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THE EAST VILLAGE OTHER

Remembering Yossarian, ‘Original Hipster and Legendary Cartoonist’

yo4Collection of Coca Crystal

Underground cartoonist Yossarian (a.k.a. Alan Shenker, Captain Stanley, Mr. Buddy) died on Jan. 14 at Beth Israel Hospital. He had a rare cardio-pulmonary condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). “Only about 900 cases of PAH are diagnosed in the US each year,” he had told me. “So the pharmaceutical company, specialty pharmacy, and pulmonary clinic all treat you as a big fish that they’ve caught and don’t intend to let go. This means they are highly motivated to keep you going, but it’s an all encompassing program that feels sometimes like joining Scientology.”

A few years ago a PAH sufferer had only about a 15 percent chance of survival for five years, and it amused Yossarian that the drug they used then was Sildenafil—Viagra. “It was PAH patients taking sildenafil having erections that caused Viagra to be prescribed for erectile dysfunction.”

Yossarian was switched to a new drug, Tracleer, which raised the survival rate to 64 percent. But it too had side effects. Although it was keeping him alive, it also made him feel awful most of the time. His head was constantly swimming from the drug’s effects. When he got a pacemaker last summer, he had to stop taking Tracleer and things seemed to go downhill from there.

He wasn’t complaining, though. “Too many people we knew didn’t get to live in my state of disrepair,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Yossarian lived on St. Marks Place for the last 35 years, and before that on Second Street, between B and C, for several years. An audacious and sharp-witted cartoonist for the East Village Other (EVO), New York Ace, Screw and many other underground papers in the late ’60s and ’70s, he had stopped drawing several years ago—but he was writing. He wrote a piece last year about One-Legged Terry for The Local in honor of the East Village Other (EVO) exhibit at NYU. Read more…


The EVO Takeover That Never Was and the Mafia That Never Were

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1968E45A2WALL ART#2NYCNYGil Weingourt The EVO office.

Yesterday, Peter Leggieri looked back on his time as an editor-owner of The East Village Other. Today he recalls his departure, and rebuts an earlier piece written by co-founder Dan Rattiner. In that piece, Mr. Rattiner remembered being told by EVO’s publisher, Joel Fabrikant, that the Mafia was behind secret, unauthorized print runs of EVO. He also described abandoning a takeover attempt with co-founder Walter Bowart after they were warned by a lawyer that the company had never paid its withholding tax. Here’s what Mr. Leggieri has to say about all that.

Dan Rattiner’s reminiscence “EVO, the Mafia, and the Takeover That Wasn’t” has so many factual errors and omissions that it should be labeled semi-fiction.

He said stock ownership in EVO began with Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman, and himself each holding three shares which cost $200 per share. He then described a strange “auction” in which he bid $200 and received a fourth share, and John Wilcock bid $100, a sum that should have purchased half a share. The truth is that Wilcock held twelve shares. I should know: I bought them from him when he left EVO in 1966.

Rattiner gave a melodramatic version of the “Takeover That Wasn’t.” Walter Bowart was always the majority holder of EVO stock. He did not need anyone else’s stock in making a corporate decision. However, there is a backstory to Bowart’s presence in New York at the time described by Rattiner.

When I was about to leave EVO in 1969, I called Bowart and explained to him that I was exhausted and burned out after working more than three years with little sleep and no rest. But most of all, I was completely disillusioned with the “Movement” because its leaders, in my eyes, were more interested in personal fame and fortune than with meaningful and achievable change. It was a time when rhetoric trumped reason; and the rhetoric was sounding more and more like slogans from the 19th century. In addition, I explained that, as evidenced by Woodstock, the “underground” EVO had achieved its goals of altering the public discourse on politics, religion, sex, art and lifestyle. Read more…


Peter Leggieri’s East Village Other

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Earlier this week, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute launched “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” with a rousing discussion that’s now archived on the exhibit’s Website, along with new audio interviews with veterans of the Other. Over the course of seven weekend editions of The Local, we’ve heard from all but one of the EVO alumni who spoke on Tuesday’s panel. Here now, to cap off our special series, is the story of Peter Leggieri.

