As Mike alluded in his response to yesterday's post, James Brown's stunning "World" performance came on a short-lived ABC show from late '69 titled The Music Scene. Wikipedia tells me that the show, though it was groundbreaking and featured several of the day's biggest musical performers, failed promptly - one, because The Young Generation wasn't considered a prime target market for advertisers, and two, because it clocked in at an unusual 45 minutes. (It was paired with another 45-minute show, a pre-Lost stranded-on-an-island fantasia called The New People.)I need to learn more about The Music Scene - if only because the people behind it were daring/insane enough to turn the Archies' too-bubblegum-for-the-Monkees "Sugar Sugar" into a gospel- and daishiki-soaked soul shout from what I take to be the show's house band. In our continuing musical education, I present: The Music Scene Singers, "Sugar Sugar." I hope you're as fascinated as I was.
1 comment:
Yup, "Music Scene" (available on DVD, BTW) is worth investigating. They (selectively) counted down the Billboard chart each week, a la "Your Hit Parade", but featuring as many of the original artists as possible. However, since the Archies didn't exist, they had to improvise. Quite cleverly.
The two-45-minute-shows gambit ("MS" at 7:30 and "New People" at 8:15) failed for ABC -- "Laugh-In", the #1 show in all of TV at the time, was on NBC at 8.
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