‘Shindig!’ Remembering the Trailblazing Rock TV Program and Producer Jack Good
by Harvey Kubernik
Although it ran for less than two years—September 16, 1964, to January 8, 1966—the musical variety program Shindig! was responsible for bringing rock ’n’ roll and R&B music, and other popular forms of the day, into American living rooms. During its brief time on the air, the program hosted such reigning American and British superstars as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, James Brown, Sonny and Cher, Sam Cooke, the Kinks, Ray Charles, the Beach Boys, the Supremes and many more, including non-rock artists ranging from pop crooners Johnny Mathis and Tony Bennett to jazz greats Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong and Stan Getz. Most of these artists performed live, which was uncommon in the era of lip-synced television music appearances, as seen on American Bandstand and other programs.
Watch all of The Kinks’ appearances on Shindig!
Shindig! was created by L.A radio personality Jimmy O’Neill and songwriter Sharon Sheeley, and was shot in Hollywood at the ABC Prospect Avenue studios. Initially it was a weekly half-hour spot that was extended to two weekly half-hour episodes.
Shindig! producer Jack Good was also the emcee (from YouTube)
The program was emceed by British producer Jack Good, born in London on August 7, 1931. Good also produced a very early TV special, Around the Beatles, in 1964. Nik Cohn, the British rock journalist, wrote that Good “had an understanding of rock music’s importance that was rare at the time. ‘Everyone else saw pop as a one-shot craze and rushed to cash in on it fast before sanity returned and everything returned to normal,’” Cohn wrote in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock (1969). “By contrast, Mr. Good realized it clearly as a major phenomenon. I suppose he was the first pop intellectual. Donna Loren, a featured singer on Shindig!, described Mr. Good as ‘the Norman Lear of rock ’n’ roll,’ for his insistence on booking African-American artists, against the objections of at least one executive at ABC. She said Mr. Good ‘had resisted efforts by the network to limit the number of black performers on the pilot.’”
Shindig! co-creator and host Jimmy O’Neill
As an L.A.-bred kid, I went to live tapings as a teenager. I have a fond memory of the Four Tops. Live vocals from Levi Stubbs and the group were sung over a pre-recorded track by the Shindig! house band. The Four Tops might have aired nationally in black and white but what I saw and felt was in living color. The Four Tops were clad in matching iridescent green suits, moving to “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).”
I also remember seeing other episodes where the guests were Pat and Lolly Vegas, the Walker Brothers, Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner, the Righteous Brothers, Bobby Sherman, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, the Isley Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Blossoms, Gloria Jones and Donna Loren.
Celebrities who dropped in on the Shindig! set at one time or another included Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Rosey Grier, Patty Duke, Raquel Welch, Orson Welles and Vincent Price, while guest hosts included actors and pop culture figures from Boris Karloff to Hedy Lamarr, and Zsa Zsa Gabor to Mickey Rooney. Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on The Addams Family, once guested in a Halloween episode.
Andrew Loog Oldham was the manager/record producer of the Rolling Stones from 1963-1967. He helped guide the Stones to their Shindig! destination in 1965 on a booking with blues giant Howlin’ Wolf.
Related: When the Stones brought Howlin’ Wolf to American television
Oldham told me in 2004, “The British music we’d had was hardly exportable. All that ever got out and onto The Ed Sullivan Show and the American airwaves was the one-offs and the freaks—Acker Bilk, Jackie Dennis and Laurie London. Eventually there was this little cluster of about 300 white kids with a passion for rhythm and blues. [Early British rockers] Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard and the Shadows ran that first all-important mile.”
In my book Turn Up the Radio! Rock, Pop, and Roll in Los Angeles 1956-1972, singer/pianist and author Ian Whitcomb applauded Good and Shindig!
“I had been a guest several times on producer Jack Good’s TV series, Shindig!” he said. “Jack had a background in drama at Oxford. When he did the earlier Oh Boy! television music series in England, he had everything organized and synchronized. So, Jack saw the dramatic potential of rock ’n’ roll. To that point, it hadn’t been exploited or explored in this country [the U.S.]. You simply had teenage kids dancing with each other on the Dick Clark shows. Jack had this dramatic view.”
Watch The Beatles perform “I’m a Loser” and “Boys” on Shindig!
And—why not?—here are The Byrds doing a cover of “I’m a Loser”on Shindig!
The Shindig! shows were recorded live, with some pre-recorded backing tracks of the music being cut at the Nashville West studio on Melrose Avenue and many more at Gold Star studio on Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street. The arranger/producer/bass player Ray Pohlman was a fixture at Gold Star, and the musical director of Shindig! It took a week to make a show.
In 1978, I hung out with multi-instrumentalist Leon Russell for over a month at his studio in North Hollywood when he was recording his album Americana. Russell had played piano with the Shindig! house band the Shindogs—Chuck Blackwell on drums, bassist Joey Cooper, lead guitarist James Burton, Delaney Bramlett on rhythm guitar and keyboardist Glen D. Hardin. The program also featured a larger band consisting of drummers Richie Frost and Mickey Conway, percussionists Julius Wechter and Jerry Williams, and keyboardists Al DeLory, Ray Johnson and Billy Preston. The guitarists were Jerry Cole, Russ Titelman and Al Casey. The bass player was Larry Knechtel. Many of those musicians were already part of the L.A. studio ensemble that would come to be known as the Wrecking Crew.
