Memoir excerpts about 1960s rock journalism and Cavalier magazine contributors

ahead. Once the laughter died down, Jules talked for a good 25 minutes about some of the ups and downs of his writing career and how hard it is to make a living as any kind of a writer, let alone a “rock journalist.” and the people who created it, seriously. Now everybody writes about rock and roll that way. Jules was one of the people who did it first. “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!” is Jules’s most famous example of rock journalism, but | think his most revolutionary is his article “The Big Beat.” It appeared in the Playboy-esque Cavalier magazine in 1965 and is one of the earliest writings I’ve ever seen on the development of rock and roll, from slaves singing in chains on their way to America to Bob Dylan “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival. Jules Siegel died of a heart attack on November 17, 2012 at the age of 77. He was a brilliant author, but neither Rolling Stone nor the New York Times honored him with an obituary. Not even a fake one. COMIC STRIPS Art Spiegelman tells me his work at Cavalier 50 years ago: I was first invited into the mag to do two full-color comix pages in 1969 (when being printed in color was a Very Big Deal for me as was Getting Paid more than 25 bucks for a drawing), somehow in proximity to a big article on underground comix. It was around the time Vaughn Bode was made a regular contributor to the magazine, They were running some Crumb “Fritz the Cat” pages. All thanx to their hip, laid back and kind editor, Alan LeMond. I also did some gag cartoons, short strips and occasional illustrations for Cavalier (one especially bad drawing for a story by Bruce Jay Friedman, I recall). My work in 1969, as an apprentice underground cartoonist taking too many drugs was really, really awful so I'm grateful for the editor's HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024627