Trash music—most famously propagated by the Cramps—and trash film—most famously propagated by Something Weird Video—all have their cult followings, but writer and artist Tom Brinkmann has dedicated his recent career to a neglected part of the wonderful world of trash culture. In fact, it’s something he actually found in the trash, generally deposited by guys whose sleaze stash just got spotted by the wife, he says. He specializes in what his two books call “Bad Mags”—fly-by-night print publications that put in (cheap!) black-and-white that same freaky exploito spirit captured on so many garage rock 45s and in so many no-budget tax-dodge sci-fi films. His categories speak for themselves: Occult Sex, Manson, Outlaw Bikers, Punks, UFOs and Strange Phenomena and more. Actually, they shriek for themselves—with lurid blown-out covers touting stories like DAVID BOWIE: I WAS A UFO PRISONER! and DOMINANT FEMALES OF THE WORLD.
And it’s quite a world—a place where Ed Wood, Frank Zappa, Stiv Bators and Charles Manson are just pages apart, possibly separated only by the cash-in articles and anonymous short stories the adult magazines were required by law to insert. (So they wouldn’t be legally classified as porn.) Here are bikers and hippies and UFO abductees all hanging out together— possibly topless, depending on the publication. The man at the dark heart of it all was the man who published the first gory true-crime mags Brinkmann bought as a child—Myron Fass, Brinkmann’s “Demon God of Pulp,” an everywhere-at-once wildman who never let a tasteless alliterative headline escape. His publications aimed lowest and lasted longest, finally fading in the ’80s as the sleaze world shifted from low-budget print to low-budget video. He of course gets a special part of the history all to himself.
Besides his two volumes of Bad Mags, Brinkmann also publishes On The Rack—an occasional series focusing on a subsect of these sorts of sensational publications, the first on Chicago tabloids and the second and newest issue on 9/11 magazines and Brinkmann’s experience on 9/11 in NYC. And he’s already started writing Bad Mags Extra, including publications he’s only just discovered. He talks now about the weird world of subterranean print.
