That clip from The Lucy Show is bringing me a lot of e-mail. Shelly Goldstein, April Wong and Elle Sanborn are all wondering if the middle lady in the group with the beehive wigs could be Lucy's daughter, Lucie Arnaz. Lucie (not to be confused with Lucy) turned up in a lot of her mother's shows before becoming a regular cast member of her next sitcom.
I honestly can't tell. Lucie Arnaz is on Facebook under the name Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill. How about if one of you — and only one; let's not nag the lady — posts a link to ask her?
I think one of the barefoot guys is the dancer who did the finished carpentry on my front door. When I moved into my current house in 1980, I had a lot of work done to it and my contractor brought in a guy he said was the best "finish carpenter" in the business. As I understand it, that denotes someone who does lovely detailed work as opposed to someone who just cuts up pieces of wood and then nails them together.
The fellow did a superb job and when we got to talking, I learned he was a professional dancer who did carpentry when he was between jobs on television. In the sixties, he was on every variety show in town, especially those that taped at Television City in Hollywood. I'm pretty sure I spotted him once on a rerun of The Red Skelton Show. I'd tell you his name if I remembered it.
I also wanted to quote this message I received from Carl Cafarelli, who blogs, mostly about rock music, here…
The "Wing Ding" clip you shared from The Lucy Show is a hoot. But, before even getting into its cheesy disconnect from what (as you said) "those kids today" wanted, I was immediately struck by how white it was. Shindig! is one of my all-time favorite TV series, and although I was initially drawn to it (after the fact) by its embrace of the British Invasion, the show always mixed in black performers, a Sam Cooke, Isley Brothers, or Martha and the Vandellas alongside its Kinks and Yardbirds. The Blossoms (with Darlene Love) were series regulars, and Billy Preston eventually joined the show's house band. Wing Ding was wall-to-wall Caucasian.
That said, the producers' disdain — or at least a lack of affinity — for rockin' pop of 1965 is as clear as you say. Visually, Wing Ding appears more directly modeled after Hullabaloo, a show I also love but suspect was created and produced with considerably less authenticity and sincerity than the creators of Shindig! brought to their show. Hullabaloo is closer to a variety show like Hollywood Palace taken over by its various teen sensations. Reb Foster does a good job channeling Shindig! host (and fellow DJ) Jimmy O'Neill, but I see way more Hullabaloo than Shindig! in Wing Ding.
There are so many examples of mainstream Hollywood just not understanding rock 'n' roll in the '50s and '60s. Even on Batman, a show with a sort of rock 'n' roll attitude, it was evident producer William Dozier considered himself smugly above the crass sounds of rock, just as he considered himself above the crass idea of superhero comic books. On the Batman episode where Catwoman literally stole the voices of British pop stars Chad and Jeremy, the TV host played by Steve Allen wonders if that's such a bad thing. Holy schisms! (In contrast, Chad and Jeremy's earlier appearance as the Redcoats on The Dick Van Dyke Show struck a more proper and appreciative chord.)
I'm sure some fans can't reconcile the contrast. Me? I'm delighted to know that I've lived in a time when both Jack Benny and Jimi Hendrix were contemporary parts of my pop culture. I'm going to need to track down this episode of The Lucy Show to watch in its entirety. And then maybe cleanse the palate with The Monkees. Or Shindig! Thanks for sharing the clip.
Thanks for writing, Carl. It's kinda fun to look at old TV shows and see how long it took some people to realize that rock 'n' roll was not a passing fad that would soon blow over like Brylcreem hair gel or hula hoops. And even the ones who accepted it sometimes seemed to not understand it. This was especially true of folks in the music business who specialized in one style, didn't particularly appreciate any others and certainly didn't embrace something that seemed to belong only to "kids."
One of the best "markers" of this kind of thing would be this 1958 spot on the What's My Line? game show where the contestants were Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote many of Elvis Presley's hits and others that topped the charts. The producers of the show assumed (correctly) no one on the panel would recognize their names and I think Vincent Price was planted with the question about whether their work inflicted pain. Someone thought that would be funny.
You see this in a lot of fields, certainly in comic books: People who want the world to stay the way it was at some point when they were very happy with it. Throughout the sixties, I saw all these folks on TV who were plainly distressed that the best-selling records in the country were by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones instead of The Four Lads. A lot of them never imagined that "those kids today" would carry their love of certain music into their adult years.
This is a good thing to remember if/when you find yourself alienated from what "those kids today" (meaning 2022) are listening to and watching. Much of it will not endure but some of it will.