Notwithstanding legitimate rivals for the title, most Americans hearing the words "Alternative Press" would probably think of the brash, crude, anti-establishment periodicals of the Vietnam Era (1963-1975). Most often tabloid in format, printed on the cheapest stock available, written with intent to maim, edited like frontline dispatches, and illustrated with "psychedelic," provocative graphics, these "underground" newspapers and magazines offered themselves as the organs of the national and regional "counter-culture" for which the period is famous—and, by and large, the counter-culture accepted the offer. The epithet "underground," however, was largely self-assumed and unmerited, since use of the police power of the state to suppress their publication was seldom if ever threatened, let alone exerted. By the time the Viet Cong forces took possession of Saigon (April 30, 1975), the great majority of the underground papers had either ceased publication or transformed themselves—like Rolling Stone—into the raffish...