a division of the Chersonian Institute

Category: Television (Page 5 of 23)

Sonny’s Recipes

Mdcooking1Recently Cher scholar Jay notified me about the October 13, 1969, episode of The Mike Douglas Show where among other things we “learn to cook Italian” with Sonny & Cher. We got to discussing Sonny’s cooking and I went on an online scavenger hunt for Sonny’s recipes.  I collected all I could find for a dedicated Sonny’s cooking page.

In this episode Sonny & Cher sing “their theme” “The Beat Goes On” and Cher sings “Just Enough to Keep Me Hanging On.”  She’s not hanging her hand yet but she occasional snaps her fingers. They also sing “What Now My Love” and Sonny smiles too much for that tragic song.

Cher wears a patterned mini-dress with red hose and has white nails and her bangs have grown past her chin. Her hair is very long! Sonny is in a suit because he says is now rebelling against the “hippie uniform” He says it’s his first suit in 8 years. Cher picked it out, she says. Sonny says he doesn’t like picking out his clothes.

Douglas tells Cher she doesn’t “exude much” and he wonders if she likes the showbiz. She says she enjoys it but “not to the bubbling point.”  They talk about Cher’s bracelet and how Sonny & Cher met. Cher says she set up her girlfriend with Sonny but her girlfriend didn’t like him but Sonny liked her girlfriend. The girlfriend and Cher ended up moving close to Sonny. Sonny says you have to like your mate when you’re together 24-hours a day. How did he propose, Douglas asks. Cher said Sonny asked her “where are you gonna ask me to marry you?” Proposals are more conversational now, she says. On bent knee…”that was a million years ago,” Cher says.

Sonny talks about working as a gopher for Phil Spector (the best producer in the biz, he says) and how hustling records takes political influence and that he was well-liked by LA DJs. Douglas notices Cher’s eyes are never off Sonny when he talks.

Also appearing that day are the Ramsey Lewis Trio and Selma Diamond (remember she was the first Night Court bailiff) . She keeps making remarks about Sonny’s sexuality. She says “he showed up ‘straight’” (she means his gender-bending clothes) and when Cher says she once had a dream she was a fairy,  Diamond turns to Sonny and asks “how ‘bout you?” Not cool. Diamond then tells some unfunny jokes about the British Royal Family. Marty Brill is also on the show. I had to skip over his stand-up act. Then a football player comes on. Sonny likes to talk to each guest about their line of work.

During the cooking segment, Sonny tells Cher to be careful while she chops onions. Douglas acts silly. Do you cook at all Mike? Cher asks. He says no. “Men make the best cooks,” Cher says. Sonny says he likes to cook. Douglas says the dish smells Italian and complains about garlic on his fingers. Cher says “Italians just have that natural odor anyway” which gets a huge laugh. Douglas is shocked but he’s been making borderline offensive comments himself.

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Cher says she enjoys Sonny’s cooking. “It’s really good. It’s really groovy.” Two more courses are promised later in the week.  “He always gets to do the artistic stuff,” Cher says,
“I always get to do the crummy stuff.”

Cher at Live Aid

On July 13, 1985 I did not, unlike every other kid in my High School, actually watch Live Aid (all day or for any part). My fan favorites weren't appearing. But since all my friends were at home watching Live Aid on July 13, 1985, I remember being very bored that whole long day. As I was trying to watch other TV, I kept running in to Live Aid and feeling very annoyed. Later, I got the Live Aid book and realized Cher was actually there.

Picture from my Live Aid book of Cher lounging backstage.

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Recently, Cher scholar Tyler posted about Phil Collins telling Cher how to crash Live Aid in Philadelphia.

Here is Phil Collins' story starting at minute mark :40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orkMaiexPCw

Apparently Cher was on the famous flight Phil Collins took from London to Philadelphia (so he could appear at both locations) and she asked him what all the hubbub was about. He was like, if you don't know already…and then she asked if he could get her into the event and he basically told her to show up and she'd be let in. (Cos she's Cher dammit!) Anyway, his story has more detail but the moral of the story is that she got herself into the finale. 

