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In case you haven’t read it, the title of this post is in reference to the if-I-do-say-so-myself-despite-a-few-tiny-inaccuracies-great-and-rather-large-piece-on-me in last Sunday’s Washington Post.

In current news, I will be taking to the stage in LA again for the first time in over a year, actually the first two times, as there are two impending opportunities for me to regale you with my most humiliating show business stories and watch the audience remember my lyrics better than I do as we sing-along to some of my greatest hits!

First, I will be performing my infamous poolside with Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Taylor slab o’ ribs story as well as a retelling of the single most ego-numbing, dignity-deprivation moment of my career, the Phoebe Snow/Paul Simon “I’m so f%#king hungry and yes, you’re Still Crazy after all these hours” story at Beth Lapides’ I’m With The Band (sorry, Pamela DesBarres who HAS been with the band!) evening at the Skirball Center, Friday night, June 5. It’s rock & roll comedy told by very funny people like John Riggie (30 Rock, The Comeback), Greg Behrendt He’s Just Not That Into You), the lovely Moon Zappa (Curb Your Enthusiasm, America the Beautiful) and, of course, ME, featuring stories about some of music’s biggest legends and presented lounge-style with cocktails and snacks available for purchase. Tickets here.

Then on Sunday night, July 12, it’s big ol’ party time when the illustrious Andrae and I + band hit the stage for a wild, so-affordable-it’s-crazy fundraiser for my Detroit-inspired record, video and feature length film about human spirit, “The D”/ Allee Willis Loves Detroit”!! Featuring a sneak peek world premiere of the record and video with more people in history than have ever been the original artist on a record, joined by some of the biggest stars to ever emerge from the Motor City.  Also sing-alongs to some of some of my fattys like “September,” “Boogie Wonderland,” “Neutron Dance,” and the Friends theme, as well as auctions from the legendary Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch collection! Many more surprises at this outrageous multimedia live feast for the eyes, ears and soul!!  Tickets, thankfully going fast, are here.

And last but far from least, we are making fairly stunning progress on “The D” record and video, both of which are in the area of 85/90% finished. We are constantly diverted from the filmmaking mission having to prepare things like a marketing deck and a movie trailer so we can all stop eating up to the green edges of our food and raise some real money to get this car on the road. But I must admit, despite the financial deprivation – PLEASE COME TO THE BENEFIT ON JULY 12 – we are all having the time of our lives working on something this creative and worthwhile. All we do is laugh, and all we do is feel better and better about what we’re doing every time we look at the joy pouring out of Detroiters eyes, mouths and hearts as we pull everything together.

Exciting news on “The D” song front is that Detroit’s own Maejor, an artist with hundreds of millions of YouTube views and the smoothest voice this Motor City side of Marvin Gaye, is the latest superstar to add his voice to the record.

Plus recent interviews for Allee Willis Loves Detroit, the film, include the multi-seriesed Michael Patrick King, the shy and retiring Jenifer Lewis, the demure Sandra Bernhard, and Earth, Wind & Fire’s stupendous Philip Bailey, among illustrious others.

That’s about it for now. Here’s the link to my story in the Washington Post again:  “Most interesting woman you’ve never heard of” (so please get your ass to my show and help rectify the situation!)

Onward, Detroit! And remember to gimme some gas money on July 12 or pop it down here if you’re in generous spirit and unable to attend.

 

After almost four decades the torturous vice grip on my psyche has been chiseled open so that my little stage personality, the one that once cowered in a dark corner  but whose pleas to give it a chance never stopped rattling through my brain, has finally put on some clothes and come out to play!  FINALLY all the noise can stop!!

