When Dirty Heads aren’t busy recording (their self-titled fifth studio album is out now) or touring (see below for dates), the guys love partaking in herb. So when we asked for some of their favorite weed-related stories, founders Jared Watson and Dustin “Duddy” Bushnell – who’ve known each other since high school – were happy to share; as long as we promised to preface that most of these tales took place during their budding smoker days.
Without further ado, take it away…
#1: DUDDY’S FIRST TIME GETTING “TOO” STONED
Duddy: The first time I got too stoned, I was probably a freshman in high school. My parents left town, so I decide to have a little party at the house, nothing too crazy, just like 10 of my buddies, some girls, and my brother and a couple of his friends. At the end of the night, everyone leaves and it’s just a few of us hanging out. My buddy goes, “I got a bong in my car, you want me to grab it?” I was like, “Oh yeah? Cool!” He brings in a two-foot bong, and at this point I had only hit a bong like once or twice, and definitely not a two-footer! So, he packs this bong, and we’d already been drinking and smoking a little bit, so I take this humongous bong toke and I just start coughing my ass off. I cannot stop coughing, and I’m just like, “Holy shit, I’m so fucking stoned I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Since I’m at my house, I end up going into my parents room and just chilling in there and lock the door. I can hear people outside going, “Where’s Duddy? What happened to Duddy?” So I turn the lights off, and hide on the bed. Then, I hear someone wiggle the doorknob, so I climb under the bed. Now I’m hiding in a dark room, in my parents’ room, under the bed while my friends are outside partying because I was too fucking stoned that I couldn’t even deal with it.
#2: GETTING HIGH AT SEA WORLD
Jared: In 8th grade, we had a field trip to Sea World, so my buddy and I were like, “How are we going to get high when we go to Sea World? Because that sounds really fun.” And this was before we knew about edibles. “Maybe we can just eat it?” He was like, “Yeah, I bet we can just eat it! It might make us sick, but then if it makes us sick we’ll just throw up or something.” We didn’t care. So we hid it in our backpacks. We both had an eighth of weed and we had two Gatorades. He had the red Gatorade and I like the yellow Gatorade. I remember having yellow Gatorade because everybody used to always make fun of me for liking the yellow Gatorade. We took our eighths and we just rolled it into little balls, and put them into our mouths and didn’t chew, just swallowed it. At first, we get to Sea World, nothing’s happening and we’re bummed. But a couple hours later, we’re at the Shamu exhibit, where you’re supposed to be sitting in the seats, and we started feeling something. Instead, my buddy and I kept getting up to stand up against the glass, and our teacher didn’t really notice at the time, but we were [strategically] standing to let the water wash over us whenever Shamu would come by. Finally, the teacher came by and was like, “What’s up with you guys?” And we were just stuck to the glass, trying to have the water crash over us, and when we finally turned around she was like, “You guys are on drugs.” And we immediately said, “No, we’re not!” But then they called our parents, and we had to go home and we got in a bunch of trouble. That was the most fun I’ve ever had at Sea World!
#3: HOW JARED FOUND OUT HIS MOM WAS A STONER
Jared: When I got home from the Sea World I told them I was sick. And they were like, “You’re high. Like, you’re super stoned.” And I kept saying, “No, I’m just sick!” At the time they were like, “You can’t be smoking weed, you’re 14. We better not find you smoking weed.” But then, you know, you get older and you find out your parents smoke weed, and I remember when I first really realized it. It was later, during high school, and my friend brought over hash for the first time. I was like, “How do you smoke hash?” And he said, “You hot knife it.” I had no idea what that meant, so he said, “Well, you literally take two butter knives, and heat ’em over the stove. Then you take a little bit of the hash, you roll it up into a little ball, and stick the butter knives together and the smoke goes up and you suck it up, just from the knives.” I didn’t even think twice about it, I just said, “Fuck it, I don’t care. We’ll just take these butter knives, my mom’s not going to notice two burnt butter knives, we’ll just throw ’em away.” So we get high off the hash and I’ve never been that fucking high in my life. Once we were done, I threw the knives away in the trash, but I didn’t really think about covering them up. When my mom came home later on or the next day, she was like, “Were you fucking smoking hash?” All I could respond with was, “What?!” And she just said again, “Were you smoking hash?” “No… How– No…” And she said, “Yeah you were, come on I know you smoke weed.” I was probably like 17 or 18 at the time. She said, “I know you smoke weed, who cares if you smoke hash?” I responded with “How do you know that I smoked hash?” Then she said, “Two of my fucking butter knives are burnt and ruined in the trash. That was really nice silverware from your grandma.” I was shocked and she just says, “I don’t care that you smoked, I care about how you just ruined two pieces of a really nice silverware.” In the end, I actually got in more trouble for that than the smoking. That’s when I said, “Wait! How did you put two and two together?” That’s when she said, “Please, you think I’ve never smoked hash before?” Which made me say, “Oh, shit! Wait, why am I in trouble then? You just admitted to doing the same thing!” And she just told me, “Shut up.”
