Help me out with this, my recollection is a bit fuzzy.
Did music videos exist before MTV? In their modern form that is. I know The Beatles did musical short films, but were artists producing music videos as part of the promotional strategy of releasing a new album? I assume they did. If not, I bet it was really hard to get venture capital to launch MTV…“You want a million dollars to create a cable station to show only music videos? What is a music video?”
If they did make videos; What was the intended venue for the videos? I can remember staying up late on weekend nights to watch one-hour music vido shows on network TV as an early teenager. This seems like such a throw-away timeslot thought that it couldn’t have been the primary market for videos.
MTV launched in '81 which could mean my memories of late night network videos could have been in response to this new station’s mass appeal
Music videos in the modern sense of individual promotional items really started in Europe, the major reason that British bands dominated the early years of MTV. There were various programs that showed them regularly in Britain.
There were a few individual programs that featured videos in the U.S. even before MTV came along, including a couple that were hour-long compilations of video clips. I remember these late Saturday nights, and I even remember a couple of good Robert Palmer videos. These might be the same ones you’re thinking of.
You’ll get into a million arguments about the origin of music videos. For widespread influence, my candidates are the Beatle’s worldwide promotion of “All You Need Is Love;” the Monkees TV show; and the videos on the first few episodes of Laugh-In. Some of the later and better Monkees clips and the Laugh-In clips could be put in rotation today and not look very out of place.
A number of 70s artists took the ideas and created videos for their own projects, and Michael Nesmith of the Monkees tried to put a pre-MTV network together. But mostly a few progressive record companies were inspired/bullied/influenced by their artists to start putting videos out, and these grew from each other until they hit critical mass.
In line with Expano Mapcase’s post, my first experience with music videos was in England. There was a program(me) on BBC called Top of the Pops which first aired on January 1, 1964. I don’t know about the programs in the 60s, but from 1973-77 when I saw it they had some live bands (mostly lip-synched) and a number of music videos. Many of the effects, then considered state-of-the-art, would seem pretty lame by today’s standards. This was the same group that did the special effects for Doctor Who. When ABBA came out with their high quality productions they raised the standards for all others.
As best as I can tell from Googling, Top of the Pops is still being aired on TV.
When I was first exposed to MTV in the early 80s, while everyone I knew was so amazed at the “new” music videos, I just thought “meh, I’ve seen this stuff for years.”
Music videos also popped up in odd places here and there on cable TV in the late 1970s. E.g., HBO and Showtime would fill out slots between movies with music videos and shorts. I.e., stuff they paid little or nothing to air. (I miss those days.) So the catalog of videos was growing leading up to the launching of MTV.
As noted, a lot of the videos were British/Aussie. So a lot of “Disco” Rod Stewart. That’s also where I got my copy of Pat Wilson’s “Bop Girl” which has a then little known Aussie actress as one of the bridesmaids.
Geez rainy, you make me feel old. There were plenty of music video clips pre MTV. When we were kids in the late 70’s, we religiously sat up in our pyjamas on a Sunday night and watched Countdown videos. Before that was GTK and Bandstand, but I suppose they were more just recorded live performances.
This is going very cafe, but I suppose you could call Elvis’ Jailhouse Rock a video and that was released in 1957. OK not a modern video in the sense of a pastiche of edited together images, but it did have a theatrical setting and lots of camera work going on. It looked designed to be played over and over, rather than a one off performance.
Music videos date back to sound films. There were many short subjects that involved artists singing their songs. They were used just like MTV: to promote the artist and his latest song.
Into the rock era, Ricky Nelson did music videos at the end of Ozzie and Harriet for the same reason.
What about Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” visualization (not video, strictly speaking, it was film) which appeared in the movie Don’t Look Back? It was parodied twice, and parodied hilariously both times, in the movie Bob Roberts and on Weird Al’s TV show.
The first actual videotaped music videos I remember seeing on American TV were (of course) British. They were promotional videos of two songs from George Harrison’s album 33 1/3 in 1976 — “True Love” and “Crackerbox Palace.”
Everybody remembers the Beatles with their “All You Need Is Love” televised event, but they also made little-known promotional shorts for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Hey Jude.” The former was a bit of moody surrealistic cinema à la Buñuel. The latter was just the band playing (most of it was nothing but a closeup of McCartney’s face, I guess it’s obvious who directed that one). Has anyone else ever seen these?
