Schlock-Wire: Tune In And Rock Out With The BARRY RICHARDS TV COLLECTION, VOL. 1 DVD

Big news here for fans of late 1960’s/early 1970’s clas­sic rock: vet­eran radio/t.v. per­son­al­ity and con­cert pro­moter Barry Richards has opened his archives to cre­ate a new DVD that will delight the rocker brigade.  The Barry Richards T.V. Collection, Vol. 1 col­lects a DVD’s worth of killer vin­tage rock and soul per­for­mances from shows pro­duced by Richards — includ­ing every­one from Little Richard to Alice Cooper — and adds a bonus CD with rare record­ings of even more per­form­ers.  Read on for all real-deal rock details, includ­ing quotes from Richards himself…

Long-Lost Classic Rock Performances Surface on DVD!

Legendary DJ Barry Richards releases live broad­casts not seen in 40 years; stars include Alice Cooper, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, more!

November 1, 2011 — LOS ANGELES — Long before there was such a thing as MTV, Washington, D.C. disc jockey and con­cert pro­moter Barry Richards brought rock music to tele­vi­sion in a series of local TV shows fea­tur­ing com­pletely live per­for­mances by such famous names as Fats Domino, Little Richard, The Byrds, Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, Bob Seger, Muddy Waters, Richie Havens, Humble Pie, and many more. Thought lost for decades, the mas­ter tapes of these amaz­ing shows sat molder­ing in a garage until an obsessed fan tracked down Richards and con­vinced the DJ that this treasure-trove of rare clas­sic rock per­for­mances was worth pre­serv­ing and releasing.

The result is “The Barry Richards TV Collection Vol. 1,” an amaz­ing collector’s DVD/CD pack­age that cap­tures all the wild energy and musi­cal aban­don of this bygone era. The two-disc set is avail­able now at http://www.barryrichardsshows.com.

With titles such as Turn-On, Groove-In, and The Barry Richards Rock Show, Richards’ broad­casts spanned the psy­che­delic hey­day of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The footage exists nowhere else, and has not been seen since it was beamed over UHF air­waves 40 years ago.

To see excerpts from The Barry Richards TV col­lec­tion, click this link: Barry Richards TV Collection Trailer.

“These are old TV shows that I did back in the sev­en­ties– they’re very prim­i­tive, but they’re still great!” says Barry Richards “It’s the first time that any­body that I know of had live rock acts on tele­vi­sion. Turn-On was an inter­est­ing show. We taped the groups dur­ing the week and then Saturday night we ran it back. I ran a chap­ter of Flash Gordon, Bowery Boys, or maybe an old cow­boy movie. Meanwhile, every­body was high. This was free-form TV. It was all done in a small stu­dio at an inde­pen­dent sta­tion, WDCA chan­nel 20. Of course back in the sev­en­ties, who had UHF? I was prob­a­bly talk­ing to myself! We had Alice Cooper, Humble Pie, Ten Years After, BB King… I have no idea of some of the groups that we had, ‘cause I was high also!”

Richards called his early rock shows “free-form tele­vi­sion”, mix­ing live music with old movie seri­als, hip­pie come­di­ans, inter­views that ran the gamut from Buster Crabbe to local head-shop own­ers, and impro­vised stu­dio shenani­gans. The broad­casts often ran all night until the small UHF sta­tion played the Star-Spangled Banner.

“I had a great time doing it,” Richards says. “Looking at this footage now, it’s like a time cap­sule, a look back at an amaz­ing time in pop­u­lar music.”

The loud, rau­cous per­for­mances were recorded live, with no lip-synching allowed. The one and only Little Richard pounds out “Good Golly, Miss Molly” with a long-haired stoner group called Jamul. A young Bob Seger sings “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”, “Lucifer”, and “Song For Rufus” with his early band The Bob Seger System, nearly blow­ing out the stu­dio micro­phones. Alice Cooper does his then-new sin­gle “(I’m) Eighteen” and climbs into an elec­tric chair dur­ing his clas­sic album track “Black Juju”. Humble Pie, with a young Peter Frampton on gui­tar, deliv­ers a scorch­ing ren­di­tion of “Rollin’ Stone” in a seg­ment taped just one night before the band recorded their clas­sic live album at the Fillmore East. Fats Domino jams with The Byrds on “Blueberry Hill”. Even the leg­endary Muddy Waters stops by Richards’ stu­dio to play his sig­na­ture songs, “I Got My Mojo Workin’” and “Baby Please Don’t Go”.

