The Ballad of High Times Magazine

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0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too And we're just hanging out feeling I-ree Here on Stuff You Should Know Did you ever, I mean I'm going to ask you two questions Did you ever read High Times much? And did you ever subscribe? I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked at the pictures. Yeah, I think for one year in college, I actually subscribed because, and this is High Times magazine. We're talking about everybody. I was going to say notorious, but not really notorious. The infamous weed magazine.

0:55Sure. But I subscribed for, I think, a year because it just seemed like, you know, I wanted to have that house, like, had that on the coffee table with our address on it. I just thought it was, like, a cool thing to do, you know? Yeah. I mean, it was legitimately cool during a certain period of life. Yeah. Like, if you were 50 doing that, it's kind of sad. But if you're, like, 20 or 19 or 21 or 20 and a half, let's say, then, yeah, I get it. Watch what you say, though. I've learned from recent emails. There may be a 50 year old out there that thinks I time is cool. This can be very upset. Yeah, it's true.

1:33But I mean, do they have it on their coffee table? I don't know. I think that's the thing that's getting me. Even when I did read it occasionally, I even at the time was like, this is the articles, the way they're written. There were so many puns. So kind of corny. Yeah. And so it never felt like as good as I think they might have thought it was. Does that make sense? Yeah. And also one of the other things, too, I was going to say you could sense it, but no, it was just really overt, was they had an agenda in every single one of their articles. There was a way they wanted you to think, which is their position on it.

2:08And they would like mock the other position on it, typically the government's position on like legalization or something like that. Yeah. Good point. Over time, though, I mean, it became it's an iconic magazine. Like, yeah, for sure. Pretty much everybody's heard of High Times. If you've never even picked one up, there's a good chance you've heard of High Times or somebody referencing High Times. It's like it insinuated itself into American pop culture. And the reason why it became iconic is it survived all sorts of drug culture transitions. Yeah. Like throughout all these different ways of thinking and looking at drugs and different drugs people were doing, High Times managed to just keep plodding along and stay relevant, I guess, is the best way to put it.

2:55I didn't think I was going to say that out loud, but here we are. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let's just get into it then. Okay. No more needs to be added. I agree. I agree. So High Times was founded by a guy named Thomas King Forsad. and I just realized I didn't look up any videos of people pronouncing his name, but I'm pretty sure that's how it's spelled. I was so ready to roll with four K'd. Well, I've seen the little French version of the umlaut, the little devil's tail coming off of the bottom of the sea. Oh, okay. And that indicates a s sound if my high school French doesn't fail me. So I think his name was Thomas King Fassad.

3:37All right. Great. Right. He looks like if you look up this guy, you know, when I went to look up, I'd never seen a picture of him. I expected I didn't expect to see someone so cool looking. I mean, he looks like he stepped right out of the Allman Brothers band or something. I was going to say it looks like the Allman Brothers satanic advisor. Yeah, for sure. And if you're thinking like, what do you mean? It was like a pot magazine. Why do you think he'd be cool? It's because I usually expect them to look sort of like a wavy gravy. any like weed activist to be just decked out in tie-dye and kind of just wearing some sort of wacky handmade hat.

4:13And this guy, like, he looked like he could jump off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something, you know? Yeah, and you know that same 50-year-old who's upset because I said something about high times on his coffee table? It's pretty much a wavy gravy lookalike too. Yeah, he's wearing his own handmade knit hat. Right. Right. So this guy, Thomas King Fassad, it's a pretty cool name. And if it sounds made up, it is made up. His real name was Gary Goodson. And it's not because his name was Gary Goodson that he ditched that name in favor of Thomas King Fassad. he was actually a big big time pot dealer like not only did he sell literal tons of pot in like the i think starting in the late 60s and going well into past the time he was um had started publishing high times uh he smuggled it himself he flew planes and he went to mexico he went to Jamaica.

