You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life
By The Mutants Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you need to believe that goodness prevails?
Features / August 14, 2025 <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41789" data-attachment-id="41789" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-lebowski/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg" data-orig-size="1600,900" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm lebowski" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=700" class="wp-image-41789" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1125" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg 1600w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=150&h=84 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=300&h=169 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=768&h=432 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=1024&h=576 1024w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-lebowski.jpg?w=1440&h=810 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Mike and Kelly believe the Dude really ties the room together. Richard’s a fuckin’ nihilist. GRASSO: I hate Top Whatever lists. Not the kind of Top X lists that are based on sales or airplay or objective criteria or what have you, but being asked to come up with, say, a Top 20 Personal Albums or Sports Figures or, indeed, Favorite Movies of All Time. How am I supposed to do that? My opinions on movies can sometimes change during the course of a single (re)viewing or conversation with someone! Also, there’s that whole “putting your intimate aesthetic tastes out there to be judged” thing that I’m constantly afraid of doing. Especially with respect to film, which seems to have one of the most contentious communities online these days. So, naturally, when Kelly asked each of us to come up with “20 Films for the Rest of Your Life,” I was grumblingly resistant. I still don’t know how I ended up being the one who finished his list first! My process entailed just thinking about the movies I’ve watched most, and picking which ones I would still need to have a copy of in Kelly’s “desert island” situation. Then I filled some of the holes in with oddball personal choices and films that, as I was considering my “bubble” of movies in the low-20s, that I just couldn’t bear to see out of contention. I’m incredibly self-conscious about the aesthetic and genre elements of the movies on this list, but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to expand on and justify my choices in my next turn. Here you go, then: Mike Grasso’s Top 20 Movies of, yes, All Time. Persona (1966) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972) Network (1976) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Apocalypse Now (1979) UFOs Are Real (1979) Blade Runner (1982) Videodrome (1983) Manhunter (1986) Goodfellas (1990) JFK (1991) Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Casino (1995) Boogie Nights (1997) The Big Lebowski (1998) 24 Hour Party People (2002) Inherent Vice (2014) Mandy (2018) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) MCKENNA: Jesus Christ. While very much not the first time Kelly has demanded we do something excruciating, he definitely raised the bar with the outrageousness of this one. Once you’re over 50, what is the likelihood of having less than, say, a hundred “favorites” of anything—if you even still like it all? I probably have more than 20 ailments that I’m sort of fond of. But this weasel-words “You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life” phrasing has allowed wily lowlife Roberts to cunningly avoid the inevitable refusal to cooperate that a request for a top 20 would have elicited while, as Mike has pointed out, making the selection even more embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes. It feels like taking off my jumper at the third year end-of-term disco to reveal the Genesis “Shapes” tee I was wearing underneath it. Anyway, the older I get, the less “stories” and “plots” and “resolution” feel relevant to the experience of existing, so I’m going to go with films I love and have either seen loads of times or not enough times and which basically put me into a fugue state while also pressing the specific aesthetic buttons inside me that I like having pushed. There are films I’ve loved very much since childhood, like CE3K and Star Wars, that I’d have put in, but I’ve seen them so many times I think I’ve basically internalized them—I don’t think I need to watch them again, they’re kind of part of the architecture of my brain at this point. But anyway, how about we make it thirty? This Island Earth (1955) Jason and the Argonauts (1963) THX 1138 (1971) The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) Eraserhead (1977) Stalker (1979) Alien (1979) The Fog (1980) Southern Comfort (1981) Litan (1982) The Dead Zone (1983) Manhunter (1986) Sonatine (1993) Solaris (2002) Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) Dredd (2012) Evolution (2015) Petite Maman (2021) (Okay, great—Kelly’s just informed me that, according to his made-up rules, TV movies aren’t actually movies. Meaning presumably TV dinners aren’t dinners either? That means I can no longer include the film I was planning to include—Journey Through the Black Sun, the amazing Space: 1999 “TV movie” that was made by cobbling together a couple of episodes of the TV show. Fine, let’s just not include one of the greatest human artifacts ever just because, why not. Okay, fuck it, you know what I’m going to include? The 2012 Dredd. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, brother Rico.) <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41795" data-attachment-id="41795" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-alien-ripley/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg" data-orig-size="1230,521" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm alien ripley" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=700" class="wp-image-41795" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="847" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg 1230w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=150&h=64 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=300&h=127 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=768&h=325 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/watm-alien-ripley.jpg?w=1024&h=434 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> We all have Alien, right? Right? ROBERTS: Listen, I don’t know what you guys are complaining about: one of my movies revolves around inept dinosaur puppets. I’ve been laid bare once again. Yes, it’s basically the “desert island” experiment, but in my version you can’t bullshit and say you want Bitches Brew for that last slot when you really want Toto IV (yes, I know, they’re both great albums). As Richard says, this exercise is “embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes.” That’s the point. You won’t find any Godard or Kurosawa or Altman films on this list not because I don’t admire those directors, but because, if I had to choose, I’d rather watch spiky-haired Kevin Bacon save a small, god-fearing town from dancelessness. If I were in my twenties, my list would look incredibly different; I might even have chosen (bravely, or rashly) 20 movies I’d never seen before. But I just turned 50-something and, you know what?—I want to watch the films that still, after a lifetime of watching films, move me, or simply make me happy. Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you want to believe in magic? When you need to believe that goodness prevails? When you want to visit a future that you won’t be around to see? These are not the 20 greatest films ever made. These are the 20 films I can’t live without. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) The Poseidon Adventure (1972) The Land That Time Forgot (1974) Star Wars (1977) Watership Down (1978) Alien (1979) The Black Hole (1979) Escape from New York (1981) Blade Runner (1982) E.T. (1982) Mad Max 2 (1982) The Thing (1982) Footloose (1984) The Karate Kid (1984) Aliens (1986) Dazed and Confused (1993) Sense and Sensibility (1995) The Big Lebowski (1998) Master and Commander (2003) <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41802" data-attachment-id="41802" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg" data-orig-size="1200,720" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm land that time forgot 2" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=700" class="wp-image-41802" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1200" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg 1200w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=150&h=90 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=300&h=180 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=768&h=461 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-land-that-time-forgot-2.jpg?w=1024&h=614 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> You thought Kelly was kidding about dinosaur puppets. Nope. GRASSO: So first things first, before I get to picking apart both of your lists (just kidding; how could I ever, especially considering the overlap Kelly and I have!), an apologia for my picks (of course): I’m thoroughly and embarrassingly aware of how there are no women directors on my list and how “dudes rock” so many of the films are. I can’t help it. There’s no scenario where I go without watching Goodfellas and Casino for the rest of my life. I’ve watched them, along with JFK, enough times to be able to recite huge wodges of the dialogue purely from memory. If society ever plummets into a Fahrenheit 451 scenario where we need to preserve films using the oral tradition, please assign me these three movies. But yeah, there’s a lot of crime flicks here, psychological thrillers, a fair smattering of science fiction, and big political films (leaving off mid-’70s paranoid stuff like The Conversation, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor hurt, but they were all definitely on my bubble). These types of movies are who I am and I can neither deny or excuse it. So many of my movie preferences were formed in the first quarter-century of my life; as you can see, I’ve only included four films from the 21st century and most of my other picks dwell in the last quarter of last century, the 25 years that overlap with my 20th-century lifespan. These are movies that maybe I didn’t see in the theater when they came out, but definitely caught on TV, cable, or VHS as I became a film buff from childhood into adolescence (thank you again Dana Hersey and The Movie Loft). Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Network, and 2001 are three films I met at a very early age and they will live in my head and my heart forever. Two directors—Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese—appear twice. Ashamed to say that despite Kubrick’s and Cronenberg’s and Lynch’s and Coppola’s inviolable places in my pantheon of auteurs, I only picked one from each director that embodies what I love about their work so much. Maybe I rewatch Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. more frequently than I do the harrowing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but for my money everything “Lynch” is in the latter, and for that reason it stands alone, much like Videodrome for Cronenberg and Apocalypse Now for Coppola. The ones I consider “oddball choices” here are where my other interests intersect with film. Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii and Michael Winterbottom’s impressionistic postmodern tale of the Manchester music scene 24 Hour Party People are two of the best films featuring/about music I could think of, and I need some music on my desert island. I could’ve easily included stuff like Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or Led Zeppelin’s toxically self-indulgent The Song Remains the Same, but both really don’t rise to the level of “must-haves.” Low-rent UFO documentary UFOs Are Real, well, I’ve written about the hauntological impact of that movie extensively for Mutants, and it too is a film that repeated childhood viewings made part of, as Richard suggested with some of his leave-offs, my permanent matrix of obsessions. Unlike Richard, I desperately need that cinematic comfort food. Whew. Richard, tell us a little about your picks! <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41799" data-attachment-id="41799" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-manhunter/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg" data-orig-size="1440,608" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm manhunter" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-41799" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="844" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg 1440w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=150&h=63 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=300&h=127 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=768&h=324 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-manhunter.jpg?w=1024&h=432 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Only Michael Mann could make a dude riding an elevator look like an ecstatic vision. And yet Kelly would rather “cut loose / Footloose / Kick off the Sunday Shoes”? MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, this is torture. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Coming back to my selection is even more agonizing than choosing the bloody things in the first place. I really don’t need to be reminded that my whole personality is just a lame blend of regressive nostalgist who refuses to relinquish the psychic atmospheres he immersed himself in as a kid and the kind of try-hard insecure idiot who cares so much about the opinions of other people—even the hypothetical other people who won’t even read this—that his decisions are always shaped by trying to impress them. I already know that, I said it before! Looking at this list again I’d probably change half the films I put in there, but I suppose we have to commit at some point, so fuck it—let the shit film choices fall where they may. It looks like the guiding principle with my list is things that put me somewhere oneiric? I mean, I put This Island Earth, but it could just as easily have been It Came from Outer Space, or Invaders from Mars, or Forbidden Planet: anything that shunts me through the veil that separates us from the dreamworld will do. This Island Earth has a particular appeal for me, though, because it feels to me like a film where the mood is the story, and I suppose that’s kind of a theme that runs through my list. And good to see that we’re overlapping on Manhunter, Mike. Like I said before, some films that I love I really feel like I’ve seen enough times to make watching them again a bit redundant, and then there’s other stuff that I love and haven’t seen much, or maybe only once, but don’t really have any interest in seeing again. I suppose it’s a bit like the saying “Friends for a reason, friends for a season, friends for life,” which I’ve always (perhaps idiosyncratically) interpreted as meaning that people can be important to you in different but equally valid ways. Some films are friends for a season—I love them but that season’s gone—and others are friends for a reason. Whereas Jason and the Argonauts feels like a friend for life, like I’m entering some sort of eternal mythical dream-space where each visit takes me deeper into something? Myself? The collective imagination? I appreciate that’s a bit bombastic when talking about a film whose main draw (for me) is the stop-motion skeletons, but much as I love, say, Pasolini’s Medea or Cocteau’s Orphée, just to give two examples of other films that engage with the mythical, I’m not compelled to rewatch them in the same way. Is it just nostalgia for the me that watched Harryhausen a shitload when I was a kid, or does Jason and the Argonauts genuinely access some different part of my brain? Does it even matter? Probably not. Choosing Alien feels pretty stupid—it’s one of the most famous films in the world, and it’s been franchised into absolute shit. And yet it’s still something that affects me in a strange way every time I watch it. I have my own history with it, but it also feels fresh every time. Mythical, you might say. Anyway, enough of the babbling, let’s get down to what’s important—Footloose, Kelly? Are you fucking kidding? I mean, I’ll give you Sense and Sensibility, I could watch Hugh Grant writhe with discomfort all day, but Footloose? Was proposing this feature just a way for you to indulge some weird public humiliation fetish that risks taking blameless Mike and me down with you? Explain yourself! ROBERTS: Like both of you said, some of these films are here because of how much they affected me when I was young and impressionable, before my core being solidified. But then, why Footloose and not a dozen other films (WarGames, The Goonies, Legend, Tron, Red Dawn) that obsessed me when they came out in a way that Footloose didn’t? Plus, dancing is stupid! I think it’s because, underneath all the ‘80s (fun) silliness, there’s something incredibly authentic to me, a suburban only child who grew up in the shadow of Reagan, about these small-town teenagers resisting an oppressive and repressive adult regime at a time when young people were patronized, scapegoated, and exploited—punished, in a way, for the sins of the counterculture. (E.T. is on here for exactly the same reason). It still gives me chills when Ren makes his case at the town council for having the school dance, and when Lithgow gives the sermon asking everyone in the town “to guide them in their endeavors.” There’s a mythic (this word keeps popping up, doesn’t it?) or allegorical quality there, at least to me. To answer your question, Richard: I need it. In a way that I don’t need another movie I love, Over the Edge, probably the best movie about teenage rebellion ever made. At first I thought I didn’t need Star Wars because I’ve seen it so many times and essentially absorbed it into myself—but I can’t stand the thought of it not being there. So I do need it. But why? And why Star Wars and not the better sequel, The Empire Strikes Back? I could go on and on in this way, questioning each of my choices, trying to make sense of this list. But the word need is pretty basic, and that’s what it comes down to. Mike, you have to explain Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii to me. I love it and watched it religiously as a young guitar player, but wouldn’t the soundtrack suffice? Are you that big of a Floyd fan? And Richard, why Southern Comfort? There are much better Walter Hill movies, and this one is kind of a rip of Deliverance, no? <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41809" data-attachment-id="41809" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-stalker-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg" data-orig-size="1225,919" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm stalker 2" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-41809" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1500" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg 1225w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=150&h=113 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=300&h=225 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=768&h=576 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-stalker-2.jpg?w=1024&h=768 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Richard was the only one to honor the great Tarkovsky. Too bad he betrayed the auteur’s memory by also including… the Solaris remake? GRASSO: Richard: Alien definitely is on my bubble and you should feel no shame about selecting it whatsoever; for Ridley Scott representation, it and Blade Runner are a tossup and, honestly, I feel like Blade Runner edges it out purely thanks to the immortal musical efforts of one Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou at his absolute fucking peak. I totally get what you’re saying about This Island Earth, too: it may be one of the thematically hokier entries in classic ’50s scifi, but visually, even up against the often trippy Forbidden Planet, it’s a phantasmagoria, isn’t it? Honestly, most of your films are visual tours de force: The Fog is probably the most memorably-shot Carpenter next to Halloween, and Manhunter stands head and shoulders above most 1980s thrillers and most of Michael Mann’s already formidable corpus. (I still feel like my jury is out on your abiding love of The Dead Zone, but its chilly, detached vision as you’ve described it now seems like a harbinger of Cronenberg’s late-career turn into the cold, clinical, and cerebral.) As for mythic echoes, I get what you’re saying about selections like Jason and the Argonauts and Alien—and of course you managed to expertly dovetail Manhunter with Dragonslayer in the Mutants book. Now I’m considering THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey long before Lucas met Joseph Campbell and, God help me, it fits! And Kelly, the middle of your list of picks—from Star Wars to Aliens—really does constitute what I would call the late ’70s/’80s “mall movie theater core curriculum,” maybe with the addition of stuff like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Night of the Comet. The Thing is the kind of choice I see on a list and smack my forehead as to how I left it off (probably the easiest explanation is that I’m not the world’s hugest John Carpenter fan; I know, I know). I probably saw E.T. three or four times in the mall movie theater when I was a little kid. Footloose and The Karate Kid are a pair of pop culture touchstones of my youth, although those two are more likely movies I internalized from repeated cable viewings. Underdog stories—boy, we really did love those in Reagan’s America, huh? As for my ranking Live at Pompeii, well, I mentioned The Song Remains the Same as its chief competitor because basically I need one “heady” music film on the list that I can get stoned and zone out to on my desert island. I probably like Zeppelin’s music a fair bit more than Floyd’s, but Pompeii‘s mix of sound and trippy, ancient visuals is the winner over Zep by a nose. The outliers on each of your lists I would love to hear more about: Richard, I love Herzog but I would never put Kaspar Hauser on my list of favorites of his. Also, I’ve never seen Werckmeister Harmonies but loads of people swear by it as superb. And Kelly, I am gonna give you shit for Sense and Sensibility just because I’ve been lassoed into watching countless British adaptations of various Regency novels of manners by my goodly spouse and have hated all of them. Also, I’m kicking myself now for leaving off Dazed and Confused, speaking of good movies to watch stoned. MCKENNA: Kelly, why the fuck are you trolling me about Empire Strikes Back being better than Star Wars? Why? We’re better than this. We’re more mature than this. We’ve read clever books, we’ve written a book (that nobody read): we don’t need to spend our time trying to provoke each other with self-evidently foolish positions about bloody Star Wars. That said, fuck you, because Empire Strikes Back is the turd that Star Wars shat out (Hoth and Bespin sequences excepted)! Okay, now I’ve got that off my chest, I actually love both of your lists. In the sense that I think it would probably be possible to reconstruct the pair of you bodily from them like Jeff Bridges from a hair in Starman, or Oddbod Junior from a toe in British comedy horror masterpiece Carry on Screaming, which I’m now kicking myself for not including (even just for Fenella Fielding). And why have none of us included Starman, come to think of it? I hate doing this. I get what you mean though, Kelly, about “needing” certain films. It’s as though they have a language built into their interiors that you need to run through your speakers now and then, the way you sometimes need to play back experience in your mind to remind yourself of how you got to be who you are. Calling it “nostalgia” is, I think, reductive (don’t worry, fans of bloviating, I have a long and tedious article on this very concept in the pipeline)—it’s more like refreshing your operating system, or sharpening a knife. Mike, I want to thank you for the Alien support and also for locating THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey—this is exactly why we need that Grasso laser insight here at WATM. Because, let’s be honest, Roberts and McKenna are not providing it: in classic Gen-X style, vibes is all we’ve got. Anyway, to answer you two’s questions, I don’t really know why Southern Comfort as opposed to Hill’s other films. I’m kind of a one-note person, and I think it’s the same thing I’ve already said: there’s something about how sleek, reductive, even derivative, it is that takes it into the landscape of the mythical. Plus, it’s basically like four other films that I like rolled in one. And Mike, Kaspar Hauser‘s a film I saw around the same time I saw Truffaut’s The Wild Child, when I was probably eight or nine. They used to show stuff like that in the early evening on BBC2 in the ‘70s, incredibly. Both films affected me very deeply, and I didn’t know which of the two to choose, but decided on Kaspar Hauser for the soundtrack and for its pervasive mood of intense outsiderness. Come on, we all feel like