Ooh Poo Pah Doo, and I Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying

Seedy rundown smoky beer-stinking basement dives are the fertile delivery-rooms of rock n roll. The Beatles may have made the aptly-named Cavern world-famous, but just as there are thousands of "Beatles" now lost to history, so too are the decrepit buildings that housed rock’s formative experiments in debauchery.  This is the very room Townshend first broke his guitar on the ceiling.

No wonder the older generation thought rock n roll was the devil’s music — its zombie practitioners were seen rising up from below the Earth’s surface at dawn dressed in evil black clothes with glowing red eyes and screaming armfuls of virgins.  

And buried with the demolished buildings was the magic that happened there. Youthful inventions — not hampered by oversight — created nightly but buried by history.

And then along came a Zapruder, in this case named Kit Lambert, capturing a fleeting moment that just happened to be historic.

In the fall of ’64, a few months after a 17-year-old Keith Moon joined the band, and two months before they would change their name from The High Numbers to The Who, while the Mop-tops were wearing their suits on Sullivan, this was the rock n roll they'd left behind in the basements of London. 

With Saints John and Paul singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," Roger and Pete were singing, “I wanna create a disturbance in your mind” — the chorus of Etta James’ "Ooh Poo Pah Doo."  That kids today think they’re the first generation to speak in an abbreviated language that their elders don’t understand is pretty wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom, all rootti.

“I Gotta Dance to Keep From Crying” is a 1963 hit by The Miracles with Smokey Robinson, similar here to Motown’s only in the joy with which it’s delivered. A born party song, played by a born party band, this is pre-long-hair booze-n-boogie rock n roll.   

It's also some pretty snappy short-film making — clearly influenced by the early European filmmakers, using brief close-ups of different non-star’s faces in the crowd to tell the story. This footage is such an historic find — both for the content and how well it’s been restored.

There’s no way you ever thought you’d see pre-Who Who in the bar where they were born. But here’s long lost footage uncovered from a box in the basement of the baby taking its first steps. Enjoy the joy.

And . . .

R.I.P

Keith Moon 1946–1978

John Entwistle 1944–2002

"He looked in the club and immediately knew that was the band he was looking for because there was all these Mods watching Moon go mad  .... ."

— Brian Hassett