Tacky and Misguided

So this is pretty strange: Neil Diamond performing "Holly Holy" with really bad dancers distracting everyone.





It's from the "Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour," and the IMDb places it in 1970, probably an October episode. It is... well, I already said tacky and misguided, so all I got left is bizarre.


Neil had been on the show a year earlier. Interestingly, he's introduced as having had 8 top ten hits in the past three years, which wasn't true in 1969 unless you counted half of those hits as Monkees versions of the songs. To make things even more confusing, the IMDb has no record of either Neil or Cher appearing on this episode, so I have no idea what the date could be beyond 1969.




Don't watch this. It's terrible. It's a revoltingly smug Glen Campbell and slightly confused Cher singing a medley of Neil's hits with Neil playing a supporting role, and at about 4:24 when he gets a close up, you can see he's frightened to death, and I would imagine really damn irritated to boot. I can't believe human beings were subjected to this kind of crap just to get their art noticed.


Not content with having his work butchered by Glen Campbell twice, Neil apparently went back in 1971 to perform "Soolaimon."



This is listed as the "Glen Campbell Comedy Hour," but no such show existed. It's a rerun from CMT so obviously it's the "Goodtime Show" again, and it's certainly 1971 because Neil looks exactly as he did on the 1971 BBC performance... which is also not on the IMDb, I mean come on IMDb, what are you even there for? While I'm not comfortable with the white god standing over the African natives motif, the dancing is very good, the song is surprisingly strong 40 years after it was released, and the overall presentation of the white male singing about his black female "my woman" was pretty progressive.


Back to the bad: The 1977 "I'm So Glad You're Here With Me Tonight" special with Neil performing a medley of his hits with interspersed bits of slo-mo clips of his past concerts. It appears stretched out because aspect ratio is hard, and editing the width doesn't correct the problem.



The sunglasses are to hide his shame.

Honestly, the "I Am...I Said" breaks my heart, because I imagine the pained look on his face is the knowledge that he is about a million miles away from the earnest young man who could barely bring himself to perform such an emotionally revealing song in the 1971 BBC appearance.


And finally, speaking of 1971 BBC, here's Neil in almost the same outfit as the BBC appearance, performing "I Am...I Said" while wandering around a bunch of teenagers who aren't paying much attention.



No idea what show this is from. Does anyone recognize the tag on the upper left? I guess I should be asking if anyone is even reading this blog first, then asking questions of the few stragglers left behind. But if the tag can be identified, we can possibly figure out what reruns they show and go from there.

I have done nothing but learn about Neil Diamond for five full days now. I was about to say "nothing but devour Neil Diamond" but that turns this post into some kind of cannibal porn I'm just not prepared to think about right now.

Speaking of tacky and misguided, I guess I should actually create a Neil Diamond tag for the blog.

More Neil Diamond

Another performance video from the same show that had "Solitary Man" which I put in the previous post. From a 1966 episode of "Where the Action Is" which was hosted by members of Paul Revere and the Raiders. Those are not imitation Raiders, they are the genuine article, which explains why they are so irritating.

I'm learning how to dance by watching the girl on the right. She is fantastic. I have an enormous crush on her right now, she is so terrific.

Special Note For Arachnophobics: One of the Raiders teases Neil with a small crab, which is a kind of freaky.

Press Your Luck

I haven't been around for a while because I'm busy. Busy busy busy. But I stumbled across this screen shot of an episode of the 1980s "Press Your Luck" -- my second favorite game show ever -- and had to share.



The audience pretty much shared that guy's WTF face. I remember this episode; the woman was a lunatic.

Studney

The Studney Twins: The irritating Godfather's Pizza commercial from 1988.

I don't actually recommend you watch it; I only posted it because the second commercial is the one that always showed in our area, and though it has been 23 years since I watched it, I still had the entire thing memorized. Didn't even have to turn on the sound to know what they were saying.

Heino!

I love two things about this video: One, that he's singing about Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where the language is Portuguese, yet the "authentic" language he inserts into the song is Spanish. And two, Heino has the most infectious, contagious smile ever. You can't NOT smile when he smiles.

Mmm. Honey.

