My own MTV Show

Music Television on a Budget

Unless you were there, there is simply no way to explain the cultural MTV had on the masses. Describing it as a TV channel that showed music videos does nothing to convey the impact it has on people’s lives. Imagine if there were only one Spotify channel, and that channel was hosted by cool people who told you what was cool, and everybody in the whole country listened to it so you could literally travel all the way across the country and talk about that Spotify channel and they would be familiar with it. Even that undersells how integrated it was. Our clothes, our hair, our language, and of course our music all came from MTV.

And while a lot of Gen-Xers say they remember the golden era of MTV, I was there on day one. Literally, the first day — August 1, 1981. My dad had some sort of microwave antenna in our attic that picked up HBO for free, and on that day, the signal changed and became MTV. I know MTV because I watched it from the day it started until the day they introduced reality television programming and killed it.

As a kid, I imitated everything around me. That’s what kids do. I quoted Star Wars, I recited facts I read in magazines, and I mimicked everything I heard and saw on MTV. Before I talk about my own show, I have to make sure you’re familiar with at least the first few seconds of Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages”:

As the story goes, producer Mutt Lange was counting in the band before recording and instead of the traditional “one, two, three, four” he said “Gunter glieben glauten globen.” What does that even mean? Well, according to Mutt, it’s German-sounding gibberish, nothing more. Unfortunately in the 1980s, we didn’t have Google or Wikipedia or the internet. Instead, we had millions of teenagers asking each other what the heck was being said at the beginning of “Rock of Ages.” We didn’t even know it was Mutt Lange, or who Mutt Lange was. The prevailing theory was that the words were part of some sort of Satanic chant. The fear that an entire generation of kids were going to become Satan-worshipping maniacs by listening to top-40 music was a thing.

None of my kids knew what “gunter glieben glauten globen” meant, or even what was being said. But I loved that song, and the lead singer can be seen weilding a giant sword in the video for no reason which made it even cooler. And so the afternoon I set up our family’s video camera and decided to make my own MTV show, I named it The “Oobin Fleetin Floutin Globin Show”, which was phonetically as close as I could get to whatever was being said in “Rock of Ages.”

For some reason there was always a surplus of posterboard around our house.

So, what does an MTV program need? How about performances from musical guests? My nextdoor neighbor Doug played the role of the lead singer of Def Leppard. Now if you watched the music video above you saw that the lead singer of Def Leppard, Joe Elliott, is a very normal looking guy. For his portrayal of Joe Elliott, Doug dressed up in my old devil Halloween costume. The reason we did this is… no explanation, none. It’s just Dough, wearing my devil mask, my devil cape, and holding a plastic trident. Because that’s what Rock and Roll was, baby.

At this age I did not have a lot of cassettes, but I did own one that contained hits from several musicians. The tape had “Rock of Ages” by Def Leppard and it also had “Shadows of the Night” by Pat Benatar, who we were lucky enough to have as our second guest.

Man, there’s a lot to unpack here. First, that’s me. Why I chose to be Pat Benatar instead of Flock of Seagulls or Rick Springfield or any of the other musicians that appeared on the tape is beyond me. I’m wearing some wig my mom bought at a garage sale and a mask that I don’t remember owning. To pull off the look, I put on… my white karate gi — because what else would Pat Benatar wear? This whole thing is a great example of kid logic. Like, I’m sure all of this made sense in my dumb ten-year-old brain and yet… huh. It’s very confusing.

The close closed with a musical performance of “Mr. Roboto” by Styx. The background of the performance was provided by one of my mom’s quilt hanging over the ping-pong table Santa brought that temporarily lived in our living room. Of course my feet had a mind of their own and so occasionally I danced to the side to reveal our living room’s fireplace. I remember being quite upset that this “ruined the video,” as if the video was more authentic with me standing in front of a quilt. The lip-synched performance was quite heartfelt and I’m surprised Styx didn’t reach out to me to join their ranks.

Lots of kids did stuff like this. I just happened to be one who had access to a video camera. I also happened to be one who had parents who saved all those old tapes. I also happened to become a guy interested in archiving old analog content into digital format and preserving it. A lot of things had to fall in line for this footage to survive 45 years.

Sadly, YouTube and most other video hosting sites squash the video due to music copyright issues. I wish there were a good way to get exceptions for things like this.