What Happened to Stand!

When I first saw the track listing for the 1970 Forum concert, I wondered why they hadn't opened the concert with their usual Sly & the Family Stone cover, Stand!, especially since they were clearly performing this song live back in 1969 when they debuted it on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was a great concert opener because it allowed for Johnny and Ronnie to play the opening bars over and over again on the darkened stage, building up excitement and frenzied anticipation in the crowd -- as if any more was needed after the interminable opening acts. The stage lights would suddenly go on and there would be the Jackson 5, standing at their microphones, singing "Oom-pah, bah-bah..."

I posed the question yesterday on Soulful Detroit, and within 24 hours had an answer from Harry Weinger of the Universal Music Group. (That's the thing I love about this forum -- you ask a question and it gets answered, usually by someone who's an expert or industry insider.) HW said that they had opened the 1970 Forum concert with Stand! but they were experiencing technical difficulties at first, so the recording was unusable.

Luckily, we have both audio and video of the original opening number in the Going Back to Indiana special, which you can see here on YouTube. This was recorded nearly a year later in Indianapolis on May 29, 1971, and by then the J5 were performing like a well-oiled machine.



For the TV special, the performance of Stand! was cut from 4:16 to 3:00, but you can hear the full version on the J5's Goin' Back to Indiana soundtrack LP. In his stage patter, Jermaine promises to "get things groovin' up here" by encouraging the audience to sing along to the "Huh! Hah! Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya" part but it sounds like he didn't have much luck. Maybe it's because everyone was too busy watching Jackie, Marlon and Michael's fancy footwork.