Saturday, January 17, 2015

Just a typical Saturday Night that's amazing!

How about these choices?  New York in the early '60s.  Wow.  I would go see any of these... except maybe CLEOPATRA.   If you had to pick, which of these attractions would you see tonight? 


56 comments :

  1. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World for me. Speaking of which, not that it should be, but do you think Mad, Mad, Mad World could be remade today? The story holds up, to an extent, but do you think it could be remade with actors that hold the same weight as the original? Been curious about this for a while.

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  2. Isn't that Rat Race?

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  3. I was scared to death of him as a kid, but I'd LOVE to see Brother Theodore now.

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  4. I saw Rolf Harris in the UK when I was 17 and loved his show. Sadly, he's recently had something of a Bill Cosby moment, with the exception that in his case he wound up in jail.

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  5. I didn't expect to see Rolf Harris's name among the listings. I thought he'd only ever performed in Australia and the UK. Anyway, he's now serving a prison sentence in London for child abuse, so that's that regarding him.

    I'd have gone to see Bob Dylan. Both for the concert and also to ask him not to make Masked & Anonymous a few decades later. I love Dylan but that's 90 minutes I'll never get back.

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  6. Wow - what choices...

    I'd end up seeing Miles Davis

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  7. A toss-up between Stiller & Meara, Miles Davis, and Bob Dylan.

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  8. This was making the rounds about a year ago, and I figured out that you really could hit just about all of it, assuming that there weren't shows canceled as a result of the events of 11/22/63.

    -Brubeck (with the great Paul Desmond) / Lambert Hendricks Bavan / Clark Terry St 23rd Town Hall

    -Sam Cooke / Mary Wells Sat 23rd midnight show

    -Count Basie Stan Getz Jimmy Rushing 27th Lincoln Center

    - Bill MOnroe / Doc Watson Town Hall Fri 29th

    - Dylan Newark 8:30 Sat 30th

    - And you MUST rush back to catch the Theodore show at midnight on Sat the 30th.

    (There are no dates I can make out for Miles & Blossom Dearie at the Village Vanguard, but you should be able to make time for him, too.)

    This leaves plenty of time to catch both MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD and HOW THE WEST WAS WON in Cinerama, and Flip Wilson and Stiller & Meara, too.

    Fact is, you could probably see all that and get change back from a hundred dollar bill.

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  9. Miles Davis at the Village Vanguard.(I almost picked Bob Dylan, but the show is in Newark.)

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  10. What a line up! As a film buff, I'd have to say How the West Was Won - and I'm not even particularly fond of westerns! Traveling throughout the western United States last year, I couldn't get Alfred Newman's epic score out of my head! And the cast! Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Debbie Reynolds, just to name a few! Plus it was screened in Cinerama at the time which gave the film a uniquely immersive quality.

    But how can you pass up Miles Davis? What an incredible time in history!

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  11. My best guess is that this is from the 22 Nov 1963 paper; I don't know why anyone would have saved it otherwise. But what a lineup! Thanks so much for this.

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  12. "Dave Brubeck - wow!" - slgc

    Ditto.

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  13. I'd agree that it must be 1963, if only for the fact that It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World had been released, but How The West Was Won was still running. HTWWW was the last movie in true, 3-panel Cinerama, and IAMMMMW was the first movie released in 1-panel Cinerama, aka Ultra-Panavision. My Uncle Mac worked for Cinerama and was one of the technicians at that developed Ultra-Panavision.

    I'd prefer Cleopatra over that child-molesting swine Rolf Harris any day. It's not a great movie, neither is HTWWW, but it has many virtues, and some good actors.

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  14. Bob Dylan. Next choice would be Doc Watson. After that one of the folkies.

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  15. Sam Cooke early show (Apollo had multiple start times t/o the day/eve)
    Miles to launch the night magic
    And IF the stimulants were kickin' hard,
    drop in on Brother Theo on the way to
    Dave Van Ronk's for poker, pot and cigars.

    Livin' the dream :+)

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  16. Charles H. Bryan1/17/2015 5:01 PM

    The Miles Davis show, but to see Blossom Dearie. I truly, seriously love Blossom Dearie.

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  17. That's easy -- Sam, Mary and Ruby... WOW.

    Ruby and the Romantics might be the most underrated pop-soul group of the '60s. And there's no topping the brilliance of Sam Cooke.

    Too bad cassettes hadn't been invented, making it almost impossible to bootleg the show (and get away with it).

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  18. 1. Bob Dylan
    2. Count Basie
    3. Sam Cooke

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  19. The Dave Brubeck Quartet for me; my folks owned the albums Time Out and its sequel Time Further Out - the latter especially was an influence on my teenage composition efforts (such as they were; tape-recorded improvisations, primarily) in the early '70s.

    D.: I was lucky enough to see 2001 in Cinerama in spring 1968 at the now-gone Fox theater in center-city Philadelphia where I was visiting a cousin. This is the first I've heard of a one-panel version of Cinerama - how on earth did they accomplish that?? The screen was incredibly wide and somewhat curved but with everything in focus. I was 11 1/2 and never forgot the experience, and even though successive viewings have been in 70mm or less, I won't see it except in a theater (lately that's every 7 years or so, which is sufficient - last time was in the AFI Silver Theatre).

