"Smoking Typewriters": the '60s underground press emerges from the shadows

"We're turning into a generation whose thing is to be an Audience, whose life-style is the mass get-together for good vibes." (The Berkeley Tribe, December 12-19, 1969)

That quote seems a surprisingly contemporary view of our media-driven culture, in its way, even as it describes the audience who showed up for the Rolling Stones wreck of a free concert at Altamont in 1969 expecting a good time. In its pages the Tribe newspaper reported the sudden end of the 1960s, as first witnessed in the underground press. In contrast the major Bay-area daily paper, the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, first reported on a successful and happy festival with no deaths and no problems at Altamont. It was a kind of wishful thinking, brought on by the expectations of another Woodstock. Where were those Examiner reporters grooving?

More than forty years later everyone is still part of a tribal audience, of course. We are all connected in cyberspace, but rather than joining in a group with shared expectations and ideas we are the internet audience of individuals bent over our keyboards. The difference is that we are now accustomed to news and information expressly tailored to our own expectations and ideas, with advertising based on data-mining of our own internet searches, and the insular "news services" of all political and cultural stripes.

The history of the underground press in the 1960s and 1970s presented in Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, is more than a memory-trip of counter-culture rags, political rants, and Indian ragas. John McMillian's study makes plain that the New Left politics of the underground press could only move further left of the Kennedy and Johnson Democratic administrations of the 1960s. The rest of the country was not as sure what was going on in college campuses, and later in the streets, as the decade ended in equal parts tragedy and war.

The only direction, for many on the New Left, was to move beyond even the goals of the politicians and union leaders of in the 1930s and 1940s. Hubert Humphrey's long career fighting for liberal causes was overshadowed by his vice presidency under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy had been assassinated in June; and the Democratic Party found itself split, again, when first-time 18-year-old voters were attracted to Senator Gene McCarthy's promise of a "peace plank" in the Democratic platform to end the Vietnam War. This idealism, created and nurtured primarily on college campuses, was bound to seem extreme in a year of assassination and riots, and it eventually met an extreme backlash in the form of Nixon's "silent majority" and the rise of Dixiecrats represented by George Wallace, who won five states in 1968.

It was plain, however, that the anti-establishment position of the underground press was initially helped along and then maintained by increasingly cheap technology available to anyone with an opinion: "our founder, the mimeograph machine," read a posted sign in the office of one paper.

With the luxury of a long view, Smoking Typewriters takes pains to draw lines between the cultural and the political. In the hothouse reality of the times, however, the lines were swiftly blurred between the polemic and the people. By the late 1960s there were an estimated 400 underground magazines in the country; in many, it would have been difficult to separate the ads for record companies from the anti-establishment editorials they helped finance.

Soon the politics became wrapped in the idea of a "counterculture" that spread into the marketplace, and though Paul Krassner's Realist magazine was funny, smart and pointed in its politics, it was Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, with lengthy musician interviews, full-color photography, and hip, literate record reviews that was found beside most readers' LP collections and plastic baggies.

The Great Speckled Bird (1969)

As the counterculture emerged aboveground in commercial ways, it was the distribution and availability of the more radical underground press, as much as the content in its pages, that was at issue. In Atlanta, The Great Speckled Bird was subject to a succession of obscenity and harassment trials, and its offices were eventually firebombed after an expose of the Mayor's office in 1972. Challenges to first amendment rights became a frequent battleground in what could and could not be printed and sold. Here was a familiar war ranged around freedom of the press, and some familiar voices spoke up for the underground papers.

Even then, however, there were differences of opinion in an era when the very words "drug culture" meant different things to different people. Allen Ginsberg took note of these subtle shadings when he chided PEN American Center director Thomas Fleming's defense of free speech in one 1970 case, for characterizing the underground press as "inflammatory":

I would have taken exception were it my place, to (the) adjective "inflammatory" applied wholesale to the New Left literature outside the context of equally-inflammatory ideology displayed in, say, Reader's Digest with its historically inflammatory cold war fury or odd language about "dope fiends;" or NY Daily News which in editorials has proposed atombombing China counting 200 million persons at their own estimate as reasonable; or for that matter the New York Times whose business-as-usual reportage in this era of planetary ecological crisis occasionally inflames my own heart to fantasies of arson. ... Merely to say that I find "aboveground" language as often inflammatory as I find "New Left" underground thetoric, (as would) W.C. Fields.

