Should have been a rock star---Beatles cartoons, Monkees TV and Chinchillas.

Beatles cartoons, Monkees TV and Chinchillas..

In the summer of 1968 I was caught in a conundrum. It was Saturday morning, and I was sitting, along with my younger brothers and sisters and buddy Larry, in my Grandma’s living room floor watching reruns of the Beatles Saturday morning cartoons.
I waited for that broadcast every week! The amount of rock music on television was abysmal, and about all anyone could count on weekly was American Bandstand. It was obviously for dancing and the bands lip-synced through their appearances.

The Beatles Cartoon, was of course, not really the Beatles, but it did fill a hole for the devoted fan. We would sit in front of the TV, watch the short silly clips and then sing along with the songs that each segment revolved around. Sometimes, we played guitar on brooms or sticks. We divided ourselves up as John, Paul, George and Ringo. We did the same with the Monkees TV show, which was simply a live action version of the Beatles cartoon. Sister Mary was Davey Jones; Tim was Mike Nesmith, etc.

We liked to watch at Granny’s because Grandpa had gotten them a color TV. We still had only black and white.

These shws gave us the music that we could only see form time to time on shows like “The Red Skeleton Show” ( I remember seeing Three Dog Night on that show… or is that a dream?), Carol Burnett, or Ed Sullivan. We missed most the Sullivan stuff since it fell during Sunday night church hours for us. Not even an appearance by Beatles or Stones could warrant missing church for rock and roll!

Anyway, back to Saturday morning….in the middle of the show, my older brother Keith came in to tell Mom, me and Grandma that he had a Saturday job for me , cleaning chinchilla cages for a friend of his. As much as I wanted to please my big brother, I also wanted to blurt out “NO!!” I didn’t want to miss those moments of Beatles music and happiness beamed straight from Liverpool into our TV set!

Reluctantly, I put on my shoes and followed Keith to his pickup and away to the chinchilla farm on the outskirts of Kiefer. There we met his buddy Bob and Bob’s uncle Dale, the two enterprising owners of the chinchilla farm. The farm to me was just a building that had stacks and stacks of cages filled with fluffy rat looking creatures. The building smelled of animal crap and Lysol.
I worked for them for several weeks, while Dale, a small chain-smoking figure of a man, guided me through the feeding, pumice baths and cleaning of the farm. After a few weeks, he let me in, then left me to clean and feed on my own. It was cool that he trusted me then, but at the same time, for this 12-year-old boy, the building full of chinchillas suddenly loomed quiet and ominous. I wanted to go home, kick off my shoes and watch Beatle cartoons with everyone else. I wanted to be a kid again, not an employee!
I could hardly wait for the 8 hoys to pass. The 12 dollar check Dale wrote me, at $1.50 an hour, was a pretty good amount for a kid then, but I just wanted to be at home.
The next week, when I went to work, I noticed Dale or Bob had left their radio in the building. I turned it on and immediately the building was less ominous. I played radio station KELI in the morning and KAKC in the afternoon. They were the two competing pop stations on AM radio of the late 60’s.
The workday flew by! I could work faster with the radio, and I was definitely no longer frightened by the loneliness of the day. I sang along with each of the songs. I wailed like a banshee to Steppenwolf! I crooned like McCartney of “Hey Jude.” I could even do, or so I imagined, the synchronized movements behind Diana Ross as the Supremes echoed around the small building. The tunes filled the ammonia tainted air and made my day slide by, even lessening the pain of no Beatles Cartoons with the variety of songs hat pop radio played in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
That was something I truly miss about radio today… it is so genre oriented that many people are never exposed to anything but their favorite flavor. The only place now that comes close to the variety of those 60’s AM stations is an IPOD on shuffle. The band, Ecerclear, captured that in their 2000 song “AM Radio”

“Yeah when things get stupid and I just dont know
Where to find my happy
I listen to my music on the am radio
You can hear the music on a am radio
You can hear the music on a am radio

I like pop, I like soul, I like rock, but I never liked disco
I like pop, I like soul, I like rock, but I never liked disco”

Variety…. Ahhhhh!

Maybe we appreciated that more because we were so desperate to hear and see any music on TV that it all was good to us? I was just as likely to watch the Carpenters when they appeared on a variety show, as I was to watch Three Dog Night. And, yes, I know the words to “Close to You” as well as I know the words to “Born to Be Wild.”

