Mystic Crystal Revelation

by Hand Up

My local PBS station aired one of those Ed Sullivan highlight shows the other day with a focus on musical acts of the 1960s.  Black-and-white film of The Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Animals.  Wonderful!  It’s always a thrill to hear the music of your youth, and I was enthralled.

Then came the following:

I LOVE the music, but what is going on with the video?  Who is responsible for this hokey mess?

I think we are supposed to believe that The 5th Dimension is traveling on some sort of spaceship that is passing by our vantage point, but the effect is so poorly realized that it looks more like the camera operator fell asleep and allowed the group to slip out of the shot.  Try as he might, he just can’t keep those five people in the frame.

More embarrassing is that these performers were convinced that they should take on a dreamy (spacey?) quality and wave their hands toward the empty void that surrounds them.  It’s bad enough that the drugged-out hippies of “Hair” would flail about to this tune, but why in the world would these five smartly dressed performers do the same?

There’s a disconnect here.

Maybe that’s why The 5th Dimension didn’t achieve the same success as, for example, The Mamas and The Papas.  That group fully embraced a concept and worked it – aurally and visually.  The 5th Dimension always seemed awkward in front of the camera and with each other.

Let’s face facts.  There’s no way that they were going to go “up, up and away” in that “beautiful balloon” with the big guy carrying that much ballast.

But getting back to this peculiar and poorly executed video, it reminds me of so many music programs of the late 60s, especially locally produced shows.  In a lame attempt to be “hip”, odd visual effects were introduced so that the image on your TV screen might suggest a counter-culture perspective.

The picture would meld into a wavy distortion pattern, or maybe diamonds would form a geometric pattern that gave way to the view from camera #2.  The zoom lens would move in-and-out in time with the beat, and the rapid action would cause the band members to blur, perhaps inducing viewers to fits of nausea.

It was an effective cautionary tale against the evils of drugs for this 11-year-old.