Cubby O'Brien | |
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![]() O'Brien as a Mouseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club , c. 1956 | |
Born | Carl Patrick O'Brien July 14, 1946 Burbank, California, U.S. |
Years active | 1955–present |
Spouse(s) | Marilyn Miller (1967–1976) Terry Wilemon (1978–1999) Holly Sims (2002–present) |
Children | 1 |
Carl "Cubby" Patrick O'Brien (born July 14, 1946), better known by his nickname Cubby, is an American drummer and former child actor. He is known as one of the original Mouseketeers on the weekday ABC television program The Mickey Mouse Club from 1955 to 1958.
O'Brien was the third son of musician Haskell "Hack" O'Brien, a well-known drummer for several big band era ensembles. When he was an infant, his mother thought he resembled a bear cub, and gave him his lifelong nickname. He has two older brothers: Haskell O'Brien, Jr., a trumpet player; and Warren O'Brien, also a drummer. [1]
Although born in Burbank, O'Brien grew up in the Los Angeles suburb of Shadow Hills, between Sun Valley and Sunland. He began studying music at the Carl Babcock School of Music from age five, and later performed with the Roger Babcock Dixieland Band at charity events and for local television. In 1962 he graduated from Hollywood Professional School, where he was president of his class.
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O'Brien, like Annette Funicello, was personally selected to audition for The Mickey Mouse Club by Walt Disney, in the spring of 1955. Disney was alerted to him by a staff member who caught his live performance at a charity gala. [2]
Though he had little prior singing or dancing experience, O'Brien was placed on The Mickey Mouse Club's first-string "Red Team" right from the start. He quickly picked up enough dance skills to perform in musical numbers, though his solo performances remained centered around his drums. He remained with the show for all three seasons (1955–1958) of original programming. When filming ended, he went on live-performance tours with other Mouseketeers to Australia in 1959 and 1960.
Following Disney, he joined the Lawrence Welk organization for two years, often doing duets with Janet Lennon. Having performed with the "Little Band", doing guest bits on the maestro's show, as well as other television series. After graduating from high school, he started touring with Spike Jones, playing show tunes and dance music with the formerly manic bandleader's final group. He then played for Ann-Margret in her live performances, and in the late Sixties returned to television as the sometime on-camera drummer for CBS's The Carol Burnett Show .
O'Brien was also music director for the LA touring companies of the Broadway hits Hair and Oh, Calcutta! in the early Seventies, and often fulfilled the same role for other engagements where his primary responsibility was drumming.
Beginning in 1973, O'Brien joined The Carpenters as a touring drummer, due to public demand for Karen Carpenter to sing at the front instead of from behind the drum kit. Despite this scenario, Karen still played drums live during this period, although rarely and mostly on B-side songs, with Hal Blaine and other professional studio percussionists performing on the group's recordings. Sharing a love of percussion, O'Brien at one point introduced Carpenter to big band drummer Buddy Rich. [3] His tenure with the band lasted until the 1980s.
O'Brien was a contestant on the ABC game show The Big Showdown in the mid-1970s, winning $5,000 for rolling "Show Down" during the timed dice roll round.
In 1980, O'Brien reunited with his fellow Mouseketeers for a television special, in which he sang, danced and played drums. He also joined some of these same Mouseketeers for live shows on fall weekends at Disneyland during the early 1980s.
Since the eighties, O'Brien's career has predominated around performing for Broadway productions, as well as for live shows by performers like Bernadette Peters. He based himself out of New York City instead of the West Coast for many years, though he has since moved back.
Cubby met his first wife, Marilyn Miller, while touring with Spike Jones. They were married around 1966, and had a daughter together before divorcing around 1976. In 1978, Cubby married Terry Wilemon, whom he met in Las Vegas while touring with the Carpenters. That too ended in divorce, in 1999. He married for the third time in 2002, to Holly Sims, a Portland-based flight attendant. Cubby lives in the Pacific Northwest and still works constantly, playing drums for various touring Broadway shows, and with Bernadette Peters. He has taken part in many of the Mouseketeer Reunion shows, including the 50th Anniversary in 2005, but usually is too busy drumming to make personal appearances. [4]
With Milt Jackson
With The Carpenters
The Mickey Mouse Club is an American variety television show that aired intermittently from 1955 to 1996 and returned to social media in 2017. Created by Walt Disney and produced by Walt Disney Productions, the program was first televised for four seasons, from 1955 to 1959, by ABC. This original run featured a regular, but ever-changing cast of mostly teen performers. ABC broadcast reruns weekday afternoons during the 1958–1959 season, airing right after American Bandstand. The show was revived three times after its initial 1955–1959 run on ABC, first from 1977 to 1979 for first-run syndication as The New Mickey Mouse Club, then from 1989 to 1996 as The All-New Mickey Mouse Club airing exclusively on cable television's The Disney Channel, and again in 2017 with the moniker Club Mickey Mouse airing exclusively on internet social media. It ended in 2018.
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