TV was a wasteland for rock music in the beginning. There were a few attempts to create something for this still fledgling genre that was beginning to be a marketing battleground. Dick Clark still reigned supreme for the dance oriented crowd. The change in 1967 became evident when “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were premiered on his show as promo clips. The former mop tops, secluded for a year from touring appeared in the clips with beards, longer hair and mustaches in psychedelic imagery. Just 4 ½ motnhs before the release of “Sgt. Pepper.”
The Bandstand crowd remarked “I don’t like their hair”, “It was finny” “They were ugly.” “ They went out with the twist” “It was weird” and for the 24 to 26 year old band members, “ they looked like somebody’s grandfather.”
The changes had been unleashed. Dick Clark’s other venture, “Where The Action Is,” 1965-1967, had been a fairly non-offensive early afternoon pop show, showcasing lip-synching bands on the beach. The 30 minute format was fats and interspersed with witty comments by the show’s rotation of performers on call, such as Paul revere and the Raiders. As the mood shifted from the cuddly pop to the more explorative and protest oriented music, “Where the Action Is” died, to be replaced by another Dick Clark show every Saturday afternoon, “Happening 68.” Paul Revere and Mark Lindsay of the Raiders also hosted it.
The show was short lived and by the end of 1969, it had expired and been replaced as the new rock show by a prime time rock, comedy and politics venue called “The Music Scene.” It was hosted by David Steinberg, and as I wrote before, was responsible for my departure from the Boy Scouts in order to see their premiere of the Beatles “Ballad of John and Yoko,’ much to my parent’s chagrin.
It seemed that Rock shows didn’t carry the monetary weight for ads that made prime time run, so after just over a year, even “The Music Scene” died a slow death.
That left us hungry for live music on TV. It seemed like nothing was sustainable and a variety fo late night shows drifted in and out of the doldrums until the two most successful made their appearance on the national TV scene.

In 1972, the late night variety show “The Midnight Special” followed “The Tonight Show” on Friday nights with a long list of rockers, pop stars and disco artists performing live on stage, a which was a big change from the prepackaged performances of bands on other shows. “Midnight Special” lasted till 1981 in it’s 1 ½ hr late night format. Its success at the late night slot prompted a little competition from another channel in the form of “IN Concert” and then “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert..” Both shows eventually fell to the new king on the mountain in 1981.

Now, by the time I was in college in the late 70’s, there were several chances for televised live rock music. “Midnight Special,” “Rock Concert” and even the weekly live music guests on “Saturday Night Live.” Helped fill the void. I had still had the peculiar habit of turning on the stereo while the TV played in a muted mode. Sound and vision. It was as if there had to be more and more stimuli!
In my second year of teaching, 1980-81, my room mate convinced me to invest in cable TV based on the one innovation he was sure I would be drawn to… a 24 hour music television station. Music groups had always prepared promo music video to advertise on shows, such as the “Music Scene’s” airing of “the Ballad of John and Yoko.” I had also watched a Nickelodeon show called “Pop Clips.” It was the brainchild of former Monkee Mike Nesmith who sold the idea to the networks of collecting and airing the band promo clips. It featured the up and coming bands of the late 70’s such as the Police, and experimental and cutting edge music from bands like the Split Enz and “M’. (M’s infamous low tech video of “Pop Musik” which heralded the coming techno brand of New Wave.)
Video did indeed kill the radio Star in August of 1981. VJ’s (video Jocks) and a rotating catalog of edgy and familiar musicians crowded the airwaves and drew me closer and closer to the set. MTV even broadcast in FM stereo that you could also plug into you stereo speakers, freeing you from the tin box distortion of tiny TV sound.

Music had hit TV in a 24-hour format! The music was visualized before your eyes in performance clips, dramatization clips and finally, from Todd Rundgren ( A Wizard A True Star) even completely digitalized, c0mputerized video.

It was a long way from 30 minutes of Beatles cartoons on Saturday morning.

Of course, there were the drawbacks as well. It seemed in the early days that MTV had few black musicians on their shows. Artists complained about the fact that video took away the listeners own interpretations of the songs. Video drove out the unsightly, the fat and ugly musician in favor of the cute, fashionable and visual. Looks over content. Surprise! Surprise!

Now, today, in 2009, MTV has several incarnations and has drifted away from its music format with reality shows, fluff and commercial after commercial. Back where we started, wanting something that is real music.

And where is radio??? Each station crammed into some small marketing formula, owned and operated by sterilized format driven companies.

Ever see the movie “FM?” True today as it was in the 70’s.

Bring back that late night live performance. Bring back rock music uninhibited by the corporate bottom dollar.

I sure would like those Beatles Cartoons back.