Star Magazine

I've decided to ring in the 2011 New Year with my own misguided version of public service: an online archive of a scandalous and short-lived 70's teen magazine! The first issue of Star hit the stands in February 1973. With its over-the-top advice and irreverent coverage of LA's teenage groupie scene, it wasn't long before Petersen Publishing was feeling the heat from "concerned citizens". Five issues and five months later, publication ceased. A sixth issue was planned but never printed. Such controversy along with coverage of "new breed" Sunset Strip groupies (Shray Mecham, Sable Starr, Lori Lightning, Queenie Glam) and glam venues like Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco cemented the mag's later cult status among fans and collectors.

Artists reinterpret album covers

My favorite: [link]

Wow, Star Magazine is the super foxiest '73 artifact I've ever seen.

Love the emphasis on girl fights and the "going steady trap." Couldn't be further from the conventional wisdom in most places.

I really liked the cartoonist they used too, Petagno.

The cartoons are pretty awesome.

With all the comic book archiving/reprinting going on, I wish that more of the underground stuff was in print.

I'm very happy to have about 8 issues of the original Punk.

But it would be very fun to have a collection of something like New York Rocker.

I was reading Creem for years before I even really owned records.

I am not a Korn fan, but my younger brother got me into a song they did with The Cure on MTV Unplugged. It's a Korn song and a Cure song played together: "Make Me Bad / In Between Days".

Ooh, yeah. I love Korn, and the Unplugged songs are surprisingly good. "Blind" came up on my Pandora, and I got hooked on it so much I checked out some of my other favorites.

Band Names of the Year, 2010.

Those are some crazy band names, but Apoptygma Berzerk has been around for a long time.

Oh, man, if I lived anywhere near L.A. I'd be all over this: Ann Magnuson Bows Before the Bowie

I've go World Cafe on the radio: they played new REM which sounds all anthemy and now they're playing some new band which sounds like something from Reckoning.

ETA: It was new Decembrists. Now they're playing some old REM "Talk about the Passion."

If it was The Decemberists' "Down By the Water," it's got such a Springsteen feel to me at the start.

Newsflash: Rock and Roll is dead.