 As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Stephen Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, Screw Magazine, and The East Village Other before eventually going on to work at The New York Times and teaching at the School of Visual Arts for decades. He chronicles his youthful misadventures in growing up underground, a memoir of countercultural New York. In November, Heller spoke at the recent Speak Easy, a monthly unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. He regaled the Manhattan audience with tales of arrests on obscenity charges, how design and aesthetics can supercharge the meaning of words and pictures, and why so many in the counterculture adopted exactly the same uniform of alienation in the name of individuals. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you very much for coming out to the most recent, Reason Speak Easy. Today we are talking with Stephen Heller, the legendary art director and graphic designer and author of the phenomenal new book Growing Up Underground, a memoir of counterculture New York. Steve started out in the late 60s as a teenager working at bleeding edge alternative outlets like the New York Free Press and Screw Magazine, of course, before becoming the art director at the New York Times op-ed page for a bit and for the book review section for many, many years. A longtime faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, Steve brings in a reverent and uniquely knowledgeable perspective to discussions of how alternative and establishment publications influence social and cultural change, a fierce defender of free speech in the First Amendment. He didn't just witness the past half century of boundary-busting changes to media. He helped make it all jump off the page and grab our attention. Steve Heller, thanks for talking at the Reason Speak Easy. Thanks for inviting me. All right. So let's start with the memoir, which also I will be sending all of you a discount code where if you order it from the publisher from Princeton Architectural Press, you can get 20% off. So that's real savings in this inflation era. Lots of gratitude from me. Yes. But it's a fantastic personal story, but it's also a story about a particular time and place. Can you, what's the kind of elevator pitch for your memoir? The elevator pitch is I had 10 good years and I kept telling stories about them. And at a certain point, since I've written or edited 200 books or so, I thought it was time to get my story on the page. And various people were encouraging me to do it. And I wanted to kind of cluster the years together how it's possible to get somewhere without going to college and still be part of the cultural scene. And I like to tell stories. So essentially that's it. There was no elevator pitch. There was just calling up the editor and saying I have a memoir that connects me to graphic design. And since they published graphic design books, it happened. So the 10 good years start, what year did that start in? 1966. I was 16. So set the stage because you grew up in Manhattan. I grew up in a small town in Manhattan, Stuyvesantown. So what was 1966 New York like? I know there's a couple of other people who were here at the same time. Tell us, those of us who don't remember. Well 1966, you could drive a bus through the Washington Monument, the Washington Square. The Arch of Washington Square, yeah. Which was, you know, a big thing because if you were in the path of a bus, they didn't stop. Dylan was just coming on the radio with Positively 4th Street. And there was a kind of anticipation of something happening. The Vietnam War was heating up. There were groups that were founded to protest the war. Civil rights in New York was actually beginning to start happening as a movement. Hippy culture was gradually taking over the East Village or what we used to call the Lower East Side. And music was making a major splash. Fillmore East, the Anderson Theater, the Electric Circus, the New York Academy of Music, where I co-produced with one of the newspapers I was with, oldie shows at a 2,500 seat theater. What was an oldie show in 1966? What were you? Do-op groups. Yeah. So like from the late 50s? From the late 50s. Yeah. Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, the Dell Vikings. Things like something was emerging. You know, why? You're 16 in 1966, so you were born. This is the math brain of an English major, so you were born in 1950. Yeah. Why was the music bursting? What was in the air or the water that things happened? Well, what was in the air was the Beatles. And just growing from 14 to 16, I had gone to Sweden for a couple of months while my parents traveled all over the world and they were going to Russia on a sightseeing tour and they used to leave me at home. They never invited me. Still pissed. But this time, they sent me with a friend to Sweden who was Swedish. And Sweden's youth culture was considerably more advanced as was England's than what was going on in the United States. The beat generation had come to an end and there was this transitionary period between beat and hippie exemplified by people like Ed Sanders and a group called the Fugs who also had a bookstore down in the PSI bookstore was Ed Sanders bookshop and he ran a magazine called Fuck You, a journal of the arts, a journal of the arts. The East Village Other had begun and it was around Tumkin Square. And so when I was 15, I ventured out of my little town, Stuyvesant town across 14th Street to Avenue A's, B and C alphabet city and there was a mixture of junkies and hippies. It was not a safe place to be but at the same time there was an incursion of younger people who were looking for cheap places to live. Nobody had locks on their doors because the junkies would get in anyway. So one of my close friends, my mentor, who I write about in the book, had an apartment where he just left the door and window open so that they could come in take what they needed and leave. Being born middle class and a little bougie in Stuyvesant town, I thought that was not the right thing to do. But he was, he came from elsewhere outside of New York and he became friends with a lot of these gang kids. In the book you talk about kind of escaping in a way. It's kind of the last gasp of straight America, right? Of pre-technicolor 60s America. What was the school you went to and your lovely hair that's in your cover photo was shorn off. Tell that story and what did that signify? Well, to tell that story I have to first say that when I was 11 and a half I was taken to NYU to be tested and I was given a TAT test, thematic apperception test. And unlike a raw shock test it's not about interpretation, it's about narrative. And they show you pictures, very detailed black and white pictures of scenes that are happening and apparently they put certain items in the picture that are supposed to trigger a response. Well, I saw a picture of a guy with his hand over his head and behind him was a naked woman in bed, looked like she had been strangled. Now this isn't a kind of picture you showed to an 11 and