The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
Before I begin ladling out the deserved praise, allow me to lodge a minor kvetch at the complaint department.
To wit, the title of Tricia Romano’s scrappy, compendious oral history of The Village Voice—The Freaks Came Out to Write—does the book a disservice. A play on the Whodini song “Freaks Come Out at Night,” The Freaks Came Out to Write scans but misleads, evoking an image of mutant hippies tumbling out of a decal’d Volkswagen bus in a giant puff of pot smoke, or an invasion of mole people.
