It was 57 years tonight (September 16th, 1964) that the groundbreaking Shindig! first aired on ABC-TV. Shindig! was the first prime-time rock n' roll program to feature live music. The premiere episode featured live performances by the Righteous Brothers, the Everly Brothers, and Sam Cooke performing his version of Bob Dylan's “Blowin' In The Wind.” The show was hosted by Los Angeles DJ Jimmy O'Neill, and included regulars Bobby Sherman, the Wellingtons, and Darlene Love, as well as the Shindigger Dancers. During the show's 16-month-run, Shindig! featured classic performances from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Ronettes, Leslie Gore, the Beach Boys, and the Turtles, among many others.
Darlene Love performed weekly on the show as part of the Blossoms — the backing singers featured within the Shindig! house band. She says that during the show's run she juggled both a solo career and session work on top of Shindig! duties: “When we taped Shindig!, we had to be at the studio at six o'clock in the morning on our tape day. And it ended up being a four-day job, 'cause we'd go into the recording studio and do the tracks — we put all the backgrounds down of all the singers, or whoever was going to be on the show that week, which would take two days. And then we'd go into the television studio and block. Then the next day we would go in and tape the show. So that was a four-day week, no matter what (else) we did, for two years.”
Mick Jagger admitted that the Beatles' opened all the doors for the Stones by recreating the music business in the early-'60s: “They were both rivals and they were also, I mean, they were also showing the way, 'cause they were the first at this kind of. . . They were kind of trailblazers in a lot of ways, and they went to the United States first, y'know, they showed the way, they were big international stars — because in England, most people have never really been stars outside of England. You had your little patch and that was it. And the Beatles kind of showed you could be big internationally.”