GIL WEINGOURT PHOTO 1968B54B2LEGGERIA-PETER_SPAIN-EVO copyGil Weingourt Left to right: Peter Leggieri, Peter Mikalajunas, and Spain Rodriguez.

From the first day that I began working at The East Village Other, I was overcome by the sense that it was not only a newspaper but a strange and magical ship on a voyage with destiny. It seemed as though each issue printed was a new port of call, and the trip from one issue to the next, a new adventure. Many of EVO’s crew members expressed that same weird feeling – a sense of excitement and creative power.

And what a crew that was! No one was recruited. I don’t recall a resume ever being submitted. They all simply showed up and started working. EVO’s crew might just have been the greatest walk-on, pick-up team in the history of journalism. She was The Other but her staff of artists, poets, writers, photographers and musicians affectionately called her EVO. Her masthead bore a Mona Lisa eye. EVO created a cultural revolution and won the hearts and minds of a generation. She was the fastest ship in the Gutenberg Galaxy.

In the Beginning
I was the anonymous Other, the one editor-owner unknown to the public. I did not party. I did not schmooze with the literati or seek publicity. I had no time for such things. I worked seven days a week, 20 hours a day and, because of law school, I had to be sober. My friend, the poet John Godfrey, told me that I was afflicted with a Zen curse: a hermit condemned to be surrounded by people and events. That was certainly the case for me in the 1960s. Read more…


Missed the Party? Watch ‘Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72’

On Tuesday, The Local’s seven-week series of essays celebrating The East Village Other culminated in the opening of “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” an exhibit of EVO artifacts now on display at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry: the above video will give you a good sense of what went down. And if you missed our livestream of the panel discussion featuring (from left to right) Ed Sanders, Dan RattinerClaudia Dreifus, moderator John McMillan, Alex Gross, Steven Heller, and Peter Leggieri, it’s conveniently archived for you below. Read more…


Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out (Or At Least Tune In): EVO Livestreamed!

eye Look for EVO alumni wearing these pins tomorrow.

If you haven’t heard by now, you’ve probably been living under a rock (or smoking too much banana peel): Tomorrow evening, we’re hosting a groovy little happening to celebrate the opening of “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-1972.”

In a series of personal essays published over the past several weeks, some of the wonderfully warped minds behind EVO have been looking back on the pioneering alternative paper, and the era from which it emerged. Tomorrow, some of them – including Ed Sanders, Alex Gross, Peter Leggieri, Dan Rattiner, Steven Heller, and Claudia Dreifus – will appear on a panel moderated by John McMillan, author of “Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America.”

If you can’t R.S.V.P. and make it to 20 Cooper Square, 6th floor, check back here at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow, when The Local will be streaming the event live. Otherwise join us in person – we’ll provide the booze if you BYOB (Bring Your Own Bananas).


Alan Abramson’s Fan-O-Gram to the East Village Other

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Because something is happening here
And you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
– “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan (from “Highway 61 Revisited,” 1965)

Alan Abramson - 1972 copy Alan Abramson, 1972.

The times were overwhelming. America was violently awakened from the slumber of the 1950s on Nov. 22, 1963 and quickly found itself inhabiting an unrecognizable, incomprehensible, rapidly evolving reality. The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Free Love Movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the Gender Equality Movement, the Consciousness Raising Movement, the Save Our Planet Movement, the Eastern Mysticism Movement, and sex, drugs and rock and roll all conspired to create a giddy, euphoric Renaissance. If you were a nice young person raised in Eisenhower-era suburbia, the questions that consumed you were: “What the hell is going on? What does this all mean? Where do I fit in?” And most importantly: “How do I get invited to the party?”

Enter, The East Village Other. For me it was the Rosetta Stone that enabled me to decode the meaning of the ‘60s.  Attending Oberlin College from 1964 to 1968, I experienced an environment that was receptive to the Strange Days that were sweeping the nation. I had a subscription to the Village Voice, which retained an aura of cool, post-Beat sensibility.

