Mike Edison: A Life of Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll

MIKE EDISON is genuine rock’n’roll renaissance man. He is the former editor and publisher of famed cannabis magazine High Times, and was the editor-in-chief of the courageously irresponsible Screw. He is the author of 28 “adult” novels, and an internationally known musician who spent much of the 1980s and 90s seeing the world from behind a drum set, opening for bands as diverse as Sonic Youth, Sound Garden, and the Ramones. He has written extensive liner notes for, among others, Iggy Pop, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and has contributed to numerous magazines and websites, including Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, the New York Observer, Spin (writing about the Rolling Stones), Interview, and New York Press, for which he covered classical music and professional wrestling.

His books have included the highly-praised memoirs I Have Fun Everywhere I Go and You Are A Complete Disappointment, as well as the sprawling social history of sex on the newsstand, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, written during his time as a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library. He also writes prolifically about food and wine, notably collaborating with restaurateur and viniculturist Joe Bastianich on his New York Times bestselling memoir, Restaurant Man, of which writer Bret Easton Ellis has said, “The directness and energy have a cinematic rush . . . not a single boring sentence.”

His most recent book is Sympathy for the Drummer – Why Charlie Watts Matters, a rawkus appreciation of the Rolling Stones drummer.

Edison can frequently be seen with his long-running blues, gospel, and garage-punk experiment The Edison Rocket Train, and he speaks frequently on free speech, sex, drugs, and the American counterculture. He is “proof positive that one can be both edgy and erudite, lowbrow and literate, and take joy in the unbridled pleasures of the id without sacrificing the higher mind.” (PopMatters.com)