Elton John – Your Song

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Ladies of the Lake…!

Academy Award winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s play 8 covering the Proposition 8 hearings starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Edwards, Cheyenne Jackson, Christine Lahti, Rob Reiner, Yeardley Smith and Marisa Tomei hits Broadway on September 19 in a one-time staged reading at the Eugene O’Neil Theater to benefit the American Foundation for Equal Rights. Tickets start at $500.

In Troubadours, The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter, our guests, director Morgan Neville and producer Eddie Schmidt, have created a vibrant film full of music, history and anecdotes. The film is an intimate and illuminating, funny, sad and cautionary tale that chronicles one the most important cultural movements of the past sixty years–rise of the singer-songwriter–troubadours–framed by the history of the still-extant club that launched their careers, Doug Weston’s Troubadour.

Founded by Doug Weston in 1957, the Troubadour, a nightclub located in West Hollywood–then itself not a city, but merely an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County–became the nexus of first the folk and then the growing singer-songwriter movement.

George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Phil Collins and Elton John — While My Guitar Gently Weeps at the Prince’s Trust Concert, 1986.

OMG! Elton John, you’re breaking my heart. And getting used by Yes-on-8 fund raisers in the aftermath of the passage of ballot initiative that eliminated same-sex marriage in California. In an interview with USA Today the openly gay icon–who united with partner David Furness in a 2005 English civil ceremony– said: