Party on, Mike

by M.J. Fine

Some people are walking downers. Others carry the party with them. With his new memoir, I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (Faber & Faber, $25), writer/editor/rocker Mike Edison makes clear which camp he falls into. For further proof, dig his subtitle: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

And he delivers. Whether he's bashing the drums for the Pleasure Fuckers, churning out reviews of skin flicks for Screw or scrambling to plan High Times' 25th anniversary blowout, Edison rarely wastes time on domestic swill. He brings that same breathless quality to his writing. He's not afraid to torch bridges in his accounts of the power struggles at High Times, but he gets equally riled up about barhopping with Evel Knievel and the science of color-correcting photos.

Take his account of visiting New York after living in Spain for a couple of years: "Snorting coke through a hundred-dollar bill was a nice treat. Nothing else in the world smells like American money, and I relished the musky bouquet of capitalism with the giddiness of a tipsy oenophile presented with a bottle of '84 Haut-Médoc. As a cocaine delivery system, Spanish money is also quite sexy (ditto the old Dutch 25 guilder note), but filthy Yankee lucre has its own pimped-out-Tony-Montana-rock-star-New-World voodoo that will never be beaten by a European banknote sporting a picture of a prune-faced monarch."

Edison's a magazine guy, and it shows. His twisty prose and sequentially presented exploits might work as a series of articles; at 325 pages, it's sensory overload. But what makes for an exhausting book holds the promise of exhilarating reading. In print, the anecdotes choke on detours through tangents on all the characters Edison comes across. Live, his skuzzy, fuzzy guitar is a natural accompanist for his riffs on going undercover for a Heeb magazine assignment on Jews for Jesus and the last time he hung out with GG Allin. All you need to do is show up.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Mike Edison makes two local appearances on Wed., June 4: 6:30 p.m., free, A.K.A. Music, 27 N. Second St., 215-922-3855; and 10 p.m., Tritone, 1508 South St., 215-545-0475, tritonebar.com.