From:  "Colin Kilgour" 
Date:  Thu Jan 20, 2005  8:07 am 
Subject:  This Is My Story : Jack Good
 
JACK GOOD (By Colin Kilgour)

Born 7 August 1931, Greenford, Middlesex, England

With a major acknowledgment to the BBC website and their preview for last
week's (1/2005) Greg Wise TV special on the Goodster, here's a piece on him,
incl. my own input but with a large chunk from the aforementioned

With Jack looking for all the world like Bob Hoskins' twin brother in monk's
habit with cowl, it was an entertaining trip, both back to our prime - and
to Jack's present world

Interspersed with visuals/comments from various denizens, these included
Trevor Peacock, a veteran and colleague from those days, currently amusing
us in his role as the dithering Jim in ‘The Vicar of Dibley’. Clips
included Marty Wilde, Cuddly Dudley and Lord Rockingham’s XI (with Benny
Green supporting Red Price in the sax zone)

He Came to Cordova:
Jack describes himself as a legend in his own lifetime, responsible for
bringing rock 'n' roll to British TV in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most
of the fascinating profile by Greg Wise was shot in Cordova, New Mexico,
where for years Good lived as a recluse painting religious icons. He is a
Catholic convert in search of the peaceful who despises the pop culture that
he helped to create, yet he comes across as a posturing egomaniac.

It was said of him that he could have done anything, and yet Jack, in his
own words became a "sausage-maker to the masses".

He took himself away from the world and tried to become a Carmelite monk,
taught himself to paint, built himself a chapel and lived as a hermit 7000
feet up in the New Mexico hills, despairing of what he had created.

Oh Boy!
He taught Britain how to rock 'n' roll - and humble singers how to act like
stars

The coolest man in the history of British rock 'n' roll is alive and well
and living in an adobe chapel. With his long grey beard and cowled habit of
capuchin brown, this celebrated iconoclast now spends his days painting
icons.

Unpredictability was Jack Good's hallmark. On leaving Balliol College,
Oxford, in the late 1950s, he intended to forge a career as a Shakespearian
actor. Instead, he became the man who gave British teenagers such
groundbreaking TV shows as 6.5 Special and Oh Boy!; who turned Gene Vincent
from a polite hillbilly into a leather-clad anti-hero; who brought PJ Proby
to Britain; and who turned Othello into a rock musical.

During the course of an hour, Good is revealed as a dauntless eccentric with
a penchant for walking away from success. What is harder for the film-maker
to catch is the brilliance with which, at his peak, Good divined the essence
of rock 'n' roll and did his best to bring it to public notice.

It was early in 1957 that the BBC decided to try to attract the new teenage
audience with a magazine programme starting at five past six on Saturday
evenings. They named it ‘6.5 Special’ and put it in the hands of two young
producers, Josephine Douglas and her assistant, Good, both in their mid-20s.
Keen to impose his taste on the show, which meant increasing the music
content, Good persuaded Douglas to become the co-presenter. Under his
guidance, rock 'n' roll, in the shape of Tommy Steele and Don Lang's Frantic
Five, shared the bill with the jazz of Johnny Dankworth and Humphrey
Lyttelton, the skiffle of Lonnie Donegan and the Vipers, and the crooning of
Denis Lotis and Rosemary Squires. Twelve million viewers, young and old,
tuned in.

In 1958, barely a year after the launch of 6.5 Special, too-fussy and
interfering executives caused Good to leave the BBC, where he was earning
£18 a week, and join ITV, which gave him free rein as the producer of a
weekly show called Oh Boy!, broadcast from the Hackney Empire. Out went
jazz, skiffle and crooners. In came a succession of young singers explicitly
inspired by the US stars whose outrageous names, costumes and singing styles
Good so admired. Recipients of his advice on self-projection included a pack
of sultry teenagers, including Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and Vince Eager,
and the ill-fated Dickie Pride, whose alarming repertoire of ticks and
shivers can be seen in Wise's film.

