Here's a piece of rock & roll history that somehow escaped me for sixty years, until I stumbled onto it a few nights ago and lost the rest of my evening to it. It's called The T.A.M.I. Show, and if you love the music that shaped the sixties — the real thing, not a tribute band's version of it — you owe yourself the next two hours.
On October 28 and 29, 1964, a dozen of the biggest acts in music packed onto one stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in California, for a pair of concerts filmed and edited down into a single feature. Tickets were free, and mostly went to local high school students — which means the wall-to-wall screaming you'll hear on the soundtrack is 100% genuine teenage delirium, not a sound effect.
The show's full name was even a little confused in its own promotional materials, alternately billed as "Teenage Awards Music International" and "Teen Age Music International" — nobody involved seems to have settled on which, so it just became known by its initials: The T.A.M.I. Show. It hit theaters on December 29, 1964, released by American International Pictures and directed by Steve Binder, who'd go on to direct Elvis's famous '68 Comeback Special a few years later.
One more piece of trivia worth knowing if you watch closely: the show was shot using a process called "Electronovision," an early attempt at capturing live video at a resolution good enough to blow up onto a movie screen — years before that kind of video-to-film transfer became common. It's part of why the picture quality holds up as well as it does.
Jan & Dean served as your hosts for the evening, popping up between acts and performing the show's theme song, "Here They Come (From All Over the World)." And then they just... kept bringing out legends.
The story rock historians always come back to is what happened right before the Rolling Stones took the stage. The producers made the closing lineup James Brown, then the Stones — and Brown, at the absolute peak of his powers, tore the place apart. By the time he finished, following him with anything was a losing proposition, and the Stones knew it walking out.
Small footnote for the curious: the Beach Boys' segment was reportedly cut from the original theatrical release, with rumors pointing to a contractual dispute involving their manager (and Brian Wilson's father) Murry Wilson. Depending on which cut you find, their set may or may not still be missing — one more small mystery baked into a night that was already stranger and better than anyone had a right to expect.
The film was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 2006, marked "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" — which is about as official as rock and roll history gets. But you don't need the Library of Congress to tell you what your ears will tell you inside the first ten minutes.