All of the sudden, however, it was left way, far behind: things were happening much too quickly for it to process. The ‘60s were not about quiet, low key cool. The ‘60s were flaming hot. There was a void in the media. Nature abhors a vacuum and something Other was desperately needed (I always felt that the name was a play on words, dissing its neighbor from the West Village). Like Athena springing fully clad in armor from the aching head of Zeus, The East Village Other burst upon the scene. The Other was not your parents’ newspaper. Read more…


Joe Kane: I Got My Gig Through the East Village Other

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JoeKane by Nancy NaglinNancy Naglin Joe Kane

A veteran of The New York Ace, High Times, The New York Daily News and many other publications, Joe Kane describes how he got his start at EVO.

When I first migrated to Manhattan from Queens in 1970, it was with dreams of becoming a working scribe, preferably writing Beat fiction (unfortunately, one of the few things I was born too late for) and/or covering film in some capacity. Instead, I landed a boring temp job typing at a downtown insurance firm. During this time, somewhat happier circumstances led me to Screw, where the magazine’s then-art directors, Larry Brill and Les Waldstein, were going halves with publisher Al Goldstein on a new spin-off tab titled Screw X, a satirical variation on Screw (the height of redundancy, no?)

I auditioned for a writing/editing gig, with no guarantee Larry and Les would even get back to me. But a couple of days later, the phone rang in my East Sixth Street pad with promising news from the pair: Seems my work had been extolled by another of their writers, Dean Latimer, who told them it was “almost as good” (accent on almost) as his own stuff and that they should hire me straightaway.

For me, this was a frankly stunning turn of events. It so happened that Dean, whom I had never met, was already something of a personal hero; his “Decomposition” column and other writings were my favorite sections of The East Village Other. I considered Dean one of the most vivid and versatile writers I’d ever read anywhere, one equally adept at reportage, “think pieces,” memoir, criticism and totally devastating satire. That he had encouraging words for my fledgling efforts cheered me no end, and I resolved to thank my benefactor for his unsolicited largesse. Read more…


Rex Weiner: There Is Always The Other

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Rex Weiner, circa 1971, photo by Deanne StillmanDeanne Stillman Rex Weiner, circa 1971.

Rex Weiner co-founded The East Village Other’s successor, the pioneering New York Ace (1972–73) and according to his FBI file, was a founding staff member of High Times. He recalls getting his start at EVO.

My first week aboard The East Village Other, its venerable editor-in chief Jaakov Kohn squinted at the name I’d signed to an article, clutched his blue pencil spasmodically, and curled his whiskered lips in disdain. In an Eastern European accent nearly as impenetrable as the cloud of unfiltered Lucky Strike smoke curling from the butt in his nicotine-stained fingers, he declared, “You look more like a Rex to me!”

The newly minted moniker echoed amongst my new colleagues in the vast, shadowy loft. At EVO you had the name you were born with and the name that EVO gave you: Jackie Diamond was Coca Crystal, Alan Shenker was Yossarian, Jackie Friedrich was Roxy Bijou, Jaakov was “The Arab,” Charlie Frick was Zod, and so on. And so with my next byline I was reborn in 1970, a new decade with a new name, and on my way as a writer, of sorts.

I’d walked out of the clanking elevator into the EVO office that fall, a 20-year-old N.Y.U. dropout from upstate and a Lower East Side inhabitant since I was 17. Two of my closest friends from high school were lost, one to Vietnam and the other to heroin, allowing me to nurse a tragic heart tinged with righteous political outrage. With half a dozen porn novels credited to my name — or pseudonym — for a Mafia publisher, and a handful of poems I’d recited at St. Marks in the Bowery, I thought of myself as an established writer. I appointed myself EVO theater critic, filling a staff vacancy, and felt right at home. Read more…


Abe Peck on Why EVO Mattered

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The moment is almost upon us: on Tuesday, Feb. 28, the panel discussion and party marking the opening of “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” will take place at 20 Cooper Square. Before you join us for that, enjoy this penultimate weekend edition celebrating EVO. We start with Abe Peck, author of “Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press,” telling us why the alternative paper was different from others. In short: because it colored outside the lines.