It was around this time that Good went to greet Gene Vincent and the Blue
Caps, famous for the classic Be Bop a Lula, off a transatlantic flight at
London Airport. Aghast to discover that the singer was not the
fire-breathing rocker of his imagination but a pleasant young man in a check
shirt and jeans, Good quickly persuaded him to swap his nondescript wardrobe
for a set of black motorcycle leathers. Inspired by Laurence Olivier's
portrayal of Richard III, he also talked Vincent into emphasising the
disability that forced him to wear a caliper on one leg. "Limp, you bugger!
Limp!" Good is said to have shouted as he coached Vincent from the wings.

Like many of the most interesting figures who peopled the first decade of
pop music, Good was an evangelist on behalf of black American music. Writing
an influential column for Disc, the pop weekly, in the early 1960s, he gave
enthusiastic advance warnings of the imminent arrival of such rhythm and
blues masterpieces as Gene Chandler's Duke of Earl and Stay by Maurice
Williams and the Zodiacs. And in 1964, when he launched a new weekly show,
Shindig! on US network television, flying in the face of a
heavily-prejudiced media (and many States) he was able to champion such
black performers as Jackie Wilson, Ike and Tina Turner, the Miracles, Aretha
Franklin, Sam Cooke and the Blossoms, alongside the likes of Roy Orbison,
the Everly Brothers and various British guests, including the Beatles, whose
first TV special, Around the Beatles, had been produced by Good.

Eventually, his television shows began to lose their magic, he would say as
a result of studio pressures but also no doubt from disenchantment
brought about by his inner demons. Good turned back to the stage. In 1968
he transformed Othello, which he had produced at Balliol 18 years earlier,
into Catch My Soul, casting Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago. When the production
moved from Los Angeles to London, the role was taken over by P J Proby. Good
himself, still grasping for the career in legitimate theatre that fate had
snatched away, played a heavily blacked-up Moor.

In the States the show had been destined for a Broadway run but this was
scotched following the murder of Martin Luther King …….. there were
uncomfortable parallels linking the two

A decade later, at the Astoria Theatre in London, he produced Elvis, a
musical in which the three ages of Presley were portrayed by Proby, Shakin'
Stevens and Timothy Whitnall. Its finale, in which Proby majestically
intoned American Trilogy against a back-projected film of Elvis's funeral
cortege, epitomised Good's marvellous instinct for blending pop kitsch with
high drama.

Ten years ago a musical based on his life, titled Good Rockin' Tonight, ran
for more than 300 performances in London's West End, with a young Greg Wise
playing the impresario himself. Those who wondered what happened next should
watch Wise's film and be grateful that Good's youthful energies went not
into playing King Lear or copying Byzantine religious art but into shaping
the sights and sounds of rock 'n' roll.

I should include from Jack’s C.V. that he appeared with Cary Grant in Father
Goose (1964) and Elvis (Clambake, 1967). Then there were spots on TV in The
Monkees and Hogan's Heroes

It is difficult to be precise about the events and chronology in Jack’s
life. The film told us he embraced the Carmelite Order of friars some forty
years ago but that doesn’t square exactly with the activities described
here. Quite likely Jack whilst no doubt being very sincere in his beliefs,
never got his religious ‘certificate’ – either that or his version allows
him to dip in and out at will

Jack’s German wife Margit left him around 1986 after 31 years of marriage,
when he was 56. This upset him enormously and he couldn’t really see why. I
think we could. He admitted he wasn’t a ‘modern man’ and pervaded by
Catholic guilt and angst he must have been an extremely difficult man to
live with. Some may literally question his sanity!

It appeared from the end of the program that Jack had relocated back to
Oxford, England to pursue his 'calling'. We saw him beavering away there on
a large, new painting but it was a major blemish on an otherwise enjoyable
documentary that we weren't told by Wise whether this was a permanent change
in Jack's horizons. To me it seemed a major switch from the main thrust of
the preceding hour and one which surely required defining!

Finally, our very own Steve Walker’s excellent write-up on Jack is preserved
at: http://www.rockabilly.nl/references/messages/jack_good.htm

Colin Kilgour – January, 2005