by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a PBS pledge-break special featuring 1960’s rock
performances from the Ed Sullivan Show,
and as usual it was merely a loss leader for the wonders and joys you were
promised if you bought the four-DVD set of the show’s longer version for a
humongous contribution to KPBS. They showed 19 songs in what amounted to an
hour’s running time — I suspect at least some of the performances were
internally edited (though the editing may have been done “in the day” to crowd
more acts into Sullivan’s variety format — the pledge-break announcers boasted
that in this compilation you could
see just the rock acts without the plate-spinners or Topo Gigio, though when I
bought the DVD boxed sets of the original four Ed Sullivan Show episodes featuring the Beatles, I was fascinated by
the whole Gestalt of how their
performances were originally presented; as I wrote when Charles and I watched
them, “What’s fascinating about watching this now is the context of the program
and in particular the unwitting clash between the Beatles and the entire
apparatus of old-fashioned show business that they would essentially blow out
of existence. … One doesn’t often get to see the revolutionaries who are about
to tear apart the ancien regime
starting their revolution on the ancien regime’s own turf; watching the Beatles on Sullivan seems
as if the French Revolution had started with the peasants storming Versailles
instead of the Bastille.”
The compilation KPBS broadcast last night featured 19
songs by 14 acts (the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the
Young Rascals and the Doors got two songs each), and it was strongest pretty
much where you’d expect: the Beatles (doing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” from the third in their
sequence of three Sullivan
broadcasts on February 23, 1964 and “She Loves You” from the legendary first
show on February 9 — you can tell because they used different set designs), the
Rolling Stones (doing “Satisfaction” and blessedly shown in color — in 1969
Mick Jagger told an interviewer they preferred to play Sullivan rather than the newer, hipper shows because “he’s so
old, he’s funky!”), the Animals (doing “House of the Rising Sun” and “We Gotta
Get Out of This Place” — the latter introduced as a typical sample of “British
blues” even though it isn’t a blues song and it was written by two Americans,
Carole King and her then-husband Gerry Goffin), the Doors (in their infamous
appearance during which Jim Morrison was instructed that by order of CBS’s
censors he was not to sing the
line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” in the Doors’ star-making hit “Light
My Fire” — they gave him a substitute line to sing and he behaved during the
dress rehearsal but sang the song come scritto on the actual show, leading to a confrontation
between him and a screaming producer who said they’d been ready to offer the
Doors three more appearances but by disobeying orders, the band had blown it:
the more pragmatic Mick Jagger, told similarly that he had to change the title
line of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together,”
had fudged it by mumbling something intermediate between the two), the Mamas
and the Papas (a nice medley of “Monday, Monday” and “California Dreaming” —
though I suspect at least part of their performance was pre-recorded since
there seemed to be more vocal parts than four people could have produced
“live”) and the Beach Boys (including a 1964 clip of “I Get Around” featuring
Brian Wilson on bass in what would be one of his last live performances before
he had a nervous breakdown on a plane and dropped out of performing with the
band in favor of staying at home, writing the songs and working with the
legendary “Wrecking Crew” studio band to cut the backing tracks to which the
other Beach Boys would add vocals when they got back from the road; it also
included the 1968 version of “Good Vibrations” sans Brian that showed the electronic noises on the
record were not a classic
theremin but a variant invented by Paul Tanner called an “Electro-Theremin,”
which is a console with a strip that is controlled by the player rubbing it —
in that sense it’s closer to the ondes Martenot, which is a rubbed strip the player controls with
one hand and a piano-style keyboard played with the other: the keyboard
controls the pitch and the strip controls amplitude and volume, though the Electro-Theremin
doesn’t have a keyboard and instead the player controls the pitch by turning a
knob).
Others included the Four Seasons doing “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (I can’t
listen to this group without recalling the Forbidden Broadway parody of them:
“Walk like a man/Sing like a girl”), Gerry and the Pacemakers doing the lovely
ballad “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” (not the same song as the one of the same title written
by Wilbert Barranco and recorded by him with singer Ernie Andrews, and a decade
later covered by Ray Charles), the Young Rascals doing “Good Lovin’” and
“Groovin’”, Herman’s Hermits doing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”
(the narrator of the compilation claimed that they got their record contract
because someone at MGM Records thought lead singer Peter Noone — called “Moon”
by Sullivan when he introduced the group — looked like President Kennedy),
Diana Ross and the Supremes (doing “You Can’t Hurry Love” with a cornball
big-band ending; when Charles and I watched Standing in the Shadows
of Motown, the documentary about Motown’s
great studio group the Funk Brothers, I noted that Motown owner Berry Gordy’s
campaign to make the Supremes acceptable to white audiences “was so successful
that the Supremes became the artists who played the Ed Sullivan Show more often than any others — and the clips of their Sullivan appearances are an ironic reflection of how great
the Funk Brothers were: their vocal performances are fine but the efforts of
Sullivan’s old white big-band era leftovers to reproduce the Funk Brothers’
grooves are embarrassing and pathetic”), Tommy James and the Shondells playing
“Crimson and Clover” (with some odd attempts by Sullivan’s director and
camerapeople to create faux-“psychdelic”
effects that come off as just embarrassingly crude), The Turtles doing “Happy
Together,” and what was probably the most galvanic number on the whole show:
Sly and the Family Stone doing a wild medley of “Everyday People,” “Dance to
the Music” (in which they actually invited people from Sullivan’s audience to
come on stage and do what the song said), “I Want to Take You Higher” and “Hey,
Music Lover” from 1968.
Not only was it O.K. by then for Sly’s racially mixed
band to show themselves on screen in all their Black and white glory, but the
clip had an infectious energy and drive and one recalls with regret how
thoroughly Sly sabotaged his own career to the point where he ended up living
out of an old bus until he was dredged up by the Grammy Awards producers, who
presented him in a tribute to his old songs and for which he dressed in a
bizarre outfit that made him look like a gold lamé version of the Creature from
the Black Lagoon. It also made me wonder — again — why his sister Rose Stone,
who sang lead on quite a few of the Family Stone’s records, didn’t quit her
brother’s act when he was doing his drug-fueled meltdown; she could have had
one of the great solo soul careers if she’d gone out on her own. What’s
appealing about watching these clips is not only do they show some of the
greatest 1960’s rock acts in the venue that made mass audiences aware of them,
even in a context like this that doesn’t show the more traditional variety acts
that were also part of the Sullivan
show, we know they were there and we get back to an era in which shows were
truly “broadcast” rather than “narrowcast” — instead of the current practice of
meticulously tailoring each movie, TV show or recording to one and only one
audience niche, the portmanteau
shows and movies of years past sought to build as broad an audience as possible
by including at least one element someone would like.
