“Forget all your troubles
Forget all your cares
And go downtown, downtown.”
—”Downtown,” Petula Clark, 1964
Well, things have certainly changed from the heady days of wide-eyed innocence as we sat on our hands and listened to Petula Clark sing those lyrics to the top of the charts. After all, Vietnam had yet to reach a full head of steam. Kent State was waiting surreptitiously in the dark wings. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were still very much alive. And video was just beginning to kill the radio star.
That video was the brainchild of producer Jack Good, a half-hour music show called “Shindig.” (Even the name sounds appropriately innocent, like a clambake with minimal necking allowed). Music was the main event here. Lighting was adequate, adolescent and primitive. Sets were sparse and built for speed. After all, this was live television at its early best. The Shindig dancers did “The Pony” and “The Swim” and a variety of other shimmying while Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin or Lesley Gore performed their classics that still stick in our collective brains to this very day. And all the songs, or so it seemed, were a concise three minutes or less.
The Shindig series has now been given a new lease on life as Rhino Home Video has produced six compilations of this pre-MTV vintage television. Watch as Tina Turner, looking better today than yesterday, shakes and rattles through “Ooh-Poo-Pah-Do;” or the Supremes, with Diana
Ross sporting all that high hair and lip-gloss, glide through “Baby Love”; or sing along with the wistful refrain of Jack DeShannon’s ”What the World Needs Now.”
The music is only broken here and there by your host Jimmy O’Neil, sporting a radio DJ vocalese style and inviting “all you shindiggers out there to tune in next week.” Ah yes, there’s also a refreshing MILK advertisement brought to you by all the good people at the National Dairy
Association, in which three young people knock themselves out on the dance floor to some boogie/woogie fever music. Suddenly, the music turns inward and down, as if Dexter Gordon were playing some smoky dive, and the feverish youngsters take a dance break (not a break dance) to drink wholesome milk, gulping it down and smiling. Then they return to their dancing, shaking as if some arm or leg might be thrown off.
Still, the whole thing is bathed in a kind of saintly glow. A few Beatles-esque screams occasionally erupt from the mild-mannered studio audience, but mostly the assembled crowd is well-behaved and all dressed up—skinny ties and sweaters—passively enjoying the music. Now you can too. The six videos feature of variety of stars, including the ones mentioned as well as Jimmy Wilson, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Righteous Brothers.
For anyone who grew up with this show, or for those who simply remember the songs, this show provides innocent entertainment for a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
The trip down memory lane isn’t quite as pleasant for those who check out David Lifton’s Best Evidence. The just-released video presents some ideas and evidence about what happened following the tragic events of November 22, 1963. For any of you who have followed the controversy surrounding Oliver Stone’s new film, JFK, Lifton’s Best Evidence should be a required companion piece. While Stone’s film blurred the lines of fact and fiction (quite effectively I thought), Lifton attempts to convince with sheer empirical evidence.
During the fall of 1980, Lifton conducted a series of interviews with several of the medical personnel present at both the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was taken immediately after the shooting and Bethesda Naval Medical Center, where the president’s body was flown for an autopsy. The startlingly different stories told by the men give the viewer pause about the publicly accepted version of the lone gunman theory. Gaps in the stories include differing coffins, post-mortem surgery, the size of the head wounds, the missing brain and the wrapping encasing the President’s body.
When Kennedy was assassinated, Lifton was a UCLA graduate student in physics, working nights at North American Aviation on the Apollo Space program. Following the shooting, and armed with a considerable amount of curiosity, Lifton bought and examined the 26-volume Warren Commission Report. Puzzled, he focused on the film of the shooting that had been taken by bystander Abraham Zapruder. Lifton, a Cornell University Graduate in engineering physics, was shocked at what he discovered: scientific proof that the government’s explanation of the Kennedy assassination just didn’t make sense.
“To suggest that the President was shot from behind would be contrary to the laws of physics,” Lifton explains.
Now, 28 years after that fateful day in Dallas, Lifton has published a best-selling book and a companion home video, appeared frequently on national television and is generally regarded as one of the country’s leading experts on the Kennedy assassination. Of his book, Time Magazine wrote, “Lifton has turned up intriguing new evidence of some strange doings with Kennedy’s body in the 12 hours after the shooting.”
All of the documentary footage is shot in a straightforward, matter-of-fact, low-budget style. The witnesses seem credible and genuinely shocked to discover that what they saw wasn’t what was. The wraparound segments featuring the Kennedy inauguration and subsequent funeral with the rider-less stallion are highly emotional stuff, complete with brooding background music. If true, the magic act with the President’s body borders on “War of the World” proportions. And those being taken in by this high-level shell game include every last one of us.
Representatives at Rhino indicate that both the Shindig series, as well as the Best Evidence video, can be obtained at Tower Records and Tapes, K-Mart and other video outlets around the area. You can also write Rhino to receive a complete catalog at 2225 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404-3555.
