Anatomy of Pop: The Music Explosion (ABC-TV Productions, aired February 15, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched an old DVD I had of a 1966 music program from ABC-TV called Anatomy of Pop: The Music Explosion, which I obtained in a really peculiar way. I had bought a CD containing 11 sides of Ray Charles from his early years recording for Jack Lauderdale’s Swingtime label in Los Angeles that claimed to offer a DVD with a documentary on Ray Charles. The “documentary” was utterly lame and literally unwatchable -- just a bunch of people with absolutely no connection to Ray Charles uttering silly platitudes about him and labeled “Music Enthusiast” in their chyrons -- but they also sneaked on this ABC documentary that proved unexpectedly interesting not only because of the people featured but the overall tenor of the documentary and the way it presented (mostly) American music. I say “mostly” because a few of the British Invasion bands were included -- mostly the Dave Clark Five and Eric Burdon and the Animals (and interestingly both Clark selections were covers of Black R&B or soul records: Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That” and the Contours’ “Do You Love Me?”) -- as well as an audio-only snippet of the Beatles’ record of “She Loves You.” The show began with a veteran (and very old-looking) Black American bluesman who regrettably was unidentified, and ran the viewer through as many genres of American popular music as producer, writer and co-director (with Jonathan Donald) Stephen Fleischman could crowd into a 50-minute running time. Some of the most treasurable moments were of musicians who have passed, including members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (a lineup similar to the one I saw “live” at Stern Grove in San Francisco in 1972, six years after this was filmed, featuring the husband-and-wife team of cornetist De De Pierce and pianist and blues singer Billie Pierce, along with Jim Robinson on trombone -- though somewhat to my surprise the clarinetist was George Lewis; by 1972 he had “passed” and Willie Humphrey had taken his place) doing “See, See Rider” and Gene Krupa’s later quartet playing “Drum Boogie.” In 1966 Krupa had seven years left to live and he was more heavy-set than I’m used to seeing him in his 1940’s film appearances, but he was still playing drums with an almost orgiastic fervor and he was driving his little combo as effectively as he’d once powered Benny Goodman’s band (and his own big band after that).

The show was a good illustration of the point that occurred to me when I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ Country Music mega-documentary that virtually all American pop music has come from the combination of African-American music with something else. You combine Black music with the white marching-band tradition, and you get jazz. You combine Black music with Jewish music, and you get Broadway and Hollywood musicals and the “Great American Songbook.” You combine Black music with British and Irish folk music, with a few extra spices thrown in from Hawai’ian and Mexican music, and you get country music. Most of the songs here were presented in brief snippets, but some artists got longer (if still not note-complete) performances. We see Diana Ross and the Supremes do “My World Is Empty Without You” (with some precious shots of James Jamerson on the bass, generating those marvelous hesitation beats that were the Motown Sound), though the Supremes in general and Ross in particular are all wearing cloth coats and Ross has a cloth hat and way too much eye shadow: one of the most unfortunate outfits ever inflicted on a basically attractive woman. There’s a snippet of Waylon Jennings, in that unsatisfying interregnum between the time Buddy Holly discovered him and the time Willie Nelson rediscovered him, doing a song called “Stop the World and Let Me Off” -- an all too appropriate title in terms of how he felt about his career just then as the Nashville “suits” of his record company, RCA Victor, tried to push him into their usual mold. There’s a lovely clip of the Temptations doing “My Girl” with nice shots of David Ruffin applying his beautifully sweet voice to the lead -- Motown has sent out various rump editions of the Temptations ever since the originals left this plain and went to that great gospel quartette in the sky, but somehow this song never sounds the same as it did when Ruffin was around to sing it (though Otis Redding does an excellent job transmuting “My Girl” from Motown pop-soul to hard-edged R&B on his 1967 live album from Paris).

