The Midnight Special - Pilot - August 19th, 1972

[cayugafalls]

The Midnight Special debuts with an ulterior motive. Hosted by John Denver, with special guest appearance by Argent, Harry Chapin, David Clayton Thomas, Cass Elliot, The Everly Brothers, The Isley Brothers, Helen Reddy, Linda Ronstadt, and War.

...The pilot for the series aired on August 19, 1972. It was presented as a 90-minute special encouraging young people to vote in the upcoming Presidential election. Nielsen ratings for the premiere episode were a success, with 4.4%, or approximately 5 million television sets "tuned in", and 32% of those watching TV during that time period were watching The Midnight Special...

from Wikipedia

Burt Sugarman has been releasing episodes for the past year. I am hoping that he is able to release the whole catalog. I wait with baited breath for the next YouTube Live debut...

[msongs]

1. back when singers had to actually sing to achieve popularity. nt

[cayugafalls]

2. And musicians had to play...for instance, War, from the special.

[ProfessorGAC]

3. I Sure Remember This Show

My friends and I attended a taping at a couple shows at the University of Chicago fieldhouse.
This pilot is pretty good. The Argent piece is nice. Rid us an excellent keyboardist, Russ is sounding good. One thing though is the bass player playing that beastly doubleneck! Boy, those are heavy! They're doing the AM radio version here, so I we don't get to hear Rod's wonderful solo.
War killed it. Super tight & funky.
Parts of that Clayton-Thomas tune reminded me of Low Spark of The High Heeled Boys!
That last tune by Argent was pretty adventurous!

[Diamond_Dog]

4. I never missed this show when it was on!

[cayugafalls]

5. ...I hear that

Last edited Sat Mar 23, 2024, 11:05 PM - Edit history (1)

I took my girlfriend Snoopy to a rally shortly after the pilot. We were two young hippy kids carrying ‘Make love, not war’

Edited to Correct my Old mind timelines...the Nixon Rally was 1970...oops, it was another Rally Snoopy and I went to in '72

The events are the similar, but this happened in '70

Bayfront Center hosted the event for the Nixon, rally and Snoopy and I went, got close enough to see Nixon as he was leaving the venue we were actually like in one of the tunnels, and we squeezed our way to the front of the tunnel that let out onto the main floor and held our sign up two little hippie kids holding up a make love, not war signed Yeah that was pretty cool