a half year old because I couldn't stop laughing. And the grad student who was conducting the test couldn't stop writing notes in his yellow pad. And it turned out that test sealed my fate to go to boys school because I was too precocious when all I was was naive and young and stupid. So I went to a boys prep school that was attached to the YMCA up in the 60s on the west side near the park called McBurney. And the first year was okay because I kind of bought into the conformity that they had. We wore uniforms and joined sports teams. The thematic aptitude testers or the whole barrage of tests suggested I needed physical activity and to go into sports otherwise I would turn out to be a serial killer or something. So I went to this school, I bought into their thing and then that's when I went to Sweden for a while. When I came back I was radicalized, had lived with a communist family among other families and I just saw this different world. I even changed my name to what it is now. And when I went back to the school there was a dean of discipline and he would measure people's hair when you walked in for the first bell. And my hair even though I had trimmed it was still pretty long. And so he sent me to a barber for a cut three times and each time I came back it wasn't short enough. So punitively he sent me to the YMCA barber and he and the barber and the gym teacher stood around while they shorn all my hair off and I looked kind of like I do now. That just sent me into a psychological downturn. I went home, I was truly depressed, my parents sympathized but my mother had never liked my hairstyles and was very controlling about her or tried to be. And their solution was to get me a hat. But I had an uncle who said if I didn't go into some sort of therapy I would probably break down the way I felt and I felt my whole individuality was taken away from me even though I was wearing what an educator later called the uniform of alienation. But I preferred the uniform with long hair and beads to no hair and a varsity letter sweater. So that kind of just threw me into a tizzy and I started drawing pictures, very disturbing pictures that my therapist really fell in love with because I was a textbook study for her and those pictures ended up getting me into the underground press because I sold some to different outlets and it also got me out of the school. My father who, we didn't agree on the war issues and other aspects of patriotism, but he was kind enough to go further than he had to to get me out of that environment and put me in a progressive school called Walden where teachers were called by their first names and you could wear anything you wanted and you could express yourself and it changed my life considerably. Why did the boomer generation become individualists? On mass, obviously there's a lot of contradictions here but you were raised by people who were, early boomers were raised by people who had grown up lucky to survive the depression, World War II oftentimes and then kind of moved into a large scale level of middle class wealth or rising wealth but typically my parents lived conformist lives. Why did their children become these monsters who were wearing long hair and love beads? Well, I think it's different for different cultures. We lived in New York City. Your folks were in Hell's Kitchen. My folks were in Stuyvesant Town. Living in New York City, you're a different breed. It's an island off of America. Even though my parents were conformists, they were Jews so that they were discriminated against. They were the children of immigrants so that they had to succeed because that's what their parents wanted them to be and do and while they were liberal enough not to impose too many restrictions, it's all contextual. I felt that I was being confined by their own history. If I didn't go to college, I would be a failure. If I didn't get good grades, I wouldn't be able to go to college. It was a chain reaction. Most people who lived in New York, I think in a middle class environment, rebelled against the middle class environment that it felt privileged on one hand and not privileged enough on the other hand. I think this is also true for Native New Yorker kids who were within that milieu. I knew a lot of kids whose parents were famous. I knew a lot of kids who went into show business. I wanted to be an actor so I went on auditions. Many of my friends went to professional children's school. Many of them ended up as druggies and all sorts of things. I somehow managed to avoid drugs of any kind including grass. Except now I use CBD on my legs because I have arthritis. But I think when you have too little, you rebel and when you have too much, you rebel. And even when you have just enough, my father and I would argue over certain issues of politics. But at the same time, he never voted the Democratic party. He voted the liberal line, which I don't even think you can do anymore. My mother hated the way my hair looked before I started growing it out when I had a pompadour and a duck's ass. And she hated it when it was long and was embarrassed by it. In that seam of the 60s, where it's 66, so it's not quite the 60s, but it's clearly not the 50s anymore. And in New York, and you're talking about a place like Tompkins Square, or even I guess Washington Square by that point, was there a sense that the one version of the city or one version of the country was dying and something new was being born? Or was there something beautiful in the mushroom that was Tompkins Square Park where it's a bunch of hippies and a bunch of drug addicts and muggers? And that's what was good? Or was it that this was the soil in which something new was coming to it? Well, I really had no sense of that. I just had the sense that there was something that I saw in a different country that made me want to be like them. Coming back to New York, I had to disguise myself. I had the long hair and all that. In order to get out of Stuyvesant town, I'd have to put it under my collars or pull it back in a ponytail and hide the ponytail because literally people would come up to me and start pulling on the hair. I mean, there was this real dichotomy between an alternate culture and what seemed to be the mainstream culture. And just by virtue of trying to walk from A to B, literally A to B, Avenue A to Avenue B, I had to become a different person. And is it at all ironic, Sweden, when people think of conformity, like all Swedes think the same, they all look the same, they're all named Lars? I didn't meet any Lars's. Okay. Although my godson, who I haven't seen in 50 years, is named Lars. Well, maybe it's time you get in touch with him. Talk about the publications that started coming out. What was going on where there was this profusion of alternative media in the mid to late 60s? Obviously, alternative newspapers, The Village Voice was founded in the mid 50s, right? So you mentioned the East Village Other. What was that? And where was the energy that was driving that kind of publication? Well, there was a Bohemian culture. And there was a