Here are some screenshots of her singing "We Are the World." She comes and goes very fast. Here's video. (Don't miss Patti LaBelle!)

Cherliveaid

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Look, she's right behind Lionel Richie!

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Decoding the Time Life Sets

Chertime

So the new Cher TimeLife set is out (thank you to Cher scholar Michael for alerting me to this).

To purchase these:

The Best of Sonny & Cher (1): https://timelife.com/products/the-best-of-sonny-cher-carol-burnett
The Best of Cher: https://timelife.com/products/the-best-of-cher-deluxe-collection

These TimeLife sets come in two tiers (cheaper and much less cheap). When I received the first set, I enjoyed the booklet and the extras. I was disappointed that there was only one episode I hadn't seen before and that one was edited. But I was looking at it from an uber-fans POV. Also, I didn't rightly consider the episodes of the solo show that I hadn't yet seen in full, having seen only 1/2 episodes from VH1's most welcome rediscovery of Cher in the mid-1990s. So I finally sat down this week and compared all the sets to each other to see what we have here. If you've bought the original Best of Sonny & Cher series and don't consider the remake version in the Cher bundle, you'll miss out on a few extra episodes of Cher

The Best of Sonny & Cher – version 1 (2019)
You could bundle that with the a Laugh In box set which had only one Cher appearance on it (but that one was very good). It looks like the current bundle is with Carol Burnett Show lost episodes.

20200617_141648The Best of Cher (2020) + The Best of Sonny & Cher Version 2 (2020)
You can bundle the new Cher set that with The Best of Sonny & Cher Version 2. It’s not the same collection as Version 1. The booklets are different and the Cher episodes represented are not the same. The new sets come with shelf boxes. So that's nice. See version 1 and 2 in the picture to the right.

In fact, this discrepancy made me review all the Cher shows with more attention and I have to say, I’m more excited about them than I was at first. I’m not going to list out which DVDs have which episodes because you can see for yourself on the respective links above. I'm just going to survey the bigger picture, which episodes are new, which are mostly full episodes (unless they've cut skits) of shows we’ve seen on VH1 (1990s) but not on Get TV (2010s).

Sonny & Cher – version 1 (2019)
There are 5 Cher show episodes in this set. None are unique to all the sets. All these Cher episodes also exist on The Best of Cher (4) or The Best of Sonny & Cher – Version 2. The booklet in this set has 33 pages. They include pages on the Cher show. This set has the same extras as the The Best of Cher and The Best of S&C V2 combined.

20200617_143121 (1)Cher (2020)
There are 10 Cher episodes included. Of those, 6 episodes are unique to this set and 4 episodes are also on The Best of S&C V1.

The booklet is completely different, about 30 pages with different fonts and layout and many more pictures focused on Bob Mackie drawings and some historical photos of Mackie with Cher. There’s a new “feature” extra called "Cher: Then and Now" and some extras around the Mirage and MGM TV specials. This is first legitimate release of the 1978 and 1979 television specials and that’s a big deal. Someday I wish we also get official releases of the Monte Carlo and Celebration at Caesars concerts as well. There’s also an extra of one of the James Corden appearances, a Believe-era interview, and her Superbowl appearance. The rest looks like recycled shows and interviews from the S&C V1 set.

Sonny & Cher –Version 2 (2020)
There are 5 Cher episodes on this set too. Only 1 is a duplicate (from The Best of S&C V1) and 4 are unique to this set. All the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and The Sonny & Cher Show episodes are the same in both S&C V1 and V2.  The bonus features seem all the same as well. The booklet is only 27 pages and excludes the pages about the Cher show.

Taken all together there are 7 full Cher episodes on these sets that have only previously been aired on VH1 in half-hour segments. There are 3 episodes that have never been re-aired since the 1970s.

I'm looking forward to watching all the new Cher episodes when it comes time to explicate them like literary texts on Cher Scholar

Lost TV Land Commercial with Sonny

SonnyfunnyI've watched a lot of bootleg Sonny & Cher shows from TV Land but thankfully the commercials had mostly been removed, which is a shame because I never saw this gem of a TV Land commercial: https://youtu.be/vZINMYfiHGg

Recently a Cher TV scholar sent me an clip of an episode I hadn't seen before and this commercial was stuck in there too.

