they pleaded for tolerance, Boyd flipped a finger at everything

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Catholicism has the appeal it has for all who lack sexual gifts: it assures them that the thing they're not good at, sex, is wrong anyway. Soft cocked, hard hearted; broad-hipped, narrow-minded; cold assed, hot tempered ... The middle class are endlessly vulgar, with no redeeming obscenity. They represent themselves as above sex, but they are beneath it - too cold, too frightened, too ambitious, too conventional, too unattractive for sex. To this day they love lovely things. They are themselves lovely things, robots like the "straights," performing as programmed; they are the true undesirables, the undesiring …

abortion, hairdos, shoplifting, Catholicism, vomit, rats, reform school.

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Three days after September 11, 2001 the Ricki Lake show is concerned with a world crisis of another kind: white-trash teens whose mothers dress like sluts. A fat, toothless hag in a sheer black peignoir and shiny go-go boots bumps and grinds her way onto the stage. Her teenage children are explaining to Ricki that they want the kind of mom who bakes cookies, not the kind who works in a titty bar and hits on their school friends. Christopher complains that his mother is dating one of his classmates - "And one of the stupidest ones too! My mom looks like a hooker, Ricki! When she takes me to school, she flashes her tits at people as we drive past!" 

Mom grins and sticks out her tongue at the camera. "It's hot where we live! I'm just airin' 'em out!"

They launched into “Rockaway Beach,” and the audience went insane.

 

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Edie got involved in the underworld of LA’s strip joints, bootlegging, prostitution, and organized crime—and made it her life. She fled a couple bad marriages and worked her way east, waitressing in mob-run bars, and was a madam in a brothel outside Chicago. She even had a bar of her own in Tishamingo, Okalahoma, but couldn’t make a go of it. She headed to Baltimore in the late 50s because she heard “nothing but bars were there.” This was when the notorious “Block” of stripper bars, porno peep shows, and dirty book stores was packed with sailors, travelling salesmen, and curious diplomats from Washington, DC. The “Block” was anchored by the infamous stripper and mistress of Louisiana’s Governor Huey Long, and Edith worked at many of its clubs, as bar maid and a B-girl. A “B-girl” was a sexy chick who perched on a bar stool and convinced drunken rubes to buy her $50 bottles of champagne. The champagne was actually ginger ale, and the b-girl split the $50 with the house. For independent-minded gals in Baltimore, it was a respectable living.

Edith began to lose her looks, figure, and teeth.

If you watch TV all the time, you might as well be a heroin addict

pdf (280 pages / 3 MB), with thanks to the original sharer

I think something must really be the matter with anyone who would take a job as a censor. I mean, they’re not doing it for the money, they only get $4,000 a year and you can get that on welfare. So why do they do it if they don’t like it? They like it . . . they get their rocks off doing it. Some are not that hard to deal with, but the fact that they are censors makes me so galled that I even have to deal with them. After I work for a year to make a movie and then I have to go in and show it to someone who doesn’t have an eighth-grade education and have them say what can be shown at a university when they never set foot in one.

THE MAGAZINE THAT DOESN’T KNOW WHEN TO QUIT!

pdfs of all issues - 1GB! - here

Slash: Tell us about the clubs in N.Y.

Lux: CBGB's is really the only club.

Slash: What about the "downtown bands"?

Lux: My personal opinion is, I think it's a good thing to keep those damned art-rock bands separated some place where they can drop out of art school and work out their neuroses! They don't know anything about rock 'n' roll. You can't dance to their music and I couldn't care less about it. I'm not interested in music you can't dance to. Get them out of the bars and put them in a loft!

Ivy: There are a lot of bands trying to get in at CBGBs but the art bands are keeping them out, they're cluttering up the place. They should call their music what it is. They should play for the artists in Soho. 

Lux: This "new wave," I don't know what it is. When rock 'n' roll changed to rock, it became acceptable. When punk rock changed to new wave it became acceptable and all these muck people started moving in.  Robert Christgau from the Village Voice despises us, so he won't write anything about us except snotty remarks and put-downs. He does not understand a goddam thing on what this band is about in the least. A hundred people told me the show we did at CBGB's was the best they'd ever seen and the review in the Village Voice called it "calculated ... sterile ... boring ... "

The nuns in Sunday School were insane, devious, sick sadists.

