1968 Upbeat Footage Survival Confirmed?

[Haight Trashbury]

You’re probably aware of that video on YouTube (and other sites) of the Yardbirds on “Upbeat” in April, 1968. Well I did some date-checking, and the Yardbirds were only in Cleveland (the city where “Upbeat” was produced) for around a couple of days (a little over a week at most) during that month of that year. Therefore, this clip has to be their only appearance on that show from the Spring, 1968 time period. Thus, we can conclude beyond all reasonable doubt that this performance was sourced from the following episode of “Upbeat:”

http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/vi ... _05_11.jpg

Note the first and last bands on that listing...

[Low]

This is interesting. They were without doubt on the same show, so I wonder why their appearance hasn't seen the light of the day...

Could it perhaps be that The Yardbirds segment has been copied to another tape, and the rest of the show has disappeared?

[peppergomez]

Try to imagine our gang on it right here:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT2F1gN_xVA

But they would have been miming, right? That would blow.

[stadtwerker]

But they would have been miming, right? That would blow.

Not necessarily. Although bands largely mimed on Upbeat, some recorded live like Otis Redding when he recorded a few songs on the show in late 1967. I'm still hoping it shows up and is live, but I've seen the dvd-r sets of the hours of extant Upbeat material that have been floating around and there's no Velvets on it.

[Low]

But they would have been miming, right? That would blow.

Not necessarily. Although bands largely mimed on Upbeat, some recorded live like Otis Redding when he recorded a few songs on the show in late 1967. I'm still hoping it shows up and is live, but I've seen the dvd-r sets of the hours of extant Upbeat material that have been floating around and there's no Velvets on it.

We can hope they have tried to find this now, when Haynes has been making the new documentary.

[Sheila Klein]

But they would have been miming, right? That would blow.

If I recall correctly, the TV Guide listing for one of the VU's Upbeat performances specified that they'd play "Guess I'm Falling In Love." It's a typically perverse move to not only avoid using the opportunity of playing on TV to promote your latest single, but to play a song you never even released! As it wasn't released, though, that'd virtually guarantee that they indeed performed it live.

We can hope they have tried to find this now, when Haynes has been making the new documentary.

David Spero, the son of Upbeat producer Herman Spero, is a rock industry businessman himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spero, and appears to be quite accessible. If there's a chance of the Upbeat material still existing (excluding any heretofore-unknown off-air home video recordings), I trust that Spero will be able to provide it for Todd's film.

That's not meant to give false hope, though: my best guess is that if the material still existed, Spero would've already presented it somewhere by now.

[iaredatsun]

re. Todd Haynes. The problem with documentaries is that they rarely if ever play the whole of a piece of surviving performance footage completely through.

[Haight Trashbury]

I just contacted the archive that had the Velvets footage. Both appearances were wiped. To conserve tape, only the most famous artists on the show had their performances saved, and since the Velvets didn’t kept big until a decade or two after they appeared on the show, their appearances were trashed. Curiously, there is a quote from Tony Conrad where he said that he taped their 1968 performance off of his TV while it was still on the air. He surely kept his copy, so I’d assume that the last remaining tape of this show would be in his family’s archives. We gotta look into this.

[peppergomez]

thanks for looking into that...ah I guess we will just have to use our imaginations
but in a strange way, we all must admit that part of their allure is how elusive they were, right?

[Haight Trashbury]

I’m gonna try looking into Tony Conrad’s archives to see if he kept his copy. Hopefully I’ll be able to find it...