It made me very happy to think of Sonny enjoying his reruns on TV Land.

In related news, there's a new Cher TV Time Life series to buy. More on that in an upcoming post. 

 

Season 3 is Done

Gotitbad5This week I finished season 3 of documenting the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. One more season go for this show.

Cher scholar Jay has helped me figure out some anomalies in the online lists of episode numbers and filling in some missing material. Before heading on to the final season, I'm going to go back and fill in some information gaps.

 There's so much Cher scholarship, there are specialists among us! How cool is that?

Biases of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (and Museum)

Contrast3

As I've been reading academic books on pop culture, I come across some interesting things like this most interesting essay, “The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Myth, Memory, and History by Robert Santelli from the book Stars Don't Stand Still, Music and Myth.

Now, I didn't know Santelli when I started reading the essay and I appreciated the first paragraph:

“Depending upon your point of view, the Cleveland-based Rock and roll Hall of Fame and Museum is either the music’s official house of history—the place where one can find proof of its artistic and cultural merit—or as triangular-shaped glass temple that has more to do with myth and mass consumption that the real story of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Santelli acknowledges the “vigorous discourse” about the two points of view. Note here that he calls the institution a Hall of Fame AND museum, and here surmises it might be a "house of history." More on that point later.

He continues,

"The skeptics’ fear that institutionalizing rock ‘n’ roll would kill the music’s present and future and trivialize and compress its past into neat, carefully packaged modules was not to be taken lightly….After all, rock, by its nature, has always been chaotic, incorrigible and anti-institutional.”

So I'm somewhere with these skeptics. A canon of taste-makers creating an in-circle is very antithetical to the idea of rebellion in art, but Santelli has a point that doesn’t stop folk and fine art museums from canonizing rebel painters, sculptors, writers, etc.

But then Santelli dismisses all the skeptics with one sentence: “No one explained, mind you, how rock’s integrity would be violated…No critic came forth with any anarchic alternative worth recalling.”

This dismissal is so vague, essentially saying 'no challenges were worthy' and the use of the phrase “mind you” sent up a warning flag to me that maybe this guy was affiliated in some way with the hall of fame.

Ah yes, we get to page two where he admits he was “a member of the curatorial team.”

He would be biased then. But I still wanted to give him a hearing. He spoke about the museum needing to be “free to make mistakes” and that they wanted to not be that guy who creates “a myth-plated story of the music and its most famous artists that is often shallow, vague, fractured, exclusionary, and nonrevisionist.”

Unfortunately, "exclusionary" and "nonrevisionist" are two words that come to my mind when I consider this museum.

So I wondered what happened? Well, the essay goes on to provide answers.

Early curators worried that

“without any standard historiographical references, there was no way to know for sure if we had gone too far, forging, for example, our own ideas on rock’s role as a countercultural force in the sixties, or assigning values to certain artifacts, or giving one artist too much credit and another too little[me: or none] in shaping the music. Even more importantly, how could we be certain that we separated myth from truth, when so much of what passes as standard pop music history is suspect?”

This is a place to start from, for sure. So what happened?

It turns out maybe the bias was in the homogeneity of the early team. And maybe this is a homogeneity that persists. 

Santelli says, “Jim Henke, the museum’s newly appointed chief curator, assembled a team of music journalists to act as consultants, most of whom he had worked with or who had worked for him when he was music editor at Rolling Stone."

Wow. I was not prepared for that. So it might be fair to call this the Rolling Stone Magazine Hall of Fame. How shocking that one magazine would be so influential in the trajectory of a supposedly unbiased hall of fame institution. I mean, this magazine was never the only point of reference in the industry, right? Anyway, maybe unintentionally, but surely effectively, a Rolling Stone point of view prevailed to set standards and practices for inclusion and exclusion to the lists.

