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Post by rberman on Jun 11, 2020 9:24:28 GMT -5
1:04:00 Mark Goodman announces the previous video by April Wine (wrong). The Dolby Sound advertisement returns. A few seconds of dead air mar Mark Goodman giving music news about new film Heavy Metal, Elvis Costello's upcoming country album,and the Alice Cooper and Rolling Stones tours.
1:06:40 A live performance by Iron Maiden of their eponymous song. Hard to get heavier heavy metal than that in 1981.
1:10:35 The Movie Channel promo returns, followed by the REO Speedwagon concert promo. Advertisers realized long ago that short frequent commercials are more effective than longer infrequent ones.
1:11:15 synergy between promo and program, as REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Lovin' You" gets a concert video (with live audio).
1:14:35 Mark Goodman teases an upcoming contest involving a Learjet ride.
1:14:45 Nickelodeon channel promo. MTV promo prominently featuring Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" video. Then eight seconds of dead air.
1:16:00 Michael Johnson's "Bluer Than Blue," without any identifying credits at the beginning or end of the song. Johnson lipsyncs while roaming a small apartment lit in blue, because he is sad.
1:18:45 The Pretenders' "Message of Love" gives us our second repeat artist. It's a performance video on a small, sparse set in the Pretender's black and white motif.
1:22:08 Jazz fusion guitarist Lee Ritenour on "Mr. Briefcase" cuts between Ritenour playing electric guitar in the dark, and his band in a corporate boardroom satire. Vocalist Eric Tagg is shown singing but not credited. The video starts cutting out as the song nears its end.
1:25:35 another moonman promo.
1:25:45 Ooh, The Cars! Ought to be good, right? Well, it's "Double Life," so no. The video is another "performing against a black background," with minor camera tricks and occasional cutaways to the dashboard instruments of a car. Instead of The Cars' instruments, I guess. Guitarist Elliot Easton is a leftie.
1:29:40 Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" is ambitious for its time, mixing a claustrophobic face-framing close-up lipsync with scenes of Collins brooding on sparse domestic sets, and some trippy infrared "Predator vision." The famous drum loop heard throughout the song is a disco preset on an early drum machine, with hi-hat dropped out.
1:34:18 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Phil Collins as the previous video. Yay! Patter promising future discussion of the value of collecting vinyl.
1:34:33 MTV promo with Carly Simon wailing on an electric guitar. Not what I expected to see. Its main point is that customers need to ask their cable company to run the cable audio into their FM stereo receiver, not just directly into their mono TV. Ah, that's what the "MTV sticker" promo was about 90 minutes ago.
1:35:00 as promised, a feature on valuable LPs. But I can only hear the music track of the feature (Sam Cooke's "What a Wonderful World"), and not the narrator. I guess my cable operator isn't giving me a stereo signal. Or maybe the MTV tech guys screwed up again.
1:36:25 Goodman tells us about Squeeze tour dates in the NYC area.
1:36:51 Robert Palmer "Looking for Clues" shows him dancing awkwardly with a guitar, which I did not realize that he played. The video is redeemed by interesting greenscreen work presaging The Cars' "You Might Think" and Peter Gabriel's "Sledge Hammer." This video typifies the oddity that content-hungry MTV was playing videos for songs that never cracked the Hot 100. A photogenic face was more important than recognizable music at this point, and Palmer certainly has one of those.
1:40:28 MTV promo "Television used to be called a vast wasteland. That was before music television, MTV." There's a definite shortage of advertising content in this first day of MTV.
1:40:38 Eight seconds of dead air, then "Too Late" (1979) by a band called Shoes, performing against a black background. Not a Hot 100 single, but great harmonies make me want to get this track, so MTV is doing half of its job, which is getting me to buy the music. The other half is getting me to buy the advertised products. In my college class on the Sociology of Television, the textbook noted that MTV was the first station where both the content (music videos) were advertisements, and then other advertisements were played between.
1:43:26 Mark Goodman explains that cable TV has superior video to broadcast TV and better sound than FM... if you get your cable company to wire the cable into your FM receiver.
