These were the entry points, the new and exciting places hungry for talent and maybe even community. They were where it was happening, but also, crucially, they were the prime opportunities of their day.
I delivered my pieces in person, sometimes hanging around for feedback from Jake Kugel, the literary editor, and hopefully to get another assignment and some more books. Once that December he told me that the staff Christmas party was taking place at a restaurant and bar nearby, and that I should go over. I did, but there was almost no one there yet. I was sitting alone at a small table with my free drink when an amazingly beautiful young woman walked in, looked around and left. She turned out to be Janet Maslin, one of the Arts Editors at Boston After Dark. John Koch, the senior movie reviewer, and Ben Gerson, the music editor and chief writer, were the others.
On another visit to Jake, he sent me back up the corridor to Ben Gerson’s office, who was pretty open to new writers for record reviews. Ben pointed to a pile of records stacked against a wall, told me to pick out a couple, and write 150 words or so on them. I’d earn $5 for each review published, plus I got to keep the record.
There were concerts and club dates galore as well as records, and I covered some, mostly in Boston but also on trips to New York City. My first one-on-one interview was with Bill Withers in his trailer before a summer concert on Boston Common. He probably sensed I was nervous so we sat together on a step to the trailer and chatted. I asked him about the theme running through his new album; he said he didn’t think anyone would notice that there was one.
 |
| Harrison with Pete Ham of Badfinger |
The life of a rock critic also included attendance at various promotional events, which always featured free food and drink. A few times a limo actually picked me up at the B.A.D. office. My friend Mike Shain, writing for Broadcasting Magazine then, said there were freelancers in New York who pretty much lived on the food at these events.
Rock music as a serious cultural force was so new that there
were few books on it then. Mostly we
read magazines and music tabloids, especially Rolling Stone, but also others
that have come and gone. And of course
we read each other. The coverage in established
newspapers and magazines was sparse and generally laughable.
I reviewed albums by David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Harry Nilsson, the Bee Gees, Little Feat, Bob Seger, Paul Simon, Ravi Shankar and the Incredible String Band as well as the now mostly forgotten (but remembered and revered by some) Jackie Lomax, Family, Kenny Rankin, the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils and Jim Carroll, and the completely obscure Audience and Formerly Fat Harry. Some reviews are embarrassing now (I didn’t understand Steely Dan’s first album) but I was maybe ahead of my time on others (I was much in the minority in proclaiming John Cale’s “Paris 1919” a masterpiece, which it is now acknowledged to be.) I was hardly a music scholar, even about the roots of rock music before the 1950s, but the power of that music in those years was emotional.
Besides Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs in the Midwest, the titans of rock criticism were Robert Christgau at the Village Voice, and Jon Landau, the record review editor of Rolling Stone in San Francisco, who actually lived in or near Cambridge, and wrote for its weekly, the Phoenix. I met Christgau a few times, through Mike Shain, and later was friends with his younger sister Georgia. I knew Jon Landau a little better. Later, when he switched to writing about movies for Rolling Stone, I watched an Orson Welles movie with him (F is for Fake) at the Orson Welles.
 |
| a fancier 1108 Boylston today |
Boston After Dark had its offices then at 1108 Bolyston Street in what likely was an old industrial building, close to the Bolyston Street subway station. (It looks like the building is now part of the Berklee School of Music.) The paper was composed on the first floor, and the editorial and business offices were up a long flight of stairs on the second floor. The door opened onto to the central reception area. Back to the right was the entry to the advertising and business offices. Ahead were the editorial offices. There weren’t many of them.
Walking down that corridor, past the room sometimes occupied by a staff photographer and/or cartoonist, the first office on the left was Ben Gerson’s. John Koch and Janet Maslin were in the next office on the left, opposite Jake Kugel’s on the right. These consisted of a desk or two surrounded by plasterboard walls and a door.
At the end of the corridor was a room occupied by assistant editor Kate Herriges and her intern, Mike Baron. But a sharp right immediately before this area led to a large room that was basically the office of the Editor (by early 1972, Teddy Gross) but was also the entire news department. True to its name, Boston After Dark had begun as an entertainment paper, with gradually expanding news. For awhile it especially was home to veteran journalists of “the movement,” such as Carl Ogelsby, Alexander Cockburn, Derek Shearer, Frank Browning and others.
