In the fourth season of Showtime’s hit dramedy “Californication,” the long-suffering daughter of David Duchovny’s Hank Moody did what every angst-filled teenage girl would do when her sex-and-booze addict of a father continued down a dark, spiraling path of nameless women, liquor and drugs: She joined a rock band.

Becca Moody, played by 17-year-old Madeleine Martin, had picked up the guitar early in the series, and viewers have seen the precocious, sarcastic teen improve her ax skills over the years.

After hitting the Venice boardwalk to pay her dues playing for cash (she wants to earn enough to move out on her own), she meets a gang of equally angst-ridden teen girls, fronted by Zoe Kravitz, who invite her to join their punky outfit, the Queens of Dogtown.

The show’s music supervisors, Budd Carr and Nora Felder, said Becca joining the band was a natural progression for the character –- but the addition of a band to the scripted show proved “interesting.”

“We’ve had in-camera stuff before,” Carr said. “Becca’s character plays guitar. We got a heads up that she was going to join a band. And it was, 'OK, what kind of band?' It took a little bit of a nudge to figure out, but we knew that integrity would be there.”

 
The FX channel’s crime-drama series “Justified,” which just launched its second season and is airing Wednesday nights, is set in the coal-mining country of southeastern Kentucky. That gives it something of a “Coal Miner’s Godfather” vibe with its storyline of a deputy U.S. marshal who patrols the back roads of Appalachia on the lookout for dope dealers, thieves and murderers.

The rural setting makes it an ideal forum for an Americana-heavy soundtrack, but even roots-music fans might shake their heads in disbelief during the Feb. 23 episode “Harlan County Line,” when none other than singer-songwriter Dave Alvin makes a guest appearance.

Not only does Alvin appear on-camera -- as a musician in an out-of-the-way roadhouse where star Timothy Olyphant, as Dep. Raylan Givens, is having a clandestine meeting -- but he also sings an original song he wrote for the episode.

When Givens is joined at the bar by a guest who asks what he’s doing, he responds, “I’m waiting for Dave Alvin to go on.” Sure enough, there’s Alvin tuning up and then launching into the song “Harlan County Line,” backed by guitarist Rick Shea and other members of his real-life band. But even miracles have to end sometime, and after a few seconds of the song, the action shifts away from the bar and the episode moves on.

It turns out that the show’s creators are longtime Alvin fans themselves, and decided during the second season to write him into the show. We’re told at Pop & Hiss that his song will surface in its entirety on a forthcoming “Justified” soundtrack album. It’s also scheduled to be on a new Alvin solo album that's due in June.

-- Randy Lewis  

Photo of Dave Alvin. Credit: Beth Herzhaft.

 
Nat King Cole fans have a Valentine's week treat in store this year: His estate will begin posting episodes of his groundbreaking 1950s series “The Nat King Cole TV Show” for digital downloading on iTunes.

For a too-brief period in 1956-57, the always urbane and elegant singer-pianist hosted some of the most revered names in jazz and pop on his NBC series: Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mercer, Mel Tormé and Peggy Lee, among others.

The episodes have been remastered for the first time from the original black-and-white kinescopes, which sets them apart from a DVD release of highlights from the series released in 2002 without the cooperation of Cole’s family.

“It’s about time,” Cole’s widow, Maria Hawkins Cole,  88, said by phone from her home in Florida. “I don’t know what the first releases are—there’s one he did with the Mills Brothers, and they were terrific. This many years later, you hear them and there still isn’t a group around that sounds like them. Offhand, that’s probably my favorite one.”

“I have to tell you, in those days I didn’t realize how important some of those people were,” she said. “But as time went by it became clear what geniuses they were."

As must have been the case for a lot of people, when news broke about the death Monday of music mogul and TV impresario Don Kirshner, one of the first names that went through my mind was that of Paul Shaffer, for the spot-on Kirshner impersonation the comedian and musician did numerous times on “Saturday Night Live”  during his tenure on the show.

Shaffer spoke with Pop & Hiss shortly after he finished taping Tuesday’s episode of “Late Show With David Letterman,” on which he’s led the house band for years, talking about his relationship with Kirshner over the years and the development of his comedy bit.

