I hope my parents won’t read this post! While interviewing Dennis from Damaged Wear he told me about Bobby Black, the senior editor of High Times Magazine who lives with his wife, April, in the Heights. As soon as I heard about Bobby I saw a cloud of smoke in the air with my blog post title “High Times in the Heights”! Genius.

Bobby and April invited me to their home to hang out with them and their cats…to be honest, I had to reorganize this interview just a little… ;-) GOOD TIMES!

Tell me about yourself, what do you do? My name is Bobby Black. I’m the senior editor of High Times magazine.

Wait, is Bobby Black your real name? No, it’s not….but you won’t get that haha. I’ll tell you off the record.

But why Bobby Black? It started off as a nickname I had when I was working at High Times early on. I’m a metal head—I love black, I used to wear all black, I even had my hair dyed black for a while. So people in my office came up with Bobby Black: “Oh, look at Mr. Bobby Black over here!” and it just stuck. I adopted it as my pseudonym—my pen name.  And the persona of Bobby Black started sprouting from there. So that’s where it came from.

How long have you been at High Times? This is actually my 20th year.

How did you get into working there?  I went to Baruch College in Manhattan and my friend Delia had gotten a job working at High Times in their ad department that year. I was like “oh my god, how did you find that? You’re so lucky.” Then she came to me in class one day and said “Hey, there’s an opening, do you want to work for High Times?” She was being promoted and her position as an ad intern was opening up. “Fuck yeah, I want to work at High Times!” and so she came to me later and was like “okay, I spoke to the publisher and he wants you to come in today and meet with him.” I said “today? I’m not ready! I have no resume, no portfolio ready. I’m wearing ripped jeans and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and you want me to go in for this job interview?” She said, “don’t worry about it, it’ll be fine.” So I go in there and I sit down in the publisher’s office and spoke to him for like, twenty minutes. And by the end of it, when he found out that I had graphic design skills, he offered me a position in the art department instead.

That must be the best job to have while in college! The High Times offices were right down the block from my college. Literally on the same block. So whenever I would have gaps between classes I would go up to the offices and get high and then go to class.  When I graduated I started working there part-time. Within a year my boss, the production manager, ended up getting fired and they offered me the position and I took it. So that’s when I started there full time and I’ve been there ever since. I’ve kind of worked my way up through the ranks and now I’m senior editor. And I’ve been senior editor about a decade now.

Do people just hang out there and smoke? What’s the company culture like? Well, no. The thing is that we’ve changed locations many times over the years and every time we moved it got a big stricter. In the old days when I started, there was serious blazing going on.  Now we don’t smoke in the office at all anymore like we used to. We just can’t get away with it. But we’ve definitely had some fun times over the years for sure. It’s a pretty eccentric cool spot as you can imagine.

What’s a typical day for you? That, too, has changed a lot over the years. But currently, I write a column every month called “Almost Infamous” which is based on the idea of Almost Famous, the movie, where the kid gets lucky and ends up touring with the rock band. My concept was similar I lucked out working for High Times, I take the reader along the ride with me. But it’s just like, this perspective of the average stoner who gets thrown into this awesome situation and what happens from there. It’s pretty much whatever I want to write about as long as in some way it relates to weed or that counter-culture.

When I started in 1994 we had an event called the Cannabis Cup and it was in Amsterdam. Every November. So we’ve been doing that event, this is the 27th year (my first was the 7th year). In 2010, with all the medical marijuana laws that had been enacted in the U.S. we decided to be a little daring and try to throw a Cannabis Cup in the United States. We called it the Medical Cannabis Cup and the first one was in San Francisco.

So we said here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to come into a state where it’s legal medically and we’re going to hold the same type of competition that we hold in Amsterdam except dispensaries will be entering instead of coffee shops. We’re going to pick the best and we’ll have a 2 day expo whereas Amsterdam is a 4-5 day expo but we’re going to do a shortened version but while following the law. Make sure everything is legit.

We will have to make sure only people with medical cards can get in the smoking area and do everything legit. We’re going to see what happens. See if the feds or the police roll up on us and shut the whole thing down or if they’re going to let us get away with it. They let us get away with it.

What do you do at these events? Are you a judge?  The actual event is only two days. We do a Saturday and Sunday expo where Saturday night is a VIP event and has a musical performance. The people who buy the VIP tickets get to go to that concert. In Denver we’ve had Slightly Stoopid and Cypress Hill, we’ve had Snoop Dogg, we’ve had Redman, in Michigan we had Wycleff Jean. He was fantastic. We get some big name talent.

Leading up to that, there’s a whole process that has to go on. It’s a competition where we award Cannabis Cups to the best indica, the best sativa, the best edible, the best hash- there’s different categories….

