Allee Willis Blog » Songwriting

23Mar 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1950’s Record Coasters

23Mar 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – 1950’s Record Coasters

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These little hard plastic record coasters were all the rage in the 1950’s and 60’s when 45’s and 33-1/3’s were blasting from hifi’s all over the world and Tom Collins, Manhattans and Hi Balls were resting on them as everyone did The Jitterbug and Stroll, topping it off with The Twist. Some of the coasters were just cheesy versions of records featuring hit drinks:

Others used them as an advertising tool:

All of them came in handy little record jackets:

They were cute and practical as water rings no longer ruined blond wood kidney shaped tables and other groovy Atomic furniture the drinks were set upon.

I had a set of these last night with me in the recording studio so I didn’t leave rings on the mixing console. Although we’re not holding our drinks or displaying our coasters they were there in full force. I wanted my mind in peak enjoyment mode as I got to hear/produce Fantasia recording my song, “I’m Here” from my musical, The Color Purple, LIVE with a 40 piece orchestra.

fantasia,aw,im-here_6984 (L-R) Frank Filipetti (engineer), Brenda Russell (my co-writer/ co-producer), Stephen Bray (co-writer/ co-producer), Joseph Joubert (arranger, conductor), Fantasia, Greg Phillinganes (keyboard player extraordinaire) and me (co-writer/ co-producer).

I’ve been collecting these coasters long enough that I could have brought one for everyone but the night was about making music and not decorating so the bulk of my stash stayed safely at home awaiting the next cocktail, Slurpee or Vernors to be placed upon it.

01Mar 2010

Allee Willis’ Soul O’ The Day – I Love You, Color Purple People… final cast photo

01Mar 2010

Allee Willis’ Soul O’ The Day – I Love You, Color Purple People… final cast photo

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Last night was the closing of The First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple. I had never written a musical before, hardly ever went to see them. I’m an all-the-way Pop Culture gal and for me this was a medium from ancient times with way too histrionic sounding songs and singers frozen in time. I was the least likely person in the world to write a musical but write one I did, with Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray and Marsha Norman. We were nominated for 11 Tony’s. How we even won one, the brilliant LaChanze for Best Actress, was a miracle in the climate on Broadway. (Don’t get me started on that one…). Beyond being eternally proud of the work, especially the uplifting and joyous effect it had on audiences night after night, the most stunning part of the journey was the family of friends I made through the Broadway run and the ensuing national tour. Right from the beginning when we started writing Purple in 2001 I always heard that there’s constant bickering among everyone but we were all really friends. And I mean everyone, from Alice Walker, the Pulitzer prize winning author of the novel, down through us authors, the cast, director, producers, hair, makeup, wigs, production managers, everyone. I was always being told by other friends who had written for Broadway that by the end no one would ever talk to each other and that so many writers of so many shows, because the experience takes years and is so intense, never end up speaking unless they write another show and then it’s just about work. Our case always was and remains different. This is a family that will be together forever, bound by an experience where the piece itself was bigger than any one part. Everyone felt chosen and blessed to be a part of The Color Purple. Fantasia WAS Celie. Watching that journey of her finding herself through this character was a joy and a privilege. Every cast member, starting with the staggering Felicia P. Fields, Tony nominated for Sofia and the first actor we ever cast in 2003, was not only a triple threat – brilliant singers, actors AND dancers, a rare enough find in one person let alone an entire cast – they were a gift for any artist to have interpret their work.

One of the key lines of the show is when Shug Avery says to Celie, “I think it piss God off if anyone walk past the color purple in a field and not notice it. He say look what I made for you!” Life is all around us. The blessed ones among us understand that the real gift is fantastic friends, a glorious sky over our heads, birds singin and the fact that we’re here at all. I thank every single person in this photo for a fantastic five years. I look forward to more in another space and time. We all know we’re together always.

With Gary Griffin, our director, Fantasia and the Celie doll with cornrows and real wardrobe that Hair and Makeup made me after my Sound Of Soul party last week.

With my co-composers and lyricists, Stephen Bray, Brenda Russell, and Wayne Linsey, who played keyboards on all our original demos for The Color Purple.

11Feb 2010

“Shug Avery (and The Color Purple) Comin To Town”

11Feb 2010

“Shug Avery (and The Color Purple) Comin To Town”

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No official Kitsch O’ The Day entry today as I’m getting ready for the opening tonight of the last stop on the first national tour of my musical, The Color Purple. The second tour begins in March but it’s a whole new production and whole new cast. I will miss my amazing Color Purple family of the last five years BEYOND IMMENSELY!

