Somehow how I missed this. Must have been because I was eating acid instead of watching TV.

The Hi-5 (Seth Evans, Jeffrey Comanor, Ted Barron, Vic King, Pam Robins) play “Did You Have to Rub It In” and get their hair cut on this episode of I’ve Got A Secret aired on March 7, 1966.

At first I thought the Hi-5 were a bunch of actors posing as a band, but no, the group were real and had a very brief recording career, releasing one single, “Did You Have To Rub It In,” on Vanguard Records.

And no, that is not Brad Laner on bass guitar.
 

 
On a prior Dangerous Minds post, pioneering architect Frank Lloyd Wright was the game show guest on I’ve Got A Secret.  Today’s guest is a pre-Velvet Undergound John Cale.  What’s Cale’s secret?  His participation in an 18 hour and 40 minute piano recital of Erik Satie‘s Vexations.

Cale and a number of performers—including John Cage—all took turns playing the piece that’s just 3 lines long, but needs repeating 840 times.  Cage, it seems, also organized the event, having been introduced to Vexations in Paris in ‘49.

The man sitting beside Cale is off-Broadway actor, Karl Schenzer.  His secret?  He was the only audience member ballsy enough to stick out the entire concert.  Schenzer went on, possibly, and according to the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, to become a bit player for Francis Ford Coppola.

 
Bonus: John Cale live performing Paris, 1919

 
The New Yorker‘s great Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century) alerts us to the first major museum exhibition in years devoted to “arch-magus of the musical avant-garde,” John Cage.  Unfortunately, though, it’s happening not in America (nor is it scheduled to), but in Barcelona at its Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA).

The Anarchy of Silence?