Product Description

When Dick Cavett joined the late-night talk show parade in 1969, his intelligent wit pumped a much-needed breath of fresh air into the format. The show offered guests a forum for controversial opinions and didn’t shy away from an occasional debate about women’s liberation or the war in Vietnam. The Dick Cavett Show also became the late-night home of rock ’n’ roll, with a guest list that reads like a who’s who of the era’s top performers.

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons features 9 episodes from 1969 to 1974 featuring Janis Joplin, David Bowie, George Harrison, Sly And The Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and many more. Highlights include 3 episodes with Janis Joplin and "The Woodstock Show," taped the day after the festival with Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Stephen Stills. The shows also feature Cavett's interviews with many of the fascinating personalities of the day from Gloria Swanson to Debbie Reynolds to Raquel Welch.

Also included is the featurette Cavett Meets The Rolling Stones, featuring live performance footage from the Stones and a revealing backstage interview with Mick Jagger. Adding insight and perspective to the set are episode introductions and a brand new interview with Dick Cavett.

Over 25 Historic Performances on 3 DVDs including:

Chelsea Morning – Joni Mitchell
Somebody To Love – Jefferson Airplane with David Crosby
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) – Sly And The Family Stone
Young Americans – David Bowie
To Love Somebody – Janis Joplin
Try (Just A Little Bit Harder) – Janis Joplin
Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours – Stevie Wonder
Bangla Desh – George Harrison
Still Crazy After All These Years – Paul Simon
Bridge Over Troubled Water – Paul Simon with The Jessy Dixon Singers

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18409 in DVD
• Brand: Dig
• Released on: 2005-08-16
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.com
While it's a stretch calling Paul Simon or Stevie Wonder "rock," this triple DVD set presents nine entire, commercial-free episodes where Dick Cavett welcomed music superstars to his stage. From 1969-'74 his was the only talk show to invite these acts to meet mainstream America, at least half way. Although he might have been more comfortable conversing with crusty Hollywood actors, Cavett's quick mind, relatively youthful demeanor and respectful if slightly stilted approach worked moderately well with music acts not accustomed to the restrictions of network television. Here he interviews the good (a post-Bangla Desh concert George Harrison is witty and honest, as is a very articulate Paul Simon), the bad (Sly Stone in a druggy haze) and the nervous (a painfully uncomfortable David Bowie fiddles with a cane, looking as if he wished he was somewhere else), while holding his own, sometimes barely, with the Woodstock generation. The latter dominates an entire show as Jefferson Airplane, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Joni Mitchell hold court the day after the 1969 event. Janis Joplin appears three times (July '69, June and August '70) and is sharp, intelligent and affable mixing with guests as varied as Raquel Welch, Gloria Swanson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. A July '72 pre-concert chat with Mick Jagger demonstrates how effectively the comparatively straight-laced Cavett meshed with the Stones' lead singer backstage at Madison Square Garden. Sonically, the primitive mono sound is surprisingly well mixed, and the discs are conveniently chapter divided to find the musical interludes, an enormous convenience that helps skip some dull patter with Cavett's other guests. These appearances by musicians that were rarely interviewed on television are historically significant and will delight fans that previously sufficed with sketchy bootlegs of this material. --Hal Horowitz

Customer Reviews

Stones Fans: Time to start a petition?
-- GOOD NEWS:

In the original telecast of the Rolling Stones segment, Cavett interviewed Mick Jagger backstage moments before he was about to perform. The occasion: one of the Stones' famed Madison Square Garden shows on their 1972 US tour. Mick excuses himself to walk onstage, and the cameras follow -- way cool.

Jagger dances out, and the Stones tear into a sledgehammer version of Brown Sugar. It's one of the few times in the band's patchy concert film history cameras manage to perfectly capture the feeling of seeing them live back then. You *are* there -- and it's wonderful.

The original Cavett footage also includes the concert closer, Street Fighting Man. The Stones were on fire this night. They were a year away from what many consider their performing peak, the 1973 European tour. Second guitarist Mick Taylor propelled them to an unprecedented level of intensity.

-- BAD NEWS:

The Stones footage was a late addition to this set, delaying its originally scheduled release date. Previously, permission had been denied by the band. For reasons unknown, Jagger relented at the last minute. But with a caveat -- the DVD could only feature two minutes of each of the Stones' two songs.

-- WHY?

One might guess, concern about bootlegging. But the Rolling Stones would take a paltry financial hit if copies a 32-year old performance of two songs hit the black market. No. The more likely suspect is ego.

Jagger has been scrupulously blocking the release -- on either CD or DVD -- of (additional) Mick Taylor-era live material. Mick admitted years back in a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner that a lot of people consider the Taylor years the band's finest incarnation. And he sidestepped the question of whether he concurred.

Mick: We understand you don't need a lot of crap about how today's Rolling Stones don't compare to the early '70s. And we appreciate that as their leader, you need to take the feelings of the current line-up into consideration. Really, we do.

But you've been suppressing live Taylor recordings and footage for four decades now -- nearly half a century. How about at long last giving us a break? There's the unreleased Decca live album from 1972. Ladies & Gentlemen on DVD. CS Blues. Film and audio footage from the 1971 UK tour. And the greatest Stones trove of all: superb recordings of your legendary 1973 European tour.

