The Tooners' Rock N Roll Rehab for the Control Of Rock and Roll

There Is Still Time For No Time To Die

It has been about a year since the name for the new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, was announced. The movie was scheduled to premiere in April so that didn't give us, The Tooners, much time to write and record our own theme song to the movie and be able to include it on our latest CD, Theme To A Dream. There are several "theme songs" written over the years for various reasons that are included on that album so a James Bond movie theme seemed to fit right in.

And then the movie's premiere was pushed back one whole year. That means that although Billie Eilish has already written the official opening theme song there is still plenty of room over the movie's ending credits to include The Tooners' song.

So, we are now asking all of you out there, like us, with nothing better to do because we're all shut-ins now, to help us start a "grass roots" campaign to get the producers of the James Bond movies to include The Tooners' No Time To Die in the new movie since there's still time. Russia, if you hear us, please help us get our song noticed by the Powers That Be. Спасибо (Thank you).

The Tooners' No Time To Die video.

The TOONERS' FORGIVING YOU Valentine Day's Single

L.A. Band The Tooners’ new single, “Forgiving You“, may be a backlash of the #MeToo Movement in that it’s a song about the joys of make-up sex.

Watch The Tooners' Forgiving You video HERE.
Written and co-directed by Ben Warner

Influenced by the tongue-in-cheek rock of The Mothers Of Invention, Alice Cooper and the risqué lyrics of 80s New Wave bands such as The Knack, The Tooners’ songs aren’t afraid to explore some dark themes. Included on their forthcoming fifth full-length CD are songs written for the new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, (recently released as a single) and a song written as the theme for a television series about a hunter of Cryptozoological creatures in the Old West called Strange, CA.

Also released on Valentine’s day, 2020, The Tooners’ latest single “Forgiving You” sounds upbeat and catchy but beneath the surface lurks the dark side of passion. Possessiveness and sexual control are at the heart of the power pop hit about a man who “forgives” his lover for real or imagined transgressions mainly in order to initiate “make-up sex.”

Listen to the Forgiving You single HERE.

One way to re-kindle passion in a relationship is to have that relationship threatened. “I can’t miss you if you don’t go away” is an old joke that is only half kidding. Another old saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is a warning that regret often follows a breakup caused merely by romantic apathy and that the emotions that loss stirs burns hotter than the original flame of love. Those with a tiny bit of imagination may prevent real pain by simply taking a few moments to ponder what life would be like if their relationship did come to a close. How would you feel, jokes aside and after whatever feeling of exhilaration newfound “freedom” may invoke, if you found yourself suddenly alone? Sure, this fear of the unknown is often blamed for keeping people in abusive relationships that should have ended long before the hope that the significant other will eventually change (improve, cease and desist, etc.) but in the case of an otherwise stable and loving relationship that has perhaps just grown a bit stale over time, riding out a rough patch may not only be the smart move but also the easiest. Many couples will tell you that their arguments are less actual disagreements than rituals actually meant to raise their emotional levels to the point where a sexual fire can be ignited.

The Tooners' Theme To A Dream full length CD,

However, these days it seems as if a little imagination can create monsters that can find materialization into our physical reality. A woman may seek to fully experience her own femininity by allowing a man to sexually dominate her in an appropriate setting, thus more fully appreciating the “weaker” sex aspect of her sexuality, but that decision needs to be hers, alone. Surrender, in this case, is not a weakness but a strength. Unfortunately, men are often incapable of picking up on the subtleties of sexual communication and that can sometimes lead to the headlines about Harvey Weinstein and Jeffery Epstein (and many others) that are making news today

“Forgiving You” is the latest single from The Tooners, the band that brought you “The Babysitter”, “Womanizer” and “Got Off You.” from their last CD, Underground Comix. They may or may not be symptomatic of the toxic masculinity running rampant in today’s society but there sure seems to be an audience out there for them.

Listen to The Tooners' Underground Comix HERE.

The TOONERS' James Bond Theme Song

The L. A. rock band The Tooners have released a new single that is their original take on a theme song for the upcoming James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig. No Time To Die is the 25th James Bond movie and will hit theaters this coming April. However, The Tooners’ song No Time To Die will probably not be heard in the film.

The Tooners' No Time To Die lyric video.

Although the band members and the song’s co-writers Neal Warner and Greg Piper are life-long Bond fans, their Bond theme is actually more inspired by shock rock group Alice Cooper. Also fans of the movie franchise, the original lineup of the band Alice Cooper wrote and recorded the song The Man With The Golden Gun as a proposed theme song for the film of the same name starring Roger Moore as secret agent 007. The producers of the Bond films felt using pop acts such as Paul McCartney, Carly Simon and Lulu (who sang the actual theme song for The Man With The Golden Gun) for the movie theme songs was appropriate but a hard rock band such as Alice Cooper didn’t fit the James Bond image and the song was rejected. The band went ahead and released it on their 1973 album Muscle Of Love anyway.

