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John Wilcock, Pioneer of the Underground Press, Dies at 91

John Wilcock, a British journalist and travel writer who played a major role in the emergence of the alternative press at The Village Voice, The East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate, died Thursday at a care facility in Ojai, California. He was 91.

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Robert D. McFadden
, New York Times

John Wilcock, a British journalist and travel writer who played a major role in the emergence of the alternative press at The Village Voice, The East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate, died Thursday at a care facility in Ojai, California. He was 91.

He died after several strokes, said his biographer, Ethan Persoff.

In the 1960s and early ‘70s, a freewheeling age of psychedelic drugs and anti-war protests, Wilcock led two lives. He was both the author of many “$5 a day” travel books and a driving force behind underground publications that, spurning traditional journalism, attacked political, social and cultural norms with bawdy language and comic-book imagery, all of it financed by sexually explicit advertising.

In a 1973 profile, The New York Times called Wilcock “an influential man nobody knows,” an “oracle of the nitty-gritty of inexpensive, traditional tourism” and “an apostle and chronicler of the radical underground” — although, the article noted, he looked “a bit too scruffy for a best-selling travel writer and far too straight for an underground celebrity.”

Wilcock had worked for news organizations in Britain, Canada and the United States, including The Times, and was the first news editor of The Village Voice before he helped found The East Village Other in 1965. The paper was named for Carl Jung’s definition of “the other” as “one who is outside society.”

The Other, known as EVO to its devotees, was one of the nation’s first underground newspapers. Published biweekly in New York until it folded in 1972, it had a circulation of 60,000 at its peak.

In its pages one might typically find a picture of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s head in a toilet; recipes for concoctions made with marijuana and hashish; cartoons by Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb; reports on Andy Warhol, Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman; and personal advertisements like “Frenchman, graduate student, writer, will happily share his East Village apt. with swinging chick.”

In 1966, as underground newspapers spread to urban areas throughout the country, Wilcock helped found the Underground Press Syndicate, which shared news and features. Based in New York, it was initially a network of five publications: The East Village Other, The Los Angeles Free Press, The Berkeley Barb, The Paper of East Lansing, Michigan, and The Fifth Estate of Detroit.

As more underground papers joined the syndicate and startups proliferated — Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book” listed 271 affiliates in North America and Europe in 1971 — free counterculture news, criticism and cartoons became widely available.

Growth subsided, however, and by 1974 the boom was over, with underground papers giving way to less radical alternative weeklies.

“I have no regrets about the path I took, which helped to backstop and record the youth revolution — maybe the first time in history that teenagers actually had power,” Wilcock told The Atlantic in 2012. “It was a hippie bus for all to ride — The Barb claimed to have sold 80,000 of one issue — something that backed what was to become a movement. And I probably enjoyed every minute of it.”

John Wilcock was born in Sheffield, England, on Aug. 4, 1927. He became a cub reporter at 16 for The Sheffield Telegraph and worked for the mass-market London tabloids The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror. In the early 1950s he was an editor for British United Press before moving first to Toronto, where he worked at Saturday Night magazine, and then to New York, where he settled in Greenwich Village.

In 1955, Wilcock was present at the creation of The Village Voice, a weekly tabloid covering politics and the arts that was America’s first alternative newspaper — although whether he should be considered a founder is a matter of some dispute.

Interviewed last year for an article in The Nation, Edwin Fancher, one of the Voice’s founders, insisted that only he, Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf deserved to be called founders because they were the only ones who had put up money.

But in the same article, Wilcock was quoted as saying: “I was the one newspaper-experienced founder who persuaded Fancher and Dan Wolf to actually found the paper. Mailer, who provided the title, dropped out after three or four issues.” (Jerry Tallmer, who, like Wilcock, was one of the Voice’s original editors, is also sometimes referred to as a founder.)

The Voice discontinued its print edition last year and ceased publication entirely just weeks ago.

Wilcock wrote a column for The Voice, “The Village Square,” for a decade, reporting on neighborhood events and trivia and depicting himself as an innocent who yearns for young women with ponytails in Washington Square Park and collects lavatory graffiti, like “Electra loves Agamemnon,” at the White Horse Tavern.

But he was unable to live on the Voice’s wages — often little or nothing — and while working there he also got a paying job with The Times, where he edited and wrote travel articles from 1957 to 1959. Many were offbeat: a wry look at tourists gawking up at skyscrapers in Manhattan, a plan to resurrect a South Dakota ghost town by installing Indians.

He met Arthur Frommer, the travel book publisher, in 1960 and soon began working for him. He wrote guidebooks on how to live on $5 a day in Mexico, Greece, Japan, India and elsewhere. He later edited books on the occult and published Other Scenes, an underground magazine offering travel tips, poetry and social commentary.

He married Amber Nomi Lamann in 1967. They were divorced in 1972. No immediate family members survive. In 1963, Wilcock, a photographer and a nude model were arrested on a Sunday afternoon at Liberty Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan on a charge of disturbing the peace. A judge acquitted them on grounds that in that location, which as part of the financial district was normally deserted on weekends, there was no one around to be disturbed, except the detective who had nabbed them.

Wilcock was for many years a regular among the artists and partygoers at Andy Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan. He founded Interview magazine with Warhol in 1969. (Interview, like The Village Voice, ceased publication this year.) In 1971 he published “The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol” — which was actually a collection of interviews with Warhol’s friends and associates, credited to “John Wilcock with a cast of thousands.” A revised edition of the Warhol book was published in 2010, the same year Wilcock published his own autobiography, “Manhattan Memories.”

In the 1980s and ‘90s Wilcock published several small newspapers, including one called John Wilcock’s Secret Diary. He also wrote historical tidbits and practical advice on travel for Insight Guides, a London publisher.

In 2016 Persoff and Scott Marshall published the first volume of a biography in graphic-novel form, “John Wilcock: New York Years, 1954-1971.” A second volume is in the works and is being serialized on the culture website Boing Boing.

Wilcock settled in Ojai in 2001 and there began publishing an online monthly magazine, The Ojai Orange. The magazine included a column, which he continued to write until recently. He called it “The Column of Lasting Insignificance.”

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