Here’s me and my two music/lyric collaborators, Stephen Bray and Brenda Russell with Stephen’s daughter Milena and our fantasically amazing Celie, Fantasia, last night after previews.

The show runs from now through the 28th at the Pantages in LA.

26Jan 2010

THE COLOR PURPLE coming back to LA. Feb. 10-28

26Jan 2010

THE COLOR PURPLE coming back to LA. Feb. 10-28

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Fantasia as Celie. Fantastic cast, many from the original Broadway production. Five years of my life into the making of this baby. I’m very proud of it. If you’re in LA come to the Pantages.

11Jan 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Maya Angelou, “Miss Calypso”

11Jan 2010

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Maya Angelou, “Miss Calypso”

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Right, the first thing that hits your lips when you think of Maya Angelou is that she’s “Miss Calypso”. But in her early days the prophet poetess was a chanteuse in a slinky red dress back-bending under the limbo bar. This Liberty LP was recorded at The Keyboard club in Hollywood in 1956. Angelou’s Afro-Cuban-with-a-pinch- of -Blues-and-Jazz standards include “Scandal In the Family”, “Mambo In Africa”, “Donkey City” and “Stone Cold Dead In The Market”, the first two of which she wrote.

30Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Ultra Cheap Donny and Marie Microphone And Song Sheets Set

30Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Ultra Cheap Donny and Marie Microphone And Song Sheets Set

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Donny Osmond may have won Dancing With The Stars and a whole lotta money for his favorite charity but a whole lotta money was the last thing that was spent on manufacturing this toy microphone and song sheets set at the height of the Donny & Marie Show frenzy in 1976. Despite the claim on the package that you too can “CREATE YOUR OWN SONGS • MAKE YOUE OWN MUSIC” the non-working plastic mic attaches to nothing and won’t get you much farther than singing into a candle or a shoe or anything else remotely microphone shaped.

The “song sheets” are literally blank sheets of paper that you write the notes to your own song on should you have enough songwriting chops to pull one out of the blue and be blessed with the knowledge of how to notate music, the latter of which I don’t even know how to do.

To make matters worse and even lower-rent, the song sheets are stapled together at the top and the bottom and it’s next to impossible without surgical instruments to remove the staples without ripping the one-ply-thick-thinner-than-toilet-paper paper it’s printed on.

Made in Hong Kong during the heyday of the bro/sis acts’ ABC variety show by the family’s own Osbro Productions and distributed by Gordy International (how did Motown get into the act?) it also appears that Donnie got the shaft on the shaft of the microphone as Marie’s name got bumped up to all caps and Donny’s remains crushed into diminutive lower case letters.

All around, this belongs in an express elevator up to the Penthouse of Kitsch because it is sooooo totally and completely cheaply made, meant to be dumped into bargain bins at all of the dollar discount stores that were just starting to get a smelly toehold on the American merchandising scene.

23Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Captain & Tennille Toni Tennille Doll

23Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Captain & Tennille Toni Tennille Doll

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In my formative years of being a songwriter, the Captain and Tenille covered the AM radio landscape thicker than astroturf. Even their bulldog, Elizabeth, was part of the act that made wearing a dorky captain’s hat and walking around with a bowl haircut that looked like it had marshmallows stuffed in the curled under ends fashionable. But for whatever can be said about their ultra bubblegum, cringingly cute look, Captain and Tenille made equally as cute yet great Pop records like “Love Will Keep Us Together”, 1975 Record Of The Year, and the evermore schmaltzy “Muscrat Love”, a song with a great melody whose arrangement featured scrunched-up-rat’s-nose synthesized rodent sounds.

This Toni Tennille doll is a “fully poseable fashion doll” that’s 12-1/4 inches tall and features “cut out accessories”, which means you have to cut out cardboard shapes of Elizabeth the bulldog’s bones and bowls and then play with them flat on the table.

Ms. Tenille was made in 1977 by C&T’s own Moonlight and Magnolia, Inc. in association with Mego Corp, maker of some of the most popular and cheesiest dolls of the 1970s as evidenced on the back of the box where photos of other dolls in their TV Starz series feature Tenille’s identical face.

19Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Tragic And Wonderful Misuse of ‘Boogie Wonderland’ in “How To-Dominican Blowout/Doobie”

19Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Tragic And Wonderful Misuse of ‘Boogie Wonderland’ in “How To-Dominican Blowout/Doobie”

As most of you know by now, I’m one of the few songwriters who loves when their songs are used or performed inappropriately as it turns the songs into masterpieces of Kitsch. I never set out to write Kitsch as I love music too much but if I leave it in the hands of all the people who love to see themselves on YouTube I’m rarely disappointed.