Were you always a weed connoisseur?  I first smoked weed when I was 11. I didn’t start smoking more heavily till about high school. But after I started working at High Times I started smoking A LOT of weed. My weed consumption quadrupled at least. I used to smoke on the weekends or at a concert… Then I started smoking everyday and then 8 times a day. I got to the point where I was pretty much high all day, everyday at work.

Were you able to function? I worked GREAT! For me, being high was the natural state. Being sober was weird to me. I learned how to just function and do everything high all the time. And so it didn’t matter to me. But now I’m in a different place than I was in my 20s. I’ve mellowed out and my life has changed quite a bit since then. I certainly still enjoy my hash and my weed and all that, but I’m a little more selective now about when I do it.

How did you and April meet?  April and I met at the Amsterdam Cannabis Cup in 2006. She was there working a booth with her friends—this company called 420 Science who make stash jars and stuff.

We hit it off and there was an immediate attraction. I tried to lure her back to my hotel room but that didn’t happen. But I made her promise to come visit me in New York (she was living in Phoenix at the time) and she did. We started seeing each other long-distance back and forth and we would meet at different pot events—like the 420 Party in San Diego and our High Times events.

Then I asked her to move in with me. I proposed to her in Amsterdam again at the Cannabis Cup on a canal cruise. Then we were married.

That is so cute. You guys are so cute. B: We had a very weedy wedding—we used all hemp paper for the invitations and all that stuff. We had paper with actual pot leaves in it for our centerpieces. I would say about 85-90% of the guests at our wedding were smoking weed, like at the reception. Both of our parents had their first dabs at our wedding.

Were they cool about it? B: Yeah, our parents all smoke weed. I was smoking with my parents since I was 21. So yeah, we are a very cannabis couple, I call it a “Stoneybook romance.”

What about kids? B: We’re working on the first!

And how would you feel if your kids started smoking weed? Our feelings about our kids and weed is I think very simple and straight forward: it’s going to be very hard for me to try to hide who I am or what I do from our child. But when they’re very young we’re going to try to isolate them from it—we don’t want to shove it in their face, you know, out of responsibility. But when they’re older, junior high school kind of age, I plan to have a very open talk with them about it. Basically, to me it’s not controversial at all. There’s a lot of things that are more dangerous than cannabis that are legal and regularly available to society. To me, marijuana is a plant. It is an herb. Calling it a drug is almost misleading to me because a drug is something that’s synthesized.

Heroin is a drug, cocaine is a drug. Pot is a plant—it grows out of the ground. It’s not a drug. So I wouldn’t have any problem with my teenager smoking weed. But here’s the thing: as long as you keep your shit together. My parents kind of said the same thing to me when I was young. I got busted smoking weed and they told me they didn’t want me doing it because I was too young and I needed to focus on school. But basically, I got really good grades. I never cut class…okay not NEVER but I didn’t cut excessively.

I believe there are certain people who shouldn’t smoke weed. Certain people thrive on it, there’s certain people who are fucking go-getters, but then you have to understand your limits. Like, “what can I function under?”

B: Of course, everybody’s different. Some people can take one glass of wine and be loopy, some people can drink half a bottle of whisky and still appear straight. You know?

Are you kidding? Half a glass of wine and I’m dancing on the bar! B: Exactly. But the good thing is that society is finally waking up and realizing even the monetary potential of weed. The money it can bring in for the state and the city in taxes when it’s legalized. And how much money can be made for industry and entrepreneurs. So it’s changing very fast right now. Within the next 5 to 10 years it will be legal in most of the country. I believe that fully.

But long story short, you work for High Times. You have a great job and a great life.

What is your favorite Jersey City hangout spot?   Well Riverview Park is right down the block from us. We spend a little bit of time there, there’s a great farmers market there we shop at every sunday where we get our produce and nuts and all kinds of good stuff. The Trolley Bar is literally on the next corner. I do like that spot ever since they remodeled and reopened it.

What’s next for you? High Times is celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. This is a big year for us. I’ve been there for half of that, which is really cool. We’re having a big invitation-only party in NYC this month which is exciting. I also host an event which for the past 6 years has been in Austin, TX at the South by Southwest music festival. It’s called the Doobie Awards which is the High Times music awards. It’s a show I put on, we give out smokeable bong trophies to the musicians of the year who’ve had good pot songs or stoner-friendly music. SXSW is an awesome music festival. So we do that in March.

To April) That sounds so fun, so you get to go to all of these?! That’s awesome. A: Yeah! They like to count spouses in on the action.

B: Yeah, most of the staff’s spouses work the events with us. So they fly all of the spouses out and you don’t have to buy another hotel room. High Times is, in many ways, a family company. It’s still privately owned.

Any last words? A: Vote!

B: Pick up the 40th Anniversary issue of High Times. Visit hightimes.com and buy tickets for our events at cannabiscup.com.  Starting next month, we will have digitized versions of all of our past issues—all the way back to our very first issue—all online.

Cool. What kind of munchies you got? 

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