Underground newspapers: The first blogs

Back in the '70s, when I was twice editor of Philadelphia's "underground" newspaper, The Drummer/The Distant Drummer/Thursday's Drummer "“ it went through various names as befitting the times "“ we would periodically receive a packet of stories from an outfit called Liberation News Service.

These deliveries were a godsend because they were free and we were being tasked with putting out a weekly newspaper on a budget of $125. That's a buck and a quarter a week to pay all the contributors, including writers, photographers, and artists.

One writer who came in the Liberation package was the seminal rock critic Richard Meltzer, who wrote under the byline R. Meltzer. For Liberation he didn't write rock criticism, but rather anything that came into his fevered brain. The Drummer gave his stuff an actual column, and many readers thought he was on our staff, which was fine by me at those prices.

Meltzer was a real wild man. My favorite Meltzer column was an unbridled, teeth-bared attack on R. Buckminster Fuller, who was a saint to the peace-and-love, Earth Shoe crowd. "Bucky" Fuller was world-famous as the inventor of the geodesic dome, which he didn't actually invent. He was also a cuddly old dude, an academic favorite uncle, loved by all.

Except R. Meltzer, who considered Fuller an old windbag, and a well-paid windbag at that. Only Meltzer said this at hilarious column length, going up one side of Bucky and down the other like a verbal power mower gone berserk. It was pure, high-flying, uncensored venom, delivered by a master ball-buster. I loved it.

The first blogs?

And, now that I think back on it, Meltzer's column was a fucking blog! Isn't that what blogs do"“ go as far off the wall as the writer wants them to in whatever direction the writer is inclined?

There's no crying in baseball, and there's no censoring of blogs. And back in those hippie/underground paper days, the only rule was Henry James's edict: The only obligation of writing is to be interesting (and in our case, radical).

R. Meltzer was endlessly interesting. He also wrote a crazy astrology column that was the best-read thing in The Drummer and was probably endlessly libelous as well as endlessly sidesplitting.

Take no prisoners

Another Liberation News "blogger" was Paul Krassner, who was a political R. Meltzer and founder of the respected counterculture journal, The Realist. In fact, if memory serves, that was the name of his column, and he laid it out there, taking no prisoners, week in and week out, a political and journalistic descendant of all the great American muckrakers and the spiritual godfather of guys like Michael Moore. Paul Krassner was the I. F. Stone of his generation.

The Drummer wasn't a pure underground paper, because both its founder, Don DeMaio, and Jon Stern, who bought it from Don, charged for it and ran it as a for-profit venture. I also wrote for The Philadelphia Free Press and The Plain Dealer, which were both true underground rags, each distributed free and published by a collective.

All-night meetings

At both papers, every story was read to the collective before publishing and vetted and endlessly discussed and argued over until the entire assembly agreed with the content. Some of those editorial meetings lasted all night, as did our sessions at the printer. There were many bleary-eyed dawns, but we put out some fine papers as a result.

Those days were heady and exciting because we were creating what we saw as a new and different kind of journalism, responsible only to our readers and ourselves. Advertisers were merely a necessary evil, and if they didn't like what we were writing"“ tough titty!

Actually, advertisers saw these papers as a vehicle for reaching the newly discovered "youth market," so they mostly overlooked our wild and wooly politics. There was gold in them thar kids, and if reaching them meant dealing with a bunch of wild-eyed radicals, so be it. To the advertisers, it was Power to the Profit, not Power to the People. We underground journalists bit the bullet and accepted the contradiction.

Bomb formula

We put out some great papers, but we also put out some reckless papers— beyond blogs, if you will. One issue of The Plain Dealer, in particular, contained a recipe for bomb making that would have blown up anybody who tried to follow it.

Today, hunched over computers or scanning the weekend section of newspapers, you don't realize how much of what originated in the underground press was co-opted by the "straight" press, which now takes all that stuff for granted.

