It's what's happening again: 1965 TV music special, heavy on Motown, to air Saturday

[Momo]

In the summer of 1965, Detroit and Motown played starring roles in the biggest televised music special of the year.

The CBS show “It’s What’s Happening Baby,” hosted by New York disc jockey and showman extraordinaire Murray the K, aired that June 28, capturing the pop zeitgeist with a diverse roll call of 20-plus artists: Ray Charles. The Drifters. The Righteous Brothers. Dionne Warwick. The Ronettes. Herman’s Hermits.

And then there was Motown, making up nearly a third of the program, including several vignettes shot around Detroit in pioneering, music video-style clips — 16 years before the arrival of MTV.

The music and culture of the '60s have been thoroughly scrutinized, documented and turned inside out. So it’s not often a key artifact manages to emerge 56 years later. But that's the case with the Murray the K special, which aired in full just once. Since then, it has circulated only in grainy bootlegs.

At 7 p.m. Saturday, the cloak of mystique will come off: “It’s What’s Happening Baby,” meticulously restored, will be broadcast for the first time since that night in ’65, airing on Detroit Public Television and PBS stations across the country.

Produced and hosted by TJ Lubinsky, the face of oldies music on public television, it follows a painstaking, years-long restoration that involved repairing the old black-and-white videotape and remastering the audio into stereo.

It’s a lively, dynamic whirl of a show, tapping the energy of the charismatic, hip-talking radio showman born Murray Kaufman, at that point probably the most influential disc jockey in pop music.

The program features live performances taped at Brooklyn’s Fox Theatre — including Charles, Warwick and the Righteous Brothers — along with tracked sequences shot in Hollywood, New York and Detroit.

Dionne Warwick performs at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre in New York as part of Murray the K's 1965 show "It's What's Happening Baby."

Murray the K visited the Motor City for the shoots with five Motown acts, including segments at Ford’s Rouge plant (Martha and the Vandellas, “Nowhere to Run”) and Greenfield Village (Marvin Gaye atop the Suwanee steamboat for “Pride and Joy”). Also featured are the Supremes, Mary Wells (who had just left Motown) and the Four Tops — the last one in a charming “I Can’t Help Myself” segment with dancing Detroit kids.

As wholesome and feel-good as the show comes across today, it managed to cause a stir among some Republican politicians at the time. Their complaints were part of a broader federal-spending debate over President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty: “It’s What’s Happening Baby” was spearheaded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and aimed to spread messaging about summer jobs and education, particularly for impoverished youth.

The show, which drew a viewing audience of more than 16 million, was especially ill-received by Colorado Sen. Gordon Allott, who called it “shameful and degrading” and said it was “tuned to the lowest type of beatnik appeal.”

The OEO had turned to Murray the K to produce the program, impressed by his racially diverse audience and his role as “a veritable pied piper of rock,” as his son Peter Altschuler calls him.

“My father’s audience was virtually all inner-city kids,” said Altschuler. “White kids listened, too, of course. But my dad played the music by the original artists. He didn’t play Pat Boone — he played Fats Domino. That made a difference.”

That cultural cross-pollination is obvious during Warwick’s performance of “Walk on By,” as the young diverse audience sings in unison, unprompted.

“You see her singing to these white kids, Latino kids, Black kids, and they’re all calling back the answers to her in the song, in a way that wasn’t coached,” said Lubinsky. “It was like, ‘We’re all the same here.’ Which is totally different from anything I’d really seen.”

Lubinsky, a 48-year-old New Jersey native and Pittsburgh resident, grew up enchanted with music made well before his time, and he has been a staple of American public television for more than two decades. His doo-wop specials became a hit starting in the late ‘90s, and he has gone on to present dozens of genre-spanning shows as part of the “My Music” series.

For Lubinsky, "It's What's Happening Baby" had all the right pieces.

“I’m blinded by Motown, because all there is for me in life is Motown. Doo-wop is right up there, too. But Motown is Motown," he said. "If there’s one thing I’m taking with me to the deserted island, it’s the Miracles’ ‘Going to a Go-Go’ album. There’s a lot of history (in this show), but it’s essentially a Motortown Revue in 1965. And that’s why it attracted me so much.”

Murray the K's son said he had tried for years to get the show restored and released, but the effort was too pricey — especially the array of music clearances.

“When TJ came to me, I was skeptical,” Altschuler said. “But he had deep enough pockets to get it done.”

Lubinsky was hot on the case. Through the years, he’d seen various clips from “It’s What’s Happening Baby,” but never the full show.