In the meantime, for Stones diehards, this Cavett collection will have to suffice. Let's hope an enthusiastic appreciation of them sends Sir Mick a message he can't ignore -- Let It Loose.

The Return of a Great Talk Show
The Dick Cavett Show aired on ABC at 11:30 pm from 1969-1974 as an alternative to The Tonight Show Staring Johnny Carson. Both shows were 90 minutes then, and while both men were comedians, Cavett having been a writer for Jack Paar, The Dick Cavett Show had less emphasis on humor and more on intelligent conversation. As a result, Cavett was able to secure guests that other talk shows could not. He often devoted the entire show to a single guest. Groucho Marx was once Cavett's only guest for entire week. Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Noel Coward, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine all made appearances on The Dick Cavett Show. Cavett always engaged his guests in conversation, rather than simply interviewing them, or waiting for an opportunity to make a joke as talk show hosts constantly do nowadays. I am hoping that this release will be the first in a long line of excerpts from the Cavett archives. Many great rock stars joined Dick Cavett for a performance and interview. One classic episode featured Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Jefferson Airplane, fresh from Woodstock, sitting on the floor surrounded by young fans and Joni Mitchell. Dick replaced his usual neck tie for a corny neckerchief. Cavett has recorded new introductions to the segments included on this DVD set, which appears to be a very good beginning of what could be a great series of DVDS.

A time capsule
The dead live on in movies, of course, but film has a glossy, soft, luxurious look that keeps its distance. Videotape has a harder, almost three dimensional quality. It's more real somehow and, when preserved as well as the episodes of "The Dick Cavett Show" included in the "Rock Icons" set obviously were, every program has the look of a live broadcast. On video, people who are long dead really do appear to be as alive as ever. In this collection, Janis Joplin, in the grave for more than three decades, sings her heart out, legendary newsman Chet Huntley speaks of a retirement that will be cut short by death, and other luminaries, living and dead, are forever frozen in time.

Janis Joplin made a minimum of three appearances on Cavett's show and those episodes are the highlight of this collection. The August 3, 1970 show is memorable primarily because Joplin would be dead a month or two later. An overly glamourous Gloria Swanson stops by, as does Margot Kidder who looks like a teenager. Less memorable is the appearance of a presumably long forgotten football player who plugs a controversial book critical of the game (yawn).

Far more interesting is the June 25, 1970 episode in which Joplin sings "Get It While You Can," Raquel Welch plugs "Myra Breckinridge," tanned, silver-haired Douglas Fairbanks Jr adds a touch of old-style Hollywood glamour, and NBC newscaster Chet Huntley, set to leave his evening news gig with David Brinkley, shamelessly flirts with Raquel and briefly crosses tongues with Joplin.

The discussion of television news in this episode demonstrates how little the times have changed with Huntley denying charges of liberal bias in the media. Raquel, proving she has brains as well as bosoms, speaks of the need to "compromise" in an era in which we are so "polarized." It's the interaction between these diverse public figures that makes these shows unique and far more intriguing than contemporary talk shows where guests plug their latest product, then disappear behind the curtain when the next guest takes the stage.

If you have more patience with hippie philosophising that I do, you may enjoy the episode with Joni Mitchell, Stephen Stills and others taped only one day after the Woodstock festival concluded, but Paul Simon's 1974 appearance is more interesting. In addition to performing three songs, two of them with the Jesse Dixon Singers, Simon gives Cavett and the viewers an illustrated lesson in songwriting, even offering a preview of a song in progress that would become one of his best loved tunes.

Of equal interest is a 1971 show with George Harrison in which "the quiet Beatle" shows he's as quick with a quip as John Lennon. There's also a 1974 appearance by David Bowie who nervously fumbles with a cane, has a bad case of the sniffles (go ahead, raise those eyebrows), and performs two songs. Bowie's backup vocalists at that time included a then unknown Luther Vandross who (I'm guessing) adds his voice to Bowie's renditions of "1984" and the yet to be released "Young Americans." The big bummer in this set is Sly Stone who is incomprehensible for reasons each viewer can decide for himself.

At the tail end of one broadcast, authors Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess turn the tables on Cavett by interviewing him upon the publication of his autobiography.

Even those uninterested in rock and roll may find these shows fascinating. Each episode is complete and serves as a time capsule of a long gone era when television, then dismissed as a "vast wasteland," was actually more intelligent and cutting edge than it is now. Cavett, despite later revealing that he was suffering from serious depression during much of his show's run, is always bright and personable, never condescending to his guests even when they come from a field in which his interest was minimal ("Most rock and roll," he says in a current interview, "bores my a** off"). And unlike other hosts who felt intimidated interviewing performers whose popularity may have been mysterifying to anyone nearing or beyond age 40, Cavett never embarrasses himself by feigning a "hipness" that he is obviously too smart to think is worth imitating in the first place. These shows have nostalgia to spare, but they somehow seem more contemporary than Leno and Letterman combined. Intelligence, though seemingly no longer in fashion, always triumphs in the long run, and intelligence was Cavett's stock in trade.

Brian W. Fairbanks