1:43:45 Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" peformed against a black and white background, and the musicians are all in black too, which is not a good choice. I just noticed how similar the melody is to Neil Young's "Ohio."
1:47:40 twenty seven odd seconds of audio from Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" with black screen.
1:48:07 Rupert Hine "Surface Tension." I know him as Rush's producer and didn't realize he had albums and singles even. Turns out he covered "The Sound of Silence" in 1965 and has eleven albums under various monickers, but no US singles charted it seems. But this is a neat video and song with clever use of greenscreen, painting his left face half green so the background shows through. He sounds like Bowie.
Halfway through Hine's video, MTV totally lost signal for a while. So the video historian inserted footage from a rebroadcast of this video to fill up the empty space from 1:48:09 through 1:51:38.
1:51:38 Another Split Enz song, eh? "One Step Ahead." Another good song, albeit in a cheapo studio performance video. I have clearly not paid this band enough attention.
1:54:24 Gerry Rafferty "Baker Street" is always welcome. Black backdrop studio performance occasionally intercut with scenes on the real Baker Street. The video is copyright 1980, but the song was one of the biggest hits of 1978.
1:58:49 Mark Goodman incorrectly identifies Split Enz as the previous artist. Then another MTV promo.
1:59:35 Mark Goodman reports that hundreds of hours of studio chat were recorded during the recording of John Lennon's "Double Fantasy" album. Have these ever been made public? Adrian Belew and David Byrne are pursuing solo projects without Talking Heads. Journey is said to be on tour, but no details are given. Then comes another MTV promo.
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Post by rberman on Jun 11, 2020 9:28:47 GMT -5
2:01:38 Pat Benatar's "I'm Gonna Follow You" video is already in progress. She stalks night streets in black leather pants and heavy rouge.
2:05:42 the identical promo from six minutes ago plays again. Then it's former Doobie Brother Tom Johnston's studio performance video "Savannah Nights," (1979) an undistinguished disco track with a clavinet solo. Johnston belongs to that generation in which a lead singer might also be a lead guitar player.
2:09:40 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Tom Johnston. The Movie Channel promo runs again.A PSA featuring the cast of M.A.S.H. assures us that "it's just a matter of time before we find a cure for leukemia." Then a repeat of the "history of recorded music" mini-documentary.
2:12:00 Here's something new: a clip from the video version of the benefit album "Concerts for the People of Kampuchea" This 1979 concert featured a "Rockestra" of thirty British pop stars (McCartney, Plant, Townsend, etc.), presaging later projects like Band-Aid and We Are the World. The song is a cover of Little Richard's "Lucille." The camera stays on singer McCartney even when somebody else is playing a guitar solo.
2:15:00 Styx returns with "The Best of Times." Tommy Shaw plays keys, and I didn't realize that the flutelike patch used a vocoder. He looks like Mark Hamill. They're wearing the same clothes as in the "Rockin' the Paradise" video.
2:19:15 the moonman promo, followed by ten seconds of dead air.
2:19:33 Carly Simon "Vengeance" is a studio performance against a black background. Hey, Tony Levin is playing slap bass! Was he bald as a child? This is also the video with Carly playing lead electric guitar. Disco laser sound! This was actually a tone knob on an early electronic drum. It was intended for tuning the drum to a pitch, but musicians liked to turn it mid-note to create that "Pew...." sound.
2:23:43 Iron Maiden "Wrathchild" concert video. Were MTV programmers just playing their favorites?
2:26:35 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Iron Maiden. Dolby noise reduction advertisement repeats. Mark Goodman discusses the role of roadies on a tour. Footage of Alice Cooper roadies. As with the previous documentary, the music track overpowers the talking track. Mark Goodman discusses a french toothbrush that plays music if you're brushing your teeth properly. Then Goodman introduces "Blotto."
2:29:15 Blotto with "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard," performed live against a black background, intercut with scenes of the band working menial office and retail jobs, fantasizing about the beach. Music is between The Cars and The B-52s.
