I Want My Antique MTV

Nothing satisfies quite like a raw feed from a mundane moment in history. In this case, a random posting from the excellent music blog Idolator sent me into a three-hour fugue state.

An early MTV viewer with fastidious and deeply geeky archiving tendencies recorded three hours of footage from the music video network — with commercials — in 1983, and apparently preserved his VHS or Beta tape with quality standards worthy of a museum. It is now lodged in Google Video for viewing by incredulous future generations.

It is a safe bet that I was there during those three hours, splayed in front of the old Sony Trinitron with a bowl of chips balanced on my bony chest, mainly because MTV arrived just in time to help chart my course. If I had a free minute back then, the old plastic switchbox from Green Country Cable got switched to Channel 26, provided there wasn’t an R-rated movie playing on The Movie Channel.

So watching 25-year-old footage from a station that continues to exist in name only triggered some long-dormant sense memories: I seemed to know too well which clip of a horrid soft-rock hit was coming up next on an ad for Sessions Records’ not-available-in-stores “Greatest Hits Album,” and did not need to be told why Safeguard is “the smallest soap in the house.” I could call out the shots on Huey Lewis and the News’ “Heart and Soul” video as if I had personally drawn up the storyboard. Sick.

But here are a few artifacts dredged up by this video journey that even the sharpest mind is unlikely to recall.

The short-lived phenomenon that was 1-800-HOT-ROCK. I’m certain that even back in 1983, that sounded like porn. “Now, you can buy the hottest records and tapes anytime, just by calling 1-800-HOT-ROCK,” the announcer promises while flogging the second
Asia album for $6.99. That wasn’t even a bargain back then.