Rehearsing is, indeed, a novel concept for me. I like to plan, plan, plan but then just let things happen as they may and field the few things that may go awry. This is part of my daredevil style being a completely unschooled artist. But when I tried that in my last show, supposedly my big  comeback after a 37 year bout with stage fright, the tech guy screwed up so severely that I realized that could never happen again. So I spent the last week in the rehearsal studio with a lot of amazing folks getting ready to hit the floor boards again.

These were all taken last week at rehearsals for my Allee Willis’ Super Ball Bounce Back Review live show in mere moments, tomorrow and Wednesday nights, the 8th and 9th, at King King in Hollywood. These are in no particular order, just a few of my favorites.

I wish I had time to write at length this morning because I can’t even tell you what a SPECTACULAR evening I had last night at my high school in Detroit, the greatest one of all, Mumford, about to be destroyed by the wrecking ball but still the most spirit-filled place in the city. Kids from the  choir, dance company and band performed some of my greatest hits while I told stories about how they were written. So many of my classmates showed up, some of whom I hadn’t seen since I graduated, some of my family, the ones who weren’t afraid to show some soul, leave the burbs and come into the real city, friends I’ve made on my last couple visits here and, of course, the wonderful and dedicated Mumford teachers, principal and former principal, and staff who helped so much to make this one of the favorite nights of my life.

I have to race out of the hotel seriously fast and check out a recording studio because I’m hell-bent and determined to collaborate with the entire city, at least any of those who want to be on a record, on a Detroit song that I’ve been working on back in LA with my upcoming live show bandleader, Andrae Alexander. Then race back to the hotel to change and get over to Cass Technical High School where the City Council will be presenting me with the Spirit of Detroit Award, and where I’ll also be attending another performance my musical, The Color Purple, all the while trying to edit the close to 600 photos taken last night, not to mention at least 10 hours of film from cameras we placed all over  the auditorium.

I hope to be blogging a lot about this next week once I’m back in LA so please check back then. Until then, I’m cheering for you, Mumford High! And Onward, Detroit!

As we speak, I’m racing out of the house to be on Dr. Phil with Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone fame. Normally  I’d be a little excited to be on TV but the show is all about saving another iconic singer from self-destruction. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from a mutual friend who’d worked with Sly back in the heyday to see if I was interested in writing with him because he was clean and sober and a comeback felt possible.

I can’t even tell you how much influence this guy had on me. One of the earliest purveyors of fusing together different genres of music, Soul, Funk, Pop, Psychedelic and Rock, and doing it in insanely wild outfits with a message of peace and celebration. And lets not forget that The Family Stone was the first group EVER to have female players in the band. The music was uplifting and life enforcing. But we all watched or heard about the life slipping out of Sly until there was no music anymore.

Having nothing to do with the phone call asking me if I wanted to write with Sly, I got an e-mail just as I stepped on the dias to honor Lily Tomlin last friday asking me if I would be on Dr. Phil. The show was to be devoted entirely to Sly. I was honored and, trust me, if I can be of any support to someone so influential on me and any other writer, singer, arranger or producer of popular music I’m there. So they shot an interview at Willis Wonderland where I just talked about why Sly was so important in music and that I believed he absolutely could rise again.

And now today, after the show being on-again and off-again all day yesterday as Sly decided whether he could commit to Dr. Phil staying on him to make sure the path stays straight and narrow, I’m racing to throw myself in the shower, find a couple outfits that I don’t have to iron, and throw them and myself into the car that’s coming to take me in mere minutes to take me to the Dr. Phil (sober) House. I have no idea what I’m walking into, both in the near future with Sly’s family there, and in the little farther out future when we (hopefully) start to write. But no one is rooting harder for Sly to once again Dance to the Music and be an Everyday Person ( know I took liberty with People). He’s a noble and just cause and soon I hope to be talking about us co-writing a nice big, fat hit for 2012, The Year Of The Sly.