we’re seeing stars in the daytime occasionally and don’t know how to behave in polite company! There’s a case to be made, I suppose, that Werckmeister Harmonies is one of Bela Tarr’s “easier” films, which I suppose in a way it might be, but despite its gloomy themes, watching it in its entirety always feels very… healthy? It feels like you’ve been through a ritual cycle of humanity that in some way is renewing? To be honest, that might be the unifying thread running through all my choices. I feel a bit shit but apart from fucking Footloose—insert facepalm emoji—I don’t really have any questions about either of your lists. Like I say, I feel like they’re authentic representations of the pair of you. What were the films you two nearly put in but didn’t, and why? <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41818" data-attachment-id="41818" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-the-fog/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg" data-orig-size="1909,813" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm the fog" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-41818" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="852" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg 1909w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=150&h=64 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=300&h=128 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=768&h=327 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=1024&h=436 1024w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-the-fog.jpg?w=1440&h=613 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Ridley Scott is the most represented director on our combined lists. John Carpenter is second. ROBERTS: That’s an interesting question, Richard, so I’m going to give everyone five more selections. Now you can watch 25 films for the rest of your life. See mine below, with notes. You make a good point about Mike providing the insight here, because I had no idea how many of my picks are in fact about the underdog against all odds. Ripley, Max, Luke Skywalker, Snake Plisken/R.J. MacReady, Ren McCormack, Daniel LaRusso, even the rabbits in Watership Down! Jesus. It certainly says something about me. It’s Samuel Beckett, I guess—“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—but mixed with some… John Wayne? Irish pessimism meets American exceptionalism? Mike notes that many of Richard’s films are visually compelling, which is true, but they have something else in common: they’re about people/beings who don’t fit in, who are overwhelmed by a “reality” that is often alien, irrational, and unstable. The Man Who Fell to Earth is the obvious example, but it’s also the core theme of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and you can make a good case for Eraserhead (the mood perfected in Lynch’s next film, The Elephant Man), Manhunter, The Dead Zone, Southern Comfort, Evolution, THX 1138, et al. With Mike, it’s the intersection of media, politics, and conspiracy. He’s obsessed with the screen, its ability to reflect and/or remake reality. Network and Videodrome are explicit satires on television, but screens have a profound role in many of these other films: the projector and projected images in Persona, the home videos in Manhunter, the TVs that reveal Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters, the prolific “evidence” in UFOs Are Real (mostly photographs made to appear as video), the ubiquitous Zapruder film in JFK. Another thing that’s interesting about Mike’s list: only one of his last 10 films—that is, every film from 1990 on—takes place in the present day. All others are interpretations of the past—the late ‘60s through 1990, when The Big Lebowski takes place. (You could argue that the outlier, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, actually falls into the same category, given the ambiguity of time in the film and its ironic ‘50s mood and aesthetic.) This is our area of concentration at WATM, yes, but there’s something else here. A few of these films posit or suggest an alternate history—what kind of world might we have had if Rick and Cliff had killed the Manson Family? If a government conspiracy to kill JFK had been proven?—but most are tragedies that illustrate why we can’t have that better world: big dreams momentarily fulfilled but ultimately and irrevocably corrupted, mostly by greed. In short: you are both far more complicated than me. As for Sense and Sensibility, Mike, you have to remember that I was strictly a Western Canon guy well into my thirties, and Jane Austen is a favorite. This is a faithful and beautifully acted and directed adaptation of my favorite Austen novel, and it’s got a big, fat, happy, romantic ending. Every once in a while, I need one of those. The Magnificent Seven (1960) (I love Westerns, and this is my favorite, although 1972’s The Cowboys and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are extremely close. It’s about… underdogs.) The Time Machine (1960) (George Pal’s best.) Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (Harryhausen’s best.) Outland (1981) (Yet another underdog story, an early sci-fi noir with one of my favorite monologues of all time.) Conan the Barbarian (1982) (The greatest fantasy action film ever made [sorry, Peter Jackson], and Milius’s finest hour. It’s a retelling of Apocalypse Now, believe it or not.) <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41820" data-attachment-id="41820" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-once-upon-a-time-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg" data-orig-size="1272,536" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm once upon a time" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-41820" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="843" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg 1272w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=150&h=63 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=300&h=126 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=768&h=324 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-once-upon-a-time.jpg?w=1024&h=431 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Not even Cliff can save us from our psychotic past. Also, Mike is the only one who repped Tarantino. GRASSO: Yep, you got it in one, Kelly: paranoia, television, and nostalgia, my three great interwoven lifetime obsessions. I can’t think of one of my movies that doesn’t fit neatly into one or more of these themes. Did you design this seemingly fun and innocent critical assignment as a psychological test? Oh wait, maybe that’s my paranoia talking again. To get Mythic Outsider Richard and Paranoid Hauntological Mike to lay bare our entire psyches in a list of 25 movies… that’s pretty damn devious. Speaking of devious, paranoid personality tests, one of my five bubble films fits that bill perfectly: The Godfather Part II (1974) The Parallax View (1974) The Ninth Configuration (1980) Slacker (1990) Uncut Gems (2019) I may have agonized over these five as much as the previous 20. I think you guys may have seen an earlier version of this list in our shared document that had five completely different movies! The Godfather is, we must concede, a perfect movie, but I like Part II‘s overstuffed historical sprawl (and oblique nods to CIA-Mob parapolitics in Cuba and elsewhere) a tiny bit better, not to mention that John Cazale’s performance as Fredo beats any other performance in Coppola’s trilogy—and perhaps in the entirety of the 1970s—handily. I chose The Parallax View over All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor primarily for its higher quotient of Weirdness and its direct invocation of the American intelligence community’s complicity in the wave of domestic political assassinations in the 1960s. On that note, I was thinking Winter Kills (1979) for a while as well, but to my mind William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration is a better parable about how all our imperialist wars blow back onto the domestic front. I pondered Dazed and Confused for a bit until I realized that Richard Linklater has an even more rewatchable film in Slacker, and one that speaks to me far more personally (and generationally). And finally, one of the two movies I saw (along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) in a theater before COVID hit, Uncut Gems, a great gritty New York City crime yarn in the tradition of my Scorsese and Coppola selections with a killer electronic score from Daniel Lopatin that rivals the aforementioned Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner. One of my favorite parts of conceiving the Mutants book was coming up with all those great double features that may not have looked like they worked on paper… at least until we went on about them for three to five thousand words. I feel the same about these lists: they each offer a curriculum in filmmaking and film critique where the constituent movies inform, illuminate, and complement each other. One thing’s for sure: there are a bunch of films on Richard’s list I’ve never seen before as opposed to Kelly’s, where I’ve seen 23 or 24 of them. And just one more snipe here as I close things out, Richard: Soderbergh’s Solaris instead of Tarkovsky’s??? I can’t believe I missed that! What? <img width="300" height="150" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=300" class="attachment-medium size-medium" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=300 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=600 600w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=150 150w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" data-attachment-id="41805" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-slacker/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg" data-orig-size="1024,512" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm slacker" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-slacker.jpg?w=700" /> <img width="300" height="169" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=300" class="attachment-medium size-medium" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=300 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=600 600w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=150 150w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" data-attachment-id="41806" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2025/08/14/you-can-only-watch-20-films-for-the-rest-of-your-life/watm-dazed-confused/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg" data-orig-size="1600,900" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm dazed confused" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/watm-dazed-confused.jpg?w=700" /> Linklater times two. MCKENNA: It’s a fucking rocker, Mike! Obviously takes a very different tack to the Tarkovsky version (which I do love, but have to admit that—shallow fool that I am—overfamiliarity with Italian comedy Fantozzi has put an aesthetic crimp in for me, for reasons that will become obvious if you see it), but it’s a powerful, moving film about loss, love, and the nature of existence that captures the sadness and strangeness of the book, is aesthetically genuinely beautiful, and has a great cast and great (and much ripped-off) soundtrack by Cliff Martinez. And yes, it is another oneiric, unreliable world whose nebulous laws a cipher of a person tries to come to terms with—thanks for reducing my whole personality to this, Kelly. Anyway, along with Sex, Lies and Videotape, I think it’s Soderbergh’s best film and best real shot at movie immortality—it has such a beautiful elegiac mood. I think it suffered from people thinking it was trying to be a remake of the version by Tarkovsky—around whom an unfortunate aura of secular sainthood has ossified over the decades—as opposed to just a different attempt to adapt the book. But apparently Stanisław Lem hated both versions, which is pretty much standard Stanisław Lem. Anyway, talking of realizing you’re a caricature, here’s my five extras. Note Orson Welles’s The Trial—how’s that for on the nose? Mon oncle (1958) The Trial (1962) Judex (1963) Aliens (1986) American Movie (1999) Ack, that was even more grueling than choosing 20. My main takeaway from this is how frustrating it is. There are so many films I love—some of which are absolute excrement—but when you sit down to try and create a canon, it’s hard not to get a bit stuffy. Plus, my memory’s atrocious: as soon as we post this, I’ll remember the films that I should have put in. Ah well, at least this nightmare’s nearly over. Without wishing to get all solipsistic, it’s odd seeing our tastes laid out this cleanly and realizing the kind of triple Venn diagram the three of us form, with at its central intersection… I don’t know, a UFO? Where is it that we all overlap? ROBERTS: I think the Solaris pick is clearly the worst of the lot—the only explanation I can think of is that Richard has a thing for Clooney, who has done roughly 800 better movies (including Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, which almost made my list). On the other hand, including the great American Movie—a riveting and hilarious documentary charting the life and death of the American Dream—in your final five is a stroke of genius. I kind of thought we would have more picks in common, to be honest! Mike and I have three (2001, Blade Runner, and The Big Lebowski), Richard and I have three (Alien, Aliens, and Jason and the Argonauts), and Mike and Richard have only one (Manhunter). The three of us? Womp womp. Zero! I blame this on both of you, because how could any mutant not include, at the very least, 2001, Alien, and Blade Runner? Well, as we’ve discovered, there’s no accounting for taste. Is there a common theme? What’s the overlap? I think a UFO is close. The Stranger? The Visitor? The Outsider? I think “not belonging” is not exclusive to Richard’s list. From my out-of-town underdogs to Richard’s unquiet wanderers to Mike’s criminals, searchers, and bums, it’s clearly a condition that we all share. And a condition that compels us. And possibly renews us? (Speaking of compulsion and renewal, I’m surprised no one chose Logan’s Run!) The second guessing lingers on. I swapped The Time Machine for Stalker at the last minute. Should I switch them back? I’ve got so much drama and so little comedy—what can I take out to get Midnight Run in the lineup? Or The Bad News Bears? Or The Nice Guys? Or the great Sullivan’s Travels, about why movies move us in the first place? Do I really like white people dancing as much as I think I do? Everybody relax. There’s no need to panic. We can watch any of these movies at any time. We don’t have to choose. It was just an experiment. It doesn’t mean anything. We’ll forget it ever happened…
Kool Kelly’s Place: True Confessions of an ’80s Bedroom
By The Mutants A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It's my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15...
Recollections / December 17, 2024<img data-attachment-id="41638" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/12/17/kool-kellys-place-true-confessions-of-an-80s-bedroom/kelly-room-1980s-full/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg" data-orig-size="4879,3759" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.8","credit":"","camera":"Film Scanner","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"200","shutter_speed":"0.033333333333333","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Kelly Room 1980s full" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41638" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1541" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=2000&h=1541 2000w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=150&h=116 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=300&h=231 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=768&h=592 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=1024&h=789 1024w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/kelly-room-1980s-full.jpg?w=1440&h=1109 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> ROBERTS: I can’t believe I let you guys talk me into this, but I suppose it has to be done. A few months ago my dad sent me a whole bunch of pictures on a flash drive. This was one of them. It’s my bedroom in 1987. I’m 15. I think it’s winter: you can see a couple of LPs on the bed—Mad Parade’s A Thousand Words and The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me—that came out in early ’87, but you can also see a Punisher comic (#5) that came out around November (the cover date is January, but comics were future-dated so kids like me didn’t think they were old). Given all the tokens of war and violence in view, it’s somewhat incredible that I didn’t turn out to be crazier than I am. This is Reagan’s America, baby!—Even though I was a staunch Democrat and was already gearing up to pass out Dukakis bumper stickers and buttons at school. You can also see “SKT4 ” and “WAR SUCKS” written on the wall. Was I trying to suggest something about the duality of man? The Jungian thing? I also had a thing for vigilantes, as you can see. Along with the Dark Knight (Frank Miller’s series came out in 1986, changing comics and pop culture forever), Wolverine, and The Punisher, I was an avid Mack Bolan fan (the poster next to the baseball lamp). And all those yellow bags? They’re from Tower Records, which had recently displaced California Comics as my favorite destination. I was either working at the video store at the time or working at the mall (selling personalized children’s books!), or both. You see where the money went, for the most part—my skateboarding gear is not in view. And yeah, that’s a waterbed, suckers! My dad “got a deal.” Things were about to change, though: I would stop collecting comics within a few months, Bolan would be cast aside for “classic literature,” and all of those posters would come down. We would move soon—in ‘88 or ‘89. I was about to buy my first electric guitar and my first amp. Kool Kelly—bless my dad, who designed and painted that when I was around 10—was going full teen. I’m pretty sure that my parents took this photo because I was a slob and they wanted formal evidence of that fact. Now the whole world knows. MCKENNA: What’s that expression you lot over there use to express incredulity? “Hoo boy!”? Well, hoo-fucking-boy! I knew when Kelly announced he had this picture that it would be good, but I presumed it would just be very telling about—and punishingly humiliating for—Kelly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would be an absolutely on-the-nose perfect metaphor factory for a whole fucking country. Because it feels like all of the demented soup that is your great nation is in there. The “War sucks” within five feet of multiple images of people blasting their enemies into oblivion that you’ve mentioned above. The toy submachine gun right next to the panda plushie. The vast inflatable Shamu that looks like it’s being used as the world’s least comfortable pillow. The phone, presumably trailing one of those forty-mile-long cords that you lot love. The weirdly feeble plug sockets. It’s as if someone turned an American Mind inside out. Where to start? Not with the tissues. We’ll leave the tissues well enough alone. Or with that weird pickled thing in the bell jar. Or the way American beds always seem to look like a cross between a medieval voivode’s funeral catafalque and a dismantled piano. Let’s start with the elephant that is literally in the room: the writing. Mike, you share a nationality with Kelly—what the hell is going on here? And what the hell is a “baseball lamp”? GRASSO: What’s going on here is the quintessential late-1980s suburban American boy’s materialistic id unleashed. Well, maybe there’s a bit of ego and superego in here as well, let’s be fair. I will say straight off: my bedroom in 1987 wasn’t quite this overloaded with my precious material possessions (that year I was in that awkward edge-of-adolescence period between putting away childish things—my Hasbro universe G.I. Joe/Transformers obsession—and falling head-first into Dungeons & Dragons), but ’87 was the year I discovered comics. I was into Marvel as well, Kelly, but more into the mutant titles like Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants than Punisher and The Dark Knight Returns. But hey, speaking of D&D, when we first shared this image around the Mutants campfire, we were trying to identify the suspiciously LP-shaped item in the extreme bottom right of the photo. It was a long search. I had this weird feeling it was a group of musicians and I wondered what kind of jazz fusion group the nerdy beardos on the back cover of that thing could be. Lo and fucking behold, Kelly’s unwavering commitment to pop culture detective work ended with him discovering it’s the 1987 Dragonlance Legends art calendar, which not only helped us date this photo but put a real spring in my old-school 1980s AD&D nerd step. Much props, Kelly. While I wasn’t into vigilantes or the Bones Brigade, any kid with a Dragonlance calendar earns much 1987-Mike respect. We should roll up some 1st edition Krynn player characters sometime! ROBERTS: I was just getting out of D&D at this point, Mike. But the year before, on the 8th grade “outdoor ed” camping trip, we were all playing the first Dragonlance modules, and I had read and loved the first set of Dragonlance novels. As far as comics, The Uncanny X-Men and The Amazing Spider-Man were my favorite titles at the time, although nothing here would lead you to that conclusion. I did sacrifice a comic to put the brilliant fight sequence from Uncanny X-Men #173 on my wall. Those Punisher posters—penciled by the great Mike Zeck and airbrushed by Phil Zimelman—were released on the heels of the first limited series, which did extremely well and launched the first ongoing series. You can see The Damned’s Phantasmagoria cassette on my bed. I can’t make out any of the others, but I was very much a post-punk kind of guy (still am). How did I reconcile all of this at the time? Skateboarding, The Damned and The Cure (the goths at school were not my biggest fans), comic books, a baseball boy lamp, vigilantes and the Vietnam War? Also, what’s in that filing cabinet? How did I sleep here? And Richard, no one uses “hoo boy” over here any more. You’ll get beat up for that. MCKENNA: You beat me to it with the filing cabinet. Was that just standard issue American youth furnishing? Bed, bedside table, filing cabinet? I mean, I don’t doubt you had important files to put in there—and judging from the state of your room, I’m guessing files on the people you were planning to make pay for the imagined wrongs they’d done to you. But still, right next to the bed? Yep, files and a fixation with vengeful Vietnam vets—definitely in no way worrying. Also, very sub-optimal speaker positioning. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but despite the fact that you could probably have found variations of everything in this picture in kids’ bedrooms in the UK, there’s a kind of cultural brashness and confidence about it that I’m not sure you could have gotten away with over our way. I don’t know how “Kool Kelly’s Place” in foot-high letters played to eventual visitors to your bedroom, but unless you were absolutely faultlessly cool, I feel like something similar would have been a social death warrant in Britain. Thatcher’s manifesting or liberating—depending on your reading of it—the individualism the country had been repressing since WWII was still in relatively early days, and acting cocky or showing off—i.e. just being mildly confident—was still a bit of a taboo gauntlet to run. This particular bedroom wall in the same period in the UK would have been a bit like daubing “Witchcraft done here” on the door of your condo in 1690s Salem. How did it play with people when they first walked in and saw you vaunting your alleged coolness like it was a Nasdaq ticker display? Oh, and I’m still completely in the dark as to what a “baseball lamp” is, because nothing in this picture looks like a baseball. GRASSO: As I may have mentioned in past Mutants outings, I was a pretty spoiled only child of the ’80s. To put it bluntly, I had a lot of stuff. That stuff definitely skewed towards the nerdier books-and-toys-and-things side of the ledger—I didn’t really get into sports posters or equipment or anything—but I do recall my tiny bedroom being packed full of crap. Just so Kelly’s not too alone in being embarrassed, my own bedroom had a very prominent space given over on the inside of my door to the (form) letter I received from Carl Sagan’s Planetary Society and the glossy Voyager photo of Saturn’s rings I received from same—just like the kids in that Brooklyn classroom in Episode 7 of Cosmos! As I’ve mentioned here before, my childhood idols were definitely less Mack Bolan and Frank Miller and more sensitive types like Jim Henson and Sagan. I really dig that beige-ass push-button phone extension, Kelly. It got me thinking of when I had various electronic appliances of my own in my bedroom. I probably got my own TV in around 1985. One of the first things I remember staying up to watch was the BBC Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series on PBS. Before that, we did have a little household communal 12-inch-or-so portable black and white(!!!) TV that we moved around the house for various purposes. For someone who was arguably raised by the television, having my own cable hookup in my bedroom meant spending even less time with my folks in the living room. I think I got my own phone a couple of years later; there wouldn’t be much call for it before then, but when I got it, I used the hell out of it. I got my own stereo right around ’88, most likely, when I moved into the larger space in the basement where the IBM-compatible PC lived. By the time I was Kool Kelly’s age in the early ’90s, my growing love of alternative rock was starting to take over my walls, along with my rapidly exploding CD collection. (As I said in Mutant Chat, Kelly, I love the Vans shoebox marked “TAPES”; this rang so true to me.) And while I never had a steel filing cabinet (which, honestly, I probably would’ve loved) I definitely had a desk to stow all my juvenilia—my stories, drawings, maps, and other scribblings. Was my room as messy as Kool Kelly’s Place? I’d like to say no, but I’m pretty sure it at least occasionally was. I’m still envying the waterbed in 2024, to be honest. But we did live amidst great abundance, didn’t we, Kelly? As Richard points out, the same “grab all you can” strivingly materialistic impulses that were sinking into the British psyche were going truly overboard in the U.S., and kids were, as we’ve noted elsewhere, an important consumer demographic to be marketed to. From every age, the commercials bombarded us with commodities to fetishize and status symbols we needed to keep up with the classmates. Playing with Transformers or G.I. Joes with the kids in the neighborhood around 1985 was a truly fraught exercise in class envy and false consciousness. Did they have Omega Supreme or the U.S.S. Flagg? I ended up thinking a lot about whether my grade school “friends” were hanging out with me for me… or for my toys. Whether it’s something as “cool” as a computer or something as inexplicable as an inflatable Shamu (heh, sorry Kelly), our “stuff” defined us socially in a way that sometimes gave short shrift to ourselves. Pretty good training for adulthood in materialistic America now that I think about it. ROBERTS: Yeah, you really got to the heart of it, Mike. At no other time were kids courted on such a massive scale, and never was there so much stuff to have and hold—or covet, as was often the case. It was a culture entirely to itself, entirely for kids (adults had no interest in reading our books, watching our movies, etc., and it was fucking great), and if your family didn’t have the money for these things, there was a social cost. And yeah, we did make friends with the kid down the street to get to his ColecoVision and Kenner’s AT-AT. He was a dick and held it over us, so I don’t hate myself too much. By this time I was making my own money—the real American way, under the table!—although I may still have been getting an “allowance” (if you know, you know). I was not saving a damn penny, that’s for sure. I was pretty embarrassed by “Kool Kelly’s Place” at this point, Richard, and I was trying to cover it up with paper, graffiti, whatever. It was “kool” when I was 10—not so much when I was 15. But what a gift to get when you’re 10! My dad loved building stuff, fixing stuff, and painting projects; in the condo we lived in before this, he painted some ‘70s supergraphics all the way up the stairwell walls. I wish I had a picture of that. A few notes: the file cabinet was a cast-off from one of my parent’s offices and used primarily as a perch for my record player; I really have no idea what I kept inside of it. The baseball boy lamp (not a “weird pickled thing,” Richard!) was probably from the ‘50s—my grandmother ran her own antique shop in Texas and sent us various vintage knick-knacks. Shamu was a show at SeaWorld featuring several performing orcas—I vaguely remember a trip to the San Diego Wild Animal Park around this time, and we must have gone to nearby SeaWorld as well. No idea how I ended up with a pool float (we did not have a pool). MCKENNA: After looking at it for the hundredth time, I think the thing that stands out to me in this photo as being decisively American—apart from that fucking ridiculous horizontal wardrobe of a bed—is that phone. Phones were such a use-only-when-necessary thing in the UK, at least as I remember it. Maybe it was just the milieu I inhabited, but the combination of the faintly WWII-ish “keep lines free for urgent communications” vibe, an obsession with penny-pinching, and the very public placement of the phone in what was often the draughtiest point of the house, meant that making a call was usually more of a pain in the arse than it was worth. It was less hassle just to get on my bike and go round their house. So coming from that, a phone in a kids room seems like such an insane extravagance. I mean, come on: who the fuck does a kid actually need to phone? And yet it also implies a very different reality for kids, one where they maybe have more agency? Where it’s accepted that they have their own lives and their own communications needs? I don’t know, I find the whole thing quite confusing while also being immensely jealous. And with that admission, I will bid adieu to the sleek metropolitan chic of, ahem, Kool Kelly’s Room. I can sleep easy now knowing that my dreams aren’t being spied on by some weird little baseball golem. GRASSO: When I was 8 or 9 I had some friends over to play and one of them knocked over and broke a Snoopy lamp I’d had since I was really little. (Peanuts was another media franchise I was really into when I was younger, with all the merchandising that entailed.) Oh man, I cried and cried; I was inconsolable for ages. In retrospect, it was one of those formative lessons in loss that looms larger in retrospect than you can ever fully internalize when you’re little. The attachments children have to “stuff” can be an important part of the natural process of emotional maturity, self-actualization, and ego formation. Letting that stuff go, especially when you’re anxious and attachment-prone, can be inestimably harder. I’ve come to believe that the process of “managed loss” accompanies us throughout our lives, and it changes as we get older. I’ve radically lost the acquisitive impulses I had when I was in my twenties: chasing the newest technology, the newest gadgets, the newest phones. Why on Earth would I need more stuff? In countless moves to new apartments and houses I’ve left behind objects that once I considered sacrosanct; and now, with the benefit of time, they don’t even tug at me anymore. Things pass away, but memories and emotions remain. If I suddenly lost the glossy books on Galaxies and the Voyager program that my grandmother got me around that time, it wouldn’t take my memories of her away from me. Those memories, specifically around how well she knew the things I loved, that she wanted to encourage my love of learning, will always live within me. This photo, and the ambiguous feelings teenage (and middle-aged!) Kelly might have had about the Kool Place his dad built, seems to fall in that bittersweet zone of how the things we possessed and the relationships we treasure intersect in our nostalgic memories. ROBERTS: I guess what hits me hardest about this photo is that I am middle-aged Kelly (distinctly uncool), something I would have thought impossible as a high school freshman reading comics and listening to records in this pig-sty of a room. I still don’t understand how it’s possible! My oldest kid just turned 13—two years away from where I was here. Time doesn’t fly—it gushes. Which brings us to the phone, yes? Because the 13-year-old I just mentioned and her 10-year-old sister really, really want one, but not in the way I wanted one. Not even close. When I was a teenager, it was important so that you could (a) figure out where you were going to meet up with your friends, and (b) talk to girls/boys without your parents listening. Phones now are your Identity Discs, and so many of the things represented in this photo are now mediated by the phone, or they’ve been replaced entirely by the screen. There’s good and there’s bad, I guess. As we said above, we grew up in a time of too much physical stuff, but we’re no less materialistic now. We just buy apps and streaming services and devices instead of books and records and video tapes. Anyway, it’s not the things I’m interested in; it’s what’s inside of them: stories, music, illustration, film, games. You know—art. And I’m still obsessed with the same kinds of pop culture I was obsessed with when I was 15. Just take a look around the site. It’s all here. This is our room.
Ain’t No Golden Age: On the Banality of Nostalgia Memes
By The Mutants The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we're at and how we see ourselves...
Features / November 27, 2024 <img data-attachment-id="41657" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/11/27/aint-no-golden-age-on-the-banality-of-nostalgia-memes/watm-1974-2024/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg" data-orig-size="1080,1350" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm 1974 2024" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=240" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41657" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="2500" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg 1080w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=120&h=150 120w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=240&h=300 240w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=768&h=960 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/watm-1974-2024.jpg?w=819&h=1024 819w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> In my mind and in my car We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far Pictures came and broke your heart Put the blame on VCR —The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star” ROBERTS: I saw this on Facebook the other day and had to call an emergency round robin. I don’t know the original image source but I’ve seen it on several clickbait nostalgia pages at this point. The amount of “sad but true” comments is staggering, made more perplexing by the fact that most of these comments are from people who claim to have lived through the ’60s and ’70s. The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we’re at and how we see ourselves. It is, quite simply, Big Brother level propaganda. This version of 1974 never existed (we’ll get to 2024 later). Nothing about it is right. Where are the cigarettes and ashtrays? Where are the beer bottles? Why is everyone bronze-white? Where are the tablecloths (is this 1974 or 1874?)? Why the fuck is that giant window there? Is that a chess board on the table? The answer is so ironic that I can hardly stand it: the cartoon was generated by AI, which is the product of the (alleged by the second panel) grim and joyless and mercenary technological age that the cartoon attempts to condemn. GRASSO: Yeah, we can very safely put aside all the aesthetic elements of this atrocity that are attributable to the fact that it’s AI: the color grading, the inimitable and easily discernible Escherian uncanniness to all the visual elements, the kitsch factor, the utter lifelessness of the art itself. That’s all baked into the material reality of AI art. We’re dealing with a nostalgia meme made for Facebook here, for Christ’s sake—of course it’s going to bore a hole of distilled banality into the viewer’s skull. But still: someone, some actual human somewhere had to feed this thing a prompt. Some part of it came from an actual human mind. And what that mind wanted to convey with this thing is “wasn’t it better when social spaces were truly social and we weren’t all sitting around on our phones, isolated from each other?” Leaving aside another grand irony—the fact that this meme ended up finding fertile ideological purchase on the internet, on those very same phones—there is a certain libidinal thrill in all these generational memes, whether visual or textual: a violent, agitated staking of psychological territory, projected in a threatened, growling voice onto the younger generations on the internet, a statement of misplaced solidarity and pride: “REMEMBER WHEN WE DRANK FROM THE GARDEN HOSE, GENERATION X? REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO SPEAK TO EACH OTHER AND LAUGH IN PUBS? NOT LIKE THESE MILLENNIALS AND ZOOMERS, ALWAYS ON THEIR PHONES.” The implied distance between the “good old days” and today is shrunk down to the most elemental of caveman emotional urgings: “then happy, now sad; we from then, we better than you.” The vibe here is almost poignantly desperate in a way, giving the impression that the older generation is almost glad things are this bad in 2024, because it allows them to stand in smug superiority against those “young people always on their phones.” When the past is a frozen tableau, painted by AI, nothing can harm it anymore or expose the truth about those 1974 pubs and bars: they weren’t all limned in golden sunlight, full of happy people singing and chatting. In fact, they were often grotty, violent, and full of alcoholics just as hypnotized by their beers as the millennials and Zoomers are by their phones in the 2024 image. MCKENNA: At a guess, this is from my side of the pond, because us Brits—or more specifically us simple English folk—just love this kind of shit meme. And if that is the case, a few of the incongruities do kind of make sense. Even the absence of any ethnic minorities can probably be explained by a combination of extra-urban demographics, varying cultural attitudes to boozing, and general diffidence towards outsiders, as well as pretty widespread bigotry. To be honest, in the late eighties the majority of pubs outside metropolitan Bohemian zones weren’t all that welcoming even to your average random straight white male, so anyone not belonging to that group would have been forgiven for thinking twice before popping in for a disgusting pint of Skol or Harp ten years earlier. As would anyone who spoke with an Irish accent, given that the Provisional IRA had begun carrying out attacks in mainland Britain the year before—1974 was in fact the year the Birmingham Pub Bombings happened—so suspicion of strangers was through the roof. The whole year in the UK was pretty fucking horrible, to be honest. Bagpuss debuting on TV was about the only good thing that happened. But though pubs like this do—or did—sort of exist, the vibe feels more like a wish-fulfilment melding of the atmosphere of some twatty village pub in the Cotswolds, where the farmhands still live in some Wicker Man-esque idyll of rural submission to the local landlord, with that of a working men’s club, places which I remember as having a much more balanced mix of the sexes and a very different and more cheerful mood. To give you an idea, the only picture I have of my dad drinking a pint (of shit lager, natch), he was in a working men’s club: the man won’t set foot in a pub. And as Mike says, pubs could be hostile places, full of aggro alkies looking to start on anyone who looked a bit odd. Anyway, the main things missing are the dense cloud of acrid smoke and the bitter cold, which is my abiding memory of the few times I entered a pub before I was ten, and the frequent air of lurking threat from some pissed-up yobbo, which is my abiding memory of pubs in the ’80s and ’90s. Oh, and the stench, which is admittedly hard to render in pixels. Most pubs got fitted carpets at some point post-WWII, and most pubs never changed them, so years of absorbing revolting yeast-heavy spilled beer—and probably a surprising amount of urine—meant that the places often fucking reeked. A friend and bandmate very kindly got us some occasional work cleaning the pub his stepdad ran in a small provincial town on our dinner breaks from school, and the reek of sour beer in the place was fucking nuclear. I actually preferred cleaning the toilets, because at least the urinal cakes drowned out the various other stenches. And this was not a smelly pub, it was a well-looked-after one! So yes, this is a combination of good-old-days nonsense with the kind of idyllic, cozy vision of pub life CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) was aggressively pushing in opposition to the increasingly corporate mindset governing what had visibly become an industry. ROBERTS: The question of where it comes from is an interesting one. Many of these nostalgia sites are run out of Europe (several from the Netherlands), but they generally target American clicks. The pint glasses would explain the absence of bottles if these weirdly Stepfordian people were in Britain, but look at the “band,” at least two of them clutching instruments that don’t exist in the real world! And look at all the gleaming wood, and the curtains! Add a couple of cowboy hats and we might be in the small-town world of Little House on the Prairie, which was itself a nostalgic idealization of American frontier life in the late 19th century. It was a hugely successful TV show that premiered in—you guessed it—1974, a little over a month after Nixon resigned. The year also saw mile-long gas lines, stagflation, smog sieges, kidnappings, hijackings, and parents were still smoking cigarettes in cars with the windows rolled up. For a lot of Americans, 1974 was less like a country band jamboree and more like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Listen, I do lament the fact that so many people, including me, are buried in their phones for too much of their lives. We don’t, as societies, talk as much as we used to. We don’t have the physical spaces that we used to have that gave us common ground and a shared reality that actually resembled reality. But the most Orwellian thing about 2024 is not people looking at iPhones, it’s Trump, whose slogan is the fuel behind this poisonous meme. GRASSO: A few weeks ago comedian Conner O’Malley and a cohort of fellow millennial comedians put out an hour-long film called Rap World. Set in January 2009, right before the Obama inauguration, and shot on period-appropriate equipment, it tells the story of a single night in the lives of a bunch of aimless young people in the Pennsylvania exurbs recording an “intelligent” rap album. Much of the commentary on this very funny film came in the form of younger millennials and Zoomers enviously noticing how much “simpler” and less distracting life was, or at least seemed in… 2009! Cell Phones existed, but most of them didn’t give us full access to the internet; there was more of an overarching monoculture, more opportunity and desire to be social in real space. Think about how many of the most beloved nostalgia pieces of the past half-century—American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, hell, even the music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies”!—mine the cultural and social touchstones of only a decade or so in the past! Juxtaposed with this Boomer/Gen X AI atrocity… Well, I guess what I’m getting at is that every generation can fall into their own traps of thinking things were cooler and better and easier, that they just missed out on the Best Era Ever. One can always locate a perfect moment in the past, even as that distance between idealized history and harsh present shrinks more and more as technology peddles nostalgia to keep us from asking the very pertinent question, “What is to be done?” Obviously we’ve talked a lot about nostalgia at We Are the Mutants over the years. One could even argue it’s all we’ve talked about in one way or another. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about nostalgia myself recently; nostalgia and Trumpism, nostalgia and political reaction, nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the world we’ve handed down to ourselves (because ultimately, we’re all responsible for the atomized world we’ve inherited). If things were so much better “back then,” why do we collectively find it so hard to make a world we do want to see and live in now? We have a blueprint, after all, thanks to this idiotic AI image and countless thousands of others just like it. What elements of our present world are so irrevocable and irreversible that we can’t just pick ourselves up, put our phones away, and go to a pub and hang out with our friends? What, substantively and specifically, are the obstacles to a better, more meaningful life with richer, more fulfilling social experiences? If we were to start asking deeper, more specific questions like these, answers might emerge that some people—the ones who profit most from our current system—might not like us to have awareness of: economic and employment precarity, a deliberate closing down of public third spaces, sky-high rent that prevents working- and middle-class people from opening their own third spaces, less free time because of the demands of a 24/7 workplace, and the lack of energy that comes along with it that discourages us from planning and attending social events. One can blame technology, “phones,” for all of this, but that’s only identifying the symptom of the underlying disease. That disease is within us all and it’s called capitalism, kids. Sorry to be the kind of strident communist bore you’d probably slowly disengage from down t’pub. MCKENNA: Of the three of us, I’m probably the one least irked by nostalgia. Partly because a desire, however clumsy, to maintain a link with your past and your past emotions in a world where commerce demands that things change constantly seems pretty natural. And partly because—perhaps too forgivingly—I tend to see nostalgia more like a repressed acknowledgement of how terrifying the passage of time is than something more worrying. Seeing the past reminds us of the diminishing amount of future we have left, and that’s distressing, so instinctively we cling onto it. So there’s a part of me—namely most of me—that does empathize with the nostalgic. But then there are these scumbags eager to channel that distress into the hideous pipelines they’ve constructed with the goal of getting attention, or clout, or power, or just riling people up or whatever. People like the dickheads who made this picture. That said, go into any pub, at least in the UK, and I am fairly certain you won’t see anything like the bottom scene. I mean, you’ll 100% see horrible, soulless structures all painted grey or whatever modish color scheme is currently in vogue—it’s got that right. And you’ll see a few people on their phones, ignoring everyone else. But you don’t need a phone to ignore everyone else—the world’s full of people who are quite capable of ignoring you even while they sit across from you and pretend to have a conversation with you. If you go into a pub, though, I’d say most of the people will be engaged, be it with each other or with getting absolutely rat-arsed on revoltingly overpriced IPAs. They’ll be talking shit, much of which will be stupid and possibly offensive, but they’ll be talking. So, while I agree that phones are unhealthy and we spend way too much time on them, I’m unwilling to subscribe to the phonophobia the pic wants to elicit. Without phones I’d be far, far less in touch with friends and family. I’d never have met you two. Wouldn’t have done the website. And the implicit presumption that people doing something on their phones is supposedly less—productive? Worthy?—than them just staring into space, or reading some shit book, also seems a bit optimistic, as if reading is axiomatically valuable even if what you’re reading is absolute dog turds, while whatever appears on a phone screen is automatically drivel. Basically, I’d be lying if I said that the top pic, despite everything fake and stupid about it, didn’t pluck faintly at my heartstrings—because I’m exactly the kind of idiot this shit is designed to hook. At the same time, the comparison with the bottom pic is exactly the kind of fraudulent bollocks this stupid meme wants you to believe it’s railing against. ROBERTS: I’ll tell you why this image made me so angry. Because at first glance, I bought it. I thought to myself: “Jesus, life was so much better in ‘74.” And then I saw the “singer” with the microphone stand jutting out of his wrist, and the zombified faces of the old men in the band, and the distorted dart board, and the non-existent musical instruments, and so on. We’re all susceptible, especially those of us born before the internet took hold. I’ve said before that nostalgia is a fantasy, and I enjoy it as such. But unchecked, it becomes something much worse: delusional Golden Ageism that’s often empowered by contempt for people who are different than you. I don’t know what’s to be done. I think we have to start by being honest with ourselves about a lot of different things. I think we are always going to look back and yearn for the glory days—it’s part of getting older and being human, and every generation does it. But we have to recognize that this idea of looking backwards for a way forward has become a pernicious social and political obsession. I can’t say I’m a communist, Mike—I know you’ll forgive me. I’m a boring old RFK (the good one, not the shitty one) Democrat. I do believe that when money controls the tools that can make life better for everyone, it’s a good bet that life will only get better for those with money. And when the combined technology of AI and smartphones and social media is leveraged to venerate a time before the technology of AI and smartphones and social media, you can be sure that making life better for everyone is an idea whose time has come.
“An Important Place in Their Lives”: Musicland Sales Brochure, 1978
By The Mutants How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.
Recollections / November 12, 2024 <img width="700" height="899" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=700" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=700 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=1400 1400w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=117 117w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=234 234w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-1978-pg-1.jpg?w=797 797w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" data-attachment-id="41523" 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data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-pg-6.jpg?w=228" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/watm-musicland-pg-6.jpg?w=700" /> ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you worked in stores that sold the stuff you liked so you could buy more of the stuff you liked. This brochure is before my time, and that’s probably why I find it so fascinating. The ‘70s aesthetic is in full effect, and I forgot just how much merch you could get at “the record store”: stereo systems, speakers, transistor radios, tape recorders, sheet music—even guitars! But it’s the intimacy and immediacy of this environment that gets me. How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life. GRASSO: I first took a trip to the record store in what would have been late 1982 or early 1983: it was the Medford, Massachusetts location of the Northeastern US chain Strawberries and I came in search of 45s of two songs that had been in heavy rotation on our newly-acquired cable box’s channel 25, MTV: Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” and Toto’s “Africa.” I found a lot more there, though, thanks to the giant sales catalog, bigger than a city Yellow Pages, full of import and (presumably) out-of-print vinyl. I was only seven years old, so I was a little overwhelmed by it all, but thanks to that Big Book and the help of my dad and the clerk I was able to grab a copy of Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, which I seem to remember being in short supply in the record racks. It’s kind of amazing that I’m able to access those memories 40-plus years later—but that’s the impact that very first trip to the record store had on me. I’d drift away from music after my initial early-’80s spate of 45-purchasing (Tracey Ullman’s “They Don’t Know,” Yes’s “Leave It,” and the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” were some of my other early-MTV-inspired singles purchases); it wouldn’t be until junior high in 1987 that I’d start going to the mall on my own to buy cassettes and eventually CDs. Our record chains in Boston—Strawberries, Newbury Comics, and the big HMV and Tower Records outlets in Harvard Square—were great for finding import CD singles and discovering new local favorites, but I also treasured a little hole-in-the-wall used record store on Route 1 in Saugus, whose name very sadly escapes me at this time. These stores all had knowledgeable clerks who, if you were able to demonstrate your cred by asking for the “right” album, would put a young, uncertain music fan on the path to finding new artists who’d join your personal pantheon of favorites. Posters, music periodicals, merch of all kinds, ways of proving your fandom: the local record store was a place to equip yourself for doing battle in the trenches of junior high and high school music-cred combat. MCKENNA: Hmm, what a peculiar coincidence: you were a store manager, Kelly—and then the store closed down, you say? Yep, that definitely sounds like the fault of the other Musicland in the mall, not of the vision-impaired management style that almost deprived the world of the best Phil Collins article that has ever been written. Anyway, you two city slickers seem to be forgetting something: like John Denver, I’m a country boy, and in the provinces of Airstrip One, record shop history follows a slightly different timeline. The chains like Our Price, HMV, and Virgin Megastores didn’t arrive anywhere outside of London until way later than in the States, and when they eventually did, the light-years-out-of-my-league goth girl I fancied from school started working in the only one I could get to, which did not exactly incentivize me to spend my supermarket trolley-boy and lettuce picking money there. In any case, at least as I remember it, record buying in Northern England at the time was more likely to be in independent shops like Jumbo in Leeds or Red Rhino in York, or in the more institutional environs of a Sydney Scarborough or a Bradleys. If you were seeking the full beige rainbow of corporate experience, the music departments of the W.H. Smiths shops dotted around the country were for a long time perhaps the nearest thing a lot of us outside London had to something like Musicland. The people running the Smiths’ music departments often seemed to have a weirdly free hand about what they could have in stock (which could be good, or could mean the LP section suffocating under the weight of the thirty least-appetizing Zappa LPs). Was that similar to what went on at Musiclands, or was the choice of stuff more corporate generic? Also, where can I get a copy of that killer Moody Blues poster? And Kelly: which of the Musicland management styles modeled in the brochure photo top left were you channeling? Stranger Danger, Cromwell henchman, Lawyer who thinks he’s outsmarted Columbo, Italo-American SFX tech at the Academy Awards, John Boy Walton, or that slick MF on the right? ROBERTS: I’m not sure I had a style other than “you watch the store while I smoke and I’ll watch the store while you smoke,” because we were all pounding Marlboro Reds in the back room whenever we could. I remember pulling all-nighters at various stores to put all the cassettes and CDs into the new security trays (“shrinkage” was every retail operation’s worst nightmare). The manager would order pizza and during “lunch” we would wander around the dark, empty mall and the corridors behind the stores. To answer your question, Richard, we did not really have a free hand in what we stocked—it was a pretty corporate environment—but we did get to open and play “store copies” of new music, and we could special order the obscure stuff we wanted to hear. I remember playing the first Weezer and Sunny Day Real Estate LPs, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Nirvana’s In Utero, Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. As long as the district manager was not around or rumored to be around, we were good. Record stores were where we bought our concert tickets too, although we didn’t do that at Musicland. There was another store called Music Plus (we had a lot of chains in SoCal) that was the go-to for tickets. One of the employees would bring out a binder, show you a layout of the venue, and tell you how much the tickets were for each section. But nothing beat Tower Records—I still have dreams about sifting through the import section, discovering lost albums from my favorite bands. As we’ve talked about time and again (ad nauseam to some, I’m sure), these physical spaces were designed to take your money, but they were also where we discovered art and, yeah, meaning. Remember that line from Dawn of the Dead? Francine asks Stephen why all the zombies are trying to get into the mall and he says: “Some kind of instinct… Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” That’s me. I’m one of the undead now. GRASSO: Probably as good a time as any for me to get (historical) materialist about the mall record store from the consumer side, seeing as how I have no behind-the-scenes memories of working at one (my college job was at a video rental joint, which had its own set of amazing fringe benefits, not the least of which was free unlimited borrowing privileges). After my MTV-inspired single-purchasing in 1983, my music-collecting years with my own hard-earned money kicked off in earnest in the late 1980s, and thus I was fortunate enough to get in on buying compact discs on the ground floor. My friends who were just a few years older than me had massive cassette collections they’d assembled throughout the ’80s; honestly, I don’t remember many of them owning much vinyl at all. And dollars to donuts, I bet the seedling of most of those tape collections were courtesy the Columbia House Record Club, the infamous direct-mail outfit that would send you “8 tapes for a penny” and then shackle you to an onerous “negative option billing” obligation that could be very difficult to weasel out of. Score one more for the friendly local record store. So yes, from the very beginning of my time as a music consumer—around 1987, 1988—CDs were my format of choice. Remember longboxes? Those massive, wasteful cardboard sleeves were developed for the CD specifically because physical record stores didn’t want to refit their LP-sized storage racks (and because, like tapes, CDs shorn of these boxes were easy to nick before the rise of anti-theft RFID tags). Sort of laughable to think about these half-empty cardboard sleeves cluttering up shelf space and landfills just so the record stores would promote this new format, but the music industry has always tried to get consumers to (re-)buy their favorite music on an “exciting” new format, going all the way back to Thomas Edison. The CD also outpaced the LP and cassette on price during this era: I cringe to think of blowing my meager early-’90s wages on a few $14.99 CDs a week while vinyl and tapes were still going for, like, $7.99 or so. (Let’s see, a $15 compact disc in 1990 would be the equivalent of dropping nearly thirty-seven 2024 dollars on a new album, according to the always-shocking Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index calculator.) Sure, the artists didn’t get a huge cut of my afterschool job money (RIP Steve Albini, who nailed the state of the record industry and its exploitative garbage at this very moment in history pretty much perfectly), but at the end of the day the artists got some of it, and I had a physical emblem, a totem, a real piece of art—yes, even in CD jewelboxes!—that served as a testament to my love for a band. Think about all the jobs that existed in this very conspicuously late-20th century supply chain: the execs, the artists and repertoire scouts, the producers, technicians and engineers, the bands and their entourages, the label designers, comms personnel, promoters, the radio DJs playing the records, the manufacturing plants, the intermediaries bringing the CDs, posters, buttons, and merch to the record stores, and all those Marlboro-smoking clerks like Kelly in malls across the country. A good chunk of these jobs just don’t exist anymore. Seems pretty obvious which end of the labor pyramid got screwed over the past 30 years—and it wasn’t the execs. Of course, when the 20th century ended and the nascent Internet enabled file sharing to take off, the industry bigwigs definitely panicked about the future of music. But in the end it wasn’t the suits who lost their livelihoods—it was the artists. And for the past quarter-century, pop musicians have been bifurcated into a two-class system: giga-stars whose (over)exposure ensures they never have to worry about a paycheck again, and touring musicians forced to sell merch like carnival barkers just to make a (barely) living wage. Like everything else under late capitalism, the music industry has materially consolidated, diluted its product’s quality and diversity, and turned a thriving, living underground into a manicured garden where spontaneity and apprenticeship have largely vanished as concepts. As Kelly says, the locus at the base of that massive commercial pyramid was the local record store, where taste was made, music was shared, and fans’ connections with the band were consolidated. MCKENNA: One thing that saves me from feeling like some deranged, backwards-looking nostalgist troglodyte, constantly harping on about how things used to be better back in the Mesozoic, is that one of my day jobs involves teaching Zoomers. Their fascination with the random, uncurated physical realities that used to be part and parcel of engaging with music, art, people, and the world in general—before business got so good at interring you inside your interests—reinforces my feeling that having stuff like Musicland around actually was just objectively healthier. Yes, it was an anodyne corporate product of aggressive capitalism, and yes, more egalitarian situations that foster a wholesome tactile involvement in the world are definitely imaginable, but as shitty as it might have been, it was at least real, ergo better. This is something that I think gets lost in the—sorry for using the horror word—discourse around these things: there’s this implicit idea that as a society we just naturally evolve past certain realities, and that to think of them fondly, or even—god help us—think they might have been better is somehow axiomatically regressive. I think that’s bullshit for several reasons, but mainly because we didn’t evolve past them at all: they were removed in service of someone else evolving themselves more money. Like I say, you can argue that they were in any case the products of unfair wealth and extrusions of capitalism into our imaginations, and you’d be right, but isn’t the way things are today an even more brutal product of those forces? When I reminisce with people my age about the immersion in physical reality that was necessary to buy, say, the 12” of Genesis’s Mama, their perspective is often purely one of convenience, but if I talk about it with a 16-year-old, their reaction is often ecstatic shock, because they sense the increased possibilities that the less curated experiences inherent in the kinds of spaces you two are talking about offered. Even when they were the kind of shitty corporate boxes that would employ someone as musically illiterate as Kelly. ROBERTS: Look, we’ve all discovered quite a bit of great music cruising around the internet, and we’ve written about a ton of it, from library music and ambient to ‘80s pop and sci-fi synthesizer epics. Sometimes, the algorithm works (God bless Sounds of the Dawn, for instance). Was the record store better? I don’t fucking know. We’d have to ask more of Richard’s students. What I know is this: if I ask Pandora or Spotify to make me a playlist based on, say, This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren,” I’m going to hear a lot of good stuff. If I ask you guys to make me a playlist (or, better, a mixtape) based on that same song, I’m going to hear a lot more good stuff—as long as you don’t fuck around and throw Phil Collins into the mix. The difference is that you know me, and the algorithm doesn’t, and it never will. Also, the process of discovering music was fundamentally different when we were young. One of my favorite albums is The Chameleons’ Strange Times (1986). I heard the first American single, “Swamp Thing,” on KROQ’s Rodney on the ROQ, a late night LA radio show that played underground/alternative music. I had never heard anything like it—I was obsessed. Every night (for days? A week? Two weeks?) I waited for Rodney to play it again, a blank tape ready in my boombox, my fingers ready on the orange-red record button. He finally did, and I taped it (the songs weren’t always introduced before they were played, so you had to be quick), and I listened to it over and over again. Bought the LP when it came out in the States. How did I know when the album came out? I kept asking the clerks in the record store. I still remember pulling the record out of the bin at Tower, marveling at the cover, taking it home, putting it on my record player. Would the whole thing be as good as the single? (Yes!) I still smell the cardboard and the plastic sleeves that protected the vinyl. I still see the labels on the middle of the LPs (Strange Times is a double album). It was a physical experience—call it crass and materialistic—and a spiritual experience all at once: from the radio to the record store to the home record player. Every time I hear the album, all of the emotions inherent in that process of discovery are embedded in the experience of the music itself. There. I have tried my best to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to discover music before the internet.
By Richard McKenna Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973's The Exorcist, the same year's Satan's School for Girls, and 1976's The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period's ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom...
Reviews / October 25, 2024 <img data-attachment-id="41344" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/10/25/tubular-terrors-the-possessed/1317337794_8/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg" data-orig-size="400,300" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="1317337794_8" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg?w=400" loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-41344 alignleft" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg" alt="1317337794_8" width="400" height="300" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg 400w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg?w=150&h=113 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/1317337794_8.jpeg?w=300&h=225 300w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" />The Possessed Directed by Jerry Thorpe NBC (1977) The ladies, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em and all the perfectionism, repressed frustrations, sexual/sibling rivalries, and fear of aging that make them the perfect conduits for Evil to manifest itself. Before I’m rent limb from limb by justly enraged women, let me explain that those are not my sentiments: they’re the thesis that, at least superficially, seems to underpin 1977 TV Exorcist knock-off The Possessed. Because women—sorry, I mean Evil—is up to its old tricks as the academic year comes to an end in the Helen Page School for Girls in, natch, Salem. Not that Salem, though—Salem in Oregon, though the school is actually snooty Reed College in Portland, going incognito here because, despite annual tuition fees today of around $70,000, you presumably can never have enough cash to guarantee the kids of the elite the basic amenities they require. Never fear, though: sullen ex-priest Kevin Leahy (James Farentino, who I will refer to mononymously as just “Farentino” not out of any desire to sound like a proper writer but rather because, like Sembello, when you’ve got a surname that punchy, the Christian name feels like it’s just dangling there to no real purpose) is here to pace gloomily and seemingly randomly around the corridors of the school until Evil is kicked the fuck back to hell. We first meet him still frocked but with his faith in tatters, sucking on a bottle of Jack Daniels in the sacristy and morosely pronouncing mass in a doomed-pilot-episode-esque flashback prologue. Driving home from the day job that evening, he drunkenly totals his car against a utility pole and finds himself facing the final judgement. He’s fallen from God’s grace, he’s informed, and his only hope for redemption is to “seek out evil and fight that evil by whatever means… possible.” Next thing you know, he’s been Lazarused back to life with a powerful “in this week’s episode” vibe. Cut to the Helen Page School, where graduation is coming up. Our introduction to the place is an incongruous and oddly unnerving scene of screaming girls riding bikes along the school’s corridors, which is a nice way of evoking the charged atmosphere: the girls are restless to get the hell out of there, and the following year the school’s going co-ed, so everyone’s a little itchy, especially brittle and unhappy-seeming headmistress Louise Gelson (Joan Hackett), whose widower sister Ellen Sumner (Claudette Nevins) is a teacher at the school. Before long things start bursting into flames—curtains, pieces of paper, girls’ clothes. What’s the cause? Is it some kind of prank by the student body, bored teenage girls famously a nexus for mischief in the popular imagination? Is it Ellen’s daughter Weezie (Ann Dusenberry) pulling a Carrie? No—counterintuitively, it’s Han Solo. Because the cause of the upset turns out to be hunky biology teacher Paul Winjam, played by a young Harrison Ford in what looks like his last role before Star Wars. After breaking off his secret fling with headmistress Louise, Paul’s now taken to fooling around with her niece Weezie. Plus, he’s also kind of a dick in other ways, as evidenced by his edgelord biology lessons where he gets his yuks by putting the girls on the spot to nominally teach them important lessons about fear. Before long, though, Winjam gets his comeuppance in a scene that feels weirdly and cathartically like the Indiana Jones franchise terminating itself with purifying flame. The film culminates in a poolside battle between good and evil that’s resolved by Farentino meting out a couple of hysteria-resolving, patriarchy-affirming slaps before nonsensically jumping into the water and disappearing into the limbo where un-picked-up pilots go to be judged. <img data-attachment-id="41481" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/10/25/tubular-terrors-the-possessed/watm-possessed-tv-guide-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg" data-orig-size="1425,1038" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="watm possessed tv guide" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41481" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1457" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg 1425w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=150&h=109 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=300&h=219 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=768&h=559 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/watm-possessed-tv-guide.jpg?w=1024&h=746 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom and hopelessness—so grim and overheated that at times even the stolid Farentino looks afraid. It’s almost as if the real supernatural force at play is the dumb joie de vivre of the almost-Gen-X teen schoolgirls pushing against the cynicism, fatalism, and malaise of the conscientious but emotionally misshapen adults. “Is this happening because of me?” asks a tormented Weezie. No, Weezie—it’s happening because of depressed boomers. Written by John Sacret Young, who also wrote We Are the Mutants “favorite” (trauma nexus) Testament, directed by stalwart Jerry Thorpe, and starring a cast of troopers so seasoned they would never need refrigeration, The Possessed is more a work of competence than inspiration. And yet. Despite everything daft, derivative, pedestrian, and flagrantly sexist about it, The Possessed does somehow contrive to be unsettling. Like all horror that actually horrifies, as opposed to performing the spectacle of “horror,” there’s a vague sensation that even the people making it didn’t really grasp quite what they were channeling. It’s a feeling that lurks in inoffensive yet surreal scenes like the one where a group of girls prank their roommate by covering her bed with a disgusting pile of gunk, or that strange introductory image of the girls riding bikes through the corridors. I’ll be honest, I went into this review half-hoping to write a smug guffawing takedown, but the unhealthy miasma of repressed and unacknowledged emotion that fills the school and the film—and maybe Hollywood itself?— wrongfooted me completely. As is often the case, the dreariness of the plot and the film’s visuals—which presage 1980’s The Changeling—actually contribute to its oppressive mood, and the cast all put in far more effort than a cheapo TV knock-off like this probably deserves. The poolside denouement is both oddly underwhelming and deeply strange—who the fuck ever got machine-gunned with the Nails of Christ?—and the possession make-up weirdly effective, however low-rent. And I can’t think of many other films where the sensations of being physically hot or cold seem quite so tangible. In conclusion, The Possessed is gloomy fun, and it’s a shame it didn’t end up getting commissioned as a series. Who in their right mind wouldn’t have wanted to watch an episode of this shit every week to wash the foul taste of Highway to Heaven out of their mouth? —Richard McKenna
Alien Renaissance: An Interview with Illustrator Bob Fowke
By Richard McKenna Of all the visionary artists to emerge from the illustration boom of the '60s and '70s, Bob Fowke must be one of the most unfairly neglected...