2:33:05 Rod Stewart "Passion" is mostly studio shots of the band in black, white, and red, with a couple of cutaways to location shots when the lyrics mention church and school. The black walls have big red polka dots, for variety. Keytar sighting! Rod is wearing tight striped pants and doing near-splits. Was this the inspiration for David Lee Roth in "Jump"? The closing vamp is way too long. Must be a club remix.
2:38:39 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Rod Stewart.
2:38:50 Elvis Costello "Oliver's Army" shows his love for Buddy Holly, intercutting studio and beach performance shots with lip syncing by a variety of people, some of whom are Elvis Costello. The lyrics are quite political, surveying political/religious violence in Northern Ireland and the presence of the British Army (Oliver's Army, referring to Oliver Cromwell's heavy hand during the Interregnum). Its use of the phrase "white nigger" for persecuted Caucasian minorities would not age well. The octaved piano line was inspred by ABBA's "Dancing Queen."
2:41:45 seven seconds of dead air lead into REO Speedwagon's Bo Diddley-inspred "Don't Let Her Go," a fast live concert version. The camera is ready for a close-up of the dextrous keyboard solo, which is nice. The keyboardist looks like he is twelve years old.
2:45:50 Took some figuring out, because (1) it has no opening or closing credits, and (2) obscurity. It turns out to be Pittsburgh band The Silencers, doing a punk/New Wave/power pop thing. It opens with the song "Remote Control," a concept video about greed or something, with vignette video instead of shots of band performance. But then halfway through it turns into a different song, "Illegal," performed live at night on an outdoor parking lot stage. Looks to be in Texas, judging by the enthusiastic crowd wearing cowboy hits. It's bizarre in multiple ways, which is better than boring.
2:49:45 the lunar landing station ID returns. Goodman promises The Pretenders, Rockpile, and Lee Ritenour (again?) upcoming.
2:50:22 Juice Newton's "Angel of the Morning" cuts between the band performing against a black background (the video does not always sync with the song audio), and the singer alone in a "pensively looking out my bedroom window" vignette; at one point she imagines a man "touching my cheek" and "slowly turning away." I wonder what venue this video was made for. Many British New Wave videos were intended for play in clubs, but this is more of a power ballad than a dance track.
2:54:14 Another excerpt from the Kampuchea concert: Rock Pile backing Robert Plant on the Pomus/Sherman song "Little Sister," recorded by Elvis among others.
2:57:57 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Rock Pile, but as before omits Robert Plant.
2:58:12 An MTV promo highlights Talking Heads, Stevie Nicks, and another track I don't recognize.
2:58:43 Mark Goodman mocks the idea that records should carry content ratings. The Clash will appear in Scorsese's film "The King of Comedy." Bob Marley tribute album and concert in the works. Pretenders on tour in Florida. Goodman mocks a man who invented "eye phones," a pair of goggles which flash in time with the music.
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Post by rberman on Jun 11, 2020 9:32:00 GMT -5
3:00:44 The band is Bootcamp. The song is "Hold on to the Night." It's notable for listing the record label as "unsigned," so I suppose this is the first true indie music played on MTV. The video features the band miming the song with instruments (the drummer has sticks but no drums) on the night street outside a casino. No effort at choreography; they just sort of wander around the middle of the street. The bassist/lead singer "Slim Man" is ruggedly handsome and has a strong voice. He apparently played Coachella solo several years ago.
3:04:02 Cliff Richard "Dreaming." Dude was 40 but looks 30 tops. Clean living! Band performance against black background (with neon light circles and full-length floor mirrors for variety), intercut with slo-mo black/white dream sequences. The song sounds a lot like ELO. It was co-written by Leo Sayer and produced by a guy named Alan Tarney who has 250 credits on discogs.
3:07:39 eleven seconds of dead air, then an MTV promo with a "christening the ship" motif.
3:07:48 five seconds of dead air, then Lee Ritenour with "Is It You," the very epitome of late 70s lite jazz/pop. Sounds like Hall & Oates at points. I recognize this one, which went to #15 on the Hot 100 in 1981. Performed against a black background.
