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‘Grandma’s Disco’: Adorable vintage high school battle of the bands footage, 1967

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Monday, 29th May 1967: Four young groups—hopeful, enthusiastic and slightly out of tune—thrash it out at a “Band Festival” in the Pierre Van Cortlandt Middle School, Croton-on-Hudson. NY. Their classmates dance. Indulgent parents look on. The bands roll through the songs they’ve rehearsed during nights after school—when they listened to vinyl, picked up chords, learnt how to play covers of songs by The Doors, Santana, Bob Lind and Wilson Pickett.
 
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Still checking the fingering’s right.
 
“We sucked pretty bad on that one,” says the young, cherubic lead-singer of The Bad Habits after belting out a song called “Grandma’s Disco.” It’s raw, jangly, almost punky—and certainly didn’t suck as much as they thought.

The other bands stick to tried and tested covers—The Active Ingredients do a catchier version of Lind’s “Cheryl’s Going Home” and a decent “Light My Fire.” Tradewinds rock, The Hairy Things roll.

The band line-ups shift and mix, with a young Stephen King lookalike singing most of the songs. He’s sincere, plaintive, full of that earnestness only youth can endure. All the while the kids happily dance on.
 
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The importance of being earnest.
 
I wonder what happened to these bands, these young singers and musicians? Mike Turturro, a member of The Active Ingredients filled in some of the details with 60’s Garage Bands site:

In the spring of 1966, my friend Tim called me to play drums in a group he hoped to start. We practiced the next weekend at his house outside on his patio. As I recall, we consisted of Pete on guitar, Tim on bass, and also on a Hammond organ, another person on guitar (I don’t know his name; he was there only once or twice) and me on drums. We had a lot of fun and played a lot of Rascals tunes.

We continued to practice at Tim’s house for a few more weeks. The unnamed guitar player was replaced by Bruce from Ossining, NY and that made our band, but we still had no name.

One night after practice Tim went home with bad headache, reached for a bottle of aspirin from his medicine cabinet and saw the words “active ingredients” written on the bottle, and that’s how we became The Active Ingredients….

About a year after we got together as a band, we began practicing every week in my basement on Thursday nights and playing out here and there. One night at practice Tim told us that on Memorial Day weekend (1967) there would be a Band Festival in our town, Croton-On-Hudson and we decided to play in it.  My good friend John’s father was producer for one of the major news networks at the time. John told us there would be a big surprise at the band festival, but no matter how we pestered him to tell us what the surprise would be, John would not say, other than to tell us to wait and see!

We continued to practice for the show and came up with a song list that included new songs that were popular at that time: ‘Midnight Hour’, ‘Mustang Sally’, ‘She’s Not There’ and ‘Catch The Wind’. And as mentioned, we liked to play songs by The Young Rascals.

 
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Getting in the groove.
 

Memorial Weekend finally came and we were ready to play.  By the time we had arrived to set up at the school where the Band Festival would be held, word was out that a major TV network had a film crew on hand to film the show. There was no lack of equipment to use that night as every band brought what they had and we all shared what we could. The Active Ingredients had the unfortunate luck to go on first but we did have fun and we thought we played pretty well. The Hairy Things were by far the hit of the Festival and they were really a great band! And what great night!

Two or three minutes of nearly thirty minute film footage of the Band Festival was shown on national television during the next week on slow news nights. The newscasters would note that instead of young kids playing after school sports, they were forming rock band in their garages and basements, and remarking how times had changed!

The Active Ingredients went on to play that summer at parties and dances but September was coming fast and Pete was off to college and Bruce got a call from Uncle Sam. Tim joined another band and had a cameo in the Woodstock movie, and I went on to seek employment but still played with a number of different groups and still play drums today (on my Active Ingredients set) in a group called 145’s, which is a ‘60s cover band.

It’s a beautiful little film. Innocent, delightful, a perfect time capsule of one night, long ago, when everything seemed fun.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.21.2015
10:14 am
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