No new kitsch posts today as I woke up bright and early to finesse a melody and finish a lyric before engineer Supremo, Jared Lee Gosselin, and soul legend, Booker T., walk through the portals of Willis Wonderland in less than an hour.  We started a killer song, title as yet undetermined, on Friday. All I need to do is hear Booker hit the keys of a B-3 and melodies start dancin in my head.

I could NOT believe that I was singin’ with Booker T again! It had been almost 30 years since we wrote together. That was before I started carrying a camera around so no photos of us together. Though here’s what I looked like at the time for some context:

Our new song has a “Green Onions” vibe to it.

And it definitely has the insane soulfulness of “Groovin”:

So, back tomorrow with more kitsch. As for today, it’s SOUL all the way!

I’ve blogged about Riverside, CA before. I hit it at least once a year because my favorite soul food restaurant in the state is there.

You can read more details about Gram’s and see some incredible old vintage signs like this that are thankfully left standing in this post as well.

On a typical trip, I also try and hit all the thrift and secondhand shops that are further into town on Market Street once you hop off of the 60. But this was a very short trip, just to eat at Gram’s and see The Larry Dunn Orchestra, he formerly of Earth, Wind & Fire and who played keyboards on “September” and “Boogie Wonderland” for me at my recent Allee Willis Soup to Nuts live show.

So on this trip I just took a closer look at Market Street in the heart of downtown Riverside. I don’t know what this building was but the shimmering powder blue stone edifice is beyond gorgeous. I shudder to think what that construction fence around it means…

Here’s an excellent use of Chrysler-Imperial-as-awning. Perhaps I should do something like this with my 1955 Desoto Fireflyte:

Despite being a health food store now, The De Anza Theater is a still knockout:

The Mission Inn, a hotel built in 1876 and where the Reagans were married, is Riverside’s top historical landmark. But I’m much more interested in the topiary that tops the columns on the backside of the hotel. If you have any idea what this is let me know. They’re all over the place.

 

I’m guessing this one is a boxing pig:

A little further out on Market, there’s a little time-warp street that intersects it, right before the secondhand shops start.

I know this foot establishment isn’t vintage but I can never resist a name like this:

Leaving the street for a moment, I’ve never seen a Bereavement Center inside a thriftshop before but such is the case at the Goodwill at the top of the block:

Just a hop down the 91 in Corona is this excellence in architecture and signage. Though I would imagine that any Greek might be mystified that a restaurant representing that heritage would feature roast beef and quesadillas.

I always love a good trailer park…

… especially one featuring a curved wall of cutout Atomic cement block.

I love that two trains form the wings of this building. Too bad it’s not a diner and is wasted on a driving school.

I also can never resist the charm of a nice porta-potty  in the front yeard. I love the elegant door on this one, as if that makes it more acceptable to be plopped where it is.

I could have used that facility at the point in the drive I was. Luckily I made it back to the hotel and up in the elevator before duty called.

Be back soon, Riverside.

 

Needless to say this is a very special day for me, like an extra birthday a year, as it’s the opening line of my very first hit song – “Do you rememba the 21st night of Septemba?”- and my favorite of my hits to boot! So I hope everyone is having a very blessed and happy 21ST OF SEPTEMBER!!! And listening to the record a lot!

So as I was saying yesterday, this last weekend at Willis Wonderland we aKitschionados from The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch saw the light of Fluff!

For a quick recap if you were too lazy to click on that link, many of us are converging on Somerville, MA. September 24th to attend the fifth annual Fluff Festival to celebrate the marshmallow food topping in the city it was invented in. aKitschionado Rusty suggested that we first convene at Willis Wonderland in LA, the physical arm of AWMOK.com, and spend a day cooking with Fluff. Bear in mind that many of the aKitschionados in attendance had never met before and only knew each other by commenting on the kitsch they’d submitted to AWMOK. So everything served had to be a real icebreaker. As such, the first course was Fluff inspired sandwiches…:

… accompanied by Goldfish in sea foam dip vegetables:

All of which was washed down with Flufftinis…:

…an original recipe by aKitschionado iamfluff, a.k.a. Susan Olsen, a.k.a. Cindy Brady of the Bunch:

Extra points were earned for color-coordinated food, dishware and clothing:

Even more points racked up for color-coordinated lamps and other sugary Fluff alternatives:

aKitschionado Mark Blackwell scored even more bonus points for coordinating his jellybean tribute to The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch with the aforementioned lamp and M&Ms.

