t play in. Edison had just been made publisher. The video I made shows how shallow the vibes had become without my rally chants, OM circle, costumes, drums, face-paint and the Temple Dragon chorus line. I came back again in 2003 after I was reinstated as editor a third time, and tried to bring back the original ceremonies.
But when the end of the game came, and I started a circle, all the opposition joined but almost no one from the High Times, just a few early Bonghitters like Darren.
We were doing the moment of silence holding hands in a circle when Danny Danko began screaming at the top of his lungs. Hard to do a peace ceremony when someone is lobbing hate bombs at you. But that’s a fact I learned about trying to amp the peace vibe. It draws haters like flies to shit.
It went by so fast I can’t remember what Danny said, I just knew he was accusing me of being a phony cult leader and no way in hell would he ever hold hands in a circle with me.
I wondered what the opposing team thought of all this.
I just realized I was not welcome at the games anymore.
Bloom did that. Why would anyone hold hands and do an OM with a serial sex offender?
Enter Robin the Hammer
After I stepped into the magical world of improvisational ritual theater, where every gesture, every moment, every sunrise and sunset (or, if you prefer, every day-turn and night-turn), but especially every 420 AM and PM are carried out in ceremonial fashion and the Temple Dragons constantly pull song and poetry out of thin air, inventing lyrics and melodies and dances along the way, all aided by the restrained deployment of cannabis fumes.
We were like Rastas, though, and rolled our own personal joints. It was a rule designed to cut down flu transmission. And we had sober dragons around at all times and prized them for helping steer the ceremonies from a more level-headed perspective.
Creativity, as the dragons can attest, has a vibration and you can tune in to amplify it and with the right crew, make creativity flow like water downhill.
I was doing peace poles, OM circles and silent meditations mostly but knew early I needed a sacred chalice for the Cannabis Cup, that couldn’t be some piece of tin picked out at the Dollar Store, but had to be something capable of capturing, inspiring and holding real vibes.
When Robin ‘the Hammer” Ludwig appeared, I immediately knew I had my Merlin and Vulcan rolled up in one. Cruella has the original solid silver and engraved chalice that was used for the cover shoots so that’s the real Cup grail. That was too expensive and time-consuming to mass produce.
I have Robin’s original lo-fi, bronze-silver-plated and assembled from pieces Cup. It’s at Avalon Beach Club at the Church of the True Story of the Holy Grail, along with 33-plus icons, the true saints, most of them stoners who practiced improvisational ritual theater starting with Pythagoras. I’m always tweaking their portraits, but slowly, like a few brushstrokes a month maybe. They can’t be touched without a full-blown inspirational moment.
So the vibe I was assembling for the Cup, was peace and love straight out of the Golden Gate Park Sunday services by Stephen Gaskin, balanced by an equal dose of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which is where the improvisational rituals and fun vibe came in.
I actually rode with the Pranksters in Furthur and experienced the constant stream of crazed babble as everyone chased to the edge of saying something before they thought of it and they hung there for hours, interspersed with musical interludes with a strange array of instruments, some ancient some home-made. Babbs promised to induct me officially but that turned into a prank as only Kesey could have made that happen. Bobby Faust was a Temple Dragon and Kesey made him an official prankster but he never allowed me on stage to join the act. I might have made it if only he hadn’t drunk himself to death at such an early age.
Kesey called Bobby “Big Bob.”
Even though Robin was also there for the summer of love, he was traveling in a different orbit, dressing in black, drawing pentagrams, and wondering if that torrent of squeaky-clean drivel all butterflies and rainbows, that g-rated cotton candy for the mind wasn’t the real bad energy force to watch out for.
There is a whole spectrum to devil worship and only a tiny slice of it could be classified as evil. Those who do the study understand what many think of as an evil devil began as the sacred jester Pan who likely encouraged improvisational ritual theater.
And there’s Krampus, the original side-kick of Santa. His job was scaring the kids, who would run to Santa for protection. But the two were buddies and Krampus was super scary-looking but never actually desired to hurt anyone.
