THE GROOVE TUBE: August6/ 7 Thoughts from Buzzy

The interesting thing about THE GROOVE TUBE is that we started making it in 1970 and Kenny (Shapiro, the Direct0r of THE GROOVE TUBE) had seen me in a movie in 1969 named DEALING. The lady producing the documentary (Shelly), God Bless Her, bought a digital copy of Dealing - the entire name of the film is actually -
Dealing: or, The-Berklee-To-Boston-Forty-Brick-Lost-Bag-Blues. It's a great movie and should be more important because of the three Academy Award winners in it: John Lithgow, Barbara Hershey and the great Charles Durning!
Our documentary will feature the important moments, the highlights of my appearance in this movie, so stand by for that. We started THE GROOVE TUBE in 1970 with a budget of $195,000.00 - very low, even in those times, and did not finally finish everything and get it out until some time late in 1973. The scene that I did frontal male nudity in had to be viewed (as did the entire film) by a board of national censors. Perhaps because I was active and running during most of my appearance in THE GROOVE TUBE, and that it was not a romantic scene in any way whatsoever, is why we were able to not be given an XXX rating. Due to this permissive (I think fairer) MPAA R. rating that the board eventually gave us, hundreds of thousands of younger folks were allowed to experience the basis for the style of humor that would become common Saturday Night fare just three years in the future on Saturday Night Live (also, featuring Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer, sometimes Shapiro).

On Donovan:
In 1968 Donovon (Leitch) and Shawn Phillips came over to the living/rehearsal loft of THE SEVENTH SONS and played a bunch of Shawn's new tunes with Donovan playing lead behind Shawn and the rest of us learning the chords and doing a rough version straight to tape, and that's some of the tapes we are going to see soon!