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27.
THE EAST VILLAGE OTHER #1-8 (NY: October 1965-March 1966).
Tabloid newspaper format (first issue broadsheet folded into tabloid size). Printed offset-litho. Pagination varies. Initially monthly, fortnightly from issue #5. Published by Walter Bowart; edited by Allen (spelled Allan) Katzman, Sherry Needham, Dan Rattiner, and (from issue #4) John Wilcock. Other contributors include Ishmael Reed, David Henderson and Bill Beckman.
The East Village Other was founded by Walter Bowart, together with Needham, Katzman, Rattiner and Reed, the latter naming the paper, and quickly became known as EVO. The editorial in its first issue proclaimed that “we hope to become the mirror of opinion of the new citizenry of the East Village”, a reference to the newly arrived artists and bohemians excluded from the high-priced Greenwich Village.
In contrast to the Village Voice, which by then had become staid in comparison, these early issues of EVO looked to the future, embracing the new artistic, musical and cultural trends, exemplified by Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, The Fugs, and the artists, poets and experimental filmmakers who lived and worked in the same milieu as the paper’s storefront office, located on Avenue A across from Tompkins Square Park. Located just up the block from Tompkins Square, around the corner from the Peace Eye Bookstore, was the Psychedelicatessen, the world’s first head shop, where Fugs backing singer Betsy Klein worked, and it was she who asked Miles to be EVO’s London correspondent, and EVO that International Times would be most closely modelled on.
#1 (October 1965). Includes Izzy Young (of the Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village) on Bob Dylan (an article that provoked an angry letter from Ted Berrigan, published in the second issue); the first appearance of Allen Katzman’s “Poor Paranoid’s Almanac” column (inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack”); news on The Fugs’ cross-country concert tour; plans for the preservation of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers; Ishmael Reed on Le Metro, a coffeehouse on Second Avenue famous for its poetry readings, and a hangout frequented by Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Brion Gysin, and Bob Dylan, among others (it closed soon afterwards and readings were moved to St. Mark’s Church in 1966); and a brief mention of ‘It girl’ Clara Bow, who “died Sunday night, September 26, 1965, watching television”.
#2 (November 1965). Includes an article in favour of marijuana legalisation; a review of Chuck Berry at the Village Theatre; experimental cinema; a half-page EVO map identifying hip locations; and the first appearance of EVO art director Bill Beckman’s countercultural cartoon character, “Captain High”, whose main mission, famously, was to get high and stay high (this copy has been SIGNED by him, as have each of the following four issues). Beckman also made the sign for Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore and designed The Fugs’ stage set for their residency at the Astor Place Playhouse in January 1966.
#3 (December 1965). Contents include “Illicit Tatoo [sic] Clubs”; “Why Marijuana Should Not Be Legalized”; the first of John Wilcock’s Other Scenes columns; St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie (“perhaps the very spirit of the Lower East Side”); “Get The Money” by Ted Berrigan; and the first appearance of the ‘Slum Goddess’ (named after the eponymous Fugs song), featuring Suze Rotolo, whose relationship with Bob Dylan had ended in the previous year (she later wrote in her memoir that “The feature would be the counter-culture’s answer to the Miss America aesthetic of overly made-up and girdled women with beehive hairdos. I thought it was a fine idea and said yes… The reporter asked me three questions: what I did, why I lived on the Lower East Side, and what I wanted from a man. Walter Bredel was the [staff] photographer and we walked around the East Village one afternoon while he took pictures. I wrote that I lived in the East Village because I liked the view - I was being sarcastic, since the neighborhood was really grungy… By the time I was an East Village Other Slum Goddess in print, I no longer qualified in real life, since I had moved back into Village Voice territory”.
#4 (January 1966). Contents include Allen Katzman on Bob Dylan; “Screaming Girls Attack Fugs at Lower East Side Concert” (illustrated with 2 photos); “Sociable Euphorics” (drink, drugs) by Bert Herman; a second printing of the EVO map; Robert Filliou book review; an “Underground Literary Review” by Tom McNamara; Magritte at MoMA; John Wilcock’s Other Scenes from Tokyo; and Baroness de Rothschild (photographed reading EVO).
