Cowsills Music Group

Cowsills documentary film reveals a darker side

They were young. They were from Newport. They were at the top of the Billboard charts. They were on “The Ed Sullivan Show” singing with their mother, for Pete’s sake. It was the late 1960s and the whole country was watching them.

They were — and are — The Cowsills, the family band that later served as the inspiration for the hit TV series “The Partridge Family.”

Today the surviving members are spread out across the country — California, Oregon, Louisiana. But they still get together to play as a group, most recently at the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut and at B.B. King’s club just down the block from Times Square.

And they are going to be in Providence Wednesday night, Aug. 10, in a homecoming at Veterans Memorial Auditorium for Flickers: The Rhode Island International Film Festival that will mark the first film festival screening of “Family Band: The Cowsills Story.” The documentary will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience and a concert featuring Susan, Paul and Bob Cowsill. Bob, on the phone from Milwaukee where he was performing, says it will be “a Peter, Paul and Mary shot because we didn’t have the budget to bring in the eight-piece band we usually play with.”

“We don’t do a lot of shows,” adds Bob, 61, “because if we only play our four hits we can wrap up our career in 16 minutes.” So those shows are padded out with “cover tunes of our era and some of Susan’s tunes.”

Bob, who lives in Woodland Hills, Calif., has had a regular solo gig at a local pub for 26 years. “I’d settled into that life,” says the father of five and grandfather of four, when his regular routine was shattered one night by the arrival of longtime fan, film director Louise Palanker. “She’d been cruising our website and saw that I was playing in Woodland Hills near her and she came in.

Quick quips: Monkees, Parliament-Funkadelic, Don Was, Cowsills ...

A spokesman for Mickey Dolenz has told TMZ that the blame does not fall on the group for the cancellation of the balance of the Monkees reunion tour. "Management had booked a number of dates with the venues without running them by the group first, so we had to cancel the remaining dates. Micky is disappointed but his solo tour is still going strong for the rest of the year."


TMZ has also reported that a special guitar owned by Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist Shaunna Hall was stolen off the band's tour bus on August 5 in Memphis. The guitar was specially designed for Hall, made from carbon fiber and weighing only 4.5 pounds to accommodate an injury to her arm and shoulder last year.


Don Was, founder of the group Was-Not Was and producer for a myriad of artists, is the new Chief Creative Officer for Blue Not Records.
Was said of his appointment "It's a profound honor to be a part of this legendary company alongside such prodigious record men as Dan [McCarroll] and Ian [Ralfini]. We dedicate ourselves to furthering Blue Note's artistic tradition of unbridled creativity, talent, intelligence and GROOVE!"


The surviving members of the Cowsills will be playing a concert in Providence, RI on Wednesday after the showing of a new documentary on the group's career. Family Band: The Cowsills Story is being shown at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.


Ira Heilicher, Minneapolis-based producer of 60's hits, passed away on Tuesday from complications of pneumonia at the age of 65. He helmed such hits as Liar Liar by the Castaways, Six Days on the Road by Dave Dudley and Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen.


The digital music business has one less competitor. Wal-Mart has announced that they will be closing their MP3 store at the end of August. They started in the digital business in 2003 as competition for Apple's iTunes but never was able to get much of the market.

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