"At a time when the pop charts were dominated by cloying songs such as 'A Horse with No Name' and 'Joy to the World' and the playlists of burgeoning FM radio stations were heavy on..."

"... James Taylor; Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the Eagles; Creem respectfully ceded coverage of those artists to Rolling Stone. It championed, instead, proto-punk bands such as the Stooges, the MC5, ? and the Mysterians, and Count Five; mavericks such as Lou Reed, Dr. John, Marc Bolan, and George Clinton; and nascent heavy-metal acts, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper. 'Unlike Rolling Stone, which is a bastion of San Francisco counter-culture "rock-as-art" orthodoxy, Creem is committed to a Pop aesthetic,' Ellen Willis wrote in The New Yorker. 'It speaks to fans who consciously value rock as an expression of urban teen-age culture.' The original staffers... saw the magazine as a cross between Mad, the satirical comic book, and Esquire circa the height of New Journalism....  Try as he might, [publisher Barry] Kramer never succeeded in turning Creem into the sort of cash-cow life-style magazine that Rolling Stone became. Its steadiest advertisers included A-200 Pyrinate Liquid ('one shampoo kills lice and nits'), Boone’s Farm wine, and mail-order head shops that hawked pipes, personalized roach clips, and something called the 'grass mask.' ('Shit, what a hit!')"

From "The Overlooked Influence of Creem Magazine/A new documentary makes the case for America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine'" (The New Yorker).

ADDED: I tried to find an image for that item called the "grass mask." First, I turned up a lot of random junk that mostly gave me additional ideas about what it could be. I just wanted an old 70s ad. Then I put "grass mask" and "shit, what a hit" in quotes and that narrowed the hell out of the results to the point where I got to this PDF of a 1974 issue of an alternative newspaper called The Living Daylights....



There are no ads, so it's just somewhere in all that writing. If you readers would divide up the work, it's 28 pages, and maybe 28 of you could each read a page. If you find "grass mask"/"shit, what a hit," please write out the whole sentence and tell us the page number. Thanks! Lately, I've been nostalgic for the 1970s. Something about New York City going to hell has got me thinking about how the hell that was NYC in the 70s (when I lived there) was so much better than the fresh hell that is New York City today. But in any case, The Living Daylights seems to be from Australia. I've got no nostalgia about Australia. What does "the living daylights" refer to anyway?

The living daylights is an archaic idiom in English believed to be early 18th century slang for somebody's eyes that subsequently figuratively referred to all vital senses. The earliest recorded reference to this term comes from the 1752 novel Amelia by Henry Fielding, in which a character states his readiness to physically assault a particular woman: "If the lady says another such words to me ... I will darken her daylights." The idiom is now generally used only as part of a wider expression to express intensity in a negative manner, most commonly in the form "to scare the living daylights out of someone" or "to beat the living daylights out of someone."

IN THE COMMENTS: Good Cartoon Man said...

Page 24: Then from the kitsch folk at Interplanetary in California comes the super smoking electric pipe which, according to Interplanetary is “ the ultimate in smoking simplicity” , brought to you by none other than the notorious “ Modern Technology” . The electric pipe operates on two batteries — a small electric pump produces a steady flow of dope smoke when the button is held down. What to do if you’re stuck with a bundle of army surplus gas masks? Simple, put Free Enterprise to work and market them as grass masks — “ Shit, what a hit” .