The Day After The Sabbath 163: The Midnight Special (heavy TV performances 1973 - 1975)

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Welcome to volume 163! I had been considering some kind of collection of live recordings for a long time for TDATS, and quite recently a youtube subscriber to my channel (link) pointed me to a great performance of a short-lived, hard rock-orientated lineup of the Spencer Davis Group, on 'The Midnight Special' TV show, which set me off wondering what other heavy performances may be buried away in the show.

It's true that some of the acts here would not normally be considered for TDATS, but live recordings can be a whole different thing if the band liked to play extra heavy live, and a fun part of hunting is finding heaviness in places and from acts where you would not expect to find it, which always takes me back to a thread on the old stonerrock.com forums titled "Unexpected sources of doom".

Wolfman Jack presenting The Midnight Special

The Midnight Special was an American late-night musical variety series that aired on NBC from 1972 to 1981, created and produced by Burt Sugarman. It's home was the NBC Studios at Burbank, California. On a few occasions, shows were made elsewhere, including the UK, where Robin Trower and Manfred Mann's Earth Band were filmed on the open deck of a boat travelling down the River Thames in London.
  

As a Brit, I was not aware of the show until the internet age and youtube videos etc, but i'm sure it's fondly remembered in the USA. It hosted one of Kiss's early TV appearances (1975 - link), being many metal head's first exposure to the band, donning full battle dress.

One of the upshots of the variety on display in The Midnight Special is the amusing introductions to the bands, made by the artists that were acting show-host for that particular episode. I have gone to lengths to preserve the introduction of each band in this comp, so we get such fascinating one-time-ever events as Barry White introducing The Eric Burdon Band, Curtis Mayfield introducing Status Quo and Gladys Knight (and one Pip) introducing the French/Moroccan hard rockers Les Variations, who have appeared here in TDATS before (v45 & v07).

Sugarman pitched the show to capitalize on the large post-Tonight Show audience (following Johnny Carson), targeting the 18-33 age group who attended concerts but watched little TV. NBC initially rejected it, so Sugarman bought the airtime himself for the August 19, 1972 pilot (hosted by John Denver) with sponsor, Chevrolet. Strong ratings led NBC to pick it up as a weekly series starting February 2, 1973. 

DJ JJ Jackson interviews Robert Plant
and Phil May on The Midnight Special

The title and theme song came from the traditional American folk/blues standard "Midnight Special," recorded by Johnny Rivers. Wolfman Jack served as announcer and frequent on-camera presence. At the beginning, it featured all-live performances (rare for the era, unlike lip-synced shows), spanning rock, pop, soul, R&B, folk, disco, country, and oldies/nostalgia acts. Occasional comedy (e.g. Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Andy Kaufman) and sketches appeared. Guest hosts rotated weekly (Helen Reddy was regular host 1975–1976). In later years, as disco peaked, the set shifted to a nightclub vibe, though it increasingly relied on lip-sync toward the end.

I noticed that during the life of the show, the emphasis on hard rock bands diminished (unfortunately for us), with a good proportion of heavy bands appearing in the early years, but not so many later on. This was partially due to the changing times of course, for example, Disco acts certainly became a significant part of the show in the later '70s.

Ratings declined after 1977. NBC canceled it in 1981 at the request of Dick Ebersol (to help revive Saturday Night Live), replacing it with the Canadian sketch series SCTV. The final episode aired May 1, 1981, after roughly 450 episodes. It remains a landmark in music television for bringing raw live acts into late-night homes. 

TRACKS

01. Gladys Knight & Bubba Knight introduce
                                Les Variations - 'I Don't Know Why' (1974)
02. Burton Cummings (The Guess Who) introduces
                                The Charlie Daniels Band - 'Way Down Yonder' (1975)
03. Charles Miller (War) introduces
                                Climax Blues Band - 'Shake Your Love' (1973)
04. Gordon Lightfoot introduces
                                James Gang - 'The Devil Is Singing Our Song' (1974)

05. Smokey Robinson introduces
                                Rare Earth - 'Hum Along And Dance' (1973)

06. Jim 'Dandy' Mangrum (Black Oak Arkansas) introduces
                                Ruby Starr & Grey Ghost - 'Old West Outlaws' (1975)
07. Curtis Mayfield introduces
                                Status Quo - 'Big Fat Mama' (1974)
08. Wolfman Jack introduces
                                Sugarloaf - 'Don't Call Us, We'll Call You' (1975)

09. Burton Cummings (The Guess Who) introduces
                                Spencer Davis Group - 'Don't Throw Your Change On Me' (1975)