I was saddened when Kennedy booted Robin and our beloved and now-departed queen Sweetbryar (whose contributions matched those of her husband). The vibes without Robin, me and Sweetbryar was like going to Camelot to find no Arthur, no Merlin, no Lady of the Lake.
And the grail…a prefab piece of plastic from the Dollar Store.
Robin was the first one to wake me up about what Steve Bloom was up to behind my back. “He’s not your friend,” he warned.
Sad what happened to the 420 ceremonies after I got disappeared. I wasn’t smoking at my 420. How can you hold hands or have a moment of silence with a joint in your mouth?
Making a cloud might seem like a wonderful thing, but it’s an intrusion on the community, and a terrible example for the kids. I made clear all along the way and especially when ABC interviewed me that the most important element of 420 was a moment of silence for the victims.
Just before the silence, I’d tell people to think about all the people in jail, all the kids missing their parents and in foster care because of cannabis, all the sick people who couldn’t get access, and all the people arrested and harassed, millions upon millions.
Can we have a moment of silence while we process those numbers and the immense suffering involved?
I guarantee you, had this been the ceremony at the Boulder quad moved to Denver, the Seattle Hempfest or at Hippie Hill at Golden Gate Park, those 420 ceremonies would be still happening and growing in size and spreading across the nation.
But instead the ceremony became about weed smoking and not about a prayer for peace. We still have a chance to change that dynamic around.
PTSD and me
When I started these tales on High Times history, it was because Steve Bloom has been defaming me for 30 years or so and every time he does it online, he throws me into a PTSD crisis.
First, I drink a glass of water and go for a pedal boat ride until my adrenalin slows down and I can breath normally without any hyperventilation.
Then I go to Facebook and start venting.
Funny how nobody ever told Bloom to stop bashing my reputation and stealing my legacy. But Bloom was so successful in branding me a “whiner” that some of my closest friends asked me to stop “bashing” Bloom, and one accused me of acting like a 12-year-old. It was useless to explain that I had to defend myself. Had I stuffed these feelings, I probably would have had a heart attack and keeled over, with Bloom’s epic, transparent lies (Hager is a serial sex offender who had nothing to do with spreading 420) as my legacy, ignoring the fact I was a major leader of the counterculture peace revolution until I got curb-stomped and disappeared.
Sadly, through his bully-pulpit, celebrity click-bait website, Bloom is winning the information war.
A few years ago, I was approached by Danny McBride’s people to create an HBO TV series about my tenure at High Times. Not sure, but I think Danny wanted to play me.
But Danny wanted to make it far from reality, and I wanted to make it as close to the truth as possible. There was so much humor and drama in the real story that ignoring it seemed foolish.
So Danny made his sizzle pitch, which went to HBO, and I made my sizzle pitch, which went to Danny’s people. You can watch it on my Youtube site.
HBO passed on Danny’s pitch saying: there’s no female characters.
On the other hand, my pitch had the Contessa herself, the great Eleanora Kennedy, a major figure on the New York and Palm Beach social scene, who now resides on her horse farm in Ireland, where she raises the fastest thoroughbreds in Ireland, something proven by all the trophies crowding her mantel place.
Eleanore and Michael Kennedy by Flick Ford
She plays Cruella.
Then there are the three Assassinettes, who cause traffic accidents all over the town if they go out together in their stage outfits. They are all single and available. One is a redhead, one a blonde and one black-haired.
Why Danny never saw the wisdom of my version over his, I will never understand because nothing in his was remotely like the truth, just a platform for launching total fantasy.
I hope someone will come forward to produce “Clouds: the story of how a rock band took over a magazine and changed the world.”
It’s a true story. And Bloom is one of the bad guys.
The Secret Plot
After I wrote the first article explaining how the CIA whacked JFK, the lawyer who stole High Times began a campaign to have me removed. Because my studies on CIA psyops had gone so deep, it was only a matter of time before I uncovered the connection between the CIA and the Weather Underground. And from there it was a short jump to exposing the secret leader of the Weather Underground—the lawyer who stole High Times.
