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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Using taxpayer funds, government officials in Orange County have spent the last 16 years arguing the most absurd legal proposition in the entire nation: How could social workers have known it was ...

Orange County's contribution to the development of Mexican food in the United States is deceptive. We are the longtime home to Taco Bell, Del Taco and El Torito—but those iconic companies started in ...