Today the idea of a left-dominated, underground press as a dynamic force for change seems an increasingly distant memory. Smoking Typewriters is a good reminder that America, though challenged to do so, was able to encompass both the "radical" and "political" in its concept of a free press. Yet there are surprising echoes in the history of recent political campaigns as partisans on both the left and the right learn to use the internet to "frame the debate" with persuasive words and images, and with even more powerful personalities.

The 2008 election will always be historic, McMillian writes, not just because it made Barack Obama president, but "as a watershed election in which the Beltway media was frequently outmaneuvered or humbled by the liberal blogosphere." The power of the '60s underground press is duplicated now in the internet's viral videos and meetups, and with more far-reaching effect. As the most recent events in Egypt indicate, the potential of the internet as it develops will far outstrip the wildest expectations of any nation's underground press.

"The Last Watch," Janine Pommy Vega

Janine Pommy Vega is the author of eighteen books and chapbooks since 1968. The latest is The Green Piano (Godine, 2005). Her first CD, Across the Table, recorded in Woodstock, and from live performances in Italy and Bosnia, came out in November, 2007. An Italian translation of her travel book Tracking the Serpent (Sulle tracce del serpente, Nutrimenti, Rome) was published in July 2007. Her translations from Spanish of migrant workers' poems, Estamos Aquí, came out from Bowery Books in 2007.

She was the Director of Incisions/Arts, an organization of writers working with people behind bars, and has taught inside prisons for more than twenty-five years. Vega performed, in English and Spanish, at international poetry festivals, museums, prisons, universities, cafes, nightclubs, and migrant workers' camps in South America, North America and Europe. She also taught a course in poetics for Bard Prison Initiative and in creative writing programs in public schools, elementary through high school, for over twenty years. Ms. Vega died December 23, 2010.

The Last Watch

(from Poems to Fernando, 1968)

The monk's prayer sung bowed down in the dome
comes around ascending sound
calling far as the land reaches
Wakefulness now in the last watch —
Lord near us!
& churchbells toll no hour thrice….

dogs barking endlessly nightlong, a sign
of the ending of days, are lain down in stillness;
From my threshold of silence candlelighted I listen
alone, the flourish of wind through the trees —

dawn of grey rose, expansion of morning.

Awake! lone bird at my window exulting
each morning just now pure voice of clear water
over scales sings his varying plainchant,
Occasional cock’s crow of distance immersed
in his heraldry clear as the altitude of bells

: Delight of the First Day sings Origin’s creature
Joy blessed with creation, and the reigning of light!
A shower of thistlefall tongue could not tell
of this river I listen to, silver and lilting
and Swiftly Gone; merged beneath morning
he returns to his home unseen among fountains.

From flickering room, grey shades of the window
I come into clarity, deep blue beginning
the sky again round in the East, and extending
the breadth of horizon/ scarlet Ariel hearth until sunrise.

Dawn waiting under the branches,
Morning leaps out of my eye!
Celestial candles coinciding at sunrise!
Red-Golden the tolling of bells rolls over me!
Sounds falling in one enormous voice, foretelling
the day by its chorus, expanding horizons onto
heaven: for empty of thee the psalm perishes.

"Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original" (2009)

Thelonious Monk is one of the enigmatic figures of jazz: the more one admires his playing, his composition, and his recorded work, the more puzzling and elusive the man himself becomes. At a time when the popularity of jazz was at its height in mid-century America, he made its success a springboard into a form of personal expression few had ever imagined possible. Then, just as his music was being discovered by a new generation of fans in the 1970s, he gave up recording and composing altogether. Monk died of a stroke on February 17, 1982 at the age of 64.

