It’s no secret that heavy metal music can be a bit morbid and macabre. Heavy metal artists have never been afraid to musically confront mortality, pain, suffering and other grim topics by creating ...

Go ahead, call us a bunch of culture-less, lily-white suburbanites with a partiality to flip-flops and right-wing politics. Those kind of labels never cease to amuse us. Because one thing that ...

The caravan of Klansmen crept to a stop around midnight in front of the home of David and Lizzie Milder on Nov. 17, 1932. Their quaint bungalow in the Carroll Park neighborhood of Long Beach had just ...

Every morning, Joe Gruppie makes himself a cup of coffee at his Buena Park home of five years before heading out to work. And when he opens the front door, he’s greeted by a drab wall with four ...

The story of the 1990 New Music Seminar brawl has been whispered about for decades but never fully told—until now. This excerpt comes from Ben Westhoff's upcoming book Original Gangstas: The Untold ...

To properly orient infamous talk-show host Wally George within the history of Orange County, it's best to paraphrase the introduction of a fellow pop-culture icon with a cult following. So, with ...

Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel. Photo by Federico Medina. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who later ran “Rainbow ...

People have compiled histories of baseball in Orange County, of our long-gone walnut growers, of films shot here before the advent of talking movies. Chronicles about the Huntington Beach Fourth of ...

There's lots of bizarre lore surrounding the legend of Walt Disney. Just off the top of our heads, we've heard he's a Communist (despite him being a founding member of the anti-communist Motion ...

The gleaming black Cadillac Escalade trembles at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Cerritos Avenue in Stanton. Four young Mexican men inside, all buzz cuts and oversized white T-shirts and ...

As an 11-year-old kid in the summer of 1981, life was, by all discernible metrics, pretty cool. Even in the nascent months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, very little seemed of consequence—or even ...

Standing on what was a quiet orange grove more than half a century ago is a small faux grass hut. A diverse crowd gathers outside: tourists wearing mouse ears, children savoring the sweet tang of a ...