A number of my reviews were of books of countercultural interest, like a novel by Raymond Mungo (author of the classic hippie memoirs Famous Long Ago and Total Loss Farm), Michael Weller’s play Moonchildren, and Digger guru Emmett Grogan’s bitter memoir, as well as the latest pop psychology, including astrology and the occult. I was enchanted by the novel Hide Fox, And All After by 17 year old Rafael Yglesias, who went on to a writing career in books, movies and television.
In fact, to this day my shelves include books I reviewed or at least mentioned then, that I was unlikely to acquire otherwise: Penelope Gilliatt’s wonderful stories in Nobody’s Business, Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, The Unknown Lewis Carroll, Evan S. Connell’s Points of a Compass Rose, Reynold Price’’s Things Themselves, Suzi Gablik’s Magritte (the first in depth treatment of that artist), poet Paul Eluard’s Capital of Pain and poet Michael Benedikt’s Mole Notes. Reviewing William Irwin Thompson’s first book (Imagination of an Insurrection) led to looking out for his subsequent books over ensuing decades. The same was true for several other authors.
 |
| Joyce Carol Oates in 1972 |
I also got letters from readers, some appreciative but others disputing or correcting me, and even a few threats. Other staff members and people I knew or just ran into often commented on my reviews and other pieces. This helped make me conscious of reading eyes, so I was even more carefully about checking facts and spelling, and avoiding other mistakes. If it wasn’t before, this instilled a consciousness and habits of care that has been part of my writing process the rest of my life.
I absorbed the rules of the form (including the journalistic part of conveying information about the author and the book, etc.) and a sense of their style and their possibilities. And I learned from my peers. It was the same basic process by which I learned to write all other journalistic forms.
Apart from the journalism basics I learned in high school social studies, I didn’t have a single journalism course. I learned by reading and by writing. My college education as a liberal arts English literature and composition major helped of course, in general and various specific ways. But that education led up a path of graduate school (or a writers workshop) and the combination of college teaching and literary writing. I had wandered off that path, never to return.
Eventually that year, when Jake Kugel left, I became responsible for managing this surfeit of incoming books as Books Editor (Celia Gilbert became the Literary Editor, responsible among other things for the poems the paper published.) In terms of sheer volume at least, I’d come a long way from borrowing two books for two weeks from the Greensburg Public Library.
In late summer of 1972, we returned from a weekend to learn that our publisher, Steven Mindich, had bought out his Cambridge rival, the Phoenix. We were now the Boston Phoenix. A few Cambridge Phoenix writers elected to come over, but most stayed and reconstituted themselves as a staff-owned weekly called The Real Paper. There was a stir—one of the former Phoenix writers (Andrew Kopkind) referred to Mindich in our pages as a “hip capitalist.” Steve and I had our differences, but I admired the moment he came to an editorial meeting. “I am not a hip capitalist,” he announced. “I am a capitalist.” Still, for most of us, nothing much changed, at least not immediately.
Also that summer, while racial tensions over busing in Boston were erupting in sporadic riots, the Rolling Stones played the Boston Garden. I was there with a half-dozen others from the Phoenix. We were high up and far away from the stage as we watched a tiny Stevie Wonder perform, and when he ran out of tunes, we waited for the Stones to appear.
We had about another hour to wait, but the mood turned giddy, and frisbies and beachballs began to appear, being tossed from level to level, with notable catches roundly cheered. Finally the Stones appeared, but I was too exhausted by then to appreciate much. I don’t think there was much energy left in the rest of the crowd, either.
I described the basic physical layout of the B.A.D., now Boston Phoenix offices, with the business side separated from the editorial side by the reception area. This was more than a physical separation. There was (in those days) something called The Wall between business (specifically advertising) and editorial. It meant that editorial did not take advertisers into account when deciding what to cover or print. This protected editorial integrity, while giving the ad reps cover when advertisers were unhappy about something that appeared.