By Richard McKenna / May 6, 2024 <img width="700" height="942" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg" class="attachment-full size-full" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=700&h=942 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=1400&h=1883 1400w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=112&h=150 112w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=223&h=300 223w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=768&h=1033 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=761&h=1024 761w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" data-attachment-id="41461" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg" data-orig-size="2226,2994" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Tour B" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=223" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-b.jpeg?w=700" /> <img width="700" height="944" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg" class="attachment-full size-full" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=700&h=944 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=1400&h=1887 1400w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=111&h=150 111w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=223&h=300 223w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=768&h=1035 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=760&h=1024 760w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" data-attachment-id="41460" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg" data-orig-size="2219,2991" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Tour A" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=223" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-tour-a.jpeg?w=700" /> Of all the visionary artists to emerge from the illustration boom of the ’60s and ’70s, Bob Fowke must be one of the most unfairly neglected. I first became aware of his idiosyncratic visions through his covers for Sci-Fi 1, 2 and 3, anthologies of specially commissioned science fiction stories for young children published by Armada books in the mid-’70s. To an extremely literal-minded (though people who knew youthful me might say simple-minded) child like myself, obsessed with very literal-minded depictions of spaceships and alien worlds, Fowke’s pictures hit me like a bucketful of acid dumped into the South Yorkshire water supply. Beguilingly tactile and alluring with their bright colors and odd forms and technologies, they were at the same time worryingly surreal, seemingly communicating things that they weren’t overtly saying. Even among the plethora of gifted artists working in the field at the time—particularly the stable of his peers at art agency Young Artists, which included Les Edwards, John Harris, Colin Hay and Peter Elson—Fowke’s vision stood out, at once playful and disconcertingly strange. Once aware of him, I started noticing his work all over the place: on Angela Carter books, on the cover of Nicholas Fisk’s great juvenile SF gem Flamers in the library, and in 1980’s faux galactic travelogue coffee-table book Tour of the Universe. So sincere thanks to Bob for agreeing to be interviewed, and to his wife Pinney for being the trigger for it happening. Please visit www.bobfowke.co.uk to learn more about him and see more of his work. All of the images used in this article are © Bob Fowke, with all rights reserved by Mr. Fowke. * * * <img data-attachment-id="41453" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg" data-orig-size="1297,2076" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Fisk Flamers" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=187" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=640" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-41453 alignright" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg" alt="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Fisk Flamers" width="410" height="656" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=410&h=656 410w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=820&h=1313 820w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=94&h=150 94w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=187&h=300 187w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=768&h=1229 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fisk-flamers-4219975798-e1705120662935.jpeg?w=640&h=1024 640w" sizes="(max-width: 410px) 100vw, 410px" />MCKENNA: Bob, could you please tell us something about how you originally became interested in art and about your training? FOWKE: I’ve always been interested in art—I’m hardly alone in that—but perhaps no more than in literature and some other subjects. After school, I completed a foundation art course at Eastbourne College of Art, but I was more determined to learn the craft of painting than I was ambitious to be an “artist,” whatever that meant at that time. I would have preferred an apprentice system such as artists received in the Renaissance period. With this in mind, I went to Taunton College where I was able to study the craft of illustration under John Raynes, a well-known commercial artist of the 1950s/60s. His style is completely different to mine, but his discipline and the opportunity to watch a very competent professional artist at work were invaluable. MCKENNA: How did you first find yourself involved in book jacket illustration? FOWKE: Given that my work is, I hope, imaginative, book jackets, which are advertisements for products of the imagination, were by their nature where I would be at home and where I could get commissions. I painted some record sleeves and adverts, but book jackets were my bread and butter. MCKENNA: Did you have any interest in the science fiction and fantasy genres before you began working in the field? FOWKE: Perhaps sci-fi attracts young men because it tends to privilege concepts and plot over emotion, even if the best sci-fi writers often encompass emotion as well. So, I read science fiction/fantasy as an adolescent but as part of wider reading. MCKENNA: How did you become involved with Young Artists and what were your experiences working with them? FOWKE: On leaving Taunton, I sent some sample paintings to Young Artists, a remarkable illustrators’ agency of that period, and they were accepted immediately; I was fortunate that there was no period when I was searching for work. The images I sent were completely off the wall but John Spencer, who started the agency, saw something in them despite them being a bit mad. It was very good luck, and very kind of him to see something in my work. Young Artists were wonderful. We illustrators were scattered all round the country because we could work anywhere, and there was a wonderful party once a year, held in their warehouse offices in Camden town, when we all descended from our scattered studios in the provinces and elsewhere. They were a great agency to work with and, as it turns out, quite historically significant. <img width="700" height="1139" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg" class="attachment-full size-full" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=700&h=1139 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=1400&h=2278 1400w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=92&h=150 92w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=184&h=300 184w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=768&h=1250 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=629&h=1024 629w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" data-attachment-id="41457" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg" data-orig-size="1749,2846" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Lovecraft Museum" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=184" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-museum.jpeg?w=629" /> <img width="700" height="1127" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg" class="attachment-full size-full" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=700&h=1127 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=93&h=150 93w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=186&h=300 186w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=768&h=1237 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=636&h=1024 636w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg 1385w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" data-attachment-id="41456" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg" data-orig-size="1385,2230" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Lovecraft Burying Ground" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=186" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-lovecraft-burying-ground.jpg?w=636" /> MCKENNA: What are your memories of working in that period? Which of the projects you worked on were most memorable and why? FOWKE: I moved to Shrewsbury with my young family and worked hard, putting my finished artwork on “red star,” a same-day delivery service by train to London. In my case there was a sort-of tri-weekly turnover of work I should say. There were no personal computers, no fax even. There were so many projects, I can’t say which was most memorable. Perhaps it was painting the little dinosaur cards that went in Kellogg’s cereal packets, although not for artistic reasons. The artwork was very small and I worked so many hours each day that my eyes grew weak until, by the end, it took five 100-watt bulbs directed at the artboard for me to be able to see what I was painting. The eyes recovered, fortunately. MCKENNA: Which artists—or films, authors, musicians, etc.—have exerted the biggest influence on you over the course of your career, and are they the same ones you find compelling now? FOWKE: My tastes are boringly similar to a lot of people’s. To name but a few: Mozart and Beethoven, Samuel Palmer, Bosch, Constable. There’s a reason why these people are so famous. <img data-attachment-id="17200" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2018/06/26/new-worlds-for-new-children-the-armada-sci-fi-anthologies/armada_sf_2_whole/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg" data-orig-size="1545,1182" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Armada_SF_2_whole" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-17200 aligncenter" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg" alt="Armada_SF_2_whole" width="1545" height="1182" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg 1545w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=150&h=115 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=300&h=230 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=768&h=588 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=1024&h=783 1024w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/armada_sf_2_whole.jpg?w=1440&h=1102 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 1545px) 100vw, 1545px" /> MCKENNA: At least to me, your artwork seems to inhabit a space where Renaissance and surrealist visual sensibilities bleed into one another to create something that evokes both, but which feels very much like its own thing. Am I way off the mark? FOWKE: You’re spot on. When I started painting book jackets I was especially influenced by Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Durer and some of the Italians, as well as by Magritte and the surrealists—-but I attempted to use their visual language to create a subjective reality of my own. MCKENNA: You did your foundation at Eastbourne School of Art. Do you think that growing up on the South Coast of England informed your art? FOWKE: I was brought up in Brighton and attended Marlborough College, then Brighton and Hove Grammar School, as it then was. Like most artists, I’m always influenced by the landscape around me, and in those days it was the South Downs, but I doubt the influence goes beyond that. MCKENNA: How do you typically approach the composition of a piece? FOWKE: Pencil, paper and free-association first, then work into it. <img width="628" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=628" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=628 628w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=92 92w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=184 184w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg 811w" sizes="(max-width: 628px) 100vw, 628px" data-attachment-id="41458" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg" data-orig-size="811,1323" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Priest Wessex" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=184" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-priest-wessex.jpg?w=628" /> <img width="572" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=572" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=572 572w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=1144 1144w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=84 84w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=168 168w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=768 768w" sizes="(max-width: 572px) 100vw, 572px" data-attachment-id="41452" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg" data-orig-size="1299,2325" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Fireworks" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=168" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-fireworks.jpeg?w=572" /> <img width="640" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg?w=640" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg 640w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg?w=94 94w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg?w=188 188w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" data-attachment-id="41459" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg" data-orig-size="640,1024" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Thompson Glitterball" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg?w=188" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-thompson-glitterball.jpeg?w=640" /> MCKENNA: I have the impression that your work has perhaps been a bit neglected because it’s somewhat less literal in its visions than some of your contemporaries. Would you say that’s a fair judgement? FOWKE: I think you’re right. I wanted to paint my own subjective visions and those are things that are hard to pin down—-and who’s to say if they’re always what other people want—-if they don’t fit neatly into a particular genre. MCKENNA: When and why did you begin to move out of illustration and into publishing? FOWKE: It’s a very solitary occupation and at a certain point I needed others around me. Then, of course, I took up writing and that’s also solitary. A fool is a fool is a fool! MCKENNA: What are you up to nowadays? And are you still painting? FOWKE: I live in South Shropshire and I’m still painting and writing as well as helping others publish their books through YouCaxton Publications. There’s a lot to do. MCKENNA: Is there a project that you’d like to paint but have never yet managed to get around to? FOWKE: Several projects. <img data-attachment-id="41468" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg" data-orig-size="1380,674" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.8","credit":"","camera":"FinePix S6500fd","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1136073650","copyright":"","focal_length":"6.2","iso":"200","shutter_speed":"0.017241379310345","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Hothouse" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41468" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg" alt="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Hothouse" width="1380" height="674" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg 1380w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=150&h=73 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=300&h=147 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=768&h=375 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-hothouse.jpg?w=1024&h=500 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1380px) 100vw, 1380px" /> MCKENNA: Is there one painting of yours that you think represents particularly well what you wanted to accomplish with your art? FOWKE: If I were to select a “Desert-Island” painting, I would choose one of the three I painted in India in 1980 for Alien Landscapes. I had a lot of time for each one and the level of detail in those paintings, if I say so myself, is exceptional; you need a magnifying glass to really appreciate them. I was illustrating Brian Aldiss’s story Hothouse, which involves a tree that covers the world, and for the first painting I took a room at the Theosophical Society in Chennai, which has one of the world’s largest banyan trees in its grounds. I ended up painting a small square of ground at its feet and no tree in the painting—a long way to go for a small square of ground but such are the workings of the subconscious. MCKENNA: And finally: if you could pick any painting by any artist to hang in your otherworldly residence, what would it be and why? FOWKE: Right now I would go for a Fragonard, The Swing obviously, or a Boucher, or even a ceiling by Tiepolo. In fact the ceiling would be the best value because I would get more of it. I love the exuberance and optimism of the Rococo style. But I might change my mind tomorrow. <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41463" data-attachment-id="41463" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/05/06/alien-renaissance-an-interview-with-illustrator-bob-fowke/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg" data-orig-size="2389,1952" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"2.9","credit":"","camera":"FinePix S6500fd","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1136217311","copyright":"","focal_length":"6.8","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.0047619047619048","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Bob Fowke We Are the Mutants Why I like Angels" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" One of Bob&#8217;s more recent pieces, &#8216;Why I Like Angels&#8217; " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="wp-image-41463" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="1634" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=2000&h=1634 2000w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=150&h=123 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=300&h=245 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=768&h=628 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=1024&h=837 1024w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg?w=1440&h=1177 1440w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/bob-fowke-we-are-the-mutants-why-i-like-angels.jpg 2389w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> One of Bob’s more recent pieces, Why I Like Angels <img data-attachment-id="2390" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2016/08/29/a-great-painter-did-it-the-compelling-weirdness-of-magnus/mckenna-avatar/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg" data-orig-size="280,283" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="McKenna Avatar" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=280" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=280" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-2390" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg" alt="McKenna Avatar" width="60" height="61" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=60&h=61 60w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=120&h=121 120w" sizes="(max-width: 60px) 100vw, 60px" />Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being one day rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.
Truckin’ for Souls: Explo ’72 and the Jesus Revolution
By Michael Grasso Near the end of Richard Nixon's first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young...