Of course, like I do most things, I remain scared of them for a hundred years, then I finnallly get my toe wet and then proceed to become obsessed and jump into things in such a big way it’s all I wanna do and costs me every dime I have pursuing it as I’m a self-funded artist and I live for my art. As such, in the space of seven shows over the last year I went from a piano and a clusterfuck  of technical mistakes to an if-I-do-say-so-myself-and-if-the-standing-room-only-sell-out-crowds-are-any-indication magnificent one-woman-extravaganza-with-25 musicians-dancers-masseuses-chefs-and-me-in-it show, well oiled to the point of being a rig, hit-filled, and more fun than 27 barrels of monkeys.

But my Ringling Brothers scale troupe is too expensive for mommy to mount monthly, which is what she’d/ I’d be doing if left to her/my own devices. So to keep my performer chops simmering lest they run back into the cave they’ve been atrophying in all these years, I’m getting up and doing my very first stand up ever this coming Sunday night, January 20, at UnCabaret.  My lovely and gracious friend, the ever-talented Beth Lapedis, whose creation this legendary comedy series is, asked me to alight the stage joining my other good friends Tim Bagley and Michael McDonald (he of Mad TV fame and not the singer who I’m also friends with and would be happy to take the stage with anytime!). Karen Kilgariff and Faith Tucker are also on the bill.

Here are me, Tim, Michael, and our good friend Jimmy McGill at my place a couple of years ago.

 

You can see that I was comfortable enough with these guys that I didn’t worry about putting on makeup or serving them  on paper plates (though please notice the exceptional plastic fish paper plate holders the spaghetti-smeared dinnerware sit in).  I hope that comfortable feeling carries over to joining them on stage. That comfortable feeling certainly worked for Tim, who bagged the free foot massage after  winning “The First Three People to Win Five Chunks of Soul Get a Free Foot Massage During The Next Song” game at my BaDeYa, Baby! live show this last November.

That show being what gave me the guts to get up and try this standup thing to begin with. So it’s all come full circle and I hope Tim remembers my generous gift of a foot massage and musters up a laugh for my routine even if some of it flops around like a landlocked fish. Which I pray it doesn’t.  Why don’t you buy some tickets and find out for yourself?

 

 

 


On May 8 and 9, 2012, I took a giant leap in my evolution and broke through an almost 4 decades-long bout of stage fright, performing two sold-out performances of my Super Ball Bounce Back Review, a combo concert/sing-along/party extravaganza at King King in Hollywood.

Lack of performing has always been a raw, gaping hole in a long career that’s stretched across various fields of the arts, despite the fact that I’ve always had the balls to throw myself off cliffs as I periodically dive-bomb into pursuits I know nothing about. I’ve hosted multimedia theme parties where I’m perenially on mic so that even the conversations I have with everyone are blasted throughout my house or wherever else I host these beasts. And God knows I walk around in hair and clothes that makes peoples’ necks snap if they’ve never gotten a gander of me before. Throw in that I’ve sold 50,000,000 records despite the fact that to this day I have no idea how to read, notate or play music, and I sold hundreds of paintings before I realized that you mix colors to get different colors. So backing away from displaying myself publicly made absolutely no sense.

But then I realized that this theme of living fearlessly was at the heart of everything I ever created. View life as a creative process. You are the canvas. If you’re stuck with a weakness, for God sakes turn it into a hook. Nine times out of ten, you’re the bogey monster scaring yourself shitless so just get out the way! So I finally did.

So here then are four videos from my Super Ball Bounce Back Review.  If you like them and are going to be in LA on September 21 and/or 22, I’m rising again at NoHoPAC in a salute to “September”, the first line of which mentions the date of the opening night.

“September”:

“Boogie Wonderland”:

“Neutron Dance”:

And the whole enchilada:

Badeya!

I’m sure any kitsch lover has a similar dream – having dinner with the kitschy-kitschy-cuchi Charo and bonding like you have been best friends for 30 years. Such was my evening at composer Pietor Angell’s pad with the aforementioned singer, actress, Flamenco guitar virtuoso, CHARO!

