East Village Other^111Robert Hughes once described the weekly pasteup
night at the East Village Other(EVO) as “a dada
experience.” The year was 1970 , and none of those
who were toiling into the wee hours of the morning
at one of America’s first 1960 s-era underground
papers (founded in 1965 ) knew what he was talking
about. “Dada was the German anti-art, political-art
movement of the 1920 s,” he explained in a nasal
Australian accent. “And this is the closest thing I’ve
come to seeing it recreated today.”
Hughes, the new art critic for Time
magazine, was as welcome as any other weekly
observer. Pasteup night at EVOwas open to
anybody who came up to the dimly lit second floor
loft above Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, a former
Loews Theater on Second Avenue and Sixth Street
just next door to Ratner’s famous dairy restaurant. In the 1920 s and 1930 s
the Lower East Side neighborhood was the heart of New York’s Yiddish
Theater. Since 1967 (the Summer of Love) it was referred to in the press as
the “East Village,” the hippie capital of the East Coast.
Starting at 8:00 p.m.and lasting until dawn, the volunteer layout
staff, under the watchful eye of EVO’s seventeen-year-old, self-appointed
art director Stephen Cohen took the jumble of counterculture journalism
and anti-establishment diatribe that was the paper’s editorial meat and
threw it helter-skelter onto layouts that bore a curious resemblance to the
digital typography done in Ray Gunduring the 1990 s. Anyone could join in
whether they had graphic design experience or not, yet many of the gadfly
layout artists were usually too stoned to finish. Corrections for their pages
were often waxed at the office and cut-in during the long subway ride to
the printer in Brooklyn.
The pasteup night was a 1960 s tribal ritual. The plentiful joints
and acid tabs were advance payments for a good night’s work. The art
director routinely emerged from the editor’s office around 8:30 p.m.with a
shoebox full of the stuff, as well as with the night’s layout assignments,
which included at least three pages of “intimate” classifieds. The layout
crew would help themselves to the grass and manuscripts, find their tables,