By now you’re probably sick of us talking about the Wrecking Crew.  Don’t be.  You don’t know how good you have it.  They’re the best.

The award-winning “The Wrecking Crew” will be our first movie of season, the director Denny Tedesco will be here, as will DJs, beer, and wine, and we can’t think of a better way to kick off your holiday weekend.  Only $10 in advance, so buy your tickets now and here!

Here are some other songs the Wrecking Crew played on!

“Never My Love,” by the Association. One of the most beautiful tunes ever. Reminds me of slow-dancing at the Phi Kappa Alpha frat house in 1970. And the most bad-ass keyboard solo ever!

“These Boots Were Made for Walking,” Nancy Sinatra. This one needs no commentary, except to say Nancy provides commentary in the film too! Whoa…

“I Got You Babe,” Sonny and Cher. Man oh man!

 

 

…that’d be the Wrecking Crew, and “Pet Sounds,” respectively.

To paraphrase a glowing review of “The Wrecking Crew,” the film we’ll be showing here on Friday, May 27th:

Never thought I’d live to see the day when someone would liken The Beach Boys to Milli Vanilli, but with the exception of Brian Wilson, not one band member played so much as a lick on the legendary “Pet Sounds” album. That honor went to an elite corps of studio musicians, led by the inimitable Mr. Tedesco that played on virtually every hit song over a period that extended from the late 50s through the early 70s.

Get your tickets here. And try not to cry during this next number, aka, the greatest song ever:

 

 

 

The Monkees were the best American pop band ever (if you exclude the Beach Boys; they’re rock, I guess?) and second to only the Fab Four in the known universe.

And despite what you may have heard, they played their instruments.  Not coincidentally, they played on their two best records – Headquarters, what I’d consider “garage pop,” and Pisces, Aquarius, Capircorn and Jones, Ltd, a diverse, occasionally strange, near-perfect psych pop album.

They also played their instruments live, when you tour (Hendrix opened for them!), and as anyone who’s heard their live album can attest, they rule.

Lastly, Mike, Mickey, and Peter wrote some of their greatest tunes.

So there.

But it is also true that the Wrecking Crew played on a lot of their records.  So let us pay tribute the them, shall we?

Come see the documentary on the Wrecking Crew at the HML on Friday, May 27th. Director Denny Tedesco will be in the house!  Get your tickets here.

And here are some amazing, lesser-known Monkees jams in which the amazing, lesser-known Wrecking Crew backed them up:

Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow- Written by Neil Diamond – you can picture him singing it – I still have no idea why it wasn’t a #1 smash.  In this, Davy is torn between two lovers – Mary and Sandra.   How does it end?  Not sure – like all good art, the ending is unresolved.

Tapioca Tundra – Written by Mike Nesmith, I still have no idea what this song is about.  I do know this: “tapioca” is a starch extracted from the root of the plant species Manihot esculenta.  The song has a outer space world-music quality to it.  Like stumbling into a salsa dancing bar on a quasar.  “It cannot be a part of me/For now it’s part of you,” Mike says.  Too true.

Door Into Summer - The musicianship on this one is totally sick.  Check out the guitar work and the bad-ass bass playing.  A magnificent tune about – in my opinion – an over-worked stockbroker-type who’s lost his innocence.  His youth has vanished in the door into summer.  “Why did he throw it all away?”  asks a ghostly Mickey Dolenz in the distance.

See you Friday!!

 

Food for thought: there are many fun dance songs.  But very few super-sad fun dance songs.

Think about out it.  All your favorite dance songs are happily-themed or, at the least, not lyrically about some super-tragic, messed-up shiz.

Here are the three best dance songs that currently come to mind, and they’re all pretty happy:

• Madonna’s “Holiday” – This is a very happy tune.
• Gary US Bonds’ “Quarter to Three.” The best dance song ever, which, not coincidentally, is happy: about him dancing till 2:45 am!
• Fleetwood Mac’s “I Know I’m Not Wrong” – Lindsey’s being stubborn and mean, but it’s lyrically not super-depressing

Don’t get me wrong.  There are some great dance songs with undercurrents of melancholy, like “You Can’t Hurry Love.”  But no Grade-A, super-incredible dance song is as lyrically depressing as Gary Lewis’ “This Diamond Ring.”