Maria Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza a.k.a. Charo was very nice when we met, no star attitude detected at all, but I knew she had no idea who I was. I made my move when she walked into the living room alone to get a sweater. I told her I loved her spirit and undying devotion to being herself. I also told her I knew of what I spoke and started spitting out a list of songs I had written. Usually people go full-tilt bonkers when I get to “September”,“Boogie Wonderland”, or the Friends theme, but it was “Neutron Dance” that did it this time. Charo went firecrackers, indecipherable words spilling out at 120 mph as she told me she’d done the song in her act. Throughout the evening she proceeded to sing little pieces of it to me. I had no idea what lyric she was actually singing as the accent makes most words undetectable but it was Charo, so who cares?? It was fantastic!!

Seeing as I never knew that this iconoclastic kitsch Goddess did my “Neutron Dance” I almost had a heart attack when she broke into dance as soon as dessert was over.

If you were expecting the entire choreographed number we all can safely assume that that will be coming as the friendship progresses.

I actually prefer intimate moments to full blown peformances. It’s like being privy to Roddy McDowall‘s private footage of Natalie Wood, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda and the hundreds of other stars he filmed casually whenever he went anywhere, including here at Willis Wonderland. I don’t have the footage handy but on evenings such as this one that included the likes of Roddy, David Arquette, Lipsynka, Paul Reubens a.k.a.Pee Wee Herman, Lynne Stewart a.k.a. Miss Yvonne, Debi Mazar, me, Snappy P and Pamela DesBarres, you get a much better idea of who the star really is than watching some interview or performance with them on tv:

I hope you have a happy Monday that includes your own personalized version of Neutron Dance as I offer a toast to Charo with the champagne that was served at our dinner with actual flecks of 22k gold floating in it:

I’m toasting that more adventures with Charo be coming in the very near future!

 

 

I meant to start posting my thoughts about my Soup To Nuts Party Mix show, my first live performance in 37 years at the El Portal Theater last Tuesday night, the day after the show but I could barely pick up a stylus to write let alone move my mouth in any detectible syllabic pattern because I was so tired and overwhelmed. I’m racing to get photos up, a fun yet gruesome task as there are literally thousands of them to go through. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have them organized enough to post. In the meantime, let me tell you about this cruise on the Love Boat that mutated into the Titanic yet somehow still ended up at Fantasy Island…

Stormy seas and all, Soup To Nuts Party Mix was about the most incredible experience that I’ve ever had. Not because it went so well, but because literally 95% of the technology it was dependent on failed. It was apparent from the second I walked on stage that I was going to have to throw out the script and effects I had worked on so furiously for four months and literally ad lib my way through the evening. All I can tell you is that despite riding a sinking technological ship, I kept people in stitches, and I mean tears rolling down their faces, screaming laughter stitches, including standing ovations in the middle of the show for things I was forced to come up with on the spot.

So despite being an utter failure as far as the show I planned, it was an unbelievably cathartic moment as a performer. Like five years worth of working the act out within the space of two hours, some time of which I spent sitting down watching brilliant and charitable friends of mine takeover and help me out.

One of  them was the stupendous comedienne Luenell, who has stepped it up at other parties of mine as well and Tuesday night helped a sista out during one of the 6,437,293 technical glitches that befell the stage.

But just as Luenell got to her punchline, something FINALLY popped up on the screen and I had to cut her off.

One of the best moments of the show, although perhaps not for Luenell, was when she then took a seat and the chair started rolling out from under her…

…until she plopped down flat as a log on the floor. When I asked if she needed a first aid kit she yelled “NO, what I need is a lawyer!”