Santelli admits that “each of us owned entirely different interpretations of events, artists, and albums, despite the fact that we were all approximately the same age—late-thirties to early forties—…had been at many of the same major concerts, knew intimately the so-called classic-rock works…”

Ok. That’s not good either.

He goes on to say that “Rock ‘n’ roll, like America itself, is a multicultural, multidimensional maze. The museum, it was agreed, ought to reflect this.”

It’s fascinating to me that this group of people, all from essentially the same social group, is surprised by their own diversity but clueless as to the limits of that diversity. Rock criticism is male-dominated and it's no wonder the roster is as homogeneous as it is.

He takes pride in the non-chronology of the flow of the museum, where an exhibit of The Allman Brothers Band could be situated next to one for Alice Cooper…

“the Allman Brothers Band demonstrated its importance as a musical unit minus theatrical histrionics, like those that made Alice Cooper’s show so exciting in the early seventies; yet an Alice Cooper exhibit, complete with stage props and costumes, was positioned just a few feet away, as if the two were somehow thematically linked. Such a chaotic, “unruly” approach to rock history was spectacularly effective in breaking apart myth and convention and challenged the visitor to rethink his view of rock history—perhaps the museum’s most important accomplishment to this point.”

Contrst2Aside from all the self-congratulations right there, it’s maddening to imagine this, if you will, an exhibit of Gregg Allman (minus those "theatrical histrionics") [oh my blood pressure] situated right next to a CHER exibit (“complete with stage props and costumes”) positioned just mere feet way as if, not somehow but f*#king actually, those two acts were physically linked in some way, like say a concert they did together in 1978 or Allman’s appearance on Cher's TV show in 1975. I’m not talking about a relationship here. I’m talking about products and performances. If Alice Cooper and Gregg Allman were linked romantically, that’s beyond the scope of the Hall of Fame surely. But actual rock shows, record albums and TV segments…

Imagine that!

Oh…my…God. The same reasons they use to glorify Alice Cooper (creative theatrics and costumes) are used against more feminine acts like Cher or Madonna or ad nauseam. I’ve also read quite a lot of rock history in the past 6 months and everybody seems to agree that an Alice Cooper show was mostly image and artifice and show biz. I actually think he would agree with that assessment.

Related: this week I saw a great documentary about the cross-influences of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and David Bowie called Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-1973: The Sacred Triangle. Bowie’s Contrast1Ziggy Stardust creation is described by one commentator as pure image. The commentator said the music could as well have been Elton John songs. [They love to dismiss Elton John too]. The music didn’t matter. The show was about the image-making.

Ignoring the contributions of women artists in image-making is selective history.

First of all, a Hall of Fame is by definition an establishment institution, asserting itself as THE authority figure. When you become the authority you set yourself as an opposing force to rebellion. This is why establishments respond to challenges to its authority. Practitioners of any rebellion will necessarily happen outside of the establishment. Which is an irony of any art canon. It abdicates its identity as rebellious and should be aware of its own new bias.

Of course I’m not the first person to kvetch about these hypocrisies in canon-making and the double standards for men and women inductees. The best example I’ve read to date is “Across the Great Divide: Rock Critics, Rock Women” by Barbara O’Dair (also in Stars Don't Stand Still, Music and Myth), who points out how most rock and blues histories have eliminated the stories of women artists. She also describes the push-back received in attempts to correct this from rock music institutions, like Rolling Stone. A quote from her essay:

“But while male fans and critics may say it’s okay for Mick Jagger to wear eyeliner or Kurt Cobain a dress, identifying with actual female rockers appears to be a much Tourpostergreater leap for most men to take. It’s interesting to note, for instance, that the male fans Joni Mitchell and Madonna boast seem to be disproportionately gay.”

My feeling is it takes balls to buck gender conventions. So those who do it, do it. Those who can’t, don’t.

On the way to my Aunt's funeral last weekend, Mr. Cher Scholar, a student of the NMU museum studies program, was asked by me to explain the differences between a Hall of Fame and a museum and it seems the curatorial aim of each would be entirely different.

A museum tells the history (by both big and small players) and a Hall of Fame simply celebrates the most successful, which is not a history. It would seem an insurmountable challenge to curate for both things at the same time. But I guess that's the least of it.

