Cheech and Chong, The Playboy Interview, September 1982

This issue jumped out at me for two reason: 1) it had Cheech and Chong, and 2) the Behind the Lines in the TV News War--which is a great report on the then current broadcast journalism culture. You can download the entire C&C interview here as a pdf for free.  All the ads are from the same issue.

The C&C interview starts with them running down to a pool to meet 16 year old Brooke Shields.  Shields had two films under her little belt by 1982, Pretty Lady (1978) where she played a teenage prostitute, and  The Blue Lagoon (1980).  Their priorities are to light a joint, and go find Geraldo Rivera, who is interviewing Shields for 20/20.





Rivera is described by C&C as being a long time friend.  He backs away from the two when the PB interviewer shows up with a strange microphone and C&C with an active joint.

C&C say they have a strong admiration of Woody Allen and vaudeville.

Their comedy is in not getting laid, "movies are for laughs, crying, and hard-ons."

  

If you see enough of their movies, 17 exactly, Columbia pictures will cure your cancer.

  

They talk about their critics who accuse them of promoting drugs, but they say they’re just telling jokes.  They say their humor has a third-world relaxation element to it directly stemming a certain roughness related to being poor and born brown or black.  

Talks about a falling out they had during the filming of Nice Dreams.  Tommy was directing and it got to him.

Cheech has a Catholic school upbringing and a police officer for a father.  He was a English lit major, thought he’d be a lawyer, then a teacher…. but became a hippie draft dodger who went to Canada.

Tommy Chong’s grandmother was a friend of Amelia Earharts.  She was also the first Chinese woman to fly a plane.  He's from a small town in Canada.  He lost his virginity to a prostitute in Calgary.  He has an unearthly way with women.

Tommy makes an inspirational reference to a comedy improv group from the mid to late 60s, The Committee, that I coincidentally have a matchbook of, picked up at a garage sale on the Island.

Tommy was a musician and played with a series of R&B groups, he wrote Does Your Momma Know About Me?  for Robert Taylor and the Vancouvers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBxOm-dhoek

That's some funny shit.

They were rock bottom broke in 1971.

Troops in Vietnam were writing letters to them saying they loved them and that it cost two Stones tapes to one Cheech and Chong tape by their local bartering system.  Their comedy records were outselling Led Zepplin, Stevie Wonder, and the Stones in the continental U.S. too.

Cheech really admires Richard Pryor as the best comedian of the time.           

They’ve been able to handle their success because they didn’t believe the hype surrounding them.

They talk about playing Vegas, rock festivals, and prisons, not too much different from one another.

Cheech calls LSD “a cosmic colonic, clears all the shit right out.  The great purifier.”

Cocaine made them too paranoid and fucked up their timing on stage,  It also screwed them up physically getting all sorts of nasal and upper respiratory issues.  Marijuana strictly to relax.

They have a real inside view of how Hollywood movies were made in the early to mid 70s, the wheeling and dealing and backstabbing, good stuff.

Tommy talks about how he and Cheech looked forward to doing The Playboy Interview because so much of who they are was still unspoken and they saw the interview as being the ultimate showcase for them, a very much "we've really made it" moment.

So many great ads.

Hunter S. Thompson Interview Playboy Nov. 1974

  

 I read Fear and Loathing in high school, it had a huge impact on me.  Thompson is still one of my favorite writers and when I found this issue with his interview I immediately felt it was my duty to share it.  The advertisements alone are comedy gold.  The complete interview can be downloaded for free here.

a little back story, this interview was pieced together over seven months.  Two weeks before going to print Nixon resigns the presidency (Aug. 9 1974).   The whole last half of the interview gets scraped and rewritten.

Some things to note: favorite drugs: mushrooms and Mescaline and LSD.  Least Favorite: cocaine—not because of the high, because of poor high risk/low benefit compensation.  Talks about first LSD experience with Ken Kesey and a group of Hell’s Angels.  He was convinced it was going to get horribly ugly.  Drinks in moderation, never to get wasted.  Not much of a fan of marijuana because it doesn’t mix well with alcohol.