#5 (February 1-15, 1966). The first fortnightly issue. Front cover headline “Poet Arrested On Obscenity”, with photograph of Ed Sanders at his Peace Eye Bookstore in the aftermath of the police bust. Other articles include Walter Bowart on the Neo-American Church and the defence of “its right to administer psychedelic drugs as the Holy Sacrament on the grounds of religious freedom”; brief news on the recent completion of Andy Warhol’s latest (unnamed) film (“Vinyl”), and Dick Preston’s disparaging critique of “My Hustler”; “The Day Reich Died” - Harvey Matusow on Wilhelm Reich (Matusow “served a sentence at the same prison at the time of Reich’s demise”); a small ad. for the Free University of New York (founded eight months before), and a classified ad. announcing “London’s New Book Shop - INDICA BOOKS & GALLERY… Send for FREE catalogue of Modern First Editions. Art Gallery, Coffee, Readings, Films.”
#6 (February 15-March 1, 1966). Front cover story by Walter Bowart on the charges facing Timothy Leary for bringing marijuana over the border from Mexico; group photograph of EVO staff (and others) in Tompkins Square “in a blizzard”; John Wilcock on Andy Warhol, Barbara Rubin, John Cale, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg disrupting the taping of David Susskind’s TV programme at the Mosque Theatre in Newark, New Jersey (Cale and Gerard Malanga can be seen with Susskind in the accompanying photograph); brief news of The Fugs signing to ESP-Disk (plus separate ESP ad.), and, upcoming at the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque, “Tony Fox’s [sic] color short consisting of 15-second shots of beautiful bare asses” (the first screening of the first version of Yoko Ono’s “Film No.4”, directed by Tony Cox and filmed in Ono’s New York apartment). The first issue to list Miles as a contributor.
#7 (March 1-15, 1966). Front cover feature on the Los Angeles Peace Tower, a huge sculpture erected in LA featuring work by artists including Larry Rivers, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Motherwell (a film of its inauguration was advertised in the Village Voice, April 7); Walter Bowart on Salvador Dali; a full-page feature on Jack Smith by Dick Preston (2 photos); centrespread montages; Allen Katzman on Al Hansen’s Happening in the East Village (photo of Dick Higgins); Toby Mussman on Multiples Inc., and Robert Breer; a short story by Bill Beckman; and Miles’s first report from London, making reference to a proposed but ultimately unrealised audio magazine: “Indica bookstore is full of poets and pop singers putting up shelves and making coffee… We are opening a radiophonic studio. It will be built by Ian Sommerville… We will issue a 12” long-playing record every month [containing] poems… prose… electronic music, by Paul McCartney, Ian Sommerville, and Peter Asher… beautifully boxed [with] various subversives from the presses of Lovebooks Ltd. of a sex-pol [ie. Reichian] nature.”
#8 (March 15-April 1, 1966). Includes front cover feature on Stan Lee; John Wilcock on the LA scene; Albert Ayler; the Native American Church; news of Wolf Vostell’s arrival in New York “carrying a battered brown suitcase full of copies of his magazine Decollage”; centrespread ‘narcotics’ montages; ad. for Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle at the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque; and Miles’s second “London Report”: John Esam “busted for being in possession of stolen LSD which is a unique charge”; Michael Hollingshead recently opening up “his expensive Pont St pad for An Evening of Psychodelics” [sic]; and Keith Rowe and Cornelius Cardew [AMM] performing at Victor Schonfeld’s weekly sound workshop at the Royal College of Art (Miles attended one of them with Paul McCartney around this time).
All issues with old central horizontal folds (slight wear to #4); newsprint paper slightly tanned, especially along folds; o/w Very Good (each issue stored flat in an archival sleeve).
A rare, early run of one of the first underground papers, founded before the term ‘underground press’ had been coined (John Wilcock came up with it when discussing the idea of the Underground Press Syndicate with Walter Bowart in June 1966), and the first to fully exploit the experimental page layouts made possible by offset lithography.
