Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 6: October to November 1969

Here's the sixth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. This also is the first album from the show's second (and final) season. Note the big time jump, between Volume 5 ending in January 1969 and this one starting in October 1969 - that's most of a year.

This show tended to have a lot of repeat guests. Consider the soul group Checkmates, Ltd. This already was their third episode. Many of the other guests on volume made or would make appearances on other volumes as well. I think it was especially common for a musical act to appear on an episode in the show's first season, and then another one in the second season.

There are more incidents of "[Edit]" - four - in this volume than in any previous ones. That's because there was more talking over the music in the second season. One particularly annoying aspect was that each episode of this season ended had a brief spoken advertisement for T.W.A. Airlines over the final song. In most cases, I was able to successfully wipe such talking while keeping the underlying music, thanks to the UVR5 audio editing program.

There's a surprising number of songs performed on this T.V. that were never officially released in any form. Consider the duet between Linda Ronstadt and Billy Eckstine. If you listen to the banter before the song started, it seems Ronstadt was very reluctant to sing it, and had to be coaxed into it. That could be prepared dialogue, but in the case, it seemed like a genuinely spontaneous performance to me. As far as I can tell, this was the one and only time Ronstadt performed that song in public.

The duet between Checkmates, Ltd. and Carla Thomas on "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is similarly unique to this TV show. I also couldn't find any release of "Soul Man" by Bill Medley (who was one half of the Righteous Brothers). Similarly, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" was never released by Sonny & Cher (or by solo Cher, for that matter). It also seems Carla Thomas never released any version of "Abraham, Martin and John." And it's a similar case with the other volumes.

If anyone knows the name of the instrumental performed by Canned Heat, please let me know so I can give it a proper name. 

This album is an hour and eight minutes long.

01 Walkin' Down the Line (Linda Ronstadt)
02 Living like a Fool (Linda Ronstadt)
03 Hitchcock Railway [Edit] (Joe Cocker)
04 Something (Joe Cocker)
05 God Bless the Child [Edit] (Linda Ronstadt & Billy Eckstine)
06 Soul Man (Bill Medley)
07 What's Wrong (Sweetwater)
08 For Once in My Life (Bill Medley)
09 Why Oh Why - Hey Jude (Sweetwater)
10 Sweet Caroline (Checkmates, Ltd.)
11 Where Do I Go (Carla Thomas)
12 The Japanese Transistor (Biff Rose)
13 Molly (Biff Rose)
14 Abraham, Martin and John (Carla Thomas)
15 Proud Mary (Checkmates, Ltd.)
16 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay [Edit] (Checkmates, Ltd. & Carla Thomas)
17 For Once in My Life [Edit] (Sonny & Cher)
18 Can't Take My Eyes Off You (Sonny & Cher)
19 Future Blues (Canned Heat)
20 My Time Ain't Long (Canned Heat)
21 Instrumental (Canned Heat)
22 Take Me for a Little While (Sonny & Cher)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/aKqnxAQ1

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/6VNID5vPpmlP32t/file

For this series, it was hard for me to pick the cover art, because I could take screenshots of any of the musical acts, and there are always a few good ones to choose from. I didn't choose Linda Ronstadt because she gets a cover later in this series. A key reason I decided on a picture of Cher is because the screenshot I took shows comedian Bill Cosby playing bass in the background. (One can see some of his faced, with sunglasses and cigar, and a little bit of his hands on an upright bass.) 

At the time, Cosby was a widely beloved star. But nowadays, he has been revealed to be a serial rapist. So his appearance on this show can be seen in a whole new light. And he didn't appear just on this episode, he appeared on a LOT of them. I'd guess about a dozen, probably more than any other famous guest. A lot of the time, as in the episode shown on the cover here, he wasn't doing a stand-up routine, but instead was just kind of lurking around. In hindsight, it's super creepy to imagine what Crosby might have been doing behind the scenes with all the beautiful women there. It's symbolic of how the whole carefully constructed image of Playboy has also been torn down, now that we know more. Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 5: December 1968 to January 1969

Here's the fifth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. There are 11 in all. 

Just the first three songs were recorded in 1968. The rest date from 1969. As usual with the albums I post, check out the mp3 tags for more detail. I organized these by recording date. The broadcast dates usually took place a few months later.

