Bruce Campbell confesses in Requiem for Ash (Exclusive Interview)

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The Road to Europe

1428 Elm: How long did it take you to write the new material for the reissue? What was that process like?

Bruce Campbell: I don’t know. I didn’t really keep track of it. I took notes when I was touring in Europe. I wrote it pretty quickly after that. So, it was fresh.

It wasn’t a long process but I had to set up a story about the death of the show and then the retirement of Ash and then the European tour. You know a bunch of other crazy movies that never got included, there was one or two things.

So, its all catching up but it ended up being more pages. Normally, an author can tease, “All new material!” and its 10 pages. This is 50 pages of new stuff. It’s a lot.

1428 Elm: It seems like there are a considerable number of chapters dedicated to your European tour. I know you were pretty enamored with Amsterdam. The chapter Sex, Coffee, Pot sounds like a trifecta. Tell us a little bit about that. What impressed you the most about the city?

Bruce Campbell: I had been there before. Its just what gets me every time I go there. The fact that civilization does not collide if they legalize marijuana and that was proven to me thankfully, 20 years ago in Amsterdam. But two decades ago, weed was still looked down upon as being some sort of gateway drug.

Amsterdam was great to show that you could legalize pot and people weren’t shooting up on the streets. You could legalize prostitution, clean it up and pay people better because prostitution is going to happen anyway.

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So, it was interesting to see if you legalize certain things that are normally “scandalous” in America, you walk around the city, it’s a beautiful city. Well kept canals, bicycles everywhere, its amazing!

I just like it for what it represents. We talk about freedom in the U.S. all the time but they’re freer than we are.

The only problem with Amsterdam is it’s getting overrun by tourism. Between the internet and articles that say, “10 Best Kept Secrets in Europe,” when you publish crap like that it’s a bad idea.

1428 Elm: Thinking of one of your new chapters, If Chins Could Kilt, I read a decade old interview where you mentioned the Campbell ancestral home of Oban. Have you been there yet?

Bruce Campbell: No, I was going to go when I toured there last year, but it was too frickin’ cold. So, my wife and I bailed. We went to the south of France because we had to kill some time between a couple of book signings.

We opted for warmer weather and it was the best decision we ever made. I’m going back to my ancestral land maybe in June or July, definitely not in March.

That was the end of Part 1 in our series on Bruce Campbell. Stay tuned because Part 2 is going to deal with Act III and exciting news about future projects. To order Requiem for Ash, go to bruce-campbell.com.

Have you read Bruce Campbell’s Hail to the Chin 2? Have you ordered the Requiem for Ash edition yet? Let us know in the comments.

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