3:11:37 Mark Goodman send in a dollar for a full color MTV poster! Nancy Reagan PSA about the Foster Grandparent program, which paired elderly adults with disabled children.
3:13:06 The unmistakable rhythm of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk," with a new video genre: "behind the scenes," as the band members watch USC's Trojan Marching band rehearse in a baseball stadium. Normally videos of the "rehearsal" genre pay off with a concert segment at the end, but this one does not.
3:16:20 REO Speedwagon promo again. 7 seconds of dead air. Video for Michael Stanley's "He can't Love You" shows the band playing inside and outside a metal parts factory, intercut with a vignette in which a factory worker's dream of a sexy nurse comes true when his daydreaming causes an accident. Clarence Clemons provides the sax in reality but not in the video. The song only went to #33, but the video is fun.
3:20:08 MTV flag promo. REO Speedwagon playing "Tough Guys" live. The line "She thinks they're full of shit" goes uncensored.
3:24:00 Blondie's "Rapture" starts with a dapper black dancer in white tux and tails outside an NYC brownstone at night. He looks in the basement window. Scene shifts to a cheap set of the basement apartment in which a party is going on with members of Blondie and some women. Debbie Harry (lip syncing) is of course the focus. I didn't realize the song contained the line, "back to back, sacroiliac." During an unbroken take for the second half of the video, Harry saunters around a set imitating an outdoor scene; its inhabitants include White Tux Man, a ballerina tween doing spins, a stereotyped Indian Chief, Uncle Sam, and a grafitti artist. There's no cutaway to the electric guitar solo, surprisingly.
3:28:50 Goodman announces an upcoming Jackson Browne video. MTV promo features "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" at length. Footage of a Gary "U.S." Bonds concert at the Hollywood Bowl at which Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen joined the fun. Once again the voiceover narration is inaudible. Van Halen tour dates. Goodman introduces The Who.
3:31:11 The Who's "Don't Let Go the Coat" was shot at the same time as the previous The Who video, in the same black background concert style. Still looks great.
3:34:38 MTV promo with guitar smashing a TV screen
3:34:48 Rod Stewart "Ain't Love a Bitch" on a blank black stage with lighting trees.
3:39:09 Mark Goodman correctly identifies Rod Stewart, "What a crooner."
3:39:20 The Pretenders "Talk of the Town" is on a spare set but uses a deliberately mis-set camera aperture to give everything a washed-out glow.
3:42:30 Rainbow "Can't Happen Here" intersperses a black background studio performance with tons of stock footage depicting the politically charged lyrics. Good track, effective video.
3:46:25 Andrew Gold "Thank You for Being a Friend," played by the band against a grey background. For slight variety, during the bridge he stands alone, a strong fan blowing his collar length hair slightly.
3:51:15 Lunar landing MTV promo again. Upcoming: The Who, Kate Bush, and David Bowie. That's the end of the recording!
