Dutch prog rock band Focus appeared on The Midnight Special on 5 October 1973 where they performed “Sylvia”, “House of the King” “Focus III” (the last song they did and which plays over the end credits of that evening’s show), and their hit “Hocus Pocus”. According to comments on the official and unofficial videos of “Hocus Pocus" on YouTube Focus was told they only had approximately five minutes to do the song, a song that clocked in at 6:42 on the album version on Moving Waves/Focus II. Focus, according to these posters, decided against trimming the song and instead played it at a faster speed.
There may be some truth to the myth, rumour, or gossip that Focus was told they had less than five minutes to do the song and so speeded it up and speeded it up they clearly did during their performance of “Hocus Pocus" on The Midnight Special that evening. However, now that The Midnight Special has released the full version of their live performance of the show on YouTube it is clear that the full live version lasted 6:02 sans the Gladys Knight intro and outro on the unofficial video compared to 4:38 for the unofficial video copied from the VH1 rebroadcast of the show and put up on YouTube.
One can and should hypothesise about the time discrepancy here. It is possible that The Midnight Special edited down the 6:02 performance for the initial broadcast because of NBC broadcast time constraints. It is also possible that VH1 edited the performance down due to time constraints when they broadcast the show later (how much later I don’t know as I can find no information on the later VH1 broadcasts). What I do recall is that in the initial broadcasts of The Midnight Special on the show routinely ran for an hour and six, seven or eight minutes without commercial interruptions. And while I watched the show that night I can’t quite remember everything or much of anything about the performance of "Hocus Pocus” that night other than the live performance was different from the studio version, that my ears had to adjust to the different speed of the song compared to the studio version, and that I was impressed with the musicianship of the band, which was not a surprise to me since I already had a copy of Focus II/Moving Waves in my album collection that I listened to repeatedly at the time. What I do know now, thanks to the complete official video of “Hocus Pocus” The Midnight Special put up on YouTube, is that the section that includes Thijs van Leer repeating his yodel for about a minute was edited out of the VH! unofficial version that is also up on YouTube at the moment. Another poster, he or she who runs the Unofficial Focus Band Video Archive, claims that another section, one like the first van Leer yodel we hear on The Midnight Special official video, was also edited out of the outtake as well.
The performance of “Hocus Pocus” on The Midnight Special that night is even more complicated and complex than the question of whether that specific performance of “Hocus Pocus” was whittled down because of NBC time constraints and did Focus speed up the song for that reason. By the way, Focus could have performed the US single version that lasted for 3:18 instead though by and large at that time most bands did not like the shortened versions mandated by record company suits because they wanted hits and most singles did not last during the era more than 2 to 4 minutes during the era. During the performance of “Sylvia”, for instance, Focus went into another somewhat different and much shorter performance of “Hocus Pocus” at the 3:30 mark, a brief performance that is even more speeded up than the 6:02 one. a performance that lasts until the 4:42 mark and includes some spontaneous interpolations. Additionally, Focus’s performance of “Hocus Pocus” in the long version and in the version on “Sylvia” was not the first time the band speeded up the song. Focus, for example, also speeded up their performance of “Hocus Pocus” on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972 and varied the performance relative to the studio version of the song just as they did later on The Midnight Special performances. This suggests that Focus at least on occasion if not often sped up their performance of the song in live performances. But then bands weary of playing the same hit songs again and again in live performance did like to vary them in live performance to keep them interesting at the time.
Anyway, isn’t it fascinating how myths get started and persist even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary? The empirical evidence to the contrary? The “outtake” put up on YouTube by The Midnight Special, clearly shows that Focus played for six and a half minutes on The Midnight Special that October evening. And that, along with other empirical evidence that shows that Focus speeded up “Hocus Pocus” on other occasions, shows that the notion that Focus speeded up “Hocus Pocus” for their The Midnight Special performance in October of 1973, is a problematic hypothesis at best.
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