Taping Music Videos

An email exchange yesterday with Ryan brought the memory of staying up late in high school, watching the latest music videos on VHS. Did anybody else do this?

In 1983 MTV has not yet penetrated 99% of American households. Most of us got our music video fix from Ted Turner. That's right, I said Ted Turner. Back in the day when most TV stations signed off with the national anthem at 1 AM, TBS would run music videos all night on Friday and Saturday nights. We would set the VHS up to tape all night, then watch the videos at our leisure, over and over again.

This became particularly important when I moved overseas in the fall of 1983. Armed Forces Radio is not know for being cutting edge. We were cut off from pop culture. Today I would consider that a good thing. At 16 years of age, not so much. The only way we had to keep up with the music scene was video. We had relatives in the US tape 6 hour chunks of TBS and MTV and mail the tapes to us on Kwajalein.

You young kids with your Youtube and video Ipods really have no idea how good you have it ;) Sharing a video with a friend back then meant 20 minutes of searching the VHS tape to find it first. And when you found it, it was grainy VHS, in mono.