“Back in 1977, I did a show for Don Kirshner and Norman Lear that was a partnership between the two of them: ‘The Year at the Top.’ In it, Greg Evigan and I played rock performers who had sold their souls to the devil. It played on CBS for just five episodes in the summer of ’77. Nonethless, I became friendly with Don during that time. I was a fan, and I knew about his association with what we know now as Brill Building rock, which was my favorite kind of music anyway, so we struck up a friendship.

“One day he called me, and ‘Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert’ was on the air at the time, and he told me,  ‘I’m going on-camera to do the introductions on the show.’ Up  until  this point, it had been completely sober [voiceover] introductons of the acts, but he had decided to do them on-camera.

He said, ‘A lot of people think maybe I’m stiff, but [Ed] Sullivan was stiff, and he had the gig.’ He asked if I wanted to come down and watch him tape his first introduction. It was at some studio near Hollywood and Vine. Of course I jumped at the chance and saw him tape those first introductions.

"He was a great character, a lovable character, certainly the most colorful character I’ve ever met. He was very fast talking, always very emotional about the music he loved and the music he was making. He was the ultimate when it came to promoting the songs he loved. He’d go on these runs and talk so fast that sometimes he’d break himself up.

“But when he went on-camera, he slowed right down. I guess he was nervous. He froze a little bit, but he still spoke from the heart. I found it very humorous, and I never forgot it. When the show ‘Year at the Top’ didn’t get picked up, I got my gig at 'SNL' back. I’d left 'SNL' and moved to California to do the show, but when I came back, I brought that impression back with me and started doing it.

“On one show we needed a way to set up a certain musical number, a rock number -- Garrett Morris did Tina Turner -- and I said I could do it as Don Kirshner. So that’s how it came about.

“He was asked all through the years, ‘Didn’t that impression that Paul Shaffer did [tick] you off?' He always said, ‘No, I loved it.’ l loved him, he loved me, and he loved the impression because he knew it came out of love for him.”

“I gave Don a call and spoke to him over the weekend, but I didn’t think he was going to slip away so soon. He sounded weak, but he rallied when he heard I was on the phone. He said ‘Paul, babe!’ He went right into his Don Kirshner for me. I certainly consider him a friend, and I’m very saddened by his passing.”

-- Randy Lewis

 
Reason No. 785 that “there will always be an England”: The U.K. pop singles chart this week is topped by the latest winner of Simon Cowell’s hit show “The X Factor,” coming to U.S.  TV screens soon. But on his way to No. 1 with his single “When We Collide,” newly crowned pop star Matt Cardle got a surprise challenge from a nearly 50-year-old U.S. surf-rock classic.

The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird’’ -- the one boasting the Shakespearean refrain, “Bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word” -- debuted at No 3, right behind Cardle and the No. 2 single, Rihanna’s “What’s My Name,” and ahead of the Black Eyed Peas’ “The Time (Dirty Bit),” last week’s No. 1 place holder.

“Every Christmas, the No. 1 single has been by the person from that show,” said Tim Livingston, director of sales and publicisty for Sundazed Music, the New York-based reissue specialty label that has the rights to “Surfin’ Bird” in the U.S. “Evidently, a bunch of people over there got fed up with that, and last year they had a grass-roots campaign to try to get Rage Against the Machine to No. 1.”

It worked: Rage’s 1992 song “Killing in the Name” outsold 2009 “X Factor” winner Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” and wrested the No. 1 slot from Cowell’s talent-contest victor during Christmas week.

When it came time to select a theme song for MTV’s upcoming adaptation of the hit British teen drama “Skins,” the network wanted to try something a bit unconventional. So in October the brass at the network quietly launched an almost off-the-grid campaign where undiscovered artists could submit original tracks for the series. 

“[We] sort of recognized the disconnect between the broader face of music and the changing face of MTV,” said Joe Cuello, the network’s vice president of creative music integration. “There is still a great music story to be told, but it’s simply grown from just the music video. The question we were faced with was how do we take the MTV brand, and all of its shows, and connect it to the music?”

