Steven Ford Brown - Southside, Journalism, Music, Publishing

Southside, Journalism, Music, Publishing

In 1973 Brown moved to Birmingham’s Southside, a community just below Red Mountain and ten minutes from the downtown area of Birmingham where the most violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era took place. Not unlike New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight Ashbury during the 1960s, Southside, in stark contrast to the Civil Rights battleground in downtown Birmingham, was home to a tolerant alternative artistic, cultural and lifestyle scene. The Southside community featured an alternative newspaper (The Paperman), a Buddhist styled natural foods store (Golden Temple Health Foods), Society's Child, a folk music oriented coffeehouse, several communes, a headshop, a free medical clinic, the Charlemagne Record Exchange, The Garages art studios and the Red Mountain Alternative School.

Brown began his literary affiliations on Southside by joining a loose congregation of artists, writers and musicians who gathered and lived at the Cobb Lane Studios, a collection of apartments and studios above the Cobb Lane Restaurant on 20th Street. He began a writing career in earnest with The Paperman as an occasional journalist, books and literary editor and music reviewer. During this period on Southside he met poet John Beecher and his wife Barbara and also began a correspondence with John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow Press, and discovered Black Sparrow authors Charles Bukowski, Tom Clark, Jack Spicer and Diane Wakoski. He would eventually correspond for several years with Wakoski. He created and edited for the paper an original series of features and profiles of American artists and writers that included Diane Arbus, John Beecher, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hugo, Diane Wakoski and Poets against the Vietnam War. As a rock music critic and journalist he was among the first to champion Buckingham Nicks, the debut album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac. During this period he reviewed such recording artists as the Allman Brothers, Blondie, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Gram Parsons, Jimmie Spheeris, Michael Stanley, Alex Taylor, Steve Winwood and Warren Zevon.