Watch Leon Russell perform “Roll Over Beethoven” on Shindig! in 1964
Pohlman also assembled a horn section that included trumpet players Bud Brisbois, Tony Terran and Jimmy Zito. Lew McCreary and Dick “Slide” Hyde were his trombonists, and the saxmen were Jim Horn, Lennie Mitchell, Jay Migliori and Jack Nimitz. Not all the musicians were booked every show—for example, Glen Campbell often guested on guitar but was not a steady member of the bands. The show’s choreographer was veteran David Winters, who worked with the dancers.
Watch the Shindogs perform “Not the Lovin’ Kind”
In 2007, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn told me a Jack Good-related story, explaining why he [McGuinn] deliberately wore color-tinted glasses on Shindig!
“I saw [the Lovin’ Spoonful’s] John Sebastian in Greenwich Village and I said, ‘Wow! Cool shades.’ He said somebody from Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band had just given it to him. John said, ‘Here, try them on. Look up at the streetlight and move your head back and forth. It’s really groovy, man.’ I tried them on. I was nearsighted. Later, in Hollywood, I went to a clothing shop on Sunset Strip, De Voss, and got these little wire frames and took them to the eye doctor and had him put in cobalt blue rectangular lenses.
“Jack Good saw me, and said, ‘Wow! What a great gimmick. Everybody needs a gimmick. You gotta wear those all the time. Day and night.’ I had been taking them off, like to do TV, or whatever, just wearing them around. Good encouraged me to wear them for everything, onstage and offstage. So, I did. And it worked, and it became a bit of a fashion style.
“There was a minute there, after the success of both ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!,’ where I could go to restaurants, be approached and followed home. It never got to the stage [Bob] Dylan talks about in his book Chronicles, where people are up on the roof trying to get in. It didn’t get that crazy but it got pretty crazy.”
Jack Good with John Lennon on Shindig!
In a 2000 interview, I talked to keyboardist/arranger/composer/producer Jack Nitzsche about Russell and a memorable visit he had to a Shindig! taping in 1965. “I met Leon with Jackie DeShannon; she introduced me,” Nitzsche said. “Leon at the time was playing piano in a bar in Covina. He was an innovative piano player. He was good. In those days it was really hard to find rock ’n’ roll piano players who didn’t play too much. Leon talked the same language. You could really hear Leon play in the Shindig! television band. In 1964, I put him in the T.A.M.I. Show [concert film] band, and he’s all over the soundtrack. I knew Leon would emerge as a bandleader.
Related: The T.A.M.I. Show pitted James Brown vs. the Rolling Stones
“I spent a day with Howlin’ Wolf on the set of Shindig! I went down there with the Rolling Stones, and Sonny and Cher were there, too. Sonny introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and I was speechless. He was imposing. There was a sweetness in there you could see. [Wolf] was like 300 pounds, huge, and he had a tiny toy harmonica that he would put in his mouth. He could hold it between his lips. He got up there on stage to do his set and he put that little harmonica in his mouth. That was the surprise. The band was playing, and it came time for the instrumental and he was kinda dancin’ around. When he came up again for air, he was playing harmonica and holding the microphone. It was theatrical and funny stuff.”
Jack Good often argued with ABC executives, who made racist suggestions about avoiding having black and white recording artists vocalizing with each other in the 1964 Shindig! TV pilot. ABC-TV brass didn’t want Good’s white wife, Gracia, a studio background singer and an occasional member of the Blossoms, who were Shindig! regulars, to be seen on camera together. By January ’66, Good had had his final argument with those executives, splitting from Shindig! The final season was helmed by Dean Whitmore.
Related: Our obituary of Jack Good
Good remained involved in the music and television businesses for some time, but never attained that level of visibility again. In the February 26, 1968, episode of The Monkees, titled “The Monkees Mind Their Manor,” Good was cast as Lance Kibee. He went on to produce the group’s TV special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee, which aired on NBC-TV on April 14, 1969. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Clara Ward Singers, the Buddy Miles Express and Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and the Trinity were his guests.
Shindig! spawned a plethora of similarly formatted rock music TV programs, ranging from Hullabaloo to Where the Action Is, along with many others that have been largely forgotten. As for Jack Good, he died on Sept. 24, 2017. Richard Sandomir, in his obituary on Good in The New York Times, noted, “Mr. Good was an unlikely rock evangelist. He was not a musician, a record executive or a disc jockey; rather, he was an adventurous Oxford-educated actor whose proper style provided counterpoint to rock ’n’ roll’s brashness.”
Watch The Who sing “I Can’t Explain” and “My Generation” on Shindig!
[Author and music journalist Harvey Kubernik’s books are available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.]
1 Comment so far
Jump into a conversationI watched the first episode Monday, Sept 16, 2024.
I will continue to watch them on their original broadcast date until the second season is over.
There is a great book about the show and guests by Peter Checksfield. I bought the complete series on Ebay.