But this didn’t stop certain efforts at persuasion, gentle or otherwise, from Barry M., the head of advertising sales. Barry came to me with various ideas for things I should write about, basically because they were good for advertising. (Or things he was afraid we were going to write about that might be bad for advertising.) I listened to him, and though I got angry a few times, he was a genial guy and I basically saw it as a game we played, because I never accepted a single idea he offered.
Then I proposed a Book Supplement, which was approved. But not by Barry. He came to moan to me about how he couldn’t see how to sell ads for it. There were two major publishers in town: Little, Brown, and Houghton-Mifflin, and lots of bookstores. But how was he going to fill all those pages? I didn’t know, I said, and I didn’t care.
I edited our first books supplement in fall 1972 (November 28 issue.) Unfortunately I haven't yet found a complete copy if I have one somewhere. I did locate a couple of pages from it, with my essay on Philip Roth, about his complaint that American reality was more bizarre than anything a fiction writer could imagine, along with a review of his latest novel, The Breast. The piece was headlined "The Gripes of Roth," suggesting I'd learned something from John Leonard's amazing headlines in the Times Sunday Book Review. The pages also have the beginning of Victor Burg's piece on the latest works of several Southern writers, including Flannery O'Connor's collected stories, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter and essays by Reynolds Price. I met Victor at his day job of presiding over the Harvard Bookstore. I believe there was another piece on Southern writers, by a young woman who grew up in New Orleans and never written for publication before.
A word about Walker Percy, who seems to be forgotten but was then a respected and in some ways seminal writer, and still deserves to be read. Re-reading Love In the Ruins today, it first of all reminds me of two things: where I first heard of Early Times bourbon, and how apocalyptic those years were, the late 60s through the mid-70s, which he had projected into an alternative near future tale. Walker portrays the extreme division in American life and politics in terms that look very familiar today. The breadth of those divisions was perhaps obscured by the most obvious cause: the still-ongoing war in southeast Asia.
In any case this did appear, even if not in the book supplement. I was part of the Halberstam interview, held in his room in the Ritz hotel, where major New York publishers liked to house their top authors when they visited Boston. Halberstam’s speaking voice, even in conversation, was at once authoritative and intimate, almost conspiratorial. He had an easy yet urgent way of describing his books as if he was letting listeners in on amazing things he’d just discovered. His interviews were tremendous assets, evident in this one, for his first of many books. Any criticism of the Vietnam war was still controversial, but this book was an immediate success. By early 1973 it was the #1 Best Seller on the New York Times list.
.jpg)
Some surviving notes indicate I prepared a number of short reviews and lists: Fred Barron wrote short reviews of books on film, Mike Baron on books on Tarzan, Wayne Biddle on fiction, Adrienne Rich and Liz Fenton on books by and about women.
In any case, while I was getting the final editorial copy ready for this first book supplement, Barry bolted through the Wall from advertising, showed up at my desk very excited. The ads for the supplement were rolling in, including the first national ads he’d ever sold for books. He wanted to know when we could do another one.
As I recall we also got good response from readers, including a letter on McGovern for President stationery from a professor of English at Northeastern who took out a subscription, not because of our (mostly my) positive coverage of the McGovern campaign (read on), but because of the writing in our book supplement.
But I also did arts section cover stories, including one on Buckminster Fuller and another on Dick Cavett. The week that latter story was in the current issue, I got a disorienting jolt one night. I was watching Cavett and about to turn it off, when I saw the next guest was comedian Mort Sahl. He entered carrying a copy of my Cavett story (“Does the Emmy Spell Cancellation for Cavett?” Spoiler alert: it did.) Sahl then read a few lines from the story, and the camera focused on the newspaper, with my byline. So my name appeared on Dick Cavett, though without my person. (It turned out Sahl had a week’s engagement at a club in western Massachusetts, where he saw the paper.)
I ended the year with a series of stories that appeared in the front section of the Boston Phoenix, all concerning the 1972 election campaign between incumbent Richard Nixon and Democratic nominee George McGovern. For reasons lost to history, I was assigned—or perhaps just permitted—to cover McGovern’s day-long, early October campaign stop in Boston.
