Poughkeepsie
Live:
The “Beat Club” of the Hudson Valley
By Peter Aaron
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“Poughkeepsie
Live” represents the tail end of a once thriving but now dying
piece of American popular culture: that of the live local music
television show. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a garage band could
put out a 45 and odds were it would actually get played on the local
radio station. At the same time, every decent-sized town from Trenton
to Topeka to Tacoma had a regular TV show that aped “Shindig!,”
“Hullabaloo,” or “American Bandstand” and
featured teens dancing and live or lip-synched performances by local
bands or touring artists. In the late Seventies and early Eighties,
public access programming picked up the slack after the teen-dance
shows had died out, but before long MTV and massmedia homogenization
slammed the studio doors on most small-town talent.
“We have all kinds of acts on the show,” says Dell.
“From singers using backing tracks to old blues players to
jazz players, hip hop artists, teenage garage bands, you name it.”
So how is the experience for an artist appearing on “Poughkeepsie
Live”? “Awesome,” says The Warhol Crowd’s
Htoo-Levine. “We really had a lot of fun doing it.”
“This show is really important to local music,” says
Joe Fusca, the band’s drummer. “Unless you’re
in some really big-name band, how else are you going to get to play
on TV?”
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