>From this week's Riverfront Times. Does anybody remember this show or seen these vids? It sounds too cool. > MAKING THE SCENE > > BY ROBERT HUNT > > Call it laziness, call it spring fever, call it a bad dose of pop culture clouding >my senses, but the stacks > of new video releases were getting even higher than usual. Some were worth my >attention; some were > worse than you can imagine (Spring Break Uncensored, which advertises itself as >“Better than Jerry > Springer, Howard Stern and MTV combined,” or “the sexiest action movie of the >year,” Major Rock, > “fighting for truth, justice and the American babes!”), but I ignored the good and >the bad alike. I had > allowed myself to be distracted — obsessed? — by a tiny piece of pop history. More >specifically, I > was watching Bobby Sherman singing “Little Woman” to a foot-tall dancing woman. >Those Seijun > Suzuki reissues would have to wait; I was hypnotized by a short-lived, almost >forgotten TV series, by > the shotgun marriage of TV variety shows and Woodstock. For a few brief days, I was >hooked on > Music Scene. > Music Scene, which called itself “a super concert of the world’s best music,” >premiered in > September 1969 — the same TV season that saw the first episodes of The Brady Bunch, >Room 222, > The Bill Cosby Show (the one where he played a gym teacher), The Bold Ones, Then >Came Bronson, > Bracken’s World and (a glimmer of light in the vast wasteland) My World and Welcome >to It — and > staked a claim at the bottom of the ratings for four months before finally being >put out its misery. > Though Harlan Ellison, whose L.A. Free Press column “The Glass Teat” is an >indispensable guide to > TV during the Nixon years, had kind words for Music Scene (“It’s so good the >scythewielder of TV > attrition will certainly mow it down forthwith,” he warned), a recent look at a few >episodes released by > MPI Home Video suggests that the show was doomed from the start, a schizophrenic >shot at creating > a self-consciously hip TV show at a time when the medium’s definition of hipness >was the bikini-clad > dancers on Laugh-In (which, incidentally, ran opposite Music Scene). > It should have been easy: Take a popular standup comedian, David Steinberg; add a >handful of > young comic performers (including a pre-Laugh-In Lily Tomlin) to perform brief >sketches; bring on a > handful of musical acts ranging from Isaac Hayes to the Everly Brothers, from Janis >Joplin to Eydie > Gorme; and wrap the whole thing around the Billboard Top 10 list for the week. >Watching the > occasionally delightful, occasionally excruciating but almost always interesting >episodes of Music Scene > 30 years after they first aired, its rapid path to self-destruction is easy to >chart. First came the obvious > contradiction of trying to showcase new rock music while the charts were topped by >the likes of > “Sugar, Sugar” (one episode offers a quirky gospel arrangement of the Archies’ >bubble-gum hit, which > held the No. 1 spot the entire month of the series’ premiere) and aforementioned >teen idol Sherman > (who appears five times on the eight tapes, once to the obvious disgust of host >Steinberg). It certainly > couldn’t have helped that ABC positioned the show against two ratings champs, >Laugh-In and > Gunsmoke, or that it was an irregular 45 minutes long, part of a network >experiment. By late October, > the show had recruited the then-controversial Tommy Smothers to offer his >counterculture imprimatur > while muttering a few staggeringly unfunny Nixon jokes in a stony haze. (This >episode also features one > of the strangest musical moments: Merle Haggard singing “Okie from Muskogee” on a >dark > front-porch set — complete with hound dog — that slowly turns out to be completely >surrounded by a > hundred or so small flags.) By the final episode — which includes one of the >brightest moments in the > series, an obviously unrehearsed interview with Groucho Marx — the comedy troupe >has been > disbanded and the Billboard chart ignored, and a resigned Steinberg, with just a >hint of bitterness, > signs off. > Each of the eight tapes released by MPI includes a complete episode, a >half-dozen-or-so extra > musical performances (the producers reportedly taped extra performances so that >they could adapt > each show to the changes in the Billboard chart) and one of a series of commercial >spots featuring the > Rolling Stones (though, curiously, neither the Stones nor Howard Hesseman, who >appears in one of > the ads with them, was ever on the series). The musical performances are uneven, of >course, from the > bland Gary Puckett to a sloppy but lively Sly and the Family Stone, from a >lip-synched Three Dog > Night turning “Eli’s Coming” into an unintentionally hysterical comedy sketch to a >typically laid-back > Roger Miller obligingly walking through a goofy cartoon set singing “King of the >Road,” but as cultural > relics of the tail end of the ’60s, they’re priceless. > MPI Home Video has released eight volumes of Music Scene, each priced at $19.98. >It’s unclear > whether these represent the entire series, and, curiously, the episodes are out of >sequence. The first > episode, for example, appears as Vol. 5. For more information, or to order, contact >MPI at > 800-323-0442 or www.mpimedia.com. >
