I know what you mean — I was fooled by the title at first. What they mean is, “world’s worst sci-fi” in front of an audience, on the tv show, “Who’s line is it anyway?”, which brought improv onto the tv screen back in the day.
Now, Superband plays on the street in New Orleans, and as you’ll see, it’s quite a crowd today — sometimes only a few of them show up, sometimes it’s everyone.
That’s Pete Seeger in the green shirt on the video below. You’ll get a rare glimpse of things long past, in footage that hasn’t been seen in 60 years.
Now, here’s some SOUND footage of a club in which I sometimes did comedy standup type performances — the Gaslight Cafe on MacDougal Street, directly across from Rienzi’s Cafe, my second home at that time, meaning I was there for so many hours at a time, it was as if I lived there.
Of course, I didn’t. Nobody did, except Shephard Sherbell used the trap door in the kitchen to get to his 19th century abandoned subway station, in which he lived for about a year, until he moved in with Ramblin’ Jack, whose previous roommate, Bob Dylan, had just moved into his own apartment on MacDougal, just above Rienzi’s.
My apartment was across the street, over the Cafe Wha? which was home to many comedians of the time, including Hugh Romney and Woody Allen.
Every Sunday, we’d all meet at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The city would drain the fountains, and we’d gather inside the walls of the fountain and sing folk songs, protest songs, and, of course, we’d play our acoustic folk instruments, mostly guitars, a few banjos and the occasional fiddle.
There was no videotape at that time, and even the 8mm cameras didn’t have sound until much later, with the addition of the magnetic stripe on the film.
I don’t know when this video was made, but it sure looks and sounds like the kind of music we made in the park many long years ago.
I came across this footage of vintage Greenwich Village, and I think it conveys the feelings and atmosphere of the time, place and people — the beatniks, among whom I found a welcome home.
Now the next video, you really have to get the scene behind the scene. The time was the 1960s, and everybody wanted to be cool, so when this rock song, “One Toke Over The Line” became a rock radio hit, naturally Lawrence Welk just had to have it on the show, thinking that the line “sweet Jesus” meant automatically that it was a Christian hit.
Clearly, nobody on the show knew what a “toke” was, and nobody enlightened them on the way to this historic broadcast, in which a dope song is featured on a Christian network show, sponsored by the entire Christian population of Planet Earth.
Problem is, for Brewer & Shipley, the writers of the tune, it didn’t help any — they were a one-hit wonder and vanished rapidly from the Jesus landscape, but it’s still a big hit among the rock and rollers, even the Gen-Z crowd thinks it’s cool, and the story behind it, even cooler.
That’s the videos for today, but I do want to take the opportunity to invite you to come shop my Christmas store, where I’m trying to put the “X” back in “Xmas”.
