Book Review: Smoking Typewriters - WSJ.com John McMillian began a 2004 op-ed column in the Harvard Crimson by confessing: "Growing up, I've often lamented that I missed out on the zeitgeist of the 1960s. For better or worse, I think I might have enjoyed the frothy exuberance and moral drama." For better or worse, Mr. McMillian has written a book about a slice of the 1960s zeitgeist: the rapid rise and fall of the underground press across the U.S. It's a pity he didn't bring a bit of frothy exuberance to this laborious examination of long-forgotten newspapers such as the Washington Free Press, Space City!, the Great Speckled Bird and the Berkeley Barb.
Mr. McMillian's "Smoking Typewriters" meticulously picks over the charred remains—we get 1,036 footnotes for 190 pages about publications that themselves mocked any persnickety approach to the printed word. Most were filled with prose, poetry, comics and often incoherent political screeds that didn't suffer the indignity of even one red pencil mark before bring printed. Still, as someone who avidly read, as a teenager, many of the newspapers that the author mentions, and later founded three "alternative" newspapers, I rather enjoyed the nostalgia for the era evoked by "Smoking Typewriters." (Disclosure: Because of my publishing background, Mr. McMillian asked me for my opinion on his topic; my name is mentioned once in the book.) Mr. McMillian, who teaches history at Georgia State University, celebrates the "brash and saucy" collectivist editorial approach employed by most of these "rags" (or "newssheets"). And he wants to believe that short-lived "underground" papers—which were freely available and hardly samizdat—played a pivotal role as the communications organ of the "New Left rebellion" and the antiwar movement. Without these papers, he says, "much of what we associate with the late 1960s youth rebellion—its size, intensity, and contrapuntal expressions of furious anger and joyful bliss—might not have been possible." Really? Somehow I suspect that opposition to the Vietnam War would have flourished as long as there was a military draft, with or without the underground press, and you didn't need a renegade newspaper's encouragement to be swept up in the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll bacchanal. Then again, J. Edgar Hoover certainly thought the underground press was a threat to the nation. Mr. McMillian ably captures the paranoid politics of the time—a paranoia that reigned on all sides. FBI Director Hoover issued a memo to the bureau's offices instructing them to "compile information concerning each paper's staff, printer, and advertisers." Others who were worried about the country's fate in those fraught days went even further: "Subversive" newspapers were fire-bombed, received death threats, were raided for drugs and prosecuted for obscenity; their employees were arrested for "loitering" while hawking papers. A central figure in "Smoking Typewriters" is Thomas King Forcade, a flamboyant, prescient and sometimes delusional man who, for a time, ran the Underground Press Syndicate. Like its rival, the Liberation News Service, the syndicate was a sort of countercultural Associated Press that sent out packets of articles to subscribing newspapers. Forcade, a founder of the pro-marijuana magazine High Times, committed suicide in 1978. As Mr. McMillian recounts, Forcade published a survey in 1969 showing that 60% of all underground newspapers claimed to be "hassled by police." He concluded: "With obscenity busts they get your money, with drug busts they get your people, with intimidation they get your printer, with bombings they get your office, and if you can still manage to somehow get out a sheet, their distribution monopolies and rousts keep it from ever getting to the people." Perhaps the most effective tool that the FBI employed was strong-arming record companies to cease placing full-page ads in underground papers. Revenues shrank significantly. The newspaper owners who were affected must have looked on with envy as a San Francisco-based biweekly somehow went unnoticed by the FBI, reaping the music industry's largess even while running a column called "Dope Notes," offering marijuana "roach clips" as a subscription bonus and publishing virulently left-wing articles. Precisely how Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone escaped J. Edgar Hoover's attention isn't explored by Mr. McMillian. Smoking Typewriters By John McMillian Oxford, 277 pages, $27.95 The author also gives short shrift—inexplicably—to the Village Voice, founded in 1955 as a bohemian community newspaper in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. There was no newspaper that exerted more influence on both the underground press and the second-generation "alternative" weeklies than the Voice. Yes, in the often upside-down politics of the 1960s, the Voice was considered "square" by some radical budding journalists, but a historian intent on discovering the era's "zeitgeist" would learn far more from studying the Voice than by combing through tattered copies of 50 other underground papers. The Voice's founding editor, Dan Wolf, is scandalously unheralded today, but he was one of the most significant journalists of the mid-20th century—Wolf certainly looms larger than Thomas King Forcade. It was Dan Wolf who pioneered the idea of printing long-form journalism by young writers who didn't have the pedigrees necessary to crack the mainstream dailies. Mr. McMillian suggests that the underground press was the guiding light for the alternative weeklies that sprang up in the 1970s and 1980s—some of which, like the Chicago Reader, the Boston Phoenix and Phoenix New Times, became not only profitable enterprises but also vehicles for muckraking, intense personal journalism and stinging arts criticism. But the example of Wolf and the Voice was far more influential. There are moments in "Smoking Typewriters" that even Mr. McMillian's ponderous approach can't entirely deaden. He devotes a full chapter to the "Great Banana Hoax of 1967," a brief fad that saw gullible youths smoking dried banana peels in pursuit of a marijuana-like high. The rumor was inspired by the song "Mellow Yellow," in which the folk performer Donovan sings: "E-lec-trical banana / Is going to be a sudden craze / E-lec-trical banana / Is bound to be the very next phase." Mr. McMillian notes that Donovan later said the lyric was inspired by an advertisement for a yellow vibrator, but that made no difference. Soon enough a few enterprising hippies—who no doubt professed to scorn capitalism—were trying to market dried banana peels. It's an amusing episode, especially given the grim way that most 1960s drug tales turn out, but Mr. McMillian saps the humor from it by hailing it as an example of the underground press's power. "Through the banana rumors, the underground papers helped to carve social spaces (called 'scenes') where certain commonalities of taste, style, and behavior were generated, and youths were socialized into whole new ways of thinking and being." Oh, brother. —Mr. Smith is manager director of the website splicetoday.com. -- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146451881030710.html?mod=googlenews_wsj%3E Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
