Mike Marino
Mike Marino has delivered a one-two punch of a book that goes under the V-8 hood of the American car culture. It’s style is fast paced, rapid fire and colorful, and examines the Chrome-magnon car and pop culture of America with a sense of humor, history, and a dose of horsepower haiku.
THE ROADHEAD CHRONICLES separates the world of the Roadhead into three distinct sections. You’ll jump into the backseat world of Saturday night drive-in movies, V-8’s and Vietnam, fuzzy dice, carhops, jukeboxes, and the rock ‘n roll rebel without a cause switchblade, black leather jacket lifestyle of the blue suede cruise of the 50’s and 60’s, not to mention the muscle-flexing Motor City of the ‘70s where GTO’s ruled the roads!
THE ROADHEAD CHRONICLES will also gas up and kick asphalt through the world of Route 66, the kitsch culture of roadside nostalgia, neon motels, cafes, gas stations and diners, along with an offbeat look at Mystery Spots, Rock City and other asphaltian oddities that have become destinations and road culture icons in and of themselves.
THE ROADHEAD CHRONICLES wraps up with previously published articles of Mike’s Roadhead Columns that explore the city where the “beat” goes on in Jack Kerouac’s North Beach, Jerry Garcia’s spare change Haight Ashbury, all the way to Cadillac Ranch and the famous Ken Kesey bus tour of America in the ‘60s. So buckle up, lock and load, and get ready to KICK ASPHALT as you fire up the engine and hit the highway in...THE ROADHEAD CHRONICLES!!
Mike Marino’s writing style has been described as “wickedly wonderful” and “delightfully weird.” His writing voice is a verbal machete cutting a pathway through the literary landscape to a place where pop culture and chrome meet asphalt and art!
In addition to Mike’s freelance writing, he’s also a photographer, playwright, and founder of the former Experimental Theater Workshop in Detroit, Michigan, and hosted “The Blue Suede Cruise” oldies radio show in San Francisco. Raised in the Motor City, Mike has also lived in a tree house in Hawaii, the Haight Ashbury district, and the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. He enjoys a good pair of fuzzy dice, Hawaiian shirts, and a cold Corona on Saturday nights.
Where Cool Was Born
No one saw it coming. No one heard it coming. No one could utter a sound until it was too late.
The horrific flash of light and blast of heat ate them alive, as flesh evaporated, making the dead disappear in a vaporized instant, while the living stumbled numbly through the rubble that was once their city, their life, their future. They walked slowly now, quietly, a ghost population of broken spirits peering out from empty, hollow, irradiated eye sockets, and watched in pure disbelief as the debris-filled cloud mushroomed and rose high above the gray landscape, on celestial wings of pure, mad, and atomic science; Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 1945. The atomic jaws of a hungry hell had opened wide and swallowed them whole.
Nuclear nightfall settled over the Land of The Rising Sun. Fascism fell on it’s narcissistic, Aryan face, as underground bunker bullets took out the addled Adolph, and the swastika exploded and landed in a heap of rubble onto the streets below. Germany had been delivered an Allied goosestep to the groin and Mussolini was turned into unrecognizable hamburger, as he hung upside down on a pole, swinging in the Italian breeze. The war to end all wars had come to an abrupt end in a nuclear blast of energy that would usher in a new age; a positively political post-war era that would see the downfall of old enemies and witness the rise of new ones.
The gates of the Buchenwald’s were now open, but the prison gates of the new Soviet state were beginning to close tight in secret Siberia. Behind the concrete veil of an Iron Curtain, and across the watery expanse of the Churchillian Atlantic Ocean, the former colonies were giving hard birth to a new American empire of temporary peace and prosperity. It would be a time bomb of right/left politics and youthful rebellion in music, movies, and attitude.
It was an age of fins and chrome, drive-in movies and drive-in restaurants; it was the birth of a generation that would revel in a neon nighttime world, where pop culture and chrome would meet asphalt and art. It was the birth of the Roadhead Generation.
1946: Johnny came marching home and Rosie the Riveter was only too happy to see him. He put down his rifle and she laid her tool belt on the floor, and the baby boom was on. It was time to rock, roll, and rule. It was an age of atomic energy, burgeoning jet propulsion technology, rocket science, and the good, old fashioned, asphalt blood-sport of drag racing, where nukes and nitro fired our fertile imaginations— the result was a greased-up and gassed-up semi-fabulous Fifties.
The decade was locked, loaded, and ready to fire a warning shot over society’s head. That shot, fired point blank, would find it’s mark, and kick some serious asphalt with mechanized machismo, with a show of motor, muscle, and heavy-metal. St. Georges’ in rolled-up tee-shirts, fighting, slaying, polishing, loving, and worshipping, all at the same time, for God’s sake, Detroit’s finely tuned, fire-breathing dragons that rolled off the assembly lines 24 hours a day, non-stop.
Barking beast machines of Great Lakes steel, fully loaded with crowns of chrome, enough horsepower to light up the Bikini Atoll, and those fins—those big, wonderful magnificent fins. It was sex and steel, steel and sex. Fin-to-ground ratio’s became reason for asphalt envy, and damned if it wasn’t engine eroticism at first sight.
The radio’s played loudly, frozen dials set to 10 grease ball decibels, as ducktails and ponytails moved to the rhythmic beat, in synch, and blended their voices, as they sang along to the hormone harmonies of their youth. The radio’s rocked, the cars had class, Brylcreem did you with a little dab, and the hula wiggler was the grass skirt queen, high priestess, of the dashboard. She ruled the realm from her windshield throne and hypnotized us with fuzzy dice that hung from the rearview mirror, swinging to the movement of the car, with the precision of an automotive metronome.
The culture of youth had experienced its first fender bender. Ok, it was more than that, it had collided head-on, in a demolition derby with the engineering creature-marvel-monster, Automobilius Asphaltius, and together they would create a world of burning rubber, rock ‘n roll, and V-8 wonder wagons—and in the process, create the ideal Roadhead Garden of Eden, smack dab in the middle of the chrome-magnon galaxy.
The times, they were certainly a’ changin’, Mr. Dylan, as Brando and Dean replaced Hope and Crosby’s lighthearted screen romps with angst laced films of rebellion and restlessness. The image of the family sedan and suburbia had been sideswiped by the “Wild One’s” Harley, and that fabled and fabulous, although rebellious, ‘49 Merc, drove to the black leather jacket edge of the cliff in a race to nowhere.
