Ozzy Osbourne on the cover of the March 1999 issue of High Times magazine. All photos by Dennis Kleiman.
 

“What other job can you imagine where the more fucked up you turn up, the better people think you’re gonna be? ‘Oh, fuckin’ Tony’s stoned’ or ‘Ozzy’s stoned’ or ‘Bill’s stoned.’ It’s going to be good fun tonight.’

—Ozzy in High Times talking about smoking ganja with Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath’s original members came together twice during the 1990s—the first occasion occurring at the conclusion of Ozzy’s first No More Tours tour when a newly sober Ozzy asked his old band to open two shows in Costa Mesa, California on November 15th and 16th, 1992. Both shows would end with Ozzy joining Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward on stage to rip through a few Sabbath classics. The second “reunion” in 1997 at Ozzfest (minus drummer Bill Ward until his return in December of that year), would eventually lead to an album, the band’s first live record (featuring the original lineup), Reunion. In October of 1998, the band arrived in New York City for their first TV appearance in 22 years on the Late Show with David Letterman. While in New York, Ozzy’s people reached out to High Times magazine saying that he wanted the magazine to interview him. When High Times journalist Chris Simunek got the news he was going to interview the Prince of Darkness (or perhaps the Prince of Dankness in this scenario), he thought he was being “pranked” as the thought of possibly doing bong hits with Ozzy was just too much. But the request was legit and Simunek and High Times production director Rob Braswell eventually set out to meet Ozzy and Iommi at their hotel. Once they were whisked away to the room where interviews were being held, they were greeted by Osbourne who asked them if they were “rolling yet.” Priorities, Ozzy has them.

Upon meeting Ozzy, Simunek described shaking the hand of the odds-defying vocalist like “shaking the hand of a man who just came out of a 30-year panic attack.” Even at 50, Ozzy’s hereditary tremors and stammering speech were front and center; however, this didn’t stop Osbourne or Iommi from sharing some stories from their drug-using/abusing past—which was the point of the interview with High Times in the first place. In the words of Simunek—if you want to read about Black Sabbath’s music “go read Guitar Player.” This discussion with Ozzy and Iommi, two of heavy metal’s most valuable players was about weed, and as it turns out, lots of other party favors the band had devoured during their smoke it/snort it/drink it days. The interview was published in the March 1999 issue and would become one of High Times’ biggest sellers. As I am a proud owner of this issue, it feels like high time to share some of the highlights.
 

Ozzy, Tony Iommi and ALL THE WEED in High Times Magazine.
 

Simunek: So I’ve got to ask you about “Sweet Leaf.” Where did that come from?

Ozzy: Well, what do you think? We used to smoke pounds of the shit man. We used to buy it by the fuckin’ sackful. We used to be so fucked up all the time. Wake up in the morning, start the day with a spliff and go to bed with it. Yeah, it started to get…I started to get the heebee-jeebees. I was mixing all kinds of other chemicals. Booze, coke, pills…

Simunek: Do you see a difference between pot and other chemicals?

Ozzy: Absolutely. This, for instance, (waving his cigarette), tobacco. I couldn’t smoke as many joints a day as I can this stuff. Gotta legalize pot. I’m all for the legalization of pot, decriminalize it. I don’t smoke it myself, but if anybody wants to smoke it, fine. I got busted for it. We all did.

Simunek: With coke, wouldn’t you record albums faster?

Ozzy: You’d do it, and then you’d forget what you were doing! We couldn’t turn the fucking tape machine on! We’d turn the ‘pause’ on instead of ‘play/record,’ you know. We’d be playing for fuckin’ twenty-four hours.

Iommi: Those neat little bags (of coke).

Ozzy: Just chop us another line out! Get another can of beer out of the fridge! Roll another joint! We used to smoke big bags of hash. Big fuckin’...we used to buy hash by the pound.

Iommi: And coke. We used to buy these sealed bottles of coke.

Ozzy: Government sealed!

Simunek: Is it rough to be sober now?

