#alt-weeklies

Part One is here.

The shutting down of all Avatar publications in Boston represented a turning point, and a blurring of lines between commercial and underground newspapers. Why limit yourself to being to just an underground newspaper when an actual profit could to be made for going slightly above-ground? And with far less harassment, too. Most underground and student newspapers in Boston received visits from the FBI in 1968, and in at least one case, their meddling led to the dissolution of the paper. When feds visited the Avatar office at the 37 Rutland Street, editor Wayne Hansen let them search the location freely and they left soon after. Outside, Hansen found the agents trying to get into their own car with a coat hanger, their keys locked inside. He walked over to the scene with his camera, but the agents begged him not to take pictures, which he obliged. 

Below, TV host David Silver approaches 37 Rutland Street, office of Avatar. Underneath, the building as it stands today.

By the time the agents arrived at Boston University News, word had gotten out. Alex Jack, an editor at the paper and one of the founders of the New England Vietnam Resistance movement, had prepared some materials in preparation for their visit. “Thank you for coming. I just have a few questions,” Jack told the FBI agents, handing them a three page questionnaire. As they left in a huff, other students followed them to their car, pretending to take notes on their every move, muttering “Ah, yes, very interesting.” 

Alex Jack at a resistance rally, photo by Peter Simon.

It was perhaps this bold brand of non-cooperation and outright mocking that led the FBI to alter their tactics and start to play dirty in regards to underground newspapers. Under the FBI's COINTELPRO program, spooks created fake underground rags designed to undermine and chill the anti-war movement and its leaders. Armageddon News popped up in Bloomington, Indiana, The Longhorn Tale in Austin, Texas, both literally fake news. “The purpose of this program is to expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the activities of this group and persons connected with it,” a memo written to Domestic Intelligence Director William C. Sullivan read in 1968. “It is hoped that with this new program their violent and illegal activities may be reduced if not curtailed." 

In Boston, in the case of Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom's Liberation News Service this program worked fairly well. With less than a year of successful work under their belt, like Avatar, an internal rift developed inside the LNS. Founders Mungo and Bloom were accused of being “social democrats,”—aka not true revolutionaries—by their New York collaborators. Mungo boiled down the rift to a disagreement on how to operate the service: “Their method of running the news service was the Meeting and the Vote, ours was Magic. We lived on Magic, and still do, and I have to say it beats anything systematic.” Finding themselves at an impasse, Mungo took a cue directly from his friends at Avatar and hatched a plant to steal all of the LNS's equipment, empty the bank account, purchase a farm in Montague, MA and move the entire operation there. Surprisingly, this marijuana-soaked scheme somehow worked; the Village Voice subsequently described it a “daring daylight raid.” However, the New York LNS contingent materialized one night in Montague, held Mungo and Bloom's team team hostage, smashed up the farmhouse's furniture, and beat up some members with great vigor. “Marshall was bleeding, scarlet rivers running down from his face across his chest and down his legs,” Mungo recounted of the terrible evening. The captors left at dawn empty handed, the equipment hidden away in a barn down the street. The Collegiate Press Service called it “the most bizarre story out of the underground since Valerie shot Andy.”

Below, Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom.

What no one knew at the time was that “the FBI had deeply penetrated our news service,” LNS contributor Harvey Wasserman wrote in 1990, “and may well have been at the root of the split.” According to the FBI's own documents, they had three inside informants at the LNS, but it's unclear just who these particular people were; it is possible that the violent farmhouse raid we instigated by one or more of these federal informants. Under J. Edgar Hoover's direction, a disturbing one-sheet titled “And Who Got the Cookie Jar?” was drafted using “the jargon of the New Left” and distributed widely to left organizations. It was purportedly written by “a former [LNS] staffer.” “Cookie Jar” was particularly brutal for Marshall Bloom, as it singled him out by name. “The establishment of a bastard LNS at 'Fortress Monague' is the most unrealistic bag of all,” the propaganda declared, “Bloom, you've left the scene of the action in exchange for assorted ducks and sheep.”

“The article was such a perfect mirror of the type of writing being done at the time it never occurred to me that it might be the product of the FBI,” Wasserman eerily noted in hindsight, “But it almost certainly helped kill Marshall Bloom.” In addition to the 'Cookie Jar' piece, rampant rumors of Bloom's closeted homosexuality were spread throughout both camps. Ray Mungo recalled, “Kids who'd never even met [Bloom] would approach me with questions like, 'Is it true Marshall Bloom is a thief? Sex pervert?'” On the first of November, 1969, Marshall Bloom drove a few miles away from the Montague farm, connected a vacuum tube to the exhaust pipe, snaked it into the car, and drifted off into death. Allen Young, a former friend who was on the opposite side of the LNS split, is certain that Bloom's closeted homosexuality played a factor in the tragedy. “Marshall has become a minor folk hero and symbol of 'the movement,'” Young wrote in 1990. “Although Marshall was indeed a Yippie, I find it rather incredible, if not stupid, that some of Marshall's friends, particularly Ray Mungo, treat his suicide as though it were some kind of ultimate Yippie stunt.”

