We were doing it all live, in a sense. Even though it was being recorded on this electronic process. So, at that stage, you know, we were in a sense winging it. Well, once the behind the scenes was done, and I was trained in my routes, you know basically I loved the improvisational spirit, but it had to be really well orchestrated and organized. So before we ever went to go put the first act on film, we knew exactly what each act was going to do, we had a house band, which was really interesting. We had Jack Nitzsche conducting, and it was a rock’n’roll orchestra. I think we had Glenn Campbell, at that time he was not a star himself, he was famous for being a great rock’n’roll studio musician. So he was in, Leon Russell was the keyboard player, Hal Blaine was the drummer--
Mojo: That’s very impressive!
Binder: And they were the band, even though a lot of the acts didn’t want orchestration--you know, rock’n’roll should be very simple and pure, and in those days it was in mono--but we felt we needed the support, when we could use it, and we used it quite a bit. And then I was working, I had met this young choreographer named David Winters, he was the hot guy from New York on the coast who every young hot dancer wanted to take lessons from. So I went to his studio and we started talking and we hit it off and I said, you know, I’m doing this movie, would you be interested in choreographing it? He was and did, and you know, Toni Basil, who later had a singing career, was his assistant. I remember her father was a band leader in Las Vegas. And then we put together the dancer auditions, and one of the couples we had were in the bikinis, representing the Beach Boy/West Coast spirit....is Bobby Hatfield’s wife. And then we had the girls in the go-go cages, with the frilly lace things, and that was when the Whiskey A-Go-Go started. Johnny Rivers was also in our stable, and we knew the Whiskey really well, and the girls in the cages, which I later brought to a show I did called Hullaballoo. And that was, then, we thought were the hottest dancers in town. And we didn’t even ask in those days, we were so naive we just did it, you know, we put them, integrated them into the show. Today, I do a lot of Diana Ross specials, and to go to Diana Ross and say “Oh yeah, and while you’re singing out there, we’re going to have 18 dancers behind you....” You’d have to have pretty good justification to get that through. But we didn’t have anybody balk. Everybody was excited about it, everybody was kind of fresh and young and new, and the show, just as things happened, was about 72 hours of sheer excitement, energy, and it was a happening. I remember the audience at the TAMI show were just kids from Santa Monica, were going nuts. Their parents were--we didn’t know what to anticipate or expect, and when Sargeant said, We’ve gotta have policemen lining the stage or all these kids will attack them and everything, we thought he was crazy. There are some shots in the movie where you can see the cops are standing with their arms folded and their back to the stage, like security guards today at rock concerts, and so forth, and parents were coming in, over the filming day, literally looking for their kids, and the kids were just completely into this thing.
Mojo: Were you the one who was responsible for determining the running order of the bands?
Binder: Yes and no. I mean, to be really honest with you, I remember saying that I wanted the Rolling Stones to be on after James Brown, and I remember Mick coming to me and saying, “We can’t.” Because James Brown was obviously the king, and James and I, when we met, we hit it off really well, we’ve been friends ever since, and his manager had sorta come to me and said, “Nobody can follow James.” And I, for whatever my instincts were, whatever my feelings were, I just felt that we should put the Stones on to close the show. And, as it turns out, to this day, I think it is one of the great performances of the Stones. Because I think, at the time that they went on, either they were so stoned out or whatever, they just literally, Mick was impersonating James, almost, with all the dancing and the shenanigans and so forth, and that performance would’ve never happened if I had them on before James.
Mojo: Did you have any idea what James Brown’s act was going to be before the actual concert?
Binder: Well, the interesting things is that James came to me, and said “I don’t want to rehearse.” And everybody else had basically at least given me one camera rehearsal. And I said to James, I looked at him--I was very impressed by what everybody had said about him, even though I’d never seen him in my life--he said to me, “I have enough faith in you that you’re gonna do just fine, but I ‘m not rehearsing.” I said, Ok. So that was a totally winged camera rehearsal. It was actually on film. The amazing thing of it is, that when he did the number “Please Please Please,” and he kept dropping to his feet, I had no idea, we didn’t even have it on script, I didn’t know when he was gonna fall to his feet, when he was gonna get up, and he walks away, and then the cape comes off and he turns around, and it was all beautifully choreographed, and it would’ve been nice to know all of that before I actually shot it. But I didn’t.