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. 

Covered: Shel Silverstein, Volume 2: 1974-2010

Here's the second and final volume celebrating the songwriting of Shel Silverstein for the "Covered" series.

As with all these Covered albums, the songs are in loose chronological order, usually by year. Silverstein was active writing lots of new songs in the 1970s, and a lot of cover versions resulted. Some of his songs were hits, especially on the country charts. But, typically, his songs were more memorable and interesting than the usual hit material. Not many songwriters could write children's songs, funny songs, and even erotic songs. (Hopefully not all in the same song though!)

Silverstein gradually slowed his songwriting, as people do. He only released one album of new songs after 1985. So a lot of the later songs here were actually originally written earlier, sometimes much earlier. He died of a heart attack in 1999, at the age of 68.

It just occurred to me that I don't think I included a link to his Wikipedia page in the Volume 1 write-up, so here it is:

Shel Silverstein - Wikipedia 

To be honest, I know the well known songs written by Silverstein, but not all the lesser known ones. But he's the type of songwriter who wrote quirky gems. So if any of you know of some excellent songs he wrote that I left out, and especially covers of them, please let me know and I'll consider adding them in. 

This album is 46 minutes long.

01 Marie Laveau (Bobby Bare)
02 Queen of the Silver Dollar (Emmylou Harris)
03 Alimony (Bobby Bare)
04 I Got Stoned and I Missed It (Dr. Hook)
05 The Danger of a Stranger (Stella Parton)
06 More like the Movies (Dr. Hook)
07 The Ballad of Lucy Jordan (Marianne Faithfull)
08 Put Another Log on the Fire (Bill & Boyd)
09 Numbers (Bobby Bare)
10 I'm Checkin' Out (Meryl Streep)
11 Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out (Tori Amos)
12 The Twistable, Turnable Man Returns (Andrew Bird)
13 The Winner (Kris Kristofferson)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Mha2Sjvi

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/FojQ9dwYjS5kuAi/file

I don't know when or where the cover photo was taken. Clearly though, he's older than in the Volume 1 photo, judging from the grey in his beard. The original photo was a black and white one, showing him in a crouching pose in front of some trees. I stripped out the background. Then I used the Kolorize program to colorize the picture.

Covered: Shel Silverstein - Volume 1: 1963-1972

Here's the next songwriter in my Covered series: Shel Silverstein. To say Silverstein was a colorful character is putting it mildly. Among his many talents was songwriting. I've found enough good covers of his songs for two volumes. Here's the first one.

Silverstein was born in Chicago in 1930, and raised there. He went to college, then spent a few years in the U.S. army. After that, he started to get known for his cartoons published in magazines. He especially had many of his cartoons published in Playboy Magazine, from the 1950s into the 1970s. He developed another creative career as the author of children's books. He eventually sold 20 million books. His most acclaimed books include "The Giving Tree," "Where the Sidewalk Ends," and "A Light in the Attic." He also had success writing for plays, movies, and TV shows.

So he was a creative Renaissance Man. But out focus here is on his songwriting. He was a music performer too, and released many albums, with the first one coming out in 1959. But he had a gruff voice with limited range. Also, it seems he very rarely performed in public, probably because he had so many other creative projects going on to want to go on long tours. So he was much more successful having others cover his songs.

His songwriting career started fairly slowly. He only had a few successes for most of the 1960s. But that changed drastically in 1969, when Johnny Cash had a huge hit with "A Boy Called Sue." That was such an unusual song, with lots of comedy, that many other musical acts went looking for other songs he'd written. It turns out his biggest fans were the band Dr. Hook. Their debut album "Doctor Hook," released in 1972, consisted entirely of songs written by Silverstein. And their second album, "Sloppy Seconds," released later in 1972, also consisted entirely of his songs! Those albums gave Dr. Hook their first two big hits, "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone."

That takes us to the end of 1972. I'll write more about him in the second and last volume.

