(Pictured: one incarnation of the Beach Boys. L to R: Bruce Johnston, Carl Wilson, Al Jardine, and Mike Love, circa 1971.)

(Hyperlinks updated in 2021.)

In July 1971, the Beach Boys, Ike and Tina Turner, and several new young stars headlined a two-night stand in New York City’s Central Park, part of a regular concert series sponsored for many summers by Schaefer Brewing Company. Both nights were filmed and then edited into a concert special called Good Vibrations From Central Park. (The TV crew shot from different vantage points each night, so when the producers put the show together, it looked like they had twice the camera coverage.) An hour of concert highlights was broadcast on ABC 45 years ago tonight, on August 19, 1971.

The TV show opened with the Beach Boys doing “Good Vibrations,” although I am pretty sure that at Central Park itself, Boz Scaggs went on first. Good Vibrations From Central Park was the first national TV appearance for Boz and his band, doing their lone hit to date, “We Were Always Sweethearts.” It had reached #61 on the Hot 100 in May, and was the opening track on Moments, Boz’s second album. Boz may have played other songs that night, but only one got on TV, befitting an opening act.

Kate Taylor went on next. James Taylor’s sister, who billed herself as “Sister Kate,” had released her debut album in January, featuring many of the same musicians who appeared on Carole King’s Tapestry, including King herself. Her song choices were impeccable: two by King from Tapestry (“Where You Lead” and “Home Again”), two from Elton John’s Tumbleweed Connection (“Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” and “Country Comfort”), plus her brother James’ “You Can Close Your Eyes,” and “Handbags and Gladrags,” which was made famous by Rod Stewart. Any of those would have been better than the performance the producers opted to show, the R&B song “Barefootin'” which was not on Taylor’s album. Although she was enthusiastic as hell, she yelled more than she sang, and I wonder if she was having trouble with the stage monitors. [Link no longer available in 2021.—ed.]

Next on the bill was Carly Simon, also making her first national TV appearance. Carly turned 26 in the summer of 1971, and she was already a showbiz veteran, having recorded two albums with her sister Lucy as the Simon Sisters, in 1964 and 1969. She came onstage in Central Park with the confidence of someone who knows she’s a star already and is going to be a bigger one, and she’s smokin’ hot besides. The broadcast featured “Anticipation,” which wouldn’t be a hit for six months, and “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” which was on the radio at the time. (If you watch the video, you’ll easily spot a couple of famous spectators at the show.)

Ike and Tina Turner took the stage next, although they followed the Beach Boys on the concert broadcast. They were shown doing “Good Lovin’,” their recent hit “Proud Mary,” and a version of “Higher and Higher.” Then it was time for the headliners. The Beach Boys’ part of the program opened with “Heroes and Villains.”  Next, either because it was on the set list or the producers edited the show that way, came a decent-but-ultimately pointless version of Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” sung by Mike Love. They had jammed on the song with the Grateful Dead earlier in the year, but it’s doubtful that people would have turned on a Beach Boys TV show at the height of summer to hear it. In fact, if you tuned in for the sun-splashed classics from the 60s, you didn’t hear many, just “Good Vibrations” and “I Get Around.”

Good Vibrations in Central Park was one of the forerunners of the concert shows that proliferated on TV within the next couple of years, including Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special. It has never had a DVD release, as far as I can tell.