I hope you had a marvelous Thanksgiving! Mine was typically quiet, spent hosting Thanksgivng programming at Radio City, then heading home to enjoy a Black Friday vaca day.
PBS had a marvelous Christmas special on Thanksgiving night (I admire their restraint–CBS yet again aired “Rudolph” three full days before Turkey Day, the scoundrels). The special was an episode of “The Dean Martin Show” from 1967 featuring the Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra families. Dean, his wife Jeanne and their…many, many children. And Frank and his three. (No Mrs. Sinatra appeared…Frank’s situation at the time was, as they say, complicated.)
The highlight of the hour is a rollicking medley of the Great American Songbook with Frank and Dean:
The framework for the PBS broadcast made a big deal out of this being a “lost” and “remastered” hour of television. Whatever they need to say to goose up interest is fine by me…but this is not “lost” by any means. I’d even wager a commercially released DVD of the episode exists. What I won’t bet on is how much of the musical content was cut for DVD, and that’s where the PBS presentation shines. There were also some nice newly recorded interviews with Dean and Frank’s kids remembering the production of the episode. Kudos to PBS for finding things like this and doing them right. (The show was made possible by viewers like me! I helped!)
Right after watching the Dean and Frank Christmas show I noticed that TCM was about to run a brand new documentary, “Dean Martin: King Of Cool”. This is a marvelous feature-length search for the soul of an entertainer who always played things close to the vest. His kids, his coworkers, his deepest friends all admit to not really knowing him on any deep level. So the filmmakers take the “Citizen Kane” route and try to find Dean’s “Rosebud”.
From his youth in Steubenville, Ohio to his rocket ride to stardom with Jerry Lewis (the infamous quote at the nadir of their partnership: “Jerry, you’re nothing to me but a f—— dollar sign”) and beyond, the film has a roll call of legends offering stories of their own experiences with Dean. The wild and crazy Rat Pack days–less wild and crazy for Dean, who was the only one who would walk away from the debauchery after the show and go to bed–lead into the variety show.
There are great moments of sadness in the Dean Martin story and “King Of Cool” addresses them with delicacy and respect. Dean lost his mother, father and brother in the course of a year-and-a-half. Footage is shown of Dean struggling through a performance of “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” on the variety show very soon after his divorce with Jeanne. And particular attention is paid to the great tragedy of his life, the death of son Dean Paul in an airplane accident.
Besides being a great documentary on the man’s work–the music, the movies, the TV show–the film offers personal glimpses; despite being thrice married, Dean was a loving, present father for all of his children. And Dean’s “rosebud” is, arguably, revealed at film’s end.
If you’re a fan, you’ll love it. And (as of this writing anyway) the whole movie is on YouTube!
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I have watched parts one and two of Peter Jackson’s “Get Back”. I don’t want to write a lot about it because A) just about everybody is writing about it and B) between reading the companion book and producing and hosting a radio special, I am very near overkill of the topic. But in brief: It is, for Beatle fans, as revelatory an experience as the hype has indicated. There are moments here that made me smile, made me laugh, made me gasp…and, yes, everybody smokes like a chimney. Jackson so wisely keeps things simple…the footage is presented day-by-day, nicely divided between rehearsal performances, idle chatter, and aimless discussions on the original intentions of the project. I can’t wait for part 3 which will include the legendary rooftop concert.
I agree with my friend Jeremy Fifield who says this miniseries deserves a physical media release, preferably bundled with an official Blu Ray of the original 1970 “Let It Be” documentary. I have come a long way on this whole streaming thing…I am totally on board with it. But physical media offers the capability for supplementary material that the streaming services just seem to have no interest in, whether it’s producing new supplements (audio commentary, documentaries, deleted scenes) or porting over supplements from previous physical releases.
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My pal Dangerous Dave and I started producing our little internet radio shows in 2004. Back then, and for quite some time, episodes of our original series, “The Golden Girls Radio Hour”, were rarely more than 15 minutes. (The title was sort of a private joke on the fact that “The Lutheran Hour”, a nationally syndicated religious program, ran only 30 minutes. The Spanish language Lutheran Hour ran 15 minutes.)
As the years have gone by we’ve expanded our horizons and produced shows that could run as long as we could write. Our latest production, “Doc and Dave Present The Wizard Of Oz”, runs 50 minutes. But hey! It’s The Wizard Of Oz for crying out loud! You got Kansas, the tornado, the munchkins, and on and on.
Since our internet radio empire began with our cheesy impressions of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia, we cast them in the Wizard. Here’s the link to listen:
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Born on this very date in 1917: Robert Emil Schmidt! Better known to baby boomers as Buffalo Bob Smith!
Ol’ Buffalo Bob was a radio man first and last, but in-between he became a beloved figure as host of “The Howdy Doody Show”, and voice of Howdy himself. Back in the 50s, the way for Smith (not a ventriloquist) to talk and sing with Howdy on live television coast-to-coast was to pre-record each day’s Howdy lines on an acetate disc, a record made for limited use that involved a very different and complex production process than the mass production of vinyl records.
I’ve read two good books about Smith and “The Howdy Doody Show”: one is a warts-and-all biography called “Say Kids! What Time Is It?” by Stephen Davis, son of the show’s original longtime director. It goes into detail on Doodyville scandals like the great Christmas massacre, when Bob Keeshan (who played silent clown Clarabelle before he was assigned the rank of Captain) and other on-and-off-camera talent demanded raises and were told not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way out.
The other book, “Howdy And Me”, is a glossy (physically and literarily) autobiography written (with a ghost co-author) by the Buff. It, no surprise here, offers a more rosy view of those golden days of live television. But it also goes into Smith’s post-“Howdy” years, when he owned several radio stations in New England and enjoyed hopping on the mic to support charitable efforts and connect with the communities the stations served. It’s been said of my old boss Mike Garwood that keeping KCOW local and supportive of the community was like a religion for him. I think that’s how it is for anyone who enjoys local radio. When you’ve seen it done well, done right, you wanna be a part of it as long as your key opens the door. And the checks clear.
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Speaking of checks! We’ve been giving away cash on the radio these last couple weeks, and Thanksgiving Week was my turn to call the lucky winners. Now that’s fun. Telling people they won some cash at the most “I could use a little more cash” time of the year…fun stuff!
A few years ago KCOW did something called the Cash Cow High Low Game, which was bonkers, in both the positive and harrowing aspects of the word. That was a call-in contest with a long, slow build and a huge payoff. The current “Jingle Cash” offers a more conservative payoff but many more chances to win.
Anyway, here are a couple of my favorite winning moments from the week:
And with that, we end this go-round of “multiple topic blogging.” Welcome to the holiday season!