Although the Voice was never a daily newspaper, it sometimes — especially in matters of culture and progressive politics — met journalism’s “first draft of history” criteria. In the week after President Kennedy was murdered, the paper chronicled the pall that enveloped the city. Contributor Arthur Sainer foreshadowed the coming decade of unrest when he wrote, “Kennedy’s assassination has acted as a spiritual castration upon the generation under forty.”
When reports of the fatal shooting in Dallas came over the radio, arts writer Suzanne Kiplinger went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and evoked a scene beyond anything portrayed on ”Mad Men,” describing “Madison Avenue types” who were “slim and elegant” and who “almost ran into the cathedral and, flinging down attaché cases and Brooks Brothers coats, incredibly fell to their knees.” A sidebar reported on FBI agents tracking leads on whether alleged — and by this time, murdered —assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had spent any time in the East Village. Like everything else about the enigmatic ex-Marine, the facts were spectral and inconclusive.
Things seemed brighter in 1969, when the Voice went all hands on deck for the Rolling Stones Thanksgiving Day concert, one reporter singing the band’s (and, especially, Mick Jagger’s) praises while another dismissed the frontman as “the skinny kid in the Marvel Comics get-up, mincing his precious way through an act as contrived and as programmed as anything ever presented by Lawrence Welk.”
You can decide for yourself by watching the Maysles brothers’ seminal 1970 documentary, “Gimme Shelter,” which features performances from these same MSG concerts as well as a raucous Rainbow Room press conference (which McDarrah captured in a Voice photo), where the lads discuss their hopes for an upcoming free concert on the West Coast, unaware that they were on a runaway train to disaster at Altamont a week later.
The ad on this page — promoting the Fifth Avenue Band on Reprise, the record label founded by Frank Sinatra — looks to have been drawn by a moonlighting Jules Feiffer.
Viewed in retrospect, other concerts during that dawn-of-arena-rock era did not have the tragic undercurrents of the Stones’ gig. Unless one considers the popularity of prog rock as a tragedy unto itself.
Later in the Seventies, legendary reporter Jack Newfield decided it was time to honor heroes who weren’t seen on concert stages, or in “Superman: The Movie,” “Rocky,” or the “Dirty Harry” franchise. In his 1977 roundup, Newfield wrote, “I would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Queens phone book than by the incumbent New York state legislature.” He did, however, chronicle those who were fighting the Peoples' battles, listing a number of names that are still in the news today, including Chuck Schumer and Jerry Nadler.
Of course Thanksgiving week has always marked the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and in 1970s and ’80s New York, the place to go for innovation was Crazy Eddie’s. Because his prices were “Insane!” Until the feds started looking into his business practices and the chain went bankrupt, in 1989.
Now fast-forward to six weeks after the 9-11 attacks, when Bob Christgau, on one of his annual Turkey Shoot review pages, noted, “If my bile seems inappropriate, the terrorists have already won.” Giving Enya’s “A Day Without Rain” a D-minus, he noted, “Yanni is Tchaikovsky by comparison,” and asserted that the wildly popular new age songstress “tests one’s faith in democracy itself.”
At the other end of the decade, this 2010 Voice cover conveys all you need to know about both what the city means to Tom Robbins and what he has meant to it for decades. You can certainly judge this reporter by his friends.
Like Newfield before him, Robbins tirelessly sought out the Good Samaritans who, in true Thanksgiving spirit, were “fighting for people who have no influence and no affluence.”
So here’s wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving, 2017. Let’s hope a few recent bright spots in Virginia and New Jersey have started a trend that will lead to the eviction from the White House of a Queens native who has never represented those Queens ideals of tolerance, inclusion, and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Although it's not from a Thanksgiving issue, we close with this page from 1980, giving thanks that the Voice has been onto Donald Trump's mendacity and cruelty from the jump.