By Martin H. Rots

We were visiting my grandmother in Detroit the first time I remember seeing the Rolling Stones on television.  It was 1964 or 1965, I'm not certain any more.  They were playing Robin Seymour's Swinging Time after-school dance show.    Swinging Time was beamed in from Windsor, Ontario across the Detroit River to our living rooms in the USA. The Stones performed Little Red Rooster for the dancing teens and television audience.  Jagger strutted across the stage wearing a striped shirt and Brian Jones looked every bit the rock star he was about to become.  Keith had not taken on his death wish persona yet; he looked surprisingly healthy, even in black and white.

It was the heyday of teen television.   It had started in 1952 with American Bandstand.  Dick Clark became the host in 1957 and built an entertainment empire around the Philadelphia based dance show.  The current teen sensations appeared to lip-synch their latest releases.  Music was first integrated into a weekly television show when Ozzie Nelson began regularly featuring his son Ricky crooning to the camera on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

It wasn't long after the Beatles arrived in 1964 that American television producers realized the potential of the British Invasion and the inevitable American backlash.  Clark produced a new, more contemporary after-school music show called Where the Action Is  featuring Paul Revere and the Raiders as the house band.   There were no dancing teenagers on this show, only go-go girls in white boots and short skirts or bikini-clad teens at the beach.  Filmed in LA, we got our first glimpses of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield on Action.  In September 1964, ABC premiered Shindig! in prime time.  A list of the artists who appeared on Shindig! is literally a Who's Who of the popular music industry of the mid-sixties.  NBC joined the fray soon after with Hullabaloo and a London segment hosted by the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein.  By the end of August 1966, both shows had run their course and were cancelled.

That fall, The Monkees replaced Hullabaloo at NBC on Monday nights.  Inspired by the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, The Monkees was aimed at the same teens who had made the Beatles such a phenomena.  Initially, the four Monkees only provided vocals to their hits.  Top LA songwriters provided the material and the best studio musicians played on the sessions.  The weekly show promoted their records much as Ozzie Nelson had done so successfully ten years previously with his son Ricky. 

Variety shows were big in the mid-sixties.  If you were lucky, you might catch the Rolling Stones on Dean Martin's show or of course the Beatles following Topo Gigo on Ed Sullivan's Sunday night crowd pleaser, The Ed Sullivan Show.  Sullivan had been promoting rock acts since Elvis.  To the British acts, playing the Sullivan show meant you had made it in America.  The exposure guaranteed a hit and everyone from the Animals to the Zombies were awaiting their turn in the spotlight on Sullivan's stage.

The Smothers Brothers brought us the Who, George Harrison and the Jefferson Airplane, among others.  On one classic episode, Keith Moon of the Who miscalculated the amount of explosives required to blow up his drums.  He erred on the high side.  When the charge went off at the end of their performance, Moon was wounded by a piece of flying shrapnel and Pete Townsend's hair was left smoking and singed.  When a shocked Tommy Smothers walked out on the stage, Townsend grabbed his guitar and smashed it on the stage just as he done to his own only moments before.  In addition to the cutting edge musical acts, the Smothers Brothers political satire became more and more critical of the war in Viet Nam and the Johnson administration.  They finally lost their battle with the network censors  when their show was cancelled in September 1969.  With the cancelation of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour we lost an important national showcase for new musical talent.

In June 1971, after twenty-eight years The Ed Sullivan Show had finally run its course and was also cancelled.  Variety shows had fallen victim to the changing tastes of the American public.  It wasn't long before they were no more than  distant memories.

In 1973, producer Don Kirshner brought us Don Kirshner's Rock Concert at 11:30 PM on Saturday nights.  The premiere episode featured the Rolling Stones taped in London.  Like Shindig! before it, the list of performers who appeared on Rock Concert during its eight year run included nearly all the major acts of the seventies performing live.  No more lip synching like in the past.  In October 1975, Saturday Night Live debuted on  NBC and featured a weekly musical guest much as the Smothers Brothers had done more than five years previously.  Some have been established artists like Paul Simon and others relatively unknown, like a young Elvis Costello.  The show has maintained this musical tradition for over thirty-five years. 

Watching reruns of SNL's musical guests is interesting.  Some of these fledgling performers went on to be big stars and others quickly faded into obscurity.    Some seem dated and others make me nostalgic.  I remember how old some of the performers looked to me when I was a teenager and how young they look in the films today.  It seems amazing that such young people made so much wonderful music in such a short period of time, but I'm glad they did.

If you're reading this, I'll bet you are, too.