This inspired the independent band The Tooners to record their own Bond theme inspired by Alice Cooper’s initiative and even the Salvador Dali inspired look of their song’s logo has an Alice Cooper connection as Alice Cooper, the man as opposed to the band, is the only rock musician known to have ever collaborated with the surrealist painter.

No Time To Die is also included on The Tooners' full length CD, Theme To A Dream, available everywhere starting April 1, 2020.

Star Wars vs The Wizard Of Oz

Has anyone ever noticed that the original Star Wars: A New Hope is a total rip-off of The Wizard Of Oz? First, there is the Wizard. In Oz he is a kindly, protective sage whose goal is to return the lost little girl to her home, far, far away. In Star Wars Obie wan Kenobi is called by Luke Skywalker's uncle Owen "a crazy old wizard", has enough technological and metaphysical knowledge as to be undifferentiated from magic and who takes on the quest of seeing that Princess Leia gets home to her home planet.

Leia is, of course, Dorothy Gale in this analogy. A young lady in battle against an evil that has her outmatched but has such a drive to "go home" that nothing can stop her. She is assisted by her little dog, Toto, who at one point actually runs off to fetch help. Toto is to Dorothy what R2D2 is to Leia. The brave and helpful yet speechless characters also both have four letter names where the second and fourth letter (or digit) match.

The Tin Woodsman is naturally C3P0, an android who values intelligence, the Cowardly Lion is Chewbacca who is neither cowardly nor a lion but is an animal character rather than a human and is physically intimidating until you get to know him and the Wicked Witch of the West, the very epitome of evil, dressed all in black, with an army of lackeys (flying monkeys and guardsmen) and with the ability to fly is basically a female Darth Vader.

This leaves only the Scarecrow unaccounted for. Is Han Solo the Scarecrow? He has been called "scruffy looking" which certainly can also describe a scarecrow. He is Leia's love interest and although I wouldn't go so far as to suggest a romantic aspect to Dorothy and the Scarecrow's relationship it did always bother me that at the end of her time in the land of Oz, when she's saying goodbye to her new friends as she's about to board the hot air balloon (air/space travel) for her journey home to Kansas, she whispers to the Scarecrow "I think I'll miss you most of all". WTF Dorothy? What an insensitive thing to say right in front of the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion. They risked their lives for you too. Is it because out of the three of them the Scarecrow is the only one who wears pants so she thinks that maybe he has something functional in there? The Cowardly Lion is an animal after all and the Tin Woodsman clearly is smooth as a tin can, literally, down there. At least Dorothy didn't kiss her brother.

Leave your comments below and tell me I'm wrong. Go ahead, I dare you.

The TOONERS' THEME TO A DREAM CD

Today, April1, 2020, is the official release date for The Tooners' fifth full length CD, Theme To A Dream. It may be the last Tooners CD in that we have now recorded and released virtually every song the band has ever written. If there is ever a follow up it will have to be written from scratch. The only time we've ever recorded an album from scratch was Ripped. Every other Tooners CD, Rocktasia, The Haight and Underground Comix were compiled of songs written years before the recording of the CDs, usually with songs taken from our live sets. Now all those songs that the band has written over the years have been recorded and distributed out on the ether for all the world to hear, or ignore, as apparently is the case.

Theme To A Dream CD.

Theme To A Dream is the third in a trilogy of albums that were compiled from a list of over thirty old songs separated into three distinct albums according to subject matter and overall musical vibe. When a songwriter writes a Pop / Rock tune it can usually be classified into one of three categories;
1. HITS: upbeat, catchy tunes that might appeal to one or more of the various radio formats.
2. DEEP CUTS: more "artistic" or experimental songs that may be longer than the standard three minutes playing length, have changes in tempo, mood or format and
3. FILLER: or what the late, great John Lennon called "crafted songs", the songs that are written because songs were needed and not because they came from any sort of inspiration.
There are a couple different types of "inspiration" as well. There is the inspiration where your hands suddenly and unexpectedly play a phrase or a riff that then leads to the completion of an entire song and the inspiration that comes when an event or memory or maybe just a feeling compels the writer to write a specific song in order to memorialize the event, person, place or thing that inspired it.

