The 16th music video to be played on MTV on August 1st, 1980 was also the first heavy metal song to ever be played on the network. Appropriately enough, the song and the band performing it were both named Iron Maiden.
This is a performance clip, taken from Live At The Rainbow. It was not easy to find this video on YouTube. Doing a search for “Iron Maiden music video” returned a lot of results, none of which were this one. Finally, I had to go with “Iron Maiden 1980.” To the best of my knowledge, this is the video that was played on MTV.
The 15th song to be broadcast on MTV on August 1st, 1980 was this video for Rod Stewart’s cover of Sailing. There were actually two videos shot for this song. The first video featured Stewart sailing outside of Dublin. The version that aired on MTV was shot at New York Harbor.
MTV’s first broadcast day was August 1st, 1981. On that day, they aired 116 music videos. The 14th of those videos was a performance clip for April Wine’s Just Between You And Me. It was taken from April Wine’s concert film, LiveinLondon, and it was the first video by a Canadian band to be aired on MTV.
Unfortunately, that’s not the video that is at the top of this post. The clip of the LiveinLondon performance is not available on YouTube. (You can, however, watch LiveinLondon in its entirety if you want to.) So, the video above is from another concert that occurred around roughly the same time. This was one was filmed at a 1982 concert at the Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“That was a major moment for me. It was my first foray into co-writing. Kalodner said, ‘You did great with ‘Rockin’ into the Night,’ I want to put you together with Don Barnes and Jeff Carlisi of .38 to see what you can do.’ That first night, Jeff and Don are at my house in La Grange, Illinois and we’re sitting around the kitchen table. Writing sessions are always like blind dates: It’s like making love without the foreplay. Suddenly you’re sitting there face to face, and you’re thinking, ‘OK, what do we do now? Am I going to embarrass myself? What if my ideas suck?’ So we’re sitting there nervously, just making small talk, and all of the sudden Jeff says, ‘I’ve got this lick,’ and he starts with the opening lick of what became ‘Hold on Loosely.’ I go, ‘That’s really neat,’ and Don says, ‘I’ve got this title – ‘Hold On Loosely,” and I go, ‘Yeah, but don’t let go.’
My wife of 32 years now, this is what broke us apart when we were teenagers – I was getting too close. I was getting too serious for her. She didn’t say, ‘Hold on Loosely,’ but that’s what was in her heart. So when Don said ‘Hold on Loosely,’ I immediately knew what he was talking about. He wasn’t even talking about that exactly, he told me later, he just thought it was a cool title.
I immediately saw a story, and it was really my own story. I said, ‘Jeff, play that riff.’ He plays the riff, and I start singing: ‘You see it all around you, good loving gone bad.’ It just started coming. I turned on the tape recorder and said, ‘Guys, I think we have something here.’ We got the stalk of the song in the next two days, then I fine-tuned it in the next two or three weeks. I flew down to Jacksonville where the band was rehearsing and basically worked out the song with them down there.”
— Jim Peterik, on co-writing Hang On Loosely
Jim Peterik was also the keyboardist for Survivor and that band, which was still looking for its first hit, were initially not happy that their keyboardist had written a hit song for another band.
HangOnLoosely was such a hit that the video for it, a simple performance clip, was the 13th video aired on MTV on August 1st, 1980, their first day of broadcast. Fortunately, a performance clip was all the song needed because the .38 Special could really play!
The 12th music video to play on MTV on August 1st, 1981, their first day of broadcast, was the video for HistoryNeverRepeats by Split Enz.
This video feels much more like a “typical” MTV video than some of the other videos that were aired on that day. Though the emphasis is on Split Enz performing, there’s still a slight narrative. In the 80s, there were several music videos that were set up to appear as if they might the lead singer dreaming about a song. As well, the video celebrates the nerd chic that would dominate MTV’s early rotation before being replaced by hair metal (which, itself, was later replaced by grunge which was replaced by pop which was replaced by hip hop which was replaced by reality programming).
