The "at last it can be told" story of the Sixties by the one person capable of writing it. Effortlessly moving in its first-person narrative from London's rock scene to Berlin's student radicals to Amsterdam's practical pranksters to a whole range of American causes and crises, the author provides the definitive answer to a soon-to-be-disgraced vice-president's claim that all the national movements of the Sixties were guided by an international conspiracy-"to the extent that there was any such plot, it was probably me." It is three books in one. Combining elements of spy story and time-travel adventure, it is finally a responsible history of a remarkable era. This book explains once and for all how hope was born, struggled against all odds, and ultimately prevailed during the Sixties, only to be forgotten by later generations. And how such hope can be rekindled again today. During the Sixties the author wrote for and occasionally edited major underground newspapers in London, New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam. He was also the principal founder of the Art Workers Coalition, a group of radical artists who demonstrated in New York and elsewhere. Almost all of "The Untold Sixties" was written during the mid-Seventies, when these events were still fresh in the author's mind, bringing the reader remarkably close to reliving the Sixties in all their intensity. "Alex is a reporter. His attentive eyewitness account is a basic document by a trained and knowledgeable observer. At the same time, he was a partisan, and his writing is relentlessly personal. The reader really feels it...”it” being the texture of cultural politics, the sizzle of social change...a book like this is of inestimable value in opening the locked dusty doors of our useful pasts." Alan W. Moore ABC No Rio
The Untold 60s: When Hope Was Born
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TRUE TO ITS TITLE, The Untold Sixties (Cross-Cultural Research Projects, New York) offers a rare insight into how the "underground" alternate society in Europe blended with its counterpart in America and confirms how its author, Alex Gross, is the perfect person to report the story.
Arriving in London in the `60s he and his girl friend Ilene seeing themselves as "outsiders" would joke about how the Thirties seemed to be still alive in England. Satire was permitted but anything more incisive banned by the libel laws and public inertia
It was a time of offshore pirate radio stations presenting the latest tunes from "those four Liverpudlians" but music and the miniskirt were early stirrings of the change that was to come
Gross became fond of Hyde Park's Speakers Corner where "every possible point of view was proclaimed in every regional accent"--anarchists, poets, black spokesmen and just plain crazies.
Two years later just before the underground press was born, many of these lost and wandering souls coalesced around the Arts Lab, started by a catalytic American expatriate from Louisiana Jim Haynes.
At last there was a meeting place for the young and hip to meet and Haynes' presence was an example of how London life was being transformed by "outsiders"--Bill Levy, an American who later edited IT, Britain's first underground paper; Australian Richard Neville (OZ magazine) and Gross himself in addition to numerous others.
The launch of the tabloid IT (International Times), with its blatant espousal of sex, drugs, pop culture and anarchism was greeted with stunned disbelief that such a paper could even exist Big event at the Round House, an old engine switching barn transformed into a hippy
wonderland with light shows, rock groups, pot everywhere and arrivals handed an (innocent) lump of sugar.
All this was followed by the predictable British hypocrisy that although there was officially no
censorship it proved almost impossible to get either a printer to print it or a distributor to handle it.
In addition to playwriting and contributing to both IT in London and the East Village Other in Manhattan (as well as maintaining cheap apartments in both places), all on less than $6,000 a year.
(On a personal note, it was for these reasons that this British writer---although already publishing an underground paper, Other Scenes, in New York---turned down an offer to publish in London.)
There's lots more in this seminal work but the message is best summed up in Gross' introduction: "A lot of people like to believe that the Sixties are finally dead now. Or that they ended up failing in some earth-shattering way. Those people are wrong. The Sixties are still very much alive in each of us, perhaps most alive in those who
want to believe them dead".
---John Wilcock --John Wilcock, Underground Press Editor, Founder Village Voice, East Village Other, Other Scenes. etc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
By A. M. Wilson
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
A major part of getting the story for a journalist is being in the right place at the right time.
As a chronicler of the Sixties counter-culture, the travels of Alex Gross between London, New York and Berlin throughout that decade provided him with a closer view than most of what was 'going down'.
For much of the 1960s he was covering events for underground newspapers such as London's International Times and New York's East Village Other, but then had the good sense to get down what he hadn't already recorded in the early 1970s.
As a result, reading `The Untold 60s' really is like entering a time warp. More than simply capturing the events and characters of the time, Gross brings long-forgotten attitudes, outlooks and preoccupations back to life, investing them with new significance. The sections on Berlin in particular, are invaluable in providing an insight into just what was troubling the young in that mixed-up city at the time.