Greenwich Village that was straight and narrow and it was represented by the villager. So The Village Voice was the alternative to that, was Mailer. What's his name from other scenes? John Wilcock and one other partner, Ned Hentoff. Yeah, thank you. And Ed Fancher. And so there was the beginning of this Bohemianness. Jules Pfeiffer was my hero. I later became friend and an editor on one of his books. There was a need to break away from a generation. And it was like the old left and the new left. Lots of the old left became part of the Irving Crystal commentary crowd and turned right. I think it was just an inevitable wave that kind of took over the same way, you know, there was a split in the Communist Party between those who believed in the non-aggression pact with Germany and those who couldn't tolerate it. There was something going on. And I'm not even sure what it is at that time in 1965-66. But there were representatives of a different mindset. And I think for me it was governed by television. You know, when I saw Hugh Hefner's late night show and he would have Lenny Bruce on it, that seemed so different than watching Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan. And there was just this cultural wave that kind of moved through TV despite itself. Was the counterculture at that point or as you were experiencing, was it a self-conscious, you know, it's a counterculture. It was, you know, the opposite, right? Of, you know, Lenny Bruce is the opposite of a Red Skelton or something like that. Were you conscious of that as like whatever they are doing, I'm going to do the opposite and that will make sense? Well, yeah, it's, it's, I'm the enemy of, there's a phrase that I used to use. I support anything that the enemy opposes and I oppose anything that the enemy supports. Jinzai Mao. And it was just a kind of sound, you know. I used to wear a button that somebody just found for me called Enemy of the State. And I remember my parents getting all freaked out when they saw it, you know, that somehow I would be busted for it. You know, they came out of McCarthy. McCarthy was an era that changed a lot of people's lives for the worst and caused other people to change their lives and hide. Just as, you know, names changed to avoid being considered a Jew or a Catholic or whatever. Let's talk about some of the characters in your book. You, you kind of go through and throw out any ones that I don't mention. But I guess let's start with Al Goldstein. Because Al Goldstein is somebody who, well, who was Al Goldstein? Well, first of all, does anybody know who Al Goldstein was? Okay, Al Goldstein was a dirtier Lenny Bruce. And even less funny. No, quite honestly, he was funny as hell. I met Al Goldstein when I was 17 years old. He had been working for a company that produced national inquirer type newspapers. They were all about blood and guts, murder and sexuality, not sexuality, I'm sorry, murder and crime. They wouldn't touch sex. They thought that was dirty. But icepicked murders were just fine and dandy. And Goldstein used to write stories for them, where he'd put all our names in it. So I must have icepicked about two or three people in my time. He found that to be total hypocrisy. He was a very complicated person. He was an industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation. And that's how we met. He came into the office of the New York Free Press, and he wanted to whistle blow. And he wrote a story that I did a cover for. I was an industrial spy, two-part series. What was the Bendix Corporation? The Bendix Corporation was some sort of war material corporation, chemical corporation that produced stuff that was used during the Vietnam War, whether it was napalm or some sort of machinery, I don't remember. But he was tasked to find secrets. Before that, he was a street photographer. He actually worked with... Who is the guy? Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea? Edward Murr. Walter Winchell. Thank you. He was an assistant. I'm going to have to have you stand next to me. He was an assistant to him, monitoring the police bans. Oh, so he would go out whenever there was some kind of terrible accident? Yeah, kind of like Ouija. And his father was that also for the New York Murr. So he had this strange upbringing. In the book, I recount that when he was younger, he was a bed wetter, and he was overweight. And his mother took him to a doctor, and he later found out she was having an affair with the doctor. He just was totally messed up. But he was totally messed up with a great sense of humor. And it's as if you made a Frankenstein's monster by taking a libido, taking self-pity and self-effacement, and throwing it all together with other personality flaws and deficits. And you come up with a guy who was really basically a comedian, who wrote very funny stuff. And with an editor, he could have been a really funny writer, who had this brilliant idea to kind of commercialize sex, to say Playboy has become too tame. Esquire gave sex up. The men's magazines were just bad copies of Playboy, Escapade, the like. And he went down and dirty and started a sex paper. Which was called Screw. Which was called Screw the Sex Review. I know when I started reading, I guess, The Village Voice in the 70s, when they would show porno ads, they would always say like four stars, and they wouldn't write Screw, they would write Al Goldstein's man. Because even then, there's a little bit of it. He had something called the Peter Meter. So they'd do four Peters, two or whatever. So what was Al Goldstein doing hiring a 17-year-old kid to be his art director? I happened to be there. I left high school, graduated, somewhere there's a diploma. And I was encouraged by an art teacher at Walden, who seemed to have the same cloud over his head as I had over mine. And he encouraged me to take my work around. And I got a gig at an underground paper called The Avatar, where they used a number of my drawings, which were mostly Christ figures with long hair, beards, and no genitals. And they were doing Christ-like things, like being crucified, which seemed like an interesting thing to draw. So like Jesus, you were another Jew with a Jesus complex? I didn't have a Jesus complex. I felt Jesus had a heller complex. And I guess it's time to point out that in the book, you reproduced that thematic appercession test photo or drawing that started it all. And it's a perfectly happy couple. I'm joking. So what did you do for Screw then? Well, Screw was being founded at our typesetting machine. Our managing editor was also our typesetter. And he and Al would go over his copy as it came off. It was called an MTST IBM Selectric System. It used the round balls that the IBM Selectric type writers used to use, but it was run by a magnetic tape. And they just started talking. My office was adjacent to the typesetting machine. And I didn't know what they were talking about. And then I think it was Jim Buckley, who he was talking to stuck his head in my office and said, you want to paste up a magazine? And I said, sure, because