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  20. Bob Dylan and then Sam Cooke and Mary Wells - that's a late night for a two year old.

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  21. Since Dylan is listed as "folk" I guess this was pre-Newport. Bet they never saw it coming.
    Janice B.

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  22. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  23. Pete O'Philia1/17/2015 6:43 PM

    Bob Dylan and then Sam Cooke and Mary Wells - that's a late night for a two year old.


    Good thing you didn't see Rolf Harris!

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  24. It's a real shame about Rolf Harris. He made his bones in Vancouver. Before then he was relativity unknown, but when he moved to Vancouver, he became a star, and had his own TV show, and his Christmas song "Six White Boomers", became a standard, I used to cry to that song as a kid.

    In recent years he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, then his dirty secrets came out, and now he is in jail, probably for the rest of hislife. Pity.

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  25. Looking through the bottom-billed names (Doc Watson, Blossom Dearie, Flip Wilson, Clark Terry, Stiller & Meara, etc.), I realize that I would much rather have seen the opening acts of 1963 than most of the big name headliners of today. Back then, only Borscht Belt comedians did acts that involved lip-synching to records.

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  26. miles davis AND BLOSSOM DEARIE!

    sorry, i just came.

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  27. Mike in Seattle1/17/2015 7:35 PM

    Thanks to Mark Evanier we know that MAD MAD WORLD premiered in LA the weekend of the assassination. I imagine it did in NY also. The dates jive with the week after. I wonder if that Brubeck concert Saturday night 11/23 happened?

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  28. Same Cooke, Mary Wells, et. al.

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  29. Could we have guessed the impact these performers had at the time. I would have gone to Stiller / Maera the the Chad Mitchell trio ( Hootenany lover that I was) but my inner Motown lingered. I love this.

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  30. "gottacook said...
    D.: This is the first I've heard of a one-panel version of Cinerama - how on earth did they accomplish that?? The screen was incredibly wide and somewhat curved but with everything in focus."


    You were seeing one-panel Cinerama when you saw 2001, as it was shot in the process, and released as a "Cinerama" movie. I saw 2001 on the same Cinerama screen on which I'd seen How the West Was Won, and that screen was DEEPLY curved, a 146-degree arc. In fact, it isn't even one screen. A Cinerama screen was 51 feet from tip to tip, and 25 feet high. It consisted of 1100 vertical strips of perforated tape, hung at an angle like louvered window blinds, so the light reflected went behind the next strip, instead of reflecting onto other parts of the screen and mucking up the image.

    The one panel version my Uncle and his colleagues created, first used on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and then all all subsequent "Cinerama" releases, involved shooting on 70mm film, with an anamorphic lens that created a greater image squishing at the ends of the images, so it would project onto the deeply curved screen without distortion. For "Flat" releases, the film image had to be re-rendered to remove the distortion of the ends on the film strip.

    I can now answer Ken's question of which I would do tonight, as I now have the Blu-Ray of IAMMMW running.

    Ah, Mary Wells. I was briefly in an acting workshop with her, 30 years ago. Great lady. I did improv in class with her.

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  31. Dylan in 1963 for sure.
    Sam Cooke would be good too!

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  32. I have a feeling the shows scheduled for Nov. 23 either were postponed or canceled in the wake of the assassination. Not sure about the shows slated for later dates.

    Assuming all of these did go on, I'd probably go with the Sam Cooke gig at the Apollo. I have a feeling the Cooke who performed at that legendary venue was a completely different cat than the one who played the Copa. And it would be fun to hear an early Motown legend such as Mary Wells (though this was probably before she recorded her signature song, "My Guy"). I bet her "Bye Bye Baby" would be dynamite, especially without the sappy chorus. (When Motown issued her greatest hits LP some years later, the chorus was removed, making "Bye Bye Baby" sound far less dated.)

    Second on the list might be the acoustic, freewheelin' Bob Dylan in Newark. Dave Brubeck might have replaced him at #2 if the supporting act was Lambert, Hendricks & Ross instead of L, H & Bavan, but Annie Ross made that vocalese trio shine and she had left the previous year.

    Wonder whether the Chad Mitchell Trio performed their hilarious "Oh, we're the John Birch Society" song so soon after the assassination.

    There are some other acts I'd have been curious to see; Blossom Dearie was a wonderfully clever jazz singer, Stiller & Meara already were Ed Sullivan favorites, and I'm wondering how close the 1963 Flip Wilson was to the comic who soared to national fame half a decade later.

    The movies? I can always catch them later (and that summer at age 8, I saw "Cleopatra" at the Dewitt Drive-In near Syracuse and fell asleep in the back seat; now, I consider Claudette Colbert the classic Cleo).

    I'll close with this -- Vaughn Meador thankfully isn't on this half-page. After Nov. 22, 1963, his career sank like a stone.

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  33. MAD MAD WORLD had its New York premiere on November 17, 1963.

