HEADS TOGETHER: THE ART BEHIND WEED & THE UNDERGROUND PRESS SYNDICATE
David Jacob Kramer Images courtesy of the Author from "Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate 1965-1973"
The art in Heads Together speaks to a time when pot was smoked with optimism — as something potentially good for society and people, capable of activating profound transformation in the face of corrupt and powerful forces.
Now, as pot fast-tracks toward full legalization in the U.S. and beyond, its once incendiary status is brought into relief. Pot’s profiteers in the corporate market today do not reflect those who fought for legalization, or the Black and Latino populations strategically criminalized in America for pot well before hippies were targeted, and long after.
The protest movement and counterculture of the sixties was fed by one of the greatest booms in publishing history. The Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) began as a loose confederation of five American papers in 1966, and within a few years swelled to over 500 across the world, reaching millions of readers. They “spread like weed,” said Tom Forcade, the UPS director, weed-dealer, and eventual founder of High Times. The metaphor was apt: the UPS spurred the legalization movement, and weed became its totem.
Weed was so pervasive it also became a helpful means for government agencies to crack down on the UPS — just bust into an editorial office and frisk the staff. These tactics meant activist groups adopted weed as an emblem of resistance. Weed would permeate UPS pages, with gaps in text crammed with weed-inspired “spot illustrations,” and it added a touch of flair to the mastheads of UPS titles. Heads Together collects these drawings, shining a light on lesser-known names in the stoner-art canon, and many who literally weren’t names at all, as no signature was attached to their illustrations.
The Marijuana Review
The Marijuana Review was run by Michael Aldrich, who had composed the first PhD dissertation on weed in the U.S. — “Marijuana Myths and Folklore.” A typical Marijuana Review article covered a topic like cannabis purification rites of Scythian nomads in the third to seventh centuries. The FBI found the publication threatening enough to bug its phones. Ultimately, Aldrich found his Buffalo, New York commune’s phone connected to a reel-to-reel recorder in the basement. He managed to waste all the tape on the machine by picking up the receiver and spending days reading out lurid passages from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.
Free John
John Sinclair was a poet, Minister of Information for The White Panther Party, editor of the Ann Arbor Sun, and manager of the Detroit band, The MC5. An undercover agent befriended him for six months and arrested him when he handed her two joints. He got a ten-year sentence. His jail dispatches became weekly columns in multiple underground papers. John Lennon wrote a song in his name: “They gave him ten for two / What else can the bastards do?”
A global “Free John!” campaign ensued. Antiwar protesters across the country could be seen wearing “Free John” shirts, and carrying placards with the phrase. Fundraising ephemera was promoted across UPS papers, from posters to buttons, raising money for his legal defense. Sinclair was freed two years into his sentence, the day after a benefit concert with a heavy-hitting lineup of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and jazz-luminary Archie Shepp.
I interviewed Sinclair for Heads Together before he passed away in April of this year, at the age of eighty-two. He smoked a joint and castigated the government with just as much fire and aplomb as ever. Here’s an excerpt:
“We all lived together. So you could do this shit anytime and nobody would call the police.
That’s what was at the bottom of all this: weed was very much a tremendous unifier. Unprecedented. Eventually you smoke enough weed and say, I don’t want to join the army. It’ll change everything. Shit hit the fan then. Our resistance got so large, they had to do something. They were our enemy. They dogged every aspect of creative life. We were all smoking weed, so we were in their sights. They were getting paid to disrupt our lives and put us in jail. I did two prison terms! There was a lot of paranoia. We were terrified.
[Weed] was the basis of our life. It’s what made us what we were. We were quite proud of it. The State and the people that put us all in prison, now they’re getting rich off this, the rotten motherfuckers. They’re out of their minds with greed. Better to get your weed from the guy down the street who’d bring it over to your house then go to a dispensary and pay an inflated price because the State is getting paid from each dispensary. They’re grubbing as fiercely as they can now for the money. They could be selling rubbers, or any goddamn thing. Opening your mind? They don’t want to talk about that.”
Amorphia
Rolling papers in the 1960s were not just paraphernalia, but vehicles for anti-war rhetoric, and even funded legalization efforts. Though Zig-Zag papers dominated the market, and the graphic of “Captain Zig-Zag” and his upturned mustache was a ubiquitous symbol throughout the UPS (and artist Alton Kelley’s show posters for the San Francisco Avalon Ballroom), by the early 1970s the counterculture was independently producing rival rolling papers of its own.
The Patriotic Rolling Co. Inc offered rice papers printed in the form of a draft card to set to flame. One could also spark up the American flag or a dollar bill. “A free society rolling in money creates the highest form of government,” the package punned. There was a technological innovation in the “Insta-Roach”: each individual paper included a metal wire as its own in-built roach clip.
These were sold at the head shops sprouting up across the country. By the early 1970s, head shops weren’t just in urban centers, but in suburbs and small towns, and were important distribution points for local UPS titles, too.
Non-profit legalization organization, Amorphia’s Acapulco Gold Papers were hatched as a fundraising effort. Their sights were set beyond legalization, but to eventually cultivate and sell weed itself, then apply the proceeds toward saving the planet. An ad read: “Legalization is not an end; it is a means to create social change and a new form of economic organization.”
