Rip Rense
Rip Rense is an American music and film journalist, author, poet, and music producer, based in Los Angeles, California. He has written for numerous Los Angeles publications since the 1970s, including LA Weekly, the Valley News, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Post, and the magazines Billboard, TV Guide, People and Los Angeles, among others. Rense's activities in the music industry have included writing the liner notes for albums by Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, Captain Beefheart and the Persuasions. He produced a series of comeback albums by the Persuasions, beginning with the group's 2000-released Frankly A Cappella, a collection of a cappella interpretations of Zappa's music. Among Rense's works as an author, The Oaks (2007) is his semi-autobiographical account of growing up in 1960s Thousand Oaks, and The Last Byline (2003) details life at a fictional newspaper from the same era. Early life and early career Rip Rense's parents were Arthur F. Rense and the latter's first wife, Madelon. His father was a sports journalist with the Los Angeles newspaper the Daily News before going on to a successful career in public