Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 8: December 1969 to February 1970

Here's the seventh volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. It's the third volume of the show's second season.

I'll only mention some things about a couple of the performances. The rest should be evident just by listening. 

This episode features a previously unknown chapter of Lesley Gore's music career. She'd had a string of hits from 1963 to 1967, but her music went out of style. She continued to release some singles, but they all flopped. In 1972, she put out an album for the first time since 1967, "Someplace Else Now," that recast her in a singer-songwriter mode, similar to Carole King and her seminal 1971 album "Tapestry." In her Playboy TV appearance, she sang two songs that were moving into that mode. Neither of them were officially released by her anywhere, as far as I could tell. One of them, "Didn't We," is a Jimmy Webb song that was covered by many musical artists in this time period. 

Another bit of lost history are the two songs by Joanne Vent and Muscatel. Vent was an attractive White woman with a soulful, bluesy voice, who seemed to have potential for a big music career, a la Janis Joplin. She put out a solo album in 1969, called, "The Black and White of It Is Blues." Unfortunately, as one review I read put it, "Great voice, but not such a great album." At the time of this show, she was getting ready to release a second album with a new backing band, called Muscatel. I found a web link of someone selling a test pressing of it on eBay. But somehow that album never came out. The two songs she sang here suggest what her second album could have sounded like. She also was part of a duet in Volume 5, and shows up again in Volumes 10 and 11.

It's great that Fleetwood Mac is included here. But unfortunately, their performance was badly edited down. Their one song, "Rattlesnake Shake," is only two and a half minutes long. It's clear the performance was longer, since the song both fades in and fades out. They also did a second song, "Coming Your Way," but it only showed up for half a minute at the very end of that particular episode, under an overdubbed advertisement for T.W.A. Airlines. So I didn't bother to include that.

I've mentioned that each episode ended with talking over the music. But, by chance, that only impacted one song in this volume,  "The Category Stomp by John Hartford. That's why that one has "[Edit]" in its title.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long. 

01 Something (Dolores Hall)
02 Just Because of You (Dolores Hall)
03 A Simple Thing as Love (John Hartford)
04 Natural to Be Gone (John Hartford)
05 The Category Stomp [Edit] (John Hartford)
06 Let's Get Together (Jack Jones)
07 If You Want Me To (Chambers Brothers)
08 Love, Love, Love (Chambers Brothers)
09 Georgia on My Mind (James Brown)
10 Yesterday (Vicki Anderson)
11 By the Time I Get to Phoenix (James Brown)
12 God Bless the Child (Jack Jones)
13 The More I See You (Jack Jones)
14 Rattlesnake Shake (Fleetwood Mac)
15 Hello Young Lovers (Lesley Gore)
16 Didn't We (Lesley Gore)
17 High Sheriff of Calhoun Parrish (Tony Joe White)
18 Groupy Girl (Tony Joe White)
19 Slow Train (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)
20 Long Walk to D.C. (Joanne Vent & Muscatel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JdGHbzj8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/HAcJNqwRYyI9p09/file

The cover image shows Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. It's a screenshot I took from one of these episodes.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 1: July to August 1968

Here's the start of a weird series of albums. In the 1950s, Hugh Hefner became famous due to his magazine "Playboy," featuring lots of pictures of naked women. He tried to make the magazine respectable by including a lot more than just the nude pictures, such as stories written by famous authors and interviews of prominent people. In 1968, he was able to launch a TV show, "Playboy After Dark," to help promote "Playboy," and it ended up running for two years. Since it was broadcast on a major TV network (CBS) across the U.S., any sort of nudity was out of the question. Instead, the show focused on music, comedy, and serious discussions with prominent people, as part of Hefner's effort to make his magazine more respectable. What interests me about the show is the music. So I've compiled no less than eleven albums with the best music from all the episodes of this show.

I love Western popular music from at least the 1950s until today, but in my opinion, the creative peak was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This show happened to coincide with some of the very best years, and there was an attempt to include music of many different genres. So there was a lot of great music on this show. 

A big problem with most music on TV shows of this era is that the performances were usually lip-synced. That happened occasionally on this show, but I checked pretty carefully, and I believe the vast majority was performed live. (Admittedly, sometimes just the vocals were live, but that's still worth hearing, in my book.) In these albums I'm posting I believe I've weeded out all the lip-syncing, although it's possible I made the occasional mistake. 

As just one example, the rather obscure rock band the Collectors performed two songs on one of the episodes that makes up this first volume. I checked with the recorded versions of those songs, and one was lip-synced but the other one was performed live, so I only included the live one. (In that case, I surmise the harmony vocals and instrumentation were more complicated on one song, so that's why that one was lip-synced.) Or, in another example, Steppenwolf performed two songs live that are included on this album. But they later returned to the show and the songs they did then were all lip-synced. (In that case, those later songs were more musically complicated, with a group of female backing vocalists and other elements that would have been harder to reproduce live.) I was careful about detecting the lip-syncing like that all the way through this series.

Another big problem with most music on TV shows of this era is that most of it wasn't saved for posterity, since it was before the era of widespread ownership of video recording equipment. And when it was recorded, usually on those very first video recording machines, the quality often was low, and tended to degrade as copies were made of copies over the decades. 

But, luckily for us, this T.V. show is different. The people behind "Playboy" kept pristine copies of all the episodes. Then, in the 1990s, they started a Playboy cable channel, and broadcast all the episodes in full. I was able to find them via SoulseekQT. So for all the songs in all the albums in this series, the sound quality is truly excellent.

Despite that quality, the music from this show has generally been little known by music lovers. There are a few exceptions. The main one is that the appearance of the Grateful Dead for two songs on one episode has gotten around, because it's a very rare chance to see great video footage of that band from way back in 1969. Some of the other performances by famous rock bands have also been shared a bit, like performances by Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat, the Byrds, and Steppenwolf. But that's well less than five percent of it. The vast majority hasn't been seen or heard, unless you've been one of the few people to watch the full episodes. The problem with that is that nearly all of the non-musical parts of those episodes are pretty dreadful. So I've taken it upon myself to "liberate" the music from these episodes so they can be properly appreciated by many more people. I went through all the episodes (quickly skipping over the non-musical parts), converted the video to audio, and saved the songs as mp3s.

I'll write more about the T.V. show, and especially about how very weird it was, in a later write-up in this series, because I don't want this write-up to get too long. But I do feel it's important to mention here with this first album that the music in this series is a very mixed bag. It seems Hugh Hefner had a lot of say about which musical acts would appear on his show - maybe even it was entirely up to him. But clearly, he had two competing desires. On one hand, it's obvious that he personally liked middle-of-the-road music, such as mood-setting cocktail jazz. He was in his forties when this show was on air, and he naturally preferred music in the style of what was popular when he was a teenager, which would have been the late 1940s. Thus one gets many acts like Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Johnny Mathis. But on the other hand, in this late 1960s era, rock and soul music were all the rage. If Hefner wanted the T.V. show to be successful and stay on air, he needed to cater to that audience as well. If you watch the episodes, over and over again, when he introduced rock and soul acts, he would say that that's "for the kids." Happily, he included a lot of music "for the kids," even though it's pretty obvious that he wasn't personally keen on it.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for the T.V. show, although it doesn't say much, other than listing the acts on each show:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_After_Dark 

I could have just collected all the rock and soul acts, and this album series would be considerably shorter. But I figured that I'm probably the only person who ever is going to take the time to "rescue" the music from this T.V. show. After all, it's been decades, and only a small percentage has been rescued up until now. So I tried to include all the musical performances I considered at least decent. There were some musical acts that I simply couldn't stand hearing, so they got the axe. Nearly all of that was the show-biz stuff based on pre-rock and roll music. Just guessing, maybe I cut out about 20 percent of all the music.

That said, the odds are strong that you'll like some parts of this, and dislike other parts. If that's the case, just delete the songs you don't like. That's another reason I tried to be more inclusive, because it's easy for people to delete songs, but I doubt anyone would bother to find and add any of the songs I left out.

I believe that everything on all the albums in this series is unreleased in any musical format. Back in 2006, a three DVD collection was officially released of highlights from the show. But that's just a small portion out of the 49 episodes. One can also find all the episodes on DVD, but I believe those are bootlegged copies recorded from the T.V. broadcasts in the 1990s. I highly doubt there ever will be any official releases of the music here, due to the difficulty of getting the legal rights to so many different musical acts.

The songs here are in the order they appeared, first by episode, and then within each episode. If you want to know the details of which songs are from which episodes, consult the mp3 tag info for each song. We're lucky that we know the recording dates for all the episodes, not the broadcast dates, as is usually the case for most shows. So I used the recording dates. 

