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The year was 1984.  The horror genre was riding high in the midst of its Fangoria era but it needed something new. The glut of slasher films had played itself out creatively and teens, the major consumers of […]

July 25th saw the passing of John Saxon. He leaves
behind an amazing career as an actor that covers everything from major studio
work to leads in foreign films (particularly Italian ones) as well as decades
of […]

2112 is considered the album that established Rush but it didn’t do the job alone. They were not a singles band so they couldn’t count on radio to carry them up the charts. Instead, they found success the way a […]

Once the biker movie became a standard of the film
business in the late ’60s, enterprising filmmakers at all levels of the
business put everything on a bike to see what would sell: experiments included
films […]

The
Readthru is designed to take you through the issue run of a comic book or
magazine. It will be an ongoing series of capsule review guides to famous
titles of yesteryear.

Of all horror comic books, the […]

Transport your mind back to the distant era called
“the mid-’80s.” The VHS revolution was in full force in that glorious
time before Blockbuster took its ultimately fatal stranglehold around the video
rental […]

Caress Of Steel’s blend of prog rock and hard rock was an adventurous step forward for Rush but the muted reception it got almost killed the young band, prompting ominous requests from the label for a return to […]

As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, the writing was on the
wall for drive-in filmmakers. People were starting to watch movies at home via
VCRs and cable, major studios were co-opting the formulas that […]

Backbeat Books has a noteworthy non-fiction franchise in
its “FAQ” series, a string of books that covers all manner of pop
culture topics like films, filmmakers, t.v. shows and especially bands and
singers. These […]

One of the coolest and most progressive aspects of
International-Independent Pictures was their willingness to work with all sorts
of talent.  Anyone from a novice actor to
a veteran considered “over the hill” […]

When album number three arrived, Rush were primed to
take the next step forward in their career: they were a successful touring act
in Canada and the U.S. and they were getting played on the radio. With Caress Of […]

The dawn of the ’70s brought a new permissiveness to
American cinema, one aided and abetted by the development of a ratings code
that allowed filmmakers to bring racier material into their productions without
the […]

You could say author and music critic Martin Popoff has
Rush in the blood.  As a Canadian teen,
he grew up listening to their music and playing it in garage bands.  Once he became a music specialist writer, h […]

Horror films were always a reliable staple of drive-ins
so it was inevitable that the prolific and money-conscious Al Adamson would
make a few, often with business partner and vintage film enthusiast Sam […]

What a difference a drummer change can make. Changing a
band’s percussionist often reshapes their sound but when Rush brought in Neil
Peart to replace John Rutsey, it altered more than the band’s groove. […]

Al Adamson’s prime period as a director of drive-in
films was that hothouse period where the ’60s gave way to the ’70s. The hippie
dream was dead, America was embroiled in the Vietnam War and the Cold War
echoed […]

The ’70s was arguably THE era of the live album,
producing an array of classics, often in double-album form, that allowed
punters to have their own concert experience on the home stereo. Wishbone Ash
entered the […]

The event of the summer for exploitation film collectors
is Al Adamson: The Masterpiece
Collection, a jaw-dropping 14-disc set from Severin Films that includes a
whopping 32 films. Making one’s way through such a […]

This is Rush… but not the way you know it. There are
no tricky time signatures, brainy lyrics, keyboard embellishments, side-length
epics or mathematically complex Neil Peart drum fills to be found here. […]

“A
Hard Day’s Night meets Star Wars”: this is how Bill Aucoin,
manager of Kiss, pitched the t.v. film Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park to
the band. What they ended up with made no one happy: the band hated it, […]