AbeAbbieREV2 copyCREDIT Abe Peck and Abbie Hoffman.

Starting in the mid-1960s, in the zone between 14th Street and Houston, First Avenue and the Alphabet blocks, a wave of longhairs began joining Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, and pockets of poets, writers and artists. Ingestive preferences turned the grey streets Technicolor. So what if one of my roomie’s father would tell us, “I moved out of a better apartment in this neighborhood in 1924.” We were self-proclaimed life artists, merrily donating our belongings to local intruders into our happy hovels. We were home.

The East Village was where I experienced the end of grad school and the Army Reserves and the start of a community I could call my own. Where I became closer to Sergeant Pepper than to my master sergeant. Where EVO – The East Village Other – mattered.

The Village Voice was literate, and had the apartment ads. But from 1964 to 1973, hundreds of underground newspapers sprang up in every city and college town, and within high schools, the military and even prisons. They varied, but all provided a bent-mirror image of what the dailies and TV news and Time offered: herbs were fine, sex was cool, the Vietnam War sucked, racism was for losers.

Like The San Francisco Oracle (though not as third-eye-y) or my eventual underground-press homeland, the colorful Chicago Seed, EVO began, in late 1965, to chronicle an urban tribe. “We hope to become the mirror of opinion of the new citizenry of the East Village,” EVO declared in its first issue. Read more…


Lynda Crawford on John and Yoko’s Leftovers and EVO’s Post-Salad Days

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Lynda Crawford 1971 by Kathy Streem Kathy Streem Lynda Crawford, 1971

Breathless — not just from the late-night climb up 11 flights to the EVO office on East 12th Street, or the astonishing art by the likes of Yossarian, Spain, Little Moon, Joe Schenkman, Brad Holland, R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, Trina Robbins, and Fred Mogubgub, or by Dean Latimer‘s gorgeous prose, or the thrill of reading Ray Schultz, or from the stunning reportage of Jackie Friedrich, Pat Morris, and Claudia Dreifus, or the amazing true life adventures of Coca Crystal (subduing a would-be attacker with a tune on her guitar) and Steve Kraus, or the Krassner interview by Kathy Streem, or the wondrous music reviews by Richard Meltzer and Charlie Frick (and Charlie’s magical layouts), or Tuli’s poetry and songs, Vincent Titus’ fables, Honest Bob Singer’s film writings, Rex Weiner’s off-off Broadway reviews (he was homeless and theaters were warm), Tim Leary’s communiqués from Algeria, A. J. Weberman‘s illuminating investigative portraits, or the vocal harmonies of Steve Heller, Latimer, and Schultz; but also from EVO’s coverage of the major events of the time: efforts to stop the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, the Panther 21 trial, American Indian Movement protests, the murder of George Jackson, the Attica uprising, and Bob Dylan’s 30th birthday party, all produced at high intensity under editor Jaakov Kohn‘s benign leadership.

“EVO is not a tit!” I remember editor Allen Katzman telling several of us when salaries were slashed to the single digits, and then disappeared, during the post–salad days of the early 1970s — my tenure.

I waitressed to pay the rent on my $51-per-month apartment on East Sixth Street and to be able to eat a little more than the nightly fare of free chicken wings and chickpeas at Max’s Kansas City that many subsisted on. The EVO piece I wrote that is most remembered came out of that gig at a deli on Christopher Street when John and Yoko happened in one night and I interpreted their relationship through bits of conversation, body language, and by dissecting leftover pieces of blueberry blintz (A. J. gave me kudos for that one); it was reprinted in the Berkeley Barb and a bunch of other papers too. Read more…


Michael Simmons: EVO, Tuli and the Kiss Corps

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Tuli Kupferberg by Bob CQ Simmons   copyBob Simmons Tuli Kupferberg

The funniest part of reminiscing about the uber-subversive East Village Other for The New York Times is that the latter set me on the road to rebellion before the former was even founded in 1965. I’m told I was reading by age four and within a few years the first section I grabbed when the Sunday Times arrived every weekend was the Book Review. The Grove Press ads kidnapped my imagination: Who was this Alain Robbe-Grillet guy and how do you pronounce his name?  Why was William Burroughs considered so dangerous and did his characters have meals while wearing no clothes? And speaking of clothes, how come the girls on Grove’s covers wore so little?