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 11, 2020 9:58:30 GMT -5
0:35:30 What in the world? After five seconds of dead air comes what seems like Styx's song "The Best of Times." But no, it's another song, "Rocking Paradise," with the same music for two verses before going in a different, more rocking direction. Watching this hammers home how much Styx wanted to be Queen. Tommy Shaw's hair makes a perfect, smooth helmet on his scalp and down his neck. I didn't even realize Styx had a second guitarist, but apparently James "JY" Young was always in the band. James Young was with Styx long before Tommy Shaw joined. The two Styx videos were from The Paradise Theater album. It was a concept album so the costuming being the same makes sense and would have tied in to the concept from the tour for the album. That's not Tommy Shaw playing piano in The Best of Times. That's Dennis DeYoung. 0:50:30 since the REO Speedwagon video was aborted, .38 Special's "Hold On Loosely" gets the honor of being the first concert video to successfully air. They look like Skynyrd, an unkempt contrast to Styx, the other longhair band to air so far. Nary a stylist in sight. This band has TWO DRUMMERS! Both with full kit. Donnie Van Zandt, .38 Special's vocalist and rhythm guitarist, was the younger brother of Ronnie Van Zandt, founder of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Two drummers wasn't super unusual. The Allman Brothers frequently had double drummers. The Doobie Brothers did at least on tour. Pink Floyd did on most of their tours in the 80s. |
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Post by rberman on Jun 11, 2020 10:32:57 GMT -5
0:35:30 What in the world? After five seconds of dead air comes what seems like Styx's song "The Best of Times." But no, it's another song, "Rocking Paradise," with the same music for two verses before going in a different, more rocking direction. Watching this hammers home how much Styx wanted to be Queen. Tommy Shaw's hair makes a perfect, smooth helmet on his scalp and down his neck. I didn't even realize Styx had a second guitarist, but apparently James "JY" Young was always in the band. James Young was with Styx long before Tommy Shaw joined. The two Styx videos were from The Paradise Theater album. It was a concept album so the costuming being the same makes sense and would have tied in to the concept from the tour for the album. That's not Tommy Shaw playing piano in The Best of Times. That's Dennis DeYoung. Dennis plays piano. But at 0:34 in the video, Tommy plays keyboard piped through vocoder. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 11, 2020 10:39:02 GMT -5
James Young was with Styx long before Tommy Shaw joined. The two Styx videos were from The Paradise Theater album. It was a concept album so the costuming being the same makes sense and would have tied in to the concept from the tour for the album. That's not Tommy Shaw playing piano in The Best of Times. That's Dennis DeYoung. Dennis plays piano. But at 0:34 in the video, Tommy plays keyboard piped through vocoder. I missed that. Short lil snippet. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Jun 11, 2020 10:45:03 GMT -5
BTW, Dennis DeYoung posted himself doing The Best of Times a couple months ago at the height of the Covid-19 quarantine. Whatever you want to think about Styx, at 73, the dude still has some serious pipes.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 11, 2020 21:24:19 GMT -5
Dual drum kits wasn't anything new. During the punk days, in the UK, what was known as the Burundi Beat became popular and was central to the music of Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow, both of whom were introduced to it by Malcolm McLaren. When MTV started up, they went to the record companies for video content. The number of fully formed music videos was small and more existed as concert footage and all were used to promote the albums. MTV got them for free, since the record labels considered them promotion. This set a precedent that greatly worked in MTV's favor. When they launched, nearly a 1/4 to 1/3 of their videos were from Rod Stewart, who had been shooting quite a lot of them. Others were doing experimental film things, like Devo. The Pretenders had one, "Tattooed Love Boys," that was in early, heavy rotation, with "Brass in Pocket;" but, was rarely seen again, after 1983, though Brass in Pocket would get brought out periodically. It did turn up during the Reunion Weekend, where the original VJs were back for a weekend (I taped it all). The VJ segments were always taped in advance and the tapes were out of sequence with the debut. The group had to go to a New Jersey bar to have a launch party, as MTV wasn't carried on any cable system, in Manhattan. They were literally changing tapes in the machine. We got cable and MTV in the summer of 1982. They still had few sponsors and you got somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 straight minutes of video content, before VJ segments, commercials and news. Part of the reason you got non-chart toppers was that not every band was doing videos. Some bands didn't need them for promotion, since they were getting airplay; others needed the exposure that videos brought. The Go-Gos benefited greatly from "Our Lips Are Sealed" being played on things like Solid Gold and various entertainment shows. They hadn't shot one for "We Got the Beat," so one was taken from a concert. After that, they shot videos for all of their singles. Some of the early stuff I recall seeing, at the dawn of their second year included a band called Steel Breeze, with this video...  