Which brings us to the TV show that links us into the theme I’m labouring towards here.
Now Time screened on the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1968. There were thirteen half-hour episodes cram packed with the latest stuff from Swinging London, though I suspect that the footage was drawn from a variety of sources, which would explain the lack of a handy DVD set. The series being in black and white might also have something to do with the matter.
There were film clips which would fit right in with the current generation of music videos, sequences which seemed to have been shot specifically for the series, and excerpts from other films which hadn’t quite made it out our way.
While the footage of the Vanilla Fudge’s You Keep Me Hanging On may have been live or may have been mimed in a studio somewhere, there wasn’t much doubt about the live credentials of the stuff that had been lifted from a European tour by the Stax/Volt Revue in 1966.
Tom Dowd had headed a transatlantic expedition featuring Booker T & the MGs, the Mar-Keys, Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding and Sam & Dave which was greeted like royalty when it touched down in London and proceeded around Europe.
In Tom Dowd And The Language of Music Mr Dowd recounts how the participants were feted by the British pop aristocracy, and tells of his amazement that the Beatles were still working on four-track recorders when even the Stax studio in Memphis had gone to eight.
Somewhere in the process one (at least) of the concerts was filmed and parts of it were scattered through the thirteen episodes of Now Time along with the Small Faces, Pink Floyd and a host of others I can’t recall thirty-eight years later.
However there was one act I have never been able to forget. Of course, when the same footage that was used in Now Time turns up in one of those documentary series about popular music in the second half of the twentieth century fading memories are revived, but a first sight of Double Dynamite a.k.a. Sam & Dave was something that was emphatically NOT to be forgotten.