It’s hard for me now, sitting at this keyboard, to describe how exciting all of this was - yes, even to a cadet at West Point. The Voice would repeatedly beat back something called the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have run across Canal Street, devastating Little Italy and Chinatown and most of what would become SoHo, and the Voice backed a little known local politician named Ed Koch (who was also the Voice’s lawyer) in defeating the last Tammany Hall boss, Carmine DeSapio for district leader of Greenwich Village, giving life to reform politics in New York. What an exciting scene! Virtually everything was not just new, but brand new - the theater, the music, the dance, the clothes, the hair - oh, yes, the hair! - and the politics. There was a real community behind that story - the community that would help Joe rebuild his off-off Broadway venue where playwrights like John Guare, Tom Eyen, Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson would get their starts. I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to why I was so attracted to a gritty little newsweekly from Greenwich Village that was just beginning to cover - if not help to create - what was just becoming known as the “counterculture.” I think it goes back to that first issue I bought with Joe Cino on the cover. Marks Place and the Café au Go-Go, to listen to music on the rare occasions we got time off to go down to the city. When I got to West Point in 1965, I subscribed to the Voice and read it cover to cover every week, and followed its recommendations to go to places like the Five Spot on St. I took that copy of the Voice home with me at the end of the summer, and it sat on top of my dresser throughout my senior year in high school. It stayed there for the next two month, and as we were camping out along the roadside in our jungle hammocks, I would take out the Voice and re-read the story on Joe Cino and read the theater reviews by Michael Smith and the crazy Village goings-on chronicled in Howard Smith’s “Scenes” column. I read that copy of the Voice cover to cover and stuck it in one of the saddlebags on my bike as we headed west. Elsewhere in the paper there were ads for clubs on Bleecker and McDougal, featuring singers like Carolyn Hester and Tom Paxton and Fred Neil and Odetta and Bob Dylan. There was going to be a fundraiser for him, as I recall, at someplace called the Judson Church. The story said a committee had already been formed to take up a collection to help Joe rebuild. On the cover a Fred McDarrah photograph of Joe Cino standing in the middle of his burned out coffeehouse at 31 Cornelia Street, where people were putting on plays as part of something called off-off Broadway. Folksingers in pass-the-basket coffeehouses, street vendors selling sausage sandwiches for a quarter, crowds of babes in long hair and tight skirts and leather sandals, each one more mysterious looking than the last.Īnd over there at the newsstand, a paper that told you all about it - The Village Voice. So we gave up on the mess in Flushing and rode the subway to the Village. The Worlds Fair was a bust – insane crowds, oppressive heat and a blazing sun, absolutely no shade, and everything cost five times what it did a subway ride away in the city.

The World's Fair beckoned.įritz and I rode through eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and took a little steel truss bridge over to the Fresh Kills area of Staten Island, rode across the island, took the ferry to Manhattan and rode uptown to 32 nd Street, where we scored two single rooms at the Y for 75 cents a night. Fritz took a Greyhound from Kansas to meet up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where we began our journey by first riding east to New York City. My parents started sending my brother Frank and me across the country on Greyhound buses when I was 12 and Frank was 10. I was 17, Fritz was 16, and while 10-speed bikes were brand new on the American scene, the idea of turning a couple of teenagers loose like that for a summer wasn’t. My friend Fritz Lash and I were riding our 10-speed bikes across the country. I got my start at the Village Voice more than 50 years ago, and I’ve never told that story, so just for you, just this one time, here it is. The sad news last week that the venerable Village Voice will cease its newsprint edition and become an on-line only publication, not unlike Salon, brought back some memories.

The village voice returns its voicey