I was gabbing with a friend last night about growing up in Smalltown
I grew up in a tiny village in rural
God it’s weird to think of how much things have changed since I was a kid.
Anyway, aside from being fed an interesting diet of vinyl from my uncle Walt, my source of cool music was the mainstream TV shows dedicated to playing music videos.
God it’s weird to think of how much things have changed since I was a kid. ;-)
My must-see TV was CBC’s half-hour after-school show Video Hits. Samantha Taylor. Platinum Blonde. Duran Duran. Van Halen. a-Ha. Lionel Richie. Man they played a lot of Lionel Richie. And they had that killer boombox you could enter to win by sending in a postcard with your name on it. I never won. But I never missed a show. Sometimes I even recorded the audio for songs I liked onto my dad’s little ghetto with the built-in mics.
I would also do my best to stay up on Friday nights too so I could watch Good Rockin’ Tonight, also on CBC. Because it was a late-night timeslot, they could afford to stretch out over an hour and have interviews with bands, more like what MuchMusic was doing.
(I still remember the interview Stu Jeffries, who was the host after Terry David Mulligan, had with Loverboy guitarist Paul Dean. Dean had just released a solo album on the heels of Loverboy “taking time off”, and was in the studio to be interviewed about it. When they came on the air after a commercial break, Jeffries was chuckling. He said, “We were just talking before coming back on the air, and Paul just said something really funny – tell us again, what do you think about keyboardists?” and a smirking, fro-headed Dean said, “Keyboards are like condoms. You only use them because you have to.” I’ve hated Dean ever since.)
Those shows were my window into an exciting world of music that existed far outside of earshot of my hometown.
In a way, I think the ability for bands (like us) to very cheaply produce our own videos now and post them on a globally-accessible “station” like YouTube is as groundbreaking as the very idea of music videos themselves back when the oddly square-but-cool Sam Taylor would hold class every day after school via a snowy PeasantView TV channel.
It’s also a little depressing to think that at a time when there’s more music video content than there’s ever been in the history of pop music, there are so few mainstream outlets to view them. It’s painfully obvious that music TV stations like MuchMusic and MTV have very little interest in playing music videos anymore, and big interest in being the celebrity gossip rags' answer to CNN. Most other mainstream networks don’t bother with music shows either. I can’t think of a single one, actually, that does.
Part of what made the early shows like Video Hits and Good Rockin’ Tonight great for me growing up was the fact they were hosted, and the hosts would guide you and introduce you to bands that you would otherwise never know about, sitting in a basement in smalltown rural
Still, I guess that’s all part of the big shift that’s afoot - people aren’t getting that kind of content on their TV, and that content is easily accessible on the web, so people are flocking to the web and traditional TV is struggling to adapt.
Hmm. If Samantha Taylor has a daughter, she should encourage her to host a Rocketboom-esque video podast introducing music videos, and post the episodes to YouTube. I’d tune in. Just make sure there’s a killer boombox you can enter to win. I’ll enter. I gotta win that thing one of these days!
cn