The secret plot to remove me a second time was exposed right before Richard Stratton was scheduled to secretly take over, and before I was moved to a different location. Bloom was positively ecstatic and fully supported Stratton’s insane plan to kick pot out of High Times and turn it into some sort of low-budget Vanity Fair.
Stratton had nowhere near the ability to pull that off. He’d spent 8 years in prison, was never a hippie, just a rich drug kingpin turned novelist. He wanted to use the position to build his fame, while I had tried to use the position to promote peace culture and end the war on cannabis.
So Stratton’s plan destroyed all profits, and insanely the lawyer left him in charge for a full year as sales just kept sinking, while Stratton kept saying they were about to turn the corner and never did.
So Stratton was out, and suddenly Bloom had his dream job. All he had to do is put pot back in.
Or so he thought. But Bloom never did much journalism beyond celebrity puff pieces and likely he never will. And he couldn’t bring sales back to where I had them, or anything close.
So he had his year and when he couldn’t bring back the sales, was booted as editor, and much to his horror, I was brought back.
Bloom immediately sold his three shares and quit. But on the way out, he made sure he poisoned the staff against me by telling them all I was a serial sex offender. Bloom’s hate for me had started after I tried to date a girl he had the hots for but that hate multiplied tenfold after I stole his dream job, at least that’s likely the way he viewed his demotion. Demoting him was just Cruella having fun. She wanted him to stick around so she could keep playing us off against each other.
So upon arrival, I could feel the intense hostility against me. I can only equate the experience with suddenly being Captain Queeg on the Caine destroyer. Queeg was a good man at heart, but his senior staff despised and ridiculed him behind his back. He had a nervous condition (I got PSTD when I was abused as a toddler).
The comedian I shot a Borat-style feature with at the 20th Cup came to visit me a decade later for his podcast. We talked about how that project had a real shot at being an underground hit, but the project was so despised by the staff that they got it killed.
Their friction made shooting a real stress in Amsterdam, when it should have been a ball of fun for all. They intimidated my editor so much he never interviewed them about Big Apple Seeds or me. He was too scared to go there.
My Borat character showed up and entered the Seed Company Cup. His strain was called Ookie Kabuki and he ego-postured all over the event about how it was the best in the world, and would smoke people out to prove it.
He ended up on stage with Robert Connell Clarke in a face-off against DNA seeds. Imagine how stunned the DNA boys were when Ookie Kabuki beat the strain they entered.
The Temple Dragons were slapping me on the back. “You got it, Phoenix. That’s the climax of the movie.”
But when we got back, I was told High Times wasn’t interested in the Borat movie and planned to release a 20th anniversary Cup video–without my Borat. But it was so hard to cut him out that a few minutes ended up in the film Mary McEvoy produced anyway. Needless to say, that video was pretty much a total bore.
The isolation and telepathic hostility is what breaks Queeg, and causes him to start rolling metal balls in a neurotic attempt to calm himself.
Everything I said and did was twisted into something bad. Nobody wanted me as editor. I was able to write some more groundbreaking journalism to add to my portfolio, including the first article on Rick Simpson, but was too handcuffed to do much more. Could have produced a hilarious Borat movie about the Cup as well as a $2 million feature film with Orion on the event, but that lawyer swooped in and killed both projects, leaving $2 million on the table.
Meanwhile Bloom started a celebrity click-bait website where he could continue bashing me with his story I was a serial sex offender who had zero to do with spreading 420.
Because of his bully pulpit, and because of my withdrawal from the world of cannabis, Bloom is winning the information war, and his narrative is going down in history, not mine. So I decided to end this bullshit, call out his lies, demand a retraction and an apology as well as damages for the immense suffering he has caused me and my wife.
