Turbula
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Reviewed November 2005

The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons
The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons
Dick Cavett with various artists
Shout! Factory: 2005

To hear sound clips or learn more about this release, Turbula recommends viewing its Amazon.com entry.



The Dick Cavett Show: John & Yoko Collection
The Dick Cavett Show: John & Yoko Collection
Dick Cavett with John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Shout! Factory: 2005

To hear sound clips or learn more about this release, Turbula recommends viewing its Amazon.com entry.



The Dick Cavett Show: Ray Charles Collection
The Dick Cavett Show: Ray Charles Collection
Dick Cavett with Ray Charles
Shout! Factory: 2005

To hear sound clips or learn more about this release, Turbula recommends viewing its Amazon.com entry.

Dick Cavett, for those too young to remember the early 1970s, was one of the few late-night talk show hosts to carve out his own identity from under the shadow of Johnny Carson. A former Carson writer himself (one of the few Carson kept over from Tonight Show predecessor Jack Paar), and fellow Nebraskan by birth, Cavett was as good-looking and charismatic as Carson, with the same kind of light-up-the-room smile.

He just had the bad luck to not be Johnny when Johnny ruled the airwaves.

What Cavett also had was a certain reputation for hipness among the younger set that Carson lacked – a rep that let Cavett book some of the younger rock acts that Carson neither appealed to nor particularly wanted on his show.

Three new DVD sets from Shout Factory! capture some of the best musical moments from Cavett's ABC show that ran from 1969-1975. Two are devoted to particular artists – John Lennon and Yoko Ono on one, and Ray Charles the other – while the third is a kind of catch-all, with everyone from Jefferson Airplane to George Harrison.

Unlike some of the Carson and Paar collections on the market, these Cavett collections, for the most part, present the full 90-minute program. We get the sit-down interviews and then the live performances.

On the "Rock Icons" set, the first disc contains Cavett's famous post-Woodstock show when Jefferson Airplane and Stephen Stills and David Crosby stopped by ABC's New York studios a day after Woodstock. Joni Mitchell had actually skipped Woodstock to ensure she wouldn't be too fatigued for her national television debut on Cavett – and Mitchell's four performances are pure goose-bump territory. Also on this disc are Sly and the Family Stone and David Bowie, plus a film segment Cavett shot as he interviewed the Rolling Stones backstage during their 1972 U.S. tour. Disc two is devoted to Janis Joplin, with whom Cavett had a brief affair. Her performances during her three separate visits to the show are typically incendiary; the interviews intriguing and revealing. The last disc of this collection contains interviews with and performances by Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Gary Wright, Ravi Shankar and Paul Simon.

The Lennon-Ono set is two discs, taking in three complete episodes. What is most fascinating about this is how much they open up for Cavett. And while they didn't perform in the first two episodes, they did show the entire short film they shot to accompany "Imagine" – a full-on music video a decade before MTV. It's also interesting to see John's performance of "Woman Is the Nigger of the World," because ABC forced Cavett to air an explanation of the use of the word before letting Lennon perform it.

The Ray Charles two-disc set is interesting because Charles was by the early 1970s a bona fide star, yet he recorded very little of his best work during that decade. His performances here take in classics of his canon, like "America the Beautiful," "Georgia on My Mind" and "I Can't Stop Loving You." But he also sings a cover of "Eleanor Rigby," and duets with Cavett on "Am I Blue." Twice.

The packaging is first-rate, with the gate-fold jackets containing a booklet with inside information on that particular collection. They're generally quite informative, although the liner notes for the Lennon-Ono collection goes a bit over the top in assuring viewers that Cavett was no Carson.

Actually, the comparison brings up the interesting point that Cavett wasn't as good a pure interviewer as Carson or Paar. Both of those men were masters at making sure all the attention was paid to the guest. They were quick with the quip, but if the guest was at all interesting both would become nearly invisible. Cavett was more of a conversationalist than an interviewer – it's not better or worse than Carson and Paar, just stylistically different.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).



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