Obviously my nascent libido was ready for plucking, but my fascination was not simply sexual. I wanted to know why in the land of the First Amendment some had wanted to ban these books.

I bought my first issue of the Village Voice in February 1966; it contained an obituary of the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. Already a Dylan fan, I scanned the ads for folk clubs and was absolutely smitten by bohemia. The first girl who won my heart in elementary school was Jessica Hentoff (I don’t recall my feelings being reciprocated) and her father Nat wrote for the Voice. Soon I picked up the Voice’s competitor, The East Village Other.

No friends’ parents wrote for EVO. Scruffier, funnier and dirtier than the Voice, EVO was not simply about bohemia, it was an anarchist’s bomb in newsprint hurled at the bourgeoisie. Even at my tender age, I knew that I didn’t like the world that grown-ups had created. The troublemakers at The Other were expressing themselves in ways I could only daydream about at that point. Read more…


Bob Simmons on Timothy Leary and the Raid on Millbrook

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The only time I really ever wrote anything for EVO was when Walter Bowart, high on something, called me up and said, “Bob, you are the only straight-looking guy we have around the office. We have to do something for Leary. He just got busted up in Millbrook.” Hmm. So Walter and I cooked up this scheme. I would call up the sheriff of Dutchess County, one Lawrence Quinlan, and I would put on my regular work suit and drive up to Poughkeepsie to interview him.

Of course we knew that the sheriff wasn’t interested in talking to anyone from a hippie rag like EVO. So what did I do?  I called up the sheriff and told him my name was Bob Simmons, a stringer for Look magazine, and that my editor asked me if there was a chance I could come and do a short interview for the magazine about the arrest of Dr. Leary. You would think God had called for an audition. “Certainly,” came the reply. “Sheriff Quinlan would be happy to talk with you.”

So, there on a weekend in the spring of 1966, Walter Bowart, Timothy Leary, and Bob Simmons crammed into my Karmann Ghia VW and buzzed up to Poughkeepsie to the headquarters of the Castalia FoundationRead more…


Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman: EVO and Abbie Hoffman’s Occupy Wall Street

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In Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s 1998 book, “Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Counter-Culture Revolution in America,” he recounts what happened the day Abbie Hoffman dragged him and Peter Leggieri out of the East Village Other office to witness the Yippie icon’s attack on Wall Street. Mr. Sloman was a lowly EVO intern at the time who credits the paper with giving him his start as a writer. The excerpt is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Read more…


EVO, the FBI and the Plot to Bomb the Pentagon

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I can’t honestly remember how I became interested in The East Village Other. Probably, it’s just the age-old thing of a son wanting to know more about his father. That my father’s twin brother was also part of that scene (more involved as it turns out), made it even more curious. The more I researched the whole thing, the more I became aware of what an important part of history they had been.

I suppose it’s not every kid who would make a Freedom of Information Act request to learn everything he could about something, but that was the historian in me back in 1989 when I was writing my undergraduate thesis at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There were lots of stories about possible surveillance and possible this and that. I wanted to know for sure.

The documents came back from the FBI and many of them were typical FBI documents – not all that interesting and with lots of stuff blacked out. However, there were also many surprises, many little semantic treasures, and many things revealed that one might think shouldn’t be. The following account was culled from the most interesting of those documents.

In September 1967, The East Village Other hatched a plan to bomb the Pentagon. The planned date of this bombing was Oct. 20, 1967 (though it was changed to Oct. 21 at some point or the FBI got the date wrong in its original memorandum), the day before the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam was to hold its march on Washington. On page 22 of EVO’s September 1-15 issue was a not-so-subtle ad: “Pilot Wanted for Daring Feat, phone 228-8640, ask for ALLEN or WALTER.” Allen was my uncle, Allen Katzman and Walter was Walter Bowart. The plan was true and the FBI took immediate notice, only the bomb wasn’t nuclear or conventional. It was flowers. Read more…


Anatomy of the Great Banana-Smoking Hoax of 1967

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Donovan record jacket "Mellow Yellow" copy Donovan record jacket.