Before I started, I spoke with Tim Crouse, who lived in Cambridge and whose pieces on the media covering this campaign that eventually became his classic book, The Boys on the Bus, had begun appearing in Rolling Stone. He suggested people to talk to for my story.
With my press credentials, I got to the noon rally early and stole a quick interview with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of the antiwar candidates in 1968. I witnessed him meeting long-time Massachusett’s congressman and former Speaker of the House John McCormack. I characterized this as the meeting of the Saint and the Pol. “Should I genuflect?” I heard McCormack say, probably the best line in my story. I talked with other campaign operatives, and eventually with campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz (an interview on the campaign bus to the airport) but I also spoke with various members of the press covering the campaign, in an enormous room full of tobacco smoke and typewriters at the Sheraton Plaza Hotel.
At first I was just dazzled-- all these reporters from wire services and large newspapers across the country, pretty much all friendly and accessible. When the most eminent of reporters entered—the New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston-- the waves parted before him. He gave me a courtly nod, a kind of welcome to a newcomer, and maybe a blessing.
I was also present when McGovern spoke to a small group of young people working for his campaign outside the hotel, and asked him a question or two as we shook hands there.
It also happened to be published in Teddy Gross’ last issue as Editor. Kerry Gruson, an associate editor for news, became the interim editor while a not very urgent search for a permanent replacement began. Very early she said she would not take the job herself, a decision she came to regret.
In the October 17 issue I had two pieces in the news section. One was another piece on the McGovern campaign, when it came back to Boston for an evening fundraiser, a Gala which featured Hollywood stars (Tommy Smothers, Warren Beatty, Shirley McLaine) and political stars (Senator Ted Kennedy, the teenage Caroline Kennedy.) Other politicians spoke as well-- they told jokes (as I noted in my piece) while the Hollywood stars made political speeches.
 |
| Cassie Mackin |
Members of McGovern’s family were also at the gala, including his teenage daughter, Mary, who at some point ran past me in the company of a laughing Caroline Kennedy. I ended my piece by re-stating the stakes of this election through these two teenage girls. Referring to McGovern’s dedication to transforming the political life of the country, I wrote: “One could not see Caroline Kennedy and not remember what that dedication means, and hope that the boy she was smiling at from the stage would at least be spared the killing and the dying, that Mary McGovern at least could be spared the further twisting of conscience, the frustration and the terrible absorption of energy that the war has brought to being young in America.”
My second piece in that issue was a long exposition on the Nixon administration’s attempts to intimidate and control the press—efforts that would become even more obvious and effective in coming years.
Along with the influence of polls, another new wrinkle in American politics was the role of television network projections of outcomes based on computer analyses. Computers had been used to predict vote totals as early as the 1952 presidential election, but even in 1960 they were treated as a novelty, a sideshow. In 1972 they threatened to become a major factor.
I got a tip from someone—probably Mike Shain in New York, who couldn’t use the information himself—that NBC was planning for the possibility of announcing the presidential winner before the polls were closed in all the states. This had never happened. So I reported this in October 31 issue, along with reactions I solicited, from the ACLU for instance. The response was divided. Some saw it as a free speech issue, others as essentially disenfranchising western voters, and possibly affecting the election because the projections became self-fulfilling prophesy.
This possibility was related to the overall danger that potential voters—especially potential McGovern voters-- would see all the coverage of the polls and then the projections, and become too discouraged to vote. They would simply give up hope.
On the front page of our last issue before Election Day, we confronted the doubts about voting for McGovern with two stories. A short book had been published outlining how McGovern could surprise everyone and win, mostly because of a huge youth vote. It was excerpted, under a picture of the famous photograph of Harry Truman in 1948 holding up a newspaper proclaiming his defeat, the morning after he’d won.
Under that began my story about the many reasons to vote against Nixon, including the corruption that had already been at least partially exposed by Woodward and Bernstein in Washington. (McGovern himself had proclaimed the Nixon administration “the most corrupt in American history,” but no one listened to that, either.)