On LSD: “About twice a year you should blow your tubes out with a tremendous hit of really good acid.  Take 72 hours and go completely amuck, break it all down.”

 

 

Ya, color-blind, style blind, and most likely flammable.

Thompson says he's not a believer of the more spiritual, existential effects of drugs, that's not what he’s after.  “I like to just gobble the stuff [drugs] right out in the street, see what happens, take my chances, just stomp down on my own accelerator, it’s like getting on a racing bike and all of a sudden you’re doing 120 miles per hour into a curve that has sand all over it, and you think ‘Holy Jesus, here we go’ and you lay it over until the pegs hit the street and metal starts to spark.  If you’re good enough you can pull it out, but sometimes you end up in the emergency room with some bastard in a white suit sewing your scalp back on.”

 
Thompson explicitly states he never sells, traffics, or gets involved with the market end of drugs in any way.






Even in light of his own drug use and professional successes, he doesn’t advocate drugs for everybody, believes there are many people with psychic baggage that shouldn’t do drugs, the same people who become mean drunks.

17 days of research on a story cost him $1400 worth of cocaine.  By today's prices that puts him around a gram and half a day.  He was probably consuming upwards closer to two grams a day for three straight weeks.  My nose bleeds just thinking about it.

  When asked “What is Gonzo Journalism?” answers “It’s something that grew out of a story on the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Magazine.  I was convinced I was finished.  I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work.  So I finally started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer.  I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.  Then when it came out there were massive numbers of letters, phone calls, congratulations, people calling it a ‘breakthrough in journalism.’  And I thought ‘Holy shit, if I can write like this and get away with it, why should I try and write like the New York Times.’  It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in pool full of mermaids…I like to get right in the middle of whatever I’m  writing about---as personally involved as possible.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Playboy interview July 1973

 

If you're a fan of Vonnegut you're going to like this Playboy interview with him from July of 1973.

I scanned the pages and assembled them here.

This way you can enlarge the jpegs.  Once I post a pic here it becomes fixed.

I also scanned some ads I thought were funny and/or interesting.

Some notes I took from the reading:

“Writers are specialized cells in the social organism.  They are evolutionary cells.  Mankind is trying to become something else; it’s experimenting with new ideas all the time.  And writers are a means of introducing new ideas into the society, and also a means of responding symbolically to life…Writers are specialized cells doing whatever we do, and we’re expressions of the entire society---just as the sensory cells on the surface of your body are in the service of your body as a whole.  And when a society is in great danger, we’re likely to sound the alarms. I have the canary-bird-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts.   The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam.  They chirped and keeled over. But it made no difference whatsoever.  Nobody important cared.  But I continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems.”

---Religion-atheist, long line.

---What’s wrong with society is the destruction of the community.  People have to move to where the jobs are so they can survive.  They get cut off from the family.  He laments the breakdown of culture as a byproduct of socio-economic politics.  He also believes cultural relativity should be taught in the first grade.

“Everything is a lie, because our brains are two-bit computers, and we can’t get very high grade truths out of them.  But as far as improving the human condition goes, our minds are certainly up to that.  That’s what they were designed to do.”

”The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe, in my opinion.”

Wet or dry none of these guys are getting laid.

--Known bouts with depression, which on medication and therapy he’s been able to manage.  Cyclical blow ups.

--what he learned from his parents: “…that organized religion is anti-Christian and that racial prejudices were stupid and cruel.”

--Black humor and gallows humor is what he gravitates toward.

--On his experience in the army “Every officer I knew was a shit.”

--On witnessing an Apollo launch “It’s a tremendous space fuck.”

--Alludes to the “brown note.”

Between the two pages I counted 17 albums I'd be interested in. What an extraordinary deal!

From a shoe fashion review.  The shoes, the pants, hilarious.

If I were a nudist, and comfort was important to me, clogs would not be my first choice of footwear.

Patent-leather-wing-tipped-heels. on HIM.  Is this what going through a MAXIM in 20yrs is gonna be like?

The only thing that could get me in those shoes is six pack of malt liquor.  And yes, I do seek unique, why thanks.

1973 was the first year Things were available on the U.S. market.

