California
Kieron Tyler
The Beach Boys signed with Capitol Records on 24 May 1962. Early the next month, their first single for the label became “409”/”Surfin’ Safari”. It was not their debut release. The “Surfin'”/ “Luau” single had been issued in November 1961 by Candix.Before Capitol, Hite and Dorinda Morgan had brought them into a recording studio. The former was a music publisher known by Murry Wilson, the father of Beach Boys’ Brian, Carl and Dennis. When the Morgans first encountered the band, they were known as The Pendeltones. Without being asked, they were renamed The Beach Boys for the release of "Surfin Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer. They also employed the Chamberlain, a Mellotron-like instrument where the keyboard triggers tape Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.Phase Zero is the second album by a California native who has assumed the name Morgan Delt. Fittingly, it is shot- Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There are memorable appearances from two great actors playing close to the top of their game in Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love, but they’re almost upstaged by something else. Nothing human – though their reunion and interaction in the film is being “directed” by an absent third party – but rather the environment in which they find themselves: the stark desert beauty and almost unbearable temperature of California’s Death Valley.The fact that they are played by Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, who play characters named Isabelle and Gérard, themselves two actors of a certain vintage Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Womanising detectives, shapely dames, gangsters and convoluted criminal conspiracies: Richard O’Brien and Richard Hartley’s 1982 musical take on Carter Brown’s California-set whodunit fiction is pulp noir to the max. However, unlike the pair’s previous collaboration, the indelible Rocky Horror Show, this is more homage than send-up – arch but fairly straightforward storytelling in place of riotous, risqué pastiche.That’s problematic when Sixties sensibilities are presented to a modern audience with only the flimsiest attempts at subversion. The male gaze dominates, unashamedly, in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Susan Sarandon's natural radiance papers over a considerable number of cracks in The Meddler, writer-director Lorene Scafaria's loving, largely autobiographical tribute to the kind of mum you might want on occasion to throttle but in the end adore beyond all words.Her grin as wide as the distance between the American coasts that she has traveled in order to start life anew, Sarandon has been given – and runs with – one of the most generous-hearted screen heroines in years.So what if some of the film's rhythms are off and Scafaria's screen alter ego – Rose Byrne (pictured below, with Sarandon Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Of all the challenges the Chilis have faced over the years none has been greater than how to deal with guitarist John Frusciante's occasional spells of retirement. When, in the mid-nineties superstar axeman Dave Navarro stood in for him, his technical style lacked emotional simplicity. Frusciante was coaxed back. Then, when in 2009 the guitarist finally left for good, the band hired Josh Klinghoffer. Yet what initially seemed like an inspired choice, resulted in an album that was, ultimately, underwhelming. Now Klinghoffer returns with The Getaway – notably, also the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.The official biography, documented repeatedly in the hundreds of press interviews Steve Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Though composed after and based on a play by the same author, Puccini’s spaghetti western is in no way a sequel to Madama Butterfly, his whisky-sour eastern. Fanciulla is Butterfly’s opposite in almost every respect, and to tell the truth it isn’t much at home in a small theatre like the one at Grange Park. Where Butterfly is delicate and light-handed, its successor is loud and punch-drunk. Its heroine is no frail Puccini victim but a tough mother figure surprised by true love. Simpering geishas are replaced by rough gold-diggers, and mawkish tragedy by the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Alexander Payne’s adored 2004 film adaptation of Rex Pickett’s semi-autobiographical novel didn’t just pick up an Academy Award – it led to a plummeting in sales of Merlot, and Pinot Noir becoming the drink of choice. What might Pickett’s theatrical version accomplish?The good news is this midlife-crisis comedy will certainly encourage visits to the bar, if not to California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Canny ads and paired wine tastings stoke the flames of the latter.) Both parody of and love letter to the oenophile, it savours the rituals and jargon, as Pinot fanatic Miles (Daniel Weyman) takes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.When Nash added his high vocal harmony to the other two voices as they sang a new Stills song, "You Don't Have to Cry", it was the first spark of a California soft-rock revolution. Crosby Stills and Nash, later joined by Neil Young, would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While Harpers Bizarre’s US Top 20 version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” will always be their single turned to by American oldies radio, its follow-up “Come to the Sunshine” defines their sound and musical attitude. Written and previously recorded by Van Dyke Parks, it captures an irresistibly effervescent Californian harmony pop which painted a sonic picture of the West Coast in 1967 as balmy, beautiful and seductive. In the same way as The Beach Boys’ early surfing songs, it was as much invitation as postcard, one which said: bring yourself into an Read more ...