The McCharmlys charm local fans — and each other
'Every single person in this band has been a part of other bands that I love and admire,' said lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist Angie Monroy, who started the band in 2018.
Monroy was a fan of bassist Yari Bolanos, who was playing with a band called the Mellows in Texas. Dummer Cole Maxwell was a fan of the McCharmlys before he joined the band.
'I was a fan of this band for a long time, and then I saw Angie at a show,' said Maxwell. 'I was, like, what could the be the harm in introducing myself and saying how much I love the music?'
Guitarist Eddie Gutierrez was last to join the band in 2021.
'Angie says that when I joined the band at that time, it felt like the band really solidified,' Gutierrez said.
The Santa Ana-based group borrows their name from an obscure Beatles interview in which John Lennon introduces the band as 'George Parasol, Ringo Stone and Paul McCharmly.'
'I guess technically, John Lennon named us,' said Monroy.
They have been making a name for themselves in the local Orange County and Los Angeles music scene with a sound that blends elements of surf rock, '60s girl groups and old-fashioned rock 'n' roll. Their latest record, 'You'll Be Fine,' dropped on Jan. 14, released on Nu-Tone Records, a sister label to Hi-Tide Recordings.
The band celebrated with a listening party at Bar 616 in Santa Ana where their own fans got to hear the song for the first time and watch a screening of the pulp noir-style music video.
'From the beginning there wasn't an aim to be retro-sounding,' said Monroy. 'The sound really developed when everybody came together. We all have our own influences and ones we all have in common.'
Collectively the group references the Ramones, Roy Orbison and the Beach Boys as key influencers of their sound, but members' Mexican American heritage finds its way into the music as well.
'The stuff that I like, that I grew up with, is really just a lot of music that my folks listened to, like rock 'n' roll from the past,' said Gutierrez. 'Watching 'La Bamba' as kid made a huge impact on me.'
Monroy agrees.
'I was raised on banda fresa, banda limon, all these different genres and a lot of really strong women, like Lola Beltran and Ana Gabriel, women with really raspy, rock 'n' roll voices,' said Monroy. 'Mariachi can still be rock 'n' roll, in a way.'
The McCharmlys single 'Tu Seras Mi Baby,' a Spanish-language take on the Ronettes' 1963 hit 'Be My Baby,' currently has 355,810 listens on Spotify.
'We are Latinos, our parents are immigrants and they are the ones who showed us pretty much everything, and doing this song, specifically 'Tu Seras Mi Baby,' was inspired by Les Surfs,' said Monroy.
A lesser known group than the Ronettes, Les Surfs was a pop group from Madagascar that recorded from 1964 until 1971.
'They sing in lots of different languages but they do 'Tu Seras Mi Baby' in Spanish, and us being nerds about vinyl and enjoying old music on YouTube, when we saw it we were, like, man, that is a cool one. And of course I have huge love and admiration for Ronnie Spector.'
The band has recorded original music in Spanish too, which Monroy calls 'challenging and beautiful' work that connects her to her community.
'Especially when you see a lot of la raza coming through in different places around the world,' Monroy said. 'It's special; you are never alone. Sometimes you feel alone and then you look around, and you're like 'My people are here.''
No matter what language you speak, the McCharmlys feel they have something audiences can connect with.
'Rock 'n' roll is such an inherently American thing, and I think that we all can vibe to that,' said Gutierrez.
The vibes are good and the band is enjoying a bit of buzz around their new single.
Recently the McCharmlys were featured at a 95.5 KLOS 'Breakfast with the Beatles' live event at Hollywood's Hard Rock Cafe. The 'Breakfast with the Beatles' segment on the popular classic rock radio station introduced Gutierrez to the band's music as a teenager.
'I would tune in to that pretty often, and to be able to play for Chris Carter and just the mere fact that we were on the radio was an honor and privilege,' said Gutierrez.
This week band members pack their bags for Spain, where they will play the European music festival 'Rockin' Race Jamboree' ahead of headlining their own tour across the western United States.
The McCharmlys will kick off their tour with a show at the Observatory in Santa Ana on Feb.16 with Ramona and Los Tranquilos before playing dates in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
They are excited about the upcoming travel plans but even more excited about getting to connect with fans.
'Music brings people together, and we have created a community around that,' said Gutierrez. 'It is a wonderful thing.'
