Music Videos

I’m trying to remember the first music videos I ever saw. I don’t mean live performances of artists on shows like Ed Sullivan, Shindig, Hullabaloo, and the like. I mean a special film that is released to accompany a record. I keep going back in my mind to the traumatic (for some) event in late 1966 when the Ed Sullivan show announced that the Beatles would be appearing on it. People in general (including my family) assumed that we’d see them on stage, either on the set or from England, performing a couple of their latest releases. But what we got instead was completely unexpected! The video for Strawberry Fields Forever depicted the Beatles acting totally weird, running backwards, jumping in and out of trees, and taking turns leering at the camera. But worst of all---say it ain’t so---they all wore moustaches! It was indeed quite a traumatic event for my family and me. I believe that it was the very showing of this video on Ed Sullivan that evening which began to turn my parents away from the Beatles. The tamer Penny Lane video, with the band riding around on horses for some reason (but still with moustaches), was also shown during this episode. From then on, artists began to gradually use the medium of videos more to market their products. In 1968, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, guitarist Mason Williams appeared on the show with a dazzling video, depicting a rapid-fire succession of still imagery, for his hit Classical Gas. For the next few years, videos were there, but mainly in the background and underused. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1970s when I began to see them dramatically increase. Shows like Saturday Night Live then often featured bands such as the Eagles or Foreigner by showing special videos made for their hits. By 1981, of course, the genre had grown to the point that a new cable television network, MTV (Music TV) began an all-video programming schedule. In the summer of 1983, Ted Turner got into the act for a while with a weekend show on his TBS Superstation devoted to music videos (when they weren’t showing late Atlanta Braves baseball games, that is). It was while watching this show (whose title eludes me now) that I became very taken with videos. Turner’s show featured several acts played nowhere else, such as Kid Creole and the Coconuts, the Belle-Stars, Shakin’ Stevens, and the English Beat. The show was thick with videos, and the commercials were few and far between. Ah-h-h, those were the good old days!. I decided that getting MTV added to my cable TV service was a big deal in the summer that year, and they were pretty good, too. For a while. Then, the commercials seemed to keep getting longer and larger in number. The V-J’s (video jockeys) kept talking longer and longer between videos, and by the end of 1983, it was becoming more and more difficult for me to watch MTV for very long at a sitting. Then, Michael Jackson, after enjoying such phenomenal success with his album Thriller that year (along with the great videos for Billy Jean and Beat It), decided to embark on a short movie video project based on the title track. The showing of Thriller was an exclusive deal between Jackson and MTV, and they completely saturated their programming with showings of it or advertisements about it. But after driving me crazy with that, they weren’t satisfied and began showing and reshowing a feature they made titled The Making of Thriller. Well, I was by then getting close to calling it quits with MTV altogether. For then Michael Jackson came out with his notorious Pepsi commercial. Can you guess what happened? Yeah, MTV went nuts showing that as well. But wait, I’m not through! As utterly incredible as it may seem, this increasingly sorry network pulled off the abomination of all abominations: The Making of Michael Jackson’s Pepsi Commercial, which they, of course hyped and showed relentlessly. After that, if I remember correctly, I still kept MTV on my cable service (it was a package deal, anyway, and I liked some of the other stations) for a while. But when I did finally cancel my cable service later in 1984, I didn’t miss MTV at all. Nowadays, of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find music videos on any of their stations. And, quite frankly, most of the videos that come out these days are pretty sorry anyway.

But I’ll always have fond memories of that period in mid-to-late 1983 when music videos ruled my TV set! It’s too bad the programmers and big shots in charge couldn’t recognize a good thing when they saw it!