Juno Awards…On Acid!

Anything on acid is nuts right?  William Shatner looks like Don Cherry… on acid; Limo drivers seem like CIA agents… on acid; ATM machines are like angry robots who want to get fucked by your debit card… on TONS of acid! Etc. Well we thought we’d do really scary things on acid, to see if that journalistic cliché had a point. This week: the Juno Awards.

This is our friend Greg 15 minutes after arriving in Ottawa by bus from Montreal for the 2012 Juno Awards, which are basically the Canadian Grammy’s except much less glamorous and with zero percent chance of Kanye West doing something embarrassing. Not only was it Greg’s first time in Ottawa, it was also his first time taking LSD. This is the first of six hits that he would take over the course of the weekend. As they say in Canada, “Go hard or go home, eh?”

We decided to wander around Ottawa a bit to see the sights and about 30 minutes after dropping the first hit, Greg started to notice that things were getting a little weird. “Waves of warmth were coursing up and down my body and the sky was changing colours in the way that a television screen looks when the contrast and brightness are adjusted.” After that he looked totally flushed and was all laughs and smiles for the next 72 hours.

Most people are afraid of cops when they’re on drugs, but Greg couldn’t have been more at ease asking this nice officer if he’d let us take a photo. “The changing colours of the sky were affected by different vibes that I was getting off of people and with this officer of the law, the heavens were purple from his good vibe.”

Walking around town and getting acquainted with the city, Greg thought it might be funny to see what a strip club would be like while tripping balls. But when he saw that the bricks on their wall were pulsating, he abandoned that idea and said “I know! Let’s just fuck the wall instead!” When he noticed that the strip club offered an all-you-can-eat buffet Greg mentioned how his dad always said, “I don’t care how horny and hungry you are, NEVER eat at a strip club.”

Later that evening, we went to see Fucked Up at a bar called Babylon, which someone described as one of Ottawa’s “cool bars”. Greg was so happy in this photo because he managed to escape the inside, which was a little too hectic and crowded for his LSD-addled brain. In fact, during the trip Greg smoked cigarettes with a huge smile because of all the effort that was required wading through sweaty crowds, trying to figure out how door handles worked, asking angry-looking security guards for directions to the exit, thinking windows were doors, thinking the bathroom was actually outside, etc. Tobacco just tasted better the harder it was earned.

Inside the bar, we bluffed our way backstage to the VIP room where Fucked Up was hanging out. Greg was getting consistently bad vibes from most of the band who were clearly not impressed with his brimming smile, penchant for weird jokes, and acid-induced social autism. But after a few minutes of sounding like a crazy person, the singer Damian Abraham burst out of the bathroom, laughing his balls off after hearing him blather on while taking a huge dump. On acid, you are strangely attuned to vibes that are emmitted from people and he had the best vibes of anyone that Greg met during the entire trip. I think he called him his “spirit animal.””

Here he is making Greg’s brain melt by framing his face and creating a trippy tunnel vision effect with his hands. At this point Greg had done three hits.

And here he is trying to freak Greg out with some demon bird faces.

After doing a bowl from his fun-looking gravity bong, Greg went back to tripping his balls off at the bar. Things got crazier when he came back and said his friend gave him some MDMA. Greg’s next few hours became a blur of dancing and making out with random girls. “Luckily, the loud music covered up the crazy things I was saying and the dim lights hid the fact that my pupils were huge. Silence and lights would have DESTROYED my game.”

There was to be no intermission on this Canadian music spirit-quest so here he is the next day, prepared for the first of the two award nights, ready and energized by taking more acid first thing in the morning. This was shot in the Q & A media room, where award winners were going to be interviewed and photographed. “I felt like we were at a top secret meeting of world leaders. There were people from television and newspapers on their laptops and their cell phones seeming very official.” Greg felt that we were basically just kids at the grown-ups table and started giggling for so long that he teared up a little bit and had to get up and walk around before he made a scene.

When Greg was walking off his giggles, he started pointing out “all of these intense CSIS agent-looking guys outside.” He was also convinced that some homeless guy was an undercover cop. He wasn't homeless at all; he was just a regular clothes cop wearing a polar fleece. He started to nervously lurk around to investigate what their deal was: Was it all a plot to prevent people on acid from getting to meet Justin Bieber? It turned out they were just limo drivers with good vibes that made the sky turn yellow. I asked the drivers how many dicks they've seen sucked in the back of their limos, "too many" was their response.

