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Rock n' Roll TV

R

RicoGregg

With all the retro programming out there, why hasn't someone like VH1 or some syndication company dusted off some old music shows?

Here is a partial list of what I'd love to see again:

Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
ABC's In Concert (especially the 1974 Cal Jam episodes. I was there.)
Shebang
Ready, Steady, Go! (the British version from the 60s.)
The Beatles cartoon show. MTV ran it for awhile in their early days, but the early 80s was a long time ago.
The Midnight Special (and maybe edit out Helen Reddy? What was NBC thinking?)

Retro music programs like these would be great to see again.
 
If I am not mistaken I believe The Midnight Special is on DVD through mail order, kinda like the way Hee Haw is.

The others, perhaps its a question of rights.

Myself, I would love to see many of the local dance/rock & roll shows that were around back in the 50s, 60s and 70s but I am sure many of them are lost.

Example Buddy Deane's show on Baltimore's WJZ channel 13 back in the early 60s. The show that the movie Hairspray was based on. According to a Maryland PBS special on Buddy Deane only about 13 minutes of the Buddy Deane show survive today and that is from a station known to have a rather large amount of stuff archived.
 
Johnny Cash's show would be neat to see today...He had a lot of the leading rock acts of the day on his show as well as the best country music. Glen Campbell's show was similarly eclectic, although it had more of the standard TV variety show trappings than Cash's show.
 
Corky Marlowe said:
Johnny Cash's show would be neat to see today...He had a lot of the leading rock acts of the day on his show as well as the best country music. Glen Campbell's show was similarly eclectic, although it had more of the standard TV variety show trappings than Cash's show.
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I have The Best Of Johnny Cash on DVD both the special with interviews and the one with 66 performances with classic music stars as Eric Clapton (when he had Derek and the Dominos), Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, among many many others.

CMT showed Glen Campbell's Goodtime Hour in 2002 with Keith Urban doing new introductions to each episode. They showed around 13 episodes of this, I taped all of them because I figured they wouldn't show them again. They were great shows and one of these episodes featured Kenny Rogers and the First Edition doing "Something's Burning". A couple of months back, PBS had a special of Glen Campbell's Goodtime Hour featuring Glen doing duets with Bobbie Gentry, Johnny Cash, Anne Murray, and others. Our PBS station in San Antonio didn't carry it but those performances are on YouTube.

I know that Sonny and Cher's show is on DVD but I haven't seen it around in stores. Barbara Mandrell's variety show with Louise and Irlene is on DVD as well and I came across the same thing.

Back in the early 1990's, TNN showed reruns of Hee Haw and Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters not to mention The Statler Brothers Show which ran from 1991 to 1998. Those were great shows and they need to be shown again and it would be better than what CMT has to offer now (which is nothing to do with country music).
 
RicoGregg said:
With all the retro programming out there, why hasn't someone like VH1 or some syndication company dusted off some old music shows?
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Most likely because of two words: music rights. It can be time-consuming and expensive to get rights to broadcast old music performances. Just one edition of one of the shows you mentioned could involve negotiating with several different labels or other copyright holders, some of which might want more money than the broadcaster might be willing to spend. That is why even a sitcom that used a lot of actual music tracks (as opposed to generic rights-free music, or music composed specifically for the show) like "WKRP in Cincinnati" has had a devil of a time with getting the show out on DVD, and had to redub some scenes with generic music, or edit out other scenes entirely. It may simply be a matter of being too much trouble and expense to justify the effort.
 
mleach said:
Myself, I would love to see many of the local dance/rock & roll shows that were around back in the 50s, 60s and 70s but I am sure many of them are lost.
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You'll be interested to know that Lloyd Thaxton, creator of "Fight Back! With David Horowitz", and host of a popular daily teen dance show on KCOP-13 Los Angeles, which was also syndicated for awhile, is putting together a 3-disc DVD of his old shows, including many music acts. He obviously spent a lot of time clearing rights. He's still working on the project today. He had hoped that it would be ready by Christmas, but he couldn't swing that. As soon as it's ready, I'm writing him a check.