I hope anyone reading this appreciates the importance of color-coordinated meals and accoutrements. If there’s any question at all about the importance of food and furnishings color-coordination, please refer here.

The main course was delicious and nutritious Fluffernutter cake. I know this photo’s blurry but so was my vision after the day’s 21-gun sugar salute.

If you think that cake is gooey, let me tell you that as the party hostess who had to clean up – actually I didn’t clean up at all as the aKitschionados are a very conscious and esthetically tidy breed – there were vestiges of Fluff everywhere. Like on Mark’s pants:

Slightly less lava-flowish-of-Fluff were the fried S’Mores made by akitschionado Snappy P.

Technically, there’s no Fluff in this recipe but as its fraternal twin, marshmallows, are a key ingredient the Willis Wonderland stove did not discriminate.

Many aKitschionados came bearing gifts. Doug Wood, for example, brought me a lovely kitsch-filled basket:.

One of the gifts was a practical Hostess Twinkie holder:

Many aKitschionados were jealous of my acquisition:

Just as important as protecting your Twinkies is protecting your Pringles. Thank you, aKitschionado Windupkitty, for the lovely Pringles protective case.

By the way, a practical party hint: name tags are essential. Even if your guests know each other for a hundred years it gives them an opportunity to express what they’re feeling in name, which acts as much of an icebreaker at a party as food no one has eaten since they were 11 years old.

It also saves the host or hostess time in making introductions.

As I said, the bulk of the day’s festivities centered around cooking and eating. But aKitschionados were free to wander around Willis Wonderland to enjoy the artifacts they’ve been seeing in my posts since I first launched AWMOK.com in 2009. Many of them also enjoyed the fine reading materials scattered around.

and

That book deserves a close up:

In fact, my whole Soul kitsch collection deserves a close-up. Here’s but a few of the shelves of it:

I think Fluff is a soulful food. It recalls one’s childhood and brings feelings of peace to the mind if not the blood vessels, as aKitschionado John Zenone experiences here:

Off in my recording studio, I was showing some of the aKitschionados some more of my Soul kitsch collection:

You might want to see the front of that picture frame:

As much as I covet my James Brown autograph, I covet this bit of Soul kitsch almost as much, Sammy Davis Jr’s last stash of marijuana:

Slightly easier to see than the cannabis in that last photo are the edges of the round circle rugs that cover the floor in my recording studio. They’re there to protect the plastic that’s actually the floor surface that scratches as soon as you breathe on it. Here’s what the floor looks like in real life:

Despite signs posted all over begging aKitschionados to carefully step on the rugs, several of them found it necessary to defy their leader’s command. Bad girl, kookykitsch!

And Meshuggah Mel!

And Rusty!

And Ken!

Although it was close to 100° and muggy, we also spent time outside.  That’s where my over 200 pieces of bamboo dinnerware are.

And for anyone who missed the sugar inside, there was plenty of cotton candy floating in the pool.

Food that floats is something every party chef should consider when throwing summer parties.

So all in all, a good and Fluffy time was had by all!  Come back again soon, aKitschionados. See you all in Somerville in “September” one way or the other.

 

Photos: Allee Willis, Prudence Fenton, Mark Blackwell, Rusty Blasenhoff, Ken Dashner.

Other then “Right on!”, there was no more popular phrase in the late 60’s and early 70’s than “Can Ya Dig It?”. Though this patch is missing the ‘?’, which makes it as kitsch as it was hip back in the day. Of course, sewing patches all over your clothes was never excessively hip but here are a couple other ones you may have sewn over holes in your bellbottoms were you of the mind:

The patches were all machine made.

