Learning the language The NewPaper and the New Providence BY BILL FLANAGAN

In the early ’60s there was a cover story in the Sunday Journal’s Rhode Islander magazine that projected what Providence would look like in the future — 1970 or 1975 or some such Irwin Allen science fiction date. I was just a kid but I remember being amazed by the drawings of a downtown with a river running along the foot of College Hill and a pond in front of the State House and walkways and skyscrapers and parks and happy children. I don’t recall if the people in those drawings were flying around the Biltmore with jetpacks, but the presentation had that sort of Kennedy era sky’s-the-limit optimism.

Last summer I was with my own kids at WaterFire and I thought, "I can’t believe it, that Rhode Islander drawing came true." It took an extra 20 years, and gondolas replaced the jetpacks, but you have to expect some such nod to the Italian population.

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the birth of the publication formerly known as the NewPaper, I would like to propose that this alternative weekly made a significant contribution to the Providence Renaissance. That may sound a bit like the claims that the Beatles brought down communism, but hear me out.

Cast your mind back to what our city looked like, felt like, and smelled like in the mid-’70s. The once-proud capital of Rhode Island was an abandoned rust belt remnant. The old downtown was dark. Gladdings, Shepard’s — all the big department stores were boarded up, and the mighty Outlet itself was on its last legs. You can blame that on the ’50s flight to the suburbs, you can blame it on the new malls that had opened in Warwick. Some of the blame, though, has to go to the remarkable resistance by the old Providence establishment to admitting that anything in the world around it had changed. The suburban malls stayed open till 10 p.m. The downtown department stores still closed at 6, suppertime, as they had since the ’20s. They were designed for a world in which ladies shopped for clothes and draperies during the day, while their husbands worked. They were designed for a world that no longer existed.

That was the problem with the whole ruling culture of Providence at that time. The people in charge would not change the way they operated to accommodate shifting demographics. The Journal regularly ran editorials condemning rock concerts at the Civic Center. Lupo’s — the Mayflower of what would turn out to be the new Providence — was continually hassled by the police. If post-RISD artists tried to move into lofts downtown, they were rousted out through the enforcement of outdated zoning laws. If someone was brave enough to open a gay bar, they had to worry about carloads of goons beating up the clientele.

There was a new Providence trying to be born, but the old Providence establishment kept strangling it in the cradle. It was like the City Council was run by Herod.

One of the brightest lights during this dark time was when the old Loew’s theater downtown was reborn as the Palace, a sort of local Fillmore, with regular multi-artist concerts (Lou Reed with Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, the J. Geils Band with the Eagles, Van Morrison with Grin, Steely Dan) and movies for 99 cents (The Harder They Come, Harold and Maude, and Marx Brothers festivals were in regular rotation). It was a wonderful hall. The municipal establishment hated the Palace, and a civic renewal effort was launched to clean it up and reopen it as the Ocean State. They thought they would entice the middle-aged crowd back from Barrington and East Greenwich by replacing the rock bands and cult movies with new motion pictures (Murder by Death, the remake of King Kong) and ushers dressed in knickers and tricornered hats.

Talk about frustrating. Providence had slipped down the pole, past Worcester, past Fall River, approaching Bangor, and still sinking. The municipality was driving the wrong way down the East Side bus tunnel with the headlights off. I said once that maybe what the city needed to get back on the map was a Wonder of the World — a St. Louis Arch, a Seattle Space Needle. My friend Kelleher shrugged and said, "It wouldn’t do any good. If the Eiffel Tower were in Providence they’d put a plaque on it saying, ‘1938 hurricane waters came up this high.’ "

That attitude, that smart-ass take on Ocean State culture, was how the new generation of Rhode Islanders talked to each other — but it had no public forum until the NewPaper appeared. The NewPaper came along at a time when Providence could not have sunk much lower, but seemed determined to try. What the NewPaper had — almost all the NewPaper had — was the voice of the young, smart, and disenfranchised population of the Providence area. It was the voice you heard in bars and concert halls and the Silver Top diner at 4 a.m., mocking all the corruption and baloney of the town with the same exasperated affection Mencken had for Baltimore, Damon Runyon had for New York and, once upon a time, S.J. Perelman had here.

