Bob Dylan Turns 70. An L.A. Weekly birthday tribute
By Michael Simmons Thursday, May 12 2011
I'm 56 years old. Old enough to remember one president's assassination and another's resignation, black people getting beaten for insisting on the right to vote and later a black man being elected president, people walking on the moon, and more wars than I care to think about. A constant throughout my last 46 years has been Bob Dylan.
When I was a kid, my father would drive me and my siblings on Saturdays from Manhattan to Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island. We'd always stop at the same diner for a hamburger and iced tea. Each booth had its own jukebox. I'd flip through the rows of the juke and for a nickel I'd get the Four Seasons, "Little" Stevie Wonder, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and, of course, the Beatles.... Читать дальше »
José Tanaka was born in Kyoto, Japan. But his parents were so dedicated to flamenco music that they named him José, to make sure he'd always be tied to the traditional Spanish Romani folk art of singing, dancing, guitar and hand claps.
His father had been captivated by the music as a teenager after seeing legendary flamenco guitarist Sabicas perform on television. His mother, who'd been his father's guitar student, became a flamenco dancer.
"We were a flamenco family," Tanaka says. "There weren't many families like us. In our building, the first floor was our guitar shop, guitar lessons were on the second floor, and the rest was our house."
Tanaka is now 44 and has lived in California since the late '80s. He's become an enormously successful f
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Michael Jackson had a thing for military jackets, as the display at Julien's Auctions makes clear. See also:
*How Ozwald Boateng Helped Invent the Suits Men Wear Today
*Michael Jackson's Art and Studio, Revealed for the First Time
On this November day, Julien's Auctions resembles what Michael Jackson's closet might have looked like, albeit a much shabbier version. It's the opening of "The Collection of Tompkins & Bush: Michael Jackson" exhibit, and the Beverly Hills showroom is almost wall-to-wall military-style jackets. A week later, on Dec. 2, some very rich collectors will clean out the place during a live auction.
But perhaps none of those collectors is bigger than Michael Bush, who, with his late partner, Dennis Tompkins, designed for Jackso
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The brazen hedonism of Bangkok agrees with Jerry Hopkins. The co-author of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the best-selling portrait of iconic Doors frontman Jim Morrison, Hopkins has been described as "the dean of pop biographers." He laughingly refers to himself as a free-spirited "bottom feeder" with good timing.
"I've been in the right place at the right time often in my life, just like Forrest Gump," says the 77-year-old wordsmith, who also penned the first bio of Elvis Presley, as well as accounts of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Yoko Ono. As Los Angeles correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine in the late 1960s, Hopkins experienced flower power in full bloom.
Four times married, Hopkins has lived in Thailand since 1993; his current Bangkok apartment nestles on a restful downtown side st
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A duo of Ron and Russell Mael in the Fonda Theater in Hollywood yesterday. They said a good news – in 2014 there will be featured a movie The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman
Ах, счастливые времена. Вьющиеся волосы, Классные парни...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzoDVHR7UuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iz53uzlNls
Tribute to Lou Reed in New Beverly Cinema: GetCrazy is today. The New Beverly Cinema was founded in the time of Counter-culture as a counter-cultural theater. In Get Crazy there is the Sparks music too. Between Sparks and Andy Warhol friends was some friendship.
A FANTASTIC NEW DOCUMENTARY BY THE SON OF JOHNNY CASH'S MANAGER
It’s a weird miracle that Johnny Cash and his primitive twosome banged out music that still feels so full and vital today. And it’s a weird miracle that My Father and the Man in Black is itself full and vital, despite throwing off all sorts of vanity-project warning signs: It’s directed by a first-timer with a personal stake in the story. It tells much of that story through green-screen re-enactments in which actors play the father of that director and no one less a personage than Cash himself, that hopped-up oak of a man. It even opens with a reel-to-reel playing back a conversation between the director, age 7, and his father.
But, as Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has t
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Lou Reed Remembered By Other Rock Legends 10.31.2013 R.I.P.
Lou Reed died this past weekend; best known as the founder of The Velvet Underground, he transformed the rock landscape through, among other things, his lyrical deviance. For this he was beloved by other fearless rockers and observers, and we spoke with some particularly influential ones about Reed's legacy.
Slash
"My parents turned me on to The Velvet Underground when I was a kid. It left an indelible mark; it was noisy, poetic and street. It was art. It was a statement and it was confrontational in terms of everything that was going on socially at the time. Lou Reed was the embodiment of everything that I thought was cool about the NY scene. I can't think of Johnny Thunders or Television without thinking of Lou Reed or The Velvet Underground. He was
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Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant returns to Los Angeles on June 26th 2013 at the Shrine Auditorium with his newest backing band, The Sensational Space Shifters. The lineup features members of his early-'00s band The Strange Sensation, and sees Plant revisiting both blues rock and world music influences; this after exploring Americana the last few years through collaborations with Alison Krauss and Band of Joy. L.A. Weekly talked with Plant about this new project, memories of L.A., and what he means by the "British condition."
See also: The 20 Greatest Metal Albums in History
After exploring Americana music the last few years, what drew you back to classic blues and world music?
One of Ray's favorite films was the 1958 Orson Welles classic, "Touch of Evil". He loved the long opening tracking shot with Henry Mancini's amazing music and Welles' performance as police captain Hank Quinlan. Here is a photo of the incredible mural in Venice depicting that opening scene. This was taken yesterday
In 2006, Ray Manzarek published his civil war novel "Snake Moon", based on the Japanese film "Ugetsu" by Kenji Mizoguchi. In Ray's own words, "Snake Moon is my next journey into novel writing. It is a Civil War ghost story. A tale of the supernatural, forbidden love, and man's greed and folly set in the South of 1863. The idea came from my interest in things Americana, the world of phantoms, and the possibility of transubstantiation. Could the world of solidity somehow be joined by the world of the shades? And what is it that drives men to risk everything for the feeding of their egos?".
When Ray was a grad student at UCLA, one of his
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Los Angeles residents who attended the Lightning in a Bottle music and arts festival (July 11-15) in Riverside County and were arrested in a sophisticated sting for passing weed and party drugs to other friendly "attendees" — actually Special Investigations Bureau cops — are raising a stink after being slapped with serious drug charges and huge bond amounts.
Several dozen guys were hauled to the Southwest County Detention Center near Temecula after an undercover operation by SIB, a task force of the Riverside County Sheriff's Station, whose alleged nasty tactics, slurs and push for fairly extreme criminal charges have left attendees and their families crying foul.
Some of the 58 arrestees, almost all men under 30, tell L.A. Weekly their troubling experiences followed a similar arc:
The attendee is hanging out at a campsite, or near a stage, when approached by another attendee. Tha
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