“I first heard of Barry Richards over 15 years ago,” explains pro­ducer Eli Brown, who com­piled and restored the mate­r­ial for release on DVD.  “I saw a really grainy black-and-white VHS copy of a Long Island band called The Illusion play­ing live on some local TV show in Washington. Even though this copy looked ter­ri­ble, I was amazed and wanted to know more about this guy Barry Richards and his show. It took about ten years before I could find a way to get in touch with him. I tried to con­vince Barry that I could turn his tapes into a DVD. He thought I was crazy and that no one would want to see this stuff 40 years later. He wouldn’t return phone calls; he ducked me when I flew out to California to meet with him. This went on for two years, but I wouldn’t stop and I think I just wore him down to the point where he gave up and let me look at the tapes. When I finally got to see the orig­i­nal color mas­ters, I just knew this stuff was magic. It also looked amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing the reels have been all over the coun­try in base­ments and garages!”

Once Richards agreed to let Mr. Brown restore the old tapes, the project took years to assem­ble. A search through Richards’ per­sonal archives turned up reels of audio tape that con­tained, among other unique finds, an inter­view Richards con­ducted with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr just prior to the Beatles’ his­toric 1964 appear­ance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

A screen­ing of the footage at the AFI Silver Theatre in Maryland in late 2009 brought a rave review from reporter John Kelly of the Washington Post under the head­line “D.C. DJ’s Old TV Show Tapes Make For A Groovy Project”. The event brought out long­time fans who grew up watch­ing the shows, as well as younger rock­ers who wanted to go back in time; among the enthu­si­as­tic view­ers were doc­u­men­tary film­maker Jeff Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot) and Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi.

“It was a mon­u­men­tal task putting the whole thing together, essen­tially by myself,” Brown says. “I spent a year re-mastering the audio, which was recorded by the set designer who had never touched a micro­phone before! None of this was easy, but I think it’s such an impor­tant doc­u­ment and such a rare col­lec­tion that it is vital that it be saved and made avail­able. The laid-back vibe of the show really brought out incred­i­ble per­for­mances that you’d never get on a high-budget major net­work set. For true music fans, this is just about the coolest show ever!”

Underground film­maker Nick Zedd still remem­bers the impact Turn-On had on him. “I fol­lowed the show reli­giously when I lived in Adelphi, Md.,” he recalls. “It was the most sub­ver­sive local pro­gram on TV and has never been sur­passed. To a teenager liv­ing in the sti­fling hell­hole of con­formist Maryland, it was a breath of fresh air. Barry Richards was the clos­est thing we had to a hip­ster hero. I can’t wait to see those old tapes!”

The fin­ished DVD is already get­ting rave reviews from rock fans of all ages.

“It’s a clas­sic and heavy rock trea­sure trove that has to be seen and heard to be believed—and for those of us muck­ing our way about the seedy under­belly of the music indus­try, an utter inspi­ra­tion. In A Word: Smithsonian,” wrote JJ Koczan of the Aquarian Weekly.

DVD Contents Include:

GROOVE-IN

Cliff Nobles– The Horse

The Flavor– Sally Had A Party

BARRY RICHARDS PRESENTS (1970)

Richie Havens– Handsome Johnny

Jamul– Tobacco Road

Zephyr         — St. James Infirmary

Uncle Dirty

Little Richard– Good Golly Miss Molly

TURN-ON (1970–71)

Alice Cooper-  Eighteen, Black Juju

Humblie Pie– Rollin Stone

Fats Domino with the Byrds– In Love Again, Blueberry Hill, I’m Ready,

Walkin’ To New Orleans

Bob Seger System-  Lucifer, Song For Rufus, Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man

Biff Rose– Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Myrtles Pies, Nothing To Gain

THE LOST TURN-ON REELS (LOWER QUALITY BW HOME RECORDINGS)

Illusion– When I Metcha Babe, Did You See her Eyes, Man     , Lets Make Each Other

Crow– Cottage Cheese, (Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie Woogie on the) King of Rock’n’Roll