As opposed to a performance, this is someone who’s chosen to verrrry sloooowwwwly show us how to achieve a Dominican hairdo using two Earth Wind & Fire songs as background music, “After The Love Is Gone” and “Boogie Wonderland”, the latter of which I co-wrote and the significance of neither in regards to the the subject matter make any sense.

With pixelated effects that happen in the first few seconds of the video and never occur again in the 9 minutes and 13 torturous seconds it takes to get the damn rollers out and hair wrapped, this is a directorial masterpiece in the filmic language of Kitsch. Among other highlights is that absolutely nothing happens in rhythm to the music, the “wind machine” only functions in one “scene” and the label on a jar of product appears backwards so you can’t possibly see what it is even if you wanted to achieve this look. Also excellent is the fact that ‘doobie’ doesn’t mean what we think it does and is apparently some kind of barrette or bobby pin.

I got excited when it was apparent that the final hairdo was going to look like a Fez. At this point, over 7 minutes in, “Boogie Wonderland” is in full throttle instrumental. That hair should have been whipping around to the strings and horns, combs and doobies flying. But alas, the Fez just gets pulled tighter and tighter, smoother and smoother, totally defying the intention of the music. And why would something be called ‘blowout’ that’s actually deflated and increases in value the flatter it gets?

Even I had trouble making it through to the final strand but from a Kitsch perspective this is a Top 10 hit!

02Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Lawrence Welk Musical Spoons

02Nov 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – Lawrence Welk Musical Spoons

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Lawrence Welk was always too square for me except that that’s where I could continue to get my Mickey Mouse Club fix when in 1961 Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess won a dance contest to Welk’s hit, “Calcutta” (an LW record I LOVED) and became a regular on the show two years after the mouse ears left the air. Though Bobby went from being a hip kid to an excessively corny adult as soon as he hitched to Mr. Wunnerful Wunnerful wagon, I still appreciated his move as otherwise I may have missed Lawrence Welk and his jaw droppingly cheesy production numbers that became a primer in my never ending education in Kitsch. Combine that with the fact that I never learned how to play an instrument and you end up with my excitement about these musical spoons which became one of the first instruments I “played” when I started to write songs.

Forget the spoons, the packaging on this is fantastic. With not an inch left uncovered, it boasts “Get on the beat!”, “Be a champion!”and “The international pastime – spooning!” Perhaps so, but not that kind of spooning.

Lawrence Welk was always too square for me except that that’s where I could continue to get my Mickey Mouse Club fix when, in 1961, Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess won a dance contest to Welk’s hit, “Calcutta” and became a regular on the show two years after the mouse ears left the air. Though Bobby went from being a hip kid to an excessively corny adult as soon as he hitched to Mr. Wunnerful Wunnerful’s wonderful wagon, I still appreciated his move as otherwise I may have missed Lawrence Welk and his jaw droppingly cheesy production numbers that became a primer in my neverending education in Kitsch. Combine that with the fact that I never learned how to play an instrument and you end up with my excitement about these musical spoons which became one of the first instruments I “played” when I started to write songs.

Forget the spoons, the packaging on this is fantastic. With not an inch left uncovered, it boasts “Get on the beat!”, “Be a champion!”and “The international pastime – spooning!” Perhaps so, but not that kind of spooning.

Bobby Burgess went on to become Welk’s longtime accordionist, Myron Floren’s, son-in law. Here they are doing The Chicken Dance, which, according to them, is “one of the most popular dances in America” and which, according to me, “wasn’t”.

Here’s Welk’s biggest and only Top 10 hit, “Calcutta”:

06Oct 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – PARTY VIDEO! Me, Earth Wind Fire and Luenell at the opening of The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch!

06Oct 2009

Allee Willis’ Kitsch O’ The Day – PARTY VIDEO! Me, Earth Wind Fire and Luenell at the opening of The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch!

It was the 21st night of September, the opening line of my very first hit song as well as the date of the grand opening party celebrating the launch of awmok.com, my mini social network and ongoing museum exhibit of all things Kitsch. I am SO NOT the songwriter type to get up at a party and perform but this was the night that tradition broke. As it was a special night in my musical history as well as a night to celebrate kitsch I decided to let anyone who wanted to sing sing bad karaoke versions of September.I also brought a bunch of cheap, thrift shop instruments with me – a knockoff Beatles Apollo bass with three strings, a 1981 Casio keyboard with 2 1/2 octaves and a missing middle C. key – just in case any of the famous musicians in attendance might want to play along my style.

