Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked by some in the civil rights movement for cherishing his visibility. In February of 1968, King responded in what turned out to be one of his final sermons at his home congregation, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He began by describing two apostles of Jesus who asked to sit next to him in heaven. Although it was easy to condemn such egotism, King suggested that we all have the desire for attention. He called this the “drum major instinct—a desire to be out front . . . We like to do something good. And you know, we like to be praised for it . . . And somehow this warm glow we feel when we are praised or when our name is in print is something of the vitamin A to our ego.” After giving examples of how this instinct could be perverted, King maintained that the key to life was not to repress this universal desire but to harness it to serve others. Contemplating his own funeral, he said, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness.”
Of course, there was only one Martin Luther King Jr., but there were many people in the counterculture and various protest movements of the sixties who shared his view that the media was an indispensable tool for social change. It was certainly what got to me as a teenager.
Marshall McLuhan
In 1967, most media were primarily driven by the desires of advertisers, and advertisers wanted the baby boomers—more than twenty million of whom turned eighteen between 1964 and 1970. One of the most influential people in the way many counterculture figures and hippies interacted with the media was a Canadian academic who had been born before World War I.
Marshall McLuhan was fifty-six in 1967, yet listening to recordings of him half a century later, the man who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” is still quite a trip. McLuhan, who taught English and led culture and communications seminars at the University of Toronto, published The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, in which he coined the phrase the “global village” to describe the effects of television on most of the world. In 1964, he published his best-known book, Understanding Media, which suggested that the media itself should be the focus of study, not merely the things the media covered. He articulated many theories that are now taken for granted but at the time were revelatory.
Like Andy Warhol, McLuhan perceived depth in pop culture. “Rowan and Martin say, We don’t tell jokes, we just project a mood,” he remarked approvingly of a schlocky but popular network TV show of the sixties. McLuhan’s affect was that of a slightly impatient being from another planet who was dumbing down obvious ideas for us earth people. (When the TV series Star Trek debuted in 1966, some critics speculated that Mr. Spock’s otherworldly persona was modeled in part on McLuhan.) He patiently explained, “Old medium is typically content of new medium. Novels were content of movies, movies of TV. Now we live imaginatively in old culture, horse opera, Bonanza land—more comfortable emotionally than modern suburbia.” (Bonanza, set in Nevada in the 1860s, was one of the top-rated network dramas of the 1960s.) In a televised conversation for the BBC with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, McLuhan said, “What people see is a rearview mirror. The future of the future is the present. The past went thataway.”
In a Newsweek cover story published about McLuhan in March 1967, novelist George P. Elliott said, “It is not possible to give a rational summary of McLuhan’s ideas. His writing is deliberately antilogical, circular, repetitious, gnomic, outrageous.” Yet McLuhan could also be clear. He attributed the generation gap to the fact that the young grew up on TV and the older people didn’t, and opined, “Without television there would be no civil rights legislation.”
Many in academia discounted him but the American advertising community was enthralled and political conservatives took note. In November of 1967, Ray Price, an adviser to Richard Nixon, wrote the future president a memo about McLuhan’s theories, suggesting they be taken into account in the upcoming campaign.
In March 1967, McLuhan and a graphic designer, Quentin Fiore, published a best-selling book called The Medium Is the Massage, the title of which was a twist on his earlier work. It sold nearly a million copies. McLuhan divided media into “hot” and “cool” categories (TV was cool) and extolled the power of TV commercials, Fellini films, and other entertainment that communicated in nonlinear ways. An LP version of the book, produced by John Simon, was released on Columbia Records. (Simon went on to produce Music from Big Pink by the Band and Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company the following year.) For a moment, McLuhan was the Western world’s most famous public intellectual.
Timothy Leary attributed “Turn on, tune in, drop out” directly to McLuhan; he said it had been cooked up at a lunch in late 1966. McLuhan also befriended Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, but no one’s counterculture shtick owed more to McLuhan than Jerry Rubin, who used McLuhan collaborator Quentin Fiore to design his book Do It!, which contained many McLuhanesque observations aimed at the radical community, including:
Walter Cronkite is SDS’s best organizer.
Have you ever seen a boring demonstration on TV? Just being on TV makes it exciting . . .
Television creates myths bigger than reality.
Every reporter is a dramatist, creating a theater out of life.
I never understand the radical who comes on TV in a suit and tie. Turn off the sound and he could be the mayor!
You can’t be a revolutionary today without a television set—it’s as important as a gun!
Mass Media
Many network TV programs, popular radio shows, and mass-circulation news weeklies such as Newsweek, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, along with major dailies like the New York Times, gave extensive coverage to various aspects of the counterculture. Although they often did so through jaundiced eyes and they distorted things, the mere exposure of certain ideas and images magnified their power enormously. The playing field also included magazines aimed at men, such as Esquire and Cavalier, that wanted to reach young guys with long hair.