“They make Marshall a mysterious magical figure, a shaman, which is not all that surprising as this is a traditional role for homosexuals in many cultures,” Young continued. “I knew Marshall Bloom not as a shaman but as a human being.”

Mungo acknowledges the FBI infiltration, but cites his own reasons for Bloom's tragic end. “Bloom often threatened suicide long before all that. He was floridly bipolar and never medicated for it.”

As the end of the FBI propaganda piece noted, “LNS seems dead. Long live, LNS.”

In the absence of Avatar's original political coverage and the lack of an LNS branch in town, another Boston underground newspaper titled The Old Mole sprouted up in September 1968, announcing itself as a “radical bi-weekly.” Mole's most popular recurring column, a page called Zaps, delivered short bursts of information, often pointing out a hypocrisy, like: “PEACE CORPS EXPELS 13 FOR ANTI-WAR ACTIVITY -- a real headline from the Washington Star.” In April of 1969, when approximately 500 Harvard students took over the campus's University Hall in protest of the Vietnam War, a few individuals managed to obtain some confidential papers that highlighted Harvard's participation with the CIA to quell anti-war movements. 

Police removed the protesters with billy clubs and mace, but the documents escaped with the students. The Boston Globe reported that “every file in the Dean's office” had been rifled through; The Old Mole reprinted these damning papers in their next issue, igniting a serious scandal. The private correspondence was published under the headline “Reading the Mail of the Ruling Class,” and shortly after the issue hit the streets, a box of the stolen papers appeared on a law professor's steps with a note attached reading, “Comrade: please return to [Dean] Franklin Ford.” “But how can we know these files are authentic?” Old Mole editor Dick Cluster recalled the straight-press asking him about the leaked documents. The Boston Globe reported that the paper's leaked documents and the editorial conclusions drawn by the Old Mole were “unfounded.” “Not only don't proper Bostonians read each other's mail,” The Boston Globe reported, “but also their theft and subsequent reprinting indicated, if nothing else had, that the SDS militants saw their own ends as justifying almost any means.” It would be years before the mainstream press acknowledged these documents' authenticity and implications.

Founder Dick Cluster had named the paper after a reference in an obscure speech by Karl Marx: “We recognize our old friend, our old mole, who knows so well how to work underground, suddenly to appear: the revolution.”In the years that followed, the “underground” transformed into something called the “alternative.” In an article detailing The Old Mole's 1970 collapse, The Boston Globe explained, “Part of the attrition undoubtedly could be attributed to the growth of more commercial, less self-consciously 'movement oriented' weeklies appealing to the Mole's youthful constituency. These include an expanded Boston After Dark, covering political events as well as entertainment, and The Phoenix, an eclectic weekly published by 'youth marketing' experts whose other interests include radio station WBCN-FM and the Boston Tea Party, both of which specialize in rock music.” By 1972, none of these media outlets were using the language of the “2nd American Revolution anymore,” and both of the two reigning alternative weeklies—The Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper—had inched further and further away from the underground as their circulation grew. “The dailies are getting more like us and we're getting more like the dailies,” The Real Paper news editor Joe Klein said in 1974.

The exact chronology and details of Boston's alternative weekly history is complex and serpentine, but in broad strokes it goes like this:

*1965 - A supplement to the Harvard Business School newspaper entitled Boston After Dark begins publication covering arts listings.

*1966 - Boston After Dark (B.A.D) breaks free from the Harvard paper, becoming its own independent publication.

*1969 - Modeled after The Village Voice, The Cambridge Phoenix begins incorporating both arts listings and news coverage.

*1970 - Boston After Dark follows The Phoenix's lead and begins to cover news as well. Both compete to be the voice of the counterculture in Boston.

*1972 - Steven Mindich, owner of Boston After Dark, buys The Cambridge Phoenix and combines the papers calling it: The Boston Phoenix. Boston Tea Party and WBCN owner Ray Riepen partners with Mindich. One of the paper’s innovations is to offer free personal classified ads and to sell copies on the street, a successful sales method gleaned from Avatar.

*1972 - The staff of the Cambridge Phoenix form a new paper called The Real Paper, in direct competition with The Boston Phoenix.

*1981 - The Real Paper ceases publication.

*2013 - The Boston Phoenix ceases publication.

