Open City No. 57 1968 – Bukowski Mick Jagger George Harrison Underground Paper

Description

Issue No. 57 of John Bryan’s great Los Angeles underground weekly is practically a time capsule of the city in June 1968. Charles Bukowski contributes another installment of his now-famous “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” work first reaching a substantial readership in the pages of Open City. Elsewhere are Alan Watts, an interview with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, coverage of the Watts Writers Workshop and Watts Theatre, and Barry Miles’s interview with Mick Jagger under the irresistible headline “I CAN’T SAY ‘FUCK OFF!’ TO EVERYONE.” The paper’s huge broadsheet format is part of the experience: after issue 52 Open City doubled in size, giving its psychedelic typography, illustrations and color printing an almost poster-like presence.

Just as good are the things nobody thought would become history: ads for Cream’s Wheels of Fire, Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida for $2.99, Judy Collins and Dave Van Ronk at the Troubadour, Howlin’ Wolf and John Hammond Jr. at the Ash Grove, the Cinema Theatre advertising The Queen, record shops on Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street, and the wonderfully seedy classified and entertainment advertising of late-1960s Los Angeles. Open City lasted only from 1967 to 1969, but became an important voice of the L.A. underground, mixing radical politics, sex, drugs, art, rock & roll and Bukowski on cheap newsprint that was never intended to survive another sixty years.

Bukowski, Jagger, Harrison, Ravi Shankar, Alan Watts—and the clubs, record stores, movies and street culture of Los Angeles in 1968. This is what an underground newspaper is supposed to look like.