I didn't know what I was doing anyway the free press. I had gotten that job on the sly. And I did the first issue of Screw, which is in one of those slides. We'll show those in a second. Talk a little bit about the free press. The New York Free Press. What was it free of? It was free of hard news. It was actually the local village voice at one point. It was the West Side News. And the person who became the publisher took it over from the people who owned the West Side News, changed the name, hired a legitimate editor who was also a bartender at the 55, which is next to the Stonewall. This was before the Stonewall happened. And he was editor of Arts Magazine. But something happened and he was no longer editor of Arts Magazine. So he was kind of like an interesting character. He looked a lot like Ernest Hemingway. He was older than the rest of us, but older than just meant he was in his 30s. And he had a newsy intuition. So he wanted to make a paper that was a muckraking journal. He wanted two stories that weren't being covered by the New York Times. He would have been very happy doing the Pentagon Papers. But instead he did local news that didn't make it into the Metro section. And some of it was for real. And some of it, I'm sure the writers made up. A lot of the fake news that went into these publications turned out to be true, which was the irony. I mean... Can you give an example of that? Well, Nixon was, once he came into office, was attacked on a regular basis for things that were speculative. His incursion into Cambodia and things like that. And what was going on with the CIA on campuses. And these were things that weren't being proven in publications like the New York Times. But there were publications like Ramparts and Evergreen, where they were, in fact, covering these stories. And the Free Press wanted to cover similar stories. And if they didn't have the story, they would make it up. Well, they would make it up. It wasn't as crass as that. They would piece together bits of information. Like one of the stars of the paper was the guy who was the... Mark Lane, who was the Kennedy conspiracy theorist. And his theories were not all that out of keeping with the truth. I mean, the answers haven't been found yet. He was certainly right to question. He was right to question them. But also we had on our... As a contributing editor, Eric Bentley, who was the Brecht translator, and he ran a club called the DMZ, Uptown. Gregory Badcock was our art critic, and he was pretty important for contemporary art. Roger Greenspun, who was also a film critic later at the Times. Did you have a sense of anything being possible? Because in part of the book, it's almost like you would go out on a random walk and you would stumble across somebody who was just either living a bizarre lifestyle or starting something that would become meaningful. Everybody could do anything. I mean, there's a section in the book where I talk about our dealings with the mob. I was so young, I didn't know to be afraid of these guys, who were our distributors, basically. And they were the distributors for screw magazines. They were the distributors for all the underground papers. And then screw published magazine for a while called The Mobster Times. We published Mobster Times. I was a co-publisher of that. Which was being distributed by the mob. No, that was being distributed by Curtis, which distributed Saturday Evening Post. But they were going downhill at the time, and they needed some other properties. And they took on our Mobster Times thinking that they wouldn't have to spend much money because they weren't going to invest much. But it would be a publication that would turn out to be something like the National Lampoon. They were wrong. And they ultimately folded us. But The Mobster Times was supposed to be kind of an ironic title. It dealt with major criminals like J. Edgar Hoover. While it also dealt with, we had a two-part series with Gay to Least talking about The Mob. So there was a certain legitimacy, at least what we thought was legitimate, and there was a certain fantasy that we engaged in. How important to the broad kind of alternative media world or the world of the sixth season that was emerging? How important was irony? Irony was the basis for everything. It was the crust of the pie. Goldstein was living his life in reality, but it was all based on irony. When he would go out on a date, he would carry a medical bag with him. And had all these sex toys in it. And he knew that it was ridiculous. But he did it. So there was this kind of crossing the line from irony into reality. And that seemed to be a big part of the counter thing, right? Because Eisenhower in the 50s to simplify everything, they were not ironic. They were what they said they were. No, there was no irony that I could discern. I mean, there was comedy. There were sitcoms. There was A Dream of Genie. There was Mr. Ed. But you wouldn't turn to those now as being the height of... It wasn't the Marx Brothers. And I guess Mad Magazine is kind of one of the active ingredients. Mad Magazine is the God in it. It started in the 50s and is deeply ironic in an America that plays it pretty straight. It was very progressive for a time when we were terrified of the Red Scare, terrified by the Red Scare. And of course, Mad Magazine had to change its format because of congressional investigations and the comics code that was imposed on all comics. That you couldn't have sex. You couldn't have violence. You couldn't have unpatriotic messages. You couldn't have soldiers that committed atrocities. You couldn't have a lot of things that would make kids stay up late at night and need psychopharmaceuticals. So let's... And I want to go through some of the pages that you include in the book and just talk about what they represent. But before we do that, tell us briefly who Mel Lyman was and what was your interaction with him? Well, Mel Lyman was a cult figure from Boston. And when you say a cult figure, you're not saying he's like a cult filmmaker. He's not kind of an anchor. He actually ran a cult. He was like Jim Jones. He ran a cult. Somehow he had money because he had a house in Boston, as far as I know. I never went up there. But he had a townhouse on 15th Street off of Seventh Avenue. He had followers. He had a band. He ran the underground paper, The Avatar. He had a charismatic following, which is why they took my drawings, my Christ-like drawings, because they felt it was consistent with his Christ-like embodiment. Is that the flip side of the individualism that was kind of pushing up in the 60s? I mean, you have people who are individuals, and then it seems you couldn't swing a dead cat in New York or LA or San Francisco or anywhere without hitting an occult leader? Well, that's what I meant by the uniform of alienation. Everything was somewhat conformist, but conformist to a counterculture. So Lyman was certainly one of those kind of dangerous characters. I mean, I contrast him to Goldstein because Goldstein never tried to create a cult. He just tried to create