Shark Bytes

In Concert was a great series. You could turn on your TV and stereo at the same time and get FM broadcast sound. Among the many bands featured was The Hollies, who were at their best in 1973, rocking the house. Only two songs are floating around, both on YouTube: Long Dark Road and Carrie-Anne. But they did a total of 5, the other three being Bus Stop, He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, and a great Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress, where the audience went wild. It is my fondest wish to see those three.

i think it was klos or somthing that would mention on the air that they were gonna have a concert in the middle of the day at some famous small theater in hollywood to be filmed for the in concert series. any time i heard about it my friends and i would cut school and go. it was amazing! i saw kiss, peter frampton, three dog night, the four tops, and many more i can't remember. the theater was so small and i would see myself on tv sometimes.

A great series, short as it was. Stage concerts from the greats or almost greats shown in a format that was just plain-jane music and people having a good time. Then, along came The Midnight Special on NBC. Oh m'gawd... It ruined everything. ABC lost their nerve immediatly and tried to follow suit with making In Concert "production" with sets and gimmicks to make sure the numbers continued to point north. Screwed it up royaly and it died. I wish we could find some old tapes or even a CD format of these shows. Its almost like ABC wanted to distance itself quickly from In Concert and its demise...

Does anyone have a copy of the Three Dog Night perfromance from Good Friday 1974. Also performing were The Four Tops, and Isis.

Why is it so difficult to find copies of the ABC In Concert tv shoes from the 70's? I attended several at Bananafish Garden in Brooklyn and when Stephen Still and Manassas played there, the show aired and there I was...in the audience with the camera on me....it was very exciting to see....my glory days. Anyone know where one can request copies of these shows.....anyone? Any ABC exec out there????

Not sure whats happened.

A bit hard to be specific here for two reasons. The first reason is that there seems to be almost no documentation relating to this program and the memory is a bit hazy after all these years. Basically though, the show jumped when the suits at ABC took it over and tried to re-mold it into the shape of its slipshod, oafish cheez-whiz-glitz immitation on NBC, the dreaded "Midnight Special". The story went sorta like this: Start off with a deceptively simple yet so uncharacteristically "networkish" concept - Go to an ordinary concert hall (not some garishly decorated studio set) and set up a multi-camera shoot, with ample and adequate lighting, do a simultaneous professional multi-track stereo audio recording (for subsequent FM simulcast in those pre-stereo TV days) and do a straight recording of great bands performing live. That's it! No lame-ass intros by jiggly starlets or an ancient Wolfman Jack, no boring "behind the scenes" interviews, no fawning puff pieces highlighting drooling fans, no urgent-sounding talkovers by mindless VJ's, no goofy camera tricks, no artificial for-TV duets, and above all - NO LIP SYNCHING (ie: everyone plays live!). Just great bands playing. Wow! What an astounding concept! Somewhere along the way though, the more traditional entertainment formatted (ie: all of the above listed things "In Concert" was not) "Midnight Special" over on NBC began to gain the edge ratings-wise. The execs at ABC responded by gutting the concept of "In Concert" and bringing on the glitz. I think the show lasted another year or so before dying its by then, well deserved death. Along the way though, for the first year or two, some of the best (and in some cases, only) high quality live footage of the best of early 1970's rockers was captured. We're talking The Allman Brothers, T-Rex, Mott The Hoople, Dr. John, Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, E.L.P., Mahavishnu Orchestra, Doobie Brothers and many others. The only question left is why this material has never been resurrected and re-issued on DVD??? The combination of the high quality video and the rare (for the time) existence of full stereo audio would seem to make this stuff a no-brainer. Ahhh but there's the rub... The TV world is sort of a no brainer to begin with..... The second reason that the precise date of this show jumping is hard to pin down is that there's some confusion about when this show aired. The *real* "ABC In Concert" first aired as a weekly 90 minute show on Friday nights (in the late-night time slot) beginning circa 1972. At that time ABC was perpetually in third place ratings-wise among the networks. That made them willing to try a lot of new concepts to see what might take off. They tested quite a lot of youth-themed programs during this time and this was one of the few that lasted even as long a couple of years. The heyday of the shows original concept lasted to sometime in about 1974 when the suits bastardized it beyond recognition, turning it into a clone of the wretched "Midnight Special". I never paid any attention to it much after that but I think it lumbered on for another year or two in its by then, unwatchable form. The show you have listed dated as beginning in 1991, was actually a dismal failure at reviving the concept. It did actually start off on the right foot with its premiere episode being an amazingly straightforward and unadulterated recording of a show by David Bowie's Tin Machine on an outdoor stage at an old airfield(?). Unfortunately (and predictably) by the time the second episode aired, the gaudy studio sets, the dancers, the jiggly starlets and the unbearable behind-the-scenes tripe was out in full force and once again, I paid little attention after that. If the show did indeed air until 1998 as you indicate then I'd have to say that "In Concert" (1990's model) jumped right about the time Bowie and band walked off the stage.

This show USED to be on at 12am, I think it changed it's time slot after the first season (at least in my area). I didn't even realize that it ran as long as it did cuz I stopped watching when it got pushed back to the 3am time slot! It was great while it was on though. Especially the first season as Metal was still pretty popular so I saw a lot of cool bands perform on it.

Better than the other similar concert shows of that era. Featured a rare Allman Brothers performance after Duane's death but before Berry's, with Southbound being premiered I think.

The show was great because of the artists, venues, and it was *live*! I wonder if the archives are available. The artists were often times just breaking it big. Imagine Edgar Winters, The Doobie Bros., Jim Croce and War in a show with a zillion people in a very smoke filled Madison Sq. Garden. Or the Mahvishu Orchestra at the Banana Fish Theater. Or the grand show that Cat Stevens did doing Foreigner Suite.

This show jumped the shark when they had an "All Soul" In Concert. Here they had a brand new In Concert theatre, and used this to debut it. After that, they had too many soul acts, so rock fans stopped watching it. Don Kirshner's Rock Concert took away a lot of viewers too. (This is the original "In Concert" show from the early 70's.

Great show! The Hunter S. Thompson interview with/performance of Keith Richards and his X-Pensive Winos was classic. Richards greets Thompson at the door with an electric cattle prod and Thompson blasts him with a megaphone....they are both nearly incomprehensible as they speculate, next to a table full of mixed drinks and ashtrays, on J. Edgar Hoover coming back as a dung beetle....etc, great stuff!