If there’s one thing the Fifties had anything to do with it was Being Teenage, which was a nifty way of telling all those kids abhorring the fact they were stuck in the 12-20 wasteland that it wasn’t so bad after all. There were all sorts of exclusively boss things about the in-between years, which businessmen soon picked up, because theirs were the pockets being lined by all that postwar teenage affluence. Being executively far-sighted, it stood to their reason that other teenage image makers would sell; hence teen films.

Always following the latest fads and trends, they started off being about rock groups and how they were maligned by parents, about juvenile delinquents, teenage girls and their teenage problems, and all those other neat teen things. Some of them were even good; High School Confidential was brilliant. In the early 60s they became beach movies, changed to hippie films in the mid 60s, somehow sidetracking into bike movies by the end of the decade.

1970 found us without any private form of film, and at the same time searching for some new form of generational myth, the Summer of Love being slightly tarnished and battered by this time. (Though even that’s not totally over yet – I saw a kid in San Francisco a few weeks ago with a bell around his neck.) Woodstock set the myth, and the resultant movie gave us the form. We’d become so intellectually infatuated with ourselves that we were prepared to get numb asses watching celluloid strips of our peers eating, getting stoned, fucking, and freaking out over schlock rock bands. Worse, we were prepared to buy an album of the event so that we could have that special moment available instantly, jacking off to a generation teen dream. If any one of those executively

far-sighted folk who hate rock just as much now as they did 1S years ago had his proverbial shit together, he’d get a bunch of those booths like they have on the observation deck of the Empire State Building where you put in your coins and speak into a microphone for a select number of minutes and a little while later out pops your very own 45rpm record of your very own scratchy voice, and he’d set them up in strategic spots at each and every rock festival throughout the year, even the ones where the promoters didn’t hire the advertised bands.

“Hi Mom, this is Today. It’s real far out here .. . Had a mud fight yesterday, and there’s no water . . . ummmm ... I got an abscess, and there ain’t any good acid, just this shit that’s full of strychnine ... oh yeah – I think I got the clap from some cunt I fucked last night, so make an appointment with the doc, okay? .. . The bands are really outasight – The Wired Embryos did a real farout jam for six hours last night that was really cosmic, better’n the Dead even, ya know? . . . Well, gotta go, I’m gonna score some dynamite coke pretty soon, and I wanna sneak backstage an’ talk with Gracie . . . See ya soon – wish you were here. Bye.”

But Woodstock wasn’t the first to show every last pore of your favorite rock star’s p.etty face, and it didn’t even start with Monterey Pop. No, it began in 1965 with The T.A.M.I. Show, a 90 minute spectacular showing the pores and follicles of Chuck Berry, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Barbarians, Jan and Dean, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, James Brown, and the Stones; masterminded by Phil Spector, who’s onscreen for about ten seconds, probably only out of courtesy seeing as how he was so weird with those funny shades and wild hair falling all about his ear lobes; presented in grainy black and white Electronovision. (Whatever happened to the Electronovision version of Harlow’s life and times? Maybe some executively far sighted soul will throw an Electronovisioh Film Festival, and then we’ll all be able to find out together.)

For some obscure reason like the Generational Teen World Brain thinking it’s the right cosmic time, The T.A.M.I. Show is currently touring the college and midnight undergrounds circuit; I caught it on the basis that anything that held my undivided teenybopper attention in 1965 had to be just as good today, and because my girlfriend is in the film, a then tender 13. And ya know what? Everything sounded really good, even the Barbarians, who really got it on with the de rigeur hair shaking. They were the only punk band in the whole show, and we all know that punk bands rip off their licks from hotshot English bands like the Who. So .the name of the game was: who did the Barbarians steal their riffs from? And the answer, after much along the row deliberation, was the Troggs, which was pretty forward minded of the Barbarians, seeing as how “Wild Thing” still had a year to go before conception within Reg Presley’s brain.

Chuck Berry looked really young, and got in some good semiclean bump and grinds before splitting a medley of his more famous hits with Gerry and the Pacemakers, who were the only rock band aside from the Bachelors Ed Sullivan ever felt comfortable with. Maybe he figured that a huge guitar strung so high like that must keep Gerry’s arms pretty hampered, and he wouldn’t be able to make a grab before Ed could jump out of reach. Kim Fowley says that the hottest rumour in 1964 Britain was that Gerry couldn’t have an orgasm unless a girl shat on his forehead, which was why he had a receding hairline, but that sounds like an unfounded malicious rumour to me.

Billy J. Kramer, never looked more like Eddie Cochran, even though he was only England’s version of Ricky Nelson

– looking and sounding like Eddie Cochran being the exclusive property of Billy Fury – and Lesley Gore wore all her junk jewelry especially for the occasion, even her ankle bracelet with the gold plated heart. Everyone in the audience sang along – the movie audience that is, the 1964 one (that’s when it was filmed) was too busy screaming – but they bogged down on the more obscure goldies. But not the girl who sat next to me – her name was Leslie too, but “ie” instead of “ey,” and she was a member of the Lesley Gore Fan Club and had all her records, even the ones you never heard of. Like the Lesley of yesteryear she too wants to be a rock and roll star, so if you’ve got a recording contract, look her up, ‘cause she picks and sings pretty good.

