Simon&Garfunkel 1969 TV hr-"Bridge over Troubled Water"-sponsor left over JFK-RFK/Vietnam footage
Last edited Fri Jun 14, 2013, 08:16 AM - Edit history (1)
Simon & Garfunkel - Songs Of America
U.S. TV special. Nov 30,1969. Controversial and rare TV show containing in-studio rehearsal and recording, road travel, political viewpoints, concert performances and video montages of key events of the 1960s.
The program was originally to be a "Bell Telephone" TV special but when they saw the finished product they said, "No!"
When video images of JFK, RFK and MLK were shown while "Bridge Over Troubled Water" played, the Bell Telephone executives commented: "They're all democrats, why no republicans?"
Simon & Garfunkel said, "Is that what you see? How about they were all assassinated?" Simon & Garfunkel met with CBS and they sympathized with the content and agreed to air the program.
(The controversial footage begins round the 10min mark. The whole video is worth watching)
http://vimeo.com/62015081
This literally makes my heart hurt.
I've always thought the many different people that watched RFK's funeral train pass was an amazing group. I haven't seen that many different segments of society joined for a common purpose since.
= new reply since forum marked as read
'The Uncensored Story' Of The Smothers Brothers
October 15, 201012:00 PM
What, exactly, made the Smothers Brothers so important a guiding force in the 1960s? Mostly, they were in the right place at the right time, reacting to the '60s as events unfurled around them. They were the first members of their generation with a prime-time pulpit, and they used it. Each season, the average age of their writing staff got younger, and the satiric edge of the material being televised — or censored — got sharper. Yet in an era when most families still watched television together, in the same room on the same TV set, the greatest and most impressive achievement of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was that it spoke to and attracted young viewers without alienating older ones. With its humor, guest list, and high caliber of entertainment, it bridged the generation gap at a time when that gap was becoming a Grand Canyon-like chasm.
For every battle the Smothers Brothers won, CBS sought and got revenge. When The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour wanted to open its third season by having Harry Belafonte singing "Don't Stop the Carnival" against a backdrop reel of violent outbursts filmed in and around that summer's Democratic National Convention, CBS not only cut the number completely, but added insult to injury by replacing it with a five-minute campaign ad from Republican presidential nominee Richard M. Nixon.
Politics, and politicians, play a big part in the story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Even though the show poked fun at President Johnson and criticized his Vietnam War policies, LBJ's daughters were fervent fans. Yet more than once the chief executive of the United States called CBS Chairman William S. Paley to exert pressure on the Smothers Brothers. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour even ran its own candidate for president, Pat Paulsen, whose tongue-in-cheek campaign was a brilliant deconstruction of the 1968 presidential race. Paulsen had become popular delivering fake editorials on the show, such as the one in support of network censorship ("The Bill of Rights says nothing about Freedom of Hearing," he told viewers, adding, "This, of course, takes a lot of the fun out of Freedom of Speech"
. Paulsen moved effortlessly onto the actual campaign trail, where real candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy got and played with the joke, and the show hired a former California gubernatorial campaign manager to offer behind-the-scenes advice.
With regime changes both at the White House and at the CBS New York headquarters known as Black Rock, the Smothers Brothers' days were numbered. Once Nixon ascended to the presidency, Tom Smothers insists he was targeted in a way that both predated and prefigured Nixon's enemies list and the sneaky tactics of the "Plumbers." Nixon pushed for greater governmental control of broadcast media at the same time well-placed Nixon allies, from new CBS programming chief Robert D. Wood to TV Guide publisher Walter Annenberg, adopted hard-line stances against the sort of envelope-pushing content the Smothers Brothers were trying to present in prime time. Both sides got increasingly, exponentially petulant and combative. Tom Smothers fought too fervently for every word and idea, and slipped obscenities into scripts just to tweak the censors, who promptly removed them. Eventually, Tom lost his own sense of humor while railing against the network suits. CBS executives, on their part, grew impatient and resentful at having to defend or discuss the Smothers Brothers everywhere they went, and began to both change the rules and enforce them ruthlessly.
Undeniably, CBS wanted Tom and Dick Smothers off the air because of the ideas they were espousing on their show, but eventually removed them by claiming that the brothers had violated the terms of their contract by not delivering a copy of that week's show in time. It was like the feds busting Al Capone: the crime for which he was convicted was a mere technicality, but it got Capone off the streets. In the case of CBS and the Smothers Brothers, they got them off the air. Fired, not canceled, as Tom Smothers invariably corrected people in an effort to set the record straight.
A few years later, in the case of Tom Smothers et al. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., the US District Court in California ruled that CBS, not the Smothers Brothers, was the party in violation of its contract. But by then, the duo's prime-time platform had long been torpedoed and their influence stolen from them. The attitude they reflected would continue to flourish on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, but only briefly. In late-night TV, it would find its closest approximation, within a decade, on Saturday Night Live, which as recently as the 2008 presidential race proved itself a vital, arguably invaluable, pop-culture component in analyzing and advancing what was, and wasn't, funny about national politics and politicians. But in prime time, where the Smothers Brothers once dared to offer the same sort of probing and timely humor, the concept of relevance in entertainment shows would become an endangered species, if not completely extinct.
Much More with Clips and Snips of the Show at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130569467
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In 1969, CBS cancelled the show, even though they had already promised another season of shows would be made. The reason given was that David Steinberg, a comedian whose style included double entendre, had been invited back to appear even though CBS had vetoed his reappearance. The two sides went to court.
In 1973, the court decided CBS had violated (broken) their contract with the Smothers Brothers, and that the real reason they had cancelled the show was out of censorship. CBS had to pay the Smotherses for the never-made season. The reputation of the brothers, though, had suffered.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smothers_Brothers
(paraphrasing) We need to fuse together and we can do great things.
Powerful, powerful snapshot of 1968. We lost Dr. King and we lost Bobby within a few months of each other and that was less than 5 years after we lost John.
Watching the marches back then. Footage of RFK and Caesar Chavez and the UFW in Delano, just south of where I'm sitting now. A politician marching with the fledgeling union. When does that happen now?
Grits, thanks so much for posting this. I'm a little verklempt at the moment and probably not making a whole lot of sense.
That was a sad and senseless time that continues to this day.
who lived through those turbulent years.
Your sensitive heart isn't alone in its melancholy, grits.
The whole video is a treasure that makes my heart long for S & G's unique harmony. These two amazing guys created such beauty in the midst of war, assassination, and social upheaval.
They were a brilliant and indelible background to the 60's and early 70's. Their music affected me so deeply that I can still recall where I was and what I was doing when I first heard "Sound of Silence", "Bridge Over Troubled Water", "The Boxer", etc.
(Not to mention the effect "The Graduate" had on me thanks to their achingly beautiful accompaniment.)
May the Muses bless you for finding and posting this!