5:16And he smuggled pot, tons of pot at a time into the United States. There was a quote I found of his that he said, there's two types of pot dealers, those who need a forklift and those who don't. I need a forklift. And like, he wasn't, he wasn't joking. Like he really dealt that much pot. Yeah. So, I mean, regardless of how you feel about that or him or any of it, he wasn't just some guy saying like, hey, let's try and make a little dough off of this marijuana people are smoking. Like he was knee deep in the business. Right. This was after coming out of seemingly to avoid the Vietnam draft, a short stint in the air guard where he was discharged after convincing them that he had schizophrenia.

6:03And at that point, he went back to Arizona in Phoenix, changed that name, which was his mother's I'm sorry, grandmother's maiden name. and, you know, got into the underground zine scene. You know, that was a big thing back in the late 60s because of the ubiquity of, like, being able to print your own stuff in an office or I don't know if they had Kinko's back then. But he got into those and founded his own first underground magazine called Orpheus, which had some politics to it, but it was kind of just a little groovy, psychedelic thing that covered, like, music and pot and stuff. Tell them about the issue with the peace sign in the bullet hole.

6:41Yeah, there was a peace sign on the cover that actually had a real bullet hole. So instead of just drawing a bullet hole, he shot them up. Yeah, he shot bundles of stacks wrapped together with a Colt 45 handgun to really kind of drive the point home. I mean, it's creative. That is an underground zine right there. If it has a bullet hole in it that the publisher put there, that's really something. Yeah. It's like with real blood. Right. You said something that I think is really worth pointing out because there's a whole camp of people who tell this origin story of high times and Thomas King Fassad that is like just some money making scheme or just a lark or something like that.

7:23This guy in actuality was a dedicated First Amendment warrior, like dedicated. And also he was very committed to the counterculture, not just because he sold tons of weed. But he genuinely believed in legalizing marijuana, that that was a crucial thing to do in the United States. And he put his money where his mouth is. And like you said, he started with underground zines. And then he took up, I saw that he joined or he founded. I couldn't tell which one was correct. Well, it's basically like an associated press for underground magazines. It was called the Underground Press Syndicate. and I think it changed its name to something else, right?

8:08I'm not sure. I always saw it called UPS. Well, we'll just call it that. But it was, like I said, the AP where you could get all sorts of news about drug busts or about some spectacular pot harvest or something to do with underground culture and you could just print it in your local mag and the people in Phoenix are reading the same thing as the people in Denver, but they don't know that. They just think it's like part of your magazine. Yeah. And he eventually worked his way up to national coordinator for the underground press syndicate. And that's where he learned how to run a magazine, basically.

8:45That's how he learned about ad deals, distribution, printing, like efficient printing, real printing for a little while. And I figure we should probably do something on Abby Hoffman and the Yippies at some point. All right.

9:01you don't want to highlight boomers do you no it's not that i just think that guy's gotten more than enough of his spotlight but yes it's all right you know what then forget it okay wow i didn't think i was going to talk you out on that one hey if you want to learn about abby hoffman you're not going to learn about it here everybody go go steal his book yeah or read very nice i got that one uh so he did join up with hoffman though and his yippies again if you want to read about them. They were a group that did a lot of like kind of social pranks and media grab, you know, activist stuff for their radical causes.

9:38In 1970, Forsade, you said? Yeah, because if you take out the O and change, or no, if you change the O to an A and take out the R, you've got facade, like the front of a building. So I'm making an educated guess here. I think you're probably right, but I've been saying it wrong all day in my head, so it's going to take a minute. That's okay. I was reading the High Times archives, and I guess they had some sixth-grade trained AI scan and alter or turn all of their magazine photos into text. And boy, they came up with some creative ways of spelling that guy's name. Wow. You also sent me a lot of fun ads for cocaine paraphernalia.