The most schizophrenic was Playboy, which persisted in conveying a fifties fantasy view of the sexuality of women while giving significant editorial space to interviews with countercultural figures like Leary, Dr. King, and Lenny Bruce. In 1967, Ward Just of the Washington Post wrote, “If World War II was a war of Stars and Stripes and Betty Grable, the war in Vietnam is Playboy magazine’s war.” Playboy ran articles as early as 1965 sharply criticizing America’s policies in Vietnam, but made sure to write sympathetically of the soldiers themselves. Antiwar journalist David Halberstam wrote about the troops in Playboy in 1971: “We admired their bravery and their idealism, their courage and dedication in the face of endless problems. We believed that they represented the best of American society.” In a 2017 New York Times article, Amber Batura explained, “Troops in Vietnam could turn to Playboy for coverage of their own war without fearing criticism of themselves.”
The most influential magazines by far were the newsweeklies Time and Life, both of which were part of the media empire controlled by their founder, Henry R. Luce. In his 1980 memoir Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, Abbie Hoffman wrote, “I’ve always maintained that Henry Luce did much more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary. Years later I met Clare Boothe Luce at the Republican Convention in Miami. She did not disagree with this opinion.”
On the surface, this is a bizarre contention because Luce was a political conservative who had coined the phrase “The American Century” in a 1941 essay. His wife Clare was a Republican congresswoman in the forties and the US ambassador to Italy and Brazil during the Eisenhower administration. Yet both Henry and Clare took LSD in the 1950s, and as a result, the Luce publications gave repeated mass exposure to psychedelics, most of it positive.
Miami University professor Stephen Siff wrote that Luce “was unembarrassed by his use of LSD, likely seeing himself as similar to the respectable, traditionally minded spiritual seekers depicted using the drug in his magazines.” In an article for
Slate, Jack Schafer listed half a dozen pieces in Time and Life magazines that celebrated psychedelics, including the 1957 Life article “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” which is what motivated Timothy Leary to go to Mexico to try the stuff.
Mrs. Luce’s acid trips were recorded in her papers, now at the Library of Congress. She giddily described sorting mosaic glass by her swimming pool and looking through a kaleidoscope. When Henry first took the drug, he asked UCLA professor Sidney Cohen (who himself had taken LSD) to record notes, including the observation, “Now things are getting sharper . . . This perception is wonderful.” When Cohen’s book The Beyond Within: The L.S.D. Story was published, Time gave it a rave review.
There were also numerous TV talk shows that welcomed members of hip culture, but often put them in adversarial situations. This was especially common on The Alan Burke Show and The Joe Pyne Show, whose hosts were forerunners of conservative talk radio tough guys. Also broadcast on national TV were the more effete The David Susskind Show and the newly minted Firing Line hosted by William F. Buckley Jr., whose contempt for all things liberal and radical was balanced by an intellectual curiosity and commitment to making guests feel relatively comfortable.
Underground Press
New York had the most media because the population of the city and its surrounding suburbs was over ten million people, much greater than any other American metropolis. New York’s bohemian, intellectual, and beatnik roots gave rise to hip ideas even before the Beatles and Vietnam were household words. At several New York City tabloids there were guys who had favorably written about the civil rights movement, the beats, and jazz and folk music, including Nat Hentoff, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Al Aronowitz. (Aronowitz carved a special place in history for himself when he introduced the Beatles to Bob Dylan, who proceeded to turn the Fab Four onto pot for the first time.)
However, most of the straight press always felt a step away from the “real world” of hipness. Mass media popularized but also distorted youth culture. Even the most empathetic writers felt obliged to maintain an “objective” distance that often made coverage seem more like they were trying to explain our frame of mind to our parents’ generation than writing for us.
This dilemma was addressed in part by the advent of a more personal, subjective “new journalism” that started to emerge in the late sixties. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion were among its stars, but even literary talents of that caliber maintained a critical distance.
By contrast, people in the underground media regarded themselves as advocates of the counterculture, not merely as reporters. Their unabashed enthusiasm was part of what made us trust them even if the quality of the writing was uneven.
In the early and midsixties, the Village Voice was the only publication in New York that articulated some of the criticisms of the establishment that my friends and I were developing. As the sixties culture exploded, the Voice kept a foot in the old left intellectual world and off-Broadway theater and downtown art galleries, while increasingly embracing the counterculture. The Voice was one of the first publications to review rock music with intellectual rigor, first by Richard Goldstein and later by Robert Christgau.
The New York Review of Books was created in 1963 during a strike of New York dailies by Robert B. Silvers, Barbara Epstein, A. Whitney Ellsworth, and Elizabeth Hardwick. They were encouraged by Epstein’s husband, Jason Epstein, an editorial director at Random House, and Hardwick’s husband, poet Robert Lowell, and they published an extraordinary array of literary luminaries in early issues, including Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Paul Goodman, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. In addition to book reviews, they printed interviews with Soviet dissidents, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, but on American issues, the political and cultural attitude was staunchly left wing, particularly regarding the Vietnam War.
