The Dick Cavett Show: Ray Charles Collection; The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons

The late 1960s and early ‘70s may have been a golden age for rock music, but the geniuses who controlled television programming remained largely clueless as to how to present it on the small screen. Dick Cavett was an exception: younger and hipper than most of his talk show contemporaries, Cavett seemed to really like the music, and a number of big name performers were eager to be on his show. The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons collects a total of nine Cavett shows from 1969 to 1974, and the list of performers is impressive, topped by George Harrison, Janis Joplin, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, David Bowie, Sly and the Family Stone, and Joni Mitchell. Joplin is terrific; she appears on three shows, singing “Move Over,” “Get It While You Can,” and others with power and emotion. Simon (joined by the Jessy Dixon Singers for “Loves Me Like a Rock” and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”) is also good, as is Wonder, and Cavett's Madison Square Garden interview with Mick Jagger is amusing. But Harrison is a disappointment; he only plays on one song (backing a mediocre Gary Wright), talks little about the Fabs (“I don't really remember anything about the Beatle days”—yeah, right), and plugs The Concert for Bangladesh. What's more, the TV sound mix does no one any favors, especially the Jefferson Airplane, who are dreadful. In fact, witnessing these musicians' sometimes bizarre interactions with Cavett's other celeb guests (Joplin with Gloria Swanson, Raquel Welch, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; a very stoned and nearly unintelligible Sly with Debbie Reynolds and Oklahoma senator Fred Harris) may be the most entertaining aspect of these shows, along with a genuinely literate discussion involving Cavett and authors Anthony Burgess, Jerzy Kosinski, and Barbara Howar. DVD extras include new episode introductions and an interview with Cavett. A strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P.“I'm unable to sing any song the same way twice,” Ray Charles tells Cavett in The Dick Cavett Show: Ray Charles Collection, compiling three complete programs on a two-disc set. He then proves it, offering versions of his best-known material (“Georgia on My Mind,” “I Can't Stop Loving You,” “America the Beautiful”) that breathe new life into songs he'd sung hundreds of times before. In his early 40s here, “the Genius” performs more than a dozen songs altogether. Charles' music, of course, is sublime, even in the antiseptic environment of a television studio (sound-wise, he says, “TV is death to me”); ever the stylistic alchemist, he makes material as diverse as Sam Cooke's “Shake,” the Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby,” and pianist Oscar Peterson's instrumental “Blues for Big Scotia” sound as if he'd written them himself. His conversations with Cavett are nearly as good—the two clearly like and respect one another, and Ray freely discusses his blindness, drug addiction, his mother, and taste in music (“I always thought Bach was a nervous man,” he quips, but he digs the more mellow Chopin, Sibelius, and Sinatra), among other topics. He's joined by the Raelettes for a few numbers, but he mostly appears alone onstage, with the unseen Cavett house band providing able if not exactly inspired backing. Other guests include actor Tony Randall, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and New York mayor John Lindsay, but this one's all about Ray—and that's a beautiful thing. Recommended. [Note: The Dick Cavett Show: John & Yoko Collection is also newly available.] Aud: C, P. (S. Graham)