I need the same lawyer for the guy at the controls. But from the jump four months ago I approached this whole thing as a party thrower, not a playwright, and a good party thrower is ready to field anything that goes wrong, even if of a catastrophic nature such as the tech sinkhole happening on stage left. I’m sure a phrase that will stick with my shows forever was born: “Get the foamcore!” as I sent my assistant, Dina Duarte, and set-collaborator, Mark Tomorsky, both on stage with me for the whole show, racing for a ratty piece of paper covered foam to hold over the main monitor every time the wrong photo, lyric for a sing-along or even worse, the tech guy’s desktop, appeared. Here they are hoisting it over what was supposed to be the lyrics to “Boogie Wonderland”, while my collaborator on that song, Jon Lind, kills time with his story about Maurice White, chocolate danishes and other things that happened the day we wrote it.

I doubt that Larry Dunn, founding member of Earth Wind & Fire who played keyboards on the records of “September” and “Boogie Wonderland” and accompanied me on those songs in the show, ever got cut off early before. But I had to yank him short as without lyrics sing-alongs can only be so effective.

Danny Sembello also came onstage for two songs he co-wrote with me, “Neutron Dance” and “Stir it Up”, neither of which were consistently accompanied by correct lyrics.

Chris Price played “I’ll Be There for You”, the theme from Friends and “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”, both of which I was forced to race through without their accompanying stories as by the time we reached them it was already the time I had planned to end the show, 10:15, and we were barely at the halfway point because of the malfunctions. Dina and Mark had the foamcore ready but thankfully the Friends theme is so short and has been hammered into the heads of every audience member a hundred times a day since 1994 so my tech guy could only wreak so much havoc.

And then we were supposed to play Bingo. How do you mess up Bingo??!  But if you’re spelling K-I-T-S-C-H and not B-I-N-G-O and there are no visuals to go along with “K- Dust Mop Slippers” or “T-Flowbee”, “S- Farrah Fawcett Shampoo & Conditioner” or “H – Beatles Pantyhose”, who’s going to know what you’re talking about without visual accompaniment? As soon as it was apparent that that too tanked I just turned to the audience and yelled “Fuck Bingo! The first 20 people up on stage get all the prizes!”. You would’ve thought the Gold Rush hit California again from the way this audience stampeded the stage.

Jelly room deodorizers, soccer balls that turn into magic towels when they get wet, vintage Afro picks, matzo ball kitchen timers donated by Davida (who also contributed the packs of Kosher Kurls in the gift bags), Handerpants – underpants with finger holes so graciously displayed by Daniel Franzese in a shot below and donated, as much of the gifts were, by Archie McPhee… this was one of my favorite moments of the show. To me it’s all about interaction between performer and audience and there they all were on stage like bit players and incredible friends. It truly felt like a party in my yard, which is what I had built the set to look like anyway.

Then I threw in a montage from my musical, The Color Purple, though we skipped the sing-along.

And finally, a veritable tour de force, Pigmy Will doing “The Hustle” played us out.

Just like I never learned to read, notate or write music yet have sold 50,000,000 records, or that I didn’t know you mix paint to get different colors until ten years into my art career, I’m probably the only person in theater history who ever booked the theater before they wrote the show and then performed the show before they had a rehearsal. I am, if nothing else, consistent! It’s the spontaneous event and what happens between performer, audience, and stage, whether it’s in a theater or on my porch, that’s the art form to me. Yes, a stage manager and lighting and sound director would have been nice, as would have been a theater whose usual fare wasn’t Christmas specials and geriatric musicals. But thankfully much of the audience was peppered with people who understand the pitfalls the stage can hold. For example:

My sentiments exactly! All I kept thinking as the world collapsed around me was a) what the f&#k is going on and what the hell am I going to do next??, while simultaneously being conscious that b) this will be my most legendary performance ever because I don’t know anyone else who wouldn’t have walked off stage after 20 minutes. Through it all I just kept going and got funnier and funnier and funnier. So the tech mishaps in their own bizarre way worked in my favor. In the end, I got far more out of it than I had intended. My soul soared, and although I was nearly suicidal by the end of the show it was probably the most artistically satisfying thing I’ve ever done. At once everything was shattering around me in the worst conceivable way that anything can happen on stage, yet it was a totally triumphant evening.

