Whilst channel surfin, I’ll come across one of those 30-minute Time-Life oldies CD collections (most recently hosted by Barry “Greg Brady” Williams). During the infomercial, they’ll reel off the names of 100+ songs and artists included in the set. For most of those, they’ll show some TV appearance of said act. Well, why not release a DVD set of those performances?
Since those performances were all likely lip-synched and broadcast in mono, it would be easy to remaster them with the stereo original.
I think it would be great to see all those hideous outfits and haircuts from the 70s.
Any takers?
I don’t have any inside info on it, but I suspect the reason why there are no video complations like this is over mechanical rights and publishing royalties. Many of the clips you see were taped on one TV show or another. The show may never have been in syndication. At this late date, many of the people involved may be dead. One network or holding company may own the video, another record or holding company the audio, another publisher the composition. Trying to clear the rights to release this material may be near impossible, logistically and financially. It would cost so much, the sales projections couldn’t come close to recovering the cost of buying permissions and manufacturing, or nobody could afford the DVDs.
I collect this stuff, having taped the clips off the TV. If there were commercially available DVDs of these video performances (a lot of them were not lip-synched), I’d be first in line with the bucks. I would give nearly anything to see Sugarloaf on “Midnight Special” doing “Green-Eyed Lady / Bach Doors Man / Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You” again, or Kraftwerk doing “Autobahn” on the same show (the synthesizers were all out of tune with each other by the time they were done). But you just can’t buy the clips anywhere.