There’s Robert Johnson the country blues legend and Robert Johnson the man and somewhere in the mix is the devil. With the help of blues researchers and latter-...
Derek Bailey (1930-2005) was a successful guitarist playing pop music in dance halls and jazz in nightclubs in England when he had his ‘road to Damascus’ collis...
On January 15 1947, the body of a murder victim was found in a weedy, vacant lot in Los Angeles—the severed body of a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Shor...
A former English teacher and mail-order salesman from Detroit named Herschell Gordon Lewis saw an exploitable niche in the film industry and, starting in 1963, ...
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and George Barris created a new visual language that captured the unbridled spirit of Southern California starting in the late 1950s. In pri...
Slash, the indispensable fanzine that charted the Los Angeles punk scene (1977-80), gave birth to a record label that pushed the punk boundaries well into the 1...
Jack Black was a burglar, rambler, jailbird and writer whose lone published memoir, You Can’t Win (1926), was an important early influence on William S. Burroug...
The real-life Edward D. Wood, Jr. was far more interesting than the character depicted by Johnny Depp in the 1994 Tim Burton campy Ed Wood. Yes, Wood was a seri...
As we enter a new Roaring Twenties, let’s recall two renegade art dealers who kickstarted modern art back in the Swinging Sixties: Walter Hopps and Irving Blum ...
Often overlooked by punk history’s gatekeepers, Lisa Fancher’s venerable Frontier Records label is celebrating 40 years of important punk rock releases. Without...
Eric Clapton, rightfully, revered the mysterious Southern bluesman Robert Johnson and, because of that, some dubbed him the father of rock 'n' roll. Anthony Mos...
Love were poised to be bigger than their Elektra label mates—and friendly Sunset Strip rivals—the Doors, but trouble and darkness followed them by the end of th...
Fifty years ago, an ex-con, wannabe rock star named Charles Manson channeled all the paranoia, fear and hatred hovering around Los Angeles into a murder spree t...
Tony Mostrom is a Los Angeles native and a former columnist for the L.A. Times, where he wrote about historic criminals, musicians and artists. His musical tastes run toward atonalism. Currently he writes book reviews and essays for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