Ozzy: It sucks. I don’t like being sober, but say you chopped up some lines (of coke). I’d go, ‘Yeah, I’ll go for it.’ By twelve-o’clock I’d be hanging off of the fucking building screaming with a bottle of vodka in my hand. There was a big period of time when I used to drink cheap wine and do ‘ludes. I’d be like fucking jelly, and the audience would be like a pond, a fucking oil slick. Did you ever try the original Quaaludes?

Simunek: No. That’s a little before my time.

Ozzy: (Now addressing Iommi) They were fucking wonderful, weren’t they? I could still get them. I know somebody who froze ten thousand.

In addition to Ozzy and Iommi’s take on their own personal Fear and Loathing journey in High Times, there was also a photo shoot with Osbourne and Iommi at photographer Dennis Kleiman’s New York studio involving a shit-ton of high-quality New York grown nugs and buds. Ozzy’s publicists kept a tight wrap on the guest list for the shoot (even Simunek was barred from being there), which was probably for the best as according to those who were there, Ozzy was especially “playful” during the session as he clutched a giant bag of weed while running laps around Kleiman’s studio. While all this was going on, some of Ozzy’s crew started pocketing some of the bud used for the shoot. When word got back to High Times editor and publisher Mike Edison (as noted in his 2008 book I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World), he was pissed. Here’s more from Edison on the great Ozzy Osbourne Weed Heist of 1999:

“They were stuffing their pockets with weed when they left. Fuck, why didn’t they just ask! Boosting the stash was pretty square. No class. We would have pretty much given them whatever they wanted out of respect for their boss. There was no way I was not going to exploit this, and I leaked the story to the New York Post which it ran on Page Six titled ‘Drug-Addled Rock Star Pilfers Pot, Chaos Reigns at Stoner Photo Shoot.’”

More after the jump…

 
It won’t surprise anyone to learn that the December 1978 issue of High Times went with a holiday theme. More surprising might be the identity of the two models masquerading as Santa Claus and one of his elves, those being, respectively, Andy Warhol, the most dominant artist of the postwar period, and Truman Capote, one of greatest literary writers the U.S. produced in the same timeframe.

Especially in 1978, Tru and Andy were more or less synonymous with the fabulous goings-on at Studio 54 and elsewhere. Both men were known to hang with an illustrious and sparkly group of personages, and both were public figures at a moment when TV had deepened its clutches on the middlebrow slice of America—hence, more creative and bizarre media opportunities for everyone.

The cover was supposed to feature Capote wearing a “little girl outfit,” but he was drunk and not in the mood to go drag that day. In The Andy Warhol Diaries, for the date of September 26, 1978, we find this:
 

Truman was coming to the Factory at 3:00 for the High Times Christmas cover photograph of him and me. Truman was early, 2:30.

...

Paul Morrissey was down, and he and Truman talked all afternoon about scripts and things. Then Toni arrived four hours late, she had a Santa costume for me and a little girl outfit for Truman. But Truman wasn’t in the mood to go into drag, he said that he was already dressed like a little boy. Truman was really drunk, hugging around.

 
Toni Brown is the “Toni” mentioned in the diary that day; she was the art director for High Times, whom Warhol had met in the spring of 1978. According to Victor Bockris’ biography of Warhol, Brown and Warhol fell into cahoots for a stretch in 1978:
 

[Warhol] had also become friendly with the art director of High Times magazine, a powerful woman named Toni Brown whose overt, humorous personality fitted his needs. Soon a lot of people at the Factory were throwing up their hands in dismay over the amount of time Andy was spending with Toni.

 
In Warhol’s diary, Brown pops up in just a handful of entries, and her appearances are entirely limited to 1978. The folks at the Factory needn’t have worried so much—Warhol’s diary entry from late September documenting the cover shoot is actually the last time her name appears in the book.

