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.
