Q’s With Backstage Budtender Josh Taylor

Scott McCaughey – Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign:
Josh Taylor’s Backstage Budtending service offers cannabis legally to venues, festivals, artists/bands, labels, management agencies and more with an eye towards education and well-being. Photographed at Nashville’s The Basement East.

Josh Taylor: I worked in the music industry for a good 15 years before starting Oregon’s Cannabis Concierge and then just over 

a year ago started California’s Cannabis Concierge. Cannabis has always played a big role whether in touring or in the studio, less for just getting high and more for the idea of wellness and replacing substances with more side effects like alcohol or opiates.

I worked as a tour manager and day-to-day manager. I was lucky enough to start off with Jerry Joseph of Jerry Joseph and the Jackmormons and moved to the Drive-By Truckers after booking them for a run of New Year’s Eve shows in Oregon close to 20 years ago. Then I worked with Patterson Hood, Jason Isbell, Justin Townes Earle, Centro-Matic, Sarah Jaffe, The Sadies. I became somewhat of a resource for artists who had questions about cannabis products for their overall well-being.

I saw the writing on the wall when Oregon was passing Measure 91, which this July will make four years, so I wanted to get into the cannabis space doing something legal and compliant. I had been working as a caregiver with OMMP six years prior and that gave me insights into the cannabis space. About the same time, I was approached by the Portland Mercury about writing a weekly cannabis column.

Backstage there’s always been cannabis use. In the green room, backstage, on the tour bus, people have been using cannabis longer than I’ve been alive. 

A lot of people outside the music industry don’t understand how difficult it is to be a touring musician. It extracts a high 

price physically and psychologically. Whether it’s riding in a van or tour bus, there were complaints from artists and crew members about insomnia, GI tract issues, anxiety, paranoia, the inability to come down after a show and physical complaints. 

Absolutely. It can allow one to gain different perspectives on situations or foster camaraderie or help you feel better about yourself and the people you’re with in a situation.

One hundred percent. That’s one of the things I try and focus on is the delivery method of cannabis, which is just as important as the cannabis itself. Utilizing things that don’t irritate the respiratory system like vaping, low-dose edibles, tinctures and now even transdermal patches are ways people can forgo the coughing fits that you might have had in college after hitting a five-foot Graffix bong in your dorm.

It’s like everything else: shopping, TV, sex, chocolate, food, alcohol – all can be addictive tools with negative outcomes if the people using those substances and tools aren’t conscious of their choices. You can certainly get lost in a cannabis haze and not take care of things in your life. You can do the same thing with spending, too much shopping or eating too much. Everything has a good and a bad side. I would say the potentially detrimental side effects of cannabis are lower than a lot of other legally taxed things available to Americans.

I provided Sharon Jones cannabis products for the last 16 months of her life, along with working with Charles Bradley, Teenie Hodges, Guy Clark and others when they reached an end of life phase. 

In some cases it’s expanded from that. What we had at The Roots was a pretty limited offering. But in general, we bring in a custom road case filled with both a vaporizer and a wide range of low-dose edibles, tinctures, topicals, CBD-only products. We also produced 20 CannaSwag bags, which went exclusively to the guest artists who joined over both nights. We curated the bags, which had a retail value of over $1,000 with 13 product partners.

The tabletop high-end vaporizer of choice is the Herbalizer, a recently defunct company which was founded a few years back 

by – I swear – downsized NASA rocket engineers. We can take that with us to any location. 

We’re giving it away. Under Oregon’s cannabis program, you are allowed to gift individuals 21 and over, regardless of residency, certain amounts of cannabis product as long as there is no exchange of money or any form of compensation. 

It’s not quite the money printing machine a lot of people outside the cannabis industry believe it is. Truthfully, it’s not a full-time job. I’m not out five nights a week doing this, but it pays for itself in other ways. If nothing else, I haven’t paid for a concert ticket in probably five or six years and being a big music-goer, that’s big savings for me.

It’s rare anyone says the commodification of anything is a good thing. We knew when we started down the path of designing and passing recreational programs in states that was going to occur. That said, the drawbacks are a factor of it only being legal at the state level and still being a Schedule 1 federally illegal drug. If those barriers were removed you would see lower licensing fees and consumer taxes. But for all the drawbacks, the plus has been increased access for people who wish to use it, especially geriatric patients and people reaching out to use cannabis to replace opioids. Another huge benefit is the expungement of people arrested and charged with cannabis possession or production.

We’ve certainly seen a greater interest, curiosity, and acceptance of cannabis from people that prior would have been turned off by it, whether it’s venues or record labels. I was in Nashville in October and met with three record labels and two management agencies who all said, “Now that it’s becoming legal, we want to find a way to incorporate this into things that we’re doing with our artists, whether it’s a record release, merchandise or even having some artists come out of the closet and talk about what cannabis has done for them.” Those aren’t discussions I’ve had previously unless it was very much on the down-low.

I’m seeing a lot more brands from the non-cannabis space having an interest in incorporating it, recognizing that cannabis is not as siloed off as it once was. I speak with chefs interested in producing cannabis-infused dinners and hotels about potentially offering cannabis welcome packages to arriving guests. We’re seeing greater widespread acceptance than I thought we would this soon into legalization.

I was cited once for smoking a joint in the parking lot of a Bunny Wailer show about 20 years ago. Aside from that, I’ve always managed to stay within the confines of the law. 

Sometimes I probably stepped outside those boundaries when visiting friends and family back in places like Muscle Shoals, but I have yet to have to do a perp walk.

We’re just consistently trying to demonstrate to people higher up the food chain at companies like Live Nation that what we’re doing is 

a more refined approach than, again, the five-foot Graffix bong. 

I don’t hold anything against anyone that pursues dabbing [highly-concentrated cannabis], but we don’t really want to see torches backstage being used. If people do want to go that route, there are cleaner, safer delivery systems. 

We just believe we can help incorporate and place cannabis into people’s personal and professional lives in ways that they may not have considered.