Rant #2,605: Action

Today, after a long hiatus, it is time for a little self promotion/
 
Quite frankly, I am sick and tired about talking about things like Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and Andrew Cuomo, even though the press and others seem to be obsessed with these topics.
 
They do need to be spoken about to a certain extent, which I have already done, and I am putting them all to bed for now.
 
I am not retiring them, I am just casting them off on the side, and if they need to be spoken about again, then I will do so.
 
But today I want to talk about something that is much lighter, something that has been near and dear to my heart for the past nearly 60 years.
 
I am a true Baby Boomer, and when I was eight years old and living in the new community called Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, the possibilities were seemingly endless, and almost every day there was something new to do and explore.
 
And that included on television, which was a medium seemingly designed and created for my generation.
 
Baby Boomer were the real first TV generation, and I watched television each and every day.
 
I loved the sitcoms, of course, and I loved the cartoons and the Little Rascals and the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello, and I was just getting into the sports on TV, but I also loved the new things that were popping up on the tube back then, the new concepts, the new shows that were premiering right before my eyes.
 
Back in those days, ABC was solidly the third network. CBS was king, and their shows were pretty standard fare, stuff that I liked but were geared pretty much for an older audience.
 
NBC was somewhere in the middle, kind of gravitating toward that older audience but with one foot in the new generation.
 
But ABC was kind of the doormat of the three, and since they could not go against “Gunsmoke” or “The Ed Sullivan Show” or even “The Tonight Show,” they decided that their direction and focus would be on younger viewers, and that meant at all times during the day.
 
So on ABC you had shows like “Dark Shadows” and “Bewitched,” which certainly catered to the Baby Boomer generation, shows that there was no way in heck that CBS or NBC would have ever shown at that time.
 
And you also had “American Bandstand,” a show that was created to showcase the new music, which was rock ‘n roll, to kids from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between.
 
Although Dick Clark was not the original host of the show, once he got on board, the show took off way beyond any expectation that ABC could have had for it.
 
Clark, known as “America’s oldest teenager,” branched the show out from its five-day-a-week afternoon outings into the evening on Saturday, and later, he moved the show from Philadelphia to Hollywood and it became a Saturday staple of the network for generations.
 
The show was so successful that it spawned a copycat show in many markets, including those hosted by Lloyd Thaxton and Clay Cole.
 
Anyway, the show was so successful that there were several spinoffs, and perhaps the most successful one was something called “Where the Action Is,” which ran on ABC during weekday afternoons from 1965 to 1967.

 
The black and white show had one theme: how young kids and rock ‘n roll blended together into a fun mix, and the program highlighted many of the top acts of the day, including the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, the Who, Tommy Roe, the Supremes and many others performing lip synced versions of their hits on the beach and in other vacation spots around the country.
 
It was done is such a free-form way that even though it was lip synced, that acts were having lots of fun singing and dancing on the beach or in a park or wherever, and the crowd that gathered to hear them was having lots of fun too.

 
The show was so popular that it created its own stable of stars. At first hosted by Steve Alaimo and Linda Scott, the new stars that got their foothold on the show included Keith Allison, Tina Mason, and of course, Paul Revere and the Raiders.

 
The Raiders were almost designed for television, with their Revolutionary War outfits and the free reign that they were seemingly given on the show to do anything and everything that came to mind.
 
And the ringmaster of the show—which was certainly the precursor to “The Monkees” series on NBC and later, MTV—was Dick Clark, naturally, who was on each episode to keep things in some type of order.
 
The show was as if Tiger Beat Magazine or 16 Magazine came alive, and kids rushed home from school to watch WTAI and “Dark Shadows” often back to back.

 
Anyway, when the show went off the air in 1967—and the Raiders were moved to another show format, the “Happening” shows that they did for the next few years each week—these shows, featuring the top acts of that tine period, pretty much faded into the either. To this day, none of these shows have ever been formally released on any type of video format.
 
They have turned up on numerous video bootlegs, but the quality is pretty bad, as witnessed by the photos I have put into this blog entry.
 
Supposedly, Clark was finally working on a deal to release these shows in some form when he passed away a few years ago, and thus, they still remain in something of an abyss right now.
 
But people remember the show, and I sure do, as it was really, along with “American Bandstand,” my introduction to the world of rock ‘n roll. Ed Sullivan was too—the Beatles, for sure, but also the Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones and so many other acts—but WTAI and Bandstand were my weekly doorways into this music.
 
I so fondly remember WTAI that I have set up my own Facebook site chronicling the show, offering it as a meeting place for all of us to talk about the show and reminisce about one thing or another.
 
The Facebook group is called “Where the Action is: Yesterday and Today,” and you can access it at https://www.facebook.com/groups/598790963991601/?modal=false&should_open_composer=false
 

I put up links to available videos—all bootlegs on YouTube—photos of the show, and the records that were featured on the show, and it is a fun site, no politics at all, it is nothing but fun.
 
Right now, I am trying to get together a project where a lot of the music on the show will be featured in a place where members can access it, and it has been fun digitizing a lot of music that I hadn’t listened to in ages for this project.
 
Anyway, if you remember the show, why not give the site a whirl. I don’t think that you will be disappointed at all.
 
The site is as I described it, nothing more or less, and if you are a Baby Boomer or want to find out what kids who are now in their 60s were listening to when we were youngsters, this is the place to be.
 
Heck, I believe that even Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head would enjoy this site, and you can bet the Governor Cuomo, the same age as I am, watched this show as a kid too.
 
Those aren’t endorsements, but it just gave me a few more lines of this blog entry to shill a little bit for a site that I am kind of proud of, with well more than 1,000 members.
 
Action! Action! Action!
 
Let’s Go Where the Action Is!
 
Try it, you’ll like it!