By the way, here is the final cover:
 

 
Warhol shows surprising equanimity after being made to wait for four hours—I’d've been arranging a contract hit, myself—although that may have factored into their not being as close after that; either Brown paid a price for being cavalier about Warhol’s time or else Warhol’s usefulness to Brown evaporated the moment that she had secured the desired cover photo. Or both!

Four years ago the Warhol Museum ran a note about that day on its website, in which the possible identity of the pooch is discussed:
 

An artist as prolific as Andy Warhol was bound to have their share of bizarre media coverage. In December of 1978, he and his good friend and collaborator Truman Capote appeared on the cover of an issue of High Times. Warhol is wearing a Santa suit, and is holding a dog, possibly one of his dachshunds Amos or Archie.

 
More pics from this bizarre and merry photo shoot after the jump…...
 

 
A handful of times between 1975 and 1986, a comic called “Dope Rider” appeared in the rollable pages of High Times. Heavily influenced by the gritty, intense westerns of Sergio Leone, “Dope Rider” was the creation of a young New York comix artist named Paul Kirchner. If Kirchner’s strong compositions and clever wordplay didn’t already make him a perfect fit for High Times, the trippy visual tropes surely did, the most potent among them being the constant presence of a skeleton cowboy prowling the vistas of the American Southwest.

Kirchner himself has a blog up in which the entire run of “Dope Rider” is available as large jpegs—that’s right, every page. It turns out that “Dope Rider” didn’t even start its existence in High Times at all. The first incarnation of the character was executed on spec, so that Kirchner would have a sample ready for prospective freelance employers. It eventually appeared in the October 1975 issue of Scary Tales. Two more installments appeared in the November 1974 issue of Harpoon and the March and May 1975 issues of Apple Pie, which were actually the same magazine—the name change occurring “after lawyers for National Lampoon started clearing their throats.”

The same year “Dope Rider” found its way to High Times, where it reached its largest audience and also used color images for the first time, which certainly improved its impact on the magazine’s baked readers.
 

Kirchner’s High Times bio, from the August 1976 issue
 
The primary function of any “Dope Rider” comic was to induce an “Ohhh wooow” reaction from the zonked readers. The comic occasionally featured a locomotive engineer with a third eye in his forehead who would supply cockeyed dictionary definitions such as: “Pyramid, n., to look within, to peer amid.” Most of the comics featured either a psychedelic vista or a shootout in which the Dope Rider skeleton character was killed—if not both. In “Crescent Queen,” Dope Rider inquired of a raven how to get to Tucumcari; the bird replies, “No one gets there, man. It’s one of those places you just end up.” Right on, man…..

That first High Times comic, titled “Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” got Kirchner a little unwelcome attention from the Hell’s Angels:
 

I did one very bad thing in this story—I depicted the logo of the nation’s premier motorcycle club on the back of Dope Rider’s vest. That motorcycle club, whose New York City clubhouse was a few blocks from the High Times editorial office, sent over a contingent of large, hairy negotiators to make it clear that they didn’t care to be associated with High Times or the Dope Rider character. [High Times founder and editor Tom] Forçade let me know he would just as soon not have that happen again. I’ve blurred the logo out here in case they’re still checking up. (Love you guys!!)

Kirchner would later find more regular work at Heavy Metal, where he turned out a brilliant, surrealistic comic series called “The Bus” for several years. (That series is available in book form.)

Here’s a list of all the appearances of “Dope Rider” in High Times:
 

“Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,” August/September 1975
“Beans for All,” December/January 1976
“Crescent Queen,” August 1976
“Taco Belle,” June 1978
“Matinee Idyll,” January 1981
“Loco Motive,” May 1986

  
In addition, Kirchner also worked up a single-page parody of his own series for Al Goldstein’s National Screw. In that story the character was called “Dopey Rider,” and the story was titled “Toe-Jam.”

I’ve cherry-picked a few of the more striking images for this post, but to see the entire “Dope Rider” output, you just have to go to Kirchner’s blog. He also has a Cafe Press store with plenty of great Dope Rider swag.
 

 

 
More “Dope Rider” after the jump…

 
From a 1977 issue of High Times. Kinda like finding Fool’s Gold, eh?
 