I blogged about Nazis for a bit over on SBBN tonight. Also, I have the hots for Werner Klemperer.

Beth Ditto

Found on Chateau Thombeau:



"I Wrote the Book" by the fabulous Beth Ditto.

Because I wanted to, that's why.

Divorce is Entertaining

This is not a hint to any husband-shaped person or persons who may be reading. Promise.










In truth, the only thing I want to divorce is my favorite restaurant, which closed down unexpectedly, just in time for Cinco de Mayo. But I guess since it closed without notice, it divorced me before I could divorce it.

Ham Still Sounds Delightful This Evening

Toby Huss MTV Sinatra promos from 1994:















Toby Huss MTV "Go to hell!" promos from 1994:







Compilation of other promotional bits from MTV:




And yet I still cannot find a copy of Toby Huss as Sinatra singing Onyx's "Slam."

So, about MST3K Vol 20...

Remember how, last month, I said I couldn't wait to find out how the new Shout! Factory MST3K Volume 20 set was going to look?

This is from about 11 seconds into "Project Moonbase." You can see it's the same sort of thing that happened in the "Beast of Yucca Flats" disk I posted about a month ago. When it plays at regular speed, it looks like a white flicker, and it happens repeatedly on multiple disks.

I went through this set immediately because I was too late to return the other sets. I'm exchanging it and I won't be buying any more. The reason people buy the disks is so they can get nice clean copies of what they already have from "trading" copies, and this pretty much undermines that reasoning. Besides, neither Shout! nor the store I buy them from has responded to my complaints (except with a snotty email from Shout! that made it clear they didn't give a fuck), so fuck them.

I just wish MST3K fans didn't think that it was sacrilege to expect decent quality on disks. Most just say "Yay I don't care that it sucks at least I have it!" which is, honestly, not a very defensible life philosophy.

Posted for reference rather than entertainment

Some Shout! Factory MST3K disks have quality issues where the image flickers and, after a lot of effort because my coordination sucks, I managed to get some pictures of the flickers.  I'm posting these here for reference only.  There may or may not be entertainment value in this!

These are from about 14:40 into "Money Talks," a short on the "Beast of Yucca Flats" DVD. This is probably where I mention that, while Vol 18 sucked as far as flickers go, Vol 19 had almost none at all. Can't wait to find out what Vol 20 is like.

sometimes I post to technoknob when I run out of post-it notes

I'll just leave this here.



I'm given to understand it might have the old MTV promo with the lounge guy spoofing on Onyx's "Slam" with a song about ham. Ham sounds delightful this evening. Anyway, I'll be back later tonight to actually watch this and find out if the promo is included, because I loved it.
 

Jeanette Jacobs and The Cake

The Cake





I had to find out why Jeanette was just standing there, and this article explains it:

While Barbara and Eleanor skated, dipped and weaved to the rhythm, Jeanette stood stock still to their left, looking detached and aloof, holding her microphone down by her waist. When she did finally raise it to her mouth, she purposefully lip-synched the words rather than sing them.

Everyone assumed it was just part of their shtick. "Yeah, that was her gimmick," agrees Rodney Bingenheimer. Barbara recalls Greene and Stone also saying, "Yeah, it's different. Keep it!"

But Chelsea thinks there was another reason. "Everybody said, 'Why does she just stand there?' Most of the time Greene and Stone would have her mic turned off because she couldn't sing R&B. She felt left out. I didn't notice that was happening because I was overpowered by Charlie Greene."

Jeanette Jacobs, member of The Cake, close friend and lover of Jimi Hendrix, and wife of Chris Wood of Traffic has all but disappeared from rock history. Finding anything on her online that isn't incidental information from when she dated Hendrix or was married to Wood is almost impossible.




She had epilepsy -- one article online speculates that her "out of it" look in the performance is a result of her epilepsy medications -- and she died of a seizure at a young age. The date of death is listed 1980, 1981, and 1982 in various articles across the web, but this site about Chris Wood says she passed on January 1, 1982. Wood passed away in 1983.

That is a great article about The Cake at the first article linked, by the way. Highly recommended, although it is hard to read because the formatting screws up quotation marks in my browser, though.