Peter Tosh Interview from Head Magazine, 1977

I found this quaint interview with Peter Tosh today. It was in an issue of Head magazine from 1977 that I bought at a warehouse sale. The place was Oddball Film, a film archive and licensing house on the third floor of this unassuming San Francisco warehouse. Check them out. The owner, Stephen, hosts screenings of old bizarre movies on Friday and Saturday nights.

He was having a sale and he had put out these boxes of old magazines -- art and architecture journals, old pornos, strange counterculture mags -- and I found a few choice items. This Tosh interview isn't very deep, and I'm still not sure whether it's really an interview or just a carefully transcribed record of what Peter was saying on stage at the concert the reporter attended. Peter was known to go on these long, two or three minute diatribes about music, Jah, the government, the "shitstem," the political situation, obeah -- whatever topics the lyrics in the next song dealt with, or whatever he had read in the paper that afternoon.

The image above is the centerfold from the magazine, and here's the interview in its entirety. Click through on all of these for the larger versions:











The particular issue of Head magazine is advertised as "The Cocaine Issue," and the interview is nestled in between an article about DMT and a primer on how to tell how much Clorox has been cut into your cocaine. The ads are amusing, too -- everything from "the passer," a 24-inch-long roach clip, to "The Bug Alert," a device that detects DEA phone taps. There's a small picture of Peter on the cover, which is dominated by a close up shot of a giant blob of cocaine. I'm curious how Peter, a devout Rasta, would have felt about seeing his photo dwarfed by a big hunk of Peruvian Marching Powder.




He probably would have been a little more into the back cover, a full-page ad for X-rated rolling papers from the fine folks at Hustler magazine.




I put up these scans because this article is probably next to impossible to find anywhere. If you hold the rights to Head magazine and you want me to take it down, just ask.