*This article first appeared on SFGATE.com
Debby Goldsberry was nervous. It was the afternoon of April 20, 1997, and she was helping organize San Francisco’s first 4/20 weed party, a benefit for the Cannabis Action Network, or CAN. The organizers didn’t know if anyone would show up at Maritime Hall, yet when Goldsberry scanned the parking lot, she saw hundreds of people waiting to get in.
“Once we opened the door, it was free for all, just the freest experience we could have,” Goldsberry recently told SFGATE. “We were completely unprepared with what was about to happen for the 4/20 phenomenon. It was great, it was literally a legendary party.”
The inaugural event raged for 12 hours from 4:20 p.m. to 4:20 a.m. and is still reverberating across global culture. Today, the date is synonymous with marijuana’s highest holiday, but at the time, hardly anyone had made that connection. This largely forgotten SF party was so successful it ran for six years and helped make April 20 the international stoner holiday now celebrated by millions every year.
Goldsberry’s party was itself a product of decades of happenstance connections, set in motion by some 1970s high school hijinks in Marin County, and propelled forward by legions of Deadheads and a mysterious hippie dancing through an Oakland parking lot. In an even stranger twist, CAN’s 1997 4/20 party likely wouldn’t be remembered today if Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell hadn’t died of an overdose in San Francisco a year earlier.
All of these factors came together to shift the folklore of 420 from a secret code word between stoners to a public display of cannabis use in defiance of prohibition, helping legalize weed — and throwing a killer party in the process.
Many theories have been put forward as to the real origins of 420, from it being a police call sign to a reference to Bob Dylan lyrics, but popular use of the term actually started with a group of high school friends in Marin County, although exactly which group of friends invented the phrase is a matter of bitter disagreement.
One group, who call themselves the Waldos, say that 420 became a nickname for pot because they met at 4:20 p.m. in front of San Rafael High School to search for a secret pot farm. Their story is good enough for the Associated Press and the Oxford English Dictionary.
A rival group in the same town known as the Beebs say the Waldos’ story is “a bunch of bulls—t,”, and that 420 became a code word for pot after an afternoon smoking session when one of the group saw the clock strike 4:20 p.m. and said, “We should load some bongs.” These two camps have spent years fighting this fight.
No matter the story behind it, at first, 420 simply meant the time of day to smoke pot, not the date in April. But by 1974, people had begun observing the April date, as well. The first 4/20 party took place on Mount Tamalpais, where a few dozen people wearing “light ‘hippie clothing’ … and some playing congas!” met on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, according to an email to SFGATE signed “the Waldos.”
“There weren’t massive amounts of people up there and not all assembled at one place,” the email said. “Rather it was smaller pods of 3-8 people celebrating, spaced about 15 to 30 yards apart. … People were celebrating but kind of mellow–peacefully and rather quietly in the clean mountain air … A lot of them had jugs of wine.”
Steven Hager, a former editor at High Times, said in an email to SFGATE that this original party was shut down after a short time. “It was legendary among high school students in Marin for a few years, but never attracted that many, perhaps a few dozen,” he wrote. However, he and other people in the nascent legalization movement heard about the 420 call sign, and used it to unite underground pot smokers.
“Upon learning about the code, I immediately began using it as a tool for legalization. Watching the sunset across the ocean from a high ridge seemed Pythagorean and evidence of spiritual use,” Hager said.
Meanwhile, the term also took root in the growing Grateful Dead community, spreading across the world as the band’s pot-smoking fans used it to jubilantly declare their love of marijuana. By the late 1980s, 420 had fully worked its way into the counterculture, showing up, for example, in classified ads for roommates asking that applicants be “420 friendly,” and 4:20 p.m. (and 4:20 a.m. for the especially devout) was recognized as the perfect time to get high.
By the early 1990s, cannabis use was plummeting as the American government waged a full-scale assault against all drugs. Ronald Reagan’s administration had spent the 1980s using the American military to wage a war against pot growers in Northern California, and mainstream society widely looked down upon pot smokers.
California, however, was home to a growing movement to fight against cannabis prohibition. Berkeley-based CAN, Goldsberry’s organization, was one of the primary groups arguing for the legalization of hemp and medical marijuana. Part of the group’s work involved following the Grateful Dead and setting up booths at shows, where they would turn the already-converted into full-on cannabis activists.
CAN members were set up outside a Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum on Dec. 28, 1990, when they saw a hippie in tie-dye “just dancing merrily through the Grateful Dead parking lot” handing out a flyer advertising a 4/20 party on Mount Tamalpais, Goldsberry said. The flyer likely started one of the most persistent 420 myths, mistakenly saying the number was “the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress.” There’s no evidence this is true, but the flyer also proposed a change in what the code should mean:
“Now, there’s something even more grand than getting baked at 4:20. We’re talking about the day of celebration, the real time to get high, the grand master of all holidays: 4/20, or April 20. This is when you must get the day off work or school. We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420 in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpias,” the flyer said, typo and all.
This fundamental shift — that 420 should go from a secret code to a call to openly smoke pot in public — was immediately appealing to CAN organizers, so they copied the flyer for a May 1991 High Times story.
