“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.
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Possessed’
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…
Alien Renaissance: An Interview with Illustrator Bob Fowke
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…
Truckin’ for Souls: Explo ’72 and the Jesus Revolution
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…
“No Glue or Glass Bottles”: The Gateshead Music Collective
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…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Norliss Tapes’
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…
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…
RAD, MAD & BAD: The Analog Rebellion of Craig Baldwin and Other Cinema
Under the stewardship of underground filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin, Other Cinema stands as the vanguard of Baldwin’s personal artistic conviction—what he calls “cinema povera”…
“Things Can’t Get Any Worse, They Got to Get Better”: Paul Schrader’s ‘Light of Day’
All of the characters in Paul Schrader’s Light of Day (1987) are looking for a way out. They’re stuck in menial nine to five jobs, on the line in factories and behind candy-colored checkout stands in supermarkets…
On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records
Having grown up in the 1970s, an era when record shops were a fixture in communities and often served as neighborhood social centers, I became obsessed with a small store located on 146th and Broadway…
We Are the Mutants 