an audience. And there's a difference between followers and an audience. But there was certainly a lot of that going on, whereas Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, as iconoclastic and individualistic as they seemed, wanted people to follow them into the breach. And because of my upbringing in Stuyvesantown, I think I was a little more pragmatic than most of my colleagues. The first time I could vote, I voted for Hubert Humphrey. Everybody else was voting for peace and freedom and Eldridge Cleaver, and I knew that wasn't going to happen. And I also knew from being around my father and mother that Nixon was not going to be the best thing for the country. So I always took a kind of pragmatic approach to my undergrounding, which is kind of like, I'm not a religious Jew, but I'm a cultural Jew. So I wasn't a religious hippie, but I was a cultural hippie. Who was Brad Holland and why is he important? Brad Holland is one of the greatest post Rockwellian illustrators in the United States. And he had worked at Hallmark Cards and wanted something better for himself. He was from Arkansas and Ohio, and he was, you know, a midwesterner who came to New York like so many other people did. But he answered an ad in the Village Voice that I had put in for a magazine that I was starting. Once I had two or three months into being at the Free Press, I figured I knew everything. So I could start my own magazine. I had a friend whose father was a printer. He was also an anti-Semite and a drunkard, but he had a full package. But he also had this printing firm, and he didn't give it to me for free, but he gave me a discount and I used my bar mitzvah money to pay for it. The only thing he insisted was I couldn't put in any political ads. He was, he would have been a Trump person at this stage if he was alive. But I did put this magazine together, and Brad Holland answered the ad and brought in with him this wealth of experience, which basically was my graduate school and doctoral program in graphic design. And what was the name of this publication? Borrowed Time. It was again my youthful innocence. I felt we all lived. I read a lot of existential stuff at that time in Russian literature in my bathroom, and I absorbed all of these cliches of existentialism and Sartre and Camus, and I wanted to make a magazine that was as depressing. Is Brad Holland, is he still alive? Yeah. Okay. And is his journey kind of from the Midwest, or from, you know, Arkansas and Ohio to New York, from hallmark cards to alternative press, is there, is that emblematic of what was going on in America or for a good chunk of it? Well, there was a lot of, it was a magnet, you know. Like some of the music, people came to New York looking for another way of living. He came to New York, and he settled in on the Lower East Side. He ended up getting work with Playboy, where he worked, had a column, a ribo classics. He worked for Avant Garde magazine for the great art director Herb Blue-Ballon. He became a regular on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He was copied by many, many, many people to the extent that they kind of diffused some of his work through bad copies and some good copies. He has always been true to himself. He taught me not only how to do things that I absorbed a lot by osmosis, but what to read, how to think, as an art director. And he was an occult figure. He was just who he was, and I was lucky enough to be in his path as I was growing up. I'm going to try and grab my computer and see if I can reach, and we're going to run through some of the slides that you have in the book. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about this? I mean, first, let's start with that New York free press. That's an incredible page. That was an ad for a benefit that we had. So, at the Fillmore East, a famous venue, no longer extant. What kind of world are we in where, you know, it's a benefit with Norman Mailer, Charles Mingus, the Fugs? Well, before I entered the world, I didn't have any idea who these guys were. Once I entered the world, I was introduced to them. And I found out how significant they were in that period of culture between 1949 and 1963 or four. And Mailer gave this amazing talk that everybody hated, because he was more misogynistic than anybody could have imagined. And he just stood on the stage and he confronted the audience. It was really quite amazing to see. And I never liked Mailer, personally. But it was a little piece of history that was never recorded. It must have been 69 or so. So, talk about Screw Magazine then. Well, also, let me just say something about Charlie Mingus. His wife, who just passed away about a month ago, Susan Mingus, she was our advertising salesperson. So we shared an office together. And I didn't know who Charlie Mingus was. I wasn't a jazz person. My uncle was a very big jazz person and started introducing me to jazz artists, records at any rate. So I had no idea that Mingus was a genius. He had stopped playing two years prior to this. And he was courting Susan, who, and they would constantly be at war with each other. So I became Susan Mingus' beard. Her name was Angaro at the time. And Charlie would call up, Charles would call up and ask for her. And I would always have to say she wasn't there. And that's when I started developing pseudonyms. Because he would say, who's this? And I would give a name. Like, for some reason, I came up with John Bingham, very white bread name. And every so often, he'd come up to the office and Susan would somehow miraculously not be there. And one time he came up and he was just so pissed that he couldn't reach her. He put his fist, which is three times as big as mine, maybe four, because I have tiny hands like Trump, through the wall next to my head. I was a little nervous. This page kind of mailer Mingus, they're old, though, right? I mean, they're not hippies. They're culture. They're from the earlier, the older left. Yeah. And then the fugs kind of get there. The fugs are there and the fugs, they're like a transitional life form from beat next into hippies, beat next into hippies. And they had, they were a music rock group, and they were called the fugs based on Norman Mailer's. Fug you because he couldn't use the word fuck. Yeah, and the naked in the dead. And right, there's the great Dorothy Parker quote that when she met Norman Mailer, the naked in the dead was the great war novel of World War II. And she said, Oh, you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck. Right. Screw magazine, speaking of fucking. What is going on with that? That looks like a terrible magazine. It wasn't very well put together. The logo was handed to me by Goldstein. He had some friend of his do it. I think the friend had no arms and no legs. But this the penis there is trying to be ironic. The irony comes into the woman holding the salami, you know, it's like the train going into a tunnel. I put the hand with the finger or whatever is in his finger on to the salami thinking that was would be clever way of putting in headlines. And