I don’t want to go to court, I just want the apology, the confession, and some damages. But so far, Bloom refuses to negotiate. He thinks if he ignores me, this will go away but I ain’t going away until I get justice.
The reason I had to be suspended without pay and the office told I might not be coming back even though I was completely innocent of the charges against me is because all the women in the office had to be interviewed about me. And they had to know it was safe to talk openly and there would be no negative repercussions to them for telling the truth.
Not one woman in the office verified her allegations, not even the hater I had moved off my staff and into another position, who is Bloom and Edison’s crony.
Unlike Bloom, Edison has never called me a sex offender even though it all went down just before he was publisher. He calls me a hippie fool, but not a sex offender. However, the one part of his book where he discusses the false allegation against me, I am not identified. He couldn’t bring himself to type my name.
The reason I moved the person off my staff was because I had sent her to Amsterdam to run the Cannabis Cup and told her, if there are any problems or issues, call me.
She never called. But it was the worst Cup ever, a real disaster with nothing but medicore Power Plant clones from a few coffeeshops. Imagine given seven mids to judge and they are all the same clone.
So I knew this person wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t fire her, I just requested to Cruella to swap her and the former lover who had gotten a job in the company. So Cruella calls her up, and she exploded over that idea, even though it meant not working under me but working under her boyfriend. She acted like being asked to work with her boyfriend was a totally outrageous and insulting request. She hated me then and still does to this day and is part of Bloom’s echo-chamber.
I could never communicate with Cruella in confidence. To my constant horror, everything I said about the staff to her privately was immediately relayed back with, “what do you think of this idea of Hager’s?”
Bloom took this one step farther. He stopped going through me and started communicating directly with Cruella full-time. She loved that dynamic. He had started a annual award for movies in the magazine, so I turned it into an annual event with major stars in attendance at BB King’s in NYC.
The Waldos of San Rafael, creators of the code.
I contacted the Waldos and the New Riders about headlining one year. It was all set-up except the date. Bloom and Cruella scheduled it and I didn’t find out for a week. When I found out, it was too late. I had a college lecture debate contract I couldn’t get out of, so I missed the show. Usually, I was directing the show and managing the live, 4-camera shoot.
Bloom was so happy not to have me around because he had been bashing my story about the Waldos ever since I wrote the first story on them. He claimed it wasn’t true.
But when I got back after a tour, and asked Bloom, “how was the event,” he became angry, “Why didn’t you tell me they had letters!” he snarled. He had schmoozed the Waldos at the event and was now suddenly a supporter because they showed him a letter. They came armed with evidence in order to stop Bloom from bashing them.
The whole thing was captured on video by the Temple Dragons. I never made it into a documentary mostly because the New Riders were drinking beer backstage before the show and it demolished their three-part harmonies. Also because while my crew did a serviceable job, the live edit was nowhere near as good as it would have been with me directing.
Dave Chapalle gave out an award. He was freestyling backstage and the dragons got classic stuff from him.
Before the show, Buddy Cage had come to the office because he wanted to meet me. I called Bloom in to meet him.
Bloom swaggered in, shook hands and said, “Must have been tough replacing Garcia.”
My jaw almost hit the floor. I don’t think Buddy was ever so disrespected.
Buddy just looked at him and then said, “Jerry is the best guitar player, but I am far better on pedal steel than he was.”
There was a brief moment of silence before I restarted the conversation.
When they write the history of the me-too movement I hope they include me as the first innocent victim to have his life shattered by a false allegation.
Certainly the girl who made the allegation was being pressured by the hater I had tried to move off my staff. She had gotten a large judgment after being locked overnight in an elevator with a few others.
Me-too became the Treasure of the Sierra Madre for a few women intoxicated by the profits that could be realized. We’ve had an entire 10,000 year history of oppression and sexual exploitation of women with only a few isolated breaks where women were allowed to stand toe-to-toe with men intellectually, even though that should have been wired in everywhere from day one. You won’t find women in the Illuminati that manufactures war for profit.