I always hated what they looked like on the back. A bunch of spider veins or corpuscles.

I actually never covered myself with patches but throughout the early 70s I did walk around covered in fan club buttons.

I don’t know that I walked around spouting the phrase, “Can ya dig it?” but I sure sang it a lot as one of my favorite records of all time, “Grazin’ In The Grass” by The Friends Of Distinction, came out in 1970 and made the phrase ubiquitous.

If by chance you’re not familiar with the phrase “dig”,  here’s the definition in one of my favorite reference books from the era, The Third Ear: A Black Glossary, published in 1971 by The Better- Speech Institute of America.

“Dig” is as follows:

I have to “split” now.

I have a dentist appointment. Not sure how much I’m going “dig” that but my teeth are begging me not to give them the shaft.

 

Mere days after my first and only album, Childstar, was released on Epic Records in 1974, I walked on stage in front of 10,000 people to open in Boston for folksinger David Bromberg.

The only other time I had been on stage before was when I played a little fur tree in a school play when I was 8. Now here I was singing soul music, the first 10 songs I ever wrote, plus a Mary Wells medley and Brenton Woods’s “Oogum Boogum”. My band, the singers of whom would go on to become Chic, were dressed as sequined vegetables and I was in a satin suit that I’d autographed from head to toe. This is a really crappy photo of part of the costumes on mannequins but it’s all I’ve got;

Me and The Angle Babies aren’t in costume here but you can get a pretty good idea that between us and our costumes we weren’t what the folksinging crowd came to see.

I didn’t have a very good time on stage. I never could remember my lyrics and I always spent more time designing the sets and costumes than I did rehearsing or getting comfortable being on stage. After five performances on the East Coast we were booked into a lunchroom at Ohio State, the only way the college could also get Joni Mitchell to play in the main auditorium because we had the same agent. Our only audience were three people at a bridge table eating hot dogs and a psychology class being conducted in the back of the room, with the professor telling us to lower our volume after every song. I walked offstage after six songs and made the decision to just be a songwriter, where at least if I was being tortured it was in the comfort of my own room.

Through the years I’ve gotten much more comfortable performing – in my own unique way of doing so which doesn’t include singing live – mostly because I’m a big party thrower and walk around on mic the whole time.

Almost every conversation I have comes through the speakers and I’m literally directing and producing the party as I go. Throw in the thrift shop auctions and stupid party games that I lead the guests through and I’ve gotten very relaxed holding that cold metal thing in my hands.

But I still never have gotten it together to sing anywhere other than in the studio.

So the fact that in mere hours I will be up on the stage for the first time in almost four decades and I’m not sitting here throwing up is a MASSIVE ACHIEVEMENT! Me and five other well oiled songwriters will be singing our greatest hits and talking about how they were written. It’s just with a keyboard – Chris Price, who I’ve been writing and recording a song with and shooting a video all on iPhones, is accompanying me –  but I’m singing and remembering lyrics and lines nonetheless.

And if I can get through the evening not thinking about soul singers dressed as vegetables, psychology professors and hot dogs I will have made a big breakthrough.

I’ll be performing “September“, “Boogie Wonderland”, “Neutron Dance”, and “I’ll Be There for You (theme from Friends)“. At least radio has regaled me with these songs thousands of times over the years so I’m hoping that for once I can remember my own lyrics and be happy I’m up on stage.

Wish me luck!

I know… I promised that Part 3 was going to be about finally getting into the house I grew up in on Sorrento Ave. in Detroit after trying for the last 46 years. But, as someone who’s conscious of her evolution and creative process every waking moment, this finally-going-home experience was BIG for me. Also, it’s not like I can go posting detailed photos of someone else’s stuff, which is inevitable if one is photographing a room. So this isn’t so much about documenting the actual house as it is about what I felt like being back in it.