For example, during my first stint as editor of The Drummer, Matt Damsker was the paper's entertainment editor and star rock writer. Matt knew his music and could write his ass off. He was also cocky. One day he had a beef with Jon Stern, the owner publisher. He got right into Jon's face and crowed, "I am The Drummer!"

Hired by the Bulletin

Nevertheless, Philadelphia's establishment flagship, the Evening Bulletin, shanghaied Matt about a month into my editorship. Up until then, the dailies only covered rock sporadically, if at all. Jon Takiff, another Drummer alumnus, had a long and distinguished career at the Daily News as its rock writer. Rock 'n roll was the bedrock of the youth market, and when the suits at the dailies finally realized it, they had a ready-made farm club for rock writers in the underground press.

Matt Damsker was succeeded as The Drummer's entertainment editor/rock writer by Mike McGrath, who much, much later became editor of Organic Gardening, if you can believe that (where Matt ended up working for him). Mike still has a show on National Public Radio. My second go-round as Drummer editor, I had David Fricke as entertainment editor/rock writer, and he was so good that Rolling Stone grabbed him— and he's still there.

Astrology was another underground staple that matriculated to the dailies. Dick Fuller, another Drummer guy, had a long career as Philadelphia Magazine's film critic.

Campus freebie

These days, every time I look at a daily newspaper's weekend entertainment, I think of The Daily Planet, which was The Drummer's entertainment section with a different cover, distributed free to the Greater Philadelphia colleges to grab all that youth market advertising. Lew Beale, an editor of the Planet, went on to a great career as a free-lancer, then to the staff of the New York Daily News, and today he's on a college faculty in North Carolina. Bob Strauss, whom I call The King of the Freelancers, made some of his bones at The Drummer and still seems to be going strong in half the publications you look at. Thom Nickels, a BSR contributor and Philadelphia man-about-letters who's published eight books, was a Drummer columnist. Then there's Len Lear, now the bellwether of the Chestnut Hill Local, and at one time the only non-African-American writer on the Philadelphia Tribune.

Hard as it is to believe today, the dailies didn't have those hopped-up weekend entertainment sections with all those listings until they got the idea from the underground pubs. At The Drummer, baby-faced Bill Mooney was the guy who compiled the entertainment listings for the paper and did a remarkable job. He went on to the West Chester Daily Local News.

Clark DeLeon's first break

Actually, many writers went through The Drummer on their way to better "“ and better-paying"“ gigs. Clark DeLeon, one of the Inquirer's most popular columnists ever, joined The Drummer fresh out of Penn State; his story about watching his wife give birth got him a job at the Inky.

Arlene Leib, long a Philadelphia P.R. maven, was an early Drummer contributor. So was one of my ex-wives, Suze Schaefer, who also did very well in public relations.

Other noted Philly writers who graced The Drummer's pages were Jim Quinn, the nationally-known food critic, who has never written a bad sentence; his old pal, performance/neon artist/poet/man-about-letters Annson Kenney; Maralyn Lois Polak, in those days the bitch goddess of Philadelphia poetry, who had a long-running interview column in the Inquirer's late, lamented Sunday magazine; Rathe Miller, who still freelances for the Inky but mostly supports himself as a professional poker player; and John Lombardi, who was later an editor at Esquire.

Allen Ginsberg objects

Hell, even Andrew Wylie, now the arch-druid of today's literary agents, wrote for The Drummer with his partner, the elfin Victor Bockris, under the byline Bockris-Wylie. I remember they did a two-part interview with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. I was at my desk in The Drummer's office on Germantown Avenue in Nicetown, typing Ginsberg's name for some reason, when the phone rang and "“ lo and behold "“ it was Allen himself.

"Wow, Allen, man," I exclaimed. "I was just typing your name."

He replied he didn't have time for any metaphysical bullshit; he wanted to correct some errors in Bockris-Wylie's interviews so that literary critics 50 years later would have the right information. That's how sure he was of his place in American poetry.

So you think life is one long blog today? Life was one long blog back then.♦


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