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WATERS: I used to sit in church and imagine explosions, the roof falling in, every horrible thing that could happen ... everybody would say "ARGHH," running out like Gorgo stepping on things . You know? I would fantasize that because I was bored. And they made us stand up and take the Legion Of Decency Pledge that we wouldn't go see these condemned movies. That was the first thing that I refused to do. And that led me to everything. Because every week I looked at the Legion of Decency. I looked at every title - Love Is My Profession, The Bed, Mom and Dad, Naked Night - and I'd think, "God, this is so great."
IVES: Who came up with those lists?
WATERS: Who knows? It was put out every week. They still have it!
IVES: How did they know what was in the movies? Did they go and look at them?
WATERS : Yeah. The Legion of Decency screened them. In the fifties and sixties they ruined Baby Doll. That was the main movie they went after. They were like the rating board now. They still have it, but now "O" for offensive. Condemned is better. You hear that big iron brand hit metal with smoke sizzling out: "Condemned!" I always wanted to be condemned, and I don't think I ever was because they would never even bother submitting my films. I think Polyester was the first one that they ever submitted, and that got a B - morally offensive in part or all. I was really disappointed.

William Castle fan clubs were now forming throughout America

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Finally, two minutes before the end, the movie stopped. I held my breath as I heard my recorded voice make the announcement: 

This is the "Fright Break!" You hear that sound? The sound of a heartbeat! Is it beating faster than your heart? Or slower? This heart is going to beat for another sixty-five seconds to allow anyone to leave this theatre who is too frightened to see the end of the picture, and get your FULL ADMISSION REFUNDED. Ten seconds more and we go into the house. It's now or never! Five! Four! You're a brave audience! Two! One!

Then we really got going and began to heighten the fun and publicity with additional stunts. Yellow stripes appeared on sidewalks near the curb, leading past the theatres — and stenciled on the stripe: "Cowards, keep walking." Inside, large yellow footsteps were stenciled on the floor from the seats back to the box office—and over the box office there hung a sign: "Cowards' Corner." A blood-pressure outfit sat on a table nearby, attended by a nurse who offered free tests to cowards. A yellow light bathed Cowards' Corner, and a recorded message kept repeating, "These cowards are too frightened to see the end of Homicidal! Watch them shiver in the Cowards' Corner. Coward…coward…coward…" As a final touch, we required anyone demanding a refund to sign a yellow card which read "I am a bona fide coward."

it was criticized viciously as "sex-loaded" and "in bad taste"

pdf scan (204 pages / 150MB)

Realism only comes to the screen when the film jams in the projector and the image begins to bubble. An instinctual fear of the dark manifests when the projection light fails ... heightened by the little, furry things with long tails that scamper beneath the seats. The electrical nature of sex becomes apparent as the hair on your neck bristles when that pervert to your left makes knee contact. In these moments of truth, cinema reveals her face of realism. But, she is a twofaced creature, the other countenance being a rainbow palette of dyed coiffures, pancake make-up and pancake bloated guts crammed into costumes designed by cock -eyed midgets. Superstars who beat their children with wire coat hangers and then peddle soft drinks potent enough to rot their dentures. Aging women taking endless enemas so as not to wind up in horror films. Virile he-men doomed to an excruciating regimen of exercises to keep their sodomized posteriors picture-perfect. EST trained actresses showing the world what it is like to be liberated and free of cellulite. Alcoholic celebrities who barf up their past in book form so that all can marvel at the hideous mess that has been cleaned up by a Christian re-birth. Harpies with herpes who rip apart, in print, plump fornicators whose every performance they slander with typeset Ju-Ju curses. Innocent children who sing and dance down the yellow brick road to drug addiction and toxic box office poisoning. This is the other face of cinema …

We were ghosts then and we are ghosts now

pdf scan [dead link, check comments](141 pages/193MB)

It was so grassroots. People were doing their own fashions. There was a street aesthetic going on where flyers were made and just slapped on to things. We were pretty wild. I remember making flyers for shows and going around town and slapping them on anything. At that time it was verboten to be putting flyers on buildings. There was lots of people involved creatively. A lot of photographers, a lot of graphic artists. It was a great atmosphere. People putting out fanzines and such. There were a lot of local fanzines we would just generate.

"They're too drunk to see it, but they sure can smell it!"