Then, there was stuff like Romeo Void, The Waitresses, Todd Rungren's Utopia, Devo, Adam & the Ants and the post-breakup Adam Ant, the Police, Rush, Triumph, Quarterflash, Juice Newton, Kim Carnes, Pete Townsend, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Asia, The Motels and The Tubes. Pat Benatar had a few actual videos and then concert footage from her HBO concert ("Promises in the Dark" and at least one other). I recall that about the only black artist, other than Michael Jackson, was John Butcher Axis, before Prince turned up. "Angel in the Morning" was on both the Country and Poop charts, back when that wasn't that unusual. newton mixed influences from both. She had some livelier stuff with "Queen of Hearts" and "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard on Me." Late 1982 into 1983 is when you see a lot of the New Romantic bands appearing on MTV and more American bands shooting videos, as there were starting to be more outlets for them, on network and cable. Sometime in '83 or 84 was when MTV started their "I Want My MTV" campaign, which got them on a ton of cable systems. Queen appeared quite a bit in the first couple of years, then it kind of thinned out, as they were touring outside the US, mostly, until the video for Highlander and the Live Aid concert. However, MTV would never air their later videos. |
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Post by Rob Allen on Jun 11, 2020 21:52:32 GMT -5
... the Country and Poop charts... Best. Typo. Ever. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 11, 2020 22:11:24 GMT -5
... the Country and Poop charts... Best. Typo. Ever. Just be glad I didn't screw up the other one! My new computer is a Lenovo and the keyboard is about 2/3 the size of my old HP (and the Dell's I use at work) and it drives me up a wall. I feel like I'm being squeezed, trying to type on it. My typos have gotten far worse. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jun 11, 2020 22:26:38 GMT -5
I was very young when MTV started, but it was a staple of my childhood. I watched videos a TON in the mid 80s... I always loved the ones that actually told a story, like Thriller, or Take on Me, or the fun graphic ones like Money for Nothing or any of the Peter Gabriel ones. Then there was Land of Confusion with the Croft puppets.. amazing stuff. It was always a treat when I got to stay up to watch Remote Control (which I remember my mom thinking was inappropriate). Then later Beevis and Butthead of course... I think everyone my age has done 'Cornholio' at least once in their life  . I really miss music videos. |
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Post by impulse on Jun 12, 2020 13:12:16 GMT -5
It's pretty interesting to go back and watch the very earliest music videos where it was clear they had no idea what to do with this new medium.
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Post by rberman on Jun 12, 2020 13:47:31 GMT -5
It's pretty interesting to go back and watch the very earliest music videos where it was clear they had no idea what to do with this new medium. Yes, it's fun to see the industry's use of this promotional tool evolve. I see three basic genres: (1) The concert film chopped up into individual songs; (2) The in-studio performance of an individual song; (3) Vignettes. #1 and #2 differ most significantly in their original intent and may be otherwise quite similar, though #2 allows for more elaborate staging and cinematography since it doesn't have to capture a performance in real-time. Examples of all of three types go back decades to film and TV. Some music videos hopped back and forth among the three within one presentation. MTV's main innovation was playing them back to back 24/7, intercut with commercials. The hunger for content and demonstrated audiences led record labels to invest in the medium. I wonder why videos fell out of favor as the 80s went on. If ratings were higher for videos, MTV would not have branched out into other content. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 12, 2020 19:26:21 GMT -5
I was very young when MTV started, but it was a staple of my childhood. I watched videos a TON in the mid 80s... I always loved the ones that actually told a story, like Thriller, or Take on Me, or the fun graphic ones like Money for Nothing or any of the Peter Gabriel ones. Then there was Land of Confusion with the Croft puppets.. amazing stuff. It was always a treat when I got to stay up to watch Remote Control (which I remember my mom thinking was inappropriate). Then later Beevis and Butthead of course... I think everyone my age has done 'Cornholio' at least once in their life . I really miss music videos. I think you mean the Spitting Image puppets.  I was so-so with Bevis & Butthead; a little went a long way. Liquid Television was a different story, with Aeon Flux, Grinning Evil Death, Art School Girls of Doom, Winter Steel, Stick Figure Theater, Pltymptoons, Brad Dharma, the Specials, Dog Boy, etc. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jun 14, 2020 13:51:10 GMT -5
those are the guys... I really thought that were from the Crofts... they had a show that was set in a bar, too, but maybe I'm wrong.
Liquid Television I was too young for at the time.. love Aeon Flux though (I have a DVD set of it somewhere around here)
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