Here's the start of a weird series of albums. In the 1950s, Hugh Hefner became famous due to his magazine "Playboy," featuring lots of pictures of naked women. He tried to make the magazine respectable by including a lot more than just the nude pictures, such as stories written by famous authors and interviews of prominent people. In 1968, he was able to launch a TV show, "Playboy After Dark," to help promote "Playboy," and it ended up running for two years. Since it was broadcast on a major TV network (CBS) across the U.S., any sort of nudity was out of the question. Instead, the show focused on music, comedy, and serious discussions with prominent people, as part of Hefner's effort to make his magazine more respectable. What interests me about the show is the music. So I've compiled no less than eleven albums with the best music from all the episodes of this show.
I love Western popular music from at least the 1950s until today, but in my opinion, the creative peak was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This show happened to coincide with some of the very best years, and there was an attempt to include music of many different genres. So there was a lot of great music on this show.
A big problem with most music on TV shows of this era is that the performances were usually lip-synced. That happened occasionally on this show, but I checked pretty carefully, and I believe the vast majority was performed live. (Admittedly, sometimes just the vocals were live, but that's still worth hearing, in my book.) In these albums I'm posting I believe I've weeded out all the lip-syncing, although it's possible I made the occasional mistake.
As just one example, the rather obscure rock band the Collectors performed two songs on one of the episodes that makes up this first volume. I checked with the recorded versions of those songs, and one was lip-synced but the other one was performed live, so I only included the live one. (In that case, I surmise the harmony vocals and instrumentation were more complicated on one song, so that's why that one was lip-synced.) Or, in another example, Steppenwolf performed two songs live that are included on this album. But they later returned to the show and the songs they did then were all lip-synced. (In that case, those later songs were more musically complicated, with a group of female backing vocalists and other elements that would have been harder to reproduce live.) I was careful about detecting the lip-syncing like that all the way through this series.
Another big problem with most music on TV shows of this era is that most of it wasn't saved for posterity, since it was before the era of widespread ownership of video recording equipment. And when it was recorded, usually on those very first video recording machines, the quality often was low, and tended to degrade as copies were made of copies over the decades.
But, luckily for us, this T.V. show is different. The people behind "Playboy" kept pristine copies of all the episodes. Then, in the 1990s, they started a Playboy cable channel, and broadcast all the episodes in full. I was able to find them via SoulseekQT. So for all the songs in all the albums in this series, the sound quality is truly excellent.
Despite that quality, the music from this show has generally been little known by music lovers. There are a few exceptions. The main one is that the appearance of the Grateful Dead for two songs on one episode has gotten around, because it's a very rare chance to see great video footage of that band from way back in 1969. Some of the other performances by famous rock bands have also been shared a bit, like performances by Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat, the Byrds, and Steppenwolf. But that's well less than five percent of it. The vast majority hasn't been seen or heard, unless you've been one of the few people to watch the full episodes. The problem with that is that nearly all of the non-musical parts of those episodes are pretty dreadful. So I've taken it upon myself to "liberate" the music from these episodes so they can be properly appreciated by many more people. I went through all the episodes (quickly skipping over the non-musical parts), converted the video to audio, and saved the songs as mp3s.
I'll write more about the T.V. show, and especially about how very weird it was, in a later write-up in this series, because I don't want this write-up to get too long. But I do feel it's important to mention here with this first album that the music in this series is a very mixed bag. It seems Hugh Hefner had a lot of say about which musical acts would appear on his show - maybe even it was entirely up to him. But clearly, he had two competing desires. On one hand, it's obvious that he personally liked middle-of-the-road music, such as mood-setting cocktail jazz. He was in his forties when this show was on air, and he naturally preferred music in the style of what was popular when he was a teenager, which would have been the late 1940s. Thus one gets many acts like Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Johnny Mathis. But on the other hand, in this late 1960s era, rock and soul music were all the rage. If Hefner wanted the T.V. show to be successful and stay on air, he needed to cater to that audience as well. If you watch the episodes, over and over again, when he introduced rock and soul acts, he would say that that's "for the kids." Happily, he included a lot of music "for the kids," even though it's pretty obvious that he wasn't personally keen on it.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for the T.V. show, although it doesn't say much, other than listing the acts on each show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy_After_Dark
I could have just collected all the rock and soul acts, and this album series would be considerably shorter. But I figured that I'm probably the only person who ever is going to take the time to "rescue" the music from this T.V. show. After all, it's been decades, and only a small percentage has been rescued up until now. So I tried to include all the musical performances I considered at least decent. There were some musical acts that I simply couldn't stand hearing, so they got the axe. Nearly all of that was the show-biz stuff based on pre-rock and roll music. Just guessing, maybe I cut out about 20 percent of all the music.
