The Show That Time Forgot : The cable TV program ‘It’s Happening’ is a half-hour time warp featuring today’s youths enjoying yesterday’s sounds.

It’s hip. It’s boss. It’s mod. It’s groovy. And it’s happening--all over again.

The spirit, sound and look of “Shindig,� “Hullabaloo,� “Boss City� and other televised teen-age dance shows that were all the rage in the 1960s are back.

“It’s Happening,� airing at 6 p.m. Thursdays on United Artists Cable’s Channel 77 and 10 p.m. Saturdays on Valley Cable’s Channel 65, is a weekly half-hour time warp that features youths of today movin’ and groovin’ in ‘50s- and ‘60s-style clothing to the rock-steady beat of yesterday’s sounds.

Creator Domenic Priore, 30, and co-host Audrey Moorehead, 25, take their be-boppin’ studio audience back to the years 1955 to 1966, mixing influential old records, videotapes of ‘50s and ‘60s television performances and live performances by young bands and budding Buddy Hollys.

“This show is about teen-agers, dancing, music and clothes,� Moorehead said. “There is no message. It’s just good clean fun.�

The show features clips from Priore’s own video library, which includes more than 1,600 hours of music-related material from 1955 to the present.

Teen-agers eager to appear journey from as far away as San Francisco to Carlsbad, where the show is taped. Like the youngsters, the bands on the show outfit themselves in clothes and hairstyles that were popular during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The songs they perform are original compositions, the instruments and amplifiers typical of that era.

“The Beatles came on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ and kind of made rock ‘n’ roll bands on TV,� Priore said. “We want to capture the excitement of all that.�

Priore and Moorehead choose the bands, design the Spartan sets, and write and edit the show, which is financed by Priore and grants from various cable companies. The equipment and crews are provided at no charge through the companies’ local access departments.

The most striking element about the 30 low-budget segments that have been produced is their glaring, and oddly endearing, roughness. There are no jump cuts, computer-generated special effects or other MTV slickness.

“Our show has an innocence,� Priore said. “That’s probably the most important element that’s missing from today’s music.�

Jasmine Wilde, 20, said teen-agers are gravitating toward the rockabilly and rhythm and blues sounds of the ‘50s and ‘60s in search of alternatives to heavy metal, rap and repetitive synthesized music.

“There’s something about the music of the ‘60s that’s just happy,� said Wilde, who lives in Los Angeles and has attended several tapings of the show. “It’s better to dance to than the music today.

“I’ve seen tapes of ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ � a ‘60s British teen show, “and when we’re doing ‘It’s Happening,’ I feel like I’m in a colorized version,� she said. “Everyone who goes on the show is into it.�

But is the viewing public?

Estimating the size of the audience is impossible because, unlike commercial television, local access cable programming is not monitored. But “It’s Happening� definitely has found a niche.

“It’s one of the few shows that gets a lot of feedback,� said Dawn Patillo, local access coordinator for Continental Cable, which serves Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, downtown Los Angeles and West Hollywood. “If the show isn’t on one week, I get calls from people asking what happened. They’re afraid it’s not going to be on anymore.�

Priore, however, isn’t one to let things he cares about fade away.

Witness his fondness for the early ‘60s, which he traces to the summers of his childhood, when his older sister and her friends piled into a station wagon and took him along to the beach.

“I’d sit in the back, and they’d be acting up and goofing off and telling stories about boys,� said Priore, who grew up in Monterey Park. “I’d just be soaking it all in while hanging out in the mid-’60s with a bunch of teen-age girls who smelled like Coppertone. It was probably one of the best places you could have been.�

Priore’s infatuation with surf music, which served as a backdrop for those rides to and from the beach, grew into his obsession with the Beach Boys and the group’s leader, Brian Wilson.

In fact, in 1988, Priore assembled and published “Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!� an exhaustive, 264-page scrapbook that chronicles the creation and subsequent disappearance of the Beach Boys’ “Smile� album.

Recorded in late 1966 and early 1967, “Smile� was slated to be the follow-up to the group’s critically acclaimed “Pet Sounds� album and was rumored to be as revolutionary as the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,� which was released in June, 1967. To this day, however, “Smile� remains unreleased, buried beneath a mountain of legal entanglements.

Priore’s book includes reprints of just about everything written about “Smile� and features interviews, essays, unpublished photographs, session sheets and handwritten lyrics.

That effort, as much as anything else, earned Priore a full-page spread in a September Rolling Stone story about obsessive fans. The color photograph featured him standing, hands clasped behind his head, between a Ford woody and a black and white television set with Brian Wilson’s image on the screen. Moorehead, clad in a polka-dot bikini, leans against a surfboard in the background.

Moorehead says she caught the ‘60s bug in 1971, when she was 6, and her mother and aunts introduced her to Beatles records. “I’ve been stuck in my own little time warp since I was a baby,� she said.

Moorehead gained prominence in the Los Angeles music scene in the early ‘80s by spinning vintage records as a disc jockey at the Rave Up club in downtown Los Angeles. When the Rave Up closed, Moorehead moved to the Cavern Club in Hollywood, where she became a popular source for national magazines and television shows exploring renewed interest in the music and fashion that was driving the mod scene.

Priore, too, gravitated to the Cavern and invited Moorehead to appear in a college broadcasting project that eventually evolved into “It’s Happening.�

Priore is hoping to take his show into new markets and expose more young people to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll.

“It’s Happening� plays on cable outlets throughout Southern California and recently began a run in Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Tex.

“Audrey and I often say to ourselves, ‘We wish we had a time machine,’ so we could go back and see certain things and buy certain things,� Priore said. “Hopefully, ‘It’s Happening’ can bring that time machine to other people.