Six cameras were shooting. I realize that a brilliant Waiting For Guffman times 1063 could be made out of it. That’s music to the ears of a kitsch lover such as myself, especially one who’s obsessed with learning how to make lemonade out of extremely rotten lemons. So it’s a kind of Self-Help Waiting for Guffman, or in this case, The Tech Guy. I also realize it gives me an incredible starting point for the next version of the show, which should happen by the end of January.

I will never again be afraid of adversity. I will only look at it as an annoying friend that I have to make the best of, and in the making of that a beautiful flower can bloom.

Tons of photos here!

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Join me and Hidden Los Angeles and send a Valentine’s Day card to Milly Del Rubio. Details below.

Anyone who knows me knows that two of the most important things in the world to me are music and kitsch. Songs I’ve written have sold over 50 million records and, to the best of my knowledge, I have the largest collection of kitsch artifacts in the world. Discovering The Del Rubio Triplets in 1985 is easily the jewel in my musical kitsch crown.

I first saw the Del Rubios in 1985 on a flyer that said “Three Gals/ Three Guitars…We play 375 different kinds of music”. I didn’t even know there was 375 different kinds of music but between that and the mini skirted, go-go booted, platinum hair helmeted madness of their photo I called them immediately and made plans to go to a party they were playing at that weekend.

My party date was Katey Sagal a.k.a. Peg Bundy. The breath was literally knocked out of both of us when the triplets opened the door to the porta potty-like shed that was their dressing room and we beheld the most magnificent  vestiges of human kitsch we had ever seen. I didn’t care what they sounded like, I knew they had to sing my songs.

Out of the 375 different types of music the Del Rubios played, conspiculously missing was Rock or anything remotely contemporary. I told them that playing “today’s” music was going to be their rocket to stardom and said that if they learned my song, “Neutron Dance”, a huge hit by the Pointer Sisters at the time, I would hire them to play at a party I was throwing in a couple weeks to open a new club downtown called The Stock Exchange.

And so they preformed for 2000 of my closest friends, all of whom stood gaped-mouthed as the 65+ year old minskirted sisters gave much leg and warbled from a balcony 20 feet above the crowd.

No one had ever seen or heard anything like it before, the triplets perfectly in tune with each out-of-tune other, playing similarly out-of-tune guitars and smacking drum solos on the sides of their instruments. As they plowed into “Neutron Dance” I looked down and saw the crowd parting to make room for a mound of hair that was pushing to the front. I realized that the moment I had always waited for, the ultra smashing together of the high and low ends of music into one perfectly mangled moment of musical expression, was upon me! As the Del Rubios finished the song, Ruth Pointer, who sang lead on “Neutron Dance”, wove her way up the circular staircase and ripped into the song again. With her help, The Del Rubio Triplets had ARRIVED:

For the next few years I did almost nothing without the triplets. They performed at every single party I threw, including a pajama party where they backed Joni Mitchell.

The Del Rubios had long told me that their main competition back in the day was The Andrews Sisters. But when Maxine Andrews showed up at the pajama party it was the first she’d heard of them.

In 1987, my song, “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”, was a hit with Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield. Neil and Chris were obsessed with the triplets and always wanted to do a duet with them. The Del Rubios preformed the song when it was #2 on the Billboard charts at my “What Have I Done To Deserve This Art?” opening.

The video I made of them performing it there expired when I left it on the front seat of my Studebaker Commander in a heat wave but here’s the outro of them singing the song on the Victoria Looseleaf show a couple of years later:

In 1991, they were a complete hit at my “Smock It To Me (Art Can Taste Bad In Any Medium)” party where they entertained a plethora of show business luminaries. There’s pieces of “Neutron Dance” and “Whip It” with Devo lead, Mark Mothersbaugh, accompanying them at 3:14 here:

Once I called legendary record exec, Clive Davis, and told him I had made the most significant  talent discovery of my career. I loaded the Del Rubios into a van and drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Clive opened the door to his bungalow, took one look at them, hugged me and whispered in my ear, ”You owe me big time”.