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USA Today
a day ago
- USA Today
America's fascination with the kiss cam: For better or worse, it's here to stay
'Are you not entertained?' Russell Crowe's Maximus famously bellowed to the Colosseum crowd in the 2000 film 'Gladiator.' But for decades, kiss cams have been posing a different question to U.S. sports fans and concertgoers: 'Are you not the entertainment?' Whether lighthearted distraction or comic relief, the ubiquitous arena and stadium feature is as American as apple pie — or at least as American as baking an apple pie and posting it on social media. Live competition and performance offer us communal experience on a massive scale, but they also offer a chance to make memories and — with the aid of kiss cams — to become part of the entertainment ourselves. For a few back-to-back moments, as the camera zeroes in on its various targets, fans watch with curiosity, anticipation, excitement and maybe even self-conscious dread. 'These events are epic, nostalgic, and for some even narcissistic,' said Adam Resnick, founder of 15 Seconds of Fame, a Los Angeles-based company whose app allows participating fans featured on in-venue video boards like kiss cams to download and share the footage as a digital souvenir. The origins of the kiss cam are frustratingly foggy but Resnick and others agree they burst onto sports scenes in the 1980s, in the years after sports franchises began introducing increasingly massive color video screens at ballparks and stadiums. Designed to fill breaks in the action and typically set to cheesy pop ballads, the kiss cam was a major innovation that shifted the focus from courts and fields into the stands. The feature is pretty much a slam dunk, with the camera's roving eye picking out random pairs of people in the stands who may or may not be actual couples — and therein lies part of the fun. Reactions are broadcast on the venue's giant video boards: If they kiss, the crowd cheers, while refusals draw playful jeers or laughter. "We love love," said Pepper Schwartz, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. When couples oblige, she said, "it's a feel-good feeling that transfers from one person to another and makes us optimistic." Kiss cams are cheap entertainment designed to keep audiences engaged when they could easily check out, said Joseph Darowski, an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. 'The energy of the live crowd is incredibly important, and the kiss cam helps to prevent it from dying down,' said Darowski, co-author of 'Survivor: A Cultural History,' a book that in part explores the rise of reality TV. 'Sporting events are not just about the game being played. It's the entire entertainment experience.' Any additional theatrics are generally a bonus — at least for the audience. But as illustrated by the now infamous July 16 incident at a Coldplay concert in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, that's not always the case for the featured individuals. When reactions tell the story It was the shot broadcast around the world – the TikTok'd footage of a couple at a Coldplay concert caught mid-cuddle. 'Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy,' Coldplay singer Chris Martin quipped after seeing the video from the stage. The video of the July 16 incident at Gillette Stadium has received more than 129 million views on TikTok alone. The viral moment and its professional and personal fallout, Schwartz said, prompted reactions ranging from amusement and fascination to, for those who've been involved in similar circumstances, schadenfreude and relief. But it wouldn't have unfolded the way it did without the kiss cam. The couple seen on the screen "could have saved themselves from worldwide derision had they waved and looked like, 'This is no big deal,'" Schwartz said. "But they took the second instinct, which was to flee. And that was the funny one." 'It could have been a vanilla, fleeting moment,' Resnick agreed. 'However, their reaction told a story." The episode illustrated how kiss cams have provoked occasional embarrassment and controversy since their debut. In addition to outing potential infidelities, their use in the past has been accused of pressuring unwilling participants to take part and shamed for promoting homophobia by showing same-sex couples for laughs. It also showed the hazards of baring private matters in public in the age of kiss cams, smartphones and social media. 'The expectation of privacy at a public event has never existed, and today, with camera ubiquity, it's preposterous for anyone to take that position,' Resnick said. More often, though, kiss cams offer those attending live events the chance to score a cameo in their own experience, claiming part or even all of those 15 seconds of fame once foretold for all of us. The power of those moments, Resnick said, lies in their organic nature. 'Authenticity can't be staged in real time,' he said. 