Cher Scholar Digs: Mad Magazine, 1967 Interview, Moonstruck

Cher-mad1

The picture to the left is Cher reading Mad Magazine in the mid-1960s,

So I've been organizing Cher loot during the Great Shut-In and I'm finding some good stuff….and some not-so-good stuff, like this Mad Magazine spread from March of 1973, which is ironically exactly where we're up to in cataloging the TV episodes

Mad Magazine loves to take the piss out of popular things. So the tone of this isn't surprising. I don't tend to enjoy their sense of humor, although I enjoyed Spy vs. Spy as a kid. There's another clipping I once ripped out of one of my older brother's 70s-era issues that had a predictive age-progression for Cher's face. It was wildly inaccurate (looking back as it assumed she would never change her hair style) but I remember feeling a sense of dread about it (and not just because I destroyed a possible eBay sale from my brothers' future). I'll post it here if I come across it.

Here is the comic I was able to locate online. Click the thumbnails to enlarge. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

Funnyglare5 Funnyglare1 Funnyglare2-5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I think part of the un-funnyness is knowing that the premise of the critique (Cher being a bitch who pushed Sonny around) was based on a tragically false assumption. I also think this is a macho response to an emerging feminist subtext occurring in this show. And I'm not just trying to be an academic wonk. (Liar!) This kind of response sort of proves that something unnerving was happening. It's like that disturbing quote from Chris Hodenfield in the 1973 Rolling Stone piece where the author's male friends were hoping Sonny "beat the shit out of her with a tire iron" which was also a macho-Rolling Stone-reading male response to seeing a woman (a wife, no less) like Cher on television daring to act assertive and critical when, at most, macho male audiences were used to seeing only the challenges of tentative but cautious characters like Marlo Thomas' Ann Marie or Mary Richards or Gloria on All in the Family. And then there's Maude. Look, Cher isn't even included in the list: https://www.thoughtco.com/sitcoms-of-1970s-3529025. But she got this kind of blowback. Why was that?

InsidepopThere's an interview with Sonny & Cher in the book “Inside Pop” book by David Dachs (1967). The most interesting parts describes a Cher modeling shoot for Vogue and calls out the uniquely packaged deal of Sonny being a writer, producer, provider of arrangement ideas (if not fully the arranger), music editor, and the one who chooses the master. The author says they were able to keep a lot of their royalties this way. The article also states that in his pre-music-biz life, Sonny was a masseur. I wonder if Cher got free massages during their time together. The interview also references Sonny's early compositions including “Koko Joe” Larrywilliams2 and “You Bug Me Baby," recorded by Larry Williams, which I first heard on my local oldies station a few months back.

There are also lots of mistakes in book: describing Georganne as Armenian, completely misrepresenting Sonny & Cher's age difference.

The author calls them an ingratiating couple and talks about their upcoming planned movie Ignaz (never came out)  and says the movie was concerned with “mind expansion.” The author finally concluded that they “aren’t all 'camp' and kooky clothes.”

What a hip word to use. Susan Songtag's essay "Notes on Camp" had just come out in 1964.

Moonstruck

I found an old local newspaper from when I was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the year 2000. The American Film Institute had came out with this list of the funniest movies of all time.

Moonstruck is #47.
https://www.brainerddispatch.com/news/3372065-some-it-hot-tootsie-top-list-100-funniest-american-movies

Television Share Through Time

ApperDuring the Great Shut-in of 2020 I've been working on organizing my Cher stuff. Mind you I haven't done this since before I moved to LA, which was in 2002. So I've got a mess of stuff from the last 18 years! I'm finding some good lost things about which I will surely blog.

This is the first article I pulled out, "Heres to the Death of Broadcast" by James Poniewozik (Time Magazine). There's a breakout box in the article called "The Small Screen Get’s Smaller" and it depicts percentages of households watching CBS prime-time benchmark shows over the decades.

Although it stops in 2008, it's a fascinating comparison between what The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was getting in comparison to American Idol.

