FALLOUT DEPT.DUCK, COVER, AND PASS

In 1972, Greg Mitchell was an editor at Crawdaddy, the proto-rock magazine, when someone called his desk.

- Zach Helfand

"It was some fast-talking manager, who said, 'I've got this hot act. We're getting a big press entourage, taking you all up to Sing Sing prison," Mitchell recalled. The act was playing for the inmates to début his new band. "I thought, Well, I don't care about this guy, but I get to go to Sing Sing," Mitchell said. He and Peter Knobler, the magazine's editor-in-chief, rode along in the band's van. The manager was Mike Appel. The act was Bruce Springsteen.

Nobody else showed up. "Greetings from Asbury Park" came out soon after, and Mitchell and Knobler wanted Springsteen for Crawdaddy's cover. "The staff revolted: 'You can't put him on the cover, it'll kill the magazine.' So we ended up with Loggins and Messina."

Afterward, Mitchell became the editor of Nuclear Times, the disarmament magazine, despite having no nuclear background other than some extravagant atomic-bomb drills in junior high in the fifties. "This air-raid signal would go, and you would go out in the hallway," Mitchell said. "They would call out, "There are four casualties in Room 203!' And these kids would carry stretchers around with fake injured on it." Nowadays, he covers both music and nukes. "I am really the perfect boomer for this," he said. "It's duck and cover and rock and roll."