Saw it on PBS. Interesting - James Brown was amazing - but it's so hard for me to watch these old performances from this era because of one particularly painful aspect.
The screeching.
Seriously, what was the deal with the girls of this time? Non-stop with the effing screeching. During ballads they're screeching. There's no reason to screech during "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying". Like fingernails on a chalkboard.
[deleted]
yeah would have been cool when they made it to tone down the audience noise since it wrecks the performances. however, I found a good way to justify it:
If I had been alive and gone to see that show live when it was filmed, it probably would have sounded exactly like that. So, we get to experience it as if we were actually there.
That helped me a little, but it was so much old midrangey I ended up turning the volume down to about half just to tolerate it.
Still wish I could have been in the audience though. :)
I was at that show...It cost $.99 for the ticket, which I still have. Also have the program. I have seen most of the performers and had it autographed in the last few years.
As for the screaming, a mob mentality takes over, and you just join in. I saw The Beatles in '65, and we swore we wouldn't scream...lol...it happens.
I saw the movie a zillion years ago, and saw it again on PBS. God, those were the days.
I read on The Wikipedia page for that concert that the tickets were distributed to the local high schools. So how local was local? I was a high school freshman at the time in Huntington Beach and never knew this concert existed until it showed on PBS a few years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
It says there that "Free tickets were distributed to local high school students." 99 cents is almost free, though.
There's only a limited number of people a venue like this can hold. I'm sure that a couple of very local (i.e., Santa Mónica) high schools would have provided more than enough to fill the place to capacity.
shareDecades of sexual repression was being released. We're still feeling the aftershocks.
"If I knew the way, I would take you home" ("Ripple")
According to the director on the DVD's commentary track, the audience would react whenever anything happened on stage, even the slightest movement. I noticed this when the curtains changed during Leslie Gore's performance. The director said that whenever he walked on stage the audience would scream in the area he was walking toward.
shareI understand that the audience was very young, the mob mentality, etc, etc. But still, the yelling is too loud in the movie. My guess is that the director did it on purpose: he must have placed microphones over the audience and even encouraged them to screech! Also, sound engineers could have filtered out a lot of the screaming, but they didn't. So, it was the director's intent to capture the noise and reproduce it in the movie, so that teens watching it across the nation (and the world, even) could feel as if they were watching the show live, sorrounded by their peers.
I was born in 1965, I saw the film recently on TCM, and all that screeching really ruined the movie for me. It was still interesting to watch as a time capsule sort of experience, but it's disappointing to think how awesome for music lovers this movie could have been.