That looks like fun.  On they're anywhere from $3-18,000 dollars.

Excavation: The Unearthing

In April of 1925 Lt. Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett embarked on an expedition into the Amazon jungle to find the Ancient Lost City of Z.  They never came back.  Obsession will do that to you.  It will drive you places you didn't know you could go.  
 

Over this past Fourth of July holiday I had the opportunity to venture into my Uncle Vic’s garage.  I was on a mission.  To peer into the past, to find treasure buried within a labyrinth of old-well-past-their-use utensils, giant, dangerously unstable pyramids made of cardboard boxes, and crude rusty traps composed of ancient appliances.  I suspected significant cultural artifacts from the Golden, Silver, and Bronze age of comic books lay buried in there somewhere and I was determined to find them.  I had no idea what I was getting into.

The complete Watchmen. 

My Uncle Vic is some what…strange, but for the most part he’s alright.  Recently, after many years living in my long time deceased grand parents home, he has moved into a retirement facility.  My brother Tony was tasked with going into the house to move Vic’s things.  No one outside Vic had been in the house in a very long time.  It was not pleasant.

Irony here: It was Uncle Vic who introduced me to comic books when I was maybe 10-11rs old.  It was a Legion-of-Super-Heroes mini-trade paperback reprint of early Silver age stories and a second mini-trade of the then-current incarnation of the team.  I remember reading them and thinking they were interesting, but I had no money and lived in the country, they were cool, I guess.   There weren’t any stores to go buy comics at, and even if I could go into the city 35 minutes away I couldn’t afford it.  I accepted that and didn’t think twice about them.  I was a very practical 11year old.  I remember thinking I read books, not comic books….and those books were a mix of Wells, Bradbury, and C.S. Lewis.  That stuff captured my imagination.  I had to read and reread The Martian Chronicles several times to understand what was going on.  I was not interested in your little picture book.  I was a prick.  My wife just corrected me, I am STILL a prick.

If you’ve never been to northern Wisconsin in July, well….you just haven’t lived.  It’s like being in a sauna, all-the-frickin’-time, it’s hot, mid 80s, and the humidity is through the roof.  You can easily break a sweat sitting still doing nothing.  I would guess it’s akin to being steam-cooked. If you’re lucky enough to have a lake nearby, and because it’s Wisconsin there’s no shortage within a reasonable distance, you might find some respite from the heat.  This being said, I chose to walk in the opposite direction of the lake, and into a hot, musty, dusty, dank, two car garage. 

First comic I see

Rolling up the door I surveyed the landscape. A handful of makeshift rows had been made out of what was worth salvaging from the house.  There were boxes everywhere.  I could see comics peeking through the cracks of more than a few of them.  8 long boxes of comics were stacked in a rack off to the side.  There were 3 more long boxes on the opposite side, plus 3 or 4 more irregular shaped cardboard boxes mixed into the rows.

Green Lantern Green Arrow #85, this is relevant to me because I'm a drug addict.

The smell of mildew was choking.  Mold was visible on things, but not really on the garage itself.   The smell was really coming from the things in the garage, but not the garage.  Tony said the whole house smelled ten times worse.  He had a wear a respirator during the demolition or “he could feel that fuckin’ mold growing in his lungs.”  

 I open up the first box and this is what I see.  Jonah Hex getting married to Mei Ling.  This is Jonah Hex vol. 1 issue #45.  Or what is left of it after years and years of sitting just like you see it here. Jonah decides to marry Mei Ling and give up bounty hunting....for a day. My stomach dropped.  I was pissed.  How could Vic do this!? After going on and on about these books, to treat them like this.  

Yeah, that was the look on my face too when I saw the cover.

It occurred to me this is just a manifestation of Vic's psychosis, he collects but doesn't take care, of really anything.  As I dug through the box it became clear Vic was a western and war comics fan. Old Weird Western Tales, Bat Lash, Rawhide Kid, Sgt. Rock, G.I. Tales, were all mixed together.  I was reminded of my own issues, and my issues of Jonah Hex.  

