Post #246248 by donhonyc on Wed, Aug 2, 2006 5:37 AM

But it was 1979 that sticks in my mind. I had my own small television in my bedroom, which I had redeemed for coupons earned by talking people into subscribing to the Daily Breeze newspaper. Late at night, when I couldn't sleep I would turn on the TV and there, on some obscure midnight show, would be David Bowie's "I Am A DJ" video with the shocking (to me) scene of Bowie kissing some guy on the lips that he passed on the street. I was amazed and hooked on the music video format from then on. David Bowie made it easy with otherworldly videos like the 1980 Ashes to Ashes, which was so creative and hallucinatory to me at the time, that it inevitably spoiled me for the repetive pap that MTV became only a year or two after its premiere.

That's got to be one of the best descriptions of David Bowie videos from that time that I have ever read.

I have very similar experiences in those pre-MTV years as well when videos in the form we would know them later in the 80s, were popping up here and there. Around 1978 or 79 I remember going to a local hi-fi store where they had big screen TVs playing Rod Stewart videos continuously, but even more interestingly I remember going to a Musicland record store in the mall where they had a monitor set up in some fancy free-standing unit called the 'Videotron 3000' or something like that. I remember standing there, all of 12 or 13 years old and being glued to the thing as it played videos with a host talking in between the songs much like the VJs on MTV would do later on. The videos they played were 'Babe' from Styx, and more mindblowingly 'I'm Bored' by Iggy Pop and an incredibly quirky video from Mike Nesmith formerly of the Monkees from his album 'Infinite Rider on the Big Dogma' called (I think) 'Cruisin'. Standing there watching the Iggy and Nesmith videos were like 'here's your mind..here's your mind completely blown to smithereens.'

And like you Sabu, I had the same experience watching David Bowie videos around the same time. One night on the Midnight Special (which ran every Friday night after Johnny Carson on NBC), they ran the 'DJ' and 'Boys Keep Swinging' videos from Bowie's 'The Lodger' album which had just come out. Not only was I shocked at the content of those videos, I think I was actually scared. But scared in a good way, I didn't want to turn them off. Particularly in 'Boys Keep Swinging' when Bowie is dressed in drag as three different women, and walks a fashion show type runway, takes off his wig and smears the lipstick he's wearing. FUCKED UP!! The concepts in both of these represented alot of what was going on in those days in music videos. Total free-form content with crude imagery that broke all narrative boundaries and challenged whatever ideas you may have had about regular day-to-day living. As a teenager someone like Bowie doing these things in videos was a wierd and very exciting thing.

But yeah...looking for videos before MTV was like a lost treasure hunt at times. I remember around that same 78-79 era staying up late into the night to watch a video show put on by one of the local radio stations in south Florida called K-102. The show was called 'K-102 Video Rock' and I remember one night hanging out trying to stay awake, just so I could see them play the 'Dream Police' video from Cheap Trick.

All this talk of days like that sounds so pre-historic with things like Youtube and stuff, these videos are all a database search away. That's great and all,but I did love those days when getting your mind blown was a relatively infrequent and precious thing.