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special report special report
I played a fairly minor role in the history of Interview magazine,
and this is as good a time and place to toot my horn. In three or four
issues published in 1971 my name appears on Interview’s masthead
under “layout”—not “design” or “designer”, but “layout.” That year,
however, I “redesigned” Interview magazine at the request of
Bob Colacello and Glenn O’Brien (who were the editor and ersatz
“art director”, respectively, and watched over me like hawks). If I do
say so, my version was typographically cleaner than the handful
of previous issues, which were grungy in the contemporary
underground style.
When it premiered in 1969 at the Warhol Factory, high above Union Square in
Manhattan (just a few blocks away from the legendary Max’s Kansas City),
Interview was Andy Warhol’s very own DIY magazine before the term “Do It
Yourself” became a fashion. It was his toy, but to be honest, Andy didn’t really
design or edit it himself—he had members of his entourage do it for him. In
fact, I never even met him, but his spirit was pervasive, like a bewigged
phantom peering through the clouds.
The first half-dozen or so issues of Interview (with a logo that
read: “INTER/view”) adhered to the slapdash tradition of late
Sixties underground newspapers like the East Village Other and
Berkeley Barb. I suppose it could have been influenced by
George Maciunas’s Fluxus periodicals—although I never heard
any Interview editor mention Fluxus by name. However, I did see
the editors reading the so-called cheap-chic newsprint fashion
magazine RAGS (published by Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow
Publishing Co. and where Barbara Kruger was a designer in her
early years), which was somewhere between under- and middle
ground. John Wilcox’s Other Scenes, a scrappy underground
tabloid edited by one of the founders of the Village Voice, was
also on the table. Hence Interview’s early issues did not exhibit
any uniquely exceptional design approaches.
As far as I could tell, Warhol rarely got his hands dirty with this rag. He ruled
Interview many blocks from where I was, and was surprisingly listed second
on the masthead under co-editor and Chelsea Girls director Paul Morrissey.
Not only had I never meet Warhol, I was never even told that he (or Morrissey)
passed my redesign before it went to press. I still wonder whether they even
read the publication.
At this time I was also art director and designer of Rock, a second-
tier music tabloid, which to make ends meet rented typesetting
services to Interview (and other publications), and threw my ‘talents’
in as what in the retail business is called ‘a loss-leader’ (something
free to lure customers into the store). Actually I deserved a better
title, since all the type and graphic choices for the redesign were
mine. Instead, Colacello, who selected all the photographs, in
addition to writing and editing articles, saw himself as a.d., though
O’Brien took that title for himself. They made choices they knew
would please Andy, yet never dictated what typefaces I could use,
or prohibited me from using my then-favourite two—Broadway
and Busorama—which in retrospect was a big mistake.
I still cannot understand why Andy didn’t vet my typography. Before becoming
America’s pioneering Pop Artist, he was an accomplished graphic designer/
illustrator (with a distinctive hand-lettering style) and should have been
the first to realise that my pairing of Art Deco Broadway type for the nameplate
“INTER/view” and the curvaceous Busorama typeface for the subtitle “Andy
Warhol’s Film Magazine” was one of the dumbest combinations ever. It
was unsuitably retro and inappropriate for a progressive journal; moreover,
the two faces lacked any harmony whatsoever. Add to that the heavy oxford
Centre
rules I placed at the top and bottom of each page, and, if I had been in
Interview November 1982,
spread featuring Niki de
charge, I would have fired me. Still, no one uttered a displeased peep, and
Saint Phalle photographed
the magazine kept my logo for six issues, even after I voluntarily left for
by Jean Pagliuso greener pastures (at Screw magazine).
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