then at the last minute, we decided we should put a warning label on so kids wouldn't buy it. And what happened was with this issue, they printed a few thousand and Jim and Al distributed themselves. They brought it to all these news dealers. And in those days, you had to be a veteran to be a news dealer in New York. And many of them were disabled and quite a few of them had no sight. They were sight impaired. And the cops were told to go out and confiscate all of this stuff and arrest some of the news dealers just to scare them off. And some of the news dealers they arrested were blind. And that made it into the papers that blind news dealers were being arrested for stuff they couldn't even they didn't even know what was there. The New York review of sex after six issues of the free press of the screw. Goldstein wanted a new logo. And I didn't know how to make a logo. I didn't know as you can see, I didn't know how to paste up a newspaper. But I started drawing a logo that would never have worked because it was too big. And Goldstein called me up at home. I was living at home. And he said, I've got one. We're going to use it. I don't care what you're doing. He could get nasty. And I left the in tears basically my job with him. He and Jim Buckley moved out and got an office on Union Square. And the publisher and the editor of the free press and I started the New York review of sex as a vengeance paper. We were getting back at the first act of revenge porn. First act of revenge porn. Yes. It was funded by Grove Press for the first issue. And then they saw what we were doing and they said, we don't want any part of this. Here are two magazines such worked on. Is this the first issue of interview? No, interview existed for at least a year before I came on board. What was the interview in this iteration? Interview was the same as it is now, except not as extensive. I mean, what it was was somebody would start writing about a movie or two. This issue was devoted to death in Venice. As far as I know, Warhol saw it, but he never saw the layouts before they went to press. And I worked with Bob Colicello who ended up at Vanity Fair and Glen O'Brien who ended up also at Vanity Fair. I guess here this, how does this photograph kind of describe what was going on in the culture, which by that point was kind of synonymous with counterculture? Well, every underground political paper like Rat or the Free Press or the East Village Other, you see a little bit of that sticking out, or other scenes, which was John Wilcox publication, produced a sex paper because the majority of money that came into any of these papers. First were the record companies, and second were porn ads for either porn films or classifieds for hookers. And eventually, the New York Free Press gave up, passed the baton on to the New York Review of Sex, Kiss belonged to the East Village Other, and the four, and there was one called Pleasure, which I think is there. Pleasure was Rat's paper before women took over Rat, feminists ultimately took over Rat. And then there were some slicker publications like Evergreen Review, which also had a sexual component, but it was more literary and... And that was published by Grove. That was Grove Press, and I was the art director of that in its last incarnation. And that, I mean, among other things, there was a special issue devoted to Last Tango in Paris. It was a special issue devoted to Last Tango. Was there a sense, which was a movie that came out, you know, that was considered so out there, it got an X rating? I mean, was there a sense that like everything, like nothing was impermissible? Well, Grove Press started its rise with the film I Am Curious Blue. Yellow. Yellow. But there was also an I Am Curious Blue, I think. But the I Am Curious Yellow went to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court then determined that pornography was community standards. So Grove won this huge case, which opened the doors to everything. Television was still sanctified, and there was no such thing as cable. And the idea of pay TV was being tossed around. But the idea that all of this stuff would turn into HBO was not in anybody's consciousness. Let's go through a couple others, and then we'll open it up for questions. There's the irony, right? And for those of you who know who Milton Glaser was, who passed away two years ago, he did that logo. With the with the upturned, with the Peroni's disease penis, right? That we have all learned about thanks to the Clinton administration. But here's the irony, right? That Betty Boop, what a cartoon character from the 30s, highly sexualized, became an icon to the counterculture. Right. And if we did this today, we'd probably be slapped with a number of copyright infringements. Well, that's Ed Surrell. And as you can see, there's the only sex is coming from the tape recorder, presumably Richard Nixon. And these are the missing 26 or 28 minutes. And that's Judge Sirica listening to the tape. The joke is he's hanging out with BB Robozo, his buddy. Oh, this is Kusama. Can you explain what the hell this is? And I'd say I'm a little bit offended. I don't know what this is, but What offends you, the masks or the fact that it's Hans Christian Anderson? Well, it's stunning to see actual penises, right? Oh, yeah. I didn't notice that. Yayoi Kusama is now considered one of the great artists of the 21st 20th and late 20th, 21st century. She when I knew her, she was selling us pictures of her artwork, her happenings that were orgies. She was the polka dot queen of the world. And she made soft sculptures that looked like potatoes and or phallic symbols. And she would hire hippies mostly to put on masks or not, as the case may be, and run around with polka dots all over their bodies, naked, usually in public places. And she provided us with so many pictures that if I kept them, I'd be rich right now. But it went to the Woody Allen joke about the guy who thought he was a chicken. Why didn't you put him in an institution? Well, we needed the eggs. We thought she was crazy, but we needed the pictures. Well, she lives in a mental institution, but on her own terms, she could leave whenever she wants. She leaves whenever she wants. It's across the street from her studio. Here's a couple of his fellow jothers, but let's we'll go to questions in a second. I guess one of the things that I want to ask you that is, you know, what what we're seeing here in your book is kind of that great weirdening of America, where, you know, suddenly you went 10 years before, you know, 1906 and 1970 are kind of like different planets. Something broke open, you know, a Pandora's Box of all sorts of things. Is there is there an underground now or a counter culture if there isn't the same kind of repressive culture that you grew up out of? Well, I think the repressive culture has been minimized or changed. There are still taboos, but the underground now are the militias and the survivalists and the anti-Semites and the anti and the white supremacists who had always been underground, but fortunately way