Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
on events—it helped organize them. A month after Watts the Freep held a two-hour forum onstage at a movie theater in the Black neighborhood on West Adams Boulevard near La Brea. The six panelists included Black Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who served as moderator, and leaders of the local chaptersof CORE, N-VAC, United Citizens of Watts, and the Afro-American Cultural Association. Their main theme: the underlying cause of the riots was “the fact that over 30% of the people in Watts don’t have jobs … and do not control their community.”28
The Freep also sponsored free music festivals. The 1968 “Bastille Day Bash” on Venice Pier featured Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and other bands, including the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. “Wear costumes and masks,” the Free Press poster said. “Do your thing on the beach: swimming, body painting, sculpture, sand castles, listening, loafing, dancing, playing, freaking … Be kind, be pure, avoid busts.” 25,000 people showed up.29
And the Freep ran bookstores—in Westwood, Pasadena and Fairfax. Its Fairfax store, “The Kazoo,” was located right across the street from Canter’s legendary late-night deli. The New Yorker’s Renata Adler visited, reporting that the Kazoo was open until two in the morning, and that along with books, it carried “innumerable little magazines and obscure works,” including “works on drugs and hallucinogens, and some works on religions of the East.” The store also sold posters, cigarette papers, roach clips, and buttons, including “Be Creative, Invent a Sexual Perversion.”30
The Freep had all kind of enemies. Its offices were firebombed on May 1, 1968;31 sheriff’s deputies seized eighty street-corner vending boxes in January 1968;32 and in September 1968, the FBI decided to mail copies of the Freep to the paper’s landlord in the hope of getting them evicted. (It didn’t work.)33 The FBI investigated the paper in 1970 for “ITOM”—Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter —and the FBI file on the Freep includes carefully cut and pasted items from the paper’s classified ads: “Male Nude ‘Action’ Photos,” “Pornography from Denmark,” “Color Climax Magazines.”34 The FBI closed its investigation after being told that the US Postal Service was considering prosecution of the Freep for mailing obscene matter, while the US Attorney concluded that the Freep’s advertising policy “appeared similar to other newspapers including legitimate Santa Monica and San Francisco newspapers.” The US Attorney also noted that “The FREE PRESS is milder in content than many currently in distribution.”35
It was an official national “problem”; Congress established a national Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which held hearings in L.A., at which Kunkin testified. “The young American today knows more about sex and its place in human relationships than perhaps any other comparable group in human history,” he told the commissioners, and “they do not see anything at all obscene about the human body.” What was “obscene,” he said, was “to kill people in Southeast Asia … while mouthing words about democracy.” The real function of obscenity prosecution, he said, was “to attempt a censorship of unpopular political and literary expression” with criminal trials that bankrupted small radical publications that relied on sex ads to pay the bills.36
The underground paper that the Freep gave birth to, Open City, began publishing in May 1967. Editor John Bryan, before working as Kunkin’s managing editor, had been a reporter and editor for the LA Herald-Examiner, the LA Mirror and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was from the older generation—like Kunkin, in his mid thirties in the mid Sixties—and he quit the Freep when Kunkin refused to run a horrifying photo of a napalm-seared Vietnamese baby on the front page.37 Open City’s circulation peaked at 30,000 before it stopped publication early in 1969.38 Bryan started Open City with his own money, and in the first issue he promised that the paper would highlight “the angry and determined minorities who continue to challenge the worst contemporary madness and injustice”—which “the town’s sell-out daily press so nervously ignores.” And, he said, the paper would cover “the perpetuation of police state terrorism which singles out socially harmless psychic voyagers whose experiences with hallucinogenic drugs make them less likely to join in the current militarist-materialist rat race.” He also published a column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” by LA beat poet Charles Bukowski; even Time called Bukowski “a laureate of American low life.”39
Open City’s greatest coup was reporting that mainstream media photos of LBJ bidding farewell to Vietnam-bound marines at Camp Pendleton had been staged; all the marines scheduled to leave for Vietnam, Open City discovered, had left a week earlier. When the brass at Camp Pendleton were told the president was on his way to give a speech to departing troops, they “rounded up all available Marines—many from local bars,” put them in full battle dress, turned them out to hear the president, and then “marched them into waiting transport planes.” The president, according to Open City, never knew the truth.40
It was obscenity charges that brought down Open City. The paper published a half-page ad for best-selling rocker Leon Russell that featured a photo of a naked woman with Russell and his partner, who was holding her knees apart. Defenders said it was a parody of the use of sex to sell products, and columnist Art Seidenbaum argued in the LA Times, “I’d rather see prosecutors restrain themselves instead of the press.” Still, Kunkin himself had turned the ad down, calling it “exploitative.”41 Bryan was put on trial and fined $1,000, and Open City was shut down shortly thereafter, in March 1968. Kunkin paid tribute in an editorial: “The establishment didn’t like Open City. It saw too much and said too much … It let voices be heard which too often were smothered … Where Open City died another must spring up. There’s room in this town and this society for more than one alternate voice paper.”42
At its peak in 1969, the Free Press sold a hundred thousand copies a week. The company, including the three bookstores, employed 150 people and made $2 million a year. Although Kunkin was publisher and editor, “the staff collectively decided what articles ran in the papers.” The only clearly defined jobs were ad sales and bookkeeping. “Money was pooled,” historian Abe Peck reports. Kunkin welcomed a union, and Free Press staffers “could be nearly as well paid as mainstream ad reps and editors.”43
Then the trouble began. On August 8, 1969, the Freep front-page headline read “Narcotics Agents Listed: There Should be no Secret Police.” Inside was a list of eighty undercover agents of the state bureau of narcotics, along with their home phone numbers and addresses. The paper called it “a public service announcement.” Kunkin and reporter Jerry Applebaum were charged with receiving stolen property—the list—and the state attorney general filed a $10 million obstruction-of-justice suit against Kunkin, his corporation, and the staff. The agents also filed a separate civil suit for invasion of privacy, seeking $15 million.
You might say Kunkin had been foolish to risk everything on this one story, but his lawyers had told him there was no law against publishing the names—which was true at the time. (In response to the Free Press case, Governor Reagan quickly signed a bill making unauthorized publication of names of “peace officers” a misdemeanor.) The list, provided by a mail clerk in the state attorney general’s office, had not been stolen; it was xeroxed and then returned. Nothing on the document indicated that it was classified or secret. In fact, it was the Bureau’s Christmas card mailing list.44
Kunkin’s front-page editorial made the case for publishing the names: “History demonstrates that the secret policeman invariably uses his anonymity to become unaccountable to the people over whom power is exercised.” And the goal of the undercover narcs, the Freep declared, was to “enforce laws as unwise and unenforceable as the now-banished prohibition of liquor.” Fifty years later, that assessment of the law became the basis for decriminalizing marijuana possession in many states, including California.
At the trial, the prosecutor (Ronald George, who later went on to become chief justice of the state supreme court) had to prove the list had been stolen, and that Kunkin and Applebaum had known it was stolen. Kunkin told the judge