Honor thy godfather

The T.A.M.I. Show

(1964)

I had never heard of this film or the concert it documents until reading this in the Times a couple of weeks ago, whereupon I popped it to the top of my Netflix queue. Good move.

I haven't seen these people young in ages, and some of them I never saw this young. Mick, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Brian Wilson--geez, even Keith was young and--dare I say it?--handsome (or "cute," I guess, in the idiom of the time). Incidentally, someone really should have told Jan and Dean or whoever wrote the opening-credits song that the Stones weren't from Liverpool.

Not that Merseyside wasn't well represented: Gerry and the Pacemakers got a handoff of "Maybelline" from Chuck Berry, then traded songs with him for the first long set, and later Billy J. Kramer did four numbers, three of them written by members of another fairly prominent Liverpudlian band. That absent band was the only British invader bigger at the time (October 1964) than the Pacemakers, though the Stones were on their way, else they wouldn't have gotten to close--and while Richards was quoted to the effect that going on after a gut-ripping performance by James Brown was the biggest mistake of their career, they seemed to survive it OK.

And the boys did a nice set--would have been a great close to the concert had they been following a mortal. They started with a nod to Berry, with "Round and Round," making them the fourth act, including Chuck himself, to perform a song credited to his authorship. That wobbly articulation is designed to include the Beach Boys' "Surfin' USA," bizarrely performed three-quarters of an hour or so after Berry opened the concert with "Sweet Little Sixteen." This was after Berry had threatened a lawsuit over the obvious melodic plagiarism, and Brian Wilson and the group agreed to credit him as the composer and cut him in on royalties.

The Beach Boys, incidentally, are one of the few acts whose performance can accurately be called dull. Surprisingly exciting, on the other hand, were Lesley Gore's rendering of her feminist anthem "You Don't Own Me" and something called "Hey Little Bird," by the only act I was completely unfamiliar with, the Barbarians. These guys were proto-Ramones, which I guess explains why the Cape Cod group didn't get a lot of play on WLS in Chicago and KXOK in St. Louis, which were the only rock stations of note in my listening area.

Another great and weird pair of elements of the concert is that, if you looked only onstage, you'd have thought the fight for integration had been won, at least in Santa Monica. If you looked only at the audience, on the other hand, you'd say (as I did repeatedly, in fact, aloud; hey, I watch a lot of movies alone), "Where are all the black people?"

Anyway, not the greatest rock concert film ever, but a lot closer to the top than you'd have imagined, if you were as ignorant of its existence as I was.