Lloyd Thaxton, the host of a popular Los Angeles TV dance show in the 1960s who memorably injected a visual zaniness into his daily rock 'n' roll party for teenagers, died Sunday. He was 81.
Thaxton, who later became the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of TV's long-running consumer advocacy program “Fight Back! With David Horowitz," died of multiple myeloma at his home in Studio City, said his wife, Barbara. He had been diagnosed with the disease in May.
A TV personality from Toledo, Ohio, who arrived in Hollywood in 1957, Thaxton launched “Lloyd Thaxton's Record Shop" on KCOP Channel 13 in 1959. The show featured records, star guests and Thaxton's flair for humor. Revamped and renamed “Thaxton's Hop" in 1962, the live, low-budget, late-afternoon program became such a big hit with young Southern Californians that it was syndicated nationally in 1964.
Like “American Bandstand," Dick Clark's popular local TV dance show out of Philadelphia that went national on ABC-TV in 1957, what came to be called “The Lloyd Thaxton Show" featured teenagers dancing to records and guest appearances by top recording artists such as the Turtles, Jan and Dean, Sonny and Cher, the Righteous Brothers and the Byrds.
But new viewers quickly realized that the 30-something Thaxton was more than just a genial, dapperly dressed host. Humorously lip-syncing -- and doing assorted variations thereof -- to the hit records of the day was his signature.
For a Herb Alpert instrumental version of “Zorba the Greek," Thaxton donned a fez and moved around the teen dancers as he “played" two trumpets in his mouth. Another time, Thaxton sat at a grand piano “playing" Roger Williams' “Summer Wind" as a huge off-screen fan increasingly blew newspapers, toilet paper and assorted other debris at him.
He would even cut a singer's lips out of an album cover and mouth the lyrics by putting his lips through the hole. And then there were Thaxton's famous “finger people" (painted faces on his thumb and/or other fingers), who would “lip-sync" to a record as Thaxton slightly bent his finger joints to open and close the painted-on mouths.
In one “finger people" routine of Linda Laurie's recording of “Jose He Say," Thaxton wore a large sombrero and a droopy mustache and lip-synced the male part in a duet with his thumb, which was topped off with a small sombrero, doing the female part.
The group of some 30 teen dancers on each show, who came from different Southern California high schools, also got into the act in various contests, including lip-syncing contests in which the boys might lip-sync the girls' parts and vice versa.
“It was an anything-for-a-laugh type of approach," said Dan Schaarschmidt of Research Video, who has been editing a pending “Best of" DVD of the show with Thaxton.