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  34. This is sort of a miracle.

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  35. BTW, if Evanier said the film premiered in Los Angeles the weekend of the assasination, he appears to be wrong. Absolutely everything I've seen online indicates MAD WORLD had its LA premiere on November 7.

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  36. Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis or Bob Dylan? What a decision to have to make.

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  37. Funny how no one has mentioned Flip Wilson. one of the most brilliant comics of the era. Big enough to eventually have his own TV show.
    Also the Halifax III. which was a Canadian folk troupe with Denny Doherty, soon of the Mamas and Papas, and Zal Yanovsky, soon of the Loving Spoonful. I might have gone there just in the event a young Michelle Phillips was in the audience.
    Sam Cooke recorded an album at The Apollo that is a classic, and by this time Mary Wells was already having business difficulties with Berry Gordy.
    Glen Yarbrough -lead singer for the Limeliters, had a big hit in 1965 and did a great coca Cola commercial.
    Also Jo Mapes- extremely underrated folk singer.
    This ad essentially marks the end of an era
    When John Kennedy was killed and the Quartet arrived 10 weeks later, all of this vanished forever.
    Many of these people became stars but jazz, folk and the movies were never the same. It happened very quickly.
    Consider that Sam Cooke was dead a year later and a Hard Days Night was only nine months away.

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  38. I'd have to see Count Basie, though the jazz quartet with Flip Wilson sounds like a great time. I wonder if it was like this every week back then?

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  39. CLEOPATRA. I've seen it several times. It's really not a bad movie.

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  40. Dylan in Newark. In 1963 Newark was a vibrant city. It's rapid decline did not start until 1965 after the riots.

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  41. I'd like to see the Chad Mitchell Trio, if only to hear John Deutchendorf (Denver) sing live again.

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  42. David in Cincinnati1/18/2015 9:52 AM

    With riches like that, it's a tough choice, but Brubeck for me.

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  43. At the time i would have picked the Chad Mitchell Trio and Dave Brubeck. I was a folk music freak and loved the satiric songs they sang ("I Was Not A Nazi Polka" is a classic as well as "John Birch Society"). Second choice would have been Dave Brubeck. I still have the used Take 5 vinyl LP I bought in a San Francisco used book store. I love Blue Rondo A La Turk just as much (Cincinnati Ballet used Turk in one of its performances).

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  44. SBell: Several sources I've just consulted agree that John Denver didn't join the trio until 1965.

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  45. What Bob Claster would see!!

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  46. So many amazing choices! Would prob go see the New York City Ballet, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, and “How The West Was Won”.

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  47. Oops! I didn't notice Sam Cooke and Mary Wells. I'd love to have seen either of them.

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  48. Sam Cooke, Count Basie and Flip Wilson!

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  49. Pete Grossman1/19/2015 5:54 AM

    Man! What a choice - today anyway, if I saw this, I'd say Bassie/Getz/Rushing. Back then, it probably would have been Sam Cooke and Co.

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  50. Pete Grossman1/19/2015 5:55 AM

    BTW, I absolutely love this! Great find!

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  51. And that's not all you could have seen on that final Saturday of November 1963 in New York. What could you have seen on Broadway?

    Well, you could have seen the original productions of:
    BAREFOOT IN THE PARK
    BEYOND THE FRINGE
    WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
    110 IN THE SHADE
    A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
    OLIVER!
    HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING
    SHE LOVES ME
    STOP THE WORLD - I WANT TO GET OFF (with Joel Grey as a replacement for Anthony Newley)
    and MARY, MARY.

    Plus:

    Kirk Douglas in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST; the supporting cast included Gene Wilder, William Daniels, Ed Ames, Arlene Golonka, Gerald S.

    O'Loughlin, Rex Robbins and Arnold Soboloff
    Albert Finney in LUTHER
    Alan Arkin and Vivian Blaine in ENTER LAUGHING
    Charles Boyer in Terence Rattigan's MAN AND BOY
    Mary Martin in JENNIE
    Janis Paige, Craig Stevens, and Fred Gwynne in Meredith Willson's HERE'S LOVE
    Colleen Dewhurst and Roscoe Lee Browne in Edward Albee's THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE
    Claudette Colbert, Cyril Ritchard and Roger C. Carmel in THE IRREGULAR VERB TO LOVE
    Sidney Blackmer and Van Heflin in A CASE OF LIBEL
    Betty Garrett and Joyce Van Patten in SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
    Coral Browne in Jean Anouilh's THE REHEARSAL
    Barry Foster in THE PRIVATE EAR AND THE PUBLIC EYE
    Corin Redgrave in CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING

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  52. Sam Cooke at the Apollo.

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  53. Miles Davis or Bill Monroe and Doc Watson! What a choice!

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  54. Bill Monroe and Doc Watson! Doesn't get any more revolutionary than that. The only man to single-handedly create a music genre, the only man to be in both the Country Music AND Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the same bill with the man who basically invented flat-picking guitar (and who tried out for Mr. Monroe's band at one time)...no brainer :)

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