That said, the odds are strong that you'll like some parts of this, and dislike other parts. If that's the case, just delete the songs you don't like. That's another reason I tried to be more inclusive, because it's easy for people to delete songs, but I doubt anyone would bother to find and add any of the songs I left out.
I believe that everything on all the albums in this series is unreleased in any musical format. Back in 2006, a three DVD collection was officially released of highlights from the show. But that's just a small portion out of the 49 episodes. One can also find all the episodes on DVD, but I believe those are bootlegged copies recorded from the T.V. broadcasts in the 1990s. I highly doubt there ever will be any official releases of the music here, due to the difficulty of getting the legal rights to so many different musical acts.
The songs here are in the order they appeared, first by episode, and then within each episode. If you want to know the details of which songs are from which episodes, consult the mp3 tag info for each song. We're lucky that we know the recording dates for all the episodes, not the broadcast dates, as is usually the case for most shows. So I used the recording dates.
There are two famous singers with the name Joe Williams. One, Big Joe Williams, was a blues singer. The other, just Joe Williams, was a jazz singer. The one here is the jazz singer.
Also, it's quite nice to have a couple of songs from Harry Nilsson, because he almost never performed live in front of audiences. The setlist.fm concert archive only lists six concert performances in his lifetime, most of them only a couple of songs. There may be a few more than that, mostly at the beginning and end of his career, but not much. It is said he suffered from severe anxiety regarding public performance. Also, his recordings usually featured complex vocal overdubs, which were impossible to replicate in a concert setting. He also preferred a quiet life, enjoying being able to travel without being recognized.
Given all that, if you watch the video of his performance, he seemed quite at ease, even talking and joking around between songs. Maybe the fact that the audience was very small helped. It was much like playing in a person's living room instead of being on stage in a concert hall.
This album is an hour and four minutes long.
01 I Wish It Would Rain (Chambers Brothers)
02 Love Is All I Have [Edit] (Chambers Brothers)
03 One Act Play (Collectors)
04 The Unicorn (Shel Silverstein)
05 I Know How It Feels to Be Lonely (Morgana King)
06 Sookie, Sookie (Steppenwolf)
07 Born to Be Wild (Steppenwolf)
08 Hallelujah, I Love Him So (Morgana King)
09 Yesterday I Heard the Rain (Tony Bennett)
10 There Will Never Be Another You (Tony Bennett)
11 Looking for a Boy (Sue Raney)
12 No One Will Ever Know (Sue Raney)
13 Worried Life Blues (James Cotton Blues Band)
14 Mercy, Mercy, Mercy [Instrumental] (Buddy Rich)
15 She's Murder [Murder in the First Degree] (James Cotton Blues Band)
16 Did I Ever Really Live (Joe Williams)
17 Young Man on the Way Up (Joe Williams)
18 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Pair Extraordinaire)
19 The Bright Lights and You Girl (Pair Extraordinaire)
20 Good Old Desk (Harry Nilsson)
21 Together (Harry Nilsson)
22 Cast and Crew (Harry Nilsson with Otto Preminger)
https://pixeldrain.com/u/uT98ZKoW
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/en/BwV00LdWz4HJFkK/file
The cover photo is a screenshot I took from one of the episodes of this show. It shows John Kay, the lead singer of Steppenwolf.