At the age of 43, Drew Harrison is too young to have been much of a Beatles’ fan during the Fab Four’s heyday ... or is he?
"My first memory is hearing ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ " said Harrison, one of the five members of the Sun Kings who play at Henfling’s on Saturday. "I must have been a baby. I remember being on my hands and knees."
Despite being just slightly askew of the ideal Beatles’ Baby-Boomer demographic, Harrison and his Sun Kings bandmates are embracing the Beatles on-stage in a show that’s meant to evoke the you-are-there power of Beatlemania.
" look and/or dress like the actual Beatles. "We’ll mix it up, playing some of the early stuff early in the show up to the later stuff. Who knows? We might decide to play the whole side two to ‘Abbey Road.’"
Though they eschew the Beatles haircuts and on-stage manner, the Sun Kings are committed to re-creating the music exactly how generations of rock fans have heard it. Using the Beatles’ recordings as reference, the band would love to reach the stage where fans can close their eyes and hear the Beatles.
The Sun Kings — guitarist Harrison, keyboardist Michael Barrett, guitarist Raul Quesada, bassist Peter LoMenzo and drummer Steve Scarpelli — are all veteran musicians who hail from Alameda, near Oakland. While playing for various bands, they’d jam together and return again and again to Beatles songs. Eventually, they decided to form a band devoted solely to the Beatles.
The band’s name is drawn from the song "Sun King," a little-known tune on the "Abbey Road" album that begins "Here Comes the Sun King," as opposed to "Here Comes the Sun," another song on the same album.
| Though Harrison was a mere eight years old when the Beatles called it quits, he was continually drawn to John, Paul, George and Ringo as he got older. Identifying closely with John Lennon and loving many of Lennon’s trademark compositions such as "Dear Prudence," Harrison was, he said, "devastated" when Lennon was shot and killed in 1980. |
Of course, live Beatles music isn’t anything exotic to Santa Cruz audiences who’ve thrilled to the Santa Cruz White Album Ensemble for two years now. But the approach to the Beatles’ body of work is different with the two groups. While the White Album Ensemble performs a certain Beatles’ album from start to finish, the Sun Kings take a chronological approach, beginning the show with what Harrison calls a lot of "Hamburg energy," a reference to the Beatles’ early days playing rock standards in West Germany.
For Saturday’s show, Harrison said that the Kings will give fans a good taste of the Beatles’ psychedelic period with covers of "I Am the Walrus," "Glass Onion" and "A Day in the Life."
"We can’t put ourselves out there as the Beatles on stage," said Harrison. "We’re not that cute. A lot of us are beginning to show our age a bit. So, we have to do it with the music."
Contact Wallace Baine at wbaine@santacruzsentinel.com.
If You GoWHAT: The Sun Kings.
WHEN: 9 p.m. Saturday.
WHERE: Henfling’s Tavern, 9450 Highway 9, Ben Lomond.
TICKETS: $10.
DETAILS: 336-8811.
s-serif">n Prescription drugs cost more in the United States than anywhere else because we are one of the few countries that don't regulate the cost of drugs. Americans have been going to Canada and Mexico for years in order to obtain the medications they so dearly need. First by car and now by cyberspace. And now GlaxoSmithKline is going to try and stop Canadian pharmacies from selling to United States citizens, mainly seniors, by refusing to supply those pharmacies. A recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, dated Jan. 23, by Tom Cohen of The Associated Press tells about just one such Canadian pharmacy with nearly 100,000 U.S. consumers. The pharmacy is crossborderpharmacy.com based in Calgary, Alberta.
n The next meeting of the Santa Cruz County Seniors Commission will be held on Monday, April 14 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at the Dominican Rehabilitation Solarium, 610 Frederick St. in Santa Cruz.
Chuck Molnar can be contacted at the Seniors Commission Office 454-4864 or at chuckmolnar@earthlink.net.