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Hey Nelly Nelly (Judy Collins)
02 In the Hills of Shiloh (Modern Folk Quartet)
03 25 Minutes to Go (Johnny Cash)
04 The Mermaid (Glen Yarbrough)
05 Boa Constrictor (Johnny Cash)
06 The Unicorn (Irish Rovers)
07 A Boy Named Sue (Johnny Cash)
08 Once More With Feeling (Jerry Lee Lewis)
09 One's on the Way (Loretta Lynn)
10 I Call That True Love (Dr. Hook)
11 The Taker (Kris Kristofferson)
12 Freakin' at the Freakers' Ball (Dr. Hook)
13 On Susan's Floor (Gordon Lightfoot)
14 Sylvia's Mother (Dr. Hook)
16 The Cover of Rolling Stone (Dr. Hook)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Vdghqyqe

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/YfWSztH9v8E8ui0/file

The cover image is from 1972.

Dr. Hook with Shel Silverstein - PBS Soundstage, WTTW Studios, Chicago, IL, 1-14-1979

Here's another episode of the "PBS Soundstage" TV show. This one primarily features the American band Dr. Hook. But it also has a significant solo spot for singer-songwriter Shel Silverstein.

From 1972 until 1980, Dr. Hook had quite a few hits in the U.S. So this was a good time for this episode, coming near the end of their hit-making era. Few bands are as closely tied to an outside songwriter as this band was with Shel Silverstein, so it's fitting that he was a part of this concert. In fact, all the songs for their first two albums consisted of songs written by Silverstein, and they covered many more of his songs from the rest of the 1970s.

Silverstein had an extremely varied and fascinating career as a writer, poet, songwriter, and author of children's books. But with so many interests, it seems he almost never performed his songs in concerts, although he put out many albums. So his appearance in this concert is probably the most prominent public performance that's available.

This concert is split into four parts. At the start and the end are sections featuring Dr. Hook. In the middle are two sections featuring Silverstein. Silverstein wrote many different types of songs, but he was particularly well known for both lewd songs and children's songs. Those two styles aren't meant to go together, for obvious reasons. So Silverstein did one of his lewd songs, "Show It at the Beach" about nude beaches, to an adult audience. But the rest of his songs here consisted of children's songs and were performed for a small audience made up entirely of little children, with some audience interaction. 

By the way, I already have two albums of Silverstein's songs ready for my Covered series. It's just a matter of getting around to posting them, since there's a big backlog of those albums. 

The last song, "Happy Trails," originally ended without any applause at the end, just silence. I thought that was strange. So I copied and pasted in some applause from earlier in the concert, to give it a satisfying ending. That's why that song has "[Edit]" in its title. 

This album is 52 minutes long. 

01 Walk Right In (Dr. Hook)
02 talk (Dr. Hook)
03 Ray's Yodel (Dr. Hook)
04 Only Sixteen (Dr. Hook)
05 What a Way to Go (Dr. Hook)
06 talk (Dr. Hook & Shel Silverstein)
07 Show It at the Beach (Shel Silverstein)
08 Boa Constrictor (Shel Silverstein)
09 talk (Shel Silverstein)
10 Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out (Shel Silverstein)
11 talk (Shel Silverstein)
12 Unicorn (Shel Silverstein)
13 A Little Bit More (Dr. Hook)
14 Red Winged Blackbird (Dr. Hook)
15 Everybody's Making It Big but Me (Dr. Hook)
16 Sharing the Night Together (Dr. Hook)
17 The Cover of 'Rolling Stone' (Dr. Hook)
18 Rolling in My Sweet Baby's Arms (Dr. Hook)
19 Happy Trails [Edit] (Dr. Hook)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6pc2daJ2

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/JOrXX0CzKJ0VMpN/file

The cover photo of Ray Sawyer, one of the band's two lead singers, is a screenshot from this exact concert. The video the screenshot came from was pretty low-res, so I used the Krea AI program to improve the image quality.