Instead of rolling out a glossy promotion to tout the contest MTV partnered with Our Stage, a site that allows unsigned acts to promote their music and compete for monthly competitions -- past winners have been awarded with opening slots for artists such as Drake and John Mayer, snagged stage time at Bonnaroo and secured mentoring sessions with industry giants.

Cuello said the network had been toying with the idea of crowd-sourcing music for quite some time but had been reluctant to utilize any one specific portal. 

“We have so many music heads at MTV. We wanted to collect it in an organic way without any protocol,” he said. “[‘Skins’] as a brand already has this incredible music sensibility established. It’s about independent music and sort of left of center. In many ways it reflects the MTVU brand, or ‘120 Minutes.’”

“It’s about really cool independent music that can range from bands on independent labels, or in this case artists that are unsigned.”

 

It’s hard to believe that with everything Social Distortion has been through during the veteran O.C. punk band’s 30-plus year career, a national TV appearance never happened before Monday night’s performance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Social D singer-songwriter-guitarist Mike Ness led his bandmates through “Machine Gun Blues” (above) from the forthcoming album “Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes” that’s slated for release Jan. 18, the band’s first new collection since 2004's "Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll."

I spoke with Ness over the summer on a day when he was working on that track, which is something of a history lesson akin to “1945,” Social D’s look at the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Ness recalls scribbling the words to "1945" out one day in school when he felt bored out of his mind in class.

The new song takes the perspective of an old-school gangster during the Depression and Prohibition.

“I wrote ‘Machine Gun Blues’ the same way I wrote ‘1945,’ ” he said during a break in sessions at the Burbank studio where he was mixing the album. “I obviously wasn’t there in 1934. It’s a gangster’s couple-day trip, and what his life might have been like.  Instead of glorifying it, he’s not digging what’s going on, even though he’s in a nice suit. He knows it’s short-lived, it’s going to be over soon and it’s going to be ugly.”

With its long-running “Divas” concert franchise, VH1 has over the years managed to snag an impressive array of female powerhouse vocalists, including veterans such as Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and younger divas Beyoncé, Kelly Clarkson and Miley Cyrus.

Dubbed “VH1 Divas: Salute the Troops,” this year's special will feature performances from Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Sugarland and Keri Hilson –- all of whom are scheduled to tape the event in front of military personnel at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego.

Paramore will visit Marines, soldiers, airmen, sailors, members of the Coast Guards and reservists stationed at an undisclosed military base in the Middle East. The band’s performance will be broadcast via satellite.

“VH1 Divas: Salute the Troops” will be broadcasat Dec. 5 and will also be shown internationally on the American Forces Network.

-- Gerrick D. Kennedy

twitter.com/gerrickkennedy

Photo: Katy Perry performs at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards at Staples Center in Los Angeles in 2009. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

Right on the heels of her showstopping Video Music Award performance, Florence Welsh and her band the Machine will throw on their dancing shoes to perform on ABC’s hit competition “Dancing With the Stars.”

The London-based singer is tapped for the special “Acoustic Week” theme in which she will give a rendition of her hit “Dog Days Are Over” during Tuesday’s result show.

After delivering what most critics, including our own Todd Martens, thought was the highlight performance of this year’s VMAs (she also snagged an award that night), the band has continued to cash in on a breakout year. The band was recently chosen to open a pair of dates on U2's rescheduled North American tour next summer.

Welsh is gearing up for the re-release of her critically acclaimed debut album, “Between Two Lungs,” which is to hit stores Nov. 15. She and the Machine will play a three-date stint Nov. 6-8 at the Wiltern.

Her performance on “Dancing With the Stars” airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on ABC.

-- Gerrick D. Kennedy

twitter.com/gerrickkennedy

Photo: Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine performs at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 12. Credit: Mike Blake / Reuters

 
The Beatles' nation-rocking U.S. television performances in 1964 and 1965 have resurfaced this week in a new DVD package,“The 4 Complete Ed Sullivan Shows Starring the Beatles,” providing a look not just at the group’s American breakthrough, but also the cultural context in which they made it.