The jam comes on, and you’re stoked, and you’re dancing like a fool, then you realize it’s about a cuckolded dude who’s straight-up giving away his wedding ring. Tragic.

The song came on this morning, on my iTunes, and in addition to that aforementioned thought, I also thought, “Hah, I bet the Wrecking Crew is playing on this.  How could they not?”

And I looked it up and of course they were.  The session drummer was Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye played bass and Leon Russell both played keyboards and assisted with production.  The keyboards are especially amazing!

Unbelievable.

So, to summarize: go see the Wrecking Crew at the HML May 27th!  Get your advance tickets here.

And second: can anyone name an incredible dance song that’s also lyrically soul-crushing?

Later!

 

 

 

 

 

There are  countless reasons to attend tomorrow’s fashion show: fashion, art, music, creative people, and men in g-strings.

Here’s another: your help will be needed to repel the space invaders.

Details are sketchy at this juncture, but it goes something like this: um, there’ll be space invaders and you have to fend them off (with fashion?)

Check out the excitement here at the library.  People are working, spray painting, building, climbing ladders, clinking together wind chime-y things, and fondling boas.

Also there’ll be a costume booth where you can dress up all cool and take photos!

It’s really going to be amazing, so get your tickets now at henrymiller.org because it may sell out!

 

The Byrds are the best!

Who doesn’t love driving down the 1, where Davenport turns into Santa Cruz, listening to “Notorious Byrd Brothers” start-to-finish? (Albeit grimacing through “Dolphin’s Smile” and straight-up skipping “Space Odyssey.”)

The Byrds are especially cool because they left a lot of performance mistakes in their final records.

Usually the mistakes were by their hapless drummer Michael Clarke, who, to his credit, improved tremendously over time, and eventually slayed the traps in the Burrito Brothers.

(That said, he really flubs the transition from the solo to the last verse in “Change is Now.”)

In fact, given his pervasively choppy, white-boy sloppiness, I was pretty surprised and impressed by his playing on “Mr. Tamborine Man” and their 1967 jam “Goin’ Back.” So nimble.  So crisp.   So tasteful.  So effortless.

Well, I did some research and my surprise was well-grounded: Michael Clarke did not play drums on those songs.  Hal Blaine did.  Of course he did.

Hal has played on more records than anyone ever – or ever will – and beyond being one of the top 10 drummers ever, he’s also featured in the film The Wrecking Crew, which we’ll screening on Friday, May 27th at the Henry Miller Library.

If Hal isn’t a household name, don’t feel bad.  While he and his Wrecking Crew comrades have played on all the best records ever, they remained in the shadows and never got the respect they deserve.

I mean, seriously, there should be a Mt. Rushmore in the Hollywood hills featuring their 30-or-so heads.  Something is VERY wrong with a world in which a red-haired, duplicitious, slave-owning weasel gets his puffed-up mug etched in granite, yet the genius who played the piano on “Malibu People” has to clip coupons to buy Rice-A-Roni at a some bombed-out Ralph’s in Culver City.

This fantastic, award-winning film will help to right this historical wrong.

It was directed by Denny Tesescdo, whose father was part of that infamous bunch.  Denny will be in attendance during the screening!

Tickets are a mere $10 in advance at henrymiller.org; $15 at the door.

So do come join us Friday, May 27th, and connect with your criminally under-rated and un-recognized musical forefathers and mothers.

Wrecking Crew for President!

 

Every November 5th, my friend Sarah watches “Back to the Future,” “Back to the Future 2,” and “if I’m not asleep, ‘Back to the Future 3,’ even though I don’t like it that much.”

November 5th because that’s the day Doc invented the Flux Capacitor.  It’s also the day “Marty goes back to.”

Sometimes she makes a party of it and dresses in costume!

“What if Doc had taken the plutonium the Libyans had given him and built bombs instead of using it for the time machine?” she asks rhetorically, adding, “the plutonium has nothing to do with the Flux Capacitor, in the sense that it just fuels the machine.  It’s like gas.” (sic)

While it’s safe to say the Robert Zemekis “Back to the Future” film is not the primary aesthetic inspiration for the May 19th Big Big Big Sur Fashion show, the phrase “back to the future” it is the “theme” of the event.  Get it?

If anything, this just-cryptic-enough “Back to the Future” theme is like a Rochart ink blot; a dabbled Einsteinian butterfly where we can project our confused perceptions of time.  Fun!