Michael Grasso / February 21, 2024 <img data-attachment-id="41429" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg" data-orig-size="884,1344" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg?w=197" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg?w=674" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41429" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg" alt="" width="2000" height="3041" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg 884w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg?w=99&h=150 99w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg?w=197&h=300 197w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0001.jpg?w=768&h=1168 768w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> Near the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the civil rights struggle, which had swept through America’s streets over the previous decade. America’s traditional power structures did not ignore this radical wave of change; under both Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, the government unleashed all the instruments of the state to try to quash these movements. And many parties on the side of the Establishment within this new generational “culture war” found themselves looking for ways to co-opt and capitalize upon the more superficial aspects of the youth revolution. Nowhere was this more evident than in mainstream American Christianity. Upon seeing the counterculture’s exploration of new spiritual and numinous experience in defiance of their technocratic Cold War suburban childhoods, Evangelical Christian sects saw that in order to compete in America’s vaunted “marketplace of ideas,” they would need to divert idealistic youth, many of them exploring psychedelics and Eastern religions in search of deeper meaning, back to the bosom of church and pastor. A fusion of hip, Aquarian awareness with the radical promise of early Christianity had already begun to take root within pop culture on stage and screen, as well as within the various churches, communes, and outreach programs that comprised the nascent Jesus Movement. But the big Evangelical preachers and churches who had spent the years since World War II expanding their enterprises by way of mass media were largely outsiders to the Jesus Movement, which had grown from within the nominal grassroots of Evangelical thought, especially on the West Coast. Apocalyptic preachers were reaching out to the young by meeting them where they were: using music, comic books, and other elements of popular culture. The Campus Crusade for Christ, which was founded by Evangelical candy magnate Bill Bright and his wife Vonette in 1951 at UCLA, had allied with postwar megapastor and confidante of presidents and celebrities Billy Graham (after the Brights’ falling out with ultraconservative Evangelical preacher Bob Jones Sr.). In the first two decades of its existence, the CCC had performed “conversion events” at campuses such as Berkeley that had long been hotbeds of left-wing activism. But by the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Campus Crusade for Christ was toiling in the same vineyards as the Jesus Movement—and reaping many fewer conversions. The old-school Evangelical power brokers were never going to have the broader, hipper, more ecumenical appeal that the Jesus Movement inherently possessed. What the more traditional Evangelicals did have going for them was their access to the traditional levers of media and to temporal and monetary power. <img width="668" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=668" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=668 668w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=98 98w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=196 196w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg 863w" sizes="(max-width: 668px) 100vw, 668px" data-attachment-id="41428" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg" data-orig-size="863,1323" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" &#8220;The Purposes of Explo,&#8221; promulgated to bring the Baby Boomers back into the Evangelical fold. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=196" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0013.jpg?w=668" /> <img width="649" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=649" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=649 649w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=95 95w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=190 190w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg 841w" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" data-attachment-id="41439" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg" data-orig-size="841,1326" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" The ancient Christian symbol of the ichthys, adopted by the Jesus Movement to evoke the persecuted Church of the ancient world, soon became a mainstream Evangelical calling card. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=190" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0012.jpg?w=649" /> <img width="658" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=658" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=658 658w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=96 96w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=193 193w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg 850w" sizes="(max-width: 658px) 100vw, 658px" data-attachment-id="41431" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg" data-orig-size="850,1323" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Militarism was explicitly folded into Explo&#8217;s mission; peace activists on the grounds of the gathering were ostracized. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=193" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0045.jpg?w=658" /> From Bright and his allies came the idea for Explo ’72, a mass meeting meant to bridge the gap between the new Jesus People and their older Evangelical forebears. Explo’s name was “meant to suggest a spiritual explosion,” but also evoked the recent worldwide success of Expo ’67 in Montreal and Expo ’70 in Osaka. Explo ’72 organizer Paul Eshleman, 30 years old at the time of the event, had been a crucial part of CCC’s activities during the late ’60s at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a campus that was one of the most fervent homes of protest against the military-industrial complex (in the person of Dow Chemical‘s recruiting of students). Eshleman was given the monumental task of organizing a week-long event that Bright envisioned would encompass tens of thousands of college-age evangelists, musical acts, pastoral instruction and networking, and a public relations program that would entice young people across America not only to come to Christ but “To evangelize the world in our generation.” In The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World, published soon after the June 1972 event held in the Dallas, Texas metroplex, Eshleman and co-author Norman Rohrer present highlights from the many activities and events at Explo. Bill Bright’s bombastic foreword dispenses with the occasional light-hearted humility of Eshleman and Rohrer’s text, celebrating the worldwide impact of the event. Bright eerily predicts that “Explo ’72 was part of a plan, part of a world-wide strategy dedicated to the fulfillment of the Great Commission by the target date of 1980.” While the entire world did not come to Christ in the next eight years, Evangelicals would elect a President in 1980 who would bring their millenarian dreams of Christian conversion and conquest to the fore of American society. To be fair to both Bright and Eshleman, the organizers of Explo ’72 did have a lot to celebrate; the event was a truly massive effort. (The final chapter, wittily titled “How God Did It,” is actually about how many individual members of CCC contributed to the event’s success.) While the text does kick off its first chapter by having a good-natured laugh at all of the logistical difficulties that the young participants experienced in accommodations and transportation, the remainder of the book takes up the mantle of Bright’s braggadocious joy. The photos included in the book run the gamut: crowd shots at the nightly revival meetings held at the Cotton Bowl, views of the Explo “campsite” set up for overflow after Dallas-area hotels had been filled (the chapter titled “Mud, Mosquitoes and Miracles” offers clear parallels to the much larger crowd at Woodstock three years previous), and intimate shots of young people singing and shouting praise together. <img width="649" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=649" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=649 649w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=95 95w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=190 190w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg 841w" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" data-attachment-id="41430" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg" data-orig-size="841,1326" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Smaller study groups and seminars complemented the marquee events at the Cotton Bowl. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=190" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0028.jpg?w=649" /> <img width="649" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=649" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=649 649w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=95 95w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=190 190w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg 841w" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" data-attachment-id="41432" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg" data-orig-size="841,1326" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" The logistical challenges of the event were smoothed out by a staff of hundreds, bankrolled by the Campus Crusade for Christ and its megapastor backers. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=190" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0062.jpg?w=649" /> <img width="649" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=649" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=649 649w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=95 95w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=190 190w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg 841w" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" data-attachment-id="41435" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg" data-orig-size="841,1326" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Explo&#8217;s promotional material extols the gathering&#8217;s embrace of racial diversity and the Evangelical movement&#8217;s global reach, all while athletes and celebrities brought a carnivalesque atmosphere, like this weightlifting demonstration. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=190" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0046.jpg?w=649" /> This foregrounding of the younger generation in the book is a constant. The Reverend Graham, in a press conference with Bright, makes the ironic statement that “Many of the great movements of world history have begun with students.” (Considering the youth revolts in the streets of the West and the Cultural Revolution sputtering to a close in the People’s Republic of China, one wonders if Graham’s evocation of left-wing youth insurgency on campus was wholly intentional.) Explo did succeed in co-opting one aspect of the Jesus Movement—its forays into Christian music. Giants of the Jesus Movement (and what would one day become known as Christian Contemporary music) such as Larry Norman shared the stage with giants of the mainstream: Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and June Carter. All of them literally went on the record in support of Explo with the 1972 LP Jesus Sound Explosion. The threads of country, gospel, contemporary Christian rock, and old-time religion mingled freely on stages that evoked the new ’70s trend towards massive arena rock tours. Additionally, professional athletes and coaches made appearances to spread “the Message in Muscle.” Dozens of NFL players, current and retired, showed up, including Paul Eshleman’s father “Doc” Eshleman, then-chaplain of the NFL. But whatever moments of joy and cultural relevance emanated from the Explo gathering, deep down the organizers knew what the event was all about: bringing the “lost sheep” of the Baby Boom back into the fold of conservative Christianity. All throughout The Explo Story, the anxieties of a world that had changed in the blink of an eye over the previous five years are laid bare. Eshleman and Rohrer are assiduous in making sure that the reader knows this gathering was designed to be multiracial and multicultural: “Explo drew the largest number of blacks and other minority groups of any Christian gathering of its kind in history.” Later in the text it is discovered that this “largest” percentage of Black Christians was “[a]pproximately three per cent—about 3,000 delegates—of the Explo crowd.” A frankly patronizing conversion story appears in chapter 4, “A City of ‘One Way!’ Streets,” where a young white woman overflowing with the “spiritual rekindling of Explo” met a Black man on the street who “held up both hands. ‘These are the hands of a criminal,’ he hissed. ‘Can your whitey God forgive me?'” Of course, the young woman evangelist prays with the Black man for twenty minutes, inducing him to release his worries of “selling out my people to believe in a white God,” and another soul is won for Christ. <img width="643" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=643" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=643 643w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=94 94w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=188 188w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg 835w" sizes="(max-width: 643px) 100vw, 643px" data-attachment-id="41434" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg" data-orig-size="835,1329" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Johnny Cash and other prominent figures from pop, rock, country, and the newly-baptized &#8220;Christian rock&#8221; scene entertained the masses at Explo. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=188" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0105.jpg?w=643" /> <img width="649" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=649" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=649 649w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=95 95w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=190 190w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg 841w" sizes="(max-width: 649px) 100vw, 649px" data-attachment-id="41436" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg" data-orig-size="841,1326" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" The summer camp atmosphere of Explo was meant to evoke the iconic celebration at Woodstock three years prior. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=190" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0084.jpg?w=649" /> <img width="643" height="1024" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=643" class="attachment-large size-large" alt="" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=643 643w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=94 94w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=188 188w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=768 768w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg 835w" sizes="(max-width: 643px) 100vw, 643px" data-attachment-id="41438" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2024/02/21/truckin-for-souls-explo-72-and-the-jesus-revolution/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg" data-orig-size="835,1329" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Images of the masses coming to Christ included delegations of Evangelical-aligned churches from all over the world. " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=188" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/explostoryplanto0000eshl_0075.jpg?w=643" /> Even more stark is the anxiety around the Vietnam War. The first half of 1972 saw the North Vietnamese Eastern offensive in response to the ongoing attempt of the Nixon administration to cut a retreat from Southeast Asia while declaring “peace with honor,” all while killing tens of thousands of civilians in the bombing of neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Around the edges of Explo, a real, if minority, Christian peace movement was present: placards reading “300 Gls killed this week in Vietnam won’t be reached in this generation” are mentioned by Eshleman and Rohrer dismissively. Routinely, Eshleman and Rohrer dismiss the “dissenters” at Explo, who “backed off when confronted with love and reason by our staff.” Throughout Explo ’72, rah-rah patriotism edges into Christian nationalism. The book cheerfully states, “Men soon to face enemy fire deserve priority in hearing the gospel and in receiving training to lead buddies to Christ.” During Explo’s “Military Seminar” and Flag Day celebrations, Pentagon higher-ups such as Army Chief of Chaplains Major General Gerhart Hyatt and Navy Chief of Chaplains Francis Garrett were featured speakers. Even the tiny minority of young people who sought recognition for their anti-war stance against the “shushing” of the crowd were performatively brought back into the Explo fold: “Chaplain Garrett was greeted by the protesters who asked, ‘Admiral, can you say you love us now?” Throwing his arms around several of them he replied, ‘Yes, I love you.’ This reply brought tears to many of the demonstrators’ eyes.” The Evangelical reliance on public profession and witnessing to bring new souls to Christ is a common thread in these anecdotal tales. Ultimately, the real world of the 1970s couldn’t be kept from the cultural cloister of Explo’s star-studded seminar rooms, stages, and stadiums. The sinister Children of God cult was lurking at the conference (they were deemed “extremist” by the authors in the same breath as the anti-war protesters). In a startling piece of historical irony, the final night of Explo ’72 happened to coincide with the Watergate break-in. Billy Graham had been a Nixon confidante, his first-term Inaugural pastor, and his co-conspirator in professing virulent anti-Semitism. And on the final night of Explo ’72, he made the compact mentioned at the beginning of the book into a holy covenant with his young Evangelicals to remake America: “I am asking you to light a candle… and we will start a spiritual fire here tonight that could sweep the world… It could help evangelize the world before 1980. Let’s leave here tonight dedicated, committed and determined to change the world in the next eight years.” A lot can be said about the ridiculous, garish, and pandering elements of the vibe around Explo ’72, but no one can deny that, by 1980, America would end up changed by this movement and this generation of young Christian activists, and changed for good, well into the next century. <img data-attachment-id="1911" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/grasso-avatar/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg" data-orig-size="538,538" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Grasso Avatar" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=538" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-1911" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=90&h=90" alt="Grasso Avatar" width="90" height="90" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=90&h=90 90w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=180&h=180 180w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grasso-avatar.jpg?w=150&h=150 150w" sizes="(max-width: 90px) 100vw, 90px" />Michael Grasso is a Senior Editor at We Are the Mutants. He is a writer, museum professional, and a lifelong Bostonian. You can follow him on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/mutantsmichael.bsky.social.
“No Glue or Glass Bottles”: The Gateshead Music Collective
By Richard McKenna An oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s...
Reviews / November 27, 2023 <img data-attachment-id="41373" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/11/27/no-glue-or-glass-bottles-the-gateshead-music-collective/watm-from-the-garage/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg" data-orig-size="354,500" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm from the garage" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg?w=212" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg?w=354" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41373" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="424" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg?w=300&h=424 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg?w=106&h=150 106w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg?w=212&h=300 212w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/watm-from-the-garage.jpg 354w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />From the Garage to the Station: Stories from the Gateshead Music Collective 1980-1988 By Sned Amorphous Press, 2020 One of the strangest things about having been involved in something, however peripherally, is watching its story get rewritten and mangled as it becomes formalized and turned into grist for the academic culture mill. As the center of psychic gravity inevitably tends to shift towards the HQs of the various industries that engage with this kind of thing, provincial scenes often end up getting overshadowed by events in the big cities, meaning that narratives about England—and the UK in general—tend to get monopolized by the southern metropolis where the money lives. It’s a shame for many reasons, one of which is the way it obscures the fact that, despite the obstacles they face, necessity often means that the provinces are actually just as creative and inventive in their existential solutions as the bountiful big cities, if not more so. I briefly touched on the North East of England in my piece on artist James Cawthorn—it’s a lovely, imaginative, and unfairly disregarded area of Britain that bore a lot of the brunt of Margaret Thatcher’s battle to free the UK of the pesky mines, heavy industry, shipyards, unions, and jobs that were holding the country back from achieving its destiny as a services industry-based hub of global excellence in the money laundering trade. As I said in that article, the North East is completely its own place with its own strange magic, political history, and deep links both to the ancient past and to the future. Gateshead is a large town that sits across the River Tyne (immortalized by historically underrated local band Lindisfarne in my least favorite of their songs, “Fog on the Tyne“) from the better-known and larger city of Newcastle, and the self-published From the Garage to the Station is an oral history of the Gateshead Music Collective (or GMC) in the words of the (then) young people who started it, ran it, and frequented it in the 1980s, from their first small club, the Garage—an actual garage, natch—to the larger Station, lent to them by the relatively enlightened local council and so named because of its past life as a cop shop. Both venues provided places for young people to practice with their bands and on weekends organized gigs that saw the cream of UK punk come to town. The story is told by a colorful and engaging cast of dozens of characters, from feminist collective Them Wifies to people with prototypical punker names like Keeks, Sprog, Scruff, Crazy, and Shev, and the whole thing is illustrated with exactly the kind of blurry photos that put you right in the middle of the fug of fag smoke, stale beer, and deafening punk racket. Part of the pleasure of From the Garage to the Station is that it’s a direct, non-profit product of the scene itself and is intended for the kind of people who were actually involved in it, as opposed to being another extrusion of the academia/media complex mentioned above. The book was put together by Sned, who’s a bit of a historical figure on the UK anarcho/punk/DIY scene himself: as well as being involved in the GMC first hand, he was the drummer in seminal UK hardcore bands Generic and Pleasant Valley Children and ran the Flat Earth distro and record label for many years (full disclosure: he was also unfortunate enough to have to put up with playing and living with me for a bit). To sum up, From the Garage to the Station is a genuinely inspirational journey through the memories of the people who took part. Anyone who has been even tangentially involved in the extremely heterogeneous cultural phenomenon that falls under the umbrella category of “punk,” or probably any other kind of DIY organizing, will get chills of recognition reading it, but even those who haven’t been will come away from it feeling energized. Copies of the book are available from Sned’s web distro Amorphous Pieces, (or from PM Press if you’re in the US), where you can also pick up an omnibus collection of every issue of beloved British punk fanzine Raising Hell published by UK anarcho overlord and punk rock Samuel Pepys Ben Sik’o’war between 1982 and 1990 that will give you a complete immersion in the mood, humor and attitude—and stench—of the UK punk scene of the time. And for anyone in the UK, running through November/December 2023 there’s also an exhibition and event organized by a collective of which Amorphous was part to celebrate the legacy of The Station and other youth-led music collectives in the North East of England. <img data-attachment-id="2390" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2016/08/29/a-great-painter-did-it-the-compelling-weirdness-of-magnus/mckenna-avatar/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg" data-orig-size="280,283" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="McKenna Avatar" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=280" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=280" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-2390" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg" alt="McKenna Avatar" width="90" height="91" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=90&h=91 90w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=180&h=182 180w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/mckenna-avatar.jpg?w=148&h=150 148w" sizes="(max-width: 90px) 100vw, 90px" /> Richard McKenna grew up in the visionary utopia of 1970s South Yorkshire and now ekes out a living among the crumbling ruins of Rome, from whence he dreams of being rescued by the Terran Trade Authority.
By Michael Grasso This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis's horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role...
Reviews / October 31, 2023 <img data-attachment-id="41269" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/31/tubular-terrors-the-norliss-tapes/watm-norliss-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png" data-orig-size="711,480" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm norliss 2" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41269" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png" alt="" width="2000" height="1350" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png 711w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png?w=150&h=101 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-norliss-2.png?w=300&h=203 300w" sizes="(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px" /> The Norliss Tapes Directed by Dan Curtis NBC (1973) On a pre-pandemic Halloween four years ago, my co-editors decided to bestow upon me the honor of reviewing famed made-for-TV movie The Night Stalker (1972). Even though I’d heard its praises sung far and wide, it was my first time watching Darren McGavin’s harried newspaper photog Carl Kolchak chasing a vampire through early-’70s Vegas. It was a triumph, and one I was a bit miffed that I’d long overlooked. This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role. Like McGavin, Thinnes would two decades later pop up as a guest star on The X-Files thanks to series creator Chris Carter’s love of his lead performance as David Vincent, lone crusader against a secret alien invasion in short-lived cult series The Invaders (1967-1968). At the outset of The Norliss Tapes, we see Thinnes as David Norliss, in desperate emotional straits very reminiscent of David Vincent, in his richly-appointed study surrounded by the titular audio cassettes. On a phone call to his publisher Sanford T. Evans (Don Porter), Norliss sounds like a broken man, face contorted in exhaustion and terror, telling Evans his book on “debunking the supernatural” is late and the reasons why are on a series of tapes. “When you hear them,” Norliss croaks ominously to Evans, “you’ll understand.” I made mention of the Nixon tapes in my review of The Night Stalker, seeing in Kolchak’s recounting of the details of his case into a tape recorder a prefiguring of the audio tapes that would roil the nation in a year’s time, and it’s interesting to see Curtis revisit this trope here just a few months before the Nixon White House taping system was revealed by Alexander Butterfield in front of the Watergate Committee in July 1973. Audio cassette technology was relatively new in ’73, developed for commercial use only a decade prior, but already it had begun to supplant the much more cumbersome reel-to-reel recorders. This increased availability made home recording possible for the everyday consumer, and gives The Norliss Tapes a sheen of high-tech to juxtapose with the ancient occult mysteries we’re about to see unfold. Evans gets stood up by Norliss for a lunch date to discuss his book, and decides to visit Norliss’s home, where he sees an incomplete book introduction in the typewriter, along with a pile of audio tapes that contain the true tale of what has Norliss so shaken. For Kolchak, the tape recording is a mere dramatic coda, a testament made after we’ve accompanied him on his heroic journey through the nightside of Vegas. But in The Norliss Tapes, the recording itself becomes the medium by which we the audience are able to witness the drama in flashback. The telefeature was intended as a pilot for an episodic series much like the eventual 1974-75 Kolchak: The Night Stalker; and in that series, each new tape would present a new episode in Norliss’s sanity-draining wilderness year investigating the occult. In his examination of surveillance in 1970s politics and media, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance, poet and media scholar Stephen Paul Miller explores the decade by examining the seemingly omnipresent (self-)surveillance through recording devices in both the era’s fiction and in reality. Speaking in relation to 1971’s Klute and 1974’s The Conversation, both of which feature ominous audiotape recordings whose contents stalk the protagonists throughout the film, Miller states: “Terror lies in auditory feedback. In the early seventies, the feedback of auditory surveillance is ominously put into place.” In terms of self-surveillance and the role it played in the downfall of Nixon, the result of the presence of a documentary audio record is clear: “Perhaps it was unfortunate, perhaps it was not inevitable,” Miller opines, “but Nixon was our secret self. In an uncanny fashion, he came to represent America. He undid himself through self-surveillance. One might say he found himself to lose himself. In the same way and at the same time, the great American middle class gradually lost its New Deal tradition of social and economic progress in favor of stronger identifications with narrow self-definitions and interests.” This evocation of the narcissism, the hall of mirrors self-obsession of self-recording and its implications on identity and class, strikes an interesting light on the first case Norliss is asked to “debunk.” <img data-attachment-id="41188" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/31/tubular-terrors-the-norliss-tapes/norlisstapes/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg" data-orig-size="641,480" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="norlisstapes" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg?w=641" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41188" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg" alt="" width="350" height="262" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg?w=350&h=262 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg?w=150&h=112 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg?w=300&h=225 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisstapes.jpg 641w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />That first case file throws him into the world of the wealthy and their forays into both creative art and dark ritual magic. Norliss receives a call from a widow, Ellen Cort (played gamely by future Police Woman Angie Dickinson), who says she’s had to deal with a prowler on her property who killed her loyal guard dog Raleigh. Ellen says she shot the trespasser point blank with a shotgun, but he still managed to get away. The further twist? Ellen is absolutely certain the intruder is apparently her own late husband, artist James Cort (reliable 1970s and ’80s action movie heavy Nick Dimitri). Norliss, a skeptic, investigates the world of artists, bohemians, and occultists swirling around the Corts, including mysterious antique dealer Madame Jeckiel (Blaxploitation star Vonetta McGee). The McGuffin powering James Cort’s return from the grave is a mysterious ancient Egyptian ring dedicated to the god of death Osiris, which was sold to Cort by Jeckiel. In a bargain with the demon “Sargoth,” Cort seeks immortality by using his artistic skill to create a golem of clay for the god to inhabit. The clay sculpture appears out of nowhere in Cort’s old studio, while at the same time, in the wealthy Bay Area community surrounding the Corts’ property, exsanguinated corpses are turning up everywhere, causing local sheriff Tom Hartley (Night Stalker veteran and perennial ’70s TV lawman Claude Akins) to try to cover up the occult crimes to avoid a panic. Of course, the lurid murders are being committed by the undead Cort, as it’s discovered by Norliss at the opening of the third act that “the [statue’s] clay is 40 percent human blood.” Norliss and Ellen succeed in burning down the studio, destroying not only Cort’s unholy artistic creation but the undead artist himself. The narrative thrust of The Norliss Tapes—an investigator seeking to debunk the paranormal—would be familiar to a broad cross-section of middle American TV audiences, and not just because it’s a bit of a retread of ratings success The Night Stalker. 1973 was also the year of famed psychic Uri Geller’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where fellow stage magician Carson (with the help of professional debunker James Randi), was able to scuttle Geller’s purported psychic ability to bend spoons and repair watches. Of course, in the world of The Norliss Tapes, debunking doesn’t come so easy. Over the course of the TV movie’s two hours, Norliss turns from a skeptic who seeks to put a stop to “the fake mediums, phony astrologers, the self-proclaimed seers and trick mystics… bilking millions of dollars each year out of their gullible victims,” to someone who takes the eerie advice and occult expertise of Madame Jeckiel seriously. His combination of dogged investigative work and willingness to believe Ellen Cort—that her assailant survived a point-blank shotgun blast—puts him on a collision course with dark powers. <img data-attachment-id="41189" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/31/tubular-terrors-the-norliss-tapes/norlisscar/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg" data-orig-size="642,480" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="norlisscar" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=642" loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-41189" style="width: 427px;height: auto" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=642" alt="" width="350" height="262" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=350 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=150 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg?w=300 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/norlisscar.jpg 642w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" /> Ultimately, all of these dark powers are put in service of the wealthy. Madame Jeckiel’s shop purveys artifacts for the delectation of the ruling class, just as James Cort’s art does. Cort’s art dealer, Charles Langdon (Hurd Hatfield), tries to do a little graverobbing to grab the valuable ring of Osiris from Cort’s interred body, and of course winds up as one of the zombie’s victims. Dan Curtis’s direction and cinematography does an amazing job at capturing both the lush interiors and stunning landscapes of the Bay Area; Norliss’s agent and publisher dine in a high-rise San Francisco restaurant with amazing window views. Curtis also treats the everyday schlubs out there in 1973 Television Land to high-angle location shots of Norliss driving his admittedly super-cool rust-orange convertible Corvette Stingray along the Pacific coast. Thinnes’s hardboiled voiceover on the audiotapes informs us, in case we weren’t aware, that “there’s no doubt this rugged peninsula country could give the French Riviera tough competition.” The catacombs under Cort’s palatial estate, built “in the 1920s… during Prohibition [to store] guns and liquor,” allow the zombie Cort to move around on the estate from his studio to the world beyond, preying on his victims to collect blood for his demonic ritual. Like Peter Falk’s contemporary series Columbo, the wealthy in The Norliss Tapes are venal and greedy: greedy for more trinkets, more luxury, more fame, and ultimately more life. In a way, Norliss has managed to do what he set out to do, but instead of stopping con men from bilking the innocent, he’s uncovered a world in which the rich can defy any authority—even death—with the help of their supernatural patrons. In the implicit distance created by the narrative frame of (presumably quite wealthy) Sanford Evans listening to the titular Norliss Tapes, we again delve into the questions of economic class, memory, distance, and haunting. The Norliss Tapes may never have been picked up for a series—a failed pilot itself seems to me a fairly hauntological what-if—but as Evans is about to pop a second audiocassette into the cassette player, as the case of James Cort fades into the magnetic ether, I couldn’t help but think about Mark Fisher’s observation from his essay “The Slow Cancellation of the Future” from Ghosts of My Life: [Hauntological artists] were preoccupied with the way in which technology materialised memory—hence a fascination with television, vinyl records, audiotape, and with the sounds of these technologies breaking down. This fixation on materialised memory led to what is perhaps the principal sonic signature of hauntology: the use of crackle, the surface noise made by vinyl. Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence (emphasis mine). Cort’s crimes against the innocent—and by extension the panoply of sanity-shattering cases presumably on Norliss’s remaining tapes—will never be heard, their greedy perpetrators never brought to earthly or cosmic justice. Just another mediocre TV series consigned to the dustbin of history? Perhaps. But I like to think of those audiocassettes as something more, as a kind of unrealized “18½-minute gap” in the early ’70s self-surveillance panopticon, a lost testament of crimes disallowed from entry into the permanent historical record. Haunted by occult secrets, we the viewers and listeners come to realize that some tapes will truly never be heard. —Michael Grasso
You Weren’t Supposed to Be Spooky: Non-Halloween Songs for Halloween
By The Mutants So read on to discover the songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of mutant mansions...