“To start with, you must understand that they were never, ever, underground newspapers,” The Boston Globe reported in a 1974 piece headlined “The Alternative Press Goes Straight.” “The real underground papers were The Old Mole and Avatar.” A writer for The Real Paper told the Globe that it was naïve to believe that any of the city's current alternative newspapers were started without the expressed goal of making money. “There was no mission,” he said. “Let's face it,” a Phoenix staffer confessed, “when you're billing over a million dollars in advertising a year there's nothing underground about you.” Four years earlier, you might get called a 'commie' for merely carrying an issue down the street, now everyone from construction workers to college professors could be spotted reading an alternative weekly on the subway. Even as direct descendants of Avatar, it would be completely outrageous to imagine any of the Boston alt-weeklies ceding any page real estate to a cult of personality like Mel Lyman by the mid-seventies. But the differences were more subtle than that; for example, Avatar would publish pieces critical of The Bosstown Sound and still run ads for shows featuring Bosstown Sound bands. But with the budgets of these surviving alt-weeklies being primarily supported by advertising from the music industry, there were certain topics that, by 1974, considered off-limits. “Nobody at the Phoenix or The Real Paper is about to write the definitive payola piece,” an anonymous staffer told The Globe, “because, if it was written, neither nor The Phoenix nor The Real Paper would publish it.” Even as late as 1972, it was considered scandalous when Fusion Magazine published Paul Mills's expose on the financial goals of counterculture giant Rolling Stone Magazine. Just two years later, that same piece would've been met with a resounding, “Yeah, so what?”

“It might just be that there's no need for this type of thing anymore,” Cambridge Phoenix editor Harper Barnes conjectured about the underground moving into the role of the middle class as the youth culture moved into their thirties during the 1970's, “You can't keep trading in on the atmosphere of the the late 1960's.”

“The underground press was the place where each new movement could declare itself without having its beliefs strained through a mainstream filter” Abe Peck wrote in 1990 in his introduction to Voices from the Underground. But just a few years removed from the late sixties, through a shift in values and the growing need to support these endeavors with serious quantities of money, the same underground players would need to either depend on, or in some cases become, a mainstream filter of their own ideas. In this way, for all of its wild missteps, controversies, and reckless in-fighting, Avatar can still be seen as the one Boston underground publication that took advantage of the era's unique circumstances to its fullest potential; the one thing the paper lacked was certainly a filter. As Liberation News Service's Ray Mungo put it, “Avatar had always been the best and most truthful of the underground newspapers.”

Ray Riepen claims that when he got involved in the newspaper business by buying into The Phoenix, the Boston press turned against him, depicting him as a crass puppet master of the youth culture. This 1971 Boston Globe illustration literally illustrates this relationship between counterculture and commerce with Riepen shown holding the strings leading down to rock stars performing on a stage:

The sources of progress often fade quickly in the memory of youth culture. Avatar editor Wayne Hansen, after leaving the Fort Hill Community in the 1979, found himself unexpectedly living with some twenty-something roommates in Cambridge, MA. “They said, 'What was the big deal about the sixties anyways? Nothing really changed.' I said, 'Well, here we are there's two girls and two guys living in an apartment here together. Do you know that was illegal in the sixties?'” The risks were real, the rules were staunchly followed, Hansen recalls. “You know, so, we did have a revolution of sorts and it just...” he pauses trying to figure it out. “I don't know if it's still is still out there.”

When The Boston Phoenix finally closed up shop in 2013, it came as a shock to many. For those who looked at the long-view, this had been a long time coming. From Reuters’ “The long, slow decline of alt-weeklies” article published in 2013:

The alt-weekly collapse came in spurts over the last decade, as a market shift destroyed whole advertising sectors. Craigslist destroyed the classifieds — housing, for sale, services (sex and otherwise), et al. — and the lucrative personals and matches ads fled for the Web, too. Depending on the paper, classifieds had amounted to anywhere between 20 percent to 50 percent of revenues. Now, that money is mostly gone.

Mostly gone, too, is record-company advertising. Before that business was disrupted, the labels would give record stores — remember them? — big bags of “co-op” money to advertise the new releases, and even reissues! Video stores — remember them? — were big advertisers, too. Amazon has helped to clean out whole categories of retailing that once advertised in alt-weeklies, such as electronics, books, music and cameras. Big-box stores have displaced many of the indie retailers that long provided advertising backbone. And while Hollywood still places ads, it’s nothing compared to the heyday. To give you a sense of how precipitous the drop, the smallest edition Washington City Paper printed in 2006 contained 112 pages, with 128-pagers and 136-pagers being the most common. In 2012, the page counts ordinarily ranged between 56 and 72.

Today, the last alt-weekly standing in Boston is the DIG, founded in 1999. DIG Editor Chris Faraone told the Columbia School of Journalism in 2013, that he “couldn’t be prouder to be one of the last writers to hold down the long tradition of badass reporting at the Phoenix.”

All of the publications mentioned here in this brief history were, indeed, a beacon of “badass reporting.” When reporting is now geared towards “what’s going to get the most clicks” and, in turn, preserve your employment as a journalist, are we really getting the most important coverage, whether it be local or national? That’s a question worth pondering, especially in light of all the in-fighting, obscenity charges, COINTELPRO tampering, and pure madness that got us here to the present day.

Or, to slightly alter a sentiment expressed by a piece of FBI propaganda mentioned earlier in this piece, “The alt-weekly seems dead. Long live, the alt-weekly.”

Murray Geister: Paranormal Investigator