Ep. 119: "A Cocaine Economy"
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Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Man, I hope heaven isn't run by beef jerky.
Heaven is a place on Earth.
Heaven ain't a lot like Dixie.
Heaven's to Murgatroyd.
It's a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
Oh, that's right.
Heaven.
Heaven.
Heaven.
Heaven 17.
Penthouse and pavement.
What is that?
Summer babe.
I think I'm having a fugue state.
You are, you're having a stroke.
Oh my god, I have so much sodium in my system.
I had some artichoke heart soup the other day that was like a sodium solution that just had artichoke infusion.
It was like wet salt with artichokes.
I bet that's not as good as it sounds.
It was pretty good.
But typically, the artichoke is a much maligned vegetable.
Is that right?
Well, much maligned by my imagination, because I hardly ever order an artichoke thing.
And partly it is because so much of the artichoke is inedible, and I don't understand how nature could have produced a grenade-shaped fruit that is full of corn chips that you can't eat, but that are covered with guacamole.
Like bitter guacamole.
hmm that's what it is it's like a it's like a corn chip grenade if the corn chips were made out of leaves pointy leaves pointy leaves and that you don't eat so much as scrape right and preloaded with a kind of love of like veiny guacamole oh dear get out of my dreams so so i don't but but then when i have an artichoke thing
I enjoy it.
I think it's at the low end of the butter conveyance spectrum.
Oh, I see.
It's a butter device, right?
You can do things with it.
You can make dips and things like that.
But no, there's a lot of scraping, and then you've got a bunch of leaves you've got to throw away.
Scraping, and then a bunch of... Yeah, right.
You've got a pile of detritus.
Many years ago...
I was sitting in a bar and it was one of those bar conversations where you're sitting there and there's a couple of guys and you get going with them and pretty soon you're having like a real intense meeting of the minds.
And unlike most of those intense meeting of the minds conversations, the guy I was talking to looked like a young Lindsey Buckingham.
Like Lindsey Buckingham when he was beautiful and had a little beard.
And I was talking to this guy, and it was early 90s, right?
So he's wearing some kind of hemp necklace.
And at the end of the conversation, he's like, you are perfect for this big project we've got going on.
uh, come with me.
And like, we were drinking in the bar in the middle of the day or something.
And I was like, Oh, okay.
So we go out and we start, we go for a walk, kind of half drunk in the day.
And he's like, I'm opening a club and it's going to be like, um,
It's going to be an art gallery, speakeasy, cafe, jazz club, rave space.
And I was like, tell me more.
And he said, I feel like you are kind of a visionary guy.
I feel like you're ideal to partner up with us on this club.
And I'm like, I agree.
It's about time somebody recognized that I was a visionary in the art space rave cafe.
I mean, John, just meeting somebody in the unlikelihood of meeting someone in a bar drinking in the middle of the day who has that kind of vision to pull together all those slash things into one coherent money making machine.
Right.
And then would recognize that I was an important component in the organization.
It's kismet.
So anyway, but this guy is a very handsome guy, very charismatic.
And it turns out he is a shoe salesman at the Bon Marche.
The Bon Marche being one of the big department stores downtown.
It used to be there was the Bon Marche, Frederick & Nelson's, and Nordstrom.
All three of those were department stores all clustered downtown.
And the Bon was kind of...
It wasn't all the way up to Frederick and Nelson standards, but it was a pretty nice department store, let's be honest.
So this guy was a shoe salesman at the Bon Marche in women's shoes, and he and two other of the shoe salesmen were going to partner in developing this club.
You can't slight him on his pickiness.
And they had a ton of cash because they had jobs, which is something I didn't have.
And so anyway, he and I become fast friends.
We're like inseparable.
He's got a pretty nice apartment and he just wants to talk big pie in the sky ideas about how this club is going to change the culture of Seattle.
It's going to be, you know, it's going to like, it's in a, in a way it's going to improve race relations because this group of people are all multi, multi-racial, multicultural people and,
We're going to appeal to everybody in the city.
It's going to be, you know, there's going to be a hip hop component.
There's going to be like a cool jazz component, all the things that you could want.
And eventually my role evolved to be head of security, which was an interesting evolution of,
I was still visionary, but also head of security.
Well, at a startup, you got to wear a lot of hats.
That's right.
That's right.
And we went all the way.
We found a space in the old Trailways bus station in Seattle, which was abandoned.
And we found the owner.
We rented the space.
And we stayed open for a couple of months.
And it was basically a 24-hour business.
In the morning, there would be a cafe.
We had Costco muffins and an espresso machine.
And we were serving espresso to people on their way to work.
And then during the day, it morphed into kind of an art gallery espresso space.
Yeah.
And then in the evenings, there was jazz.
Wow.
A lot of kids from the Cornish music school would come down and play improv, sort of bebop-y jazz in the evenings.
And then that would turn into...
hip-hop jazzy hip-hop which was a thing in the early 90s in seattle uh in the night and it would turn into kind of a jazzy hip-hop club where the girls were wearing turbans and um everybody was like whoo it was like a it was uh very sade let's say and then at 2 a.m
We would close the doors, close all the front doors, but then open the unmarked back door.
And then it was a power rave from 2 a.m.
until like 8 in the morning.
And we seriously kept this going for a couple of months.
That sounds exhausting.
Well, and the thing is, it was completely powered by cocaine.
It feels like a cocaine project.
It was very cocaine.
It turned out that the shoe salesman guys had a lot of money, not just because they had jobs and were selling shoes, but it was a total cocaine ring.
And I had not really spent a lot of time just immersed in cocaine times.