The movement opened the door for retaliation for the first time. It was a great thing, a wonderful moment, but there was some innocent collateral damage, and I took the first bullet.
The company should have protected me, not thrown me under the bus. Another company would have made a quick deal and kept it all super quiet. I was plastered all over the NY media. The lawyer who stole High Times made it almost impossible for me to get my job back. All he needed was one hater on staff to say “he checked out my chest” and I was gone forever.
The girl was never under sexual pressure from me, but I was in a torture chamber for one month, and it brought back my PTSD with a vengeance.
At the next High Times summit with the trustees, Judy Baker made a point of fondling my knee, copping her own feel as a way to punish me. Mary McEvoy had just been made publisher and this was her first summit.
Photo by Dan Skye (Malcolm MacKinnon)
“I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” said Mary.
So yeah, while I never abused a women, I’ve suffered tons of abuse from females for a wide variety of reasons. Not everyone in this world is a nice guy like me.
John Holmstrom was the first person Bloom called. Despite our friction, Bloom knows how much I respect John and convinced him he was innocent of all charges and I was paranoid, and John believed him and wrote a long response to my first Tin Whistle blog about Bloom.
He explained I was paranoid, Bloom was a nice guy he’d first met at a computer magazine start-up. It was sad I got demolished unfairly in the me-too hysteria, but I should let it all go and re-publish my book on the East Village art scene, in which he is a major character. That’s how we met. I was the first journalist to write that punk started with Holmstrom and the Ramones at CBs and not in London with the Sex Pistols.
Holmstrom claims that after I went to Rainbow I became impossible to fathom as I pivoted from a local garage/punk star to post-modern hippie shaman. Nobody could process that. And sure as shit nobody was interested in doing an Om circle or joining my Temple Dragon Crew.
Hey, I was the most successful magazine editor of my era and I was wildly talented and productive in a wide range of media. And to prove it, I still am, and I am still contributing groundbreaking work in music, art, film and journalism. And this book and movie on High Times that I’m fleshing out through these rants will soon join that legacy.
You have three ways you can interact with me. You can like me, you can dislike me, or you can be neutral.
Holmstrom had zero problem with me turning the magazine into a consensus based operation. Why would he since it reduced my influence? I was pivoting into events, books, television and films where the big action is in media.
So that suddenly left everyone hot and bothered and the rap became, why won’t Hager just concentrate on the magazine?
The rap on me just got more and more ridiculous after that. Forget that I have become an important counterculture influencer. Imagine if Tom was booted from High Times after starting it. In fact, that is exactly what the staff tried to do. And the rap on Tom was “why won’t he just concentrate on the magazine?” Tom had fallen into punk and filmmaking, and I fell into cannabis spirituality and filmmaking. Spirituality moves through music and we were both addressing which way the pendulum needed to swing to balance the vibrations.
Can you imagine Jean Michel doing his greatest work and some haters start spreading the story that he has zero talent and it’s all because he’s high all the time?
That is exactly what happened to Jean, and that sort of static contributed mightily to his demise. I had a wife and two kids so suicide was never a viable option for me. But a lot of victims in my situation did kill themselves after being unfairly shamed in public like I was. And I was doing my best work when I got curb-stomped.
Enter Lucy Knight
Photo by Andre Grossmann
Holmstrom likes blondes with boobs, like most red-blooded American boys, including me. My first obsessive love was a blonde. When I met her, she had small boobs. I didn’t care at all. Boobs weren’t even on my radar. I fell in love because her beauty was blinding and her intellect was as high as mine, something I wasn’t used to, not having much contact with members of the opposite sex.
I was an ugly duckling, skinny with big ears not to mention I had a speech impediment. It wasn’t until I reached the 8th grade that some girl went bonkers on me, and made a scene talking with the teacher about how adorable I was. “Look at those brown eyes!!”
I was shocked, red-faced, and it took a year to process. I certainly didn’t view myself as attractive in any way. I was wearing a Charlie Brown sweatshirt and for a year was called Charlie Brown in the halls by girls I didn’t know. I didn’t even realize they were trying to flirt with me.