underground, but like cicadas, they come out every seven years. And the left has kind of become ineffectual. Student populations are not organized. We don't have a war that we're all fighting against. You know, the idea of patriotism now is so mixed. You know, we're talking about democracy as being at risk and that's bringing some people together, at least rhetorically. But, you know, next Tuesday we might not be sitting here so happy. I'm confident that America will be just as awful after Tuesday as it is now. I think it could be much more awful. Can I ask you about sex in contemporary culture? Because the 60s and certainly your work in underground alternative publications were synonymous with sex, with showing naked bodies, with orgies. You know, things like Last Tango in Paris is, you know, still kind of a shocking movie because of its frankness about sexuality. That seems to have gone missing. Certainly on the left, you don't hear, nobody is a sexual liberationist anymore. No, because it's become part of life. I mean, I'm still kind of shocked by what does go on on HBO and elsewhere. You know, Playboy doesn't show sex images anymore. And it's not like they became born again Christians. It's just, it wasn't selling. And sex scandals are no longer scandals. They're just voyeuristic entertainments. You left this world behind and fell into a ring of hell known as the New York Times. Can you just very briefly... For me, it was a ring of heaven. Yeah. How did that happen? And what was the, what's the through line in terms of working at alternative places and then ending up at the New York Times, which is, is the culture? The through line is knowing how to put a newspaper together. It was as simple as that. I was hired by Lou Silverstein, who was the great redesigner of the New York Times, a terrific art director. He saw in my portfolio a whole bunch of screw pages, but they were well laid out. And the typography was great. By the time I went back to screw after going to some other papers and learning the craft, he hired me for that. He hired me because he was had a sense of humor because he saw that I had a passion for publications. And, you know, my highest goal in life was to work for the New York Times. And although there are many people who I was not very happy with, I mentioned one of them in the book, there were others who were just terrific to be around and to learn from and, you know, to be in an office and have brand name intellects, walking in and talking candidly. I mean, the Times was still full of taboos and still is full of taboos. I mean, only recently did I read in the New Yorker the word fuck. They finally learned how to spell it. FUG, right? Right. Yeah. It's just pronounced oddly. And you were at the New York Times book review for decades. 30 years or so. Is it fair to say that, I mean, essentially what happened is the counterculture, you know, it pushed back against the culture and then it became the culture. I mean, in terms of the aesthetics of it's inevitable. I mean, when I when Rolling Stone first came out, which is another place I wanted to work, except I didn't want to go out to California because California is going to fall into the sea. They were doing things with photographs that were not being done. I learned later that it was done in the 30s, but silhouetting photographs and all of a sudden the Times started doing that. So the Times picked up younger designers and actually had designers when before it didn't. So those of us who got older, I mean, I left the underground because I used to hang out at Hilly Crystal's Bar. I didn't drink or I drank very little, but I hung out there. And when he started CBGBs he took me over to show me the place. And I thought it was the most disgusting joint I'd ever been in, particularly the bathroom. So it was time for me to get a suit and tie and trim my hair. Before we go to questions, you know, you've kind of described a kind of dialectical movement of there's culture, counterculture, you know, the thesis antithesis becomes a new synthesis. Is that liberating? Or is that just kind of the same old, same old? Or is the room for something that, where the counterculture is not, you know, being against the man, it's saying, like, I don't care what you're doing. And I'm just moving out to the frontier, building Burning Man, or I'm just doing my own thing. Or is that, is it never really, it never really... Well, Burning Man has become mainstream. Yeah. Everything gets co-opted. And if you can be a co-opter, you can somehow chop off the prefix and be an opter, an operator within your frame. I mean, if I were still back in those days, I would be a basket case now, you know. And I've, there was a reunion a few years ago of the East Village Other. It's on the web. There was an NYU project on the Lower East Side. And all of these, you know, I was always the youngest, or at least the second youngest person in all of this goings-on. And the older ones are in their 70s and 80s. And they were still hippies. There's something embarrassing about that. All right. Let's, if you have a question, here, can I come over to you and ask you to... Can you stand up, Gene? Well, thank you for your recollection of all the nostalgic moments for me, older than you, and been in New York since 1967. And before I get to my question, I want to file just a couple of brief comments, that to those who, to those who say that Lenny Booth is not funny, he was hilarious in his day. We laughed at him in his day. And I admit, though, he's not funny now. Oh, I thought he was funny when I was, I thought he was funny. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. And then in 1906, but then, but similarly, to read up to my question, in 1968, I want to file the fact I'm reading partisan review, and there's a long excerpt from a forthcoming novel, and it's about masturbation. And it's brilliant writing by Philip Roth, and it remains brilliant, but it's still a little bit sophomoric to this day. But that leads to my question. Ironically, perhaps the best, the best reception of recognition of the 1960s was that Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. The guy of the 60s and the 70s wins the Nobel Prize, and Philip Roth is the nut he wins. And, but then my question is, what do you think aesthetically and otherwise, you've commented a little bit, was positive about the long run influences of this time, and then more difficult, what you have in common, what are some of the negatives about the long run influences of this time? Thank you. Well, the long run influences, personally, was that my mind was opened up, and it didn't have to be opened up by drugs. I mean, Philip Roth is one of my favorite authors. Bob Dylan is one of my favorite songwriters. I'm reading his book right now on the psychology of the popular song, which actually, I'm halfway through, and I got up to Ricky Nelson, and his take on Ricky Nelson is just marvelous. I think what the 60s did was open up horizons of intellectual possibility, entertainment, possibilities, and experiences. We still have show