What’s the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose,
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your mind…
-Frank Zappa and the Mothers of
Invention
I was not yet in High School in the
summer of 1968. It was one year after the so-called “Summer of Love”, but my
friends and I were largely oblivious to such social events. Instead, we were
busy enjoying the last of the innocent fun that we sensed to be fast slipping
through our young, collective fingers. We were long past the awkward days of puberty,
but were just on the cusp of that Big Scary and Exciting Thing called
Adulthood. This feeling, of course, made “adult stuff” all the more exciting.
We still reveled in “spazzing around” -- a term we used often that would
disappear from the lexicon of a bygone age and has since been long locked up in
the hallowed Vaults of the Politically Correct – and were content in our
never-ending quest for cheap fun and a good laugh.
The flower children were in full bloom
and their music was as heavily sweet and seductive as the herby scent of
patchouli. We seemed to be a little more interested in the kooky stuff,
however. Dr. Demento would soon be in full tilt and busy unearthing crazy tunes
from the past (once you’ve heard it, who can forget Benny Bell’s “Shaving Cream”?),
DJ Nevada Smith would be playing “Boobs A Lot” by the Holy Modal Rounders from
her call letters KPPC in Pasadena, CA, and Cheech and Chong would be supplying
their own unique brand of stoned humor, albeit sans music. Who needed music;
anyway, when you were so busy laughing?
All these zany shenanigans had their
roots and could be traced back to one seminal, genius loci . . . Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.
I was first asked if I was “hung up” and
introduced to Suzy Creamcheese by way of my cousin while on vacation in the
summer of ’66, not long after the double LP FREAK OUT, by a crazy guy by the
name of Frank Zappa, had been released. It was 60 minutes of pure mind warp
mixed with ‘50s Rock ‘n Roll. It was strange, but I loved it!
Followed by album titles such as WE’RE
ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY, HOT RATS, and LUMPY GRAVY, I soon learned about such
imperatives as mud sharks, the perils of eating yellow snow, and what the
ugliest part of my body was (no, you’re wrong, ‘Bro . . . it’s your mind).
One of these records (and I need to remind
you that “records” is what we called ‘em – and still do) stood out from the
rest (if that was possible!) with the stark and shocking title of WEASLES
RIPPED MY FLESH! Man, we cracked up over that one, I tell ya. However, it
wasn’t until many years later that I learned the title had originated from an
even more bizarre source – a men’s magazine!
I won’t fill space here by listing the
myriad and sundry terms that are used for “these types of magazines.” Suffice
it to say that the term “men’s adventure magazine” for me does well in
capturing the essence of this one-time, extremely popular form of men’s
entertainment.
Much like their ink-relative, the “pulp
magazine”, titles like STAG, BLUEBOOK, MAN’S WORLD, SOUTH SEA STORIES, and
EXOTIC ADVENTURES were printed every month on cheap paper and delivered by the
truckload to newsstands, drugstores, and liquor stores, for 20 years. While
generally not relegated to being held “under the counter” like the girlie mags,
they were many times tucked underneath the top rack of the magazine stand. At
the Anchor Liquor store where my neighbor (the one who introduced me to monster
magazines) bought his FAMOUS MONSTERS, MAD MONSTERS, and
Tarzan paperbacks, they were sold this way.
These ‘zines were read by thousands of
men (and I’m sure some – but not very many – women, too), then cast off into
the trash . . . which is where a lot of people (mostly wives, I’d surmise)
thought they ought to have gone in the first place. It is estimated that about
only 1% of men’s adventure magazines, from the 50s through the 70s, remain.
The covers, again much like the earlier
pulps, were painted in the bold, lurid colors of their predecessors, and
depicted such titillating tableaux as G.I.’s in do-or-die action, headhunters
chasing down their next victim, and half-naked girls being tortured by crazed
Nazi scientists.
A common theme used by many titles – was
that of a man, a woman, or both – being menaced by such unsavory things as
river monsters, flying reptiles, blood-thirsty amphibians, and a host of other
nasty critters, all hatched by Mother Nature, all hungry for human flesh . . .
and, yes, all purported to be true! These cover images became widely available
during the advent of the Internet. Web sites began to pop up that featured
cover scans and some interiors (rarely the entire article or issue). One of
these images that I came across stopped me in my tracks when I saw it; here was
a man, waist deep in water, warding off a slew of pissed off-looking furry
rodents. The title on the bottom right of the cover read: “Weasels Ripped My
Flesh!”
WEASELS
RIPPED MY FLESH: Two-Fisted Stories from Men’s Adventure Magazines of the
1950s, ‘60s, & ‘70s
Edited by Robert Deis, with Josh Alan
Friedman & Wyatt Doyle
New Texture, 2012
416 pg.
Trade Paperback, $19.95
Now, thanks to the editors of the brand
new publication of the book from New Texture, WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH:
TWO-FISTED STORIES FROM MEN’S ADVENTURE MAGAZINES OF THE 1950s, ‘60s, &
70s, I was finally able to read the story after all these years. My
anticipation was boundless, of course, as this tale, first appearing in the September 1956 issue of MAN'S LIFE, has come to be adopted by
many as the cornerstone of the cycle of themes and ideas that run through the
heart and soul of these obscure gems.
Messrs. Robert Deis, Josh Alan Friedman,
and Wyatt Doyle have managed to collect a group of stories and articles that
fairly epitomize the typical content of these magazines.
The story itself turns out to be a
manic, nerve-wracking journey into one man’s nightmare, as the reader is
immediately thrown into the middle of a tale about a horde of nocturnal weasels
bent on killing, maiming, or otherwise destroying the poor narrator’s entire
stock of breeding ducks (!). Told in the first person, he describes his
fruitless attempts at fending off wave after wave of the horde, and is torn to
shreds in the process. His “duck house” is eventually destroyed and our hapless
victim must suffer the additional indignity of plastic surgery to reconstruct his
ripped up face to the point of it being turned into an entirely different
visage.
Talk about a horror story! This is
low-brow, flash fiction at its fiercest, and the collection here is a
satisfying cross-section of the pleasantly politically incorrect, and of the
types of stories and articles that a reader back in the day would likely come
across on any given month in any given title.
Make no mistake, any resemblance to high
art here is purely unintentional, if indeed, any exists at all. More
interesting is the fact that an alarming number of noted and popular authors had
their literary teeth cut in the blood and sweat-soaked pages of the men’s
adventure magazines. Hey, you gotta make a living, right? Well, apparently
people like Lawrence Block, Mario Puzo, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Silverberg
did, as all of them contributed at one time or other to ‘zines with titles like
MALE, FOR MEN ONLY, and PERIL.
Still, the stories and articles found in
this generous serving all have a brusque sort of charm and I found myself reading
from one to the next with effortless ease. They may be relegated to the legacy
of trashy pulp pabulum, but they are a rare sort of treat, nonetheless – the
kind that you really shouldn’t eat, but enjoy anyway. I will be anxiously waiting
for the second volume.
Here is the press release from New Texture:
Below are examples of just some of the
predicaments of man vs. beast depicted on the cover of men’s adventure
magazines:
If you're hungry for still more men's adventure mania, check out the "Men's Adventure Mags" blog. Just follow link found towards the bottom of the sidebar of this post.
Great post which really got me interested in reading this book!
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