10:21Dude. That was crazy. There is few things that are funner, but also more shocking than looking at vintage cocaine paraphernalia ads that appeared in the likes of High Times and other magazines. Yeah. And there was one that I pointed out to you that was just like this thing should be in the Smithsonian. It was a metal, probably like a gold plated Coke tube. So you put one end in the Coke and you put the other end up your nose and you sniff. Right. Just in case you didn't know how to ingest cocaine. How that works? And it's shaped like an old school vacuum cleaner. And so the Coke goes into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner and comes out the handle, which is up in your nose.

11:02They call it the Hoover instead of the Hoover. Like whoever, whoever came up with this is just that's dedication right there, because that's the kind of idea you just be like, man, we should totally make this. But then the person actually went and made it and sold it. Yeah. And then McDonald's hired them to develop their Happy Meal prices. They're like, this guy's really good at these tiny little bubbles. Exactly. And if you knew what you were doing, you could clip the ends off of all those prizes and use them as coax jobs. All right. So 1970, that's where we were. Forsyth testified before Nixon's presidential commission on obscenity and pornography.

11:42And this is when he got a real chance to, you know, take the national stage and talked about, well, the quote was the only obscenity is censorship. And it's the first, and I feel like we talked about this in our Pie in the Face episode. It had to. But it's the first incident that we know of where a protest pie in the face happened when he pulled out a cream pie and face pied Dr. Larson, Dr. Otto Larson. Yeah, who was the chairman of that committee on obscenity and pornography, right? Yeah, and that must be the first one. I mean, it's cited as the first time. Yeah. You know, not in a Marx Brothers movie.

12:23Somebody's like, let me make a point with this. Yeah, it was a form of protest that picked up really quick. I mean, there's few things you can do to somebody publicly that is more disrespectful and humiliating, but also non injurious than tying them in the face. But he did that anymore. He was called to testify. And not only did he say that censorship is the true obscenity, he said he said F censorship and F you. And then he pied the guy in the face and a congressional hearing. This is what he did. This is just the kind of person he was like he wasn't somebody who just talked a big game like this guy followed through on the stuff that he really believed in.

13:04Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the day before in Phoenix, so it was rotten green. Yick. Should we take a break? Um, sure. All right, let's take a break, and we'll talk about the beginnings of the magazine right after this.

13:23Stuff You Should Know. Josh and Chuck.

13:31Stuff You Should Know.

13:43All right. So we've introduced our protagonist, I guess, in the first act. We can't, and, you know, Dave helped us put together this article, and he points out that if you tried to get, I mean, you could do a whole article on this guy and talk about all the wacky things he did over the years, like concert, festival, promotion, He snuck allegedly pipe bombs into the 72 Republican convention. Later on, he followed the sex pistols around and co-produced a documentary on them called DOA. Yeah. So he was a busy guy doing a lot of stuff. But this is about High Times. So the origin story officially for High Times magazine is that he thought of it with his friends while he was huffing nitrous oxide.

14:30Other people say it might have been an acid trip. But either way, the early idea was, hey, how about how about a magazine, like a marijuana themed magazine? They've got Playboy. And some people say like the initial idea was just a one off kind of spoof of Playboy. But everyone that worked there said, no, no, no. The idea was always to have like a real magazine that was cheeky and fun, but also like real journalism and tackle real topics about activism and marijuana and growing it and all that stuff. Right, exactly. Michael Kennedy, who was Farsad's personal attorney and then came on as High Times legal counsel from like the beginning until I think 2016 when he died, he explained it that High Times was meant to be a way to use free speech to teach people how to grow pot.

15:24and that like they basically had found a loophole thanks to the First Amendment that they could disseminate all of this information as far and as wide as they possibly could. And in teaching people to grow their own pot, that would eventually change attitudes about pot and potentially lead to legalization. And as we'll see that they were successful in that quest that they started back in 1974. Yeah, that's right. And I think, I mean, I think it absolutely did that. I think one of the missions was, hey, let's really convince people, not convince, but let's really show people what the truth is, which is that this is a plant that can be grown.

