The Record Parlour is normally the home to 15,000 vinyl discs, but Tuesday night the Hollywood shop was taken over by just one, which isn't really a vinyl disc but a digital download: At Long Last … Music and Songs From Arrested Development.
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Had the band played all the songs on the album, we'd still be at The Record Parlour as there are 42:
More than a digital record release party, it was a congratulatory coronation for David Schwartz, the composer for the best TV show ever about life in Orange County.
None other than series creator Mitch Hurwitz led the packed cheering section for Schwartz and his band, which includes his daughter Lucy Schwartz, an LA singer-songwriter who performed on many Arrested Development songs. Close your eyes and it's her voice, with a fake British accent, singing “Mr. F.”
Meanwhile, the 23-year-old's single “Boomerang” played over the closing credits of the fourth season finale. It was also the finale to a short set played at the in-store by the Schwartzes and their bandmates, and while it's actually a love song, the lyrics speak to the longing Arrested Development fans felt during the six-year hiatus between Fox's cancellation after three seasons and Netflix's resurrection last May. It's the longing we're feeling all over again as an anticipated movie and fifth season remain up in the air.
Every time you come around again
I only want to say goodbye
Every time you say you're leaving again
I want you back just like my
Want you back just like my
Boom boom boomerang
But did they play the Tahitian ukelele-powered theme song? Of course they played the Tahitian ukelele-powered theme song.
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They also played “Get Away,” the song Mark Cherry wrote and sang to tell G.O.B., nicknamed “Getaway,” to leave their Hollywood Blvd. posse.
Immediately after the set was fin, Hurwitz and David Schwartz were ushered to an outdoor patio, past a pair serving delicious “Cuatro de Mayo” tacos, to a spot in front of an Arrested Development cast poster that served as a backdrop for photos.
After a few snaps, Hurwitz insisted that the rest of the band be brought over. He even helped stage the shot, holding a large sunshade umbrella off to its side so all the band members could fit in the frame.
“You guys were so good,” Hurwitz told them. “It was thrilling.”
I was able to tell him I only recently learned he was one of Newport Beach's Chipyard kids. I vividly recall the Los Angeles Times story on these two brothers who ran a successful chocolate chip cookie business out of a shop in the Balboa Fun Zone. I even remember the Times photo of them in front of The Chipyard.
“That story came out in, what, '74?” I asked Hurwitz.
“Seventy-six,” he answered. “What wasn't known to readers at the time that this was really a big custody battle.”
Hurwitz's parents had divorced, and then-13-year-old Mitch and his brother Michael, 16, split their time living with their mother in a Costa Mesa apartment and their father in a Newport Beach home. While the boys were the face of The Chipyard, their father Mark Hurwitz was the one “really pushing it,” Mitch confided, adding he was a typical teenager who really didn't want to work that hard–6,000 cookies a day!
My wife asked during the drive home what Hurwitz and I had been talking about, and when I mentioned The Chipyard she lit up.
“That's him!?!”
Her family stayed at a Balboa Island house every summer, and they would regularly go to the cookie shop because they were told the two boys who started it were raising money for college. The biz put Estancia High School grad Mitch Hurwitz through Georgetown, where he majored in English and Theology before chucking it all for Hollywood, and his brother through medical school. Dr. Michael Hurwitz is now a Newport Beach surgeon.
But enough about cookies and cutters. We're here for the music, maaaan! A little later upstairs at The Record Parlour, Schwartz followed up on what he'd told the crowd about being proud of Lucy and publicly apologizing for dragging her into the recording studio when she was younger. Now he conceded, “It's a little nerve wracking when it's your daughter” up there.
He found the Arrested Development songs only clicked if he tried not to be funny and to follow the general storylines.
“If it was a rock song,” he said, “we tried to make it the greatest rock song of that era.”
Are there more songs to come? Hurwitz had mentioned earlier he is hoping for more Bluth family follies, everyone in the cast is down with it, and he wants everyone else back–Schwartz and band included. Hurwitz is just waiting for Netflix …
“I'm sure it will happen,” he said with the confidence of a cookie hawker.
Varèse Sarabande Records is selling digital downloads of At Long Last … Music and Songs From Arrested Development for $14.98. Visit varesesarabande.com.
See also:
10 Punk Albums to Listen to Before you Die
10 Jazz Albums to Listen to Before You Die
10 Metal Albums to Listen to Before You Die
20 Greatest OC Albums of All Time: The Complete List
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.