#4: SMOKING WEED AT A FRIEND’S PLACE
Duddy: This might have been in 8th grade the summer before I went in to freshman year. This was when I really started smoking for the first time. I was at my buddy’s house, spending the night over there. At the end of the night we were just chilling, drinking some beers and we decide to smoke some weed out in the backyard. We snuck out to the backyard so his parents couldn’t hear us while we smoked. Then we come back inside, just chilling, super stoned, and I remember going to the bathroom to pee. It felt like I was in the bathroom for three hours. Once I left the bathroom, I’m going back to the living room where we were hanging out. The house was set up in a way that you had to walk through the kitchen to get back to the living room. When I was coming around the corner into the kitchen, I just felt crunching under my feet. I’m like, “What am I walking on?” It was Lucky Charms, everywhere, all over the floor! I looked over to my buddy and he’s lying on the floor of the kitchen, throwing cereal up in the air, and trying to catch it in his mouth and not even coming close. I obviously had to get in on it, too, so I got down next to him and start throwing cereal up in the air and trying to catch it in my mouth. I remember the next morning his mom was like, “Why the fuck is there cereal everywhere?”
#5: A 6 FOOT BONG, VOMIT AND A NINTENDO
Jared: My buddy had a pretty legit setup in one of the extra rooms in his house. His was the house where the parents weren’t home a lot and he had one of those big six-foot bongs. He also had a bunk beds, so we would sit on top of the bunk bed and somebody would light the bong down on the floor. It was the coolest thing ever, back then. It was fucking ridiculous; who needs a fucking six-foot bong?! But it was just rad. You went over, smoked his six-foot bong; he had a Nintendo – the old school one – and all the gaming systems. I remember one time we were playing on the Nintendo and I had just taken a big toke of the six-foot bong and coughed pretty heavy. You know when you get done coughing and you’re still feeling it in your throat? I didn’t want to be a pussy and cough too much, but I couldn’t stop. Then I was like, “Fuck, I’m really high. We’ll play something, who wants to play some games?” You know how you have to blow the cartridge to get all the dust out of it, and then you blow the inside of the Nintendo? Well, I was still kind of coughing and I was cleaning out the inside of the Nintendo. So, I’m coughing and simultaneously trying to clean up so the game won’t freeze… the coughing fit got to me, and I threw up. I’m in the middle of a coughing fit and I throw up inside my buddy’s Nintendo. I remember that he was up on the bed doing the bong toke, and then me throwing up in the Nintendo either made him so upset or laugh so hard that he fell off the bunk bed and broke the six-foot bong. The problem was that it was his brother’s six-foot bong, and his brother was this big, gnarly dude. I remember us trying to fix it, but we couldn’t, so when he got home we got our butts kicked.
#6: EDIBLE STORIES FROM THE ROAD
Jared & Duddy: Every tour, for the last three tours, there’s always somebody on the crew that is pretty new to edibles. We’ve been like, “Yo! We have these gummy bears – only eat one!” Or, “Hey! We have this cookie, only eat a quarter of this cookie!” Then an hour later, our drum tech or whoever will come out of the back lounge way too high. I remember once, our keyboard player came out and we were all talking and he was just standing there. He walked into the front lounge and was just standing there staring. We were like, “Ohhh. Shawn?” But he wouldn’t say anything, so we asked, “You ate edibles, huh?” He wouldn’t say anything, so we were like, “You can’t talk, huh?” He just shook his head ‘no,’ and we’re like, “Did you come up here to get a water?” He shook his head ‘yeah’ and then somebody handed him a water. And he just stood there with the water in his hand. We were like, “Shaw, you can’t open the water, huh?”, He just shook his head ‘no,’ so we opened the water for him. He turned around and went back into his bunk, and we all just laughed. Usually there will be one person per tour who just eats too many edibles and is like, “Dude. I either need to go to a hospital or I’m going to go lay in my bunk for eight hours.” Overall, they always end up coming out of it fine, but it’s always funny when someone eats too many edibles.
DIRTY HEADS, the self-titled 5th studio album, is out now! Catch them live – check out dates below.
SUBLIME WITH ROME & DIRTY HEADS Tour:
07/15 – Cincinnati, OH @ PNC Pavilion at Riverbend Music Center+
07/16 – Indianapolis, IN @ Farm Bureau Insurance Lawn at White River State Park #+
07/17 – Chicago, IL @ FirstMerit Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island #+
07/19 – Lawrence, KS @ Crossroads #+
07/22 – Eagle, ID @ Eagle River Pavilion #+
07/23 – Missoula, MT @ Big Sky Brewing Company #+
07/24 – Seattle, WA @ WAMU Theater #+
07/25 – Eugene, OR @ Cuthbert Amphitheatre #+
07/27 – Murphys, CA @ Ironstone Amphitheatre #+ (on sale April 7)
07/28 – Concord, CA @ Con9ord Pavilion #+
07/29 – Irvine, CA @ Verizon Wireless Amphitheater**
07/30 – Chula Vista, CA @ Sleep Train Amphitheatre #+
07/31 – Phoenix, AZ @ Comerica Theatre+
08/03 – Corpus Christi, TX @ Concrete Street Amphitheater #+
08/05 – Austin, TX @ Austin360 Amphitheatre # ^ (on sale April 1)
08/06 – Dallas, TX @ Gexa Energy Pavilion # ^
08/07 – The Woodlands, TX @ The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion presented by Huntsman # ^
08/14 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Reggae Rise Up **
08/16 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rock Amphitheatre **
08/19 – Jordan, NY @ Kegs Canalside **
08/20 – Middlebury, VT @ Vermont Hard Cider Company #
08/27 – Cowichan Valley, Canada @ Legends Valley Music Festival
09/23 – Las Vegas, NV @ Life Is Beautiful
12/14 – Ecatepec De Morelos, MX @ Closer To The Sun 2016
* – with Tribal Seeds, Hieroglyphics, New Kingston
# – with Dirty Heads
^ – with 311, Dirty Heads, Matisyahu
+ – Bleeker
** Dirty Heads Headline Dates /Festival