There’s also an interview segment with Berry Gordy, Jr., founder of Motown and looking (of course) considerably younger than his current incarnation as an elder statesman of Black music, acknowledging the gospel roots of Motown’s sound. But then all this music has its roots in the Black church: when the slaveowners decided to let their slaves practice Christianity they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for and how the music the Black church would derive from combining white church singing with African sounds would determine what the world would be listening to from the end of the 19th century through today. There’s a marvelous clip here from the Morning Star Baptist Church choir doing a rocking song called “The Holy Ghost” -- anyone who still believes rock ‘n’ roll is the music of the Devil should watch this clip, or see the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day in which gospel singer Mahalia Jackson totally out-rocks rock ‘n’ roll star Chuck Berry. The show also depicts a classic New Orleans funeral with the Eureka Brass Band (which had continually existed at least since the 1880’s, though not of course with the same personnel! According to Wikipedia, it finally disbanded in 1975) playing “Flee as a Bird” in slow dirge tempo on their way to the cemetery (where they inserted the coffin rather awkwardly into a niche on the top story of a whole outdoor rack of them before closing the door on it) and the uptempo “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble” on the way back. The segments on jazz were mostly introduced by modern jazz pianist Billy Taylor (he was really Billy Taylor, Jr.: his dad had been a bass player with Duke Ellington in the 1930’s), though there’s a brief interview clip with Ellington himself in which he expresses the idea that music is “beyond category” and instead of trying to fit music into genre niches, you should just ask if it’s good or bad; does it move you emotionally or does it just sit there in the background?

Then there’s a rather odd segment on country music that begins with the sound of bagpipes -- I’m not making this up, you know! -- and argues that the original bluegrass ensemble (banjo, mandolin, violin and bass) was an attempt to duplicate the sound of bagpipes from the players’ Scottish heritage without access to reed instruments. There are some rather quirky mashups of singers and songs in the country segment, including the Carter Family (the second generation, featuring Maybelle Carter of the original group and her daughters -- including June Carter, the second Mrs. Johnny Cash) doing “It Takes a Worried Man,” a group called Jim and Jesse and the Virginia Boys doing a countrified version of Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline” (a song Berry actually wrote as a parody of country music -- it was originally called “Ida Red” and was about a cow! -- Berry’s friend Bo Diddley once said Berry really wanted to be a country star but that wasn’t a career option for an African-American in the 1950’s, as witness what a hard time Charley Pride had trying to pull it off a decade later!), an uncredited Brenda Lee doing an intriguing song called “Don’t You Know It’s the End of the World,” a brief bit by a singer and banjo player called “Stringbean” illustrating the older forms of country music, The Browns (sisters Bonnie and Maxine and their brother Edward) doing “You Can’t Grow Peaches on a Cherry Tree,” Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys playing their own version of “John Henry,” and Tex Ritter (to whom the years had not been kind since his days as a Grand National singing-Western star in the late 1930’s) doing a really banal tear-jerker called “Take Him Fishing,” advice to a father on how to bond with his son. (My dad took me fishing exactly once, and I was bored out of my skull.)

Then they featured a clip representing modern folk music of Peter, Paul and Mary singing “The Times They Are a-Changing” (though with no mention of Bob Dylan, who actually wrote the song!) and the Krupa clip before showing Tony Bennett in a recording studio singing “Days of Wine and Roses” and a quite long excerpt of his version of “The Trolley Song.” Bennett’s version had some rather awkward rewriting of the lyrics to make it suitable for a man, but at least it was a hard-swinging rendition with a jazz band backing, and Bennett showed a mastery of jazz phrasing Judy Garland, for all her greatness, never achieved. Anatomy of Pop is a fascinating documentary, not only for the glimpses of musicians long since deceased but the overall “take” of the show, even though as much as I love Tony Bennett I don’t really consider him some sort of ne plus ultra of American music -- though given how shaky he sounded on a recent version of “America, the Beautiful” on the Stephen Colbert show, it was great to hear him at his absolute artistic and vocal prime!