As Alan W. Moore writes in his introduction, this book really is "like buried treasure, the historian's dream".
It's also highly readable and enjoyably opinionated.
As a chronicler of the Sixties counter-culture, the travels of Alex Gross between London, New York and Berlin throughout that decade provided him with a closer view than most of what was 'going down'.
For much of the 1960s he was covering events for underground newspapers such as London's International Times and New York's East Village Other, but then had the good sense to get down what he hadn't already recorded in the early 1970s.
As a result, reading `The Untold 60s' really is like entering a time warp. More than simply capturing the events and characters of the time, Gross brings long-forgotten attitudes, outlooks and preoccupations back to life, investing them with new significance. The sections on Berlin in particular, are invaluable in providing an insight into just what was troubling the young in that mixed-up city at the time.
As Alan W. Moore writes in his introduction, this book really is "like buried treasure, the historian's dream".
It's also highly readable and enjoyably opinionated.
Format:Paperback
I knew Alex in the Sixties. He would come bustling in to the office of International Times in London, where I worked on the layouts, from god-nose where, spilling manuscripts, good humour and intelligence in equal parts and vitalising the atmosphere with the excitement of his enthusiasms. Reading his wonderful account The Untold Sixties, has revealed the other pieces of his kaleidoscopic life and good times that I never knew about. His primarily interest was in theatre and playwriting but found himself in demand to translate contemporary German playwrights for the British stage. His revelations of how things worked or screwed-up, behind the scenes of the British theatre, the established Royal Shakespeare Company and the more avant garde Royal Court, with their prejudices and their infighting and their attempts to keep abreast of the European scene are enthralling.
He has a fascination with language and his chapter on American-English and English-English and the love-hate relationship between our cultures is another unexpected delight of this cornucopia of a book.
Alex has a wide ranging cultural embrace, from New York to Italy, to London, to Paris, to Berlin and back again, and the book is an important counter-cultural insight into those turbulent and heady times when those cities throbbed with the energy and invention of the disaffected. Even if you weren't there, he makes you feel you should have been.
Graham keen
He has a fascination with language and his chapter on American-English and English-English and the love-hate relationship between our cultures is another unexpected delight of this cornucopia of a book.
Alex has a wide ranging cultural embrace, from New York to Italy, to London, to Paris, to Berlin and back again, and the book is an important counter-cultural insight into those turbulent and heady times when those cities throbbed with the energy and invention of the disaffected. Even if you weren't there, he makes you feel you should have been.
Graham keen
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.6 out of 5 stars
5 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well-told '60s
11 Dec 2009
By John Wilcock
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
TRUE TO ITS TITLE, The Untold Sixties (Cross-Cultural Research Projects, New York)offers a rare insight into how the "underground" alternate society in Europe blended with its counterpart in America and confirms how its author, Alex Gross, is the perfect person to report the story.
Arriving in London in the `60s he and his girl friend Ilene seeing themselves as "outsiders" would joke about how the Thirties seemed to be still alive in England. Satire was permitted but anything more incisive banned by the libel laws and public inertia
It was a time of offshore pirate radio stations presenting the latest tunes from "those four Liverpudlians" but music and the miniskirt were early stirrings of the change that was to come
Gross became fond of Hyde Park's Speakers Corner where "every possible point of view proclaimed in every regional accent"--anarchists, poets, black spokesmen and just plain crazies. Two years later just before the underground press was born, many of these lost and wandering souls coalesced around the Arts Lab, started by a catalytic American expatriate from Louisiana Jim Haynes.
At last there was a meeting place for the young and hip to meet and Haynes' presence was an example of how London life was being transformed by "outsiders"--Bill Levy, an American who later edited IT, Britain's first underground paper; Australian Richard Neville (OZ magazine) and Gross himself in addition to numerous others.
The launch of the tabloid IT (International Times), with its blatant espousal of sex, drugs, pop culture and anarchism was greeted with stunned disbelief that such a paper could even exist and was followed by the predictable British hypocrisy that although there was officially no censorship it proved almost impossible to get either a printer to print it or a distributor to handle it. (On a personal note, it was for these reasons that this British writer--although already publishing an underground paper, Other Scenes, in New York--turned down an offer to publish in London)
In addition to playwriting and contributing to both IT in London and the East Village Other in Manhattan (as well as maintaining cheap apartments in both places), all on less than $6,000 a year.
