![]() “My plan had always been to build it and sell it,” Nesmith said. Lack wanted more, but he also wanted to overhaul the program, give it more of a professional, Top 40 vibe-and that’s when Nesmith bailed. Lack ended up giving PopClips a test run on Nickelodeon, where it proved to be an immediate hit with the kids. But eventually, Nesmith got an audience with John Lack, the chief operating officer of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company. They didn’t see how music could work on TV without live performances or dancing teenagers. The PopClips pilot proved a tough sell to television programmers who’d been raised on music shows like American Bandstand. They were the first video jockeys, or “veejays,” although it would be another few years before anyone would call them that. He hired comedians such as Howie Mandel, Charles Fleischer (the future voice of Roger Rabbit), and Jeff Michalski to introduce music clips and provide interstitial banter. Nesmith called his idea PopClips, and with financial backing from All in the Family creator Norman Lear, he turned it into a pilot in 1979. In Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Nesmith recalls that he hit upon the idea for a show, or even a full-blown TV channel, dedicated to music videos. ![]() To Nesmith, the music video had the potential to be an entirely new medium of entertainment. ![]() He would later expand on this idea with 1981’s Elephant Parts, an hour-long medley of music clips and comedy sketches that went on to win the first-ever Grammy for Video of Year (the forerunner of today’s Best Music Video and Best Music Film categories). Nesmith recognized that songs can create their own impressionistic narratives through even the most disconnected images (and if you can have some photogenic women dancing around you, all the better). Still, “Rio” was groundbreaking because it showed how “out there” those videos could be: they didn’t need to just be live performances committed to tape. Nesmith would call his “Rio” clip the “first music video,” though everyone from The Beatles to Queen to Cab Calloway would probably take issue with that. Instead, Nesmith and director William Dear created a surrealist montage of disjointed images: black and white shots of a tuxedo-clad Nesmith, crooning into a microphone Nesmith dancing with a woman in a red dress Nesmith soaring through space, held aloft by ladies wearing giant, Carmen Miranda–esque fruit hats. The record label wanted a nice promotional clip of Nesmith singing along to the music, like the kind that was in many of the Monkees episodes. Take the video for “Rio,” from his 1977 solo album, From a Radio Engine to the Photon Wing. Once he did, he set down a defiant path of always doing the most uncommercial thing he could think of. He was an actual musician and songwriter who couldn’t wait to break free of his contract. Their very existence predicted the way personality would take precedence over artistry in the MTV age. ![]() Their songs were accompanied by short proto–music videos-and in the beginning, with a few exceptions, the Monkees didn’t write their own music or even play their own instruments. You likely remember Nesmith from the Monkees, the made-for-television rock band whose eponymous show could be today regarded as a precursor to MTV. A place like Texas may as well have not existed-which is ironic, considering that, without the Houston-born and Dallas-raised Michael Nesmith, MTV itself might never have existed. Drawing from a limited well of videos, those first hours were dominated by just a handful of artists, many of them from New York and England. Yet for a worldwide phenomenon, the channel had an incredibly narrow scope. Perhaps more importantly, the image implied that MTV’s premiere was a global event, uniting the whole world in awe (even if its initial hours were only broadcast in New Jersey). Plus, what better way to capture the upstart ethos of MTV than ripping some photos from the public domain, then slapping rock guitar over them? The debut of a cable channel devoted exclusively to playing music videos was-to its creators, at least-an epochal television moment, on par with that 1969 moon landing. There was a lot of symbolism in that image. Forty years ago this week, MTV launched with a graphic of astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon, planting an American flag, with the network’s neon logo replacing the stars and stripes. ![]()
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