 

 
Via reddit

 
Whether you plan to become a pot grower, improve your skills as a grower or simply are curious about agriculture, this is a fascinating documentary on marijuana cultivation. Ganja growing wizard and High Times columnist Jorge Cervantes gives you the step by step info you need to become a pot farmer.

Of course, we here at Dangerous Minds are providing this video for entertainment purposes only. Personally, I found this particularly entertaining stoned.
 

 
Via See Of Sound

This year’s winner Derry from Barney’s
 
And the 23rd High Times Cannabis Cup winner is:
Barney’s Coffeehouse Amsterdam for its strain ‘Tangerine Dream’.

I may just have to start smoking this stuff again. Beautiful aren’t they?
 

In London this week, the Wellcome Trust opens an exhibition called High Society exploring “the role of mind-altering drugs in history and culture,” which challenges “the perception that drugs are a disease of modern life.”

From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ will explore the paths by which these drugs were first discovered - from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories - and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture.
Mind-altering drugs have been used in many ways throughout history - as medicines, sacraments and status symbols, to investigate the brain, inspire works of art or encounter the divine, or simply as an escape from the experience.

Exhibits will include: Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ manuscript, said to have been written after an opium dream; a hand-written manuscript by Captain Thomas Bowrey describing his crew’s experiments with Bhang - a cannabis drink - in 17th-century Bengal; a bottle of cocaine eye drops; and a hallucinogenic snuff set collected in the Amazon by the Victorian explorer Richard Spruce. The exhibition will also feature contemporary art pieces exploring drug use and culture, including Tracy Moffat’s Laudanum portrait series and a recreation of the Joshua Light Show by Joshua White and Seth Kirby.

Today’s Daily Telegraph reports:

Last week, the news took on a decidedly trippy tinge. First, Professor David Nutt, sacked as an adviser to the Labour government for criticising its policy on drugs, sparked controversy when he published research suggesting that heroin was less damaging than alcohol. The following day, Californians went to the polls to vote on a proposal to legalise cannabis. In a dramatic move, President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, threatened to intervene if the outcome was a “yes” (it wasn’t).

It is timely, then, that this Thursday, the Wellcome Trust will open the doors on High Society, an exhibition exploring the history of mind-altering drugs. In keeping with the Wellcome ethos, the exhibition blends a scientific and cultural approach, with curiosities such as a 20 metre opium pipe – an installation by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping – sitting alongside more scientific (if no less bizarre) exhibits, such as a Nasa experiment that studied the strange webs spiders spin after they are given different types of drugs.

Amid the debate about drugs, one thing is often ignored: their surprising potential in medicine. Most people are familiar with the idea that cannabis can be used therapeutically, chiefly in relieving pain or the nausea caused by chemotherapy, but also to moderate autoimmune and neurological disorders. But according to Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and director of the Beckley Foundation – a charity that promotes research into drugs and consciousness – we have not fully harnessed its potential. “The prohibition of the past 50 years has dramatically slowed the advancement of knowledge in the area,” she says. “In combating the recreational use of cannabis, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.”

More surprising is the fact that harder drugs may also have therapeutic potential. Class A substances such as LSD and ecstasy, Feilding claims, may have a wealth of health benefits. “We need to wash these substances of their taboo by using the best science,” she says. “Opium and heroin are already widely used in hospitals. Hallucinogenic drugs, however, are victims of a prohibition that came into place in the Sixties.”

“The potential of Class A hallucinogens for clinical use is tantalising,” says Mike Jay, curator of the exhibition. “Psychedelic drugs have been subjected to the most stringent legislation. Yet when administered clinically, they are non-addictive, non-toxic and effective in the smallest quantities.”...

...“Every society is a high society,” he says. “The question is, what are we going to do about it? If illegal drugs can be used as effective medical treatments, it would be wrong not to research that rigorously.”

High Society runs from11 November 2010 - 27 February 2011 at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, Admission Free