Tarzan's Painting Sidekick Cheeta Comes to the Aid of The Monkees in Campaign to Get Them Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Tarzan's Painting Sidekick Cheeta Comes to the Aid of The Monkees in Campaign to Get Them Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Net Radio Station LuxuriaMusic.com Launches On-Air/Online Push Capped by Charity Auction of Three Monkees-Themed 'Ape-Stract' Paintings by 75-Year-Old Chimp

Effort Also Supports Six-Times-Turned-Down Cheeta in His Quest for a 'Star' on Hollywood's Walk of Fame

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- First, The Monkees, the best band to come out of TV and the top-selling recording artists of 1967, get slighted for nomination by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then Cheeta, the "Susan Lucci of Movie Animals," gets passed over for a "star" on Hollywood's Walk of Fame for the sixth time! When it comes to officially signifying fame, it seems that the gatekeepers from the worlds of music and movies may have a thing against entertainment's great ape acts.

Now, thanks to LuxuriaMusic.com, the web's leading purveyor of lounge, exotica, psych, surf, bubblegum music and more, the public will be able to make its voice heard and turn up the pressure, on both the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame's nominating committee and Johnny Grant, the de facto arbiter for the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The station has brought together Cheeta and The Monkees for a month-long campaign to build awareness of and gain signatures on petitions to finally gain them the honors they deserve.

The Monkees' much-loved singer/tambourine player Davy Jones is thankful for the support from campaign-driver LuxuriaMusic.com and the movies' greatest monkey star. "The slight from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is something that really seems to hit our fans almost harder than us," said Jones. "Anything we can do to help this effort and help them gain satisfaction is welcome. We're thankful to LuxuriaMusic for picking up the mantle and also to Cheeta, for picking up his paint brush!"

Now through the end of November 2007, www.LuxuriaMusic.com will dedicate its web and online resources to this grassroots campaign. Site-goers will also be able to view an exclusive video of Cheeta from his campaign headquarters in Palm Springs as well as pictures of Cheeta displaying his Monkees' Portrait and two "Ape-Stracts" named after their signature hits, "Daydream Believer" and "Pleasant Valley Sunday." One of the chimpanzee's recent works went for a whopping $10,000. The works will be auctioned off to benefit the buzz-building campaign, C.H.E.E.T.A, the Palm Springs based sanctuary that provides residence, care, and rehabilitation for homeless or unwanted ex-show business primates, Cheeta's own GoCheeta campaign for his Hollywood Boulevard Star, as well as the Jane Goodall Foundation, which is at the forefront of saving the endangered chimpanzees in the wild.

Equally important, the website will also host two online petitions for the respective fame garnering efforts of The Monkees and Cheeta, as well as a link to the charity auction of Cheeta's paintings, one of which recently sold for $10,000 at auction. LuxuriaMusic.com's forthcoming on-air schedules will feature several special programs and music marathons dedicated to the Monkees and monkeys in general from such DJs as Howie Pyro, Domenic Priore, Angel Baby and Monkees' historian/biographer Andrew Sandoval.

"It was via The Monkees that I first heard songs composed by Goffin & King, Jeff Barry, Boyce & Hart, Neil Diamond, and the great under-appreciated genius Mike Nesmith," said Chuck Kelley, LuxuriaMusic's program director. "It's time for rock critics to step away from their preconceived notions of what a rock and roll group should be and just focus on the art. The Monkees deserve to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." And you can't understate their success in the pop charts -- their first four albums hit #1 on Billboard -- and in the hearts of their fans, who keep them as a requested pop staple on radio today.

"As for Cheeta," Kelley continued, "he's the Picasso of Primates, someone whose time for a 'star' on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is long overdue."

Cheeta, aka "Jiggs," turned 75 on April 9, 2007 and has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest living non-human primate. In his "Hollywood heyday", Cheeta was an international simian superstar and shared the big screen with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in over a dozen of the classic Tarzan films of the 30's and 40's. Vaudevillian Dan Westfall inherited Cheeta in 1991 from his uncle Tony Gentry, a well-known animal trainer who obtained the chimp from Africa in the 1930s. Cheeta has now reinvented himself as the "Grandma Moses" of the animal kingdom, taking up the paintbrush and raising thousands of dollars for animal rights charities and now, through Luxuriamusic, to help the Monkees gain support for a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When not painting, Cheeta spends his days socializing under the California desert sun with his grandson Jeter and other fellow primates at the C.H.E.E.T.A. primate sanctuary in Palm Springs.

Indie Filmmaker Matthew Devlen took up the cause to secure Cheeta a star on Hollywood Boulevard 4 years ago when he became friends with Johnny Weissmuller Jr. while researching a documentary on his dad. A self professed "primate provocateur," he is working with partners, including LuxuriaMusic, to go Boulevard or Bust on his fifth attempt at seeing this animal megastar take his rightful place alongside two other iconic screen counterparts, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. Over the next 8 months, Devlen will oversee GoCheeta.com as the clearinghouse for Cheeta's campaign for a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. More information can be found at his official website, www.cheetathechimp.org and his just-launched campaign website, www.gocheeta.com.

"Johnny Jr. was a great friend of mine and a big fan of Cheeta," states Devlen. "Sadly we lost him to cancer last year and it was his dying wish that Cheeta end up with a star on the Boulevard alongside his father."

"When you see fictional characters like Kermit the Frog, Godzilla, Bugs Bunny and even Winnie The Pooh with their names emblazoned on the Boulevard, you have to wonder what's going on", adds Devlen. "There's just a lot of competition, 300 names were submitted last year and only 19 received the honor. I'm sure Mayor Grant goes bananas every year trying to whittle down that list and I'm sure he'd love to have Cheeta make the cut."

About LuxuriaMusic

Targeting an international audience of hip music fiends who are sick of hearing the same standard 50 songs on terrestrial radio, LuxuriaMusic.com plays an intoxicating blend of musical genres, including Exotica, Lounge, Space Age Bachelor Pad, Bossa Nova, Bollywood, Bubblegum, Soft-Psych, '60s Go- Go, Latin Jazz and Surf music. The LuxuriaMusic radio format was developed by Chuck Kelley (music consultant on Pulp Fiction) and The Millionaire (Combustible Edison), and launched its first Internet radio broadcast on Feb. 14, 2000. The station is now owned and operated by LuxuriaMusic, LLC with corporate headquarters in San Francisco and broadcast studio in Los Angeles.

First Call Analyst:
FCMN Contact:

Source: LuxuriaMusic.com

CONTACT: Sal Cataldi of Cataldi PR for LuxuriaMusic.com,
+1-212-244-9797, Cell +1-516-236-3817, sal@cataldipr.com

Web site: http://www.luxuriamusic.com/
http://www.cheetathechimp.org/
http://www.gocheeta.com/

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Profile: International Entertainment