I’m not generally a fan of music videos, but that one I like.
And of course, the bands would put the videos up on their web pages. This was before YouTube, so they had to use MySpace.
Pre-MTV, I’ve seen videos for Stayin’ Alive and How Deep Is Your Love? from the Bee Gees. They were concept videos, not live performances. I believe they also made one for Lonely Days.
Which inspired Weird Al’s ingenious parody/tribute Bob.
I remember seeing a video of the Style Council singing Wanted, on TV around 1987. Not sure if it’s thisone or not.
That’s not before MTV, though.
Circa 1966: (or 67 or 68, probably)
And some Beatles romps before that.
Very likely inspired by the Beatles and the Monkees, this is a 1968 promo video for Nazz’s “Open Your Eyes,” featuring a very young Todd Rundgren.
Wow, you’re right. Time flies…
Complete with faux Alan Ginsberg in the background…
And of course he used to star on a show with segments that could be considered music videos over a decade before that, as well.
Interestingly enough, Tony Bennett claims in his autobiography to have made the first music video–in 1956. He was filmed walking around a park in London, and the footage was tagged to his then current song “Stranger in Paradise”. The clip was distributed to TV stations in the US and UK, even getting airings on “American Bandstand”. By 1958 (according to old Billboard book) music videos were being made by several artists for airing on the then popular local dance show circut.
How about this video from 1939 of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli?
The real question is what is a music video? A German cartoonist was running silent cartoons accompanied by a piano back in the 20’s. The Fantasia DVD claims he was the inspiration for the Toccata and Fugue in D Major segment.
I remember a couple of shows that featured what I think of now as a music video; American Bandstand-ish; we’re talking late 60s/early 70s. Some in my brain were more film set to music (I recall one of Crimson & Clover featuring a couple motorcycles busting dunes) and some more professional concert footage (Jefferson Airplane and some early Tull). The names of the shows escape me but I want to say one was Saturday evening and another more in the afternoon.
Absolutely. Many bands produced what we would definitely consider to be “music videos” (though they were shot on film) for AB and for similar shows, like Where the Action Is (also a Dick Clark production, I believe). The Left Banke, Christie, and other more notable groups left us with some fairly decent videos from the mid and late 60s. Very few of them were from actual live performances, and many of them are rather artistic, though they almost always included some sort of lip-synched performance sequences.
Don’t Look Back, where it comes from, is from 1967 but the video was recorded in 1965.
The extras on the DVD of I’m Not There have all the actors playing the aspects of Dylan reproducing the video.
There were equivalents of music videos from as early as 1926. Indeed, as early as 1894 there were people projecting images on a screen to accompany a live performance. As early as 1940, there were juke boxes that played a short movie along with a song:
The first i remember was George Harrison’s “Crackerbox Palace” around 1976, a kinda weird video created in collaboration with Eric idle. It freaked me out as a child. In the 70’s there a few music shows that would come on late on the weekends that would show videos (Midnight Special, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, In Concert).
In the late 60s Dick Clark had afternoon shows called It’s Happening/Happening '68. The later version had Mark Lindsay and Paul Revere as hosts with their band Paul Revere and the Raiders. They did some bits set to their songs that got repeated over the series. Gotta fill the time somehow.
So, basically music videos.