But you'd be surprised how much work you can get done.
You can do a lot of espresso making in the morning and art showing in the day.
And I would take catnaps on the old bus station benches that were kind of still there in the space.
Yeah.
And we really thought we were revolutionizing the country.
And in a way, we were on our way.
Because...
There weren't a lot of people buying art, let's say, but the rave turned into a complete blowout.
By two and a half weeks in, there were 400 people there.
And that is what attracted the cops.
Yeah, how official was your business?
Not at all.
You paid rent and you had doors.
We gave some rent to a guy, I guess.
Somebody told me that they had rent.
Wow.
And I was head of security, which meant that I stood at the door and took the money from people.
And I charged people an arbitrary amount of money.
Each person kind of got charged a different amount of money.
And I kind of kept most of it because the other guys didn't seem to be in it for the money, and I was the only one that didn't have a job.
So I was suddenly doing pretty good.
They were more interested in, I don't know what their plan was, honestly.
When you're a cocaine person, don't you kind of want to meet more cocaine people?
Right.
That must be a big part of it.
It was a cocaine-driven economy, and I think they were bringing a lot of people into the venue who were buying cocaine from them.
And so it was self-sustaining, and it would have been, I think it probably would have, like an aggressive virus would have taken over the world, and the whole world right now would be a jazz, hip-hop, art gallery, rave, cocaine party, if not for the police.
who drove by one night and saw 250 kids outside of the old Trailways bus station, and it piqued their curiosity.
Red flag.
And they said, huh, let's go around the block and go back and take a look at that.
And when they came in and saw that that was just the overflow of people that were inside...
A total fire trap.
And I was, again, the guy sitting at the door, pockets full of cash, hopped up on goofballs.
And when I saw the cops, I got off my stool and walked away.
And my name was not connected to anything.
And I just left, and I think everybody got busted, but nobody really had their name on anything except for the guy who looked like Lindsey Buckingham.
They can trace it back to his Costco account.
Yeah.
The next time I saw him, he was riding like a...
like a small bore kawasaki motorcycle like a kawasaki 350 or something like a um it was a kawasaki that was an imitation of a triumph like a like a one cylinder kawasaki and i was walking down the street and he rode up on this bike and he was like hey man get on
And it had been a couple of months since I'd seen him.
I jumped on the back of his bike.
And he rode me to the ferry dock.
And I was like, where are we going?
He was like, don't worry about it.
We got on the ferry.
And then I'm like, seriously, where are we going?
We're on the ferry now.
And he's like, I'm living in Port Townsend now.
I want you to see my place.
I'm thinking about reopening the gallery in Port Townsend.
And I need you there.
You were the heart and soul of the place.
And I was like, oh, boy.
Port Townsend is a long way away.
And we rode up there on this, the two of us on this tiny little motorcycle ride.
He showed me the space that he had in mind.
And I was like, I don't know, man.
I'm kind of invested in living in Seattle and not living up here in this weird hippie town.
And he was disappointed.
I spent the night at the house that he lived in with some girl.
I mean, it had only been a couple of months.
He was a magical person who was somewhat powered by drugs but also powered by charisma and just hopping through life in this.
Two months later, he's got a house in a different town.
And he wasn't mad at you.
He understood your security.
You do what you got to do.
You walk away sometimes.
Oh, yeah.
He was like, you were the smart one.
You got out of there before the hammer came down.
I was like, yeah, of course.
I mean, we both understood.
What was I going to do?
Stand there and say, IDs, please?
Yeah.
No way.
I had, you know, $600 in my coat.
I was like, see you later.
But in the early planning stages of the cafe, we went to a pizza restaurant and he was like, you know, let's get a pizza.
We'll, we'll, you know, we'll have a lunch meeting.
Talk about the big, talk about the big plan.
And he ordered an artichoke pizza and
And I had, at that point in my life, had never eaten an artichoke.
And I looked at him like he had ordered a rat pizza.
I was like, what are you doing to me?
Like, I loved this idea of a lunch meeting where we were having a pizza.
but you just ruined it by putting some terrible shit on it.
He was like, no, no, no, trust me.
You're going to love it.
Artichoke pizza.
And it came and he was right.
I loved it.
And that was one of the, that artichoke pizza was one of a handful of events in my life where I realized that I was wrong about something and that my life was going to be different from now on.
Wow.
Artichoke pizza.
And now you order different stuff every time you go somewhere.
Now I get a different thing.
Every time I go into a restaurant, I get a different thing.
Even if I go to the same restaurant over and over and over, I never order the same thing.
What was the club called?
Oh, my God.
It was called, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
The Offbeat Cafe.
It was called the Offbeat Cafe.
That's pretty good.
And that name was the result of some think tanking high-level discussions.
It's got a lot of levels.
The Offbeat, that's right.
It communicates a little bit of the jazz and hip-hop vibe.
It has the word cafe on it, so it feels bohemian, but also it was trying to be a cafe.
The hardest audience to appeal to was all the people walking past the Trailways bus station on the way to work in the morning.
And a lot of times I was the one standing there like bleary eyed manning the espresso machine.
And you'd watch these business suit people walk by and they'd peer in the bus station.
They'd see the cafe sign and I'd be in there.
I'd wave to them and they would just keep walking.
And it was like, how are we going to, you know, the big challenge was how do we, how do we up the cafe component of the business?
Because it felt like that was the road to legitimacy, right?
The rave business was always going to be in the shadows.
Right.
But if we could get the cafe business running, then we could get licensed and get all the permits and stuff.
