- Teen A Go Go: A Little Film About Rock and Roll History. Directed by Melissa Kirkendall. New release on DVD from Cinema Libra Studio (www.cinemalibrestudio.com).
Rating: 7 (out of 10)
POPULAR culture experienced a massive paradigm shift the day after Ed Sullivan introduced The Beatles to a North American TV audience on Feb. 9, 1964.
It's estimated 73 million viewers watched the CBS Sunday night telecast of the British "mop tops" singing four of their songs on a one-hour program that also included impressionist Frank Gorshin, acrobats Wells & the Four Fays, the comedy team of McCall & Brill and Broadway star Georgia Brown with the cast of Oliver! Overnight rock'n'roll became so much more than just another variety act with millions of teenagers arming themselves with electric guitars to emulate their idols.
Melissa Kirkendall's documentary, Teen A Go Go, uses the dawn of the British Invasion as a starting point to explore the history of a little-known music scene that exploded in Fort Worth, Texas during the mid to late '60s. The Beatles started something that inspired teens in this cultural backwater to form garage bands, learn a couple of chords and rock out the rest of the decade.
Kirkendall and co-producer Mark A. Nobles spent six years making the film and tracking down many of the major players (musicians, go go dancers, fans) who participated in a scene where the most popular bands drew thousands of fellow teens to weekly dances.
The bands were made up almost exclusively of teenage boys (with the all-girl Kandy Kanes an exception to the rule) but no dance was complete without go-go girls accompanying the music on stage and some of the dancers became celebrities in their own right.
A few of the Fort Worth bands had break out hits with brief national exposure (such as The Elite's 1966 single "One Potato" on Charay Records) but for the most part their tunes released on local labels never made it out of Northeast Texas. Little success outside the region had more to do with lack of distribution and promotional savvy rather than the quality of music. Billy Miller, an expert on garage band history and owner of the Norton indie label, says in the film "the Fort Worth scene had a very high batting average, with really, really good records, that will always sound good."
Most of the bands were full of teenagers too busy partying to worry about the business side of things. They made great music but weren't thinking of posterity at the time. It was more like "Louie, Louie" on an endless loop ad infinitum.
The Teen A Go Go DVD release includes the original documentary film, released theatrically in 2011, plus four bonus features: "A Beatles Story" (with footage from their Sept. 18, 1964 show in Dallas), "The Making of the Ft. Worth Teen Scene CDs," "Lenny Kaye and Nuggets Interview," and "The Making of Teen A Go Go."