Probably the most notable thing about the music here is the performance of the Grateful Dead. As I've mentioned previously, most of the music from this T.V. show has languished in obscurity (though I hope these posts are starting to change that). However, the Dead's performance has gotten around some, especially among Deadheads. As it should, because it's a rare treat to see them on T.V. all the way back in early 1969. Three of their songs are included here. "Mountains of the Moon" is special, because it was only performed 15 times by the band, and this was just the second time. The version of "St. Stephen" was very good too. The only disappointment is that the makers of the show faded the song out while the band was jamming on it. I also included what I could of a third song, "Turn On Your Lovelight." But this is less than half a minute. Basically, it was just a snippet that played as the credits rolled at the end of that episode.

An interesting fact is that the Dead's sound engineer, Owsley "Bear" Stanley, secretly put L.S.D. in the coffee that everyone on the set was drinking! So everyone from Hugh Hefner to the stagehands was tripping on acid during the taping of this episode. You can read more about this incident here:

https://www.openculture.com/2021/01/when-the-grateful-dead-performed-on-hugh-hefners-playboy-after-dark.html

That article also contains a link to the Dead's performance, if you want to see it and not just hear it. And there's another link to a later interview of drummer Bill Kreutzmann in which he talked about the spiking of the coffee. 

While that was probably the most interesting musical performance, there are many other good performances on this episode, with lots of rock and soul. Note, by the way, two songs with "[Edit]" in their titles. Sometimes, for this show, there were other people talking over parts of the music. In the second season this would get much worse, to the point that brief advertisements were even spoken over the end of the last song of each episode. So when you see "[Edit]" in this series, that's usually why.

I would also like to point out how odd it was that the Clara Ward Singers performed for this show. Consider that they exclusively sang gospel songs in churches. I wonder if they were appalled at all the "heathen" appearances and behavior all around them. But kudos to Hefner and Playboy for putting a wide variety of musical styles on this T.V. show. 

This album is 56 minutes long. 

01 River Deep, Mountain High (Bobby Doyle)
02 Blowin' in the Wind (Bobby Doyle)
03 Wear It on Our Face [Edit] (Checkmates, Ltd.)
04 Mountains of the Moon (Grateful Dead)
05 St. Stephen (Grateful Dead)
06 The Great Electric Experiment Is Over (Noel Harrison)
07 Hello Sun (Noel Harrison)
08 Turn On Your Lovelight [Edit] (Grateful Dead)
09 Turpentine Moan (Canned Heat)
10 On the Road Again (Canned Heat)
11 Mendocino (Sir Douglas Quintet)
12 She's about a Mover (Sir Douglas Quintet)
13 Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho (Clara Ward Singers)
14 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Clara Ward Singers)
15 Chicken Wolf (Steppenwolf)
16 Don't Cry (Steppenwolf)
17 Get Out My Life Woman (Joe Williams & Joanne Vent)
18 Hurry On Down (Joe Williams)
19 That Face (Joe Williams)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1vPw9aH6

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/rd6je9jcQYVFtLU/file

The cover photo shows Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. This is a screenshot I took from the video of one of the episodes here.

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 4: November to December 1968

Here's the fourth volume of the episodes I compiled of the "Playboy After Dark" TV show. 

Imagine having James Brown in his musical prime perform for you and a small circle of friends in your living room! As you can see from the cover art for this volume, that's exactly what happened on this T.V. show. Except instead of it being your living room, it was a duplicate of the living room of Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion in Chicago, redone to allow filming in ideal conditions in Los Angeles. But basically all the performances on all the volumes in this series are like that, with a couple dozen of people gathered around the musical act. And, also as you can see from the cover image, there was a suspiciously high number of very beautiful women there. Naturally, a lot of them were Playboy models.

It so happens there's a good number of soul music acts on this volume. If anyone knows the name of the instrumental performed by Buddy Miles, tell me so I can fix the song title.

By the way, Three Dog Night appeared on the show another time, but that performance was lip-synced. But luckily, this one was not. 

It seems Playboy head Hugh Hefner had a lot of say over which musical acts were included. He seems to have had a personal preference from pre-rock and roll crooners. So we got an unusually big spot here for Sammy Davis, Jr., who got to play six songs instead of the usual two or three. 

The music here is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and four minutes long.