It took a few years, but 4/20 parties slowly started to take off. In 1995, cannabis fans in Vancouver, British Columbia, organized a celebration in a public park that attracted a few hundred people. Goldsberry said she heard of students at UC Boulder organizing a major smoking session on their campus. And then in 1997, Goldsberry and her fellow CAN organizers decided to throw their own 4/20 party in San Francisco — a fateful event that would get a tragic boost from a beloved California band.
A year before the party, in May 1996, Bradley Nowell, the lead singer of ska band Sublime, was found dead in a San Francisco motel from a heroin overdose. It happened the afternoon before the band was set to play a sold-out show at Maritime Hall, a now-defunct venue in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. Sublime was on the verge of releasing its self-titled third album, which would go on to quickly sell 5 million copies and catapult the band into superstardom. The band’s songs were suddenly in heavy radio rotation across the entire country, yet the surviving members didn’t want to play under the Sublime name again, instead performing as the Long Beach Dub Allstars.
Michael “Migs” Happoldt, one of the original guitarists for Sublime and a member of the Allstars, said the band decided to play CAN’s 1997 4/20 show as a gift to their San Francisco fans.
“In our eyes it was a makeup show to the city,” he said. “Of course, we were down for the weed part of it, but [promoting 420] really wasn’t our thing.”
It was only the third show the Allstars had played since Nowell died, and the news that the former members of Sublime were coming back to San Francisco quickly spread. A show listing in the April 18, 1997, Santa Cruz Sentinel for the “4-20 Hemp Festival” at the Maritime Hall said fans could “celebrate the green stuff with Long Beach Dub Allstars (formerly Sublime), Salmon, Zuba, Natural Fonzie and others in a benefit for the Cannabis Action Network.”
The show was a massive hit. Six hundred people were waiting to get in the building as soon as the doors opened at 4 p.m., Goldsberry said. Inside, there was music, but also a hemp cafe and a hemp expo to help celebrate the disparaged plant. People were smoking anywhere they wanted to — Happoldt said that even for his weed-loving band, it was a night of many firsts, including his first time smoking cannabis kief and seeing people drink THC tinctures — and the venue’s owners couldn’t stop the party.
“I’ve never been yelled at by anyone as bad as the owner of the venue that first year, who said, ‘This is freaking crazy!’” Goldsberry said, adding, “It was such a joyful thing, it was a true moment of freedom many of us never experienced because of the war on drugs. It was 420 full circle. We all came together and created a space for ourselves.”
“There’s no way to forget that show, that was all time,” Happoldt said. It was also a rejuvenating moment for the band, still reeling from Nowell’s tragic death. He said they weren’t even planning on touring until after they saw the sold-out show go wild for their music.
“The fact that 3,000 people wanted to see what our stupid asses were up to was amazing. The response in that crowd and that city made us rethink the whole thing, like maybe people need to hear more from us. We weren’t feeling that. What we were getting was like, ‘without Brad you’re nothing,’ but when the real people spoke, it was a f—king different story,” Happoldt said.
The Maritime Hall management’s total shock at the unstoppable 12-hour party eventually settled down, and CAN kept its 4/20 event running for the following six years. But once the hall closed down for unrelated reasons, the party ended; CAN couldn’t find a receptive venue. By that time, 420 had completed its transition from a secret phrase to the dictionary definition for the stoner’s highest holiday.
“‘Four-twenty’ — once an obscure Bay Area term for pot — is showing up nationally in the ads and business names of concert promoters, travel agencies, even high-tech companies,” reads an April 20, 2002, story in the Modesto Bee that references events scheduled across the Bay Area, including CAN’s 6th annual 420 Hempfest, “an ad hoc smoke-in on Mount Tamalpais in suburban Marin County and a ‘420’ night at a Mission District bar.”
The 2002 newspaper story doesn’t mention anything about Hippie Hill, the iconic grassy meadow in Golden Gate Park that has been a magnet for counterculture for decades. It wasn’t until 2003, after CAN’s party ended, that people started congregating there on April 20, according to Goldsberry. An April 21, 2005, story in the Oakland Tribune said “hundreds” of people were gathering on the hill to celebrate the stoner holiday.
Hippie Hill would eventually come to be the capital of Bay Area pot parties, with tens of thousands of people heading to the park by 2016, the same year California voters legalized recreational cannabis. It eventually became trash-filled chaos hated by many of its neighbors, so in 2017, organizers attempted to turn it into an official city-sanctioned party, with concert programming and even the legal sale of weed. Social distancing mandates during the pandemic derailed that party, and organizers have since been unable to raise enough money to host the official party, which requires expensive permits, as the California cannabis industry sputters. Organizers canceled last year’s party, as well as this year’s official party.
But even without an official city-sanctioned event, the legend of 420 and its significance to stoners everywhere continues.
“The events come and go, but the date and its legacy absolutely continues,” Goldsberry said.
“When I was in college, I took a class on folklore and how it’s transmitted through the culture and I never imagined that I would be able to see something like this happen, where culture is changed through communication, human gathering and putting some crazy ideas down on a piece of paper,” Goldsberry said.
Goldsberry credits that dancing hippie in Oakland, who passed out flyers for the Mount Tamalpais party, for making April 20 into an international holiday, though she still has no idea who that tie-dyed Deadhead was.
“That’s the remaining mystery on 420 — who made that flyer?” Goldsberry said.