Events - Part 16

Alternative Media Conference

In 1970, community radio pioneer Larry Yurdin was teaching a course on alternative media at Goddard College in Vermont.  He proposed to his students that they run an alternative media conference as a class project.  Invitations went out to alternative radio stations, alternative newspapers, underground comics producers and video innovators.  The result was the Alternative Media Conference at Goddard in June, 1970.

It was a gathering of 1700 counterculture people less than a year after Woodstock and shortly after the Kent State shootings.  Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band described the event as an “elite Woodstock.”  The conference keynote speech was given by counterculture guru Ram Dass.  Above, a guy does a naked yoga headstand while other attendees are naked by the pond in the background.

The college pond soon became a naked swimming hole.

The edge of the pond.

Another view of the pond.

An attendee playing his guitar.

Meanwhile, there was a conference going on.  Above, an attendee felt no need to dress to attend one of the lectures.

In another lecture, as Harvey Kurtzman, creator and editor of Mad magazine, was beginning to describe his take on the Woodstock culture, a couple disrobed and started fucking on the floor (above).  Several attendees started clapping their hands in rhythm with the couple’s movements. In response, two feminists angrily yelled at the lecherous attendees to stop clapping. Kurtzman and the other panelists looked perplexed, and the crowd that had come to hear them quickly dispersed.

Art Spiegelman, another underground cartoonist, remembers: "Harvey Kurtzman was the granddaddy of the underground cartoonists, and he was in shock. Basically, it was my first real encounter with feminists. They kind of busted up the underground comics meeting. From my perspective, they were absolutely alien. Why were those chicks so pissed off?"