Other publications that sometimes displayed the opinions of the older left included the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New Republic (it would not turn to the right until the eighties), the Nation, and I.F. Stone’s Weekly, a favorite of my parents because of Stone’s uncompromising position on McCarthy during the fifties. For the most part these publications viewed the counterculture as an unserious movement in a serious time.
To the rapidly expanding population of antiwar protesters and potheads, even these virtuous publications often felt passé. The first to fill the vacuum was the Los Angeles Free Press, started by Art Kunkin in 1964. At the age of thirty-four, Kunkin had managed the Social Workers Party publication the Militant, and he recognized that humorless Marxist rhetoric was not going to connect with the kids with long hair. The Freep, as it became known, covered rock and roll and dope, as well as a wide variety of protests, and it became the bulletin board for the free concerts that took place most weekends in LA following the Easter Be-In.
The following year, the East Village Other (known by the acronym EVO) was born in New York. EVO was less literary, but far more outrageous and profane than the Voice, and it found an immediate audience of young New York freaks like the kids I hung out with.
In a missive posted in 2002 on a website commemorating EVO’s reign from 1965–72, Ed Sanders recalled, “During the summer of 1965, [Walter] Bowart, [Allen] Katzman, and others . . . decided to found a newspaper. Poet Ted Berrigan . . . came up with the name the East Village Other, with ‘Other’ coming, of course, from Rimbaud’s famous line of 1871, ‘Je est un autre,’ I is an Other. Another account has Ishmael Reed coining the name.” Sanders continued, “EVO became a soapbox for The New Vision. It was part of a generation that fervently believed that important and long-lasting changes would occur in the United States which would bring free medical care to all . . . plus an end to war and the growth of personal freedom and good vibes.” EVO was also known for innovative graphics and introduced alt-comic artists Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb to New York readers.
Like mainstream tabloids, the underground press could gravitate toward crass sensationalism to help sell papers, and was sometimes crude at a moment just before sexism and homophobia were recognized as reactionary pathologies. EVO had a weekly photo feature of women that referenced the Fugs song lyric, “Slum goddess from the Lower East Side.”
By the end of the decade, there were more than one hundred such alternative weeklies around the country aimed at freaks. Although the underground press people saw themselves as part of the countercultural movements, they still had to survive as small businesses. EVO’s flyer to ad agencies read,
Do you want to reach the thousands who influence the tastemakers? A dynamic new media exists . . . Ours is an influential audience. It is a buying audience that is first to respond. Local advertisers have found it to be an effective selling media. Ask yourself, “Who’s hip?” Then ask, “Do I want to reach them?” If you do, our media will serve your needs. Try us.
A coordinating organization called Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was formed in April 1967 at a meeting in San Francisco at Michael Bowen’s place, not long after the Easter Be-Ins. Among those who attended were Art Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press, Katzman and Bowart of EVO, Max Scherr of the Berkeley Barb, as well as representatives from the Fifth Estate, Chicago’s Seed, Austin’s The Rag, and Mendocino’s Illustrated Paper.
Predictably, Peter Berg of the Diggers barged in midway through, accusing them of elitism. The underground press people took the chastisement in stride, but the scrutiny of the radicals now informed the way they thought about themselves. The EVO guys said they needed to get national ads from companies based in New York, but they also felt obliged to concoct a movement rationale: they would also give coverage to certain rock records and books that would undermine the corporate state.
The one tangible result was an agreement among the papers that they could share each other’s articles at no cost. The UPS issued a statement of values, which included a commitment to:
—Warn the �
��civilized world” of its impending collapse, through communications among aware communities outside the establishment and by attracting the attention of the mass media
—Note and chronicle events leading to collapse
—Advise intelligently to prevent rapid collapse and make transition possible
—Prepare the American public for the wilderness
—Fight a holding action in dying cities
Allen Cohen later wrote, “This statement indicates clearly the apocalyptic feeling of the time. Even the war seemed to us to be a symptom or symbol of the general fall of the American civilization.”
My favorite underground publication was the Realist. When I had my ears glued to a transistor radio under my pillow during high school, listening to WBAI late-night shows, no one turned on my brain more than Realist editor Paul Krassner, who was a regular guest on Radio Unnameable. A former Mad magazine writer, Krassner started publishing the Realist in 1958 when he was twenty-six. Instead of a typical editorial title, Krassner listed himself in the satirical magazine’s masthead as “Zen Bastard.” Among his memorable aphorisms were, “Irreverence is our only sacred cow,” and, “No Vietcong ever called me Whitey.”
Krassner did a series of “impolite interviews,” the first of which was with Alan Watts, soon to be followed by Dick Gregory, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer, with whom Krassner had a spirited debate about masturbation (Krassner was for it, Mailer against). Mort Sahl wanted to have a mock trial of President Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara, and suggested Krassner as defense counsel, to which the Zen Bastard replied, “My plan is to plead insanity.” Another early subject was Krassner’s friend Lenny Bruce. Krassner would later edit the comedian’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 9