In 1989 there was a fairly substantial earthquake in LA. It was before I learned the beauty of museum wax to stop things from falling and hundreds of precious kitsch and Atomic 50’s artifacts lay smashed on the floor. As such, I was in a complete fog and almost didn’t hear the doorbell when it rang. I thought it was one of my neighbors offering to turn the gas back on but instead it was Eadie, Elena and Milly, replete in matching fuscha mini party dresses and their ever present white go-go boots, ready for an interview I was doing with them for  Details Magazine, where I had my own column through much of the ’80s.

Throughout the years, I spent a lot of time in the Del Rubio’s mobile home.

They stayed up every night drinking one martini each and sewing their costumes, of which they had hundreds, all miniskirts or mini dresses, one nuttier and more fringe filled than the next. Every night once the sewing was done they would plan new arrangements on their trusted toy Emenee organ, the keys of which had all been stuck for at least three years when I met them, the victim of a spilled jug of martinis. I asked them why they never cleaned the keys so the organ actually made some sound and they always assured me they “could hear it perfectly fine the way it was”.

I documented much of our escapades in the aforementioned Details interview. The 27 page cut-down-to 3 page interview – the girls were excessive gabbers – helped expose them to a national audience and  they went on to appear on tons of TV shows including  multiple Lettermens, Arsenio Hall, Pee Wee’s Christmas Special, The Golden Girls and on and on.

The Del Rubio Triplets did everything in the order they were born. There were only 15 minutes separating each of them but Eadie was clearly the oldest, always standing on the left, Elena, born next, was always in the middle and Milly, the youngest, was always on the right. They sat in this order, ate at the table in that order, went to the bathroom each morning in that order, preformed on stage in that order and even slept in the same bed in that order.

As fate would have it, the Del Rubios also died in that order, Eadie  departing in 1996 with Elena following four years later. Milly is thankfully still with us.

I’ve written and worked with some amazing singers over the years, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Aretha, Cyndi Lauper, Patti LaBelle and Earth, Wind & Fire among them. But none swept me away with as much gusto as The Del Rubio Triplets. We should all be blessed with such belief in self and joy for what we do. They never questioned their talent, never suffered a creative block, never got tired of performing for adoring audiences who greeted them with laughter, which they always said was “better than applause”.

That last photo, from their 1995 Christmas card, is typical of the Del Rubios who were freaks about maintaining order and tradition. Even though they’re perched out of their usual order, with Milly now on the left and Eadie on the right, they signed their names in the order they were most used to, with Milly on the right and Eadie on the left. I never asked them whether they knew that they were signing under the wrong triplet.

Valentines Day is coming up and I’d love nothing more than to shower Milly with thousands of Valentine’s Day cards. So please join me and Hidden Los Angeles and send a Valentines Day card to Milly Del Rubio, c/o Allee Willis, 11684 Ventura Blvd., Suite 430, Studio City, CA 91604. With all that love pouring in and Milly seeing that she’s still getting her props maybe we can get her to pick up her guitar one last time.

PLAY THIS VIDEO!:

neutron-Dancer

I’ve seen many improvised dances to my Pointer Sisters song “Neutron Dance” but this girl has a better time kutting loose inside the klutches of Kitch than anyone I’ve ever seen. Describing her style as “Improvisational freestyle spontaneous informal interpretive dancing” Aremisbell, real name Diana Campanella, dances to more high energy songs on YouTube than Madonna. With mouth and finger action for days and pixie-like prancing in overdrive she is, in fact, SO HAPPY doin’ the Neutron Dance. And that makes me SO HAPPY for having written it.

Neutron-Dancer-comp2