The Great Speckled Bird is Going Online!

The following was an email I got regarding The Bird...

The complete run of The Bird, Atlanta's underground paper, is being digitized at GSU and fed into a database for scholarly searches. The Bird thus becomes a major research tool on the era. Thus no one else need spend the hours I did searching old Birds for data and pics. Hooray!

Unfortunately no one can find Vol 5 #47. Please check if you might have this issue squirreled away that you would lend for digitizing.

Contact Patrick Edmondson
mystere2@bellsouth.net

The Great Speckled Bird was an underground newspaper in the Vietnam War era. The FBI had more interest in it than the Klan or the local mob. One of the Bird's claims to fame, aside from getting repeatedly fire-bombed, was twice being quoted by Walter Chronkite on the CBS Evening News. Many of the photos on this web site were first published in the Bird.

Great Speckled Memories | Website

I cannot WAIT to be able to read these old magazines again. Anyone who lived anywhere near the southeast in the late 60s, early 70s, has either bought the Bird or sold the Bird and if you did, you probably met me someplace on the Strip back then. My hair looked wilder than Robert Plant's and I was usually 10 paces behind my boyfriend who was ripping off stores and buying dope for us. Ah, but that could have been any old couple on the Strip at that time. My old VW van (a 1959 with a '65 motor in it) made the trip most weekends from college in Tennessee down to ATL.

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Dodgem Logic

Dodgem Logic #4 is now in print. link

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Where Have All The Hippies Gone?

Some local Atlanta folks are organizing an exhibit of Life on the Strip. They wrote they would like to hear from:

People who were hippies or are interested in hippies or this era (1967 - 1977) of great change in The South. Do you have some memories you'd like to share? Or some pictures of folks on The Strip or in The Park during those days of change for Atlanta and the world? Does your older brother or your parents? We are interested in anything. Posters, film, recording, anything you think should be shared. Let's get our story down right before "The Man's" official version is the only one available to the future. No one of us has the story. The story was all of us at once. Can you contribute your part?

Visit TheStripProject.com still under construction.

I had my picture taken all the time on the strip during this period; maybe I can find something of me and my friends. On second thought, do I want to see some of those pictures?

Related:

* Voices From The Underground (Press) - History and images, featuring East Village Other, Berkeley Barb, The Seed, etc.

* "The Summer of Love lasted three years in the South. I tried to capture some of that spirit in these photographs. They were shot over a 30 month period and many were originally published in The Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta's underground / anti-war newspaper." Photography by Carter Tomassi, Berkeley, CA, who has also worked on many major film projects. (let us not forget The Cockettes) link

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THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

Did you ever read/see any of the great underground newspapers of the late 1960's - mid 1970's in the US? There was The East Village Other (NY), The Great Speckled Bird (ATL), Black Panther, Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), LA Free Press, The Paper, of East Lansing, Michigan, and many more?

I was a faithful Speckled Bird reader. We bought these most of the time from people on street corners in Atlanta; on the corner of 14th St, where all the other freaks hung out. As surely as you'd see a Bird vendor around there, you'd also see someone selling flowers for a small fee to wear in your hair or wherever. And you knew who was selling "what" "where". And someone was in a doorway playing guitar; a few bumming spare change passing by. All waiting for the next musical, sexual, or pharmaceutical experience.

Receiving The Last Whole Earth Catalog was a spiritual experience. Sort of a hippie Sears catalog and was one of the very few books we had at Peace Tree (a lakeside commune in Tennessee) when we first began. It was all about survival, metaphysics, learning to grow organic, live natural, how to build a shelter-- how to build or make just about anything. Stewart Brand (Burning Man) was the founder. We've still got one around the house someplace.

Many college libraries have some of these newspapers on Microfilm. Some are for sale on Ebay. Why are there no equivalent newspapers/websites? "Where is that one great progressive balls to the wall website that has it all?" Music, protest and boycott info, in-depth interviews, sex (& relationships), drugs, literature? more»

from the archives

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Good morning.

Blogger somehow misplaced my template Friday, so I had to reconstruct another one.



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::Man Cuts Off Own Penis to Cure Sex Addiction

Police said the man did not want his penis to be reattached but were unable to say if doctors had complied with his wishes. I wonder if he left any heart-broken women behind because of his newfound surgical skills.



::The list of Fair and Balanced Web Sites continue to grow. What you going to do about it, Fox? Blah, Blah, Blah, is keeping score. Over 300 Weblog sites and counting.



::Carry On Together - Neil Young has joined David Crosby's CPR side project on the entertainment lineup for the 2003 Santa Ynez Valley Music Festival, which will take place Sept. 28 in Los Olivos, CA. I'd love to see them altogether again. The first thing I always play when I pick up a 12-string is "Helplessly Hoping".



::Oscar has a fun Anger Hostility Quiz on his site.



::A panel of critics has chosen the 50 worst artists in music history. All these tone-deaf pud pullers that have the gumption to rate musicians really amaze me.



::Voices From The Underground - features old images of issues from the Berkley Barb (Berkley, CA), The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta, GA), Georgia Straight (Vancouver, BC), and more.



Haiku

no way I can stop

smoking is my only vice

that and the whoring



Quote For Today

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. ~Oscar Wilde



Stop fucking with my power chor....

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