Sixties survivors often snicker when reminded of the Great Banana-Peel Smoking Hoax. They remember the hours spent laboriously scraping the inside of banana peels, boiling the unappetizing residue obtained, then drying the remains in their ovens before finally rolling a joint in search of the promised high from the fictional psychoactive substance dubbed Bananadine.

Nearly a half-century later, conflicting accounts still circulate as to how the craze got started and which underground paper was first to report it. One version, often repeated by Paul Krassner, the iconic publisher of The Realist, puts the launch in the offices of The East Village Other on Avenue A. In other accounts, it starts on the West Coast. So which was it? Read more…


Yossarian on One-Legged Terry, Bob Dylan and a Drawing for the Ace

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Weberman-Yossarian-Vincent Titus A.J. Weberman, Yossarian, Vincent Titus

How One-Legged Terry became a member of A.J. Weberman’s circle fades into the mists of memory. Surely, he fit the mold of a Weberman associate with his good humor and dominant, eccentric personality. I met Terry along with a number of people A.J. had acquired from a series of “Dylanology” lectures he had given at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research. This was during a five-month period in 1970 in which I had crossed the country with friends in a (then almost requisite) Volkswagon bus, to spend time with the underground comix community, which by then had assembled in San Francisco.

Terry went by the full moniker of Terry Noble in the United States and Terry Ephraite in Israel, where he had gone to work on a kibbutz after finishing his education. While there, he had been assigned to work atop a hopper that loaded agricultural produce into a machine for processing. His job was to assist in moving the produce from a conveyer that lifted the material to the hopper. After a few days on the job, the platform on which he was standing collapsed, dumping him into the machinery and mangling his left leg. What was left had to be amputated just above the knee. As he remembered his thoughts at the time, they were about the loss of his shoe, one of a pair he had recently bought.

When he sought compensation for his loss, it was revealed that the platform had also collapsed in the recent past, costing another Jewish-American volunteer a leg. Terry surmised that it made more sense to assign an expendable American to the dangerous positions than to fix the underlying fault. Because of the negligence involved, Terry had won a settlement of about $50,000 for his loss. Read more…


Dan Rattiner on EVO, the Mafia, and the Takeover That Wasn’t

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Screen shot 2012-02-11 at 2.35.17 AMLeft to right: Steven Kohn, (on floor:) Heather, R. Crumb, Ray Schultz, (sitting behind:) Hetty Maclise, John Heys, Coca Crystal, Allen Katzman, David Walley, Little Arthur, (standing:) Joel Fabrikant, Jaakov Kohn

The end of my real involvement with The East Village Other came as something I perceived as a betrayal. I have come to think I really didn’t understand it at the time and perhaps what happened wasn’t directed at me personally. But sometimes I wonder.

I mentioned in my earlier piece that EVO was formed as a stock company, with Walter Bowart, Allen Katzman and I each owning three shares.

“We need to raise more money,” Walter said to me in the spring of 1966. “We’ve run out.  I’ve called a meeting and there will be new people coming. We need to get more people buying stock.”

“It won’t dilute my one third, will it?” I asked.

“It doesn’t have to,” he said, “if you buy some more, too.” And this was technically true.

The meeting took place in our office on Avenue A on a Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. John Wilcock was there, a prized defector to The Other from the Village Voice, our designated competitor. I loved that idea. There were four new people in the room, none of whom was familiar to me, except for John.

“Okay, we’re here to buy stock,” Walter said. “Who’d like to go first?”   Read more…


Kim Deitch’s Ode to Joel Fabrikant

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DEFIINITELY USE Deitch Black and Blue EVO Mar 3 1969 EVO BEST BEST copy Mar. 3, 1969 cover by Kim Deitch

He was a roughneck.  He certainly wasn’t politically correct and his blunt management style definitely took getting used to. In fact I really didn’t know what to make of him at first. But during the time I worked at The East Village Other, I received any number of sanctimonious promises from the people I worked with that didn’t seem to amount to much. Joel Fabrikant was no sanctimonious hippie or any other kind of hippie, but he always kept his word.

