Warner saw potential here for selling movies to individual homes on a pay-per-view basis the few dozen channels offered were groundbreaking at the time where the norm was three network stations tops, and maybe a few more on UHF. and American Express) was launching a cable television system called QUBE in Columbus, Ohio. Although this had been done before (by UCLA film grad Jim Morrison and the Doors, for one) it was still more the exception than the rule.Īround the same time, Warner Amex (just what it sounds like: a joint venture between Warner Bros. While traveling in New Zealand – about which more later – it occurred to Nesmith that there might be a future in making and airing promotional video clips to sell records (or cassettes). In terms of production values it is what it is, but its backstory is noteworthy.
Said company produced a short promotional film for the above song, 1977’s Rio. (Not his father, but his mother as for Liquid Paper itself, ask your parents.) After the Monkees broke up in 1970, Nesmith continued to make music and formed a company called Pacific Arts. The bearded gentleman is Michael Nesmith, born to and raised by the inventor of Liquid Paper. Specifically, the one known as “Wool Hat”. Saturday nights in late 1980 and early 1981, it aired on Nickelodeon in one-hour blocks – starting at 11:30 E/10:30 C, usually the channel’s final offering before it shut down (!) for the evening.Īnd ultimately, we have a Monkee to thank for it. Popclips was a half-hour of music videos presented from a California studio, presented by a prototypical “VJ” against a backdrop of soundproofing material and circa-1980 computer graphics. It is about the only audio-visual evidence I have seen or heard in a very long time that serves to document the existence of Popclips.īefore MTV, before TBS’ Night Tracks, before NBC’s Friday Night Videos, before HBO’s Video Jukebox – indeed, before HBO even became a 24-hour network, or ten – there was Popclips. It was recorded from a television, several months before MTV welcomed you to rock and roll and the world was never quite the same and so on and so forth. The takeaway here is that it wasn’t recorded from a radio speaker. It contained about a dozen songs, as well as some background noise, an unplanned gap of some six minutes, and some inadvertent singing along (again: single-digit grade school kid). It’s marked with the date Janu– a Saturday night during the final weeks of the Carter administration. Of course, I wouldn’t actually achieve anything like this for another few years yet, but there existed for some time in the house where I grew up an old Ampex audiocassette. In 1981, this would have been a revolutionary thing for any single-digit grade school kid. At least until the tape broke, you accidentally recorded over it, learned how magnets worked, etc. The result of this chain of events: once you fast-forwarded or rewound to just the right spot, you could hear this particular song any damn time you wanted.
nothing else unforeseen happened (ambient noise making it onto the tape, running out of tape a few seconds too early, interrupted by external forces, loud people walking into the room, etc.).you were quick enough on the record button, and the aforementioned DJ didn’t talk over the song (or if he was a skilled DJ, right up to where the vocals cut in) leaving you with a clean copy of the whole song.the human being on the other end of the radio transmitter heard your request in the first place, and responded favorably.The song in question was current enough that one of your local radio stations could be expected to play it (nothing too obscure, please, and definitely nothing that could be construed as obscene).“The best” in this case meant all of these things happening: Provided you weren’t fortunate enough to have a proper boombox, or your radio and cassette tape player weren’t contained in one unit, you held your cassette recorder (itself nearly the size of a small laptop) up to the radio for four minutes and hope for the best. In the dark days before file sharing or compressed audio – indeed, long before any of us had access to digital music of any kind – there was one reliable way for you to hear a song without actually buying it (until the mid-80s, this translated into blowing 8 or 9 bucks on the cassette on which it was found).
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