The TOONERS Rocktasia Remastered

The first of the three albums recorded pulling from the collection of songs written over the course of decades is The Haight. It is The Tooners' album of more adventuresome tunes. Several are over four minutes in length with one or two over five minutes. The more exploratory and ethereal mood of the music led to the lyrics being about beliefs, some religious, some metaphysical, some with a Huckleberry Finn sense of adventure about them.

The TOONERS The Haight

The second album, Underground Comix, is in keeping with The Tooners' penchant of writing music to accompany other forms of media. Where Rocktasia was a collection of songs meant to eventually be the soundtracks to animated films, The Haight was inspired by the book of the same name and shares the same cover art.

Ripped mimics the soundtrack to a "Disney style" animated movie and accompanying storybook, Underground Comix is an album of songs that musically illustrate particular underground comic book stories

And now comes Theme To A Dream, the title inspired by the fact that there are two "theme songs" on this CD. No Time To Die, released as a single as well as included on the album, is a song not so much about the latest James Bond movie with which it shares a title but more about the various fan theories about James Bond that have been circulating on the Internet for years. Another theme song, Strange, CA, is a theme song for a proposed TV Western about a hunter of Cryptozoological animals in the Old West written by Benjamin Warner and currently under option by a television production company in Hollywood. Other songs, although not blatantly theme songs, certainly sound like they could/should be; I Don't Wanna Work (Pleasant Valley Monday) is a song inspired by the Monkees' hit Pleasant Valley Sunday where a garage band is heard by a home owner who is outside to mow his lawn. I Don't Wanna Work takes the point of view of one of the garage band musicians who years later finds himself in the position of the suburban home owner and ponders why and how he ended up back where he came from when he was, at one time, certain his life was going to take him far away as a rich and famous rock star. A theme song for a lot of us. The song Coronado could be a travel spot theme song for the Southern California resort and Hail The Rock & Roll Band is a shout out to the original Fab Four who started it all. The second single from the album is Forgiving You. A sweet love song that on closer listening reveals some rather subversive lyrics.

And thus we have reached the end of our musical journey. There may be more music ahead but as of right now there is nothing from the past from which to pull which is both a little frightening and yet exhilarating.

The TOONERS' R- Rated Album

The Tooners are truly a "multimedia" Rock & Roll band and most of their released CDs are in one degree or another soundtrack albums. Their CD Rocktasia Remastered consists of songs that were originally conceived as being accompanied by fully animated 2D music videos, hence the reference to Disney's animated music masterpiece Fantasia.Their CD, The Haight, is loosely based on the novella of the same name (available on Amazon.com) and the CD, Ripped, was conceived as a soundtrack to a "Disney" style animated musical and the songs are sung as the character in the story, a modernized version of the Washington Irving classic Rip Van Winkle. It also has an accompanying storybook.

Listen to The Tooners' Underground Comix CD HERE (if over 18)

Their CD, Underground Comix, as the title implies, consists of songs written to add a musical accompaniment to an "underground" comic book. Underground comic books or "comix" were published from 1967 to 1974 and were noted for being artistically individualistic and completely uncensored. Originally a product of the Hippie Movement out of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the "Summer Of Love" of 1967 and starting with the Robert Crumb creation, ZAP, they went nationwide until the advent of the Xerox photocopier made it possible to flood the market with inferior product which eventually killed said market.

The Tooners' Punk Opera.

The CD cover of The Tooners' Underground Comix CD lists the songs as "Comic 1 - Womanizer" which consists of eight songs that loosely tell the tale of a guy who is born to be a womanizer and in the end is alone in a bar deciding to stay there and drink until he can figure out why his wife/and/or girlfriend has left him. "Comic 2 - Punk Opera" is a story of a boy who becomes abusive and belligerent after adopting a "Punk Rock" lifestyle and ends up paying the price for it and a printed mini-comic is included with the CD. "Comic 3 - When The Moon Is Full" is about a horrific act of gang violence.

Since these songs are the musical equivalent of uncensored underground comix, the CD cover also includes a Parental Warning label stating that the contents are for those 18 years of age and older.

ENGLISH BOB Rides Again

There's a new animated music series from the award winning animation director Neal Warner (IMDB.com) and the award nominated musical director Greg Piper (Just Imagine, A Day In His Life, Rock & Roll Rehab) called ENGLISH BOB. English Bob is an "Outlaw" Country band coming to the end of the trail that's pooled their resources and bought a music store where they're forced to interact with a new breed of young Modern Country artists.

The show's been presented as an animated "Country Monkees" in that the various band members are young (for Baby Boomers), zany (grouchy) and don't play their own instruments (as they are cartoon characters). Much of the interplay has a Millennials versus Boomers dynamic and the show has been conceived as a way to introduce new Modern Country acts that "guest star" as cartoon versions of themselves.

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