There are two famous singers with the name Joe Williams. One, Big Joe Williams, was a blues singer. The other, just Joe Williams, was a jazz singer. The one here is the jazz singer. 

Also, it's quite nice to have a couple of songs from Harry Nilsson, because he almost never performed live in front of audiences. The setlist.fm concert archive only lists six concert performances in his lifetime, most of them only a couple of songs. There may be a few more than that, mostly at the beginning and end of his career, but not much. It is said he suffered from severe anxiety regarding public performance. Also, his recordings usually featured complex vocal overdubs, which were impossible to replicate in a concert setting. He also preferred a quiet life, enjoying being able to travel without being recognized.

Given all that, if you watch the video of his performance, he seemed quite at ease, even talking and joking around between songs. Maybe the fact that the audience was very small helped. It was much like playing in a person's living room instead of being on stage in a concert hall. 

This album is an hour and four minutes long. 

01 I Wish It Would Rain (Chambers Brothers)
02 Love Is All I Have [Edit] (Chambers Brothers)
03 One Act Play (Collectors)
04 The Unicorn (Shel Silverstein)
05 I Know How It Feels to Be Lonely (Morgana King)
06 Sookie, Sookie (Steppenwolf)
07 Born to Be Wild (Steppenwolf)
08 Hallelujah, I Love Him So (Morgana King)
09 Yesterday I Heard the Rain (Tony Bennett)
10 There Will Never Be Another You (Tony Bennett)
11 Looking for a Boy (Sue Raney)
12 No One Will Ever Know (Sue Raney)
13 Worried Life Blues (James Cotton Blues Band)
14 Mercy, Mercy, Mercy [Instrumental] (Buddy Rich)
15 She's Murder [Murder in the First Degree] (James Cotton Blues Band)
16 Did I Ever Really Live (Joe Williams)
17 Young Man on the Way Up (Joe Williams)
18 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Pair Extraordinaire)
19 The Bright Lights and You Girl (Pair Extraordinaire)
20 Good Old Desk (Harry Nilsson)
21 Together (Harry Nilsson)
22 Cast and Crew (Harry Nilsson with Otto Preminger)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/uT98ZKoW

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/BwV00LdWz4HJFkK/file

The cover photo is a screenshot I took from one of the episodes of this show. It shows John Kay, the lead singer of Steppenwolf. 

Our Final Week - The Closing of the Fillmore West, Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, 6-30-1971, Part 5: Elvin Bishop, Taj Mahal, and More

Here's the fifth set from the first day of five days of concerts that closed the Fillmore West venue in San Francisco in 1971. (See my write-up on the Boz Scaggs set for general information about the closing.) This set is different. Instead of featuring one musical act, it was a bonus jam session after all the acts scheduled to perform had finished their sets. 

I luckily found this set on YouTube, then converted it to audio format and broke it into mp3s. The text for that contained some informative text taken from Wolfgang's Vault, so I'll repeat that here: 

"As many may already know, on the final night (July 4th) of the closing week festivities at Fillmore West a lengthy jam session occurred, featuring many great musicians and singers. What few remember is that a similar event occurred earlier in the week (on the first night, June 30th). It was this jam session, in fact, that provided the two tracks that made it onto the 'Fillmore: The Last Days' live release. The core band includes Elvin Bishop on lead guitar, Stephen Miller (from Elvin's band) on organ, David Brown (from Boz Scaggs' band) on bass and Michael Shrieve (from Santana) on drums. This was one of the few sets not broadcast locally, and until these pre-production reels were recently discovered in the Bill Graham Archive, nobody was aware that most of this jam session existed on tape. This part of the session features Lester Chambers of The Chambers Brothers on lead vocals. On 'Have You Ever Been Mistreated,' Chambers sings in an unfamiliar falsetto and on 'You Better Believe,' sings in his distinctive voice, with the Pointer Sisters punching out their gospel-fueled vocals between each line of the verses. A truly captivating performance." 

I have some more information to add. This set also included some lead vocals by Linda Tillery, who was the lead singer for the band the Loading Zone. And Jo Baker was involved as well. She sang lead on some songs in the Elvin Bishop Group at the time. The Pointer Sisters sang lead vocals on one song. Their involvement here is especially interesting because they were just starting out. They signed a record contract at some point in 1971, and released a single later that year, as well as another one in 1972. But their debut album wouldn't come out until 1973.

