The Naked Brothers Band: Dressed for kid-rock success

By JONATHAN TAKIFFPhiladelphia Daily News
takiffj@phillynews.com 215-854-5960
Nat and Alex Wolff may be young - verging on 14 and just-turned-11, respectively. But, oh, do they have a sense of pop history. And style.
If you're a cable- or satellite-TV viewer in their target demographic - primary school kids (ages 6 and up) and 'tweens (ages 9-14) - you probably know this versatile acting, singing, playing and composing duo already. And maybe you're panting at the prospect of seeing them live in concert at TLA on Sunday afternoon at "Fully Clothed and On Tour."
Since its February 2007 debut, Nat and Alex have been stars of the Nickelodeon series "The Naked Brothers Band." As you might surmise, it's a sometimes silly, sometimes sensitive sit-com/mockumentary with songs, evolving around a very, very young rock band and their pals.
It's a fantasy that Alex characterizes as " 'Spinal Tap' meets 'The Little Rascals.' "
Now at the outset of its third season, the show is among the highest-rated on Nick, has translated well to foreign markets and has spun off successful Naked Brothers CDs, DVDs and, now, video games, too.
It's very much a family affair: Nat and Alex's mom, Polly Draper (best known as Ellyn Warren on the TV show "thirtysomething"), writes the scripts. Dad Michael Wolff, a noted jazz pianist and composer, plays their goofy on-screen dad and helps out (strictly behind the scenes) with the band's chipper, pop-rocking arrangements.
But any suggestion that the senior Wolff might be ghost-writing catchy Naked Brothers songs like "I Don't Want to Go to School," "Eventually" or "Blueberry Cotton" was quickly and strongly denied by the cubs, in our recent after-school chat.
Q: So how has the show evolved, and how is it playing out on tour for real?
Nat: Each season, we're doing a big project on the show. The first year, we were making an album. Last year, we were on the road. This season, we're making a feature film - and in fact, we've changed the emphasis of the shows from half-hour episodes to more hour-long specials, because the audience seems to like them better.
So far, the real tour is going great. We sing and play - Alex on drums, me on piano and guitar - with a different band than you see on the show with us. They're older, in their early twenties. They've all done this touring thing before, but tell us this is "the coolest." They're like our mentors on the road, showing us the ropes.
Alex: We're just going out on weekends so we don't miss school. [The family lives in New York City, where the show is filmed.] The first night of the tour was at the Stone Pony, in Asbury Park [how Springsteen-tracking is that?], and the girls in the audience were screaming like crazy. I was wishing I'd worn more serious earplugs. But we like it that they're excited.
Q: From watching the TV show, I get a sense you've probably seen the Beatles movies "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help" at least a couple of times. I really liked the episode last season where you went to New Orleans to help out flood victims and were lambasted by the press after they misheard you saying you're "bigger than Santa." Very John Lennon. And this season, you've got your first, very fanciful animated special coming up. How "Yellow Submarine" is that?
Nat: I've probably watched "A Hard Day's Night" 30 times and "Help" 40 times. I'm not kidding. You feel you get to know the Beatles a bit from watching those movies. I think a lot of our show has that same kind of feel. Yeah, we're a kid rock group, but almost completely normal people in a completely abnormal situation. The music is written by kids - me and my brother - from a kid's point of view. And all the kids in the show are our real friends. So everything is relatable.
Alex: I learned to play the drums from watching Ringo in "A Hard Day's Night." I was into the drums before then, but that's where I learned stuff like Ringo's cross-stick move. Hope he doesn't sue me for copying it!
And did you know that the Beatles didn't really supply the voices for "Yellow Submarine"? They just had two other guys voicing the four parts, which is why Ringo sounds just like John. But in our first animated special ["The Supetastic 6," debuting Nov. 26] we did our own voices.
Q: So is it true that your parents were dead set against you guys having a performing career so young, that you pushed all this on them?
Nat: It was kind of the reverse of the stage-mother thing. They were very reluctant to let me act, but I was obsessive about it. I did some plays, I studied older movies with people like Dustin Hoffman and James Dean. In music, you don't need to be asked, you can play music any time. But you don't get to act until someone picks you. That's why I had to be so pushy.
Eventually, my mom came up with the concept for the Naked Brothers Band from watching us grow up in music.
Alex: I actually came up with the name when we were taking a bath together and singing in the tub. I was one and a half but already talking a lot. In fact, I'd already written my autobiography, "My Life Till Now."
Q: Nat, all your female fans want to know - are you and your on-screen love interest, Rosalina, played by Allie DiMeco, really an item?
Nat: Not really. We're just friends. She's even older in real life than on the show - in eleventh grade. But the message there, that I could possibly attract her, is awesome. There's hope for the younger guy.
Q: What do you think of "The Naked Brothers - the Video Game," now out on PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii and DS? Did you have much input there?
Alex: It's awesome. We got to play it on the set. It's like "Rock Band." It has all our songs, and we got to see and approve how the characters look.
Nat: Alex and I look like we're 25. That's so cool! *

TLA, 334 South St., 4:30 p.m. Sunday, $20 and $15 (in four-pack purchase), 215-336-2000, www.livenation.com. The next Naked Brothers Band TV special, "Operation Mojo" debuts at 9 p.m. Nov. 22 and their first animated special, "The Supetastic 6," debuts at 8:30 p.m. Nov. 26, both on Nickelodeon.

A Case of Religious Discrimination

(can i change the headline for this to 'The Ten Commandments; holier than thou' just for funzies.)

Displays of the Ten Commandments have long been a lightning rod in constitutional law, and so they are again today. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in a challenge to a city’s decision to allow the Ten Commandments to be placed in a public park, while refusing to allow a different religion’s display. The court should rule that that city’s decision violates the First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah, has a city park, known as Pioneer Park, that includes various unattended displays. These include historical artifacts from the town, a Sept. 11 memorial, and a Ten Commandments monument that was given to the city by the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a national civic group.
A religious organization called Summum, which was founded in 1975 and is based in Salt Lake City, applied to install its own monument in the park. The monument it proposed would include the group’s Seven Principles of Creation (also called the Seven Aphorisms), which it believes were inscribed on tablets handed down from God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Pleasant Grove City rejected Summum’s application. It told the group that it had a decades-old practice of only accepting displays that directly related to the city’s history, or that were donated by groups with longstanding ties to the community. But this was not a firm policy at the time. It was only later that the city adopted a written policy enshrining these criteria.
Summum sued, arguing that the rejection of its monument violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver agreed. In allowing monuments in its park, the court ruled, Pleasant Grove City had no right to discriminate on the basis of the content of those monuments. The city was free to ban all unattended displays if it wanted to. But once it decided to allow such displays, the court ruled, it had no right to permit the Ten Commandments but bar the Seven Principles of Creation.
The federal appeals court reached the right result, but regrettably, it ducked the issue at the heart of the case, which turns on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The real problem is that Pleasant Grove City elevated one religion, traditional Christianity, over another, Summum. The founders regarded this sort of religious preference as so odious that they included a specific provision in the First Amendment prohibiting it. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has a bad record on Establishment Clause cases, which made it easier for all of the parties to treat the case as a simple speech case.
But as the American Jewish Committee, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and other groups argue in a friend-of-the-court brief, the Supreme Court should not make this mistake. It should squarely confront the religious discrimination underlying Pleasant Grove City’s rejection of Summum’s monument and make clear that the city violated the Establishment Clause.
There is no shortage of churches, synagogues and private parcels of land where the Ten Commandments could be displayed without the need to include the credos of alternative faiths. Public property like Pioneer Park must be open to all religions on an equal basis — or open to none at all.