“What would it look like if we get the original 2-inch tapes and transfer those, then make the sound really pristine and put it out for the first time? This would be so great,” he said. “I told Peter: Look, we’ve done this with ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ we’ve done it with ‘Hullabaloo,’ we’ve done it with various artists. So trust me to take this and do something good with it.”

Lubinsky's public-television presentation is interspersed with pledge-drive segments and newly taped interviews with figures involved in the original show, including Warwick, Otis Williams (the Temptations), Little Anthony and Peter Noone (Herman's Hermits).

Poignantly, it also features one of the last major interviews with Mary Wilson, beamed remotely from her Las Vegas home two weeks before her Feb. 8 death. Wilson, in a sweatshirt emblazoned “Native Detroiter,” looks happy and healthy, even breaking into an impromptu rendition of the Supremes' “Everything Is Good About You.”

Saturday, when the special airs, would have been Wilson's 77th birthday.

During his career in the oldies-music world, Lubinsky has sadly watched the passing of many veteran artists, some who had become his close friends. Many were grateful for his efforts to showcase their music long after their heyday.

“The mantra of my life is to give them one last amazing chance at the spotlight,” Lubinsky said.

But the death of the former Supreme hit him harder than any other, he said. Wilson had worked as Lubinsky’s co-host on earlier “My Music” specials. And in their recent two-hour conversation, she was energized and buzzing with ideas for projects.

They discussed creating a lifestyle TV show for her along the lines of “Patti LaBelle’s Place.”

“It wasn't fair because she wasn't done yet,” Lubinsky said. “It just leaves something dangling out there, something unfinished. And that's pretty sad.”

Wilson is a highlight in the 1965 footage with fellow Supremes Diana Ross and Florence Ballard, performing “Stop! In the Name of Love” outdoors for a group of dancing Detroit teens. It was a rare chance for the group to dress casually, including caps, and forego the lavish gowns.

“We loved that one because we had a chance to be ourselves," Wilson tells Lubinsky.

The Supremes segment is one of several clips shot in the now-familiar style of music videos, including the leadoff number featuring Martha and the Vandellas romping through "Nowhere to Run" in the Ford factory.

“These really were like little skits of what people thought the records should be,” Lubinsky said. “I'm not aware of any other network shows that did that prior to this.”

Performances onstage at the Brooklyn Fox range from tender (the Miracles) to smoking (Chuck Jackson, Little Anthony & the Imperials), while the Temptations are captured backstage in a sizzling “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”

Otis Williams, interviewed by Lubinsky for the show, recounts that the normally fearless Tempts had been somewhat intimidated seeing Little Anthony’s fiery “I’m Alright” on the Fox stage.

“When we saw Little Anthony & the Imperials — they were headlining — we looked at each other and said, ‘OK, we better really go out here and step. We better dance like we never danced before,’” Williams says.

Lubinsky was as surprised as anyone to hear such an admission from a group he calls “the tall, tantalizing, toe-tapping, tempting Temptations.” But the group certainly managed to light things up during its own segment.

"When it comes to the classic five (Temptations lineup), I've never seen David Ruffin move the way he did. He’s so skinny and so sharp,” said Lubinsky. “I mean, I've seen clips of Jackie Wilson come close, but not with five guys all doing the same thing, letting their personalities come out, being so sharp. All you can do is look at that clip and say, ‘I wish I could do that.’”

As he’s done with some previous specials, Lubinsky occasionally sweetens the audio to make up for deficiencies in the original live recording. On the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” for instance, the duo’s live vocals are intact, but now augmented with strings, horns and a female choir.

Murray the K with the Ronettes for a video shoot as part of "It's What's Happening Baby" in 1965.
The show also includes a phenomenal live rendition of “Ooo Baby Baby” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles that manages to top the recorded classic — complete with a matinee-idol performance from Robinson and smartly syncopated steps from the group.

Lubinsky, who self-syndicates his programs to public television stations, said the show was a winner out of the gate: Within two days of announcing it, nearly 90% of U.S. stations had signed on — “very rare in the PBS world,” he said.

Martha Reeves, speaking this week, has rich memories of her involvement with the show. And she keeps a fond spot in her heart for Murray the K: The influential disc jockey was a big advocate for her group’s music, and his knack for showmanship made his concerts a blast to perform.

“If it wasn’t for the DJs, we wouldn’t have been famous,” she said. “Murray Kaufman was special. This was history forever, and it was all his dream.”

'It's What's Happening Baby'
7 p.m. Sat.

Detroit Public Television (WTVS-TV, Channel 56)

https://www.freep.com/story/entertainme ... 889050002/

[Deleted User 15506]

Definitely, must see TV.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

My mom and dad will love it, I'm sure.

[blizzard]

Airs again tonight.