So good god man, come to the Big Big Big Sur Fashion show on Thursday, May 19th, at the Henry Miller Library.  It will be a stunning and scintillating evening of brilliant fashion, music, and fun.

And if you need another reason to come, this year’s Pre-Show will include a donation-based photobooth, run by Tom Birmingham, with all proceeds going to our 2009/2010 Official Photographer, Rachael Elizabeth Short!!

Ticket information available on our website.

After all, to quote Sarah, “Back to the Future (the film) is about money, loss, meteorology, rock n’ roll, love, and incest–” coincidentally enough, a lot like the Big Big Big Sur Fashion show! (Give or take…)

 

It’ll be a veritable buffet of art: movies, music, poetry, sushi, and music by Songs Hotbox Harry Taught Us.

I mean, what else are you doing on a Thursday night?

First Hour

Variations on Want: Sequence II,  by Francesco Levato (run time: 10:00)

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, by Antonello Faretta, poem by John Giorno (run time: 3:07)

Mirror, by Kylie Hibbert, poem by Sylvia Plath (run time: 3:22)

Love Song for Cells, by Jillian Brall (run time: 1:50)

Sucks Her with Fiddle, by Jillian Mukavetz (run time: 1:19)

Two films from The Pond, by Zachary Schomburg (run time: 2:52)

The Inventor’s Last Breath, by J. Hope Stein (run time: 10:00)

The Three Organizations of L.R. Levato, by Chris Hefner (run time: 4:23)

Die Pretty, by LaDonna Witmer (run time: 3:00)

Who Says Words with my Mouth, by D J Kadagian, poem by Rumi (run time: 6:05)

Chronicles on Violence, by Maria Garcia Teutsch (run time: 5:00)

Passage, by Kurt Heintz, poem by Quraysh Ali Lansana (run time: 5:18)

Tyger, by Guilherme Marcondes, based on The Tyger by William Blake (run time: 4:31)

Short Intermission/Poetry Reading by Christine Hamm

 

Second Hour

Entanglement,  by Ed Bowes, poem by Anne Waldman (run time: 62:00)

Indeed, tomorrow is the big Cinepoetry thing at the Henry Miller Library.  It’s a historic night of “firsts”:

• First event of the Library’s 30th Anniversary Summer Season!!
• First movie of 2011
• First time we’re serving sushi (maybe?) at the HML!
• First time Songs Hotbox Harry Taught Us, uh, is playing at the Library
• First time Hotbox Harry…is, um, starting their set with “Blue Suede Shoes” (usually its either “O Loneseome Me” or “Above and Beyond.”

Better yet, we have the schedule handy, listing all the awesome movies to be seen and poems to be heard.  We’ll get to that tomorrow; until then, we’ll leave you breathless with  anticipation.

First and foremost, I really just want to convey the fact that Thursday night will be a historic night of “firsts.”

Everyone has a good hot tub story.

Here are two.  Once, while in Colorado on a high school marching band trip (we were the cool kids), my friend and I put liquid hand dispenser soap in the hotel hot tub.  Bad idea dudes!  The soap bubbled and frothed quickly instantly, and didn’t stop.  It straight-up metastisized.   Within seconds, you couldn’t see your hand in front of you - it was just a gigantic, ever-growing wall of white bubbles.  We ran away.

Another time we were in the hottub and some cops walked through the back, opened the backyard gate, walked up to the tub, and told us to get out because he had a neighbor complain.  He watched us, un-clothed, get out of the tub like some sick freak.  And he didn’t even have a warrant.  Only in Jersey.

My point: none of these stories would have been told if hot tubs were never invented. 

But they were, and the mystique and awesomeness surrounding them can no doubt be attributed to the wild and saucy folks from Santa Barbara in the 1970s.

Such is the gist of Hot Tubs, the film we’re showing on Saturday, May 14th.  The film is a testament to the founding fathers and mothers of hot tubs, namely, the bohemian free-spirits of south-central Coastal California who shunned convention, bras, briefs, boxers, boxer-briefs, and mundane and lame bourgeois claptrap to make it possible for future 15 year olds to get stoned, get wet, crank ”Led Zeppelin IV,” and make it to second base.  Truly trailblazing stuff.

Get your tickets in advance here.

Oh! Oh! What’s your favorite hot tub story? 

Please try to keep it PG.