What changed is I heard “Gloria” by the Shadows of Knight and instantly wanted to join a garage band. I was playing trumpet in the school band, but soon quit because my dream of becoming the next Herb Alpert had instantly dissolved.
At the end-of-school sock hop, some kids I knew from school debuted their band, The Knight Riders.
Now Harvey Treat was the Elvis of my school and always performed as a solo guitarist at the sock hops. He was very talented. He didn’t sing, it was usually a wild surf rock or rockabilly solo.
I became the roady and number one fan for the Knight Riders. They told me to get a bass guitar and amp, which I did. I also bought new clothes, something suitable for an emerging rock star.
But before that, Harvey found out I wrote for the school newspaper, so he collared me and got me to plant an item in the gossip column, the “love” column.
“I love the way Harvey Treat sings and plays Heart and Soul on the piano.”
I got it into the paper easily.
Harvey was delighted so it wasn’t long before he pitched me another item, but when I tried to put it in, the editor frowned and said, we are not giving Harvey any more juice. Not in those words. She very smart. Gave a speech about how we can’t just concentrate on the popular people. We have to spread the love around.
I didn’t understand there was actually a cabal of girls who probably hated him. Maybe some had a one-night stand as he was quite a mover or maybe they just thought he was vain.
When the paper came out without the item, Harvey was so insulted that he threw shade on me in shop class. I had smacked my knee while rock climbing and an egg popped out. The doctor put me on crutches to keep weight off the knee while it healed.
Harvey was holding court in shop class and said, “Hager’s just using those crutches to get sympathy, there’s nothing wrong with his leg.”
Now that I remember, this is right after that girl called out my brown eyes, and the crutches played a role in how that conversation got started, so Harvey was correct: the crutches were getting me attention.
Harvey isn’t just Elvis, he’s Tom Brady, a letterman in every sport. The team loves him. One of his backs is also the star wrestler, and he glares at me.
I’m going to band practice from shop class and standing in the door to the rehearsal room. The wrestler is shorter than me, and when he passes, he sucker punches me in the mouth.
I ditch the crutches and jump him, and soon have him pinned on the floor on his back holding his wrists to the floor.
He’s in total shock. I’m a skinny dude, but I got PTSD and my strength in crisis is so fueled up I can take on dudes bigger than me. I had more arm strength than he did. I didn’t punch him, but I did sorta humiliate him. And my move was so fast and ninja like. I could have been a wrestler and being 120 pounds and 5’10, I might have won some medals. People who jumped me were always shocked when I fought back and over-powered them.
I didn’t want to report anything but was sent to the office to see the enforcer, Mr. Walljasper. He was also a coach for one of the teams. I started to speak, “I d-d-don’t want to b-b-be here and I d-d-d-don’t want to r-r-r-eport….” after that, I just broke down sobbing and couldn’t talk. This is before I found weed and stopped stuttering.
Walljasper called the wrestler in. He made sure to tell him that I didn’t want to report him but was forced to come in. And we shook hands and he apologized for punching me and I apologized for jumping him, but we had to go from that meeting to a school pep rally and both us walked the entire length of the gym behind Walljasper to take our seats, me limping on crutches.
It was my first perp walk.
This story is just the lead-in. So blonde Lucy, Abbey’s friend from Boston has just arrived, and the Assassins have just lost one of the girls, so no audition necessary. Lucy is drop dead gorgeous. She is instantly the “it” girl of our scene.
Abbey, Kimona, Lucy. Photo by Andre Grossmann
Lucy and Abbie are sitting in a booth before the show and I tell Holmstrom she’s the new Assassinette. Holmstrom takes a look and says: “I wanna be in the band now!”
I didn’t respond and I know I offended him.
But if John had said, Steve I play a mean kazoo, can I get in on the act in some capacity?
I would have said sure. We’ll play a real punk song and have you do a kazoo solo. It will be fucking epic.
