On 11.19.67, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour featured the Smothers Brothers and George Segal singing Phil Ochs‘ “Draft Dodger Rag“.

WWII-era veterans and patriots were presumably outraged that a folk song about weaselling out of the draft was being performed on a major network in prime time.

Segal’s most recent film, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre from director Roger Corman, had opened on 6.30.67.

The first truly good film in which Segal starred, Irvin Kershner‘s Loving, wouldn’t be seen for another two and one-third years.

Cream‘s “Disreali Gears” had been released two and a half weeks before this broadcast (11.2.67).

The Chicago debut of Martin Scorsese‘s Who’s That Knocking On My Door had happened four days earlier (11.15.67) and Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate would be released roughly a month later (12.21.67).

Two days after this performance, on 11.21.67, Gen. William Westmoreland told the National Press Club in Washington, “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing…we have reached an important point…when the end begins to come into view.”

Posted earlier today by Paul Schrader. Here’s hoping the Sight & Sound Stalinists see it…

If you’re unfortunately tethered to an unhappy and dysfunctional family and can barely stand your siblings during holiday gatherings, you can at least take comfort in the fact that the battling O’Neals were always worse off.

The father of all this misery, of course, was the late Ryan O’Neal, who apparently insisted on disliking his children, never apologizing and blowing them off repeatedly.

Posted early today by the N.Y. Post’s Dana Kennedy:

Respect and praise for the late Tom Smothers, whose provocative views and attitudes in the late ‘60s made The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which aired on CBS for two years and two months (February ‘67 to April ‘69), the hippest mainstream show on television.

If you were youngish and dropping acid, listening to progressive rock (Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who), loving films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and The President’s Analyst and generally hating the Vietnam War, you almost certainly watched this intensely spiritual (in a Nehru jacket sense of the term), anti-establishment show on a fairly regular and reverent basis.

CBS finally cancelled the Smothers Comedy Hour over regional complaints that it had pushed the counter-culture envelope too far.

Tom has passed from cancer at age 86.