Free-spirited British journalist gave New York its first taste of the ‘counterculture’
Social historians may argue over the exact birthdate of the movement that would come to define the 1960s, but the day in 1954 when John Wilcock, a British journalist, put up a notice in the Sheridan Square Bookshop in New York’s Greenwich Village seeking partners to start an alternative newspaper has a strong claim.
Wilcock, a pioneering spirit who rebelled against the ‘‘stuffy and stagnant’’ conservatism of the postwar consensus, was about to launch The Village Voice, the newspaper that would give birth to the underground press.
The publication of such seminal texts as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was still in the future when the first edition of The Village Voice appeared in October 1955 with Wilcock’s byline on its front page.
He was joined in launching the Voice by money men Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, and by Norman Mailer, ‘‘a friend of a girlfriend’’, whom Wilcock regarded as ‘‘a self-important pain in the ass’’, but who was credited with coming up with the paper’s name.
Early issues listed Wilcock as ‘‘news editor’’ or ‘‘associate editor’’. He also had a weekly column in which he wrote about the bohemian community of artists, musicians and writers who were turning Greenwich Village into the vibrant hub of a new avantgarde American culture.
His Village Square column ran every week for 10 tumultuous years, during which time a young folk singer named Bob Dylan arrived in town, the civil rights movement reached critical mass and protests against the Vietnam War gathered pace. As Greenwich Village became the magnet for youthful radicals and rebels, activists and artists, Wilcock was there to chronicle it.
Hanging out with Andy Warhol, Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, the LSD guru Timothy Leary and their like, he took up every cause celebre of the time. He co-founded the ‘‘emergency committee against the harassment of Lenny Bruce’’ when the comedian was charged with obscenity in 1964.
Wilcock himself was arrested one Sunday afternoon in 1963 when he ventured into the vicinity of Wall St with a Village Voice photographer and a nude model. They were charged with disturbing the peace, but a judge acquitted all three on the ground that, because the financial district was deserted at weekends, there was no-one to be disturbed.
Wilcock left the Voice in 1966, by which time its pioneering style had given rise to a new kind of journalism. He switched to the recently launched East Village Other, which took its title from Carl Jung’s term for those who existed outside society’s conventional parameters, helped Warhol to set up Interview magazine and founded the Underground Press Syndicate, which shared news and features across a network of radical publications. By 1971 it listed 271 affiliated titles across Northern America and Europe.
‘‘I have no regrets about the path I took, which helped to backstop and record the youth revolution,’’ Wilcock said in 2012. ‘‘It was a hippie bus for all to ride – something that backed what was to become a movement.’’
Born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 1927, Wilcock seldom discussed his childhood, insisting his life began when he arrived in New York in his mid-20s. What is known is that he left school at 16 to become a trainee reporter at the Sheffield Telegraph. He concluded that, as a provincial reporter, he was ‘‘never going to get to London’’ and feared he was wasting his life. On reading a magazine article extolling the virtues of Canada, he ‘‘took the plunge’’ and emigrated.
After working for a Toronto press agency, he arrived in New York in 1954. His first paid work in the city was for Pageant magazine, for whom he interviewed Rock Hudson, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, whom he met in a bar on Lexington Avenue.
‘‘She leaned across the table confidentially, grabbed my arm with her right hand and looked directly into my eyes as if about to convey a secret known only to the two of us,’’ he recalled. ‘‘ ‘I like men who are poets,’ she declared, squeezing my wrist with her fingers for emphasis. ‘But that doesn’t mean they have to write poetry. Do you know what I mean?’ ’’
According to Richard Neville, co-founder of the counterculture magazine Oz, Wilcock was ‘‘an honest man and a spectacular failure at making money’’. What money he did make he failed to hold on to, even though Warhol gave him two of his paintings.
He wrote the first travel guide for backpackers, called Mexico on $5 a Day .He followed it with numerous titles based on the concept of ‘‘frugal’’ travel, paving the way for independent guides such as Lonely Planet.
He was married between 1967 and 1972 to Amber Nomi Lamann, a university graduate 15 years his junior, but no immediate family members survive him.
He just managed to outlive The Village Voice, which discontinued its print edition in 2017 and ceased online publication in August this year. – The Times