But he didn’t play it that way. He was in his high school band, but didn’t understand the protocol for rock bands.
Soon after the false allegations were made against me, which I was cleared of only after being thrown under the bus, I wrote a letter to Cruella saying either give me real power or let me go home and work on events and video without all this static.
She was like, fine!
Harry Crossfield by Frank Max. Harry was supposedly in the line of succession to the Spanish throne through his super model Cuban mother, and he was a flamboyant character in New York’s highest social circles.
And she put an ad in the Voice for an editor and a publisher. Holmstrom was being punished because I didn’t want to work with him, mostly because Harry Crossfield, his ad manager was terrorizing me. Holmstrom had his own ideas and he should have been made publisher-editor-in-chief, but Cruella was whimsical and the magazine her toy, and the people in it, pawns to be tortured periodically for her amusement.
I truly believe Cruella enjoyed watching people suffer.
So, I’m not at the magazine, not at all threatening Edison or the new editor, but I am throwing the first WHEE! with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and 20,000 people are expected.
Edison does not bother to attend my festival and neither does Cruella. They take a wide birth around my pot and religion movement.
The new editor, however, does show up for a day or two and walks around the site aimlessly and far as I know, talks to no one. He’s wearing shorts with sandals and white socks with a big floppy hat. Pot Star points him out to someone backstage and says, that’s the new editor. “You got to be kidding me,” was the response. A week later we learned Cruella dumped him entirely and made Edison editor and publisher, which had never happened before. Edison could have gone far if only he had tried to work with me instead of against me. His was always the smartest and most talented person in the room. In his own dream. In reality he was a wind bag.
I never knew what to think of the editor with the shortest tenure because he had worked previously for Bill Kunstler, who I know was a CIA spook, someone who called for an assassin to take out Tim Leary in prison for the crime of outing Kennedy as the head of the Weather Underground.
After I was fired, the dude invited me on his community-access TV show to interview me about my recently-released books on the JFK and Lincoln assassinations. One revealed Booth was a Confederate spook who got played by Jay Gould and Edwin Stanton, and the other that Oswald was a CIA spook who got played by the boys from JM/Wave. History had repeated itself in so many ways. And to this day, nobody but me tells the true story.
The interview was hilarious because I kept getting interrupted by useless double speak, Yogi Berra-word scrambles.
Despite all the fog and friction from Cruella, the 7-episode pilot remains amazing….
The intellectual godfather of Punk was Lou Reed. Fairies had always been celebrated in music, but only at the gay clubs. When the Warhol scene grabbed the center of gravity, Lou became their troubadour.
There’s a scene in the movie that involves a woman in a covered wagon whose hands are tied. Apparently she is a nymphomaniac who can’t be satisfied and requires constant sex. I guess her hands are tied to keep her from attacking strangers in the street or to keep her from tearing scars in the backs of those who service her constant desires. Carole grabbed both our arms as a jolt of sexuality shot through her while watching this scene. That’s when I figured out some girls like to be tied up for sex. The idea had never occurred to me, and I certainly didn’t want anybody tying me up during sex.
My band almost got famous, well famous for one night anyway. Max’s Kansas City closed down, and one of its house bands, The Senders, moved to Continental Divide. They had a regular Monday Night thing. Man, the Assassins loved the Senders! They had a similar style as ours, except we had dueling guitars. Their lead singer Phillippe was French and girls creamed their pants when he went off because he looked and acted like a French movie star. But the force of his voice was no competition for Flick Ford, our lead singer and also the High Times art director. Flick was also better on the harmonica, having been trained by Gordon Spaeth of the Fleshtones before Gordon drank himself out of the band. Like Lou, Gordy also had some issues with speed.