Features / October 30, 2023 <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41123" data-attachment-id="41123" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13-22-02/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png" data-orig-size="791,596" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Screen Shot 2023-09-30 at 13.22.02" data-image-description="" data-image-caption=" Photo: Teesside Gazette " data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41123" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png" alt="Screen Shot 2023-09-30 at 13.22.02" width="791" height="596" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png 791w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png?w=150&h=113 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png?w=300&h=226 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/screen-shot-2023-09-30-at-13.22.02.png?w=768&h=579 768w" sizes="(max-width: 791px) 100vw, 791px" /> Photo: Teesside Gazette Ever tried carving a turnip? Attempting to prise out chunks of the cold, iron-hard flesh is about as gratifying as it sounds, and yet, pumpkins still being an outré foreign exoticism in the crepuscular 1970s, turnips were what they gave us kids of the UK, when they gave us anything at all. The best you could hope for in terms of results was the kind of thing seen above in the hands of the kids posing in 1976 with Willie Maddren, football deity of the English North-East, and resembling prehistoric fetishes: frightening, certainly, but more in a literal than a playful way, which was more or less true of Halloween itself. The drab austerity of our Halloweens past is so axiomatic that it’s now cliché to hear boomers and Gen Xers incongruously united in bemoaning the fact that the nation’s youth no longer appreciate the joys of a day where nothing at all happened except whatever self-inflicted fear you could muster up to torment yourself with. The adulthood-defying Bacchanalia of the North American Halloween industry being denied us, we had to get our eerie thrills where we could, and that was as true of music as it was of non-root vegetable Jack-o’-lanterns and sexy nurse costumes. So read on to discover the ten songs that, despite having no actual connection to the 31st of October, yet produce a frisson of seasonal alarm in the paranormally persecuted inhabitants of Mutant Mansions. <img data-attachment-id="41141" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg" data-orig-size="1180,1200" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=295" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-41141 alignleft" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg" alt="25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs" width="398" height="405" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=398&h=405 398w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=796&h=809 796w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=148&h=150 148w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=295&h=300 295w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25-greatest-classic-rock-and-roll-songs.jpeg?w=768&h=781 768w" sizes="(max-width: 398px) 100vw, 398px" />“Dear Diary” By The Moody Blues Deram, 1969 I think we all know who’s actually responsible for the children of Olde Englande historically not getting to enjoy the full throttle commercially-propelled joys of the 31st of October: the dickhead known as Charles Dickens, that’s who. By setting the Western world’s second favorite supernatural story at Christmas, he basically ensured that, until the twin forces of untrammeled kid-targeting capitalism and untrammeled middle-aged narcissism prevailed, the nation’s ghost industry was doomed to gravitate around the 25th of December, with sundry worthy M.R. James adaptations the order of the day. Until around the time Tony Blair managed to liberate the City of London of its pesky banking regulations, Halloween in England (other parts of the UK have their own traditions) was left to be just a vaguely worrying oddity where, though you could make a witch out of a plastic lemon if you liked, you were also guaranteed a depressing dearth of seasonal plastic tat and traumatizing TV programming. But fear not, Britain’s Most Haunted Band (catchier than “band where all the songwriters seem deeply depressed”) The Moody Blues were on hand to provide eerie prog-rock-folk dirges year round that lent themselves to unnerving interpretation. “Dear Diary” is one of those dirges. It might have been all the Herbert van Thal anthologies I’d been mainlining since infancy, but somehow, perhaps due to an idiosyncratic interpretation of the line “For goodness sake, what’s happening to me?” or what I perceived as Lovecraftian undertones, I mistook the song’s existential critique of straight society for an eerie and beguiling ode to monstrous difference, an error that cast its lackadaisical groove, Ray Thomas’s melancholy flute, and the gurgling, vaguely amphibian effect on Justin Hayward’s vocals in a more sinister light. That If they weren’t so blind, then surely they’d see There’s a much better way for them to be sounded less like a call to arms for the Brummie hippie lifestyle and more like an invitation to radical and frightening mutation. Listened to in autumn twilight, it still sounds like the final jottings of someone journaling their drift away from the human race. —Richard McKenna <img data-attachment-id="41140" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-2/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg" data-orig-size="1306,1080" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-41140" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg" alt="7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce" width="350" height="289" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=350&h=289 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=700&h=579 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=150&h=124 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/7319768_image_0-8ef7809ad93ff0ee69fe9811c3bcddce-1.jpeg?w=300&h=248 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater” By The Sensational Alex Harvey Band Vertigo, 1975 A song doesn’t have to be about vampires, pumpkins or ghosts to inspire a spot of seasonal terror (nothing rhymes with vampires or pumpkins anyway, and “roasts” seldom inspires terror, unless you burn the Yorkshires). The swift and total devastation of the pristine and ancient in favor of the cheap thrills of modern convenience is a terrifying concept, but when I first heard “The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater“ by The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, I was five years old and the message went over my head. Nevertheless, the song terrified me profoundly. It wasn’t the only sinister musical narrative with a cultish theme of death that I obsessed over as a child, but it was certainly the most chilling. I didn’t even like to look at the album cover (conceived as a parody of prog album artwork of the time), with its spiky earth movers and snarling but doomed dinosaurs. The lurid colors had the menace of classic horror comics, and rifling through my dad’s record collection to have another look at the starship on ELO’s Out Of The Blue meant risking touching the cursed album by mistake. I didn’t want the song to be aware of me, or perhaps to fly on to the record player by malign magic, and start playing itself. We were forbidden to touch the record player, and thus I would have been helpless to listen, and I was very determined to do that as little as possible. If my dad put the album on (Tomorrow Belongs To Me), my brother and I would flee the room, often in tears. The song is written in the style of a fairytale, and so it felt somehow personal, as though the narrator was addressing me directly. Gather round boys and girls and listen, To the tale of the giant stone eater. The opening piano notes were sly and insinuating. You could tell something terrible was about to go down, and sure enough the piano swiftly gave way to the inexorable pounding of heavy guitar chords, and the alliterative aggression of the lyrics: Sudden savage shining soiled solid sanded Steel shuddering shattering shoveling until the Sabre toothed rooter roots the earth It was heavy stuff. Definitely not in the league of the Beatrix Potter cassette we’d recorded rude words over. Our dad is a terrifying geologist from Arbroath, so we ought to have been hardened to the psychic effect of Scotsmen ranting about rock stratas, but in hindsight perhaps that was part of the terror. For us, the song was a cross between an incomprehensible ghost story and getting bollocked by dad for failing to show sufficient interest in igneous rock on a family holiday. Sometimes you just wanted an ice cream and a go on the arcade machines, and in the context of the song, that made me Part Of The Problem. The eater eats his fill and is not satisfied and Roars and revs his mathematical rage On the footprints of Vikings. My brother and I definitely belonged to the camp of “Plastic space agents, selling candy floss contracts.” Perhaps Alex Harvey believed, like my dad, that candy floss would make a mess of the car. On the other hand, Harvey was inspired to write the song after seeing a bulldozer clearing ancient Scottish countryside to build a new motorway, so maybe he’d have appreciated the despoilment of our Ford station wagon via tiny sticky handprints, a constellation of careening concurrent calorific cavepainter complaint. As a young fan of musical theater, I was drawn in by the storybook narrative and complex lyrics, as well as by the way the music constantly switched between lyrical, harsh, faux jaunty, and bombastic, the lulls and the peaks feeling like a tease and a threat. I usually tapped out about the time Alex Harvey repeats “TEN MILLION YEARS OLD!” in an increasingly unhinged bellow, but occasionally I’d be able to force myself to listen to the whole song. My fascination with it made it scarier to me, which I think is the case with all good horror. It stuck in my mind, and I’d find myself pondering the lyrics, which I took very literally. I concluded that as I was not made of stone, the stone eater would not want to eat me (even during the great stone shortage!), but it was possible it could chew up the land our house was on, reducing me and my family—and more importantly the dog and my My Little Ponies—to a pulp of shattered soil and human viscera. On the whole, I preferred the mellow space swoop of ELO. Of course, given today’s increasingly bleak environmental outlook and the rise of AI devastating the human component of various industries and arts, the lyrics are unsettling in a different way. The eater eats again retches roars and vomits His computerized future is bright with security Headshrinkers analyze the unknown Meanwhile another tree dies of shame —J.E. Anckorn <img data-attachment-id="41160" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/s-l1600sas/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg" data-orig-size="1013,1011" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="s-l1600sas" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41160" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg" alt="s-l1600sas" width="350" height="349" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=350&h=349 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=700&h=699 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/s-l1600sas.jpeg?w=300&h=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“Enigma” By Amanda Lear Ariola/Polydor, 1978 Italian kids of the late 1970s didn’t have Halloween. They only had a vague idea that it existed in America because of the “Grande cocomero” (the “big watermelon,” a.k.a. the Great Pumpkin) in Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts strips, which had been translated into Italian since the ’60s by semiotician, writer, and cultural critic Umberto Eco. Eco was also responsible for the creation of the term “toffoletta” to describe a marshmallow to Italian readers who obviously had no idea what it could possibly be. When I saw Snoopy and friends roasting them on the campfire, I presumed “toffolette” must be delicious cubes of cheese. So, no Halloween in the ’70s—but we did have (limited) access to a lot of spooky stuff all year round. We had those lurid giallo movie posters that plastered the walls of every Italian city, we had Dario Argento, we had Mario Bava’s horror films and Ruggero Deodato’s cannibal epics. Granted, most of us kids could only dream of actually watching them, but we were free to fantasize endlessly about their goriness. (I was 15 when I finally saw 1975’s Profondo Rosso, and it didn’t live up to my wild fantasies. I only learned to appreciate it much later.) The most precious spooky thing we had was something American kids our age could only dream of: a sorcery-themed late night variety show called “Stryx” aired by the second channel of the Italian state TV from October 15 to November 19, 1978. Stryx was a sexy, all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza that in its brief life hosted witchcraft-inspired performances from international disco queen Grace Jones, Indian actress and singer-songwriter Asha Puthli, and Brazilian superstar Gal Costa. Eight-year-old me was allowed to stay up late to watch it even though the performers were half naked and the provocative dance numbers were not exactly kid-friendly. But Stryx was fun for the whole family and perfect Halloween viewing, even though there was no such thing as Halloween. Actress, model, Dalí’s muse, Roxy Music cover girl, and international maid of mischief Amanda Lear was of course a family favorite and Stryx’s brightest star. She spoke fluent Italian and because of her deep, throaty voice, many Italians (encouraged by the “stampa rosa” gossip tabloids) were titillated by the idea she might be a trans woman. Lear was popular enough that in 1980 she appeared in a TV commercial for an Italian sparkling wine sold in individual aperitif bottles so small that the product was sold as “Nano ghiacciato,” which roughly translates as “dwarf on the rocks,” political correctness not being a priority in the Italian advertisement ecosystem at the time. My favorite Amanda moment in Stryx was her performance of the song “Enigma.” Lear was led to the stage by a leash held by the ringmaster—actor, singer, and former ‘60s heartthrob Tony Renis. Her body shrouded in a black cloak, she looked like a witch being dragged to the gallows—yet enjoying every second of it. She soon disrobed, though, revealing a red sequined catsuit that was surely on Madonna’s mind when she was preparing her costumes for her Confessions on a Dance Floor Tour. The song was naughty fun even if you didn’t speak English: “Give a bit of mmh to me and I’ll give a bit of mmh to you” she purred, while stroking three (terrified) black kittens on an inflatable plastic mattress intended to look futuristic and Barbarella-like, surrounded by half naked space odalisques and alien creatures unleashed from the Mos Eisley Cantina. “Enigma” was a top ten hit in Italy and, more surprisingly, in Belgium. —Daniele Cassandro “We’re Gonna Change the World”<img data-attachment-id="41167" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/maxresdefault-5/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg" data-orig-size="721,720" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="maxresdefault" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-41167" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg" alt="maxresdefault" width="350" height="350" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=350&h=350 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=700&h=699 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefault.jpeg?w=300&h=300 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" /> By Matt Monro Capitol Records, 1970 It’s the stuff that catches you off guard in what you thought was a safe and secure environment that’s always the creepiest. Playing at home when I was young, my mum would invariably have the cheery, anodyne burble of BBC Radio 2 soundtracking her housework. Yet to my infant ears, there was often something a bit “off” about the songs it played, from themes of abandonment (i.e. John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and Middle Of The Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep” with its “Woke up this morning and my mama was gone”), to old men apparently preying on younger women (i.e. Ringo Starr’s “You’re Sixteen” and Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl”). But the song that disturbed me the most was Matt Monro’s “We’re Gonna Change The World.” Listening now, it’s a brilliantly sung and arranged piece of “adult pop,” with an intriguing and multi-layered lyric about women’s lib. But at the time, all I heard was its eerily jaunty call for revolution: “Come with us, run with us! / We’re gonna change the world / You’ll be amazed, so full of praise / When we’ve rearranged your world / We’re gonna change your world!” With its groovy threats to overthrow the everyday, it felt more than a little terrifying—at the age of 6, I really didn’t want my world to be rearranged. It conjured visions in my head of hordes of protestors charging down the street with a gleam of madness in their eyes. Kids are often portrayed as little anarchists in waiting, reveling in chaos and disorder. But this kid for one was pretty disturbed by the thought of everything suddenly changing overnight, the velvety tones of Monro’s voice and the tune’s upbeat penny whistle melody somehow only adding to the sense of dread it imprinted on my conservative soul. —Joe Banks <img data-attachment-id="41191" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/attachment/17031329/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg" data-orig-size="1435,1420" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="17031329" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41191" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg" alt="17031329" width="350" height="346" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=350&h=346 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=700&h=693 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=150&h=148 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/17031329.jpeg?w=300&h=297 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“Heartache Avenue” By The Maisonettes Ready Steady Go, 1982 You might think that by age 11 a child would be mature enough to not be actually frightened by something as innocuous as the jaunty blue-eyed-soul of The Maisonettes “Heartache Avenue,” but that’s a stereotype I wish to smash. I claim my right to make myself constantly anxious with anything that comes to hand. Never one for coping well with ambiguity or mixed messages, young me immediately took fright when the band first appeared on Top of the Pops. Perhaps it was the jacket and polo-neck combos, half enigmatic Mastermind miscreant, half provincial perv. Perhaps the strangely mechanical way lead singer and songwriter Lol Mason moved, as though obeying some obscure rite. Perhaps that his stylings vaguely evoked both the Yorkshire Ripper and Mr. Mann, the foot fetishist chiropodist doing cheap cash-in-hand home visits out of hours who for months had spent Tuesday evenings in our front room caressing my poor mum’s tormented feet (and, over a couple of weeks, slowly and agonizingly slicing a verruca out of one of mine) before departing under a cloud after his qualifications or intentions were called into question. Perhaps it was the ominous, oddly processed voices of the backing singers, or the downward synth slide that evoked a nauseating feeling of time slowing down. Perhaps the doomy cover photo on the single, half Last Year at Marienbad, half moment-before-nuclear-impact. I wasn’t even mad about avenues full stop, to be honest, the only one near my house being home to the caravan site where I’d been attacked by a scary Alsatian called Terry. So as much as I liked the song, I couldn’t help feeling that it was in some way freighted with horror, Heartache Avenue no simple metaphor for lost love but an actual suburban nightmare zone where one might be trapped, like Doctor Who in Castrovalva. Given the appalled reaction my NHS glasses, Adric haircut, and fucked up teeth (it can’t have been my deeply irritating personality) provoked in any girl I spoke to, was I also doomed to inhabit this cursed liminal space? An awful feeling of dread that it might actually be my destiny flooded my brain every time I heard the brass section kick in at the start of the song. I never saw The Maisonettes when they appeared on French TV, which feels like a stroke of luck, as the “Lions Club grandee trapped inside a video game set in a mountaintop cult sacrifice complex” would only have added yet another layer to the vague unease that “Heartache Avenue” triggers in me even now. —Richard McKenna <img data-attachment-id="41240" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/a-292542-1645000922-9625/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg" data-orig-size="572,600" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="A-292542-1645000922-9625" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg?w=286" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg?w=572" loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-41240" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg" alt="A-292542-1645000922-9625" width="334" height="350" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg?w=334&h=350 334w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg?w=143&h=150 143w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg?w=286&h=300 286w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/a-292542-1645000922-9625.jpeg 572w" sizes="(max-width: 334px) 100vw, 334px" />“Eve of Destruction” By Barry McGuire Dunhill/RCA Victor, 1965 In 1983 and 1984, I feel as though every night I went to bed singularly petrified of nuclear war. This, of course, was the era of The Day After, Testament, Red Dawn, WarGames, Ronald Reagan callously and dangerously joking around about starting the bombing in a matter of minutes, appearing before Evangelicals and calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. I wondered nearly every night if I’d wake up the next morning or simply be vaporized in my sleep—or, worse yet, maybe I would survive a nuclear exchange and be forced to watch as my family slowly perished from radiation poisoning. (Yeah, Testament really did do a fucking number on me.) It was also right around this time that I really started becoming conscious of pop music, my own musical tastes, and my young self as an attentive, active, and appreciative listener of music. Sure, before I turned 8 there had been music on in the background, on pop and oldies radio in the family station wagon, but it was the coming of cable TV and MTV to our house that really kickstarted my awareness of the past 25 or so years of rock and roll and what was considered cool by millions of American teens a little older than me. My dad took me to local New England record stores like Strawberries and bought me 45s of Toto, Michael Jackson, Thomas Dolby. The family hi-fi was all mine; my folks, much to the dismay of my future-self-as-music-nut, were never really into putting together a record collection. It’s this combination of new music and oldies radio that led me to two strikingly different anthems that tapped into my childhood nuclear war neuroses (the next one I’ll get to a little later in this feature). Barry McGuire’s 1965 Billboard number one hit (!)