BARRY RICHARDS ROCK’N’SOUL SHOW (1974)

Iron Jaw Samson

BARRY RICHARDS ROCK SHOW SNEAK PREVIEW (1973)

Muddy Waters– Baby Please Don’t Go, Got My Mojo Working

Rory Gallagher– Walk on Hot Coals

AUDIO CD

Barry Interviews the Beatles (1964)

Little Richard Radio Interview

Little Richard’s unre­leased Barry Richards Theme Song

Dr. John– Gris Gris, Wash Mama Wash

Ace Trucking Company

Emitt Rhodes– Live Till You Die, She’s Such A Beauty

Alice Cooper tele­phone call, Concert ad

Alice Cooper/Flo & Eddie/Barry– radio mischief

STILL GALLERY FEATURING 40 UNPUBLISHED PHOTOS AND ARTWORK

24-PAGE BOOKLET LOADED WITH UNPUBLISHED ARTIST AND SET PHOTOS

AUDIO EXTRAS FEATURING VINTAGE INTERVIEWS WITH BUSTER CRABBE, JAMES WHITMORE, CHRIS MITCHUM, and PATRICK WAYNE

About Barry Richards:

Barry Richards is a pop­u­lar DJ, tele­vi­sion host and con­cert pro­moter from Washington, D.C., where he is known as “The Boss with the Hot Sauce”,  “The Heavy Head Leader”, “The Hunk of Funk”, “Hairy Barry”, and “The Reazar”. He has worked with such greats as Little Richard, Link Wray, James Brown, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Chuck Berry, Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart and  Faces, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead, The Band, Vanilla Fudge, The Jeff Beck Group and many oth­ers  in a col­or­ful career span­ning five decades of pop music history.

Barry broke into the music busi­ness in the 1960s as a teenage pro­tégé of Don Dillard, the radio pio­neer who intro­duced a gen­er­a­tion of D.C. kids to rock and roll on WDON. Another early men­tor was TV dance-show host Milt Grant, who reigned over local record-hops dur­ing the era of Alan Freed and Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” and went on to cre­ate WDCA Channel 20 before build­ing the Grant Group.

During the same period, Barry became a major player book­ing and pro­mot­ing con­certs in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia. His dynamic pres­ence on the radio and his involve­ment in the live music scene led to sev­eral tele­vi­sion shows broad­cast in the area.

Barry’s early TV shows included a brief stint on “Wing-Ding” (1967), “Groove-In” (1968), “Sears Sound Revolution” (1969) and “Barry Richards Presents” (1970). The most well-remembered of Barry’s shows was “Turn-On” (1970–71), which intro­duced a “free-form tele­vi­sion” for­mat that included live in-studio per­for­mances by many of the major rock bands of the time as well as guest appear­ances by var­i­ous celebri­ties rang­ing from Richard Pryor to Buster Crabbe (who was hock­ing his own brand of swim­ming pools at the time!)

“Turn-On” fea­tured mind-blowing seg­ments with Alice Cooper, Humble Pie, the Bob Seger System, Steppenwolf, Dr. John, Ides of March, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Cheech and Chong, Wolfman Jack, Charlton Heston, Robert Klein, Robert Mitchum and many more. The show was taped and broad­cast from WDCA Channel 20, a UHF sta­tion owned by Milt Grant. The TV show helped pro­mote Barry’s con­certs as well as up and com­ing acts. It enter­tained view­ers with a mix of both light and heavy music in between old Flash Gordon seri­als, Abbott and Costello and The Bowery Boys. The show was open ended start­ing at 11pm on Saturdays and ran until the movies and the rock bands were over. The National Anthem was played and the sta­tion went off the air.

Over the years, Barry hosted over 13 dif­fer­ent TV shows in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try, always stay­ing on the cut­ting edge of new music. He has since worked at major radio sta­tions across the coun­try and con­sulted with Jerry Clifton’s New World Communications. He hosted TV shows in New Orleans such as “Live at the Famous” (1980) and “Video Trax” (1981) – BTV in Fresno and in Los Angeles he even did play-by-play for California Championship Wrestling, and hosted “Dancin’ On Air” and “The Video Zoo”. Barry is still on the cut­ting edge of today’s music, as inter­ested in Lil Wayne and Eminem as he is in Little Richard and James Brown.