Cruella always used the summits to take long luxurious vacations at world famous resorts, all expenses on High Times. The company was no more than Cruella’s personal piggy bank. She would stay for ten days or however long Cruella wanted. There was typically some event in New York, the Hamptons or Palm Beach that required her attendance. She rolled with Bianca Jagger and Ivana Trump…up until the divorce that is, as Micheal had botched that case, dragged it out and charged a fortune, and never made a dent in Roy Cohn’s ironclad prenup. Worse, Cruella was caught gossiping about the case at Manhattan dinner parties, something documented in a critical piece in New York magazine titled “Ivana’s avenger.” You didn’t see Ivana attending Michael’s 60th birthday at the Armory. Bianca blew in late, and did a double take on me when she entered the room.
Ten minutes later, when the high-powered casting agent arrives with the underage actor who is playing the lead, she pulls John aside and complains, “what’s that smell?”
Aside from going through the painful process of dredging up the memories of a false accusation against me made 30 years ago, which I had to document in minute detail online, which no doubt has been even more painful for the other party to read than Bloom’s attack on me was for me, I can only compare Bloom’s attacks on me with the home crowds chanting “No means no!” to Terrence Shannon at the foul line.
1) 
I could have actually helped Edison but he was too contemptuous of me. He was always bashing me in editorial meetings, and refused to let me do any conspiracy stories. It was torture until they demoted him. Boy, was I happy I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. He stuck around for a few more years, a useful tool for Cruella to play off against me, working on promotion and special projects. He was all ga-ga about getting a cameo in a low-budget film he wanted to put High Times’s name on. I read the script and told Cruella the truth: it was total trash. Boy, was Edison steamed. He thought it was a masterpiece. Go watch it sometime. It’s called Potluck. The author-writer had good intentions and the concept could have worked if the script hadn’t been so weak, and the casting so terrible. He was married and having a midlife crisis, and made the film about an older dude like him shacking up with a hot babe from the Lower East Side. Nowhere in your wildest dreams would you imagine these two people as a couple. But the writer-director had similar plans for a girl I also had the hots for and had some dates with. Jesse Malin stole her away from me and they were a regular item for a long time.
There was a super smart publicist who worked for many super big rock stars and she was super popular downtown.
Chef RA (formerly Jim Wilson) was the pitcher and the most flamboyant among us, not to mention the most gifted athletically having taken second place in the high jump in the state finals his senior year.
My outfit was heavily customized with painted patches, and my cleats were psychedelic. I had a range of ceremonial hats that included the Freedom Fighter tricorn and others. I passed them around for others to put on during the rally.
But strangely, Holmstrom, who I had appointed manager, became publisher, put on a suit and tie and quit the team, but made sure to place Bloom in charge.
We were doing the moment of silence holding hands in a circle when Danny Danko began screaming at the top of his lungs. Hard to do a peace ceremony when someone is lobbing hate bombs at you. But that’s a fact I learned about trying to amp the peace vibe. It draws haters like flies to shit.
When Robin ‘the Hammer” Ludwig appeared, I immediately knew I had my Merlin and Vulcan rolled up in one. Cruella has the original solid silver and engraved chalice that was used for the cover shoots so that’s the real Cup grail. That was too expensive and time-consuming to mass produce.
So the vibe I was assembling for the Cup, was peace and love straight out of the Golden Gate Park Sunday services by Stephen Gaskin, balanced by an equal dose of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which is where the improvisational rituals and fun vibe came in.
First, I drink a glass of water and go for a pedal boat ride until my adrenalin slows down and I can breath normally without any hyperventilation.
A few years ago, I was approached by Danny McBride’s people to create an HBO TV series about my tenure at High Times. Not sure, but I think Danny wanted to play me.
Stratton had nowhere near the ability to pull that off. He’d spent 8 years in prison, was never a hippie, just a rich drug kingpin turned novelist. He wanted to use the position to build his fame, while I had tried to use the position to promote peace culture and end the war on cannabis.
Unlike Bloom, Edison has never called me a sex offender even though it all went down just before he was publisher. He calls me a hippie fool, but not a sex offender. However, the one part of his book where he discusses the false allegation against me, I am not identified. He couldn’t bring himself to type my name.