I was actually drawing comics for EVO, as it was called by most of us, before Joel got there.  The first time I showed up at the storefront office on Avenue A was at the start of 1967. Allen Katzman, EVO’s nominal editor, looked at the art samples I brought. He told me they were interesting, but that EVO was looking for work that was more, “psychedelic.” Psychedelic was a buzzword of the moment.  Put simply it meant, “trippy,” or drug-influenced.

I didn’t have to go far to pipe directly into that. Before I even left the office, Allen Katzman introduced me to Bill Beckman, the art editor. I knew who Bill Beckman was. In fact he was one of my initial inspirations for showing up at EVO.

Back in Westchester, where I had been employed as a child care worker, perhaps nine months prior to this, I showed a co-worker some of the artwork I’d been doing in my spare time. A curious thing about this artwork was that at a certain point, it had started morphing into primitive comic strips. Read more…


Bob Simmons on Bill Beckman and EVO’s Own Touch of Evil

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Screen shot 2012-02-10 at 8.17.25 PM Detail from an illustration by Bill Beckman.

I came to EVO in late 1965. I think the paper was about three issues old. Walter Bowart had quit his job as a bartender at the Dom on St. Marks Place (Ed Sanders says it was Stanley’s, maybe it was both) and had raised some money to publish what he was soon to become fond of calling “a hippie National Inquirer.” (“Hippies don’t like to read. They like pictures and big headlines.”) I had just come to New York City from Texas. At the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make it uptown or downtown. All that was certain was that I needed to get some kind of employment.

I was living in the basement of Bill and Debbie Beckman’s apartment on East Ninth Street between Avenues C and D. At the time, this was decidedly a sketchy neighborhood, populated by young Puerto Rican street entrepreneurs who would have duels with ripped-off car antennae, whipping each other viciously over turf or girlfriends or whatever. The old mittel Europeans, Ukrainians, and refugees who lived in the ratty tenements would scurry to get out of their way as they crossed Houston to get a knish. It would have been maybe December of 1965 when I arrived. It was shaping up as a very cold winter, with an incredible blizzard that happened just a few weeks after my arrival. Being a naive Texan, I had innocently driven my car and tried to keep it on the streets. I lost it for almost 10 days under the snow. It was all very new to me. Snow. Hippies. The East Village Other. Read more…


Where Underground Comix Lurched Into Life

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The Local East Village continues its celebration of the pioneering alternative newspaper of the late 1960s and early 70s, The East Village Other. This weekend, further to last week’s piece by artist Trina Robbins, we’re keeping our attention on the paper’s trailblazing illustrations, starting with an essay from Patrick Rosenkranz, the author of “Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975.”

Crumb Gothic Blimp Works first issue Cover of the first Gothic Blimp Works issue, by Robert Crumb

I never worked for The East Village Other but I was a captivated reader from the first time I picked up an issue in 1966. As an 18-year-old naïve Catholic scholarship student at Columbia University, I was ripe for the revolution. My roommate introduced me to smoking dope that winter and my enhanced appetite often drew me to the student cafeteria, where I couldn’t help but be attracted to the radical contingent from Students for a Democratic Society sitting around their regular table. They looked to my eyes like bomb-throwing anarchists who were having wild sex every night. They often left behind copies of The East Village Other, which I picked up. It was love at first sight.

I’d never seen a publication like this before. It was full of wild accusations and bawdy language and doctored photographs. It had President Johnson’s head in a toilet bowl. It had naked Slum Goddesses, truly bizarre personal ads, and a whole different slant on the anti-war movement than my hometown paper upstate. But best of all, it had the most outrageous comic strips. The continuing saga of Captain High; the psychedelic adventures of Sunshine Girl and Zoroaster the Mad Mouse; Trashman offing the pigs and scoring babes left and right. While I enjoyed many aspects of EVO, I liked the comics the most. Read more…