16:06Like plant versus, you know, illicit drug, you know? Right. Or illicit drug versus illicit drug. Like at the time, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 had just been passed, thanks to Richard Nixon. and marijuana, which by the way, I read is not at all racist. There was a Latino, I think, historian who researched it and he's like, yeah, that's actually myth. So good for him. That it was a Schedule I, which I think it still was until like this year, which means that it has, according to the government, no medicinal value whatsoever in the high potential for abuse. And both of those are just absolute lies.

16:54They're just not correct. They're not true. They knew this back in 1970 and that this this Controlled Substances Act kicked off the war on drugs, which in retrospect, most people now agree was misguided and a huge waste of money and killed a lot of people. And this was the era that they - And incarcerated. Yes, incarcerated. It's a big one too. But it was in this era, the beginning of this era, that high times started to kind of become not just an idea, but an actuality. So they wanted to fight that, which was part of the reason they were willing to like use mockery or just all of their articles had a slant to it Because they felt like they were taking on liars.

17:38And that's a legitimate way to respond to liars is through mockery or really kind of pushing your agenda against them. But that was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So that very first issue came out summer of 74 is when it debuted. It had a 10 ,000 copy print run. And it didn't really light the world on fire, I guess, no pun intended, at first. It was it had like an excerpt from a Timothy Leary novel, of course, articles about hemp and marijuana and how great they thought it was. There were some interviews. And very importantly, they had a something that would stay in the magazine, which was a feature called the trans high market market quotation, which is a listing of like, hey, in Chicago, this is how much a dime bag costs.

18:31This is how much it costs in New York. This is what an ounce of weed costs in Phoenix. you know, what they use, I guess they still call it street value, which I always thought was really funny. But that's, that's what it was. And it, and it stayed in there for a long time, even though, as we'll talk about later, it changed a little bit over the years. But this first issue, like I said, was not, I mean, they did eventually sell out of that 10 ,000, but it wasn't through, it was through a lot of hustling. It wasn't like, Hey, it's on your newsstand. Forsad said, here, let me get it into head shops.

19:02Let me send them to record stores. Apparently, drug dealers bought copies and gave them away to people. So it eventually did sell out the two printings. But it was the second issue is when it really, really took off because of their, you know, kind of ingenious promotion. Well, yeah, they threw a launch party at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York and invited like a bunch of media and just got them messed up. like like like straight button down media types journalists um some like tv news people showed up and were like giving brownies and like here try nitrous oxide and have you ever had cocaine and i read a quote from michael kennedy the legal counsel for high times he said that um he remembers three or four lawsuits being brought against high times from people who got so wasted for the first time in their lives that they decided to sue the magazine for it.

19:56I could see that. Apparently, it was also, if not the first, one of the first times live television showed people doing drugs. That was one of the local news stations, according to Rolling Stone, showed people on camera on the news snorting cocaine. And I'm sure people at home are watching this just going like, what is going on? But it was huge publicity. And they sold out their 50, this time 50 ,000 copy run in four weeks. And it became like a genuine sensation. That's when also the second issue is when they started also as an homage to Playboy magazine, their centerfold. But of course, their centerfold was always these big, beautifully photographed pictures of buds, marijuana buds.

20:42The first one, I would take issue with the idea that it was beautiful. It was a 20-pound brick of schwag. just brown and compressed and ugly. But at the time, it was like their premier weed, Colombian. And just another aside, I'm sorry about this, but I've always wondered in Hey 19, the Steely Dan song, when he says the Cuervo gold and the fine Colombian, is he talking about cocaine or is he talking about pot? And I went and researched this and I stumbled into like a longstanding argument. Oh, really? Yeah, I read an explanation from one person, and it sounded pretty legit. They said it's 100 % pot that they were talking about.

