Rocking on `The Dick Cavett Show'

During the late '60s and early '70s, late-night TV audiences were divided into two camps: The more conservative and traditional entertainment-oriented gravitated to NBC's The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, and the younger and hipper tuned in and turned on to ABC's The Dick Cavett Show.

Ironically, Cavett, a sophisticated Yale-educated stand-up comic, admits in an interview on the nostalgic, entertaining DVD set The Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons (Shout, $40) that he didn't know much about rock music when the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin began to appear on his show. But he quickly learned to appreciate the fact that there was more to music than the Andrew Sisters of his childhood days.

The three-disc set includes nine episodes of his series that were taped from 1969 to 1974, including the famous "Woodstock" show that took place the day after the legendary rock concert and features Jefferson Airplane, a very young Joni Mitchell performing "Chelsea Morning," and a thin David Crosby and Stephen Stills still wearing the mud-caked boots from the concert. Jimi Hendrix was supposed to have appeared on that seminal show but was "zonked" out in his hotel room, having finished his gig early that morning.

Cavett provides acerbic introductions to each of the episodes, which feature Sly and the Family Stone performing "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," David Bowie crooning "Young Americans," Cavett favorite Janis Joplin wailing "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" and "To Love Somebody," a 20-year-old Stevie Wonder singing "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" and George Harrison performing "Bangla Desh."

Particularly amusing is watching Cavett's more mainstream guests interacting with the counterculture rock stars. In one installment from 1970, Joplin is joined by Raquel Welch hawking the film Myra Breckinridge, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Chet Huntley, who spends most of his time ogling Welch. Another 1970 episode features Joplin - she died just two months later - Sunset Boulevard star Gloria Swanson and a barefoot Margot Kidder.

And on Wonder's 1970 episode, veteran actress Elsa Lanchester of The Bride of Frankenstein is clearly taken with a fellow guest, French heartthrob Alain Delon. At one point, Delon asks Cavett if he could take off his tie, to which the 70-something Lanchester quickly interjects, "You can take off anything you want."