I mean, there was a plan.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the beauty of the cocaine, it seems to me.
First of all, you've got a place by cocaine people for cocaine people.
I mean, the problem was that the people who were in there just muddling through with espresso were not cocaine people.
They weren't vibrating on the same level that you guys were.
At all.
And the art, because it was basically, we were all students and it was basically a student run.
I mean, it was like a student jazz ensemble can pass for most people as just a legitimate jazz ensemble.
If you were maybe a jazz pro, you would know that this was kind of terrible jazz.
Yeah.
But student art, like student painting, really reads as student painting a lot of the time.
Oh, you mean the kind of thing you'd see in a cafe that doesn't have a license.
That's right.
So there was a lot of artwork that looked like mock-ups for the third Matrix movie.
And the art never sold.
Actually, funny connection...
The Offbeat Cafe is where I met Reggie Watts, the comedian.
Because Reggie, when he was 20 years old, his first foray into show business was as a jazz piano player.
No way.
And Reggie was one of the jazz musicians that came to the Offbeat Cafe in the afternoons and evenings.
He played a Wurlitzer piano.
And he would sit and, you know, and he's a great pianist.
And so he was like, he was one of the jazz cats that I knew from the Offbeat Cafe.
And he evolved many different times before he decided that his, before he discovered his comedy act.
His gift.
Yeah.
His true gift.
I, so that's, first of all, I mean, it sounds like it could almost be like maybe like a Gus Van Zandt film.
It very much was.
Yes, it absolutely was my own private Idaho.
Including the part where he picks you up on the motorcycle.
I think that's part of the movie.
But taken out of a kind of a punk rock, gutter punk, junkie context and put in a sort of multicultural, multiracial cocaine context.
That's the thing.
It's the cocaine.
There's something...
admirable or enviable about the lindsey buckingham guy i have to say from a distance when you look at somebody like that who clearly is staring down common sense just constantly and then seemingly just kind of swerving around common sense and making something work for a little while there's i know that's that's not something that you know we're supposed to applaud but when i see people like that i'm like god damn it man you're you're mostly pulling this off yeah i admired him yeah i would
I admired him, and I kind of loved him a little bit, and the terrible thing is, I don't remember his name.
This whole episode... You might have never learned it.
Seriously, four months later, I was back sitting in that same bar, drinking in the afternoon, wondering what had all just happened.
Like...
I was sitting in the bar drinking in the afternoon, and then two months later, I was making $600 a night in illicit money and running a MDMA cocaine rave art gallery.
And then two months after that, I was sitting back in the same bar, and all of those people were gone.
At the height of the cafe experience, I probably knew by name...
150 people that I hadn't known before and knew on site 400 people.
And then four months later, like all of those people were gone.
The only people that I ever saw again were Reggie and Reggie and I ended up in this in similar circles.
Maybe a couple of other dudes that I hung on to for a few months, and the Lindsey Buckingham guy was gone forever.
Jeez.
Who knows what happened to him?
He could be the fucking sheriff of Twisp right now.
What?
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We could not do it without them.
You should.
You should go out and search for the Offbeat Cafe, see if it's popping up, if there's a pop-up cocaine MDMA cafe.
It's evolved.
It's been a long time since then.
I bet he's learned a lot.
He's probably evolved.
He's probably worked in different shoe stores.
I feel like if there are not 400 businesses called the Offbeat Cafe, then I don't know anything about anything.
That's a missed opportunity.
You know what I mean?
I bet every state in the union has an offbeat cafe, and I bet there are offbeat cafes in every English-speaking country in the world.
And there's probably one in Marbella, Spain.
I'm betting there's an offbeat cafe, and I bet you there's an offbeat cafe in Zagreb.
I'm fascinated by the cocaine people.
When you play in bands with people, you know them pretty well, but you move more with these people than those people.
You play with this band and not that band, so you kind of know who's seeing who, who's living where and doing what.
And I was pretty good friends with a lot of people in this band scene where I used to live.
And I, I don't know how I missed this, but apparently tons of people were doing a lot of cocaine in the mid nineties.
And I just didn't know it.
I don't know how I missed it.
I feel like such a rube, but like a bunch of my really good friends were doing cocaine.
Like some, some folks are doing it every night.
And then there are a couple of people that are doing at least once a week and
I'm not trying to sound like a school mom or something, but the weird part was that I'm such a dummy, I didn't even pick up on it.
I guess I hadn't been exposed to it enough to know that people who have a full-time day job and run a bar every night need a little bump sometimes.
But the thing about cocaine is it's very curious, right?
The culture of it is predicated on the idea that you give somebody a look, they give you a look back, and then you sneak off into the bathroom together.
Right.
It's kind of like the sex people.
It's a little bit like the sex people.
Because the sex people know what to look for, right?
If you're a sex person and you want to find another sex person to make sex with, you can get pretty good at sussing people up pretty fast.
For sure.
Is that right?
Well, the thing is, I was having this conversation with a couple of people the other day.
where one of them was describing a former bandmate who was one of these sex people who would, oh, because we were all talking about like, yeah, you know, we're all in bands.
We are all on tour all the time.
And yet there's an awful lot of loading and unloading of gear and an awful lot of standing around in offices that smell like bleach and not a ton of like having sex in a swing.
Yeah.
I would clean that off with the bleach first.
This guy was talking about the drummer in his band, and he was like, he's one of those guys that you'll be sitting, you'll be standing at a party, you'll be talking to a girl all night, you'll be making a really great conversation, you'll be enjoying her company, you're thinking to yourself, hey, something's really coming together here between me and this girl.