—despite numerous radio bans for its “subversive” lyrical content (!!)—protest anthem “Eve of Destruction” had to have been something I heard on oldies radio as a kid. I remember being transfixed by the song’s vaguely threatening aura, a mix of thoroughly pessimistic meditations on the Cold War, Vietnam, and domestic racial unrest. It was the second verse that put the chill down my spine: “If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away / There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave / Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy.” And on some very conscious level at the time, I was aware this was an old song! One that was a hit when my parents were only a little older than I was! How long had this fear about instantaneous global nuclear war been going on, I asked myself! This was the kind of historical perspective that truly impactful music hits all of us with occasionally: an intergenerational connection that conveys the collective weight of history. I remember calling into the selfsame oldies station to request that they play the song. What the DJ in 1983 thought of an 8-year-old kid calling in with his mom’s help to hear a hoary ’60s protest song, I will likely never know. But man, am I curious. —Michael Grasso <img data-attachment-id="41217" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/maxresdefaultdaf/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg" data-orig-size="670,670" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="maxresdefaultdaf" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg?w=670" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41217" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg" alt="maxresdefaultdaf" width="350" height="350" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg?w=350&h=350 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg?w=150&h=150 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg?w=300&h=300 300w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/maxresdefaultdaf.jpeg 670w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“Angie Baby” By Helen Reddy Capitol Records, 1974 By the time the ’80s rolled around, Britain had grudgingly accepted certain aspects of Halloween. We would sometimes sing spooky songs in school assembly, or color in a skeleton, but this wasn’t really any more attention than was paid to something like Harvest Festival (and I suspect horror fans would be more interested in the time we were taught how to make a corn dolly than anything we did for the 31st of October). Pushback from the church led to rival “All-Saints” events where kids were encouraged to dress as saints instead, and which inevitably saw lines of girls dressed as St Trinians filing into church halls across the land in mini skirts and ripped fishnets. Parents in general weren’t especially worried about Satan, but there was still the lingering concern that sending your kids to demand sweeties with menaces from the neighbors might be considered bad manners. All of this meant that I didn’t really have a Halloween tradition of child-friendly spooks to engage with, and I developed a range of slightly odd fears in their place, like the test card flying out of the TV into my face, or the red lines painted at the bottom of our local pool, which I thought were a grate with a shark behind it. That said, my spooky song was more connected to my creeping dread of approaching adulthood than those more visceral childhood terrors. I first heard “Angie Baby” in the early ’90s on a compilation of ’70s number 1s my parents brought from a petrol station. The story is essentially about a weird kid negotiating her relationship with the opposite sex, and as an 11-year-old already dealing with the imposition of puberty, I kind of related. Trapping the souls of men inside your radio and letting them out occasionally to dance around your bedroom was less familiar to me, but you have to take representation where you can find it. Back then, the involvement of the radio seemed like an intriguingly modern take on a ghost story (I had decided that Angie’s suitors must have become ghosts in order to fit inside), while their sorry plight and Angie’s isolation, confined to her room for some vague mental disorder variously described as being “insane” and “touched,” added all the poignancy of a good Victorian haunting. I misheard the line “All alone once more, Angie baby,” when her father knocks on the door, dispelling the spirits, as “Oh-oh once more, Angie baby,” the plaintive cry of a ghostly dance partner begging for one more turn around the room before being banished back to his portable prison. In my mind, the boys were like the mournful spirits of drowned sailors, and Angie was a more sex-positive Miss Havisham. Angie gets the opportunity to put her magical radio into effect when a neighbor boy “with evil on his mind” sneaks into her room and offers to dance with her. I didn’t really understand at the time what sort of evil he was considering, and thought that probably he was going to bully her for dancing by herself, or perhaps he would pretend to take her seriously and then do a really silly dance and ruin it all. Part of me quite liked the idea of trapping boys inside a radio. Anything to do with growing up, in fact—bras, periods—they could all go in. And then I would simply slip the radio inside a storm drain and skip off into the sunset. On the other hand, maybe Angie had also noticed that boys tended to be nicer if you talked to them one on one. Maybe she was just using her radio to get them away from their friends for a minute so she could find out what kind of person they were without them shouting or kicking footballs in her face. I could kind of see that. It had perhaps also occurred to me that having a sad ghost boyfriend would be pretty sweet. Ultimately, though, I didn’t really approve of Angie’s methods, even if the neighbor boy was planning to ruin her romantic evening by doing a silly dance. Honoring Habeas Corpus is surely the bedrock of any relationship, and do you really deserve your sad ghost boyfriend if it was you that made him sad? I certainly had some thoughts about Angie Baby, but the secrets of interacting with boys remained as opaque and as terrifying as ever. —Amy Mugglestone “Walking in Your Footsteps”<img data-attachment-id="41241" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg" data-orig-size="1965,2000" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="1_BcI4crCqM7jeLgwVW00zyw" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=295" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-41241" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg" alt="1_BcI4crCqM7jeLgwVW00zyw" width="350" height="356" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=350&h=356 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=700&h=712 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=147&h=150 147w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/1_bci4crcqm7jelgwvw00zyw.jpeg?w=295&h=300 295w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" /> By The Police A&M Records, 1983 As I mentioned above, my parents didn’t have a huge record collection, but my grandmother was a completely different story. She was always ahead of her time, thinking differently, whether by her reading of purveyors of popular occultism and spiritualism such as Edgar Cayce in the bland American ’50s, her committed anti-war protesting as a middle-aged housewife during Vietnam, or her musical tastes, which eschewed the fusty big band and “beautiful music” sounds of her own Greatest Generation and found her grooving instead to Boomer rock and New Wave artists like Billy Joel, Elton John, and the Police. My grandmother is the one who first put a copy of the Police’s 1983 international blockbuster hit LP Synchronicity into my hands. I remember listening to the whole album on her hi-fi in our family’s in-law apartment and being spooked by the tales of suburban middle-class dread (and lake cryptids!) in “Synchronicity II,” identifying far too much for an 8-year-old kid with the narrator of “King of Pain,” and having absolutely no clue about Sting’s pseud-y literary references to Carl Jung and Paul Bowles in “Synchronicity I” and “Tea in the Sahara,” respectively. (These days, in my dotage, forty years distant from the affectations of Gordon Sumner’s lyrics, I do admit I wonder how much of the album cover art’s veiled references to Jungian theory, surrealism, and psychic research laid the groundwork for later grown-up obsessions with same.) It was track A2, “Walking In Your Footsteps,” that really got the hooks in me. Anchored by a “tribal” rhythm and melody, the synths and sequencer evoking pan pipes and hollow log percussion, Sting sings a paean to the vanished “brontosaurus,” wondering if his blind march to extinction has a lesson for us. I mean, come on: I was a kid of the ’80s, I loved dinosaurs and, if you mentioned them, I was definitely paying attention. But the twist came in the final verse, where I learned that we humans could easily follow in the friendly yet dimwitted dinos’ giant footsteps: “If we explode the atom bomb / Would they say that we were dumb?” I understood the irony and humor here in comparing us clever apes to the pea-brained dinosaurs, but did I fully understand how our intelligence could equally consign us to a Darwinian ash-heap? Again, thanks to previous exposure to media like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, it was made clear to me “over and over and over again” (to reprise Barry McGuire’s haunting chorus) that technological intelligence was no guarantee of the survival of our species, and that in fact, it might be a detriment. “Walking In Your Footsteps” was the self-aware, wry, ironic dialectical counterpart to Barry McGuire’s defeated dirge of resignation, and I think on some level both of those songs contributed to my psychological attraction/repulsion complex with the idea of nuclear annihilation. —Michael Grasso <img data-attachment-id="41279" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/keith_colour_5/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg" data-orig-size="2517,2477" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Keith_colour_5" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=300" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignleft wp-image-41279" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg" alt="Keith_colour_5" width="350" height="344" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=350&h=344 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=700&h=689 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=150&h=148 150w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/keith_colour_5.jpeg?w=300&h=295 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’” By Keith West Parlophone, 1967 Halloween in the North-East of England in the late ’70s was a less garishly sexy festival than the one we’ve now grown accustomed to, and probably best characterized by the lingering odor of burnt turnip in drizzle. In truth, many of us were biding our time for November the Fifth, with its glamorous fireworks and massive municipal bonfires. Festive fact: it was actually illegal not to celebrate Bonfire Night in the UK for over 250 years, though how the men from the ministry enforced this remains mysterious. Anyway, whether cheerfully acknowledging the spirit world while dressed in a bin-bag, or gazing wistfully as the effigy of a Catholic conspirator was therapeutically consumed by the cleansing fires of The State, Samhain week contained two fun-sized opportunities for youngsters to contemplate Death. This locus of jocular creepiness is also inhabited by “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’,” which, it bears saying before we even get started, could easily be the most annoyingly punctuated song title of all time. Originally released in 1967, I first heard it played in heavy rotation on ’70s radio request shows like Junior Choice, hosted by the avuncular Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, and one hosted by the considerably less wholesome Jimmy Savile. Written and performed by producer Mark Wirtz and fronted by Keith West (of psychedelic practitioners, Tomorrow), the single was conceived as being part of a larger body of work, the ‘Teenage Opera’ of the title. Apparently to be set in a turn-of-the-century village, each song was to tell the story of one of its inhabitants. Despite harboring the giddy potential of song titles like “Cellophane Mary-Jane” and “The Paranoiac Woodcutter,” the project was not initially completed. Only the first single was a hit, and such was its ubiquity that it became more simply known as “Grocer Jack.” Though failing to make the US Hot 100, it was massive in the UK and Europe, especially in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. And as masterful as the composition no doubt is (getting the thumbs-up from the likes of Paul McCartney and Pete Townsend), the real hook is the undeniably cute and catchy children’s chorus, as performed by some West London school-of-performing-arts-type kids. The song begins with Mr. West describing how Grocer Jack, though 82 and suffering some kind of heart failure, is tortured by his sense of duty to deliver food to the village. The chorus, first time around, seems to be from Jack’s perspective as he’s dying on the floor: “Grocer Jack, get off your back / Go into town, don’t let them down.” As Jack correctly suspects, his value to the townsfolk is entirely contingent on his function as a retailer, and they are annoyed at his non-appearance: “Mothers send their children out / To Jack’s house to scream and shout.” This time the children sing the grocer-torturing chorus, exhorting the dying man to “get off his back.” Slacker. After a pastoral interlude, it appears that Jack has definitively croaked. The townsfolk feel some pangs of conscience, and the children are baffled as to where their beloved grocer has now gone: “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack / Is it true what mummy says / You won’t come back, oh no no,” and we’re left with the children of the town attempting to process the realities of death. And so to my cozy late-’70s living room, where as the radio played I found myself also starting to wrestle with notions of mortality, and getting my first real tastes of The Fear, the surface cuteness of the chorus having served as a means to smuggle in much darker materials. Listening to this song was like turning over a stone to find something hideous underneath, but its morbidly sentimental aspects, creepy enough in their own way, were not the only reason I found it so terrifying. There was another, absurd as it now seems, which nevertheless scared the bejaysus out of eight-year-old me. Having recently been allowed to stay up late at my Nan’s, I’d watched the horror anthology film Tales from the Crypt (1972). One of the stories, “Poetic Justice,” starred Peter Cushing as Arthur Grimsdyke, an elderly dustman persecuted and eventually driven to suicide by his heartless neighbors. In a scene watched between terrified fingers, Grimsdyke returns from the grave exactly one year later to exact his revenge. With the poor treatment of an elderly man who only meant well, some connection was made between Grimsdyke and Grocer Jack, as I wondered: What if it isn’t true what mummy says? Oh no no. —Christopher Ashton <img data-attachment-id="41295" data-permalink="https://wearethemutants.com/2023/10/30/you-werent-supposed-to-be-spooky-non-halloween-songs-for-halloween/watm-paul-is-dead/" data-orig-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg" data-orig-size="1313,1869" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="watm paul is dead" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=211" data-large-file="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=700" loading="lazy" class="alignright wp-image-41295" src="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=211" alt="" width="350" height="498" srcset="https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=211 211w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=350 350w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=700 700w, https://wearethemutants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/watm-paul-is-dead.jpg?w=105 105w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" />“Revolution 9” By The Beatles Apple, 1968 The only “song” that ever scared me was “Revolution 9” from the Beatles’ White Album. A few of us were over at a friend’s house in the very early ‘80s and, this being the very early ‘80s, his parents were nowhere to be found. Naturally, we ransacked the place, ate an entire box of Ding Dongs, and eventually descended upon the record collection. Boy of the house Tom (not his real name) pulled out all of the Beatles records and regaled us with a short but succinctly gruesome version of the “Paul is Dead” urban legend: here was Paul, he said, pointing to the cover of 1969’s Abbey Road. He’s the guy with the cigarette. Notice Paul’s feet? Well, he has no shoes, and John, the guy in all white, he’s leading them all to Paul’s grave. “The other Beatles killed Paul, man.” Now, I knew next to nothing about the Beatles at the time. I would have recognized a few songs from the radio, but, unlike Tom’s parents, mine were not ex-hippies—the closest thing we had to a Beatles record in my house was Chuck Mangione or Neil Diamond. To me, all of the Fab Four looked like fucking Charles Manson, and I knew they were British—a people whose accent and mannerisms I had early on pegged as supernaturally evil (possibly because of Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin). So when Tom showed us the White Album and told us about this “weird song” that proved Paul was murdered, I was not only fully ensconced in the rabbit hole—I was sure that I, like Mr. McCartney, would remain buried there forever. “You have to make the song go backwards,” Tom said. “Bullshit,” we said. “I’m serious,” Tom said. For all the kids out there, you have to understand that making a record play backwards was a manual process: you had to physically turn the record counterclockwise with your fingers, and you had to do it evenly and at a speed that came close to the 33 and 1/3 revolutions per minute a record spun when the machine was playing the right way. And we knew backwards was the wrong way, partly because of the increasingly disgruntled Evangelical Christian movement: these fine folks described rock ‘n’ roll as “a force accommodating demonic possession,” and claimed that subliminal “satanic messages” were deliberately being put in songs to control and pervert the minds of young people. Also, let’s not forget the still-lingering terrors of The Exorcist, where Linda Blair’s head spins around like a fucking record, and Father Karras figures out a demon is possessing poor Regan by recording her and playing the tape backwards. (I talk about the Beatles, Manson, The Exorcist, and how the Christian Right invented “satanic backmasking” here.) Basically, we were damned before the music even started. “Revolution 9” is an avant-garde concoction of sound effects, dialogue snippets, and tape loops that Lennon described as “painting in sound a picture of revolution.” What do you think it sounds like in reverse? Yes, drugged-out bloody murder. When the words “revolution nine” are played backwards, you’re supposed to hear the secret message: “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.” What we heard was something a little different, a little more sinister: “Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man. Let me on, dead man.” Death was a train, we deduced, and the garbled screeches and haunted marching band and manic laughter were soundtracking a descent into hell. Or better yet, the train was chugging upwards, forwards, back to the light. But who was talking? Paul? The other Beatles? Or was it us, from the future, a warning from beyond the grave? After that, Tom showed us the inner sleeve of the Eagles’ Hotel California, where, he said, you can see the devil himself peeking through a second story window. Fucking Tom, man. Miss him, miss him, miss him. —K.E. Roberts