Saturday, February 20, 2021

The Teenage Awards Music International Show

Last year over Labor Day weekend, TCM did a whole weekend of concert films, which included what I think was the premiere of a movie I'd been curious about seeing for quite some time, The T.A.M.I. Show. Trying to work my way through the backlog of movies on my DVR, I finally sat down to watch this one to do a review on here.

There's nothing to review in terms of plot, since this is just a concert movie, not even with any sort of framing story the way that ABBA: The Movie has, or backstage scenes. It's just the musicians performing at a concert conceived as a big thing for screaming teens and to raise money for music scholarships (the movie record of the concert is the only thing we got).

After an opening theme that introduces us to the various artists and gives us as close as we're going to get to anything "candid" out of them as they make their way to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, we then get Jan and Dean, who I think were a bit past their peak at the time the movie was released in 1964. They're more or less the emcees, introducing the artists, who come in a fairly broad range. They start with Chuck Berry, past his prime by 1964, who segues into British Invasion act Gerry and the Pacemakers, who did have some success but flamed out after a few years like most of the British Invasion artists. These two actually do a mash-up of "Maybellene" together, with the Pacemakers providing some bizarre hand clapping.

There's a fair amount of Motown, including Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (most of their big hits yet to come); Marvin Gaye (ditto, only much more so); and closer to the end of the show, the Supremes, who had already had one or two #1 hits by this time that they sing truncated versions of.

British Invasion acts who appear other than Gerry and the Pacemakers are Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (not quite so successful); and, concluding the concert (more on that later), the Rolling Stones, who at the time I think had only had one fairly big hit, "Time Is On My Side"; their more famous stuff was to be made much later.

Jan and Dean were part of the beach music scene, and somehow the concert was able to attract the biggest beach music act of them all, the Beach Boys, who do quite well performing all of their hits to that date; the album Pet Sounds was still two years away from being recorded so none of that here.

Not quite fitting any of the other genres are Lesley Gore, big in 1964 and performing all of her big hits, including "It's My Party", and a group I'd never heard of, The Barbarians. They serve mostly to introduce the following, and penultimate act, James Brown. He was sometimes called "the hardest working man in show business", and from this performance, it's pretty darn easy to see why, as he puts out a tremendous amount of energy, although I did find myself wondering whether his backing band picking him up off the floor was staged. The Stones had to follow James Brown; good luck with that.

Several of the acts got backup dancers including women in fairly skimpy bikinis, one guy who did a bizarre writhing around on the floor bit, and apparently Teri Garr before she became a well-known actress. (From what I read, she's the one in the bullseye sweater.)

How much you like this movie depends on how much you like the music, of course. I found most of it interesting as a time capsule although I had varying degrees of like for the music. The Supremes sang big hits and I really enjoy their music; Lesley Gore also comes off extremely well for a young woman of 18. As I implied above, I'm probably the one person who didn't particularly care for the James Brown set, which I thought went on way too long and staged. The Beach Boys have great harmonies, of course, but they've never really been my thing.

The T.A.M.I. Show has been released to DVD, so if you like 1960s music, you might want to give it a try. It's a movie that defies any sort of traditional review, so I can't really say much more about it.

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