The worst news, I’m afraid, confronts you right on the book’s cover. I can’t tell you how much I wish that Tricia Romano’s superb book came up with a better title than “The Freaks Came Out To Write” (Public Affairs, 608 pages, $35).
Keep your despair well-controlled though. The cover also tells you why it’s possible to consider Romano’s book one of the most enjoyable to come along in many months. That same cover also, claims that the book is “the definitive history of the Village Voice, the radical paper that changed American culture.”
Definitive? Definite overreach there. I’d leave it at “terrific.” As well as “irresistible” for anyone who ever enjoyed reading the Village Voice – or thinks they might have.
Which is an awful lot of people, the majority of whom never lived in Greenwich Village. The Voice was far too important and influential for that. It was probably the greatest example of the wild and woolly Alternative Press that once enlightened, amused and informed America in the era where the infant social science of demographics began rearranging the chairs on deck – even if the ship threatened to resemble the Titanic.
This is a 500-page-plus page anthology of voices behind the Voice – an oral history in snippets of participants telling the story of the paper that was born in 1955 (Norman Mailer put up some of the dough in exchange for a largely forgotten column), was bought for $30 million by Rupert Murdoch in 1977 (same year, this paper began to publish Gusto), and after other owners, died in 2018. It is now an irregularly appearing zombie publication and website.
I have no choice here but to be completely personal. First of all, I am a sucker for oral histories. I love the form. Take any subject – the history of the NBA, the life and career of Mike Nichols, whatever tickles your fancy – and I’m as likely to fall for a massive anthology of snippets and quotes telling its story, especially if the quote compiler…
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