'It resonates in the social zeitgeist.' Kiss cams 'an important metric' of acceptance The kiss cam's evolution hasn't been without its stumbles. In 2015, Syracuse University discontinued its kiss cam feature after a letter to the local newspaper cited a pair of troubling instances at the football team's game against Wake Forest. Steve Port of Manlius, N.Y., wrote that the kiss cam segment had twice featured young women who expressed unwillingness to participate but were forced to anyway, either by their male counterpart or by surrounding students. Meanwhile, a dozen or so years have passed since some major league sports franchises were accused of promoting homophobia by using kiss cams to poke fun at other teams. In those cases, after featuring a series of smooching male-female couples, the kiss cam segments ended by focusing on two of the home team's rival players, or even fans – suggesting they might kiss, and that doing so would be comedic. As a fan of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars complained after such a segment in a 2013 letter to team owner Shahid Khan, initially reported by Outsports: 'Hilarious, right? No, and the message is clear. Jaguars are heterosexual and approved. The opponent is 'gay,' disapproved and the butt of a crude joke.' A year earlier, pitcher Brandon McCarthy of Major League Baseball's Oakland A's had similarly condemned the practice after a game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. 'They put two guys on the 'Kiss Cam' tonight,' McCarthy posted on the social platform now known as X. 'What hilarity!! (by hilarity I mean offensive homophobia). Enough with this stupid trend.' Later, McCarthy — now sporting director for the USL Championship's Phoenix Rising FC — told the San Francisco Chronicle: "If there are gay people who are coming to a game and seeing something like that, you can't assume they're comfortable with it. If you're even making a small group of people ... feel like outcasts, then you're going against what makes your model successful." Before long, franchises were striving to be more inclusive, and in 2015, MLB's New York Mets told the Huffington Post they would no longer feature opposing players in their kiss cam segments; that same year, the Dodgers included a gay couple in its kiss cam. 'Kiss cams are an important metric in measuring how acceptable certain people are in a given community,' said Stephanie Bonvissuto, an adjunct assistant professor of women's and gender studies at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, both part of the City University of New York system. In early 2017, the Ad Council's 'Love Has No Labels' campaign produced a commercial featuring kiss cam footage from that year's NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people had been killed seven months earlier in a mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse. 'Kiss Cams have been a part of sports culture for years,' the opening text read, but at that game, it continued, they 'became part of something bigger.' The images showed pairs of individuals, outlined by a heart, broadcast on Camping World Stadium's giant screens. Friends were featured. So, too, were same-sex and interracial couples. Then the camera zoomed in on two women in the stands, one of them wearing a shirt reading 'Orlando survivor.' The two turned and kissed, to the crowd's delight. Still, Bonvissuto said it's still rare to see LGBTQ couples featured on kiss cams beyond Pride Night events. While cautioning that she hasn't seen any statistics on such representation, she said the footage she's viewed largely features white, able-bodied and seemingly cisgender individuals. 'Kiss cams act as a means to exclude certain people,' she said. 'They're incredibly important in thinking about representation — who we're seeing and not seeing.' 'Socially acceptable' voyeurism But for the most part, kiss cams have offered streams of harmless fun, fodder for highlight and blooper reels and glimpses into the relationships of everyone from fellow citizens to celebrities and sitting and former U.S. presidents. Kiss cams, said BYU's Darowski, offer audiences the constant thrill of knowing they could be onscreen combined with 'a socially acceptable, safe form of voyeurism that is traditionally taboo.' The presumed authenticity of couples' raw, unrehearsed reactions is key, too, he said. 'So much of our entertainment is highly mediated, edited and packaged for our consumption,' he said. It doesn't always play out as planned – and not all of it is necessarily genuine, thanks to some sports teams' creative minds. Many couples share crowd-pleasing kisses. Others, not so much. Some, snubbed by their companions, stomp off in a huff or peck adjacent fans instead, while youthful pairs looking to lock lips are thwarted by chaperoning adults. Whether any of it is staged doesn't matter much. Fans and audiences alike have enjoyed their moment in the limelight. Resnick, of 15 Seconds of Fame, recalled a moment in June 2024 after a Dallas Mavericks loss in game five of the NBA Finals. The arena cameras zeroed on a fan tearful over the outcome. While it wasn't part of the kiss cam feature, 'the minute he saw himself on the Jumbotron, he smiled and kissed the girl (who was) with him,' Resnick said. 'That's all you need to know about what those 15 seconds mean to fans.'
