Cheetah #5

Not really a full-on music magazine, and absolutely not a fanzine, but we’re definitely going to write about it anyway. I first heard about quintessentially quasi-intellectual 60s counterculture magazine Cheetah all of two years ago, when I was deep in the enveloping throes of my late-bloomer Brian Wilson obsession, the one that I wrote about in Dynamite Hemorrhage #10. This fantastic Jules Siegel essay about the runaway train wreck that was the Smile sessions ran in this publication in 1967, and I henceforth learned that it was Ellen Willis who founded and edited Cheetah. I ordered my own copy – and it is the one we shall be discussing presently.

My research tells me that eight issues in total were published, with the final being the May ‘68 issue, right between the assassinations of MLK and RFK. These cataclysms haven’t even happened yet, yet the back of this February 1968 issue previews next month’s by saying “In the most dire winter of our discontent, the social fabric of America is pulling apart. With maps and diagrams, we’re going to show you just how bad it all is.” I’ll say for the record that I believe that 2020-21 in the United States was even worse, and only by virtue of electoral sanity have we restored the possibility of moving past it. 

But anyway, continuing with the Brian Wilson theme, actually, the February 1968 issue is like one big tribute to Mr. Van Dyke Parks. There’s a full piece on him by Tom Nolan, and an intro essay at the start of the magazine for this young wonderkind, full of worship but preemptively apologetic about the potential pretentiousness of his lyrics. “Columnated ruins domino”! In general, Cheetah #5 is packed with writing that’s very much trying to be the new thing, the new journalism, and some parts of the charade wear better than others. The narcissism of the counterculture is on full display, for good and for ill.

There is, for instance, an amazing ad for a different magazine called Avant-Garde right out of hip 60s intellectual central casting, along with other various terrifically dated ads devoted to sexual liberation totems and “smoke grass” buttons and T-shirts. There’s a whole piece about a groovy trip to the San Diego zoo, and another about the killer LA experimental psych band The United States of America. Robert Christgau contributes a piece about hitchhiking. People did that in the 60s, you know.

Nearly every main article has the exceptionally annoying habit of beginning, going a page or two at most, and then requiring the reader to pick it up again toward the back end of the magazine. Sure, magazines (to the extent they exist) still do that to this day, but not on the momentum-stopping level of Cheetah in 1968. Ellen Willis contributes the best piece in here about Communist rabble-rouser Bettina Aptheker, a woman often held up as a true Hero of The Struggle by the pamphleteering Left when I was attempting to get my political bearings in the 1980s. There’s also something about the “I Ching” which I think may have something to do with tarot cards, and something else about “concrete poetry” which is akin to what we might later have called graphic design. Oh, and a bunch of awful and unfunny New Yorker-like single panel cartoons.

Do I like Cheetah #5, though? I do! Had I been age 20-whatever in 1968, I’d have fit squarely in their demographic and psychographic profile, and while it’s always great to make fun of hippies, I’ve no doubt that this magazine would’ve probably fit me well had I too grown up in stultifying 50s USA, without college radio, fanzine and punk rock to guide me where it eventually did. Even the brief musical nuggets of Van Dyke Parks and Dorothy Moskowitz and Cheetah’s passel of record reviews would have been enough for me to take out that one-year subscription for $5 – even though said subscription would have unfortunately run aground a mere three issues later.