Acapulco Gold Papers came in four types: rice paper, maiz paper, liquor rice paper, and cannabis paper — the first hemp papers sold in America in half a century. The only factory still manufacturing papers with hemp was in Spain, so that’s where they went. However, the fabricator refused to print anything on the packaging associated with weed for fear of legal reprisal. Amorphia left the inside flap blank. Once in the U.S., they had stamps made that said: “ALL AMORPHIA’S PROFITS FROM THESE PAPERS GO TO LEGALIZE MARIJUANA.” They hosted stamping parties to complete the job.
Ads for Acapulco Gold Papers were reprinted in hundreds of UPS publications across the world, and the papers managed to raise over 200,000 dollars. In a 1973 interview in the Ann Arbor Sun, Amorphia’s political-director, Gordon Brownell, expressed his fears about the legalization they were fighting for: “We do not want to turn the legal marijuana market over to large corporate interests. We’re trying to get people to think of alternatives like Allen Ginsberg’s idea of having cooperative selling of marijuana on a subsistence basis.”
Hetty Maclise
I came across Hetty Maclise’s work while researching for the book. I kept spotting her drawings across multiple underground papers, along with her signature, “Hetty.” Her drawings are easily identifiable for their classically-inspired figures, airbrushed stencil silhouettes, and cursive poetry. I became more and more obsessed — but was unable to find much about her. She was so crucial in defining the look of what we know as psychedelic art, but she seems to have been left out of the canon.
As a staff artist on the San Francisco Oracle in 1967, Maclise invented the multicolor, iridescent look that would define so many UPS papers—by squeezing paint into the press from ketchup dispensers. The technique came to be known as “rainbow roll” or “split fount.” Moving to New York, Maclise went on to design and illustrate for the East Village Other paper, creating the weekly, full-page ads for Dynasty Records, visual interpreting poems by Diane di Prima, Tuli Kupferberg, and Ira Cohen that were syndicated across hundreds of underground press papers.
Maclise was married to Angus Maclise, an artist and composer, and the original drummer for the Velvet Underground—the ceremony officiated by Timothy Leary. She was something of a Zelig figure: She opened her own leatherworks business in New York where she crafted the tasseled vest Jimi Hendrix wore for his iconic Woodstock performance. She also stars in Ira Cohen’s Thunderbolt Pagoda.
In 1967, Maclise was busted for three joints in Oklahoma City, while driving cross-country with her husband, Angus, along with Loudon Wainwright III (whose wealthy parents bailed him out immediately). Maclise spent a month in jail (and never forgave Wainwright). A few years later, her and Angus moved to Kathmandu, Nepal, where their son, Ossian, became ordained as a tulku at the age of five — meaning a reincarnation of a Buddhist Lama (a position he maintains until today in Tibet).
Smoke-In
The New Left developed the “sit-in” and “teach-in” as strategies for community engagement and protest in the early 1960s. The goals of the “love-in” and “be-in” are hazier. They reached their zenith in 1967 at the “Human Be-In,” where 30,000 gathered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. There was also the “gay-in” in Golden Gate Park in 1970, to celebrate a year since the Christopher Street Riots. And a “sweep-in” where the Diggers activist group cleaned up the neglected streets of New York’s Lower East Side in 1967.
The “smoke-in” was an equal parts anti-war and pro-legalization protest. The first “smoke-ins” went down in 1967, where weed activists met over four weekends in New York’s Tompkins Square Park and handed out free joints. It coincided with a suite of pot protests in London after a bunch of rock stars were busted. The “Legalize Pot” rally was held in Hyde Park, where Allen Ginsberg chanted and attendees shared joints. Nobody was arrested, but the police had to remove protestors from a preserve dedicated to the park’s ducks.
The Yippies activists helped organize an “Honor America Day Smoke-In” on July 4, 1970, in Washington, DC, bombarding 350,000 Nixon supporters at the Lincoln Memorial. They waved the Viet Cong and Youth International Party (Yippie) flag (a green pot leaf overlaid on a red socialist star). They smoked weed among the Nixon-ites, then bathed naked in the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. They were cleared by a riot squad and tear gas grenades. Another “smoke-in” was held at the National Mall a year later, establishing a tradition that continues to this day.
Narcs
Narcotics agents joined the staff of countless UPS papers, hung out at UPS communes’ potlucks, and tried to join local bands. When Jackson, Mississippi’s Kudzu was raided in October of 1970, staff were able to identify the narc as he was the only one on the team who didn’t smoke weed. Cops snatched address books, trashed office gear, put guns to staffers’ heads, and locked them up. No weed was found on anyone, and they were let go in the morning. “That little snake,” Kudzu’s editor, David Dogget, seethed over the narc. “All those years of embarrassing us at demonstrations with his ridiculous communist literature, and now he had gotten our house wrecked and caused us a night in jail.”
To train narcs, a narc school was established at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, instructing agents on how to share a joint and go long stretches without showering. Outing local narcs became a weekly standard across UPS papers, with sketches and photos of local undercover agents to look out for, where they hung out, what cars they drove, and what drugs they were selling.
David Jacob Kramer is an Australian writer and cultural figure based in Los Angeles. He is known for his significant contributions to the literary and artistic community, particularly through his role as the co-founder of Family Books, which operated from 2007 to 2021.
His most famous publication, Heads Together: Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate 1965-1973 (published by Edition Patrick Frey) examines the intersection of cannabis culture and underground publishing, serving as a significant reference point within the context of underground art and establishing Kramer as one of the foremost experts on those publications we cannot do without, yet are impossible to find.