And then the drummer walks in, walks over, says, hey man, how's it going?
Looks at the girl, she looks at him, and he says, you want to get out of here?
And she's like, yes.
Yes.
And they're gone.
And that really happens.
Happens.
And my friend is just like, we talked about it over and over again, and he's like, the drummer predictably says, yeah, man, it's an empty life.
It's kind of a curse.
Real deep thinker, the drummer.
You know what?
Fuck you.
But it is a little bit like the cocaine people in that sense of when you're – if you're a sex person, you're just going to always be looking out of the corner of your eye for something.
There's something that's going to catch your eye.
And when those two fields of electricity start vibrating near each other, then you go off and you have the sex.
Yeah, you get the twinkle.
And I think if you are into cocaine and you have it, I think one of the keys is that if you have cocaine, then you have a certain power, which is that...
That a percentage of the people in the world want to do it.
And you have a thing that, unlike pot, like if you have pot, there are a lot of people that want to get stoned with you.
But, you know, a big deal, kind of, like they're not always the highest shelf people.
Highest caliber friend.
But if you have cocaine, it puts you into this class of like, now I can use cocaine to make friends.
You are a call brand friend.
That's right.
And if you are a person who will be friends with somebody for cocaine.
Mm-hmm.
then that too is a sort of energy that you are projecting.
It might not be a mistake that your partners in the club were salesmen.
Exactly.
Because the thing about sex people and cocaine people and sales people is that the thing that they share that I – the one part of all that awfulness that I really admire is that people who are really good at the sex and the cocaine and the selling is that they all seem to either not see the numerous barriers that I see everywhere or they just don't care.
Well, I think it's the third thing, which is –
I think there are very few things in life, very few pleasures of any kind, Merlin, that you want enough to pretend to be friends with somebody that you don't like.
Right.
And likewise, you do not desire to be friends with someone who wants to be friends with you because of something you can give them.
Unless you have an understanding like these people do.
Right.
It's opportunistic.
And like there have been times in my life when I have very much felt like I will be friends with you if you'll have sex with me.
Absolutely I will.
What do you mean?
Is that an option?
It could be even simpler though.
It could be as simple as like, well, I really need to find somebody.
I'll pretend to be friends with anybody because my ride left and I need a way to get home.
It's just that you're not going to have that with that same velocity every night of your life and every afternoon and morning of your life.
And in the marijuana department, I was very, very much a person who would be your friend if you would give me some pot.
And that was part of the kind of shame cloud that descended upon me over time.
Because when I was first introduced to pot, I was like, oh yeah, pot is cheap and
And it makes me want to play air guitar to side one of the Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers.
But as time went on and pot cut its clutches on me and I was like, I don't like not being stoned.
Not being stoned is filling me with anxiety.
I would prefer to be stoned and I don't have any money.
So now I'm going to some guy's house and he doesn't want to listen to Sticky Fingers.
He wants to listen to Skinny Puppy.
But I will listen to Skinny Puppy
If he will smoke pot with me.
And then that guy realizes that.
And for whatever reason, once somebody wants a friend to sit and listen to skinny puppy with him.
So then he would withhold the pot.
Oh, he dangles it for hours and hours.
It's just like, Oh dude, you've got to hear this latest skinny puppy album.
And I'm like, really?
There's another one.
He's like, yeah.
And I'm like, wow, I'm super glad.
Yeah.
to hear it and we would listen to it and i'd just be sitting there and i'm like i know you i know this house is full of pot this house is built of pot take some out and put it in a bong so that i can at least be stoned and listening to skinny puppy yeah um so then i turned into one of those people and i and and it's exactly as i say the caliber of me the caliber of my friendship and the caliber of
of what I was willing to endure just to have that stupid feeling of being high when really it's like $10, man.
You could just scrape $10 together and just go buy some pot.
I'm a slow learner.
Yeah.
But sometimes you get fixated.
Not you, but one.
One gets fixated.
One does.
You know, I think that's pretty common.
Did you ever buy pot?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
First time I ever smoked pot was on the way...
to a cheap trick concert we drove into the bad part of town and bought what i now would recognize as like it's like a step above you know oregano or whatever green tissue paper that was it was bad because really it was like these guys had chosen a very smart place to sell their shitty pot which is a part of town that high school white high school students were terrified to be in and would get out of as quickly as possible yeah
And so there was a certain excitement to going there and buying their crappy pot.
And it was awful.
And it didn't really take for a long time.
But no, for a long time, I, you know, not for a long time.
I mean, even in college, in college, I would more often buy the pot.
That was my, my pot smoking period was mostly in college.
And I bought, you know, an okay amount of like a quarter bag for $45.
Yeah.
Which, which back then was like the stuff that would put you on the moon.
And today, like, that's the kind of thing you'd use to mulch a plant.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
And a quarter was no small amount of pot.
That's a nice big bag.
Can make it less.
I just smoked until I get a cold sore and didn't want to get out of bed.
Those are good times.
That's actually a stress bump.
It's not a cold sore.
It's a stress bump.
Okay.
I had a friend.
This is going to sound... You know, somebody wrote a review of our podcast the other day where they used the word... They used the term questionable veracity.
which was a little bit of a reach for them vocabulary-wise anyway.
As in your stories are made up?
As in there is some question as to how true my stories are.
I buy the part where people don't know when we're kidding.
I think that's fun.
Yeah.
But I don't buy that part.
I have to tell you, listeners, I can't prove these stories, but I can tell you that these are, by and large, pretty much true.
Well, and the thing that makes me mad is that I don't know whether he is 100% clear on what veracity means.
