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Both Sides Now Remembered: Or, The Once and Future Journal
- Michigan State University Press
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Both Sides Now Remembered: Or, The Once and Future Journal ELIHU EDELSON Part 1: The Original Historical Version from 1990 Both Sides Now (BSN) barely made the sixties. The first issue was dated November 29, 1969. Its banner headline reflected one of the Movement’s main concerns of the moment: “Paul McCartney Dead!” Two more issues managed to get squeezed in before the end of the decade. BSN’s original base, Jacksonville, Florida, was not the most fertile ground for an underground paper at the turn of the seventies. The city was ruled like a feudal fiefdom by a local machine that included the Florida Publishing Company, a monopoly that put out both the morning and evening papers. FPC, in turn, was owned by the Florida East Coast Railroad. Three nearby military bases contributed to the ultraconservative atmosphere. The St. Johns River and the intersection of Interstates 10 and 75 cut the community into pieces. Jacksonville University, a private institution, was far from a hotbed of student activism. In fact, its name appeared on a list of five hundred CIA-connected institutions circulated by the Yippies. The New Leftists could be counted on the fingers of one hand—a RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) Maoist and his wife, a couple of Trots (Trotskyites), and a few ACLU/Unitarian/ Democrat-type liberals. A handful of blacks sporting berets and leather jackets put together a local version of the Black Panthers under the name Florida Black Front. Some good rock bands—like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd—were to come out of Jax, but they had to make their names in Atlanta. So it is not surprising that, like many other events of the time, the counterculture came belatedly to Jacksonville. The Haight-Ashbury scene had already passed its peak by the time people were getting hassled for long hair in Jax. The heads—as potheads and acidheads called themselves—had set up crash pads where people could come down gently from bad acid trips, but the cops kept harassing them. The deep Southeast had a well-established and exemplary underground paper in Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird, and the Jacksonville hippies wanted a publication like that as a voice for their concerns. The Jacksonville hippies were always more an aggregation of people with related lifestyles than a coherent community. Because none of them had any journalistic experience, they went, naively, to an editor of the morning establishment paper, the Florida Times-Union, for advice. 370 | Elihu Edelson This is the point in the story of Both Sides Now where I got sucked in. I was an art teacher in the public school system at the time, but I also wrote a weekly column of art criticism as a stringer for the evening paper, the Jacksonville Journal. The counterculture had only recently entered my consciousness, as I began to pick up on the messages being communicated by rock groups like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Steppenwolf. My wife, Joan, and I were introduced to a speed freak who had done light shows for the Allman Brothers before they moved to Macon, Georgia, and he put me up to using my press credentials to get passes for the First Atlanta Pop Festival, with him as my photographer. I wrote a glowing review of the counterculture scene I saw there. So when the hippies went to that editor, he referred them to me. I didn’t know beans about the nuts and bolts of putting together a paper, but the husband of one of my art teacher colleagues was into small-scale tabloid publishing, and he taught us the basics. The first issues of BSN were hacked out on a number of manual typewriters, with lots of hand lettering. Despite the lead story about Paul McCartney, BSN’s first issue had a variety of serious material, including an antiwar sermon by the local Unitarian minister, reviews of Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant (by me), a drug rap interview with the vice-squad honcho, and items appealing to men from the naval bases who wore long-hair wigs when on shore leave. BSN was distributed from a combination wig and head shop. BSN came out every two weeks for several issues into 1970 before entropy began to set in. At first it was driven by high energy and a sense of wonder as we saw our typewriter-pounding, cutting, and pasting transformed by the miracle of offset lithography into a real publication. We...