T.A.M.I. SHOW (TEENAGE Awards Music International) was the first rock ’n’ roll concert film. It featured a host of popular acts from many genres including the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Lesley Gore, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and . . . the Rolling Stones. Directed by Steve Binder, who would go on to work with Elvis on the ’68 comeback special, and produced by Bill Sargent using a new technology known as Electronovision (a precursor to both digital and closed-circuit/pay-per-view broadcasts), the show was filmed over October 28 and 29, 1964, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
JOHN LANDIS: I went to Emerson Junior High and one of the girls-in-my-class’s father produced this so the entire seventh grade went. David Cassidy was in my class. He was there. One of the go-go dancers was Teri Garr. It was hosted by Jan and Dean.
DEAN TORRENCE: Once we had an opportunity to review the whole concept, we thought, “Why wouldn’t we do this?” It had never been done before. This was kind of a forerunner to something like Woodstock.
JOHN LANDIS: It showed how this time in music was extraordinary in its diversity; you have surf music, British music, pop music, soul music, Motown.
BILL WYMAN: There were an awful lot of black artists, which was great for us, but it wasn’t the accepted thing at the time.
Steve Binder made a curious decision. Despite the dazzling array of more-established talent on hand, he wanted to close the show (and film) with the Rolling Stones.
BILL WYMAN: We were hardly known in America at that time—we’d never had a big hit—and they put us on top of the bill and in front of people like Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, James Brown, the Miracles.
Were the Stones happy about the opportunity?
BILL WYMAN: No! We wanted James Brown to top it. Especially after we saw him (laughs). But they insisted that we top it, and before he went on, James Brown came over to us and said, “I’m going to make you Rolling Stones wish that you’d never, ever come here to America!”
The Stones rehearse for T.A.M.I. Show
DEAN TORRENCE: A lot of groups probably thought they were strong enough to close the show until they saw James Brown. We had played with James Brown before, so we knew what to expect. There was no way we would have wanted to follow him.
STEVE BINDER: I mean, to be really honest with you, I remember saying that I wanted the Rolling Stones to be on after James Brown, and I remember Mick coming to me and saying, “We can’t.” Because James Brown was obviously the king, and James and I, when we met, we hit it off really well; we’ve been friends ever since, and his manager had sorta come to me and said, “Nobody can follow James.” And I, for whatever my instincts were, whatever my feelings were, I just felt that we should put the Stones on to close the show.
Considering the audience, the choice made some sense.
DEAN TORRENCE: The audience was 99 percent white and of course they were going to scream like crazy for any group that came from England. I’m sure some of those screaming fourteen-year-old girls looked at James Brown and really liked it. On the other hand, they had no idea what was coming. They were there to scream at the teen idol types. An English band was safe.
Many consider Brown’s performance that night the finest one of his ever captured on film.
BILL WYMAN: Then he went on and did this incredible twenty-minute set and scared the shit out of us. We were literally shaking in our boots; we couldn’t face it.
JOHN LANDIS: The guy who blew me away though was James Brown. I’d never seen anything like that before.
BILL WYMAN: Marvin Gaye said to us backstage, “People love you because of what you do on stage. So just go out there and do it, and forget about James Brown. Go do your thing. That’s what I do.”
There are a variety of opinions on how the Stones played that night, even within the band itself.
KEITH RICHARDS: It was the biggest mistake of our career.
JOHN LANDIS: It was one of the first US performances of the Rolling Stones, who were kind of boring after James Brown. We just thought, “Who is this English twerp?” Bring James Brown back on the stage.
Weekly Variety tended to agree with Landis: “What must surely be England’s revenge for losing the 1776 Revolution, the Rolling Stones.”
But the reality is the Stones were excellent. They played a terrific five-song set, opening with Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” and ending with their version of Bo Diddley’s “I’m All Right,” which segued into all the acts dancing and playing with the Stones on an ensemble version of “Let’s Get Together.” It’s a great window into the early Stones performances and a fascinating cultural moment.
THE STONES MEET THE MASTER
When the Rolling Stones were slated to appear on Shindig in December of 1964, producer Jack Good wanted Howlin’ Wolf on the show, but someone at the network didn’t like the idea. The Stones put their foot down: if Wolf wasn’t going to appear, neither would they.
In their wonderful book Moanin’ at Midnight, authors Mark Hoffman and James Segrest describe the scene:
MARK HOFFMAN AND JAMES SEGREST: A top-notch studio band—Billy Preston on piano, James Burton on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, and Mickey Conway on drums—recorded tracks for the taping. Dressed in a dark suit the next day, Wolf strode majestically onstage, and with the Stones and a bevy of go-go dancers sitting at his feet, launched into an incandescent version of “How Many More Years.” As the band play-synched behind him, Wolf sang and played live, stabbing his massive finger at the camera, shaking his gargantuan rear end, and blasting blues out into prime-time America.
KEITH RICHARDS: Here was this enormous man who looked like an elephant without a trunk, and very polite. Then he starts playing the shit. Oh, man—here comes another education! I was incredibly impressed by him. It was that voice, man, and the attitude. All you had to do was put a microphone in front of him and he did the stuff. There was no tricks involved.
The sight of this literal giant of a bluesman offering up this almost feral performance on a show normally associated with teeny-boppers was arresting. In fact, music critic Peter Guralnick has described it as one of the great cultural moments of the twentieth century.
PETER GURALNICK: What was so great about seeing Wolf on Shindig was it was in a sense reality imposing itself on this totally artificial setting. While I was a big fan of the Stones, it was altogether appropriate that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet. And that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.
Years later, in 1981, Wolf would appear with the Stones once again, at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. Mick acknowledged Wolf’s importance to the Stones’ musical heritage.
STEVE BINDER: And, as it turns out, to this day, I think it is one of the great performances of the Stones. Because I think, at the time that they went on, either they were so stoned-out or whatever, they just literally . . . Mick was impersonating James, almost, with all the dancing and the shenanigans and so forth, and that performance would’ve never happened if I had them on before James.
BILL WYMAN: We went out there and somehow or other it worked, everybody gave everything they had—Keith and Mick were fantastic. They really tried. Then afterwards James Brown came over and congratulated us, and we were all mates after that. We saw quite a bit of him over the next two years. But anyway, that show captured, all in one shot, where music was at in ’63–’64, and you can always go back and see those acts doing their hits and get an idea of how exciting it all was. Since then, I don’t think I’ve really seen anything comparable to that—where you’ve had fifteen top acts on the same show, and it’s come off as well as that.