Oh.
You know what I mean?
Like, he might have meant that they are... You think that was a Roger situation?
I think he was trying to say one thing, and he ended up saying another thing.
I don't fault him.
It was a very nice review.
Good.
But anyway, this next story is going to sound a little bit... Is it voracious?
It's going to sound a little bit Roderick on the line.
But I used to have a friend who worked at the Korean embassy.
I wish I had the vaguest idea what that made-up adjective even means.
Because I could not – I've heard all of our shows.
I have no fucking idea what that means.
It'll be about Hitler.
It'll be about a train that gets stolen for a movie idea.
No, my friend was some kind of like secretariat –
at the Korean embassy in Alaska.
A 1970s racehorse?
He was... He was a Seattle Slough, really, at heart.
He started out as an assistant, and then he became part of the diplomatic corps.
Oh, I would love to be in the diplomatic corps.
Of the Korean embassy.
Do you know the shit you can get away with if you're in the diplomatic corps?
Let me tell you what you can get away with.
You can send me pot in by Federal Express...
With some kind of embassy seal.
Oh, because it's a diplomatic, what do they call it?
A bag.
A pouch.
A diplomatic pouch.
Pouch.
Nobody's allowed to look at it.
That's cheating.
It's cheating.
And I don't think that this maybe was all the way to being a diplomatic pouch, but because it was coming from the Korean embassy, it was in a special category of like, don't mess around with this, or just no one would think.
And so I was living in Seattle.
He was living in Alaska.
He had a pot-growing operation in addition to being part of the...
Part of like the inner circle, because he worked his way in so that he became the ambassador's personal assistant or something.
He really had, he was in good with the ambassador.
And Alaska has a very large Korean population, so it's not like there are a lot of...
It's not like every country has a diplomatic corps in Alaska, but Korea does.
They have their own little, and I'm not even sure if it's the ambassador or whether it was an attaché of some kind.
But in any case, he would send me huge bags of pot that had been vacuum sealed and put into these Korean embassy diplomatic pouches, and they would be hand-delivered to my door.
Wow.
At a time when I had decided I no longer wanted to listen to Skinny Puppy, I needed more dignity than that.
You upped your game.
And I had some people in high places.
This was a bump, right?
Because I then sank much lower later on where I couldn't, you know, where I was just... It sounds too good to be true.
I was digging in the carpet looking for crack rocks that I'm sure... You're doing it, Dennis Wilson.
Yeah.
Yeah.
um but but there was a high time there there was a literally and figuratively like a little a few high um plateaus where i figured it out and i had it all going on and at one point it was that i was getting these diplomatic pouches from the korean embassy full of pretty high grade matanuska thunderfuck
Say that again.
Matanuska Thunderfuck.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Are you familiar with Matanuska Thunderfuck?
Is it some serious shit?
Matanuska Thunderfuck was very serious shit.
It was like the high, high, high poobah of Potts.
Back in the day.
Because it was grown.
In the Matanuska Valley.
Which is where Sarah Palin is from.
And.
The legend was.
That because the sun is up.
So long.
In the summer in Alaska and because the because the soil is so dark and black because it's all glacial river bottom that it was like the first brand of super pot and.
I think if you're in Amsterdam now or if you're a pot connoisseur, the strain that's known as Northern Lights, that's the sort of common... This stuff looks pretty serious.
Northern Lights, I think...
Yeah.
Jesus.
I think if you put the word Matanuska into Google, even without... Yeah, I'm on the cannabis wiki looking at it right now.
Even without the word Thunderfuck, if you just put Matanuska in there, you'll get about half pot images.
Jeez.
But Mad New Ska Thunderfuck was, when I was a kid, like, in a way, kind of one of the Alaskan exports we were most proud of.
It was like, yes, we have internationally famous Superbud that comes from just right north of Anchorage.
Yeah.
It was powerful stuff.
Now, these days, of course, I think the true marijuana heads are all smoking like weird MIT laboratory pot, which... Well, like hydroponic government experiment pot?
Yeah.
Yeah, and this is the problem with it.
All that stuff that you're talking about, that weird ditch weed that we used to buy, and you'd smoke a joint of it, and you'd get kind of high.
It looked like sage.
It looked like somebody cut up sage and sold it as shake weed.
Yeah, shake, right.
That was a really pleasant kind of groovy buzz that you could go to a concert, you could hang out.
It was a social buzz.
And this chronic bud, now it turns everybody into a freaking zombie.
You have to be...
You have to be a scientist to smoke it and even make toast.
The pot that the pot people are smoking today, I'm Bill Cosby, but what these people smoke for their pot today is about, it seems like it's about at the level of like where acid was in the 60s.
Where you could just sit and eat that all day long, like jelly bellies.
And, you know, yeah, some goofy might happen.
But, you know, but like, that's what we had.
And now today, the stuff that they, I'm sorry, that's back when we were kids.
And the stuff they've got today, it just seems, it seems just leveling.
Just leveling, just knock you out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I never liked feeling that way.
I did not like feeling out of control with the pot.
No, it's super hardcore.
Out of control with drinking is fun, but out of control with the pot is way out of control for me.
Well, because you get heart palpitations, you start to, I mean, the number of people.
I can imagine almost anything being wrong with me.
When you are super baked.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Like there's a lot of things that are about to go really wrong.
Well, it's the hilarious trope of like, I think this pot is laced with PCP.
People cannot believe how stoned
And out of control and freaked out that you can get on pot.
And so they have invented this hilarious story where they think that PCP dealers are wasting perfectly good PCP.
