The Original Rock & Roll Revival Concerts tour was part of a nostalgia circuit started by producer Richard Nader in 1970, versions of which are still touring. This film documents three of those early shows: Nassau Coliseum, Long Island, NY; Cobo Hall in Detroit, MI; and the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. Featuring Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Chubby Checker, Bo Diddley, The Shirelles, The Five Satins, The Coasters and Danny and the Juniors, among others, the film cuts back and forth between footage of these acts in their younger days, with a clean-cut audience, and the '70s concerts, where their audience hasn't aged much, though the performers certainly have.
Interspersed with the concert footage is a plethora of cultural artifacts, from PTA lectures on dress codes and Nixon's "Checkers" speech, to scenes from I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Rebel Without a Cause, (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Wild One (1953) and others.
Nader, whose career as an oldies promoter is still going strong, produced Let the Good Times Roll with directors Bob Abel, founder of Abel & Associates, a pioneering computer graphics enterprise that created effects for Tron (1982), among others, and Sid Levin.
Reviews for the film were generally positive with Vincent Canby of The New York Times writing, Let the Good Times Roll is an engaging, technically superior concert film ...The style of the film is world's-fair avant garde: lots of split-screen stuff that allows us to see what the stars looked like then, alongside what they look like now. In its noisy and frantic way, Let the Good Times Roll is most reassuring. Hair is longer if sometimes thinner, sideburns have sprouted and waistbands have gotten wider." Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times also concurred, adding, "It's fun up to a point (and their original footage of 1950s rock concerts is good contrast to the revival performances), but the movie really exists through its music, and there is no way to see it and not agree with Sha-Na-Na that, yes, rock and roll is here to stay."
Producer: Gerald I. Isenberg
Director: Robert Abel, Sidney Levin
Cinematography: Robert C. Thomas; David Myers (uncredited)
Film Editing: Bud Friedgen, Hyman Kaufman
Cast: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, Bo Diddley, The Shirelles, The Five Satins, The Coasters, Danny and the Juniors, Bobby Comstock.
BW/C-100m. Letterboxed. Closed Captioning.
by Emily Soares
