Denny Tedesco, son of legendary studio guitarist Tommy Tedesco, has made the best film ever about the LA studio scene, The Wrecking Crew. Unless you’ve attended one of a handful of screenings, chances are you haven’t seen this slightly sentimental valentine from a son to his father. If you are interested in the music of the…
Mad Men, TV’s best dramatic series two years running according to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, concluded its third season last night. Betty is on a plane to Reno to gain a divorce, and Don is starting a new ad agency with the finest Sterling/Cooper has to offer. It’s all excitement for Don…
The Robben Ford Group – Robben Ford – guitar, Russel Ferrante – keyboards, Jimmy Haslip – bass, and Ricky Lawson – drums – were a tight, highly musical band of studio musicians that played that strange hybrid of jazz, pop, rock, and blues that was being called “fusion” in the late seventies. Playing mostly instrumentals,…
Growing up in Los Angeles in the seventies, it was impossible not to feel the omnipresence of Chandler’s LA Times. It had become, for a time, under the direction of publisher Otis Chandler, a rival to the NY Times and Washington Post (it ranks third behind those two in terms of lifetime Pulitzers). Robert Hilburn,…
During a rather ho-hum Emmy Awards Show (unlike many others, I was not fawning over Neil Patrick Harris), winning Mad Men writer-producer Mathew Wiener referenced the “golden age” of Television and expressed how lucky he is to be making his show. I would broaden his scope here- we are fortunate that he and others like…
Quentin Tarantino has a giant monkey on his back called Pulp Fiction. Pulp was game-changing film-making, and the ripples created by that film had become so mainstream that people forgot just how great the movie was when it was released. It was a game-changer. No director working today has as unique a stamp as Tarantino. Yet…