As any of you familiar with me know, I’m a massive fan of smooshing together very high and very low elements of art that most people would create, perform or perpetuate in very different spaces and times. I live for moments where the incredible thinking, technology and execution at the top collide with the passion and dedication (and not necessarily talent) at the bottom.

Moments like these have allowed me to see some of my Greatest Hits performed by the best and the worst at once. Like when my discoveries, the Del Rubio Triplets, octogenarian identical triplets in miniskirts and go-go boots and of questionable musical prowess, performed “Neutron Dance” with The Pointer Sisters the very week the record was in the Top 10. I’m elated to report that the 21st night of September a couple of weeks ago was an opportunity for another such performance.

In walks Larry Dunn, original Earth Wind & Fire keyboard player extraordinaire who played on every single significant EWF hit, and Verdine White, cofounding member who’s still in EWF, greatest bass player who ever lived and the man who discovered me and brought me to the group back in 1978. And there’s Luenell, hysterical off-color comedienne who is literally the number one Earth Wind & Fire fan in the world. She carries their Greatest Hits CD with her wherever she goes and watches aEWF Collection DVD every day, swear to God. She’s been in love with Larry Dunn since she first caught sight of his perfectly carved Afro in the early 1970s.

Here are three 6 minute videos documenting one of the best times I’ve ever had in my life at a party. Part 1 is a set up, where Luenell meets her idols NI announced that anyone who has the balls to sing September with Earth Wind & Fire in the house is welcome to him. Part two is September and part 3 is Boogie Wonderland. I have video cameras going almost every minute of the day. It’s moments like they that would never translate unless you were there to see it that make me thankful I spend every dime I earn on tape, cameras and people to point them.

Last thing I’ll say here is to make sure and go to AWMoK.com, the reason everyone was here to celebrate and where so many people have gone to keep the party going

It was the 21st night of September, the opening line of my very first hit song as well as the date of the grand opening party at LA’s Ghettogloss celebrating the launch of AWMoK.com, The Allee Willis Museum Of Kitsch, my mini social network and ongoing exhibit of all things Kitsch. I am SO NOT the type to get up at a party and perform my own songs but this was the night that tradition broke.

As it was a special night in my musical history being “the 21st night of September” as well as a night to celebrate Kitsch with a kapitol K, I decided to let anyone who wanted to sing do bad karaoke versions of “September”. I also brought a bunch of rickety, thrift-shop-bought instruments with me – a knockoff Beatles Apollo bass with three strings, a 1981 Casio keyboard with 2 1/2 octaves and a missing middle C. key – just in case any of the famous musicians in attendance might want to play along, my style.

As any of you familiar with me know, I’m a massive fan of smooshing together very high and very low elements of art that most people would create, perform or perpetuate in very different spaces and times. But I live for those moments where the incredible thinking, technology and execution at the top collide with the passion, dedication and mixed results talent at the bottom.

Moments like these have allowed me to see some of my Greatest Hits performed by the best and the worst at once. Like when my discoveries, The Del Rubio Triplets, octogenarian identical triplets in miniskirts and go-go boots and of questionable musical prowess, performed “Neutron Dance” with The Pointer Sisters the very week the record entered the Top 10. I’m elated to report that the 21st night of September a couple of weeks ago was an opportunity for another such hi/lo performance.

In walks Larry Dunn, original Earth Wind & Fire keyboard player extraordinaire who played on every significant EWF hit, and Verdine White, cofounding member who’s still in EWF, greatest bass player who ever lived and the man who discovered me and brought me to the group back in 1978. And there’s Luenell, hysterical off-color comedienne who is literally the #1 Earth Wind & Fire fan in the world. She carries their Greatest Hits CD with her wherever she goes and watches the EWF Collection DVD every day, swear to God. She’s been in love with Larry Dunn since she first caught sight of his perfectly carved Afro in the early 1970s.

Here are three 6 minute videos documenting one of the best times I’ve ever had in my life at a party. Part 1 is the set up, where Luenell meets her idols and I announced that anyone who has the balls to sing “September” with Earth Wind & Fire in the house is welcome to do so. Part 2 is us doing “September” and Part 3 is “Boogie Wonderland”.

I have video cameras going almost every minute of the day. It’s moments like these that would never translate unless you were there to see them that make me thankful I spend every dime I earn on tape, cameras and people to point them.

Last thing I’ll say here is to make sure and go to AWMoK.com, the reason everyone came to celebrate and where so many people have gone to keep the party going ever since.

Part 1 – Getting ready to sing:

Part 2 – “September”:

Part 3 – “Boogie Wonderland”: