PBS to air the show that rocked America in 1965
Get the federal government involved in something and you know what happens — you just might have ONE WILD SWINGIN’ TIME! This story behind “It’s What’s Happening, Baby,” the star-studded rock ’n’ roll TV show that shook America on June 28, 1965 — and was restored for PBS airing by My Music producer TJ Lubinsky — starts back in January 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty.
With 19% of the population below the poverty line — as compared to about 13% in the latest stats — one part of his Great Society agenda was the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was headed by R. Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy and an originator of the Peace Corps and Job Corps programs.
In 1965, Shriver was determined to reach the troubled youth of America — who, as one newspaper put it, were mostly “cynical” and “suspicious of adult society” — with a message about the merits of a proper education and summer employment.
But who would deliver this square message?
Murray the K, baby!
He was “The Fifth Beatle,” the most happening disc jockey in New York City and, thus, the planet.
Murray Kaufman, who was raised in a Vaudeville family and had done a turn as a Hollywood child actor/dancer, had taken the reins on WINS-AM after the great Alan Freed, who had popularized the term “rock ’n’ roll,” was dragged down by payola and tax evasion.
Murray the K joined the station in 1958 and seized the 7-11 p.m. slot with his Swingin’ Soiree, which, as Rolling Stone would later describe it, was a “combination of sonic blast and nonstop yowsahyowsah [that] made for electrifying radio.”
Unencumbered by formats and playlists, he spun whatever he wanted and played all the great Black R&B artists who were whitewashed on mainstream radio (Pittsburgh, of course, had guys like Porky Chedwick and Mad Mike Metro doing something similar).
In the late ’50s, he started presenting those acts live, first at the Paramount and then the Brooklyn Fox.
As the top dog in New York City, he greeted the Beatles when they got off the plane Feb. 7, 1964, was backstage when they played “The Ed Sullivan Show” two days later and introduced them at their first U.S. concert in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11.
The fast-talking, cardigan- and porkpiehat-wearing hipster was adored by the band, and his son, Peter Altschuler, said George Harrison dubbed him “The Fifth
Beatle” to the airport security during a customs check. The name stuck, though it’s also been applied to at least five other people.
What made Murray the K even more suitable for the OEO’s purposes was that he was a high school dropout himself who knew how to talk to kids. He attended the Peekskill Military Academy in the late ’30s before being inducted into the Army for World War II, where he ... invaded the beaches of Normandy? Nah, he was stateside, planning entertainment for the troops!
The 38-year-old made it a practice to visit inner-city schools to talk to kids, and when he planned those visits, he told UPI, “I didn’t go to social workers, I went to gang leaders.”
He also came with the right degree of humility.
“Who do kids turn to when they’re in trouble?” he told UPI. “Their parents, clergyman or a favorite disc jockey? Uh-uh. They turn to their best friend. Since everyone is a potential best friend, I’m trying to reach them with this show.”
By the time the OEO reached out to him, he had left WINS, which had bowed to the rival WABC — with its ominous new Top 40 hits format — and moved to an all-news format.
Despite the fact that televised rock ’n’ roll shows had been on the wane in the early ’60s, CBS agreed to volunteer air time and picked up the production costs of more than $250,000 because, as it turned out, the government was prohibited from funding such a network broadcast.
Murray the K, who, along with Bill Cosby, did the PSA spots talking to kids, promised “It’s What’s Happening, Baby” wouldn’t be “contrived” or “saccharine.” It would be “The World Series of Music.”
90 Minutes of Mayhem
Actually, it was more like an all-star game, with no shortage of legit home run hitters, and a few who slapped singles and doubles.
It was a mix of stylized videos and live clips that captured some incredible moments, including:
• Martha and the Vandellas, at a Ford plant in Detroit, jumping into a Mustang on the assembly line while singing “Nowhere to Run,” and then driving away.
• Ronnie Spector, with the Ronettes, trying to woo a handsome but disinterested lad at a hot dog stand in New York with “Be My Baby.”
• Poor ol’ Herman Munster bumbling onto a Malibu beach and inadvertently terrorizing teens dancing to Cannibal & the
Headhunters singing “Land of 1000 Dances.”
• The far cuter Herman’s Hermits having better luck with girls on a crowded New York street singing “Mrs. Brown, You Have a Lovely Daughter.”
• The frenetic Little Anthony and the Imperials stealing the show at the Fox with their high kicks and flying splits.
• A silky smooth Marvin Gaye singing “Pride and Joy” on a steamboat full of swinging teens, Black and white.
• The gorgeous Supremes casually mingling with fans at a Dearborn, Mich., park doing “Stop! In The Name Of Love.”
• The Temptations working their Motown magic on “The Way You Do The Things You Do” backstage at the Brooklyn Fox.
The hits keep coming, with The Four Tops, Chuck Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Mary Wells, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, The Four Tops, The Drifters, etc., and ends with the slick-moving Murray the K shimmying out during Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” to incite an absolutely joyous closing dance party.
The backlash
The 90-minute show attracted more than 16 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched TV shows of 1965 (by comparison, the No. 1 show, “Bonanza,” averaged 17 million viewers).
Not all of those viewers were thrilled with the Monday night prime-time hullabaloo.
Foremost among them was Sen. Gordon Allott, R-Colo., who took to the Senate floor the next day to condemn the show as “one of the most shameful and degrading he ever viewed.”
In fact, he went further: “The people of this country were insulted and degraded by the kind of program put on by Sargent Shriver and his group. The whole program was tuned to the lowest type of beatnik appeal.”
And further, evoking a Red Scare: “If I were a Communist, I would ask nothing better than to use this film as a tool by showing it to every country in Africa and the Far East. Every American who saw the film must be sick. I said to the president of the broadcasting company, ‘I am about to throw up.’ ”
(It’s tough to say how much race played into his take on the show given that the conservative Allott, while voting in favor of civil rights measures, was a fierce opponent of the Great Society programs as too expensive and inflationary.)
On the Democratic side, Rep. Maston O’Neal of Georgia decried the show’s “cheap emotional thrills.”
Uptight newspapermen piled on, most notably a Chicago Tribune writer, who described the program being “given to the monotonous, repetitive rhythms of the wailand-wiggle set, and to the swarming worshipers of the watusi, the frog and the jerk.”
To which the participants would say, “Right on, baby!” Except for the “monotonous” part.
The paper added of Shriver, “He should have faced the cameras and explained why he would get Uncle Sam involved in such foolishness.”
A Boston Globe headline was accurate, “It’s What Happened, Baby, But Never Again.” Any plans for a follow-up were scratched. The show aired once. There was no On-Demand. No DVD. No website to watch it on. It was history. Other than the bootlegs.
Where TJ comes in
TJ Lubinsky was born seven years after “It’s What’s Happening, Baby” aired.
But, as fans know, the 48-year-old, New Jersey-born, Cranberry-based producer of the “My Music” series on PBS, is an oldies fanatic, whose father founded Savoy Records.
“I’ve been a Motown nut for years,” he says. “In fact, it was The Miracles that really got me into music. The first time I heard ‘Ooo, Baby, Baby,’ I was like 14 years old and that song hit me profoundly because of the harmony of the group. I saw a clip of them, and there was just something about the four of them that made me realize, ‘This is music. This is it. For me.’ ”
The clip was on a VHS bootleg of “It’s What’s Happening, Baby” that, he says, was “19 generations down, so you could hardly see what the picture was.”
For years, he’s wanted to reassemble the show, but the main tape didn’t play anymore. Murray the K’s son, Peter Altschuler, a film editor and voice actor, had the individual clips, which they restored, with Sean McDonald doing the audio.
“It hadn’t been played since 1965, twoinch tape,” Lubinsky says. “So we had to do section by section, minute by minute, and then once the picture was restored, we had to go in and restore the sound. It’s a labor of love but it was fun.
“The short answer is, I did anything and everything I could find to get footage of these groups. And this was the only real footage of a group in a live theater setting that I’ve ever seen, other than the Sullivan shows, but this was different because it was like one of my shows but long before I was around. No one’s ever seen the original show in its entirety, unless you saw it on its original run on CBS.”
On March 6, he will air the show, interspersed with pledge breaks featuring new interviews with Dionne Warwick, Little Anthony, Chuck Jackson, Otis Williams, Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits) and Mary Wilson, done just days before the Supreme died of a blood clot.
In one of the best exchanges, Williams, of the Temptations, talks about getting to the Brooklyn Fox and seeing the wild antics of the Imperials. “When we looked at the jumps, we looked at each other and said, ‘We better go out there and step. They are not joking around. We better dance like we’ve never danced before.’ ”
“Ain’t that funny,” Little Anthony replies, “because we admired them!
“They did something that hadn’t been seen since the Cadillacs,” he said, noting their synced choreography.
Noone marvels at how during that era, his group, which had the No. 1 song in the country with “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” that March, could linger on a New York street “without 100,000 people showing up.”
Murray the K’s legacy
Without fail, they sing the praises of their hipster host on that night in 1965.
“If Murray the K played your recording, you were almost guaranteed a hit,” Warwick says.
“Walk on By,” one of her early smash hits, was the B-side to “Any Old Time of Day,” but Murray the K insisted on playing it instead, and it all but made her wondrous career.
Jackson recalls having a case of the nerves, until Murray the K introduced him as “Soul Brother No. 1,” giving him a shot of confidence.
“Everyone fell in love with him,” Little Anthony says, “and that’s saying a lot to fill the shoes of Alan Freed.”
“Alan Freed used to go up there, and he would just say, ‘OK, and here’s another act, and then he walked off stage,’ ” Lubinsky says. “Murray, you know, he was dancing. He was part of it.”
Altschuler, in a recent podcast with Trace and Miggs Burroughs, acknowledged that his dad put the music first, at the expense of family. His six marriages were one indication of that cost. He evolved with the music, becoming one of the first FM DJs, on WOR, in 1966; advocating for the electric Bob Dylan; and producing the psychedelic multimedia concert The World.
In the end, he would be at odds with the corporate forces in radio, and, while bouncing around to different cities and stations, he was diagnosed with lymphoma in his early 50s. He died one week after his 60th birthday, in 1982.
This show is a living proof of what a force he was, and how timeless the acts he helped break were, during a critical era in the country’s racial history.
“On this show,” Lubinsky says, “you see Latino kids with white kids with Black kids, and there’s nothing dividing them. ... For me, the biggest shock with this show was to actually see in 1965 how much this music brought people together, no matter what they looked like or what their heritage was. It’s such an amazing piece of history.”
“It’s What’s Happening, Baby” will air from 7 to 9 p.m. March 6 on WQED-TV. The three-DVD set of the show will be available for purchase with a $60 PBS donation (or $5 per month). For a donation of $120 (or $10 month), you also get the new six-CD “Motown, Soul & Rock ‘n’ Roll” compilation from TJL/Treasury Collection CD.