The NewPaper had Chip Young riffing on the Rhode Island accent, coffee milk, Haven Brothers, and a hundred other local customs and eccentricities. The NewPaper had Doug Allen’s Steven of Providence trapped in the Lupo’s men’s room. Most astonishing, the NewPaper wrote about how the Journal caved into pressure from Buddy Cianci’s attorneys to kill a story about how Cianci was accused of rape when he was a law student. This was the stuff everyone talked about in private, but no one expected to see in print. The NewPaper writers had to race each other to the bank, because after the first few checks were cashed the rest usually bounced, but they kept turning out copy and Rhode Island kept reading.

The NewPaper helped give an identity, a sense of itself, to a city where corruption was a given and self-deprecation was a second language, a language no one used in public.

Reading the NewPaper was like finding out you didn’t have to speak in Latin anymore. You began to see that language sneak into local TV news and talk radio. You even got a whiff of it in the Evening Bulletin. The real Providence was being recognized. Eventually that voice, that Rhode Island accent, would find expression in the novels of Peter Farrelly and Geoffrey Wolff, the films of the Farrelly Brothers and Michael Corrente, and in post cards celebrating the giant termite at the Thurbers Avenue exit. By the time The Sopranos visited Atwells Avenue, the whole country knew: Providence was full of nuts and Providence was proud of it.

As the ’70s became the ’80s, you could tell something was changing. You could see Richard and Linda Thompson and the Pretenders at Lupo’s, R.E.M. and the Replacements at the Living Room, U2 at Center Stage, and Steven Wright and Jay Leno at the West End. All of those clubs as well as smaller rooms, from the Met Café to One Up, were providing regular work for local bands who wrote their own material. Trinity Rep was premiering the new plays of Sam Shepard. The patient was coming back to life.

The canniest student of this transformation was Buddy Cianci. In his first administration he played it straight and made life miserable for any arts or culture that did not involve a revolving stage. Buddy took a fall, landed a felony conviction, and lost his office. He used a radio talk show to launch his return, and it was during that time on the air that the new Buddy began to form.

Say what you will about Cianci, he understood his market. The man who once banned the Who from performing in Providence with the immortal words, "What’s wrong with Lawrence Welk?" came back playing the goofy Row Dilanda with a sense of humor about himself and the town he loved. He sat in on drums at Lupo’s, he rode his horse down Westminster Mall, he sold spaghetti sauce with his picture on the jar. In an Olympic backflip, he became a great supporter of artists, gays, club owners, and other people who actually wanted to live, work, and play in downtown Providence. Buddy may have been a crook, but he was no fool. He gave up on trying to make Providence back into what it had been in the past and helped make it what it needed to be for the future.

I’ve never bought the notion that Cianci was the author of the Providence Renaissance (although God knows his administration greased enough construction contracts that something was bound to get built), but at least give him this: he got out of the way. He got City Hall to stop stopping it. In that sense, Buddy was like the last white ruler of South Africa, or like Gorbachev. On an incredibly meager scale.

The NewPaper, which later became the Providence Phoenix, laid down the first telegraph wires across the frontier. It sent up smoke signals between the rockers in Cranston and the painters on the East Side, between the comedians and the writers and the filmmakers and the audiences waiting for something to do. Once they had a voice, they saw what they had in common. Once they knew what they had in common, they became a constituency. Once they became a constituency, they got political power. Now, they are the city of Providence.

Did the NewPaper contribute as much to the rebirth of our town as graft and civic corruption did? No, certainly not. Did it help the new Providence imagine itself into being? Yes, the NewPaper did that for sure. Happy anniversary.

Bill Flanagan is senior vice president of the MTV Networks Music Group. His latest book is A&R: a novel.