10. The Bee Gees introduce
                                Lee Michaels - 'Barefootin' (1973)

11. Barry White introduces
                                The Eric Burdon Band - 'The Real Me' (1974)
12. Wolfman Jack introduces
                                Todd Rundgren's Utopia - 'The Seven Rays' (1975)

13. John Kay (Steppenwolf) introduces
                                Steppenwolf - 'Gang War Blues' (1975)

14. Wolfman Jack introduces

                                Montrose - 'I Got The Fire' (1975)

15. Jose Feliciano introduces
                                Johnny Winter - 'Rock and Roll' (1973)

16. Cub Koda (Brownsville Station) introduces
                                Brownsville Station - 'Kings of the Party' (1974)

Of the acts here, a surprising number have already appeared in TDATS; Les Variations, Climax Blues Band, James Gang, Ruby Starr & Grey Ghost, Sugarloaf, Montrose, Johnny Winter and Brownsville Station, plus some others that I have not included in this volume, Cozy Powell's Bedlam and Italy's P.F.M. among them.

The Spencer Davis Group song is something of interest and particularly rare, the lineup seems to have been a one-off, assembled by Spencer especially for this show, in a time just after his group had already undergone major makeovers for recent albums. Maybe he intended this show lineup to last longer, but the 'Spencer Davis Group' as an entity went on hiatus for a decade after this performance.
The band:

Buddy Sklar - lead vocals, formerly of The Hook, featured in vol48 

Spencer Davis - rhythm guitar

Chris Pinnick (one-time Chicago member wiki) - lead guitar

Lee Dorman (from Iron Butterfly and Captain Beyond) - bass

Drums: on one youtube video, the channel says the drummer is Deane Hagen, but I have not been able to confirm this elsewhere.

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If you liked this please explore this site further, with 160+ similar collections, articles and interviews. My social links are below, I also have a youtube channel (link).

Thanks for reading, until next time, rock on!
Rich

Further listening:

The Day After The Sabbath 117: Boston Tea Party, 'Bosstown Sound' tribute

The Day After The Sabbath 128: Sweet Home Birmingham, Alabama

The Day After The Sabbath 112: UK Country Rock and Southern Rock Special

[Summary of all previous volumes]

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The Day After The Sabbath 73: Hammond Lord [hammond organ special]

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As most of you will know by now, Jon Lord, original keyboardist with Deep Purple, passed away recently. Sad and thought-provoking news as it always is when rock gods leave us, I realised it was the perfect time, by way of some tribute, to finish off the hammond organ and keyboard comp I've been formulating for a while. Having now received the inspiration for it's theme and last, fitting track, here is 73: Hammond Lord. A collection of tracks with wicked hammond organ.

No doubt many of the bands here would have sounded very different if it were not for Jon Lord, one of the founding and longest-standing members of Deep Purple. He took an instrument that was originally designed as a cheaper alternative to church pipe organs, and pushed it to the limits with classically-trained skills and mega-amplification. The guitar's total domination of hard rock was gone for ever.

TRACKS

01. Santa Barbara Machine Head - Rubber Monkey (1968)
       from album 'blues anytime vol. 3'
02. Birth Control - Buy! (1972)
       from album 'hoodoo man'
03. Aardvark - Copper Sunset (1970)
       from album 'aardvark'
04. Pocket-Size - Opus III (1970)
       from retrospective 'in one or another condition'
05. Waterloo - Why May I Not Know (1970)
       from album 'first battle'
06. Ruphus - Trapped In A Game (1973)
       from album 'new born day'
07. Tortilla Flat - Life (1970)
       single
08. Quatermass - Up On The Ground (1970)
       from album 'quatermass'
09. Sugarloaf - Hot Water (1971)
       from album 'spaceship earth'
10. Eyes Of Blue - Q III (1969)
       single
11. Murphy Blend - At First (1970)
       from album 'first loss'
12. Pacific Sound - Forget Your Dream (1971)
       from album 'forget your dream!'
13. Attila - Holy Moses (1970)
       from album 'attila'
14. The Trip - Caronte [Part 1] (1971)
       from album 'caronte'

Where better to begin than with the track that boasts the talents of the man himself? 'Santa Barbara Machine Head' were a band put together briefly to record some jams for Immediate Record's series of blues albums called "Blues Anytime". "Santa Barbara Machine Head" featured Jon Lord, Ronnie Wood (guitar), John 'Twink' Alder (drums) and Kim Gardner (bass). You are right to recognise those names, 1967 was the year and these guys were just starting their careers, or had already been in some successful bands by that time. Wood (later of the Stones) and Kim were both in The Birds and The Creation, Twink would go on to bands including The Pretty Things and The Pink Fairies.