And putting it on pot, on normal pot, and just sending it out there.
Yeah, I mean, you could put it on, like, shredded erasers and people would smoke it, right?
I mean, it doesn't need to be on good pot.
Well, and I think the logic of the idea was that PCP dealers will get you hooked on PCP, and then you'll come crawling back for more if they sprinkle it on...
Oh, I see.
I get it.
Or that, again, in people's like overactive imaginations, somehow PCP dealers are sociopaths who enjoy the idea of getting people freaked out on PCP.
Not that they can see.
It's just happening in dorm rooms.
They're essentially dosing them.
They're dosing them, but they don't even get to enjoy the experience of watching them trip out.
They're just dosing them and just sitting somewhere in their PCP van, contented with the knowledge that they are fucking with kids.
I mean, all of it is, of course, false.
No one has ever, ever, ever, ever, ever sold PCP-laced pot.
for the price of pot.
You could get PCP-laced pot if you paid extra for the PCP.
Is that something people do?
The PCP, they on purpose take it still?
Yeah, you know, one time, I was standing with a group of guys on Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage, Alaska, which was the strip where we cruised, cruising strip,
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, the strip where you do your cruising.
Yeah, that's right.
It's the cruising strip.
Northern Lights one way and Benson the other way.
And we were parked in the middle.
There's a block between Northern Lights and Benson.
We were parked somewhere in the middle there across from Bob's Big Boy.
And I was with a couple of guys.
One of them had a brand new Audi, and the other guy had borrowed his dad's Corvette.
And we were hanging out, and there was a group of about 10 of us sitting around.
And this was the first time that the Corvette was still kind of a car that mattered to people in the 80s, I guess.
I'm not sure.
Maybe not.
But in any case, we're sitting there kind of cruising.
We're watching the cruisers go by.
And we're smoking pot and we're drinking beer and we're having a good time.
And this guy walks up who's like a little bit older.
And he's like, hey, you guys, you know, what's going on?
Sits and talks to us for a while.
And we're like a little suspicious of this guy.
But it's Saturday night.
We're having a good time.
And he seems, I guess, cool.
Not so sure.
And he's like, hey, you know, you guys like to party?
And we're like, yeah, we like to party.
And he says, you want a hit of what I'm smoking?
And we're all sitting there smoking pot, and it seemed like a gesture of friendly pot, like pot culture friend exchange.
Like, here, have a hit of my pot.
I'll take a hit of your pot.
And so he hands the pipe to my friend Shannon.
And Shannon's like, well, sure, I'll take a hit of your pot.
I mean, there's a vibe about this guy that's not 100%, but this was at an age when you would take a hit off of a pipe of a guy that you didn't feel 100% confident about.
What's the worst thing that could happen?
Yeah.
And so Shannon takes a hit of the pipe, and he kind of looks at the guy, and he's like, hey, man, what is that?
And the guy is like, do you like it?
And Shannon's like, you know, like coughs out a big thing of smoke.
And he's like, hey, dude, that's not cool.
And the guy splits like just heel and toes it down the sidewalk.
And, you know, we're kind of sitting there in the dark and Shannon's like, oh, man, what the fuck was that?
And we're all like, what?
What was it?
And he's like, oh, no, I don't know about that.
And he was very touch and go for a while.
And we came to the conclusion that it was PCP.
And he sort of was like...
We watched him, and he was a guy that was not unfamiliar with every kind of drug.
And he ended up being somebody who would, many years later, I think, do PCP.
Maybe not habitually, but... On purpose sometimes.
He never turned his nose up at a thing.
But...
I had that experience, and then later on when I was working at the off-ramp, there was a guy who played guitar in a band called Mock Turtle.
Mock Turtle spelled M-A-C-H.
Oh, Jesus.
And they were a punk band.
I was hoping it was post-rock.
No, this was pre-post-rock.
It was punk.
And he went on a PCP trip a couple of times and at one point fell down a flight of stairs and at one point threw his guitar out the window.
Just like Art Linkletter's daughter.
Yeah, was running around naked screaming something about his dad.
Oh, God.
Yeah, tough times.
Oh, mock turtle.
Mock turtle.
I'm glad I'm going to steer clear of that stuff.
I've got to go back to the diplomatic bag for a minute.
Diplomatic pouch.
Certain protections used for carrying official correspondence.
The second sentence is what gets me.
The physical concept of a quote-unquote diplomatic bag is flexible and therefore can take many forms, e.g.
a cardboard box...
briefcase, duffel bag, large suitcase, crate, or even a shipping container.
A shipping container can be a diplomatic pouch.
A shipping container can be a diplomatic pouch.
I mean, this is along the lines of fucking buying indulgences.
This is one of those completely phony baloney, make-believe concepts that is so goddamn brilliant.
It's like the...
It's like the espionage version of like a bag of holding.
And I don't think – it's not like somebody from both sides has to be there to watch you put it in and say like, oh, no, this is definitely something top secret nobody should know about.
You just get to, by fiat, declare this a diplomatic bag.
Do you get a limit on a certain cubic inches of diplomatic bag per year per country?
You can drive a Cadillac with Jimmy Hoffa and Danny DeVito dead in the back.
Yeah.
I miss that little guy.
Into a shipping container.
Call it a diplomatic pouch.
And drop it into the ocean somewhere.
It seems like a really missed opportunity here.
It's just it seems like I wonder what it would take to basically to get almost everything declared a diplomatic bag.
Think about like not having to pay tariffs.
You know, this is the question.
This is the Illuminati question.
We don't know what we don't know.
Oh, my God.
You just blew my mind.
