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Not if you live a thousand years are you likely to have a life story as wild. Alan Aldridge is the cold-water-flat kid who grew up to be design guru to the Beatles and not only beat out John Lennon for a girl’s affection one evening at the height of Beatlemania, but slow-danced with Princess Margaret, the Queen of England’s sis, in the palace she shared with her husband. And that’s just the start of it. In fact, there were so many jaw-dropping, hilarious stories at the Tip last night it became clear Alan will have to come back for an encore – he himself said we didn’t even make it out of the Sixties. So stay tuned. And if you can’t wait, check out his new illustrated memoir, The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes, which he delightfully autographed to dozens of Tip guests. Many thanks to The Man for an incomparable performance and a fitting finish to year one of D/C’s Toast of the Tip.
This just in: Duncan/Channon has been awarded two prestigious National Addys, for the much-honored, Deep Zoom-based Hard Rock memorabilia website (plus embeddable widget) and our own new, blogalicious site. Competing against, well, just about every ad agency in the entire ad universe, digital and analog, all of whom had received either silver or gold in regional Addys in order to qualify, D/C took home hard-earned silvers in the categories of Consumer Website and Interactive Self-Promotion. Hooray for brilliant Addy judges.
“He designed posters for the Rolling Stones; was best friends with Jimi Hendrix; and served as the creative director for the original Hard Rock Cafe…; he even penned a best-seller… Back in the 1960s, Aldridge was as deified in the world of graphic design as the Fab Four were in music. John Lennon even appointed Aldridge the group’s official design consultant.”
“In addition… he was known for his 1968 poster for Andy Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, in which he transformed a woman’s naked body into a veritable Chelsea Hotel… [and] produced psycho-surreal images for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Elton John (the cover of the 1975 album Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy).”
And that’s not even half the story. But we couldn’t be more excited to say he’ll be telling more of it this June 19 at Duncan/Channon’s sixth Toast of the Tip event, where he will also be autographing copies of his new memoir/art anthology, The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes. As his Beatle bosses once put it: a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
Never mind why. It was just part of the rollicking visit by legendary restaurant designer/developer/owner Pat Kuleto to the pseudo-legendary Tip last Thursday night. Not only did the irrepressible Kuleto provide fascinating insights into his design and development process – which is grounded in storytelling, of imagining the building as a narrative motivated by site, city and history – he also provided insight into his romantic initiation. Unfortunately, he then challenged his interviewer, a certain D/C ECD, to do the same. Luckily, the ECD did not also take him up on the challenge to sing, which Kuleto, a former folksinger, did beautifully, entirely accapella.
On behalf of a mesmerized, fire-code-defying crowd that spilled out the door of the Tip and a completely agog Duncan/Channon staff, we offer a tip of the Tip’s hat to Pat Kuleto, who is both one of the world’s great restaurateurs and raconteurs.
The same day that news arrives about Toby getting hired by some TV show called the Colbert Report comes news that Ian “Sausage” Dailey (above left; second from right at right), longtime Duncan/Channon media planner, dismissed two years ago on unspecified “moral” grounds (well, yeah, after he left for B-school), is president of the team that has won the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize, a prestigious national student competition sponsored by MIT, Boston utility NSTAR and the US government. Again, an unholy mix of pride and envy swells our hearts, if not other parts. Hey, Sausage and Toby, don’t forget the little people.
Is it a measure of how high we’ve risen or how low Colbert has fallen? News arrives today that former Duncan/Channon copywriter, Toby Wexner (né Max Werner, pictured above left), has been hired as a writer for the Colbert Report. (Yeah, we’d never heard of it either.)
Toby/Max was green as a tree frog with swine flu when he arrived at our august institution, straight from four years at some Slacker U. on Harvard Square. D/C-style tough love helped transform the callow amphibian into a prince of an advertising scribe, yet a mere five years later he was told, in no uncertain terms, to get out and stay out. Well, after he announced he was going to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (good luck with that!).
So today’s Alumni News is offered as a cautionary tale. After all, you wouldn’t want to wind up like Toby: national TV, fancy NY crib, big salary, famous friends, and all the nose candy you can hoover. Sucks.
Update 17 June: Two days into the job and he’s already on camera.
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