Jonah Hex vol.1 #1

 This is Jonah Hex vol.1 #1.  Pretty cool.  I wasn't really interested in Jonah Hex until the Palmiotti/Gray incarnation.  I really like their Jonah Hex, it's one of the few comics I have complete runs of.  I remember picking up Azarello's Loveless, The Lone Ranger (Cassaday), and Jonah Hex vol. 3 #1 all around the same time.  I stuck with Loveless just because of Azarello (which is the same reason I'm giving the Watchmen prequels any look-see) but I still don't know what was really go on with the plot, let alone the final few issues.  P&G's Jonah Hex was the exact opposite. Their stories were not complicated but still edgy, they felt purer to the form.  It's exactly what western stories should be, gritty, dirty, and dangerous---with a ton of great artists thrown in to boot.

 

Also in this box were eight very water damaged Charlton Comics titles.  This issue of Ghostly Tales is #124.  The issue of Ghost Manor is #10.  Demons and hippies and witches oh my. 

They were water damaged beyond certainly any monetary value, but it felt like holding a little piece of history.

The Ghostly tales on the right (issue 69) has a story drawn and written by Steve Ditko.  It was a handful of older Charlton comics characters that Alan Moore loosely based the Watchmen on.

Unfortunately, none of these comics served as his inspiration.

 This is G.I. Combat #85 and #90.  These were in plastic. Published in '60 and '61 (respectively).  #87 is an issue of regard because it is the first appearance of "The Haunted Tank."  The Haunted Tank is about the ghost of 19th-century Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, who is sent by the spirit of Alexander the great to act as a guardian over his two namesakes, Lieutenant Jeb Stuart and the Light Tank M3 Stuart that Jeb commands.

 This is about when I started feeling like maybe I could find some really cool stuff buried in the garbage.  On the  bottom right Batman #181 June 1966, first appearance of Poison Ivy.  The issue to the left of it, #183 is where Batman decides he'd rather stay home and watch "himself" Adam West on television, rather than go out and fight crime.  The self referential is funny, a little reality bending.  Above it, issue #186 features the Joker with a "new hilarious henchmen," a little person clown named "Gaggy."  Here Gaggy is simultaneously blinding and choking Batman while the Joker punches him.   Sounds hot but isn't.  Issue #205 (top right) I thought was great just for the cover art.  Seeing the dynamic duo in the blind guy's glasses is just great.

As the afternoon turned to evening I knew it was going to take me longer than I expected to go through all the boxes.  I was excited to find all this great Silver Age stuff, only to be disappointed by the condition they were in.

Issue #58 of The Brave and The Bold, second appearance of Metamorpho.

The Brave and The Bold #15 & #16.  These get around $50 on Ebay (EA) in VF/NM condition.  These are not VF/NM.  These are almost good.

Green Lantern attempts to avoid a "pink heat-seeking missile." Why no, that's not closeted homophobia at all GL.  Your ass looks really good in those tights by the way.

Justice League America #28, Don't try that shit in Wisconsin fuckers, unions are for commies and Kenyans! We don't like them here, at lest now...for the moment.

Justice League America #18, Don't worry Aquaman,  the Atom will notice when Flash runs into his nuts.

All the Silver Age Justice League issues he has are in plastic bags, most are in pretty good shape.  I'm using "clear and free" dryer sheets in between various pages and each issue in an effort to pull out the mildew.

The orignal Dial "H" For Hero was just goofy.  I guess the new one is too, in a way. 

JLA fights the Animals that fought like Men, face off with an angry cosmic dad, and investigate who murdered Santa.

I was really excited about finding these issues by Jack Kirby.  New Gods #1 has lost all its gloss, but to me it's like she was printed yesterday...

Shazam #1 and Legion of Super-Heroes #1. 

I've always had this thing for the Superman/Flash races as a mythic standard. Like the Trials of Hercules.

I spent all five days I was in Wisconsin on vacation in that garage.  The first days were the longest.  I swore I wouldn't go back in there on my last day.  And I did.  That's when I found all the Mad Magazines.

I left a lot there, tried to repack it the best way I could, move what I felt was really important or valuable to the dry, dark basement of my parent's old house.  