 

pdf (252 pages/42MB), with thanks to the original sharer

 

I immediately lost interest in the schools curriculum and concentrated completely on every move of these cheap girls. I had never seen anything like it. Dressed in black, straight skirts, white "angel blouses," and pointy-toed "fruit boots," they hung in packs, combing their Debra Paget bangs and discoloring their lips with pimple medicine. They never did their homework and were proud of it. They were only "wasting time" until they could legally quit school, run away, and become full-time "skags". 

motor cycle mayhem, nude beach parties, lsd orgies

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Juvenile delinquency was not an exclusively male phenomenon and the 50s saw a wave of films that featured 'bad girls'. These depicted the usual mix of teen rebellion, lawlessness and sex, but with reckless females as the protagonists. From the 'shock by shock' confessions of the Sorority Girl to the 'jailbait' Runaway Daughters, the exploitation industry emphasized the perils of letting bad girls out on the loose. Hugo Haas (1901 - 1968) was the acknowledged master of bad 'bad girl' flicks. His sensationalist bad girl flicks followed the typical 'B' movie model. All his plots unfolded with the same general storyline: a lonely, middle-aged man is seduced by a sexy blonde with a bad reputation.

juvenile delinquents, dungaree dolls and roughneck carney workers

cbr (194MB) or pdf (20MB) scan, 178 pages

It was, after all, the look of the Halbstark, or "Half-Strong," as these types were also known, that attracted Weinberger's own attention in the first place; the way they adopted the kind of gear worn by American bikers and rockers of the conservative late 1950s and early 1960s and subjected it to wild improvisations. The Halbstark took keys big enough to open dungeon doors and made them into pendants. They suspended spent mortar shells around their necks on chains. They repurposed metal plates the size of hubcaps as belt buckles. They shredded their clothing, added fur trim, knotted kerchiefs at their knees, and scrawled the names of their idols down the legs of their trousers. Few have ever found more fashion inspiration in hardware stores than did the Halbstark. At any rate, they may have been the first to use nuts and bolts to fasten blue jeans.

"People see his movies and get the know-how, they get the ideas"

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The first stripper came out and she had tattoos, dirty bare feet and a mild paunch. As she did her act, she completely ignored the audience and instead carried on a loud conversation with her girlfriend who was waiting for her in the back of the theater. "Hey, Crystal," she yelled in a thick Baltimore accent into the darkness. "We goin' over to Sylvia's? Get some beer!" "Yeah," hollered Crystal, "I got it. Hurry up. We're supposed to be there." "All right, already. I'm not off yet. I can't leave 'til ten," she growled back, all the while gyrating obscenely for the pitifully sparse audience. Finally through, she made a quick exit and was replaced by another "talent" I soon realized was dead drunk. She could barely walk, would stand there confused, mumbling incoherently, struggling to unbutton her outfit. Finally nude, she staggered precariously close to the edge of the stage and apparently got the whirlies. The two old men up front hastily retreated to the safety of the third or fourth row. Suddenly, the manager stormed into the theater and started screaming, "Okay, Tammy, you're fired! I told you not to go on! Pack up and get out!" Tammy stood there confused, finally comprehended, gave him the finger and promptly fell off the stage, passed out cold. "Jesus Christ Almighty," yelled the manager as he rushed to the front of the theater and tried to drag out her dead weight. I joined the other few gentlemen who were running for the exits

Not only was I an alien to my parents, but I was an alien to my friends.

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One day I took off my jacket to try on a coat hanging on a rack and by the time I was finished, Edith had accidently sold my own jacket to a shopper. "Aw, hon, I'm seow sarry. I'll geev ya the moneee, I gaot fave dallers foor it," she was very apologetic, "I dint neew what ta cheearg foor it, dere weernt neo teag oon it or nuthin. I'm sarry, hon. Yeoo woont aunther ceoat, yeoo teak it, hon. Leok reound, deres seom perrty ceoats heer."

Oh, I was a wild child! I had the piano talkin' and walkin'

pdf scan (6 pages/8MB) from Playboy 1987, original version of the piece in this collection

When I was in Baltimore [at the Royal Theater], the girls would take off their –people didn't call them panties then, they called them drawers- and throw them on the stage. It was very terrible, but at the time, we didn't know better. All the girls would want to come in the room and you'd let them in and they'd never leave! I was shocked! Girl groupies, boy groupies, dog groupies, cat groupies! She would say, 'Give me a pillow' and I'd say, 'My God, ain't she going home?' And they'd stay for a week!"

 pdf (225 pages/1MB) with thanks to the original sharer

not exactly a great book (opens with quotes from Christgau & Marcus etc) but some good stuff

Huey “Piano” Smith hated Little Richard’s frenetic, one-key approach: “Almost everybody plays music — hit on the piano and go ‘BUNGA! BUNGA! BUNGA!’,” Smith grouses in the Specialty book. “I guess since they started callin’ that playin’ the piano, that’s when he became a pianist. But I played on the session before he became a piano player.”