Some eminently wise and decent person uploaded two complete episodes of Playboy After Dark to YouTube, and the back-to-back shows are full of delights for lovers of yesterday’s showbiz talents. Sammy Davis, Jr., Anthony Newley, Jerry Lewis, Louis Nye, Patty Duke and a very young Rex Reed all stop by the party. And who’s that smoking a cigar by the piano? Better watch your language and pull up your pants: it’s alleged serial rapist Bill Cosby, and it looks like he’s fixing up a batch of his signature Hello Friend cocktails!

What I suspect will interest DM’s readers most, though, is the white-hot, sheer steel-beam-melting intensity of Ike and Tina Turner’s performances, which are scattered like globs of napalm throughout the first of these broadcasts. Tina explains their incendiary music in terms of cooking with grease, both in the kitchen and onstage:

HUGH HEFNER: Now, the word “soul” has become kind of a popular term related to the music scene today, but you’ve got a word of your own: uh, “grease.”

TINA TURNER: Right. [Laughs]

HUGH: And I’m not familiar with it. What…

TINA: Well, let’s say… with meat, say, with cooking, like when you boil your vegetables—

HUGH: Well, I understand grease with cooking.

TINA: Okay, so we’re gonna use cooking first. In order to boil your vegetables, you still must have the grease, right? It starts from the cooking at home. Okay, so I have a term of saying, like, “Nothing is no good without the grease.” So that’s from there.

HUGH: I dig.

TINA: Now, another way of saying the grease is that—most black people, we say things, we say it top service, we don’t cover it, we don’t go around, we say it like exactly what it is. It’s nothing—like, say, for instance, sweat. We say “sweat.”

HUGH: Like Ike was saying earlier, you don’t perspire, you sweat.

TINA: Right. So, in other words, when you say “grease,” it means getting down to the nitty-gritty, the actual thing, not hinting, just saying exactly what.

 

 
The Ike & Tina Turner Revue’s set consists entirely of singles released in 1969. Along with their famous (“nice and rough”) version of CCR’s “Proud Mary,” the Revue sets fire to three songs that would appear on the following year’s mighty Come Together LP: Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher,” the Beatles’ “Come Together,” and (with Doug Kershaw on fiddle) the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.” Having burned these songs to the ground, the Revue dances lustily (greasily?) upon their ashes. Have mercy!

The songs:

“I Want to Take You Higher” (1:30)
interview (37:36)
“Come Together” (39:30)
“Proud Mary” (43:00)
“Honky Tonk Women” (45:55)
 

 
The even numbered years seemed to have been more successful for the Rolling Stones than the odd. The band formed in 1962, had their first number one album and number one single in ‘64, made their breakthrough album in ‘66, released Beggar’s Banquet, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” in ‘68, released Exile on Main St. in ‘72, Black and Blue in ‘76 and Some Girls in ‘78. While the odd numbers came at a price—in 1965 Richards was nearly electrocuted onstage, then came the drugs bust, chaos and disintegration of Their Satanic Majesties Request in ‘67, Brian Jones’ death and the murder of Meredith Hunter at Altamont in ‘69, the fires at Richards’ homes in ‘71 and ‘73, or his arrest for heroin in Canada in 1977—it’s all enough conspiracy to make a numerologist’s head spin.

1966 was a good year for the Stones—they released their fourth studio album Aftermath, which was their first album to be compiled of songs written solely by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards; they had successfully toured Australia, Europe and America before returning to England for a tour of the UK and were well out of the shadow of their rivals The Beatles. 

The band was also in negotiations to make a movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, adapted from the novel by Dave Wallis, and to be directed by Nicholas Ray of Rebel Without a Cause fame.
 

 
According to the Stones, they had “waited a long time and spent a lot of time trying to find the right story for [their] first film,” and seemed to have hit on the right subject with Wallis’s sci-fi tale of tribal youth gangs terrorizing London. It was topical, apt, and tapped into both the hopes and fears of what the swinging sixties’ youth revolt may bring. Alas, the deal fell through and no movie was made until Jean-Luc Godard’s One plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil) or The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus both 1968.

The Stones’s ‘66 tour had incredible support from the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, The Yardbirds (with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page) and Long John Baldry, whose band around this time had included Elton John on keyboards. It was a lineup worthy of a mini-festival. A copy of the tour program can fetch $125 a copy, but why pay that when you scan through the pages here?
 

 

 

 
More pages from the Rolling Stones’ past (darkly), after the jump…