I have only begin to sift through the data.  There is every issue of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing to read.   I am spending considerable time now reading and scanning many of the old issues of Playboy magazine that I uncovered.  I am sorry for the long delay in this post, I have been preoccupied.

I leave you with this:

Playboy September 1982

Ragemoor Revisited

Recently I picked up Ragemoor #2 from Jan Strnad and Richard Corben, published by Dark Horse.  It was the same week of the Alameda Antique Fair where I picked up three issues of Heavy Metal, including the first American issue from April 1977, purely by accident. Take a moment to note Corben was 37 years old in '77, he's 71yrs old now.  HE'S 71 AND STILL MAKING COMICS. He's a machine.  Jack f-ing Lalane of illustrators!  HOLLA BACK WHEN YO'40 YEARS IN!

Richard Corben's "Den"

It’s far from in perfect condition, but within it is a well-known comic by Richard Corben from 1973 called "Den."  The colors are in vivid neon, the story is bizarre, and it’s amazing.  I guess I had heard about Heavy Metal, my perception was that it was not my taste, but when I held one and started gently flipping through it…it was something else.  This was an aspect of comics I hadn’t really seen for myself before (internet not included).  Instead of looking into the past, I felt like I was looking into the future.  These were art comics; I hesitate to say it because I fear I’ll kill it.  I’m certain modern indie comics have been influenced by them; of course I realize I’m the one late to the party.  I know I’m the ignorant one here for sure.  I now have three issue of Heavy Metal, and I’m hooked.  Digital won’t do.  I just looked on ebay…somebody wants $160 for a Near Mint #1 of the American issue.   I found the other two being offered for around $10 apiece.  I got them for $3 each.  I should have bought fucking more.  Yep, now I have one regret in life.  I was doing pretty good up to now, or at least so I felt, then this…I curse ye god, fuck you Zeus, fuck you right in the eye.

Corben & Strnad's "Sinbad in the Land of the Jinn"

Let me put it right on the record here and now and say it’s not the boobies that make Heavy Metal so great. Seriously, although compared to some stuff by the Big 2 I really don’t know what’s more sexually objectifying.  There’s a sense of feminine sexuality and sensuality in these handful of 35 year old comics that I’ve never felt reading anything the Big 2 has put out, ever.  I do prefer adult themes.  Reading HM made me realize something else: my own modern sense of comics is so commercially pasteurized that something like this completely captivates me.  

Although I never read them as a child (I was 3-4yrs old at the time) there is feeling of stepping back in time when reading these “adult illustrated fantasy magazines.”  There a physical sensation in holding a book, holding an old book, realizing it has a place in History, a fixed place in Time far removed from the Now.   It’s impossible not to feel awe.  This is at the heart of my motivation in buying every comic, and incidentally, is what a digital copy can never replace.  I have felt it holding books of literature from the mid and late 19^th century to comics published in the early 1980s.   There are books I wish I could afford.  Nothing will replace holding a book in your hand. As long as books exist and people keep physically handling them, more people will realize there is no substitute, and books will continue to be published. 

McKie's "So Beautiful and So Dangerous"

With both issues of Ragemoor I initially sat down to write about a story and art that didn’t really strike me all that much, but there felt like there was more there.  The longer I sat and thought about it, I realized I couldn’t put my finger on anything specifically that I didn’t like, but started seeing details I really liked.  But I LOVE the personal discovery it has led me to, namely Heavy Metal.  It possesses an energy I don’t feel from most mainstream comics, so many artists being so amazing and so weird.  I feel enriched, a little enlightened.  Is this what reading Juxtapoz is supposed to feel like?

It was looking into Corben and Strnad’s past stuff that started the ball rolling.  Looking at Ragemoor without knowing who Richard Corben is, while living under my comfy little rock, would not have drawn me to look for more of his stuff.  I am blown away by what he has produced.  Corben is the alt.comic reader’s Stan Lee.  I have seen the future, and it’s filled with giant robots, strange alien civilizations, space warriors riding pterodactyls, soul eating angels and demons from other dimensions, and lots and lots of boobies---in all their super-vivid-hyper-Technicolor splendor.  And this future happened 35 years ago…da-daa-DUMMM!