I purchased an item on eBay late last year and as a very special gift (RONCO anyone?) I received a DVD of old 60s Sonny & Cher appearances on shows like Shindig and Shivaree. Was I in heaven?! I kept looking for Teri Garr go-go dancing in the background (as she worked on these shows as a dancer between 1964-1966). I still think it is odd that Garr worked for years for Sonny & Cher in the 70s and never once mentioned running into them on those 60s shows. Because it seems like they made a ton of appearances there.
I’ll just start with the Shivaree episodes this week which were grainy on my DVD copy but wonderful to see nonetheless, amazingly raw. (The dancers are pitiful on this show, by the way.)
I watched two episodes with Sonny & Cher, one where they sat back-to-back singing “Just You” and then stood on a balcony full of dancing teens to sing “Sing C’est La Vie.” Cher wore a very conservative shirt, similar to what she wore on the album cover of Look At Us. Which is, quite frankly, a bizarre thing to see — Cher in a normal teen piece of clothing. Nothing hippie-like or scandalous about that green t-shirt.
Cher also sang “Dream Baby” solo on one show (in some funky, skin-tight paisley pants) and “All I Really Want to Do” with some equally funky Cher-style dance moves. She seems very shy and young in these clips but does fine without Sonny. At the end of the Cher-solo episode it’s fun to watch the credits where you can see Cher dancing in a crowd of guests — in what looks like the last moves of anonymous carefree-ness she would ever make. So un-self conscious.
Watch the YouTubes:
Cher doing “All I Really Want to Do"
I can’t find the Shivaree credit clips or the "Sing C’est La Vie" clip which is too bad because it’s ridiculous when the MC camps as a Frenchman. By the way, when I was first chatting with my bf almost three years ago on match.com, I found out he was a former Proust scholar. We hadn’t met yet mind you and he was such a effortless and enthusiastic emailer. I thought he was gay. Heterosexual men write really dull emails IMHO. Anyway, I told him Sonny & Cher were once really into the French. And he said he had, coincidentally, just borrowed a copy of Sonny & Cher’s greatest hits at the library and he was very bemused by the song "Sing C’est La Vie." I found copies of it all over the YouTubes:
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