[Landline] Vanishing Points

Hello friends,

Allow me a bit of a personal nostalgia turn that I forgot to take in May’s Landline. I meant to spiel about Arthur No. 4, published in spring 2003. Twenty years ago! Seems like last week, seems like five lifetimes ago.

I’ve always felt like this was the issue when the magazine really started to cook, where the subject matter/scope, quality of text/photo contributors, and W.T. Nelson’s formal-feral art direction combined for the first time with a vibe of timeliness/timelessness — well, at least that’s what it felt like for me on my last go-through of the Arthur print archives, your mileage may be different, etc. I do know that the Alan Moore feature interview, which in its concerns and range seemed to me at the time to form the spine (or one of the spines) of the overall editorial aim of the Arthur project, has meant a lot to people through the years. I’ll always be grateful to Alan for this interview, and for all the editorial contributions he made during the rest of the magazine’s run…including in the issue that directly followed this one. But let’s save that for another Landline. In the meantime, if you feel the need to review One Version of What Was Going On twenty years ago, much of Arthur No. 4’s text is available to read online, for free.¹

Going a lot further back, and a bit sideways… This is probably as good a place as any to mention the recent publication of Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, a 566-page thick brick of a plant-tribute book edited by Family co-founder David Jacob Kramer via Edition Patrick Frey. It is what it says: reprints of weed articles, illustrations, photos, ads and covers gathered from the yellowed pages of ‘60s counterculture newspapers, with new interview/flashback-reminiscences from editorial staff luminaries of the time including John Sinclair, Ishmael Reed and Marjorie Heins. They’re all interesting — Sinclair is, as ever, in fine, uproarious form — but my favorite is honest Abe Peck, who, with 55 years’ passage, is still rhapsodizing over how great the stereo panning on Moby Grape’s “Omaha” sounds when you’re enhanced. (Just checked this out for myself. Abe’s got a point.) Whew! This thing could be a certain kind of house’s bathroom reading for months if not years.²

Tony McPhee (right) and the other two Groundhogs doing apprentice work with as John Lee Hooker’s band, October 1964.

Speaking of 1965-1973… very moving to see the depth of tributes this past week to the great Groundhogs working class drop-out guitarist-singer-songwriter Tony McPhee, who died this past June 6, at age of 78. The Groundhogs made so many all-time blasters: "Eccentric Man," "Garden," "Darkness Is No Friend"... well shit, I'm just listing off the entirety of a single album, Thanks Christ for the Bomb (album title of all time!)³, and then there's all of the next album, the towering Split, and then of course there’s the 1965 record when they were backing John Lee Hooker, and then there’s… Well it’s pointless to keep writing here, read the Alexis Petridis tribute in the Guardian, he hit all the bases already.⁴ Tony McPhee, humble giant.

Tony McPhee on the album cover for Groundhogs’ Hogwash, 1972. A beautiful, kind face.

Also lost in recent weeks… Barry Newman, age 92, who portrayed Kowalski — a clear-eyed, defiant, speed-enhanced variety of last American hero — in 1971’s Vanishing Point. Great obituary in the New York Times.

Temporarily sidelined in the desert, Kowalski (Barry Newman) listens carefully to DJ Super-Soul (Cleavon Little) on the car radio. Click here to stream Vanishing Point, still gorgeous/tragi-glorious after all these years.

And, finally, somehow connected to each of the above… I recently came across this ad in a 1970 issue of Chicago counterculture newspaper The Seed for an extremely useful rubber stamp/ink pad:

Could use one of these, for sure. Somebody help a fella out here.

Okay, that’s all for this Landline — next one will be much more present-oriented!

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1. PDFs of every issue of Arthur are coming in late 2024.

2. See J. Hoberman’s extended review of Heads Together at New York Review of Books.

3. I stand by 1970’s Thank Christ… as best intro to this band. Rocks from first second. The title track alone? Good god, at this point I can't even imagine what it would be like to hear that for the first time. Oh, the damage. Just look at what happens in three and a half minutes on mid-album cut “Ship on the Ocean,” see how many future bands you can hear pre-echoes of:

4. The reader comments on that Guardian tribute piece are really something. Seemingly every living very early '70s street hippie is weighing in, many still nursing grudges against punk. Ha!