Trying to explain what música ranchera is to non-Mexicans reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to–take your pick–Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington, when someone asked what jazz is. Ranchera ...

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 ...

Rodney Alcala is a man stuck in a time warp, his flowing silver hair, granny glasses, beige blazer and jeans reminiscent of a creative-writing professor circa 1980, the year he began life behind bars.

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 ...

As he walked briskly along a downtown Santa Ana sidewalk for our first meeting on a toasty, cloudless February 2014 afternoon, criminal defense attorney Scott Sanders’ brain generated waves of ...

Jeff Hakman and Bob McKnight were worried—they couldn’t get the trunks quite right. For weeks during the latter half of 1976, the twentysomethings had fumbled with sewing machines in a Spartan shed ...

One of the best parts about buying a physical album (if you still do that sort of thing) is the album cover art. And if you're a metalhead or crusty punker, the more brutal and bloody it is, the ...

Bassist, composer and arranger Jack Prather's tribute band made jazz history come alive, whether he was touting obvious choices like Count Basie or less familiar giants like Coleman Hawkins. His ...

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 ...

15-year-old high school sophomore and how he has missed her growing up and becoming a mother.” Before denying her parole, the OCDA continued, the board “took into consideration the facts of the case, ...

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 ...

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 ...