The mysterious nature of Monk's genius, it turns out, has its roots in a North Carolina boyhood and a family life that surprisingly seems very normal in many ways. Robin D.G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original (Free Press, 2009) removes layers of myth-making and tale-spinning that seem to surround the monumental figure of the musician, whose life and aloof personality became a signpost for the difficult and cerebral form of jazz called bebop.

This was not a term the musicians themselves favored, but which became a convenient tag by which the public could identify the players. It was as though they were members on a team, rather than being seen as individuals; for this musical style of ensemble playing and stellar, one-of-a-kind solos, the idea must have seemed a supreme irony and one that Monk might have appreciated:

"He got a kick out of fooling people, particularly those whom he thought were too lazy or afraid to think for themselves. One of his favorite pranks was to stare intensely at a spot on the ceiling or in the sky, either in a crowded room or on a street corner. Invariably, several people would look up with him, searching for whatever elusive object apparently fascinated him. It was an experiment in mass psychology that brought him great amusement."

As Monk's life takes on the familiar contours of a young student, husband to Nellie, and a father to their two children "Toot" (Thelonious Jr.) and "BooBoo" (Barbara), there are the intriguing glimpses into life with Monk that seem in no way typical. Kelley delights in family stories that reveal the "almost carnivalesque" aspects of this very unique life with father. Monk's niece, Benetta, nicknamed Teeny, got told not to bang on the piano and later gets her sly revenge on Monk, the one-time Julliard student,

as he tries to show off:

"Monk's piano was notorious for its clutter. It occupied a significant portion of the kitchen and extended into the front room. The lid remained closed, since it doubled as a temporary storage space for music, miscellaneous papers, magazines, folded laundry, dishes, and any number

of stray kitchen items.

Teeny thumbed through the pages of the Chopin book, then turned to her uncle and asked, 'What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn't read music? You can read that?' The challenge was on. In response, Monk sat down at the piano, turned to a very difficult piece, and started playing it at breakneck speed.

'His hands were a blur,' she recalled decades later. 'Then after he was through, he jumped up from the piano and just started grinning. So then I said, 'You didn't play that right.'

'Whaaaa? What are you talking about? I played it ten times faster than anyone could!'

Teeny sassed back, 'It is supposed to be played adagio and you played it allegro.'"

In the hot-house environment of New York's jazz scene Monk was a stand-out, not only for his music but for his uninhibited performance. The music seemed cerebral, difficult and almost mathematical, yet Monk was sincerely interested in reaching an audience, even if it turned out to be an audience of one. He performed popular tunes with the same force of personality as his original compositions. As his music gained exposure and his compositions deepened into their angular and singular forms, Monk's personal life becomes a retreat from the public and its very perception of him.

He himself seemed to create the myth, just as he professed to be disinterested in living up to an image -- and then, on February 28, 1964, he was featured in a Time cover story, and suddenly his was the face of jazz for a majority of Americans, who found the "new" jazz music mysterious and almost beyond comprehension; the Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, three weeks earlier.

Kelley's book is not a critical biography of Monk's music, but it is an intensely personal look at how life and art intersect. Monk's wife Nellie becomes a central character to her increasingly insular husband, lovingly keeping Thelonious away from distraction or being taken advantage of by managers and booking agents. In his later life, as Monk inexplicably gives up performance and composing altogether, Nellie seems a force of nature herself for having been a lifelong companion to the puzzling nature of Monk's genius.

"One of his favorite mantras was 'Always Know,' adding that the word 'Know' was Monk spelled backward with the 'W' inverted. He often illustrated the point with a huge custom-made ring that had 'MONK' emblazoned across the top in diamonds, turning it upside down in case you didn't get it. 'Always Know!" All Ways Know!'"

Monk's seventy compositions have titles describing the familiar ("BooBoo's Birthday," "'Round Midnight") and the oblique ("Epistrophy," "Rhythm-a-ning") and are among the most recorded in jazz. His music is always there for those with an ear to discover for themselves. Like his music, Monk's life is still a mystery that may not need explaining -- one of his albums took as its title one of his compositions, "Misterioso" -- and so he remains. In Monk's biography, Kelley does a great service by demonstrating that the force of creativity itself may, ultimately, be beyond knowing.