Marvin and Smokey and the Supremes put on a real stopper of a show, making it easy to see why their platters always shoot straight to the top of the sepia hit parade. I fell in love with Diana Ross’ mouth, and there was a really good shot during the opening credits, when all the stars were seen putting on their make up, and the whole screen filled with a tube of lipstick sliding over Diana’s lips, all sixty feet of them. If Rolling Stone ever gives out an award for Rock and Roll Lips of the Year they better give it to her; it’s the least they can do after slighting her for playing Bessie Smith (or is it Billie Holliday?), which in case you weren’t looking, may be the new teen film to replace the Medicine Ball Caravan/Mad Dogs and Englishmen syndrome*

But if Marvin and Smokey and their pals stopped the show, James Brown tore it to shreds. How that man can Slide out there on one foot, sing and dance himself into a total frenzy of sweat and flash, look utterly ridiculous to my 14 year old mind and totally jive to my 20 year old mind y and still notice if a band member misses a note is beyond me. The camera kept cutting to some black chicks in the audience screaming themselves silly, but they didn’t have to bother, ‘cause the theatre audience was doing it themselves. If you’re wondering where Tina Turner got all her facial moves, it’s from watching James. The Stones were last, and they were why everyone had come. They were all wearing ties except for Mick, Keith dancing and jumping all over the place, Brian making faces at the camera. Mick is a youthful 20, and Leslie kept muttering, “I used to think he looked so old then – like he was 30.” They ran through pre-“Satisfaction” hit after hit, and there came a. time when Mick took his marraccas in hand and moved out to the edge of the stage, taunting all the screaming chickies as he minced across. And there was my honey, second row, looking about to see if there’s a policeman in the vicinity, and there wasn’t, so she coolly walked over and touched Mick’s leg. She gets my undying love for that.

The big finale had all the other stars dancing out onto the stage while the Stones pound away, Mick chatting up Diana Ross, Gerry Marsden coyly asking a go go dancer her particular fetish, and over on the right, Keith Richard a respectful distance behind them, dance Bo Diddley and the Duchess. Seems that they had to keep reshooting Bo’s segment because the Duchess was too loose with her bumping and grinding, and even after all that wasted footage it must have been too racy for white folks’ eyes, because Bo and his ladyfriend don’t even get screen credit. It’s lucky for Chuck that he kept his act semiclean.

Jan and Dean were the MCs, also singing a few of their hits, and every nineteenseventyone of us got to explain to his neighbour about how Jan wrecked his car, and how Dean has been arrested five times for homosexuality, and all sorts of hot gossip. Which is what it's all about kids: nostalgia. If you think Rock Around the Clock is a total other era, you better check out seven years ago. Everyone dressed almost militaristically in style – yeah, I know we still subscribe to the same clothing service, but at least you won’t get laughed out of the Whisky if you improve your leyi bellbottoms with embroidery and satin patches. Amplifiers were so small as to be almost nonexistent. Even the Stones’ rigs, the biggest there, looked like the cardboard boxes that pass as amplifiers at the local

drugstore because they’re sitting under the styrofoam guitars. Hardest of all to relate to was a horde of go go dancers frugging and monkeying and hitchiking everywhere – the world’s first organic lightshow. You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen the Stones with 40 twisting chicks in shimmy dresses behind them. What really brought it home was a shot of a kid with hair to his earlobes, which caused the rather hirsute audience to start cheering madly. It’s what we’d been looking for all along, a reminder of present reality.

It’s only right that we make a 1972 version of The T.A.M.I. Show, for when our youngsters ask, “What was the music like before, the Revolution, Daddy?” -r or maybe it’s “during the Revolution,” or “just after the Revolution.” Who can ever discern these cosmic events when they’re happening? Instead of having to humor the little bugger we’ll be 'able to glide over to whatever passes for a closet in the future and pull out a videocassette of the 1972 T.A.M.I. Show and the little horror can take it to his personal environmental habitat, plug it into his media wall, and see for himself.

The Airplane will be there, playing in a futuristic setting of nitrous oxide tanks and giant coke spoon catapaults, which will periodically spurt NO and launch showers of snow while Paul sings about “constellation headquarters” ’and “great giant trackers” like he knows whereof he speaks. Over to the side, just there for the people who like to look at the background, will be Bill Thompson, Augie Bloom, and Diane Gardiner, all looking nonchalantly pleased that they got away with calling a record company Grunt, not realizing the personal embarrassment involved in making a telephone operator for the phone number of *ahem* Grunt Records.

Christopher Milk will jam with Led Zep, followed by a six hour marathon of Grand Funk and Black Sabbath. After the cranes remove the floor to ceiling wall of amplifiers, the stage will be decorously arranged for a 24 hour Grateful Dead set, followed by Pink Floyd. This is in consideration to the audience, who are basically the same for both groups. Between backstage shots of performers snorting coke and audience shots of girls passed out on reds being carried out by their boyfriends we’ll see Creedence and the Byrds, and rumour has it the Beatles are reforming just for the event! TheBeach Boys will turn in a mandatory dynamite performance, espousing the cause of voter registration, and booths will be placed in the lobby jvtst for their set. Dylan has written a set of new songs with the Band especially for the occasion: The Bonzos will be there as part of the governmental cultural exhange, and the rumours that Marty Babrt is going to jam with them are true! After a rousing medley of their fave tunes, Marty and Viv will softshoe down a flight of stairs, white tuxes glowing softly in the light, 40 go go dancers in satin and chiffon gliding nostalgically through the dry ice fog, singing Marty’s 1963 smash, “I Specialize in Love.”

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The Stones will retain their honorary position of show closers, and after working everyone into the proper frenzy, all the other performers will dance onstage for a stimulating finale. Rod Stewart will be heaving cases of beer and wine into the audience while Pete Townshend discusses the aesthetics of crude rock with Mark Farner. James Taylor is going over .the fine points of amplification with Black Sabbath, and Tina Turner is showing Mick how to dance. A hologram of Duane Allman floats high above the audience, which is deeply embroiled in a controversy over whether Duane is a more cosmic guitarist than Jerry Garcia, holographic images of Jimi, Janis, Al, Brian, and Jim also gazing beneficently upon the assembled multitudes. It’s the show of the century – don’t miss it, it’s the new myth.