“In an October 1957 letter to a friend who had recommended he read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, ‘Although I don’t feel that it’s at all necessary to tell you how I feel about the principle of individuality, I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing it one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence. . . .’ Thompson carved out his niche early. He was born in 1937, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his fiction and poetry earned him induction into the local Athenaeum Literary Association while he was still in high school. Thompson continued his literary pursuits in the United States Air Force, writing a weekly sports column for the base newspaper. After two…

“By the time 1962 rolled around, Roy Orbison had established himself as one of the leading lights out of Nashville. He was a little left of Johnny Cash and a little right of Elvis. But it took Orbison a little while to realise this place within the musical landscape; his voice was reminiscent of the King’s and his look presented nothing particularly new either. He toiled away under the guidance of Sam Phillips at Sun Studios, Memphis, for a few years and only minor hits were the result. It wasn’t until he met songwriting partner Joe Melson, that things really began to fall into place for Roy. He moved to Monument Records in 1960 where the focus in the studio was centred around exploiting the quality and range of his voice. Orbison also made the key decision whilst at Monument, to insist that orchestral accompaniment be employed as part of…

“Blues People: Negro Music in White America is a seminal study of Afro-American music (and culture generally) by Amiri Baraka, who published it as LeRoi Jones in 1963. In Blues People Baraka explores the possibility that the history of black Americans can be traced through the evolution of their music. It is considered a classic work on jazz and blues music in American culture. The book documents the effects jazz and blues on American cultural, at musical, economic, and social levels. It chronicles the types of music dating back to the slaves up to the 1960s. Blues People argues that ‘negro music;—as Amiri Baraka calls it—appealed to and influenced new America. According to Baraka, music and melody is not the only way the gap between American culture and African-American culture was bridged. Music also helped spread values and customs through its media exposure. Blues People demonstrates the influence…

Sit-in during SF State College strike, 1968.

“The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) rose in 1968 as a coalition of various ethnic student groups on college campuses in California in response to the perceived Eurocentric education and lack of diversity at their respective universities, most notably at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) and University of California, Berkeley. The TWLF was instrumental in creating and establishing Ethnic Studies and other identity studies as majors in their respective schools and universities across the United States. At the tail end of the American Civil Rights Movement, the combined determination of the Latin American Student Organization (LASO), the Black Student Union (BSU), the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action (ICSA), the Mexican American Student Confederation, the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE)(now known as the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor), La Raza, the Native American Students Union, and later the

Wild Dog, vol. 3, no. 21 (March 1, 1966).

“In many respects—name, form, and content—Wild Dog boldly embodies much of what we identify as the ‘mimeo revolution.’ Preceded in Pocatello by A Pamphlet, Wild Dog, which joined the mimeograph revolution in April 1963, was the brainchild of Edward Dorn, who was familiar with the emergence of divergent American writing through his association with Black Mountain College, where he had studied under Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. The literary direction that Dorn brought to Wild Dog encompassed writing from diverse sources including, but not limited to, writers associated with The Black Mountain Review, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat generation, the New York School, and certain ‘hip’ European and South American publications and poets. In its three-year history, Wild Dog moved from Pocatello, Idaho, to Salt Lake City, Utah, before ending its existence with number…

“‘Hey Joe’ is an American popular song from the 1960s that has become a rockstandard and has been performed in many musical styles by hundreds of different artists. ‘Hey Joe’ tells the story of a man who is on the run and planning to head to Mexico after shooting his unfaithful wife. The song was registered for copyright in the United States in 1962 by Billy Roberts. However, diverse credits and claims have led to confusion about the song’s authorship. The earliest known commercial recording of the song is the late-1965 single by the Los Angeles garage bandthe Leaves; the band then re-recorded the track and released it in 1966 as a follow-up single which became a hit. The best-known version is the Jimi Hendrix Experience‘s 1966 recording. The song title is sometimes given as ‘Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?’ or similar…