The Saga of Volume 1, Issue 4

by James Norton

Volume 1, Issue 4 is the first truly classic Liberator. For the first time, we really started digging into the West community – we polled more than 100 of West's 1900 students (something we would do again, several more times), we offered a reader contest with prizes, and we appropriated David Letterman's Top Ten List format to mock local concerns. The target: Chess Club.

One of West's coaches found our article about the school teams changing their name from "The Regents" to "The Eunuchs" amusing enough that he read it aloud to his students. Viva Alex. Adam Osborn's comic contribution ("That Darn Cesium") also became a classic Liberator piece in that it wasn't only funny to West High science students; it's also funny to describe it to people in the present day, which is 2000 and fucking 2.

It's with a mixture of chagrin, amusement, pride and regret that I look back on the incredibly labored CD review format we pioneered with this issue. We had four people talk about a disc, making sure to spend 30% of copy talking about our own musical tastes. It's an elephant gun used to swat a gnat, and usually a random gnat at that. But I'd like to think this format helped pioneer Flak's "jam-session" features.

With this issue, the Liberator was starting to sink in – we were really getting somewhere, and this was one of the most exhausting (due to the multi-person CD review and all the ballots from the poll) but entertaining issues to assemble.