01 Who Can I Turn To (Marva Whitney)
02 Celebrate (Three Dog Night)
03 Your Love (Marva Whitney)
04 Love Me So Hard (Three Dog Night)
05 If I Ruled the World (James Brown)
06 Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud (James Brown)
07 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Checkmates, Ltd.)
08 I Can't Turn You Loose (Checkmates, Ltd.)
09 I Got You Babe (Buddy Miles)
10 Instrumental (Buddy Miles)
11 Tell Me All the Things (Joanie Sommers)
12 I Feel Fine (Joanie Sommers)
13 Just Squeeze Me [But Don't Tease Me] (Lou Rawls)
14 That's You (Lou Rawls)
15 Washington at Valley Forge (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
16 talk (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
17 Alligator Man (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band)
18 Your Red Wagon (Lou Rawls)
19 I've Gotta Be Me (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
20 The Joker Is Me - I'm Feeling Good - In My Dreams (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
21 What Kind of Fool Am I (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
22 Who Can I Turn To (Sammy Davis, Jr.)
23 Once in My Lifetime (Sammy Davis, Jr. & Anthony Newley)
24 Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody (Sammy Davis, Jr. & Jerry Lewis)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/NDa7p1Cd

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/RayW1R6CnlrWuAa/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took of James Brown from one of the episodes in this volume. 

Various Artists - Playboy After Dark (CBS Television City, Los Angeles, CA), Volume 2: September 1968

Here is the second volume out of eleven, in which I collected songs from episodes of the "Playboy After Dark" T.V. show.

In the write-up to the first volume, I explained a lot about the music on this unusual show. Here, I want to discuss some more about the show in general, to give some context and understanding about the music that was performed on it.

First off, the show has not aged well. AT ALL! In the 1960s and 70s, "Playboy Magazine" was seen as cool by many. The owner, Hugh Hefner, promoted an entire hedonistic lifestyle, and made himself the central character, turning himself into a household name. He died in 2017 at the age of 91. He was lucky he died when he did, because he missed the cultural reckoning of the "Me Too" movement that began after he died, starting with the public exposure of Harvey Weinstein only about a month later. It turns out that Hefner was a pretty horrible person. He had sex with countless thousands of women. In most cases, it was a blatantly transactional thing: women slept with him hoping that would give them a leg up to fame and fortune. Many hundreds of women in his media empire have signed onto letters defending him. But it has gradually emerged that in some cases, at least, things got ugly. He used grooming techniques to manipulate women in all kinds of awful ways. If you want to know more, check out a documentary series called "The Secrets of Playboy," released in 2020.

The reason I mention all that is because knowing what we know now sheds new light on how the "Playboy After Dark" T.V. show is perceived. I tried to skip past all the non-musical parts. Even so, I couldn't help but catch many cringey moments as I went looking for the songs. Although there was no nudity on the show, since it was on a major T.V. channel, there were scantily-clad beautiful women as scenery almost non-stop in every episode. Luckily, if you just listen to the music, you can avoid nearly all of the cringe. I made sure to only include the songs, even though there often were brief interviews with the musical stars, because the talking was usually, well, cringey too.

The T.V. show had a concept, which was that it tried to present the show as a party held in Hefner's Playboy mansion. You, the viewer, were supposedly an invited guest who got to have a fly on the wall perspective of the good times. The very start of each episode showed a limousine pulling up to a building, the door opening for you, and you got taken to the party where Hefner personally greeted you, and so on, all through each episode. The show wasn't actually filmed at the Playboy mansion, which was located in Chicago at the time. (In the early 1970s, shortly after this show finished, a new mansion was bought in Los Angeles and the Chicago one was slowly phased out.) Instead, to make this believable, exact duplicates of many rooms of the mansion were recreated in a Los Angeles recording studio. Every episode stuck to the party format, with dozens of people mingling about. (I noticed that most of them were the same people from episode to episode.) 

A lot of this obviously was contrived, especially many corny lines scripted in advance spoken for the T.V. cameras. But it seems that, to some extent, there was a real party going on. If you're going to have dozens of people lingering around together for the hours and hours it takes to film each episode, it's only natural that they would socialize. Normally, for shows like this, each star would appear when it's time for their performance, do their performance, and immediately leave. But interestingly, as I watched, I noticed that the various musical guests that appeared for each episode, and other performing guests, like comedians or famous actors, were in background scenes of the crowd too, just hanging out and talking to other people all throughout the episode. So you can see strange situations like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead watching comedian Sid Ceasar make jokes, or actress Patty Duke dancing to the music of Ike and Tina Turner. The number of famous people from different entertainment fields crossing paths on this show is truly strange to see.