I remember when I finally went to Disneyland for my 50th birthday, after I had only been there once when I was 14, I was shocked that everything was so small. The same thing, of course, happened when I walked into the house I lived in from 5 to 16 years old last week. It was like walking into a dollhouse. Like here’s me with the banister that in my head was a giant slide, down which I rode every morning en route to breakfast:

The house now is, of course, filled with other people’s stuff and taste, but it still had the same soulful vibe I was aware of even back then. Here’s the living room corner in 1961:

And here it is in 2011:

Thank God I finally got out of those heels and into more comfortable shoes.

My shoes were also very comfortable in this photo taken in my driveway around 1957. I remember testing my penny loafers on my pink and gray Columbia bike against other shoes I had for the firmest peddle grip.

Albeit slightly worse for wear, the driveway remains intact today.

This is the Magnolia tree that was the subject of one of my earliest songs, “I Fell Out Of The Magnolias”.

No one ever released it but it was one of those songs that impressed all of my singer and songwriter friends back in 1974 when I cowrote it with David Lasley (who I would later write “Lead Me On” with) and one of those songs that when I bump into any of them they still sing a little of. Forget about “September” or the Friends theme, “Magnolias” is the classic. Here I am back in the ‘Magnolia” days:

When I first  set eyes on the house I live in now in LA back in 1980, my realtor had heard about it at a dinner party the night before we went house hunting. I didn’t want to live in the Valley but after looking at and hating a bunch of square boxes in Hollywood I decided to drive over the hill and see the house described in the brochure as a miniature Hollywood Palladium. This was a day before it officially went on sale. There was a party going on in the backyard but the back gate was open so I just ran in and raced up the stairs into the house, with the owner chasing behind me. My realtor caught me just as I entered the living room but I remember turning my head and not only seeing a curved wall in the living room that reminded me of a curved wall in the living room on Sorrento but I was dying at the bathroom, just off the living room, because it was filled with gorgeously aged vintage maroon tile. Here’s the bathroom floor as it was that day:

I didn’t know what it was about the tile but looking at it made me dead certain this was MY home. So I almost died when I walked into the bathroom on Sorrento to see the exact same tile there. I had totally blocked it out of my memory but there it was with that deep almost orange hue that only hugs tile that old.

Another unbelievable thing is the people who live in the Sorrento house. First of all, it’s the same folks who bought the house from my father in 1965. Second, their last name is Broadnax, a name I’ve  only heard once before because it’s the name of one of the characters in my musical, The Color Purple, and one of the only characters’ names mentioned in song. As soon as I walked in, the Broadnax’s, both Reverends, told me that my mother, who passed away very suddenly when I was 16, was still in the house. They hear her walking down the steps, and growing up their kids often told them there was a white lady in the house. In my youth, I may not have believed this but when  my co-writers and I first started working on the musical, Alice Walker, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book, told us that it was all she could do to keep her hand moving fast enough to scribble down the thoughts in her head she was certain her ancestors were dictating to her. The book was written in one quick draft. Alice told us her ancestors would be contacting us. I swear to God, there were times when I would just move my mouth and words or a melody would tumble out, as if someone else was dictating them. It happened to me, Brenda (Russell) and Stephen (Bray) throughout the four years we were writing the show. So I definitely believe that my mom could still be hanging around Sorrento. I hope she was home when I came over.

One last little bit of synchronicity, throw in that the person who sang the “Magnolias” song demo was the only old friend of mine cast in The Color Purple, Charlo Crossley, former Bette Midler Harlette and Church Lady Doris on Broadway. She’s been talking about that Magnolia tree for decades now.

Friday night, the Broadnax’s sat next to me at The Color Purple, where it was playing over the weekend at the Fox Theater.  I totally got a vibe that my mom was there.

It’s pretty overwhelming to be in spots where you have very specific memories and to see it through adult eyes. Especially for me, as I have so few photos and zero movie footage because all of it got tossed after my father remarried. Which I’m sure is why I so obsessively document now. I don’t ever want my past thrown away again. And now at least I can visit it more often.