I spent election night as a reporter at McGovern headquarters. It was filled with anxious but noisy supporters and campaign workers early in the evening, as a few young staffers stared at numbers coming into their computer terminals, eventually rendered speechless. Indeed at least one network did project McGovern’s defeat well before California polls closed, and the room emptied out as if by magic. Local politicians in particular disappeared. Someone eventually came down to the lonely podium to thank the few shell-shocked campaign workers who were still around. But the silence in that room was like nothing I’d experienced, despite the fact that McGovern had won Massachusetts. Unfortunately, it was the only state he did win.
 |
| J. Anthony Lukas |
In months to come, as the war in southeast Asia got even worse, and the Watergate hearings and later the Impeachment hearings gripped the nation, I had a locally popular bumper stickers slapped on my guitar case, which I took on all my plane trips. It said: “Don’t Blame Me/I’m From Massachusetts.”
In 1972, the Boston Phoenix editorial staff was largely comprised of people in their twenties, most of them graduates of local colleges: principally Harvard (and Radcliffe), Brandeis and Boston University (BU). That was true of regular freelancers as well. A slim majority were male, and I don’t recall a single person of color.
I was friends with many of the people I worked with, including support staff. We were part of each other’s social lives—we were swimming in the culture we were reporting, so I would often attend music events with Ben Gerson and others covering music, for example. We all went to movies together in various combinations. Janet Maslin sometimes enlisted me to accompany her to movies she was reviewing, especially at theatres in a dodgy part of town.
I socialized most with those on the arts and entertainment side, but I did become friends with Kerry Gruson, before and after she became interim editor. We had an odd moment that seemed significant when we both unexpectedly came back to the office after a weekend with dramatically shorter hair.
For reasons I don’t recall if I ever knew, Kerry invited me to Thanksgiving dinner at the house in Essex that she shared with her boyfriend at the time. Her father was also coming, and in fact, they picked me up at my East Cambridge apartment for the hour or so drive to Essex. They had a typical father-daughter moment on the way, when Sydney remarked on my Polish name and suggested his family might be Polish. “We are not Polish,” Kerry said emphatically, in that “Oh, Dad” tone.
By the time we sat down to dinner at a long table, I was surprised to see that I was the only Phoenix staffer there. As mentioned, Sydney Gruson was a New York Times executive. He had been a reporter and distinguished foreign editor. (His wife and Kerry’s mother, Florence Lewis, was also been a Times reporter in Europe. What I don’t think I knew at the time was that 1972 was the year of their divorce.)
 |
| Gloria Emerson |
But that somewhat out of body experience wasn’t the end of my day—I had another Thanksgiving dinner to attend that evening. This one was hosted by Martha, the Phoenix receptionist. She lived in my general neighborhood of East Cambridge with several housemates, and I’d been to their house several times. I found myself again at a long table, this time with a few others from the Phoenix plus a number of others I knew and didn’t know. This was a more relaxed and raucous group—at least I was more relaxed. I found myself seated between two women I’d had at least flirtations with, and at one point was holding hands under the table with both at the same time. A group of us ended up trooping off to a nearby blues club, after which I had just a short walk home.
My biggest problems with the Phoenix was in getting paid. We had some real conflicts over both rates of payment and promptness. But though I was the regular book columnist, and even filled in as music editor while Ben Gerson was away, I was essentially still a freelancers, and freelance writers were often treated poorly, and not just by this publication.
But then I got the chance for an actual weekly salary. I believe it was towards the end of the year that Steve Mindich offered me a job that had not previously existed. The Phoenix was about to launch a redesign, and it would now regularly appear in two sections. He offered me the new position of Managing Editor/Arts, with the Second Section as my responsibility. The salary (which would cover my writing and continued tenure as Books Editor) was substantial: not only more than I had ever made (that would be easy) but more than my parents were making (though I didn't know it at the time.)
By the time I went back to Greensburg for a Christmas visit, I had accepted. I would begin my new work in the new year—a year that turned out to hold more than one major change.
