We all owe the University of Wollongong a great debt, because they are hosting the only repository on the internet that features every single page of OZ, the influential psychedelic underground newspaper that was published in London between 1967 and 1973 after several years of an Australian version that was equally mind-blowing.

The newspaper featured an impressive roster of contributors, including Germaine Greer, Lillian Roxon, Barney Bubbles, David Widgery, Clive James, Edward de Bono, Richard Meltzer, Clay Wilson, Colin MacInnes, Anthony Haden-Guest, and Raymond Durgnat. Interview subjects included Pete Townshend, Timothy Leary, Jimmy Page, and Andy Warhol.

OZ magazine was edited by Richard Neville. Both in Australia and in the UK, OZ had to weather several serious legal challenges over obscenity. The May 1970 issue was called the “Schoolkids” issue; it featured a filthy comic strip in which Vivian Berger adapted a R. Crumb cartoon to place the beloved Rupert Bear cartoon character in an explicitly sexual situation (PDF link here). They were defended in court by John Mortimer, later the author of the highly successful “Rumpole” series of British legal novels. A few years earlier Mortimer had defended Hubert Selby for the Last Exit in Brooklyn trial, and in 1977 Mortimer also successfully defended the right of the Sex Pistols to use the word “bollocks” in an advertising display. However, Mortimer’s luck with OZ was not quite as good, and Neville, along with editors Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, were sentenced to up to 15 months imprisonment, although the ruling was later overturned on appeal.
 

Issue No. 28, the “Schoolkids” issue
 
The art director of OZ was Martin Sharp, who was one of the true artistic geniuses of the psychedelic movement. He had been with the publication since its Australian period, and his many meticulously wrought, daring, and colorful covers and internal illustrations guaranteed that OZ would stand out from a visual perspective. Sharp also did the cover art for Cream’s albums Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire, if you’re wondering why his style looks so familiar.

OZ used to do this thing where they would transcribe the lyrics of new songs, so for instance, the September 1968 issue features the lyrics to “Street Fighting Man” and “Jigsaw Puzzle” which were credited as being “from the unreleased album Beggars Banquet.” The album was released in December of the same year.
 

 
Note: The first version of this post neglected to thank the Exile on Moan Street blog for the tip.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Martin Sharp’s psychedelic tarot cards from 1967

Here’s an awesome find from artist John Coulthart (who I relink quite a bit because his blog is, in my opinion, one of the great sources of interesting original content on the web. He finds the kind of stuff that you would prolapse even if you saw in a bizarro, dusty boutique used book store, you know, those things we had before the Interwebs that don’t exist anymore. His blog is kind of like finding a first edition of the Necronomicon 3-4 times a week.)

Here he writes about Jim Leon, who drew bizarre psychosexual wonderlands for Oz magazine in the 60s:

This, dear friends, is what the art of the fantastic could give us but rarely does, something which combines the metaphysical intensity of the Symbolists with a post-Freudian sensibility to create what Philip José Farmer once called “the pornography of the weird”. Jim Leon was a British artist whose work gained prominence via the underground magazines of the 1960s, especially Oz, although he was never really a psychedelic artist as such. Many of his earliest paintings show the influence of the Pop artists, it was only later in the decade that a distinctly original and surreal imagination came to the fore. Oz was always pretty scurrilous and had no qualms about challenging the authorities with bizarre sexual imagery which other magazines would never dare to print. Leon and other artists were fortunate to have such a public forum for outré work, a few years earlier or later and they might not have found an outlet at all.

(Behold this utter glory here.)

(John Coulthart: The Haunter of the Dark: And Other Grotesque Visions)