The set includes 20 numbers from the Fab Four, a few of the songs repeated from show to show, as presented by Sullivan on Feb. 9, Feb. 16 and Feb. 23, 1964, and their final live appearance on his program on Sept. 12, 1965.

The group's performances take place amid the latter-day vaudeville variety show that Sullivan hosted on Sunday nights, which bolsters the revolutionary feeling of their arrival on U.S. shores. Their segments -- and songs -- still come across as timeless, their energy and fresh sound accentuated by the stylized geometric design of the sets surrounding them.

They’re all the more distinctive seen alongside such old-school entertainers as Welsh singer-actress Tessie O’Shea performing a medley of show tunes, comedians such as Allen & Rossi and impressionist Frank Gorshin, and the acrobat and puppet acts that Sullivan, and his audience, seemed to love so much. The shows are presented with the original commercials intact as well, from sponsors such as Lipton Tea and Aero Shave shaving cream.

When it was time to revisit the iconic theme song for CBS’ “Hawaii-Five-0” redux, composer Brian Tyler decided to look back to his childhood for inspiration.

“I was a huge fan. I had seen reruns as a kid and loved the theme song. That was one that I loved playing,” Tyler said. “I mentioned that the show could really use the original theme song. I didn’t want to force an update that really didn’t need fixing.”

Tyler said it was important for him to keep the integrity of the original composition because viewers associate the theme with the show.

“The theme is so iconic. It's one of the few themes that cant be separated from the original show it came from. The others that come to mind are ‘Mission Impossible’ and ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” he said. “It was instrumental to stay close to the original and not go too out of the box, and into the computer and synthesize it. I didn’t want to go into it anyway that would make light if it.”

Cee-Lo Green wasn’t exactly looking to become a television star -- until the opportunity was handed to him.

When the cable network Fuse went to the Gnarls Barkley rapper-singer with the idea for a new music show, “Lay It Down,” he couldn’t turn away.

“It’s more than me wanting to do this, it’s someone wanted me to do it, which was very flattering and a compliment in the fact that I was asked to be a part of it,” Green said. “That was gratifying for me.”

In the interview- and performance-based show, set to premiere in October, Green will act as host -- and sometimes collaborator -- as he puts artists such as Lil Jon, Ludacris, T-Pain, N.E.R.D., Janelle Monáe and Public Enemy in the hot seat to break down their biggest hits and discuss the inspiration behind specific verses and beats. It's a setting reminiscent, says Green, of a "modernized midnight television special."

He said he hopes the show will provide fans an inside look at and artist's creative process and offer little-known details behind some of the hits. For instance, Public Enemy’s “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” was written in the back of a U-Haul truck by Flavor Flav.

“I think this was an opportunity for everyone to be intimate about their own process, approach or formula, but true art isn't exposed in its entirety. I believe it's an opportunity to express a bit and reveal a bit but still maintain some mystique,” Green said.

Sal LoCurto, senior vice president of programming at Fuse, said adding shows such as Green's to the network's programming block only further sets it apart from other music networks such as BET, VH1 and MTV --  all of which have turned their attention to reality television.

“We are the only music channel. [BET, VH1 and MTV are] past tense.  They’re not really music channels,” LoCurto said. “I always say it’s kinda like rooting for the Dodgers and expecting to see Sandy Koufax pitch. It’s a bygone era.”

Jason Hervey, executive producer of the show, said Green was targeted because of his vast career, be it from his days as a member of Goodie Mob to his solo career to being one half of Gnarls Barkley.

“He can connect to the artist and the subject really on any level, and there is such a knowledge and a passion for music and his fellow performer,” Harvey said. “I think there's an admiration, you know, and there's a point of view that really is unrivaled unless you've walked in the many different shoes within the musical career that he has."

With production on the first season of the show wrapped, Green is back to focusing on his upcoming solo album, “Lady Killer,” as well as a new Goodie Mob album -- his first with the group since 1999’s “World Party.”

-- Gerrick D. Kennedy

twitter.com/GerrickKennedy

Photo credit: Arista Records