Birth Control's track is taken from their third album, 1972's Hoodoo Man, and Wolfgang Neuser was the keys man here. Starting out as it means to go on with the sound of air raid explosions, plenty of rock solid hammond riffs follow. To me, this sounds like Tony Iommi playing hammond...which can't be bad!

Pocket-Size

The third track is from the UK band Aadvark. Early on they included Paul Kossof and Simon Kirke who later went on to Free, but when they recorded 'Copper Sunset' they had changed to a keyboard-lead prog act with Steve Milliner (previously of Black Cat Bones) providing the fuzzed-up hammond riffs. Copenhagen's Pocket-Size first appeared on my last comp and unfortunately there is very little known about them, their only recordings were retrospectively released by Frost Records in recent times and 'In One Or Another Condition' shows their solid skills with some big stoned chops, ably assisted by great hammond.

Waterloo were a Belgian band that have cropped up here before in my Belgian comp, and they more than deserve credit for their intricate multi instrumental hard prog, often lead by plenty of awesome hammond.

Gudny Aspaas (Ruphus)

Ruphus are a rarity for TDATS, as they are from Norway, a country quite severely lacking here so far. Rest assured that I will redress that balance at some time, and in the mean-time take in this blinding track featuring the amazing vocal power of songstress Gudny Aspaas, accompanied by some hard as nails prog riffs. Tortilla Flat were a German act who made one album, though the track I used here, 'Life', was first aired as a single in 1970. Guitarist Michael Koch would later be in Jeronimo who I used way back on Vol5.

London's Quatermass (taking their name from a BBC science-fiction series) had a link to Deep Purple. All three of them had and would play in Ian Gillan-related projects like Episode 6 and Gillan. Their prog sounds were confident and accomplished right from the off and were in some ways fairly ahead of their time for 1970. Plenty of innovative electronic embellishment went along with Peter Robinson's keys and hammond. Unfortunately they didn't market well and only made one album, but they definitely had the talent and scope to become established.

8 Track

Conversely, Colorado's Sugarloaf were a less interesting, radio-friendly band who had enough success from a couple of singles to make 4 albums. I guess there's a good indicator of the power of american radio. Their biggest hit 'Green Eyed Lady', while musically proficient and slick, played it pretty safe, and I was about to give up on researching them when the scathing guitar introducing 'Hot Water' suddenly jumped out at me from their second album 'Spaceship Earth'. The riff was followed satisfyingly by cool hammond and I was delighted to find another unexpected, worthy inclusion.


Eyes Of Blue were Welsh, and one of those incredibly important bands that seemed to be a breeding ground for an entire country's rock history, as I found making the Welsh Vol56. Q III was a single b-side from 1969 with lots of great psychedelic hammond.

Pacific Sound

Berlin's Murphy Blend made one album in 1970 and the excellently named Wolf-Rüdiger Uhlig was the keys man. Bass player Andreas Scholz would later go on to Blackwater Park, who recorded one of my favourite tracks of all time, the mind-numbingly epic "Rock Song". Pacific Sound, from Neuchâtel, emerged from the Swiss ballroom covers-band scene and managed to record one album of mostly originals before calling it a day. The hard-edged tracks like Forget Your Dream had a distinctive fresh sound, and were quite manic.

Attila just had to be included here! Some of you may know that it was a one-album band that featured a very young Billy Joel on heavily distorted hammond, along with friend Jon Small, after they had both left The Hassles. Definitely aiming for shock value, they had a kind of proto-Manowar album cover, with decidedly smaller biceps of course! Billy describes them thus: "End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group. We were heavy metal, we were going to destroy the world with amplification, we had titles like 'Godzilla', 'March of the Huns', 'Brain Invasion'. A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar... I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. It was great, but we can't stay in the club."

The Trip

The compilation ends on another link to Deep Purple. The Trip were a London band, started by an Italian called Riki Maiocchi. They recruited Ritchie Blackmore right at the start and soon moved to Italy. Blackmore quit and came back to the UK in time to join Deep Purple. By the time they recorded their debut, most original members were gone (including Riki Maiocchi) and they had mutated into one of Italy's first hard progressive bands. "Caronte [Part 1]" features incredible use of hammond by the talented Joe Vescovi, as atmospheric in some parts as he is heavy in others.



*nb: this post contains the word 'hammond' 14 times.

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