There's lots more in this seminal work but the message is best summed up in Gross' introduction: "A lot of people like to believe that the Sixties are finally dead now. Or that they ended up failing in some earth-shattering way. Those people are wrong. The Sixties are still very much alive in each of us, perhaps most alive in those who want to believe them dead". --John Wilcock
Arriving in London in the `60s he and his girl friend Ilene seeing themselves as "outsiders" would joke about how the Thirties seemed to be still alive in England. Satire was permitted but anything more incisive banned by the libel laws and public inertia
It was a time of offshore pirate radio stations presenting the latest tunes from "those four Liverpudlians" but music and the miniskirt were early stirrings of the change that was to come
Gross became fond of Hyde Park's Speakers Corner where "every possible point of view proclaimed in every regional accent"--anarchists, poets, black spokesmen and just plain crazies. Two years later just before the underground press was born, many of these lost and wandering souls coalesced around the Arts Lab, started by a catalytic American expatriate from Louisiana Jim Haynes.
At last there was a meeting place for the young and hip to meet and Haynes' presence was an example of how London life was being transformed by "outsiders"--Bill Levy, an American who later edited IT, Britain's first underground paper; Australian Richard Neville (OZ magazine) and Gross himself in addition to numerous others.
The launch of the tabloid IT (International Times), with its blatant espousal of sex, drugs, pop culture and anarchism was greeted with stunned disbelief that such a paper could even exist and was followed by the predictable British hypocrisy that although there was officially no censorship it proved almost impossible to get either a printer to print it or a distributor to handle it. (On a personal note, it was for these reasons that this British writer--although already publishing an underground paper, Other Scenes, in New York--turned down an offer to publish in London)
In addition to playwriting and contributing to both IT in London and the East Village Other in Manhattan (as well as maintaining cheap apartments in both places), all on less than $6,000 a year.
There's lots more in this seminal work but the message is best summed up in Gross' introduction: "A lot of people like to believe that the Sixties are finally dead now. Or that they ended up failing in some earth-shattering way. Those people are wrong. The Sixties are still very much alive in each of us, perhaps most alive in those who want to believe them dead". --John Wilcock
5.0 out of 5 stars
He was THERE!
7 Feb 2012
By Claudia Dreifus Dreifus Communication
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Alex Gross was at the heart of the East Village Other. He was there. This is one of the few authentic insider's reports on the underground press movement of the 1960s.
5.0 out of 5 stars
New York, London and Berlin in the sixties - art, theater and underground newspapers
5 Mar 2011
By M. Humes
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
I've read many books on the sixties that covered the USA scene and London and the world of the International Times (IT) and have had the pleasure of meeting some of the notable characters in the London world that Alex covers here. This covers a broad range of topics from the East Village, underground press, London, Berlin, the CIA and the art and theater worlds.
The chapter on Harvey Matusow's trip to eastern Germany with Alex is one of the most unusual stories I came across in my work on a documentary on Matusow and led to my meeting Alex and Ilene to talk about Harvey, London, Germany, IT and EVO.
His perspective on the counter-culture movements in New York, London and Berlin are fascinating, and what surprised me was how interesting the theater world and and artist's movement in New York got me interested in topics I hadn't really expected to find so engrossing, as were his theories on how language is influenced culturally, and how he learned and adapted using his fascination with language.
Overall this is a broad ranging life story told with passion, written and reflected on over decades, and one gets a sense of Alex's sense of urgency in trying to change the world, then and now. It's a huge effort and it gives a context and overview and sense of connectedness between the locations that I've not found in any other single book. I found it informative and inspirational.
The chapter on Harvey Matusow's trip to eastern Germany with Alex is one of the most unusual stories I came across in my work on a documentary on Matusow and led to my meeting Alex and Ilene to talk about Harvey, London, Germany, IT and EVO.
His perspective on the counter-culture movements in New York, London and Berlin are fascinating, and what surprised me was how interesting the theater world and and artist's movement in New York got me interested in topics I hadn't really expected to find so engrossing, as were his theories on how language is influenced culturally, and how he learned and adapted using his fascination with language.
Overall this is a broad ranging life story told with passion, written and reflected on over decades, and one gets a sense of Alex's sense of urgency in trying to change the world, then and now. It's a huge effort and it gives a context and overview and sense of connectedness between the locations that I've not found in any other single book. I found it informative and inspirational.
›
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4.6 out of 5 stars
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