Inaccuracy In Media Dept.
In 1968, TV Guide cited social historian Arnold Toynbee, on a trip to Haight-Ashbury, as saying that if hippies hadn't materialized when & where they did, America would have invented them. Or TV would have. When it comes to covering the unsquare "fringe," the medium is widely known to "get it late and get it wrong." Which is often what makes TV's efforts such gone goofs. Witness what happens when...
TV Meets the Beats, Punks & Hippies
By the late Fifties/early Sixties, jargon-pushing jazzmen and hipsters had logged plenty of tube time. Peter Gunn hung at a dive called Mothers, Johnny Staccato (John Cassavetes) tinkled tusk at "Waldo's" on Macdougal, and Phil Harris is said to have laid down a bop rap that would not stop, portraying a hopped up horn man on Burke's Law (1963). (In the Phil Silvers Show episode "Bilko's Bopster," comic Ronnie Graham played a drummer drafted into Bilko's motor pool.) But beatniks, the jazzers' scruffy younger cousins, were never that big a noise. Dobie Gillis' Maynard Krebs (1959-63) was the most prominent exception; beating his bongos and eschewing "work!?!" at all costs, Bob Denver's MGK was a real role model for ne'er-do-wells. Then there's that Perry Mason ep, which may or may not've been "The Case Of The Jaded Joker," where a beatster played by Bobby "Route 66"/ Adam 12" Troup kills a square and stashes him in the knee-hole of a desk 'cause their shapes mesh, dig.
The bossest beat treat, though, may well be the Beverly Hillbillies' 1965 two-parter, "Big Daddy Jed" (!) and "Cool School Is Out." In the former, bearded guru Shelley Epps ("May the saxophone of life blow you nothin' but cool notes") hits Jed Clampett up for rent money for his coffee house. When Mr. Drysdale insists the bean crib vacate its current location in his bank's basement, Shel wails that he may "move to a new pad on Peel Street" (relocate to Sunset Strip). In the companion episode, Jethro (renamed "Clyde" by the beat groovers), Elly May and Granny all 'nik out, under the tutelage of Shelley and his pals Wiggy and Horace (a comatose poet who periodically wakes to bestow "major hipness" on deserving candidates by snapping his digits). High points: Granny, demonstrating how they uproot tubers back in Bug Tussle, Ark., accidentally starts a dance craze, the Tater Digger, and addles Jed with her lingo ("I'm splittin' for the kitchen. Eyeball you later!").
Smokin' Crawdads, Boostin' Lilacs
Timing and technology allowed the hippies to best the beats when it came to TV access. They were simply in the right place when the voracious eye was hungriest for sex and color. The long running Dragnet probably weighed in with more hippie tales than any other show. Gary Crosby's a commune cat whose "lady" has a bad-check habit on "Forgery," while "Narcotics" (both 1969) unleashes pot-sniffing ca- nines. Unquestionably the coolest, though, is 68's infamous "The Big Prophet." Friday and Gannon confront "Bentley," a Leary type who nonchalantly proselytizes LSD for everybody, in-cluding kids. Much of the episode con-sists of the trio debating hotly, seated in lotus positions on the floor of Bent's pad.
In the Hillbillies' "Robin Hood And The Sheriff" (1967), Jethro, playing Robin Hood in Griffith Park, is hailed as a guru by a band of roving hippies. When their leader, Sir Guy of Gisborn (Alan Reed, Jr., who also swung as beat cat Shelley), hears that Jethro "smokes" crawdads, he begs J-man to catch a batch. Ready to trip, Sir Guy verily swoons when Jethro presents him with a bag of fresh crawdads ("Grab me, baby! Sir Guy will be the first to set sail up Moon River!") As he reaches into the bag, a bad 'dad practically off chomps his hand.
For high concepts, it's hard to beat Batman's "Louie the Lilac" episode (1967). Pinstriped mobster/florist Louie (Milton Berle, devouring scenery with an appetite only a couple of calories shy of Frank Gorshin's Riddler) plans to corner the flower market in Gotham City. His strategy: induce petal scarcity by stealing every plant in town. When Louie picks all the posies in Gotham Park, the flower kids (led by Princess Primrose) are deprived of the mums 'n' daffs they need for their love-in, thus bringing Batty to the scene. A wig-kick from stem to stamen, this episode and a followup, "Louie's Lethal Lilac Time," boast the ubiqui- tous Bakalyan as Lou's flunkie "Arbutus," and rugged dia- logue. Hippie to Princess: "You've tripped out, Primrose. Groovy, but in the wrong groove!"
Pretty Vacant
The last (and probably final) time the kids got all shook up -- the punk era -- continues to be square-TV fodder. On the sitcoms, the spike-hairs come and go, as if such cliches, popping up in prime time more than a decade after their introduction, could raise anyone's hackles. And yet, when TV first tried to p-rock (early Eighties)... Don Rickles pogo'ed with the Dickies on his short-lived C.P.O. Sharkey, and Jack Klugman's Quincy, in the episode "Next Stop No- where," investigated the death of a kid ice-picked in a slam pit. Onstage, a Fear clone ("Mayhem") howls ("Saw a blind man the other day/ Took his pencils and ran away"). On the floor, a punkette asks Q, "You work here?" Quincy: "No. I'm with the Coroner's Office." Punkette: "Oh sure, I've heard you guys play. You got a great band."
But the absolute best-worst of the tele-Vicious incidents occurred on C.H.i.P.s. Heroic hog-straddlers Ponch (Erik Estrada) and John (the one who's not Estrada) are called in when another Fear rip ("Pain") is suspected of stealing other bands' equipment. Pain's singer Potato Head slings stolen guitars off a Venice rooftop, causing a three-car pileup. Doug McClure, owner of a renamed P.J.'s nightclub, is threatened by a switchblade-toting Painster: "Talk to me, earth dog!" Having vanquished the punks, Estrada closes the show by giving the misguided kids what they really wanted all along: him, belting sub-disco in glitter togs and strutting across the stage like the cool guy he's sure he is. Exquisite.
Watch for the C.H.i.P.s., Batman, Dragnet and Quincy epi- sodes wherever reruns run. The CBS Video Library has packaged the three Hillbillies eps cited here onto one rentable cassette, Groovin' With The Clampetts.