You know, you and I you and I keep talking about how there are no conspiracies that have survived.
And then we get a lot of we get a lot of chemtrails style emails from people telling us that we don't know what conspiracies have survived because they have survived.
They keep stuffing them into a diplomatic pouch.
They don't even get to see them.
That's right.
Who knows what's buried in the bottom of the ocean in a diplomatic pouch that somebody pushed off the back of a boat?
A shipping container is big, John.
Well, yeah, but I mean, did you see the movie where Robert Redford sails around the world alone on a sailboat?
No.
Is that where he bites his arm off?
No, I haven't seen that one.
Yeah, he runs into a shipping container that's floating out there.
In fact, when they were looking for that Malaysian airliner, they kept finding pieces of debris in the ocean.
And then when they zoom in on it, it's just a shipping container full of tennis shoes that fell off the back of a boat.
It's just floating out there.
That's amazing.
Do you think you need like a special seal?
Like how do they know it's like officially – like somebody had to give this some kind of an official okie-dokie to make the bag or the shipping container turn into a diplomatic bag.
That's a pretty big deal.
It's one thing to say, oh, I'm going to go park wherever I feel like.
That was a huge thing in San Francisco was people just – like somebody I think was from Saudi Arabia had like I think thousands and thousands of dollars in tickets because this guy was just fucking with people by parking like in a fountain or whatever.
LAUGHTER
And you can't do anything because of diplomatic immunity.
Right.
Diplomatic immunity.
I think that was the turning or the plot point of a lot of 80s cop dramas.
I think it was.
That's right.
You can't look.
Well, what was Beverly Hills Cop?
Oh, that was a situation where the guy was getting through customs.
That's where you put the pot in coffee.
You put the pot in coffee.
That's right.
Is that true?
If you put drugs in coffee?
German bear bands.
Oh, the German bearer bonds, of course.
Bearer bonds.
The scheisse.
Which was also the plot of Die Hard.
Is that right?
Right?
They needed the lock on the safe to disengage.
Oh, yeah, because of the German bearer bonds.
See?
German bearer bonds.
I've been doing it all wrong.
The bearer bonds.
I feel like there is not that much...
oversight in what someone calls a diplomatic pouch i bet i think there's been controversies in the past there wasn't there a big uh foo for all a couple years ago where somebody opened a diplomatic bag and doesn't that happen sometimes somebody gets mad because somebody in north korea opens a diplomatic bag or something
Oh, I don't know.
I have not been up on the diplomatic bag blogs.
What if you found some way, I'm not saying to do this in an illegal way, but it seems to me that you would get through TSA a lot faster.
You still have to do a lot of flying this summer.
You need to get some diplomatic bags.
You might not even have to go through TSA.
You might just hold up the bag and they're waving you through.
They don't want anybody to see it.
The other day, I went to SeaTac Airport for the grand opening of the Sub Pop store.
Had that on your calendar for a while?
Well, you know, I'm friends with the Sub Pops.
He had your feet on his desk at one point.
That's right.
He and I, we're fast friends.
But Megan Jasper, who is the executive vice president of Sub Pop, she and I both sit on the Seattle Music Commission together.
So we see each other all the time.
and uh megan invited some of us down to the grand opening of the sub pop store in the airport which required that we go through the airport as employees so we all met we rendezvoused at a part of the airport i had never really been to it hadn't occurred to me to go explore like the part of the airport that is being marketed as a convention center because apparently you can have a convention at the airport now
And a person from the airport met us, took us in an elevator I had never seen before.
We went down four flights.
Wow, chemtrails.
Now we're in the basement of the airport.
Whoa.
Now we went to a door where somebody looked at us on a TV screen.
Did you know the airport had a basement?
I didn't.
Holy shit.
Wait, there's more.
Oh.
uh each person that was escorting a group of people through this door could only take three people with them so there had to be there were like nine of us so there had to be three escorts and each escort went through the door separately so they talked to the person on the tv screen they were like i'm bringing these three people and the door buzzed and they went in and then the next group and then the next group and then you're in this
incredible baggage warren where it's under the building.
It's completely inside the building, but all those baggage carts and trucks are driving on streets with stoplights and intersections and stuff.
It looks like one of those UPS distribution centers.
It sounds like a Bonneville and hideout waiting to happen.
Absolutely.
Chutes and ladders.
Totally going on down there.
So we had to wait until we could get across this busy street under the building, and then we went outside onto the tarmac, up a flight of stairs, an outside flight of stairs, and then used a key card to open a door, and then we were just in the terminal.
As if we were normal, regular people, except we were surrounded by people who had like official badges and we were clearly very special people.
And I was like, wow, this is some serious heavy duty in and out.
If you have the right card, you can go all around the airport.
Right.
And I think if you are carrying diplomatic pouches, maybe you're going in a different door.
I'm not sure.
I can't imagine a guy with a special diplomatic pouch headed for Uzbekistan that he has to put that pouch on the
On the conveyor belt.
Absolutely not.
I mean, it seems like you almost would like get the equivalent of a note.
Like you would get some kind of thing where you go like, hey, don't make a big deal.
I got a diplomatic pouch.
You know, you might not have it handcuffed to your wrist.
But it seems like I bet you get to go through a special line.
Now, there's so much amazing about what you just described.
That also doesn't sound like something they do all that often.
That seems exposing you to all that luggage down there.
It just seems like they're showing you way too much to get you into a sub pop store.
Yeah, well, it seems like if you are somebody who works at the airport, there is a way that you go in every day and you go in through a back door and you end up working at the Chipotle or whatever it is at the airport.
