The other day, I was telling a friend of mine about a memorable show that ran on Los Angeles TV in the late sixties. It was called Groovy and it was an afternoon "teen dance party" show on KHJ, Channel 9. What made it unique from dozens of other knock-offs of American Bandstand (and many such shows that preceded that one) was that when it debuted, Groovy was done from the beach in Santa Monica.
The following is not any sort of official history. It's what I remember and some of it may be incorrect. I'm putting it up here mainly to see if I can jar any other memories (or photos or — dare I dream? — videos) loose. I recall the show premiering around March of '67 and ping-ponging back and forth between the 4 PM-5 PM time slot and 5 PM-6 PM, Monday through Friday. I believe it was done live when it started and then, for reasons that will become obvious as I tell you more about it, its producers began taping it an hour or so before it was broadcast. Once or twice, it got "rained out" and a slapdash broadcast was assembled in the KHJ studios over on Melrose.
The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by the gent seen in the above photo. His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (from which that is a still) before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn't the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by "young," I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.
Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day...usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach...with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren't great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they'd keep "playing" and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, "It's not over! Keep playing!" And they'd scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.
But the real "treat" — the reason thousands of depraved Southern California males tuned in — was the daily Bikini Contest. Blodgett would do short interviews with five or six young ladies selected not for their loquaciousness but for the elegance of their figures and the brevity of their swimwear. You got the idea that whoever was picking the contestants was rating them by subtracting their I.Q.s from their bust measurements. Blodgett would ask each where she went to school, what she liked to study and if she had any hobbies, and the lasses would giggle through their replies. Then each would parade down a little runway to show off her physique to hoots and hollers from the crowd. That day's musical act would be the judges and they'd select the victor. Usually, whichever lady looked the sluttiest would win passes to Gazarri's on the Strip or the Cinnamon Cinder or some other local dance club.
Other things I remember about the show: The cameras were always panning the crowds who were there to watch the proceedings. At least once per show, someone would either flash or moon or give the finger. (This, I assume, is why they stopped broadcasting live.) At the very least, you'd see an awful lot of young teens smoking and/or brandishing bottles of liquor. One person who worked on the show told me that they got very few complaints about the flashing or the mooning or even the 14 year old girls popping out of their microscopic bathing suits...but there were constant objections to the smoking and drinking.
I also remember a corollary to something I'd already formulated by then, which was the Cheap Movie Swimming Pool Scene Rule. That's the rule that says if you're watching a cheap or even medium-budget movie and there's a scene by a swimming pool, someone is going to fall or be pushed in with all their clothes on. There was no pool on Groovy but there was an ocean...so at least once per show, someone who wasn't dressed for it would get carried out against their will and thrown in the water. You can just imagine the hilarity of that.
I have a few other memories — including the story of a girl from my high school and her travails in the Bikini Contest — but I'll save them for a follow-up posting which, I hope, will contain additional info that someone reading this will send in. One thing I'm really not clear on is how long the Blodgett/Beach era of Groovy lasted. I do remember tuning in one Monday and discovering that with no advance notice, it had turned into a different show. Groovy was suddenly shot indoors at KHJ with all the dancing teens fully clothed. This version — which was quite ordinary and therefore inferior to The Lloyd Thaxton Show. a dance party series over on Channel 13 — was hosted by local deejay Sam Riddle. Later, Riddle was replaced by another local radio guy, Robert W. Morgan. By then, it was well on its way to becoming one of those shows that is watched by so few people that when it's cancelled, no one notices.
So does anyone have any stills or footage from the beach/Blodgett version of Groovy? Does anyone else at least remember it? Come on. Someone must have been in Los Angeles in the late sixties and watching TV besides me.
I'm close to giving up on The Washington Post, which has become quite a different newspaper from what it was in the days of Woodward and Bernstein...and I don't mean that it was usually Liberal back then. I mean that it was usually correct. The current editors have a pro-Bush slant, which is of course their right. I read a lot of news that comes out of that viewpoint. But like Fox News, they occasionally get so enthusiastic that it impacts the accuracy of their reporting. On May 3, they ran a story that...well, here. I'll quote the first paragraph...
Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable
Compromise Bill in Works After Veto Override Fails
By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A01
President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.
Note that this was a Page One report and it's pretty explicit. Congressional leaders, it says, are negotiating with Bush and have withdrawn their insistence on a timeline to end the war. Today, they issued the following correction and it is now — in smaller type — the preface to the online version of the article...
A May 3 Page One article about negotiations between President Bush and congressional Democrats over a war spending bill said the Democrats offered the first major concession by dropping their demand that the bill it include a deadline to bring troops home from Iraq. While Democrats are no longer pushing a firm date for troop withdrawals, party leaders did not specifically make that concession during a Wednesday meeting with Bush at the White House.
Translation: We said they offered it but they really didn't offer it. So the entire premise of our headline story was at best misleading and at worst, completely false.
Before you click, you ought to know that this runs a little under 68 minutes. It's a live interview and "town hall" meeting that John McCain did last Friday at the headquarters of Google up in Northern California. The questions are a little out of the ordinary, which is good, and it's a much more interesting chat than you'd get if McCain was just being interviewed by a Chris Matthews or Larry King.
There are some good comments in there, though I think McCain gets (and takes) too much credit for "straight talk," especially when he seems to be so fervently back-pedalling from certain past positions that might now cost him votes among the so-called Religious Right. He's asked about reconciling his once calling Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" with his willingness to go to Falwell's university, speak and be photographed alongside the man. McCain responds that he met with Falwell and they settled their differences...
...to which a lot of us have to say, "Huh?" Jerry Falwell is the same person he always was, saying the same things, pushing the same agenda. If he was an "agent of intolerance" then, he's an "agent of intolerance" now. I don't think McCain is saying that a private conversation convinced him that he was wrong about Falwell, is he? So what changed?
Shortly after that, an audience questioner asks McCain a multi-part question about atheism. McCain gives him a quick, semi-responsive answer — that a McCain administration would never fault people for whatever they believed — and moves on a bit too rapidly. He also gives a pretty disingenuous (I think) reply to a fair question about who's "won" the Iraq War if we've lost. Frankly, I think it poisons the whole public debate about the Iraq War to try and reduce it to a matter of winning and losing.
Your reaction to this video may differ from mine but mine was that I liked McCain for the first part of it...up until around the third or fourth audience question when he struck me as getting fitfully evasive and more apt to give glib dismissals of tough queries. He also seemed a bit too interested in showing the audience how funny he could be. Anyway, it's a revealing discussion and you might want to take the time to watch some or all of it. Thanks to Tom Galloway, who was somewhere there in the audience, for letting me know about it.
May 7, 2007