Once bands started going up for questions, we came back in and Greg was convinced that the mediator at the podium was a shaved monkey, which didn’t help his incessant giggling. He thought he was being discrete when he whisper-screamed, “he’s a shaved monkey!” to me, but he really wasn’t. The woman behind him was the PR director for the event and had a really, really serious business vibe. We think she caught wind of the fact that Greg was high on LSD – most likely because Greg punctuated every conversation he had with “By the way, on some real levels right now… I’m very high on acid.” She kept looking at Greg with piercing eyes and at one point Greg leaned over and whispered, “I think she is the most captivating woman I have ever seen in my entire life.”

For some awesome reason, they were offering free haircuts and Greg wanted to look his best. Apparently getting a haircut on acid feels amazing, sort of like getting rid of a beard, but on a spiritual plane. We didn’t tell the hairdresser that Greg was on acid but I think she knew something was up because he kept saying, “I can feel my hair looking good, even though I can’t see it.” She later got one of her friends to ask him for his number but he couldn’t remember it.

Shaun Majumder from This Hour Has 22 Minutes sat Greg down for an interview. He was pretending to be one of those annoying radio personalities that use intermittent fart sound effects, corny jokes and the like. Normally Canadian awards shows are pretty stuffy, bland affairs, everyone is pretty politically correct and the interviews are usually just people regurgitating platitudes and mugging for the camera. When Majumder asked Greg what he wanted to accomplish by attending the Junos on acid, Greg just unashamedly said the first thing that popped into his mind which happened to be, “All I want to do right now is make out with some black chicks.” This caused the entire room to do a spit-take including the aging members of Simple Plan who paused their interview to laugh their asses off. Having fun and feeling super confident from how well things were going, Greg decided to skip the actual gala dinner and take full advantage of the open bar.

The next day, on the red carpet, all of the reporters were elbowing each other trying to get enough room to interview arriving celebrities. Greg said he “felt like a Buddhist monk sitting cross-legged in the middle of a busy stock exchange” and said that “all of the flashing cameras looked like fun fireworks specially designed for his eyeballs’ entertainment.” The red carpet at the Juno’s is like a cavalcade of disappointment, filled with people who you think just might be famous. Every five seconds you’re like, “Is that…(fill in celebrity name)?” followed by “No, it’s just some dude from New Brunswick.” But every now and then someone you do know comes along, like this guy. While we were busy snapping shots of Captain Kirk, Greg turned to us and said, “Dude, Don Cherry looks fucking relaxed.”

Greg went up to this guy and very sincerely told him, “Raising Arizona is one of my favourite movies.” His friend in the sunglasses said, “Vice Magazine, eh. What are you doing, taking sarcastic photos?” Greg couldn’t understand why Nicolas Cage’s friend was being so mean. But this guy’s bad attitude was not going to kill Greg’s unstoppably positive outlook on the universe…

After some actress from Degrassi: The Next Generation and the drummer of Nickelback sauntered down the red carpet, garnering almost zero attention from fans or the press, this guy rolled up and everybody went nuts as he started running in circles with his crazy helmet. Greg had no idea who he was, and was convinced it was Justin Bieber finally going through his weird drug phase where he shows up to events acting retarded to ward off tween mega-fans. Even after he found out it was Deadmau5 he still had to remind myself that the helmet wasn’t really a mouse’s head after he saw the ears wiggle slightly.

After the red carpet, we headed back to the media room to chill out. After six hits of acid Greg’s nerves were completely shot to the point where he didn’t even want to go into the main part of the stadium for the show we were in town to see. He’d had enough and was ready to go home. On the way out a reporter came up and told Greg that he’d heard he was on acid and that he looked like he was handling it well. Greg replied that he went into it not knowing what was going to happen, but by the end was just hoping he didn’t get kicked out, arrested, or bad-tripping in a shower, balled up in the foetal position. Mission accomplished Greg!

By Gregory Pike and Kevin Massicotte

Photos by Kevin Massicotte