In Praise of Weed
There aren’t many jobs that you can do while stoned, but commissioning music videos is one of them.
For most of the time that I worked at Atlantic Records U.K, Richard Skinner and I practiced the smoking of marijuana with almost sacramental devotion. At 11am we began our daily Eucharist, but instead of the communion wafer we had ponging hydroponic skunk weed and king size blue Rizlas, and instead of wine we drank cups of dark splosh, always PG Tips. We were flagrant zoot-a-holics. Once that first draw on a spliff settled in the depths of our lungs we would bun for the rest of the day. End to end burners.
Weed gave us super powers. It connected us to the vena cava of label life. It tuned us into the rhythm of the business. We vibrated with the pulse. The hum. Weed made us impervious to pain. Weed made us not give a shit. Yes, there was white privilege at play — we weren’t subject to the extreme codes of so called ‘professionalism’ that our black colleges had to endure — and certainly in my case, the safety net of relatively well-off parents played its part, but not giving a shit made us powerful and mysterious; it enabled us to transcend the petty politics. The bullshit. It didn’t mean we didn’t care about the work. We cared deeply, and wanted to make the very best videos we could with whatever hand we were dealt. Our baseline of ‘five per cent better than shit’ — or was it 10 per cent — was nothing short of miraculous in the context of some of the dregs we had to work with. Shit rolls downhill in the music industry. Often a vague, unworkable, unachievable decree comes from upon high, and every underling on every rung of the ladder below scrambles around, second guessing, desperate not to fuck up the already impossible. Weed exempts you from this unseemly cluster fuck. Because. You. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.
As Skinner always used to say, “I don’t deal in speculation. I deal in facts.” Some lightweights might get paranoid when they smoke, but professional stoners know only clarity when the THC compounds combust and explode in their cortices. Like a third eye we could see it coming. We could predict the future. We deciphered facts like runes. A call would come down the A&R pipes, “Hey guys, the first single’s gonna be ‘White Lies’. We need the video to be delivered in two weeks. And it needs to be great.” Weed told us otherwise. The PG tea leaves augured a single change and a schedule that would push. So we did nothing. We pretended to work. We went for brunch at Bill Wyman’s ‘Sticky Fingers’ off Kensington High Street. And lo — through bloodshot eyes we’d see the facts come into focus. Of course the single changed. Of course the schedule moved back. Then we’d get to work with tenacity and precision, doing 18 hour days to get the video into production. Pure weed focus. Holographic lucidity.
We spent millions of dollars of Edgar Bronfman Jr’s money while high. He once walked into our office. It stank of weed. His nose wrinkled like a vole, and he started to work on his teeth with a floss pick before walking out in disgust. Even his wraithlike intensity couldn’t break through the weed’s Teflon force field. We dealt with every possible calamity — lost locations, bad weather, insurance claims, lawsuits, boardroom meltdowns, A&R tears — with a shrug and a high pitched laugh. With complete ‘dro induced equanimity.
Buying weed was obviously one of the most important tasks of each week. No Henrys. Strictly quarters and halves. We had two means of doing this. The first was a cycle courier who would drop off vivid industrial grade skunk weed in VHS cases in exchange for the cash that we left on the front desk. The mail room was manned by a guy called Jonathan who was a proper Spiral Tribe casualty. I think he may even have worn a ‘Make Some Fucking Noise’ t-shirt. A veteran of a thousand Garys, he looked like the spiral eyes emoji. He had that pinger fervour. When he spoke to you he fixed your gaze and grabbed your wrist tightly with his bony, emaciated fingers. But he was hip to our special deliveries and always brought them straight up to our office. We loved him.
The second option was much harder. Sometimes we would debate for days whether this option was worth even entertaining. It involved a trip to Westbourne Grove to the private residence of a Trustafarian. Picture the scene. We pulled up at terraced house bound by a blossom tree. We knocked on the door, and it was answered by a white waif-like beauty with high aquiline cheekbones framing a rose shaped mouth, dusty blue eyes, and caramel sun tinted hair that fell in matted tassels, dangerously close to dreadlocks, onto bare, bronzed shoulders. That low boarding school voice born of aristocratic blood beckoned us in. She wore beaded poo-in-your-kecks harem pants and a strange carved leather waist bag decorated with semi-precious stones. A small Hamsa charm adorned her navel, and a bindi marked the centre of her forehead. She caught me staring at it in disbelief and witheringly explained that it marked the sixth chakra, Anja, known as the seat of concealed wisdom or the third eye.
We sat down. The smell of incense and mothballs was heady and confusing. Josh Wink ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ played in the background. She poured us Jasmin tea and spoke about her recent trip to Goa, about a smacky pill at a Vagator Beach party, about a profound meditation with her Yogi that had stimulated her pineal gland to such a degree that she had experienced the cosmos in its pure, unmanifested state. This lasted an hour. My BlackBerry was blowing up in my pocket, almost constantly vibrating. Finally she paused, fixed us with a sad look, and then produced an ornate box from which she took a tin foil parcel carefully bound in pink thread. We gave her some money and left.
The whole transaction was such an ordeal. We always had to decompress afterwards. That usually meant going for lunch at the Pie & Mash shop on Golborne Road where the smell of suet and parsley liquor mingled with hot-knifed hashish.
I can’t pretend to understand trust-fund-onomics. I don’t know why she sold weed. Or why she went to such lengths to deflect from the fact that she sold weed. But weed she sold. And this was holy grail weed — the greatest that I have ever smoked. It was some kind of mythical Thai Stick. We just called it Boutique Weed. It was foundational. Generational. The fucking Amen break of weed. The source code of creativity. The wellspring. We did some of our best work while blazing this marijuana.
I still think about this weed all the time. Nothing ever quite matches the W11 Boutique.
I don’t know what else to say.
I just really love weed.