Perfect Sound Forever

DETROIT TUBEWORKS

Great Pre-Cable Music TV
by Sam Leighty
(June 2014)


The dictionary define "coaxial cable television" as an electronic television camera or video tape picture signal sent over an electrical cable, such as a black and white surveillance camera wired to a screen in a bank or a teleprompter in an airport. There wasn't any commercial cable TV until 1975 and it took until the '80's for it to make its way into most households.

At the beginning of the '70's, cable TV was nowhere to be seen. Most places in America featured five or six channels in the local lineup and in some places, it was fewer channels than that. It's true that TV was very wholesome and watered down then (even if many of the shows were strangely ingenious). The FCC, parents groups and little old ladies kept it that way.

But there was an alternative TV-land out there that you could seek out too. In 1970, a small corporation owned three FM album-oriented heavy rock stations in Detroit, Los Angeles and St. Louis. They were responsible for this unlikely precursor to cable TV and those three FM stations carried a radio simulcast of the Tubeworks shows. Luckily, I grew up in Wood River, Illinois, about 25 miles from St. Louis so we were in range for this. For a small charge, you got a compact filter box and you plugged into the phone line. Then, you pushed a button and you were in business. The video and audio went out over the phone lines, just like with cable TV nowadays. My brother and I got the box hooked up to our family's living room set right away and so we saw quite a few of the Tubework shows on our Kenmore console TV. In the St. Louis area, we got Tubeworks on an experimental analog cable feedout, starting from 1970 until about 1973. KSHE 95 FM in Crestwood, Missouri (right outside of St. Louis) was owned by the same small corporation who owned WABX FM in Detroit. KSHE was one of the stations that carried an audio simulcast of the shows. So, thanks to someone in that whole TV/radio setup who managed to finagle Tubeworks for the St. Louis area, my life improved considerably as a result.

The list of bands and singers who played live on Tubeworks is impressive. It was the very best that 1969-1974 black-lights-and-beer-can heavy rock could offer. This included Black Sabbath, Brownsville Station, Fanny, The MC5, The James Gang, Grand Funk Railroad, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Rush, T. Rex, Alice Cooper, The Guess Who, The Amboy Dukes, Black Oak Arkansas, Mountain, Ten Years After, The Stooges, Free, Humble Pie, Mitch Ryder, Slade, Blue Cheer, Cactus, Suzi Quatro, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart and The Faces, Mott The Hoople, Sly and The Family Stone, Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac (pre Stevie), Terry Reid, Patti Smith, The Doors, Sun Ra, Dr. John, Procol Harum, King Crimson, Sky Saxon, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck Group, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe McDonald, Hawkwind, Commander Cody and The Lost Planet Airmen, Lee Michaels, The Byrds, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention plus lots more. They were diverse enough on occasional to also include the likes of Sun Ra and Allen Ginsberg

The shows (which aired on weekends and occasional weekdays and holidays) were MC'd in an easygoing and informative way by Harvey Ovshinsky, Dave Dixon, Dan Carlysle, Jerry Lubin and "Righteous" Bob Rudnick. They were an ad-hoc assembly of local Detroit counterculture folk heroes and various FM disc jockeys. John Sinclair was in the studio and on camera often too. They would show cartoons in the afternoon and play bands like King Crimson or Hawkwind in the background. There were the Alan Watts lectures too. Tubeworks sometimes also showed old music clips, movies and reruns of old music TV shows. As you see, Tubeworks was very experimental.

As time went by, Tubeworks was on the air more often and for longer periods of time. Guests on Tubeworks were given a great deal of creative control over their presentations. The shows were live and fucking incredible. I was 15 years old and I waited all week to see The Jeff Beck Group (Rough and Ready lineup) on there once. The color video tape of the show along with the sound quality was excellent for the time. Jeff and his band played at least 10 songs. This was very unusual for music on TV in those days.

The MC5 also played Tubeworks. It was very live in many ways. It was grand to watch as the band played. Fred "Sonic" Smith and Wayne Kramer played double lead with insane feedback. There were two versions of "Kick Out The Jams" that they did on the show and they both had the "motherfuckers" intro. One was an intense signature rocking version and the other was an eerie, slow jam with Wayne Kramer playing surreal jazz chords.

One of the other shows featured another heavily bootlegged clip of The MC5 doing "Black To Comm." The clip was originally from Detroit PBS in 1968 and is in black and white. It starts out as a garage rock song with Rob Tyner singing the lyrics "my baby come down down down, my baby come down down down in the midnight hour." The song changes to a free jazz jam typical of the band live. There are lots of close ups of everybody in the band. Rob Tyner plays blues and jazz styled harmonica as the song gets further out. The TV studio does some "psychedelic" effects on the close ups of the band members- these effects work out pretty nicely for the analog technology of the time. This particular MC5 appearance was on a local talk show where the host appeared more than mildly annoyed and perplexed by the music.

Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) also played Tubeworks. It's interesting because he rarely did TV. Beefheart performed two long songs with free jazz overtones: "Bellerin' Pain" and "Woe is Ah Me Bop." It was Beefheart backed up by his Magic Band circa Lick Off My Decals Baby, which included two drummers and former members of the Mothers of Invention. They played a strange progression with very unconventional riffs, which was Beefheart's signature style. The Magic Band wore ball caps looking like "Satch" from the Bowery Boys. Beefheart stood on stage reading a newspaper when he wasn't singing or playing his parts. This seemed strange but you can't predict what a guy like Beefheart is going to do next. The hats and the newspaper only added to the performance's sense of suspended animation.

Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention also appeared on Tubeworks. There's no video online of this at the moment but trust me, their presentation was superb. They didn't do anything gimmicky or unusual. It was just interesting to watch Frank and all the others go through all those solos, chord progressions, tempo changes and funny lyrics, playing the epic "Billy The Mountain." You might think Frank and the Mothers did all sorts of comical shenanigans on stage because of the nature of their "weird" music but especially later, after the original '60's band had broken up, they just stood there playing, expertly.

Johnny Winter made an appearance on Tubeworks in 1971. He was videotaped backstage with his bass player Randy Hobbs- it was just the two of them. Johnny had been out of the picture for about a year due to heroin addiction and going into rehab. The story about Johnny and heroin was all over the rock press for a couple of months. This appearance was very informal, with a conversation between Johnny and the couple of guys who are MC'ing. It seems to me he played for at least half an hour. "Key To The Highway" was one of the songs and Johnny and Hobbs were in very good form. No doubt about it- this was proof that Winter is a fantastic blues slide and lead guitarist and a wicked blues singer.

Cat Stevens was also on Tubeworks where he played a long set too. The sound and picture quality are superb. Cat is sporting a beard, shoulder length hair and the long underwear and blue jeans look, which was predominant back then. The performance featured Cat's then-newer songs. The songs sounded as good if not better than the records.

Patti Smith was also on Detroit Tubeworks, in 1972. This was a few years before she was a major label artist. She had already garnered a lot of notoriety and she was getting noticed as an actress and a poet. In 1972, the term "punk rock" was still a catch phrase in Creem (where she sometimes wrote) and Bomp. In the Tubeworks appearance, she hadn't yet assembled the full Patti Smith Group lineup that played on Horses. I think it was just her and Lenny Kaye on guitar. They played "Gloria" and some stuff that had a free form kind of sound with lots of poetry. Patti seemed very serious about what she was doing. She didn't talk very much at this appearance, playing to a studio audience.

But nothing lasts forever and Tubeworks disappeared from the phone lines circa 1973-1974 (it did mount a comeback when commercial cable TV came along a few years later, getting on the USA network in the late '70's in reruns). What killed it? Maybe the network went over budget or possibly there were nuisance complaints about "objectionable song lyrics" or "some singer took his shirt off and we can't have that." In the early 1970's, America was still mostly a place of "roast Beef on Sunday with Bonanza at 7:00" and the people who owned and ran the networks and stations mostly didn't have patience for this wild kind of music.

Luckily, you can find many of the individual clips from just about every Detroit Tubeworks show on You Tube. These clips (including some of the ones you see above) have been lovingly uploaded by collectors. You'll find various annotations of when the clips were made, what year etc., maybe off by a year or two. Note though that YouTube clips are sometimes credited to the wrong shows (Beat Beat Beat and Beat Club get confused one with the other sometimes too). There may also be three or more clips of the same item in various degrees of quality ranging from excellent to not so hot so beware.

As of this moment, there aren't any DVDs of Tubeworks legally available. There is one Tubeworks compilation that I know of, listed on AllMusic. It's got two hours of highlights from the shows, including appearances from Joe Cocker and Johnny Winter. As they say, the sound and picture quality ain't the best (writer Richie Unterberger describes it as 'hard to watch') but personally, I'm not that picky.

At the end of the day though, Tubeworks was one monster of a music TV show. These shows were (and are) mean enough to make the entire staff and stockholders of both MTV and VH-1 start crying and hide in the bathroom. And to boot, Tubeworks was on an early version of analog cable TV. Detroit Tubeworks was a superb example of what was really good in 1969-1974 in rock and roll. It all makes you wonder what would happen if rock and roll on TV in the '70's and the '80's had followed Tubeworks' lead. Detroit Tubeworks definitely relieved the doldrums of "just the five or six channels we had otherwise then. It was really the only place where we could SEE for ourselves the jams getting kicked out by a righteous bunch of motherfuckers.




Along with Detroit Tubeworks, there are some video items I'll recommend from the pre-cable, pre-MTV days that are worth seeking out. They are very old shows, but something about them surpasses "Cheeseburger In Paradise" insipidness.


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