The credits in the song list are only for the main lead vocalists. Many others were involved, but it's pretty much for me to tell who was playing on each song. But, for instance, the Pointer Sisters were an opening act for the Elvin Bishop Group in 1971, and doing a lot of backing vocals in studio sessions. So they sang some backing vocals here as well. 

This album is an hour and two minutes long. 

01 We Gonna Rock (Taj Mahal, Elvin Bishop & Boz Scaggs)
02 Long and Tall (Taj Mahal, Elvin Bishop & Boz Scaggs)
03 You Got Me Hummin' (Pointer Sisters)
04 I Found a Love (Linda Tillery)
05 Why I Sing the Blues (Linda Tillery)
06 Have You Ever Been Mistreated (Lester Chambers)
07 You Better Believe (Lester Chambers)
08 talk (Elvin Bishop)
09 Blues Jam (Elvin Bishop & Everyone)
10 talk (Elvin Bishop)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/2x78nZby

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/kq2pNq5x6Li4Q5X/file

I thought it would be tough to find a good cover photo for this album, since there wasn't one main musical act this time. So I was tickled pink to discover a photo of Boz Scaggs, Taj Mahal, and Elvin Bishop from this exact concert. It must be from the first two songs. That's Scaggs, Mahal, and Bishop from right to left. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. 

The Chambers Brothers - Colour Me Pop, London, Britain, 8-1969

Here's something that I wouldn't have put together and posted except for the fact that it's so damn rare. I feel good when I can help bring back recordings like this from the brink of being lost forever.

In 1968, the BBC started a music-themed TV show, "Colour Me Pop," that was broadcast in color (a big deal at the time - most shows in Britain wouldn't be filmed in color until 1969 or even later) and usually focused on just one musical artist per half-hour episode. The show only lasted one year, but it was basically succeeded by the similar show "Disco 2," which then was succeeded by "The Old Grey Whistle Test," which ran for many years. There were dozens of episodes, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on the show here:

Colour Me Pop - Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the video footage has been lost for all but a handful of acts. There's more audio, but the vast majority of that has been lost as well. One of the few acts where the video footage survived was the US soul music group the Chambers Brothers. They're best known for their psychedelic soul hit "Time Has Come Today" in 1967. Although they were filmed for Colour Me Pop, the show was cancelled shortly thereafter, so the footage was never actually shown on TV. (I don't know exactly when this was recorded, but I think August 1969 is a good guess.)

In 2018, some mysterious person posted a bunch of videos from Colour Me Pop, Disco 2, and the Old Grey Whistle Test on YouTube. One such video was the full show with the Chambers Brothers. Somehow, the footage has survived even though it had never aired. Unfortunately, later that year, YouTube deleted that person's account for copyright violations.

I recently found out the Chambers Brothers recording existed thanks to a mention in that Wikipedia entry above. I looked high and low on the Internet and couldn't find any mentions of it after that person's YouTube account was deleted. But I reached out to some musical associates, and one of them, marley, actually has the audio for the full show. So here it is. Hopefully this will spread around so it won't disappear from the Internet again.

Not all of this is from Colour Me Pop. It turns out the Chambers Brothers only played 25 minutes of music. Since that's rather short, I looked around to see if there was anything else I could add. I found they did two songs for the US TV show "Playboy After Dark" in 1968. So I added those as the first two songs here.

As I mentioned above, I'm not that big of a fan of this band, but they have one undeniably great original song, "Time Has Come Today." This ends with an impressive 11-minute long version. As for sound quality of this show, while it's not excellent, I'd call it very good.

With the two extra songs at the start, this album is 30 minutes long.

If anyone has the actual video and wants to link to it in the comments, that would be great. And if you have other super rare material like this that you think needs sharing, please let me know so I can help share it. (Perhaps someone grabbed some of that Old Grey Whistle Test material that got posted in 2018 and then disappeared, for instance.)

01 I Wish It Would Rain (Chambers Brothers)
02 Love Is All I Have (Chambers Brothers)
03 I Can't Stand It (Chambers Brothers)
04 Do Your Thing (Chambers Brothers)
05 Are You Ready (Chambers Brothers)
06 People Get Ready (Chambers Brothers)
07 Time Has Come Today (Chambers Brothers)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15288191/TChambersB_1969_ColourMPopLondnBritain__8-1969_atse.zip.html

The cover photo shows the band on TV in 1969, but I don't know the details. I took the text of the band name from one of their album covers and turned the black writing to blue to make it stand out. The "Colour Me Pop" text below with the colored stripes is taken directly from some of the visuals used on the show.