Years Most Popular Show on CBS Percentage Watching All Networks
1952-53 I Love Lucy – 67% 75%
1962-63 The Beverly Hillbillies – 36% 55%
1972-73 All in the Family – 33%
(S&C were at most 20-23%)
56%
1982-83 60 Minutes – 26% 51%
1992-93 60 Minutes – 22%  37%
2002-03 CSI – 16% 22%
2007-08 American Idol – 16% 18%

See the decline? Which has undoubtedly increased now with our streaming TV options like Netflix. Even though The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and other Cher-related shows of the 1970s weren't in the top 5, they were still drawing more people than today's most popular shows.

 

Cher in Suberbowl 54 (with Bill Murray)

Jeep3This year's Superbowl was pretty exciting this year considering Mr. Cher's Scholar's team, the Kansas City Chiefs, won after 50 years of not winning.

So it was a rare occurrence of not only Groundhog Day falling on a Superbowl day but also a rare occurrence of my celebrity obsession coinciding with his sports obsession.

There were two commercials for Jeep that resurrected Bill Murray's famous role in the movie Groundhog Day, both which included location and full scene recreations, including the scene where Bill Murray wakes up hearing Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" playing on his radio. Both commercials played the Sonny & Cher song throughout the ad.

Early in the game a shorter commercial appeared and then in the 4th quarter, the extended version played where Murray walks around the town, (his brother also reprises his role as the mayor), then breaks out of the story upon discovering a Jeep and joyriding around with the Jeepgroundhog in tow. As the days repeat, it never gets old. 

In the longer ad, the full song plays. Murray even sings along to the song as he drives along. He actually sings this: "There aint no mountain we can't climb…in four wheel drive!"

Watch the ad.

More about the ad:
https://tvline.com/2020/02/02/bill-murray-groundhog-day-super-bowl-commercial-2020-video-jeep/

And a video blogger talking about why it's great and how challenging it was to arrange and pay for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7NqfEVMC74

Jeep2Turns out it was the USA Today Superbowl ad fan favorite:
https://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/jeeps-groundhog-day-commercial-wins-usa-todays-super-bowl-ad-meter/2233626

The Baby Thing (The First Nine Months is the Hardest)

A new show cropped up on Amazon Prime recently that no fan I know had ever heard about, no biographer had ever written about or obscure list mentioned. I've come to call it "the baby thing."

Amazon Prime has been including some great old 1970s material lately, like all the Tattle Tales episodes and Paul Lynde’s Halloween Special and now this Sonny & Cher special from 1971. Most fans I’ve spoken to have never even heard of it, let alone seen it; which begs the question: what else is out there that we don't know about? Anyway, many thanks to Cher scholar Michael for alerting me to its existence.

The show is called The First Nine Months are the Hardest and Amazon lists the air date as 1971, but a few fans tell me it looks like it was filmed much earlier judging by how Sonny and Cher look.

And there is a lot of Sonny & Cher here doing skits and singing songs. I can't help but think this show might have helped sell TV execs on their ability to do a variety show.

The show is hosted by Dick Van Dyke (who I love!) and includes outfits by Bob Mackie (which seem oddly pedestrian for him) and an Emmy nominated score by Ray Charles. Whaa???

Cher scholar Robrt dug up an earlier non-musical version directed by Carl Reiner in 1964.

The show features three real celebrity couples. Michele Lee is lovely and amazing and her husband James Farentino is nice on the eyes but doesn't really pop out. Ken Berry and his wife Jackie Joseph are typical Broadway fare. The other couples have oodles of talent for sure, way beyond Sonny & Cher in song and dance ability, but somehow Sonny & Cher have such an interesting chemistry in comparison. They steal the show.

The tone of the show is a bit weird, nostalgic and retro even for 1971, as if its trying to convince bra-burning women to settle down. But really, it's all about the gas-company sponsor promoting fears in new mothers in order to get them to want to switch from electric or coal to “clean gas.” But aside from that, this is a gem of a new find for Sonny & Cher fans.  

Check it out on streaming from Amazon Prime. In the meantime, here's the play-by-play of the show (at the least the parts where Sonny & Cher appear).

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