Back in the 1970s, before MTV turned “music television” into nothing but music videos, there were two remarkable shows on broadcast TV — Burt Sugarman’s Midnight Special and Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert — both of which provided 90 minutes of live performances by top flight acts in front of engaged and appreciative audiences. I stayed up very late on Fridays and Saturdays and watched both programs religiously. I will come back to the Kirshner's show in some future post, I suspect, but for now, let me offer my ode to the Midnight Special.
The Midnight Special featured an enormously wide range of performers over the years, from Aerosmith to Aretha Franklin, B.B. King to XTC, Dolly Parton to Weather Report, Donna Summer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I watched primarily for the rock acts, of course -- folks like AC/DC, David Bowie, The Cars, Cheap Trick, The Doobie Brothers, The Electric Light Orchestra, Billy Joel, Elton John, Journey, and Thin Lizzy, among many others -- but I watched every act and I liked it all. This was back when Top 40 AM radio was still around, and that Top 40 was a very eclectic, very democratic list, a rich and lovely mix of genres.
The staging on the Midnight Special was very democratic, too. All the performers were on the same footing. Every band got the same bare stage to work with: no flashy sets, no special effects, no light shows, no pyrotechnics. Just the names of the performers behind them in red neon letters. You got to compare and contrast their performances very fairly, with all the distractions removed.
What I first notice now, alas, as I view some of these sessions on YouTube, are the puffy-sleeved, silk pirate shirts and the feathered hair *everyone* seems to be wearing. The videos are a time capsule for what was once considered hip fashion -- and a pointed reminder of how quickly and dramatically hair and clothing styles change.
The other thing that is readily apparent is how bad some of the camera work is. I watched Steely Dan's "Reelin' in the Years" to see Skunk Baxter's take on Elliott Randall's famous solo in that song. And I watched Eddie Money's "Two Tickets to Paradise" to see Jimmy Lyon do his similarly wonderful solo. In both cases, the cameras were pointed at someone else in the band the entire time: the rhythm player or the conga player or Eddie Money tapping a tambourine! Very frustrating. I can imagine 14-year-old me being properly outraged.
But speaking more seriously, what I recognize now is how hard the bands were working to make their songs sound like the recorded versions we heard on the radio. The only liberty they took was to offer the *album-length* version of their songs rather than the shortened AM radio edits, which was very cool, of course, but their efforts at fidelity to the records seem so very limiting, so stifling now.
All these concerns aside, I *loved* the Midnight Special because I got to see a wide variety of live musicians performing every week, people actually playing their instruments, up close and in ways I would never get to see them otherwise, even if I saw them in person. And back before I was in a band, I got to watch an amazing parade of very different bands working *together*, collaborating, becoming one organism, which was another remarkable education.
At this time, there were two kinds of pop musical performances you could see on television: music videos (which go back much further than MTV) and lip synching pantomimes, both of which left me cold if not pissed off. It was pretend, play acting. But the Midnight Special showed me how it was actually done. And more importantly, I could see myself doing it, too.
Take just one example: Heart's "Crazy on You" (see the video below). Thanks to the Midnight Special's minimalistic approach, I got to see Nancy Wilson's aggressive, extended acoustic guitar intro, with her various infelicities intact, which was just mind-blowing and liberating when compared to the antiseptic perfection of album tracks I thought I was supposed to be able to produce live (and feared I would never be able to). And I got to see Ann Wilson work the microphone, moving it closer for softer passages and away from her mouth when she opened up and roared. I had never even imagined that this was how it was done. Seeing her do it just once, though, I knew it for the real deal, a move that separated the pros from the amateurs, and I never forgot it.
There were other weekly TV programs offering live music from well-known acts at the time, of course. PBS offered both Soundstage from Chicago and Austin City Limits, for instance, but neither of these had the stripped-down directness of the Midnight Special. The production was slicker, left a greater distance between the viewer and the performers, made it harder to see myself in their shoes. What I see now is that the Midnight Special's bare, cramped stage and lower production values presented all of these acts not as arena rock gods, but as *bar bands*, as someone I could actually aspire to be.