Right?
I mean, all those people have to get into the airport somehow.
I think about it a lot.
But...
This was a route.
I mean, I think they maybe were showing off a little bit.
I'm not exactly sure.
But it was a glimpse into literally the bowels of the airport that I never thought I would see.
That is so cool.
I was excited.
How's the store?
Sub Pop Store?
Yeah.
I have to give it two thumbs up.
They are selling Long Winter's Vinyl there.
Is it one of those where they act like it's a store, but it's really just mostly a place for Dasani Waters and Details Magazine?
No, they have this fantastic selection of very cool...
and it is, like, it's, if you are in the Seattle airport and you don't go to the Sub Pop store, you're a ding-a-ling.
So, like, shirts?
Shirts, and they have an entire wall of vinyl.
You can buy any, like, the last time I was in there, I bought Super Fuzz Big Muff and Bleach and Ultimate Alternative Wavers all on vinyl.
I never owned any of those things on vinyl before.
You need something for your kids, you buy them a Zumpano record.
That's right.
And they're tote bags, they're Sub Pop branded neck pillows.
It's pretty good.
It's pretty funny stuff.
And they say that they're making money.
A long time before they thought they were and a lot more than they thought they were.
I know you're friends with these people, John.
That sounds like cocaine talk.
I imagine the rent on that place has got to be astronomical.
Can you even imagine what the rent on a place like that must be?
Well, yeah, except think about all the places that are selling stuffed orcas and canned salmon in the Seattle airport.
It's not...
For all the beats by Dr. Dre that get sold, there are a lot of people making money, trying to make money just selling the most garbagey crap.
Eminem's and Richard Hugo dolls.
Yeah, exactly.
And the Sub Pop store also, the manager of it, the main guy, is Mark Pickerel, the drummer of the Screaming Trees.
What?
So if you go in there, all the people that are working at the Sub Pop...
He's like a casino greeter?
Are like actual rock stars.
That's hilarious.
Are you a Screaming Trees fan?
I'm not super familiar.
Yeah, they're very good.
Oh, my goodness.
Well, you couldn't have guessed that, huh?
When you had your feet up on that guy's desk, you never would have guessed.
Well, and I tried to make that joke.
I thought that it was very funny to make a joke like, wow, we've really come a long way from, you know.
He's famously disputed a lot of your stories, the veracity of your stories in the past, hasn't he?
Jonathan Poneman.
Is that the guy?
Yeah.
He and I, you know, that was my first exposure to somebody saying everything I wanted someone to say to me.
Like we talked about wanting to be proved right or validated.
Jonathan Poneman came up to me after our third show.
This is the Hurricanes.
This is the Western State Hurricanes.
And said, you are the future of rock and roll.
That's number one.
Thank you.
And I was like, fuck yes.
Thank you.
And he was like, I want to take you to lunch tomorrow.
And I was like, okay.
And he was a famous guy in Seattle.
And he took me to lunch and we laughed and we had fun.
And he's very smart.
And he said, listen, there's nobody in rock that's doing what you're doing.
And it needs it.
Rock and roll needs it.
And I was like, tell me more about this.
Tell me more about how rock and roll needs me.
And he was like, rock and roll needs you.
And this was in kind of the dark years of sub-pop, right?
Between... I mean, it was pre-resurgence, pre-Shins, pre... But it's post, like, the Singles Club and stuff like that.
Post-Singles Club.
It's right in the Pernice Brothers era, right?
Or the Scud Mountain Boys.
Yeah.
There was an era... They were already kind of diversifying to... Yeah, six or seven years there where they weren't really having very many hits and they were making a lot of different kinds of music.
But before they started having hits again, because the next generation of bands to come out on Sub Pop, Shins, Postal Service, Band of Horses, whatever, Fleet Foxes, I mean, they had hits and hits and hits in the 2000s.
But in 1998, it was still kind of a weird time.
That's when Zumpano was putting on records there.
Yes, right.
That's crazy.
But Zumpano was not selling.
Yeah, I know.
It's hard to even Google them anymore.
There were some great bands, but they were not.
Your friend Sean and I, I think, might be the only still-standing Zumpano superfans in the world.
I love them so much.
I'm a pretty big fan because I got into them, you know, reverse.
Following A.C.
Newman, I went back and figured out Zumpano.
Oh, it was after Master of Manic that you went back?
It was, yeah, well, it was after that first A.C.
Newman solo record.
What?
Really?
Yeah, that thing is dynamite.
I got a great video of my daughter dancing to, like, a hitman, like a dancer, when she was about two years old.
Did she dance the dance?
Can I mention one thing, John, in passing?
Yes.
Last sentence of the opening paragraph.
It is often diplomatic bag.
It is often escorted by a diplomatic courier who is similarly immune from arrest and detention.
Now, I know that's a power that you would only use for good.
I'm just saying if you wanted to start up a cocaine rave cafe with, what's his name, Reggie Jackson playing pianos there?
Second base.
That's right.
He was an outfielder.
As long as you were carrying something that said diplomatic bag on it, they couldn't arrest you.
So in this sense, the courier is an extension of the bag.
Which is an extension of the admiralty, of the country, of the sovereignty.
That's right.
You're like the long erect wang of America, and nobody is allowed to put the cuffs on that wang.
You're holding on to the bag, and as long as you hold on to the bag of holding, you have the power of the nation.
It could be full of Ritz crackers.
It doesn't matter.
But you shake it.
I think especially if you have it handcuffed to your hand.
I'm just saying.
I think 99% of diplomatic bags are full of cocaine.
They have to be.