As part of this party conceit, supposedly, every now and then, some famous musical act would break into song to entertain those other party-goers. Often, Hefner would have a brief conversation with the lead singer and then ask them to play a song. Then the audience would be the fifty or so party-goers, usually completely surrounding wherever the musicians were playing. So you get bizarre situations like soul singer James Brown singing in the middle of a living room, with people (mostly beautiful women) sitting all around him, so much so that he could hardly move around like he normally did on stage.

The reason I mention all this is because it is relevant to how these songs were performed and recorded. At first glance, it seems like everything must have been lip-synced, given chaotic conditions like that. But on closer inspection, I believe the vast majority of it was live. Perhaps there were hidden microphones when there were no obvious ones in sight, and the crowd members were told to stay totally quiet. I say that because time and time again, I watched the lips of singers and I was convinced the performances had to be live. I've seen tons of lip-synced performances putting albums together for this musical blog, and I believe I can notice the slight timing discrepancies of lip-syncing. Furthermore, I double checked with the album versions of songs whenever I could find them. Also, even for the talking scenes between the songs, one can hear discussions taking place quite clearly, despite there often being no microphones in sight. Maybe some of that was rerecorded for clarity later, but if so, the way the lips matched the mouth movements is very impressive.

As I mentioned in my write-up to Volume 1, sometimes there were live vocals sung to partial or compete instrumental backing tracks. But I've included those, since I consider the different vocal performances worthy enough. Often though, there were backing musicians, but they would be hidden elsewhere in the room, with only brief glimpses of them. Other times, perhaps the entire thing WAS lip-synced, but it was done for a song that was completely unreleased. That happened a surprising amount, especially for the lesser known musical acts. 

One example of that last case on this album is Marvin Gaye. He sang two songs for the show, "Chained" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." "Chained" was a recent hit for him. I double checked with the album version, and that one was lip-synced. But there is no released version of him ever doing "By the Time I Get to Phoenix." So even if it was lip-synced (which it probably was), I still included that. That actually is a major find, in my opinion, given how rarely any "new" songs are discovered to have been sung by him this many years after he passed away in 1984. 

One great thing about this T.V. series, in my opinion, is that it often had live performances by musical acts with virtually no live performances available anywhere else. For instance, consider some of the performers on this album. O. C. Smith was a soul music star who had a couple of big hits in the late 1960s. But the only live album he ever released occurred early in his career, his 1966 debut album, before he had those hits. And I haven't found any bootlegs of him either. It's exactly the same with Checkmates, Ltd. Their 1967 debut album was live, before they had any hits. There are no other live albums or bootlegs from them. Rod Piazza and Gloria Loring would both go on to have long music careers, with most of their success coming much later. There's no other live performances from them that I could find until many years after this one. As for Angeline Butler, she only ever released one album, in 1970, which is an obscurity. This probably was her one time in a nationwide spotlight. 

And so it goes for many other musical acts all through this series. Time and time again, their appearances on this T.V. show was the only time they have a live performance recorded well, or at all, at least this early in their career. (Keep in mind that the number of bootlegs, truly live recorded TV shows, and official live albums skyrocketed in the 1970s and beyond, but were very rare in the 1960s.)

I want to add one detail about the Byrds, for serious Byrds fans. Founding member Chris Hillman left the band only two weeks prior to the taping of their appearance on this show, leaving Roger McGuinn as the only remaining founding member. The others in the band at this time were Clarence White, John York, and Gene Parsons.

This album is an hour and one minute long.

01 She's the One (Rod Piazza)
02 My Babe (Rod Piazza)
03 Little Green Apples (O. C. Smith)
04 The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp (O. C. Smith)
05 It's Too Late [To Say You're Sorry] (Gloria Loring)
06 Did I Ever Really Live (Gloria Loring)
07 One of the Nicer Things (Jimmy Webb)
08 She's Lookin' Good (Checkmates, Ltd.)
09 Sunny (Checkmates, Ltd.)
10 Baby I Need Your Loving (Checkmates, Ltd.)
11 You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Byrds)
12 This Wheel's on Fire (Byrds)
13 By the Time I Get to Phoenix (Marvin Gaye)
14 Turn Around Look at Me (Angeline Butler)
15 Goodbye Charlie (Angeline Butler)
16 Train (Buddy Miles)
17 Wrap It Up (Buddy Miles)
18 Lincoln's Train (John Stewart & Buffy Ford)
19 Signals to Ludi (John Stewart & Buffy Ford)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/g6vL9ys4

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/c0ZRRf50OW3aw1o/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from one of the episodes featured here. It shows Roger McGuinn, the lead singer of the Byrds. For some strange reason, he was wearing a military jacket.