You can get periodic updates on the DVD at his blog:

www.lloydthaxton.blogspot.com
 
"Shebang"

Shebang was a local Los Angeles dance party show produced by KTLA 5 in the mid 60s - hosted by Casey Kasem, before he became somewhat famous...he was then a local DJ at an LA Top 40 - KRLA.The show only lasted a couple of years. I don't believe it was ever syndicated.

Are you thinking of "Shindig," perhaps? The host of this ABC network show was also a KRLA DJ - Jimmy O'Neill. A good number of Shindig compilations were released by Rhino on VHS casette as far back as the early 90s. I assume they have been re-released on DVD, but I don't know for sure. Generally, they were compilations of a particular group's multiple appearances on the show - like the Righteous Brothers.

It would be fun to see some of the local Rock shows released on DVD. In LA, the most popular and long-lived show of this type was probably the one that started as "9th Street West" hosted by Sam Riddle, then became "Boss City", and eventually "The Real Don Steele Show" after Steele took over hosting duties from Riddle. Both were DJs at powerhouse Top 40 station KHJ, and I think the show ran for about 8 years altogether. Another good show on the same stations (KHJ-TV9) was Robert W. Morgan's "Groovy" which was only one for a couple of years in the late 60s.

Unfortunately, I would imagine the nostalgia market for local shows like this would be small, if the video-tapes even still exist.
 
Re: Shebang:

It was Shebang that I was thinking of. I remember both that & Shindig, the show with the bespecled blond dancer quite well.

Shebang was produced by Dick Clark Productions, and if you ask me, it was much more enjoyable & hip than Bandstand was.

It's been like 40 years after the fact, so I couldn't tell you for sure if Shebang was syndicated or not. Hard to imagine though, that a show with those production values was made for just one-market consumption.
 
"Shebang was produced by Dick Clark Productions, and if you ask me, it was much more enjoyable & hip than Bandstand was."

I didn't realize Clark produced Shebang. I DO remember that the show was visually very slick because KTLA had recently spent money on then-new blue-screen technology. I believe they were at least a year or two ahead of the other LA stations. So they would blue-screen videos, movies, or psychedelic stuff behind the dancing kids. The same technology helped the George Putnam News to look visually more current than the other stations.

It doesn't sound very exciting now, but at the time, it was fun to watch.
 
RicoGregg said:
With all the retro programming out there, why hasn't someone like VH1 or some syndication company dusted off some old music shows?

Here is a partial list of what I'd love to see again:

Ready, Steady, Go! (the British version from the 60s.)
The Beatles cartoon show. MTV ran it for awhile in their early days, but the early 80s was a long time ago.
Click to expand...

...Dave Clark (as in the Dave Clark Five) owns the old "Ready Steady Go!" kinescopes and issued a lot of them on videocassette about 20 years ago. As for the Beatles cartoons, the rights are theoretically available but, since The Beatles themselves hated them, it's unlikely that they'd grant licenses for DVDs of the Parlophone/EMI recordings that appear in each one...

..."Shindig!" and "Hullabaloo" have also appeared on videocassette, dunno if they're also on DVD. "The Monkees" has appeared on DVD in various collections, both first and second season packages and single-disc compilations...

...now, the one I'd love to see issued Stateside would be "SuperSonic," which was a London Weekend concoction from the mid-'70s that was syndicated twice in the States, first under the original title (WFLD/32 Chicago ran it in '76-'77), and then by American International TV with introduction links by Twiggy as "Twiggy's Jukebox" a couple of years after that. Considering all the glam rockers that appeared on it (Slade, Suzi Quatro, The Bay City Rollers, David Essex, T.Rex), it's a cinch that "SuperSonic" has seen a British video release at some point but I haven't heard of any U.S. releases...
 
Another variety series that's on DVD now is Tom Jones' show "This Is Tom Jones" that aired from 1969 to 1971 on ABC. In March, Time-Life is going to release another 3 disc set of This Is Tom Jones.

Another show that I would like to see on DVD is Tony Orlando and Dawn's variety show. From what I heard, it was a pretty cool show.
 
Braves2005 said:
Another show that I would like to see on DVD is Tony Orlando and Dawn's variety show. From what I heard, it was a pretty cool show.
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Goodlife Television (now American Life) aired this a few years ago. Personally, I thought it was a standard variety show, a la "Sonny & Cher".
 
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