tunes, but we also have other kinds of plays. May I ask, were there Broadway musicals like Book of Mormon? No. It was Hair. Well, Hair was in the late 60s. Hair was that transitional point where you wondered whether it was being co-opted or not. And there was Laugh-in, which did all those psychedelic numbers, but also took potshots at government policies. And could, excuse me, Monty Python, but England was another case altogether. What about the negatives? Are there negative kind of aesthetics that came out of the 60s, or a legacy of the counterculture? Well, I think the negatives are the drug culture. I mean, I'm not against taking recreational drugs, if that's what you want to do, but I think it became too much of a cult culture. The commune culture was not really all that positive. I know a lot of people who went through it and got messed up because of it. I mean, what you were talking about before, not being able to throw a cat around without hitting a cult. A friend of mine was a Sullivanian, but he was also a hippie before he was a Sullivanian. So that was the kind of gateway movement to the cults. And I think there are still folks who subscribe to that. And some of them have just turned off entirely. I mean, I wasn't that fond of turn on, turn off, drop out. I didn't think that was the best of all slogans. Okay. Other questions? Yes. If you're not too happy about big current countercultures like militias, are there at least small things that make you feel as excited as you were in the 60s that make you think, ah, these people still get it? This gives me hope. There's a future. Well, I'm not, I don't want to be facetious, but I really love BBC mysteries. I have, my life has devolved into, I can't walk very well because I've got an athritic leg. And so, and I can't sleep very well because I worry about the world blowing up. So instead, I watch BBC. So that's become my life, that and my son and my wife. Do you worry more about the world blowing up now than in 1968? No, no, it's the same. Okay. No, I used to dream mushroom clouds. I mean, remember, we had air aid drills every week. We are built, Stuyvesant town, every ground floor was up to the seventh floor. And we were on the seventh floor, had fallout shelter signs, which they've still, they won't take down now. There's still thousand of them left in New York City. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis vividly. And now I read books about how just one slip of the finger could have changed everything. And you see what's going on with the people who once we thought were comic book characters who were not comic book characters. So I'm as, I just know that, you know, I've got maybe another couple of decades at most. But I'm worried for my kid. I'm worried for his kids if he ever has any. Other questions? Hi, Steven, I have a question. When you were publishing taboo things in the 60s, did you feel a danger of repercussion for what you were printing? And the reason I asked that is because now we often talk about cancel culture or you lose your job because somebody is offended by what you've printed. Did you feel a similar danger then? Or was it we're basically untouchable except maybe polite people won't like us? Well, it's a great question. And I can go on for hours about it. So I will. You have nothing to do. There's nothing good on TV tonight. And I just heard about this BBC thing that I want to brush your teeth. You have to get grit box. I'm when when I was I was arrested twice. I was arrested when I was 17. And I missed Woodstock because of it. And I was arrested when I was 18, both on pornography charges. In both cases, I was taken to the tombs. In the first case, I was too young to be put in the pens with the other vagrants and drunks and criminals. So I was put in with the prostitutes and I found that they liked me. The second time was less fun because I was 18. So they put me in actual lock up. Other than that, I was too naive to be afraid of anything. I was I thought what we were doing could have repercussions, but not in the immediate repercussions and certainly not further down in my life. I felt that this was America. And there were lawyers and there were safeguards. And the one thing I was afraid of was going into the army. So I got many different deferments. And I was also one a when lottery came. And that was the thing that scared me most. But today, I feel like much more constricted. You know, when I put this book together, I felt I should limit the number of screw images that I would show. Because people in cancel culture go back 25, 30, 40, 50 years to root out the enemy. And so I'm not a big fan of cancel culture. I am a big fan of the First Amendment. Do your students, I mean, you've been on the faculty of the School for Visual Arts or School of Visual Arts for a long time. Do you feel like are your students inhibited by that as well? Or have they grown up in a world where they're not even thinking about screw magazines? Well, it's interesting that you ask that because the demographic of our student body has changed to a great extent. And one of the changes is we have a lot of Chinese students from the People's Republic of China who are subject to some very harsh penalties should they be caught doing things that they're not supposed to do according to government rules. So I'm very careful not to give them assignments. I teach a class on propaganda. And I'm very careful not to give them assignments that might cause them harm. And it's, we've never proven this in School of Visual Arts, but it's been discussed amongst faculty in lots of different schools that there are Chinese agents who are also students, but they will report back. So it's, we're very circumspect. Then there's also the DEI stuff. That's diversity. Equity and inclusion. How does that affect your artistic sensibilities or your practice? It doesn't affect my artistic sensibilities because I don't really have artistic sensibilities at the moment. But it does mean that we're always attuned to what we say and what we do. It doesn't squelch our freedoms, but it makes us more circumspect about our actions. So simple stuff, which is actually kind of common sensical. I don't close my door when I'm meeting with an individual, male, female, whatever. I don't say things that I would say to friends or in public because I don't want to offend anybody. Do you feel that, you know, does that, is that filtering out into the culture and does it make it a less robust risk-taking culture or is that a loss that is easy to live with? Well, I think it's something that the right is caught on to and is where their counterculture begins. Our cancel culture is their meat. And we're not vegetarians yet. Not yet. I think we're going to leave it there. I want to thank Stephen Heller, the author of most recently your 201st book, Growing Up Underground. Actually, there are two others coming out next month. My God. It's like a bodily function. You could call it that. Thank you so much, Stephen Heller. And thank you all for coming out to the Reason Speekies. Thanks so much.