In the early 1950’s, the timing of television programs was not precise. Sometimes filmed musical performances were played to fill in at the end of a show if it ran short. I seem to remember that some of these were mariachi bands.
I seem to remember “Video Jukebox” as an HBO timekiller between movies. I don’t recall if it predated MTV or not. It was certainly before MTV became widely available.
Occasional venues for music videos on American television included music shows American Bandstand, Shindig! (1964-66), Hullabaloo (1965-66), Where the Action Is (1965-74), The Midnight Special (1972-83), and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (1973-81). Even The Ed Sullivan Show, TV’s top variety hour, showed music videos by the Beatles after they stopped doing live performances.
I was going to post about this show, too. I remember them playing “Don’t Put Another Dime in the Jukebox” by The Flirts and “Cruisin” by Mike Nesmith. So there wasn’t a lot of great stuff out there at the time.
I also remember “America’s Top Ten” TV show with Casey Kasem showing a couple of videos during his show around the same time.
We didn’t get MTV until Sept. 1982, so we missed most of the first year. The only time we got to see it during the early days was when we visited our cousins and we’d spend the entire weekend watching it. All they had were Pat Benetar, Rod Stewart, Hall and Oates, and Styx. I remember even seeing a Cliff Richard video during that time. It was horrible. Soon after that, the British bands started making videos and we had Talk Talk, Human League, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, The Cure, etc. It was a pretty exiting time and I’m glad I got to see the whole thing unfold.
Whoops, sorry about that, definitely not my intention. Goodness knows nobody needs that feeling.
Thanks to all the UK Dopers. I had never known that the medium spent so much of its youth there. But now that I think of it, most all the 60-70s era stuff I’ve seen had that BBC / Doctor Who look to it.
I guess having lived out in the boonies, I was completely unaware of the HBO usage of videos as filler. That makes perfect sense though; short duration, no context needed.
You guys are awesome. Thanks for the info.
Well, there was a quick reference to Mike Nesmith’s “Cruisin” by Nutty Bunny above, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Nesmith’s Elephant Parts, released in 1981, won the first Grammy for Video, of course, but there are countless websites that document that Nesmith sold his idea of a all-music video channel to Warner, and they changed it to MTV. Just Google “Mike Nesmith” MTV for them.
And I heard Todd Rundgren in an interview complain about MTV during its early years. He said he’d been making videos as an art form for years, and would never have considered using them as advertisement for albums. Sadly, I have no cite on that quote.
I do remember seeing some (very few) videos on “Midnight Special” and such when I was a kid, and even saw a few on early cable-movie channels. Videos did exist before MTV, but they were few and far between.
We should be making a distinction between music videos and “filmed” (on any medium) performances of people making music.
Ricky Nelson just got up and sang in front of the cameras at the end of Ozzie and Harriet, IIRC. The Beatles filmed performances that Ed Sullivan played. There are lots of these examples, but none of them qualify as music videos, IMO.
You can go even farther back in history and discover Soundies, a film jukebox that was in place during WWII. This was followed by a number of devices, including the French Scopitone and the Italian Cinebox.
If you go to an obsessive site, like Danish Jukebox Archives, you can discover lists of thousands of 16mm and Super8 films made for these “video” jukeboxes.
On the flip side, music set to imaginative foregrounds, not just people signing and playing instruments, was a part of movie-making since the beginning of sound films (and technically before, with orchestras playing the music for silents). Busby Berkeley is the grand innovator of music videos in this sense, and all true fanatics are waiting for the (reputedly soon) DVD release of The Gang’s All Here, with the amazing and bizarre Technicolor Banana Dance with Carmen Miranda.
Music videos were a form that was just waiting to be rediscovered, updated, and married to modern technology. There is no magic moment in their history. They just evolved gradually until one day we woke up and they were everywhere. Sorta like mammals.
A false distinction, in my opinion. A large percentage of music videos that you see today on MTV and VH1 are just that, performances for the camera.
Ricky Nelson’s performance of Travelin’ Man can be considered a conceptual video, showing locations around the world over footage of Nelson singing the tune.
Not true of Nelson – when he did “Traveling Man,” it included video of various foreign cities.
And most MTV videos in the beginning were just films of the bands playing. There were a few that showed more, but in the first year I’d say over 75% of the videos were just videos of performances.