21:24That's what you called really good pot. Back in the 70s, it was Colombian. And it wouldn't have referred to cocaine in the first place, because at that time, most of the cocaine came from Peru. Colombian farmers hadn't really taken up coca production. And so most people, if you were aware of cocaine, you were like, this is some fine Peruvian. You wouldn't say this is some fine Colombian. So it seems like that guy settled it, at least in my mind. Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never know it. It depends on the day, probably. I guess it does. Sure. Have you seen the Yacht Rock documentary yet on Max?

22:01No. It's pretty good. Like about the people who came up with Yacht Rock? Well, I mean, the people who came up with the term Yacht Rock are featured in it, but it's about the genre of music. Oh, okay. So, like, it goes back to the 70s and 80s? Well, yeah. What else would it be about? Well, there's a band called Yacht Rock that kicked it all off, and I don't know. Oh, you mean like the Yacht Rock Review? Yes. No, no, no, no. Could have been going on tour with them. The term Yacht Rock came about in the early 2000s from a web comedy series. Okay. Which I never knew until I saw this documentary. But no, it's about just Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald and Seals and Croft.

22:44All the great people. You'd enjoy it, I think. Have you seen the limited series Black Doves? No, I have not. What's that? It's a British spy thriller, like eight or ten episode show. Say no more. It's really good. I mean, you can say more, but I just mean I'm into that kind of thing. No, I'm with you. No, just go watch it. I recommend it. Well, see, I always say these things in a recording, and then I don't remember afterward. Just text me and be like, what was the thing with the thing? I don't know what you're talking about. Why don't you text me right now while I talk? Black does. I don't have my phone on me.

23:17It's on the charger. I'm sorry. That's right. So mid-70s, when High Times rolls out, those very first years, the magazine was doing really well. but as a you know sort of a new magazine but Fursad was not he was on the FBI surveillance list he was very paranoid because of the massive amounts of drugs that he was taking well but also rightfully so the FBI and possibly even the CIA was infiltrating the counterculture and planting informants and there was a time where he was like there's an informant here the high time staff and I don't know which one of you it is there may have been yeah it's possible like he had reason to be paranoid at the very least, but it was definitely fueled to extremes through his drug use for sure.

24:03Yeah, absolutely. The magazine itself was doing well, like I said, the staff. I mean, it was just, I mean, if you think like the Lampoon and Mad Magazine was kind of crazy in their office, like everybody in the High Times office was huffing nitrous and smoking weed and snorting blow, like as they were working. But it was, you know, it was creating like some really relevant journalism. They were exposing, you know, government activities as far as the drug war goes, like when putting paraquat, which I cannot help but think of Big Lebowski when I hear that word. I don't remember that part. It's when Jeff, when the dude called the real Lebowski a human paraquat when he was mad.

24:48I think he said human even, human paraquat. Yeah. But Paraquat was the pesticide that was in marijuana fields under orders from the U.S. And this article helped promote a congressional investigation. They interviewed the Dalai Lama about drugs. There was Hunter S. Thompson and, of course, William S. Burroughs doing writing. There was Truman Capote did a guest interview with Andy Warhol. Bob Marley was in it. Like it was really the heyday of that magazine as far as being like a real like they achieve what they wanted to achieve in the first few years. Yeah. I mean, that's like some heavyweight underground stuff right there that they got into their pages for sure.

25:32Yeah. Yeah. I think the latest thing you mentioned was 1978 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. So this is all in like the first four years that they're cramming all this stuff in there. So yeah, right out of the gate, it was very successful. In part, Chuck, because there was nothing like this in existence before, I mean, aside from some underground zines that 50 people read before high times. It became a national magazine, a national magazine about pot and people who love pot and love drugs and want to see them legalized. And here's how you do it. And here's how you grow this stuff. And today it seems like it's not a really big thing to talk about pod or to find an article about people smoking pot in Newsweek or whatever.