Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

When I first moved to Boston in late November of 1980 (yes kiddies, back then there were triceratops lanes versus bike lanes) there were two alternative newspapers, published weekly. The Real Paper and The Phoenix.

I preferred The Real Paper, an offshoot of The Phoenix. an employee-run collective. To my small town 22 year old mind, it seemed the more nobly pure of the two rags. I read it religiously. The reason for my preference is far more likely rooted in the fact that I could pick it up for nothing when visiting my buds on the MIT campus. The paper put out a free version, the same as the one I could plunk down dough for at my corner bodega. It was called The Free Paper and was distributed to all the local colleges.

 In any case, I was wickedly bummed when The Real Paper went under in June ’81 and switched over to reading The Phoenix. One of the bonuses, beyond the brill political pieces, the fab movie and arts reviews, the club listings -- who’s playing where/when -- was the personals section. This was well before Match.com, Plenty of Fish and lavalife were invented. Sure. sure, there were serious singles looking for serious dates, life partners and all that. Is that why I read the personals? Fuck no! I read them for the titillating, skeevy strange (to my inexperienced brain), wildly undomesticated ones -- the folks looking for interesting hook ups.

These were funny, fun AND educational!

Later, during my years as the Production Manager at a Back Bay print shop, I got to know the Phoenix on another level -- as a regular customer. The Phoenix was a training ground for budding graphic designers. They took kids fresh out of Mass Art, the only publicly funded art school in the US,  and had them doing lay out and design.

The nuts and bolts of design -- what you can and can’t do, how to lay out your art such that, when printed, it looks as you’d envisioned -- is learned within the working world, not so much in the classroom.  What this meant, for me, is that I spent an enormous amount of phone time, sorting out layout board problems, with these cocky, I’m-so-damned-hip-I-glow, brandy new designers. I doubt that anyone I worked with over there was over 25. After they got a few years under their respective belts they moved on to places which paid a living wage.

Charles P. Pierce, who now writes for Grantland and Esquire, was one of the Phoenix’s writers. His farewell memories, his eulogy, on Grantland for The Phoenix is tremendous. A must read. Get a cuppa joe, go to the link and read the whole thing. Here’s a snippet:

I mean, Jesus Mary, where do you start with the newspaper at which you grew so much, and learned so much, and came to respect the craft of journalism with a fervor that edged pretty damn close to the religious? What memories have pride of place now? The fact that T.A. Frail, now at Smithsonian, suggested you might just like Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and it wound up changing your life? The day that Doug Simmons, now at Bloomberg News, snuck up behind you and stuck a pair of earphones on your head, cranked Black Flag’s “Six Pack” up to 11, and taught you that rock and roll had not calcified when you graduated from college? What’s the song that plays when you realize that you’re young when you thought you were growing old? What’s the prayer of thanksgiving for a hundred days of fellowship, drunk on words, all of us, as though there were nothing more beyond the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph locked into place? Please say that the muse is something beyond the balance sheet, something beyond technology. Tell me that she’s alive the way she once was when you’d feel her on your shoulder as one word slammed into the other, and the story got itself told, and you came to the end and realized, with wonderment and awe, that the story existed out beyond you, and that it had chosen you, and you were its vehicle, and the grinning muse had the last laugh after all.

And another piece from former Phoenix employee, Camille Dodero, now at Gawker:

From 1973 until 2009, Clif (Garboden) wrote something called Hot Dots, a weekly column buried in the back of the arts section that ostensibly annotated television listings, but evolved into a far more extraordinary collection of one-liners, political and social commentary, and running jokes. Many weeks, the best writing in the paper was buried in tiny type. A few selected listings: 

4:00 (56) Harvey (movie). Nobody ever said anything small in a bar. 


8:00 (2) Nova: Why Planes Crash. Because nobody bothers to catch them.
 

11:00 (38) The House That Screamed (movie). Stayed on the market for three years.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road -- Elton John/Bernie Taupin