So They Were Stars: The Razzle Dazzle Rockin’ Reign of the Hudson Brothers

By Cait Brennan

The Bible says music tore down the mighty walls of Jericho. In the 1960s and ’70s, rock and roll did the same for a generation of girls and young women. The rise of pop culture brought women and girls an unprecedented level of freedom, power, and influence. Perhaps it can’t quite be called “feminist,” and it may seem like a small thing, but before the mid-’60s, before the Beatles and Monkees, who could have imagined whole magazines devoted to pin-up boys?
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The Explorers Club, The Carolinian Suite EP

By Cait Brennan

The Grand Hotel is still under construction . . . but your complimentary suite is ready.

It’s been three years since Charleston, South Carolina’s pop revivalists The Explorers Club released Freedom Wind, a peach of a debut record that sounded for all the world like a Great Lost Beach Boys masterpiece. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that album’s “Last Kiss”—speeding down the 101 through Hollywood, right as the Capitol Records tower came into full view, all sunshine and blue skies and ocean breezes. The perfect soundtrack to a perfect day. Somewhere, Brian Wilson was smiling.
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Robyn Hitchcock, Chronolology

By Cait Brennan

Robyn Hitchcock has spent most of the past 40 years creating some of the most inventive, funny, poignant, and pointed songs of our time. From the “psychedelic punk” of his work with the Soft Boys to his clever, lyrical solo albums to the neo-garage Venus 3, few artists have been harder to pigeonhole. He’s produced surreal classics like “The Man With the Lightbulb Head,” “Sometimes I Wish I Was A Pretty Girl,” and “Do Policemen Sing?” as well as spare, melancholy acoustic gems like “I Used To Say I Love You” and “I Feel Beautiful”.

Two recent Yep Roc box sets—I Wanna Go Backwards and Luminous Groove—chronicled his best-loved solo albums and rewarded fans with lavish rarities. But for those new to his work, finding an “easy in” to Hitchcock’s formidable catalog might seem daunting.

Even listing it is daunting: depending on what you count and how you count it, Hitchcock’s body of work includes at least seven albums and EPs with the Soft Boys, 18 “solo” albums (including those with the Egyptians and Venus 3), about 20 “rarities” and live albums, three very incomplete best-of’s, a Jonathan Demme-directed concert film, and countless one-off appearances—all on a wide variety of US and UK labels, and until recently, much of it out of print. Newcomers could be forgiven for not knowing where to start.
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Crypts And Blood: A Creepy Crawl Through The History Of Horror Hosts

By Cait Brennan

“There’s nothing on,” you say. A strangely common complaint in an era with hundreds, if not thousands, of 24-hour-a-day channels. Once upon a time, there was literally nothing on, because the two or three local stations your town was lucky to have would shut their transmitters off at 11 p.m. Stations invented every possible kind of stunt (up to and including running the weatherman’s home movies) to fill airtime, but eventually the exhausted staff would finish the late local news, have a priest give a drunken invocation, run the national anthem, and pull the damn plug.

But as the signals died, there through the flickering static, in the dark dead of night, one station would keep its dim light on, transmitting faded images of 1930s ghouls into your darkened living room. Then, out of the black, when it all started getting just a little too real, some character covered in blood cut their way into the movie and cracked wise. You’ve just met your horror host, and whether your movie was terrifying or just terrifyingly awful, spooky late nights never had a better friend.
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A Day On The Tube: 35 Clown-Hating, Sponsor-Trashing, Kid-Riot Years With Wallace And Ladmo

By Cait Brennan

From left to right:
Wallace, Gerald (the “spoiled rich kid”), and Ladmo

In the spring of 2011, PBS’s acclaimed series Pioneers Of Television presented a special on the lost world of locally-produced kids’ TV shows. The names and faces were familiar, giants like Fred Rogers, Willard Scott as Bozo, Romper Room, Bill Cosby, Jim Henson. And among them—taking up almost half of the hour-long show—were names unfamiliar to most of the nationwide audience, but known and beloved in the Southwest for generations: The stars of the subversive, satirical sketch-and-cartoon show Wallace and Ladmo. On the air five days a week for a staggering 35 years, the show broke every rule in the kids’ TV book, and earned a legion of fanatical fans.
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Fab Films, Terrible TV: When “Based On The Movie” Goes Wrong

By Cait Brennan

Nothing succeeds like success, especially in Hollywood, California, USA. The vast echo chamber that is the Hollywood establishment loves nothing more than to recycle some easily packaged, cloyingly familiar property into remakes, reboots, reimaginings, musicals, ancillary merchandise, and Spider-Man Ham Sandwiches. Although the practice has faded in recent years, for much of TV’s life, enterprising producers have been adapting hit films into television shows—shows that were often less than successful. Here’s a small sampling of the worst film-to-TV adaptations.
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A Manufactured Image With No Philosophies: The Rock Band Sitcom

By Cait Brennan

It’s no coincidence that television and rock and roll came of age together. Starting in the American ’50s, a demographic tsunami of young people eager to embrace new technologies and new sounds launched one hell of a cultural transformation. Postwar advances in affordable electronics put television’s sitcoms in every home. Cultural cross-pollination put rock and roll records into the hands of eager teen listeners. When that revolutionary new sound met that unprecedented distribution medium, it’s only natural that those two great tastes ended up tasting great together.
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Doctor Who‘s Elisabeth Sladen: An Appreciation

By Cait Brennan

As Doctor Who fans prepared to celebrate the launch of its most anticipated series yet, the show lost one of its most enduring stars. Elisabeth Sladen, who portrayed Sarah Jane Smith, died April 19, leaving behind generations of fans and a legacy as one of the most popular characters in science fiction history.
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Suzi Quatro: Like A Lightning Flash

By Cait Brennan

It’s hard to imagine how unwelcome women were in the rock music world of the 1960s. While the titans of what we now call “classic rock” were singing about “social justice” and standing up to The Man, the man they were talking about was definitely not the one in the mirror. Most rock stars used and abused women in ways even their fathers and grandfathers would have found offensive, and the notion that women could rock—or should even be allowed to try—was as foreign to the classic rock era as the idea of an openly gay rock star. (Sorry, Jobriath.)
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The Cape: Learnin’ The Tropes

By Cait Brennan

Television has changed mightily since 2004, when a little show called Lost took to the airwaves and left behind a trail of time-traveling, Old Testament, daddy-issue, polar bear carnage. One after another, the networks have pelted home viewers with high-concept sci-fi and fantasy adventures, ranging from engaging (the unjustly canceled Invasion) to laughable (really? a reboot of V?) to just plain stultifying (The Event).

The Cape and Orwell

None of these genre efforts better typified pop culture’s creepy-uncle embrace of comic book culture than Heroes. Engaging and original in its first season, Heroes took a great cast of characters and ran them around in angel-dust spaghetti-squash circles for its last three years, finally collapsing under the weight of a mythos so impenetrable it made The X-Files look like Three’s Company. Strange and even brave, then, that NBC greenlit another big budget superhero show so soon after Heroes‘ implosion. It’s a good thing they did, because The Cape is a lot of fun—a show that both embraces and spoofs comic book tropes, with a rogue’s gallery of great characters that make it all worthwhile.
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