The East Village Other — The Elektra Company, or How One Learns to Love the Bombs

The East Village Other, published by The East Village Other, Inc., Issue 41, dated September 10, 1969. This is a US-origin underground newspaper printed in tabloid format, running 12 pages. The specific draw for Doors collectors is David Walley's piece titled "The Elektra Company, or How One Learns to Love the Bombs," which makes this particular issue a primary-source document touching directly on the band's label home during one of the most turbulent periods in their career.

The East Village Other was printed on standard newsprint in the tabloid format typical of late-1960s underground press, and this issue follows that same production template. At 12 pages, it is a compact run, though EVO issues varied considerably in page count depending on advertising revenue and editorial content for any given week. The paper itself was not produced for archival longevity; newsprint from this era yellows and becomes brittle with age, and finding a copy of Issue 41 in genuinely clean condition is harder than it sounds after more than five decades. Collectors should inspect for the usual damage points: edge browning, fold stress along the centerfold, any moisture warping, and ink bleed-through from the adjacent pages. The tabloid format means that the pages are large, which also means they were frequently folded for storage, creating crease patterns that significantly affect presentation grade. EVO's visual identity in this period was characteristically dense, mixing hand-lettered headlines, psychedelic illustration, and political cartoonery in layouts that would have alarmed any mainstream art director. Issue 41 carries that same aesthetic energy. The Walley article itself, as an editorial or investigative piece about Elektra Records, is set in a standard column format amid the surrounding visual chaos that defined EVO's pages. For a collector specifically hunting Doors-adjacent print ephemera from 1969, the physical condition of the pages carrying Walley's Elektra piece is the primary grading concern. The cover and any associated imagery from this issue reflects the countercultural moment of September 1969, a period that also saw the band releasing Absolutely Live into an increasingly complicated cultural landscape.

David Walley's article is the entire reason this issue lands in a Doors-focused collection. Elektra Records was the band's label, and any substantive journalistic examination of the company's operations, culture, or business practices in September 1969 is going to touch on The Doors whether explicitly or by implication, given that the band was arguably Elektra's highest-profile act at the time. The piece's title, "The Elektra Company, or How One Learns to Love the Bombs," suggests a critical or satirical framing, which fits squarely within EVO's editorial posture. Underground papers of this era were not writing label profiles as promotional exercises; they were scrutinizing the music industry's relationship with the counterculture, the commercialization of the underground, and the tension between artistic integrity and corporate structure. Walley's piece, written in this context, carries a real weight with readers who were themselves navigating those questions as consumers and participants in the scene. For collectors, what matters is that this is a primary document, written contemporaneously, examining the label infrastructure that produced and distributed records like those covered in related period coverage such as Poppin's September 1969 issue. EVO's underground provenance also distinguishes Walley's piece from mainstream rock press coverage of the same label; this is not a Billboard business column or a Rolling Stone feature following industry conventions. It is an outsider perspective from within the counterculture that Elektra was simultaneously serving and profiting from. Compared to earlier underground press engagement with the Doors world, such as the kind of coverage documented in This Is Happening from April 1968, this Walley piece represents a more structurally critical mode of music journalism. For anyone building a comprehensive archive of how the Doors' label was perceived and written about during the band's commercial peak, this issue of EVO is a genuine gap-filler. The 1970 East Village Other issue in this catalog gives some sense of the paper's continuing coverage into the next decade, but the September 1969 moment is distinct in that Elektra's relationship with its artists was under particularly active scrutiny.

This is a 55-year-old piece of underground newsprint with a single article of direct relevance to Doors and Elektra Records history, and it should be evaluated on exactly those terms. It is not a rare find in the sense of a limited pressing or a deliberately scarce release; EVO circulated widely in its time. But survivorship has done the work that scarcity could not, and clean copies of any specific EVO issue from 1969 are genuinely difficult to source. If Walley's Elektra piece is a gap in your research archive on the band's label history, this issue fills it with primary-source authority that no reprint or digital scan fully replaces.