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
MrBeast's plan to reach a new generation of fans
MrBeast has been in the lab cooking up an animated show that he hopes will hook the next generation on his videos. The world's biggest YouTuber announced a new anime-style series coming in October called "MrBeast Lab: The Descent," based on a wildly popular toy line he launched last summer. MrBeast and his team partnered with Australia-based Moose Toys for both the animated show and his "MrBeast Lab" toys. Those action figures debuted last July and became the best-selling new toy property in 2024 across 12 leading global markets tracked by retail sales data provider Circana, the company confirmed to Business Insider. Stephen Davis, the chief franchise officer at Moose Toys, told BI that his team had been talking with MrBeast about making an animated series for a while. The success of their MrBeast-inspired toys last holiday season convinced both sides to make an animated series that would fuel sales for new versions of their toys — and vice versa. "With the launch of this next product line, it was the right time to now move into animation," Davis said. Besides generating millions of YouTube views and selling tons of toys, MrBeast — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — is moving into animation to grow his already-massive audience, specifically by introducing himself to younger viewers. "We wanted to create a show that was as inviting to a younger demo as it was to an older demo," Davis said. Growing the tent to fit Gen Alpha Animation isn't just for kids, as the recent breakout success of Netflix's "Kpop Demon Hunters" demonstrates. Davis emphasized that point, saying that the "MrBeast Lab" show's "modern anime flavor" could help expand the fandom while also appealing to MrBeast's current YouTube subscriber base of over 418 million. Still, industry insiders told BI they thought viewership for MrBeast's animated show would skew younger than his Gen Z -heavy following. "He's filling a white space for his audience," said Amanda Cioletti, the VP of content and strategy for the licensing group at market-making firm Informa Markets. Gen Alpha children, between the ages of one and 15, appear to be a target demographic for this cartoon. Amanda Klecker, SVP of marketing and franchises at toy and kids' media company called developing both a show and toy line targeting a particular audience "a smart move." Please help BI improve our Business, Tech, and Innovation coverage by sharing a bit about your role — it will help us tailor content that matters most to people like you. Continue By providing this information, you agree that Business Insider may use this data to improve your site experience and for targeted advertising. By continuing you agree that you accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Davis said the audience for the "MrBeast Lab" action figures is kids ages six and older, though he added adults in the so-called "kid-ult" community also buy the toys. MrBeast isn't the only content creator who's dabbling in toys. Kid-focused YouTubers like Ms. Rachel, Ryan of "Ryan's World," and the girl from "Kids Diana Show" have toy lines to reach preschoolers. STEM YouTuber Mark Rober, whose audience is older, is also getting into the mix, with a toy line from Moose Toys coming in 2026. More than a cash grab MrBeast and Moose Toys dream of a virtuous cycle in which toy sales spark interest in their show, and the other way around. Cioletti said that MrBeast likely launched the toys first to feel out the market before making the cartoon. While toy sales data from Circana suggests that the MrBeast-Moose Toys tie-up is lucrative, Davis declined to comment on the terms or structure of his firm's partnership with MrBeast. Klecker said MrBeast's approach to brand building shows he's focused on staying power across generations. "What I appreciate about what MrBeast does is there isn't a 'label slap,'" Klecker said, referring to a hasty money grab trading on a famous name. "He's very thoughtful, it seems, about his brand building and his brand strategy." Smart brand partnerships fulfill unmet needs, she said, adding that MrBeast seems to be on the right track so far.
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Woman caught in Coldplay ‘Kiss Cam' embrace resigns from tech company
A senior human resources executive at a New York-based tech firm has stepped down after a moment of unintentional viral fame at a Coldplay concert exposed her in a compromising embrace with the company's CEO. Kristin Cabot, formerly chief people officer at Astronomer, resigned this week following the abrupt departure of CEO Andy Byron, who had quit after initially being placed on leave. The resignations come in the wake of a July 16 Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in the Boston suburb of Foxborough, where the pair were unexpectedly caught on the venue's kiss cam. 'Kristin Cabot is no longer with Astronomer, she has resigned,' company spokesperson Taylor Jones confirmed in a brief statement. The footage, now widely shared online, shows Byron and Cabot smiling and leaning into one another before reacting in panic upon seeing themselves on the Jumbotron. Cabot recoils, hands to her face, while Byron ducks out of the frame. 'Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy,' Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, narrating the moment, quipped. Astronomer soon confirmed their identities and launched an internal investigation. Their profiles were quietly removed from the company website, along with a news release announcing Cabot's hiring. While the episode marked a corporate scandal for Astronomer, it had an unexpected upside for Coldplay; the band's streaming numbers jumped by 25% in the days following the incident, according to Luminate. 'While I would never have wished for it to happen like this,' interim CEO Pete DeJoy reflected in a LinkedIn post, 'Astronomer is now a household name.'
