Dick Cavett “Rock Icons”, Disc 1

I was excited to get this three-disc set from Netflix, mostly because of the opportunity to see a rare mid-Seventies interview with David Bowie. After watching it the other night, I realized that I got more pleasure from the small idiosyncrasies of Cavett’s style and the show as a whole than any individual performance or interview. Cavett is decidedly old-school–that probably goes without saying–and his interaction with his countercultural guests is akin to an overbearing parent with a teenager coming over to spend the night. Cavett actually, and I’m not making this up, asked Bowie and the assembled members of Jefferson Airplane, Joni Mitchell and Crosby/Stills if their parents knew what they were up to, and if they approved. And I loved it. It’s refreshing to see a host so self-assured, so used to interviewing Gore Vidal and George Plimpton, that he throws his youth-appeal guests for a loop, enabling them to reveal things they never would to a current uber-poseur like Carson Daly.

Okay, let’s go through the sections of the disc in the order I watched them. First, there’s a bonus segment where Cavett sits down with Mick Jagger. Not just Mick Jagger, though, but a preternaturally old-looking Mick Jagger in 1972, at the height of the Stones’ remarkable streak of post-Beatles “biggest band in the world” debauchery. Given these circumstances, the sit-down is relatively uneventful, but Cavett does get in a mention of the fact that Jagger majored in Economics at University, then asked him if he was, in fact, a Keynesian. Jagger seemed taken aback, but then talked for a second about it in a moment of sentimental clarity that he definitely wasn’t used to at that point in his career. Elsewhere, after Jagger mentioned Marlene Dietrich still performing at an advanced age (Jagger was still sub-30 here), Cavett fucking broke into song, accompanied on the first line by Jagger. Just bizarre.

The Bowie part is why I ordered the DVD, and while it was a bit of a let-down musically (just horribly-mic’ed versions of “1984″ and “Young Americans”), the interview is total time-capsule material. This was Bowie’s coke-fueled period, and it’s made abundantly clear during the first third of the interview, as he nervously squirms in his seat, endlessly fiddling with a cane and, yes, rubbing his nose involuntarily. He was completely at home performing, but sitting still under uncomfortable stage lights was not his forte. It was still very entertaining, though (once the screaming kids in the audience quieted down), to see Cavett accidentally get Bowie, who’s obviously well-read, to talk about such seemingly square things as what books he’s reading and, yes, what his parents do for a living.

An unexpected surprise was the hippie segment of the DVD, which featured Joni Mitchell, Jefferson Airplane and half of CSNY (the C and the S, specifically), all of whom performed. That’s not the coolest part though; they had all just returned–Stills with dirt still on his jeans–from Woodstock, which had freshly wrapped up about an hour north of Cavett’s studio. I haven’t been too large of a fan of late-Sixties psych-rock since I stopped doing acid, and Jefferson Airplane proved why–despite the best efforts of super-hot Grace Slick, they earnestly meandered through two songs that were frozen in time before they were even written. Joni Mitchell brought the fucking house down, though—she was demure and luminous, performing two songs on piano and one a capella. Even Cavett realized her timeless vocal talent. Crosby and Stills strolled in about halfway through, and Crosby was his typically annoying, talkative hippie self—at one point issuing a fatwa against oil companies, recommending that they all just “go out of business.” Cavett seemed genuinely lost a few times–a bit overwhelmed by both the number of guests (who looked as goofy as Cavett sitting on naughahyde stumps) and the tenor of the conversation, which frequently got away from Cavett’s wheelhouse of high culture. Also, there was a very obtrusive boom mic. The best performance, though, was Stills’ just perfect rendition of perhaps his best song, the somber “4+20″.

And then, well, there’s Sly. I featured him the other day here, but this clip is much, much more entertaining. He barely makes it to his seat before engaging the game Cavett in some coked-up mind games that Cavett never falls for, either because he’s blissfully unaware (perhaps) or just a stalwart professional (probably). You just kind of have to watch (sorry for the bad quality, time-coded TV rip here):

Filed under: David Bowie  David Crosby  Dick Cavett  DVD  Jefferson Airplane  Joni Mitchell  Mick Jagger  Sly Stone  Stephen Stills  TV