Director Noel Crombie was a member of Split Enz. Following the band’s break-up, he’s gone on to have a successful career as a freelance designer.
There’s a lot of people making fun of the lawn mower simulator right now but I just watched the trailer and I’m ordering.
Yes, the trailer make it look like LawnMowingSimulator just a game about mowing lawns but we all know what the game is really about. How many weird pictures can you mow in the grass before the homeowner comes home and figures out what you’re doing? How many sticks and stones can you run your lawn mover over before you have to replace the blade? Is your lawnmower powerful enough to destroy a pair of roller skates? If you accidentally clip the neighbor’s yard, do you even it out or do you just play innocent and say you have no idea how that happened?
I did some research and I discovered that this game is not just about lawns. It’s also a business simulator, where you build your landscaping business from the ground up. You get chances to upgrade your lawnmower and there’s also mini-games involving trying to find and remove objects from the yard before you actually start cutting the grass.
The 11th music video to play on MTV on August 1st, 1980, the network’s first broadcast day, was When Things Go Wrong by Robin Lane and the Chartbusters.
This song and video are may not be as well-known as some of the other videos that aired that day but, in many ways, the video for When Things Go Wrong does predict what would become the standard MTV music video. As opposed to the performance clips that most bands of the era used as music videos, this video tells a story, complete with horses, ships at sea, and gothic cliffsides that look like something out of Wuthering Heights. This is the type of narrative video that would largely replace the stodgy performance clips of the past.
According to Styx’s Dennis DeYoung, this song was meant as a “working class take on what was wrong in America.”
it was also the first song on the Paradise Theater album. The Paradise was a real theater in Chicago. It opened in 1928 and, after years of neglect, it was torn down in 1958. DeYoung saw a picture of the dilapidated Paradise in an art museum and he felt that it was the perfect metaphor for the end of the American dream. Hence, the album and this song.
And, for that matter, this video. The video opens with DeYoung on a stage that could very well have been in the Paradise Theater. He wears a white tuxedo, the type that would have been popular when the Paradise Theater first opened. Of course, once he joined onstage by the rest of Styx, the video becomes a fairly standard performance clip.
This was the 10th video to be played on MTV on August 1st, 1981, the network’s first day of broadcast.
The 9th music video to air on MTV on August 1st, 1981 was the video for REO Speedwagon’s Take It On The Run. However, due to technical difficulties, only 12 seconds of the video were aired before the Speedwagon was replaced by a black screen, which, to me, sounds like an improvement. Though MTV moved on to the next video, the video for Take It On The Run would eventually be aired two more times over the course of August 1st.
REO Speedwagon does have its fans. I’m not one of them but they are out there. This video was the type of concert clip that celebrated bands like REO Speedwagon in all of their light rocking glory.
Though it was not my original intention, it looks like I’m going to end up sharing every video that MTV aired on August 1st, 1981, its first broadcast day. Let’s keep things going with the 8th video that aired on that day, the video for Todd Rundgren’s Time Heals.
Though it was never as big a hit as some of his other songs, Time Heals was a very personal song for Rundgren. He wrote it while he was still dealing with two traumatic events. First, he and his girlfriend were the victims of a violent home invasion in August of 1980. Just a few months later, he learned that, before the assassination of John Lennon, Mark David Chapman made a trip to Rundgren’s home town of Woodstock, New York. Before fixating on Lennon, Chapman was reportedly obsessed with Rundgren and there was much speculation that Rundgren was Chapman’s original target. The song was about how Rundgren needed time to heal all of those recent traumas.
Rundgren produced this video with the music that he made from producing Meat Loaf’s Bat Out ofHell. At the time, expensive music videos, like this one, were unusual. Though it may not longer seem so, this was considered to be very avant-garde for 1981. At that time, most music videos were just performance clips, often lifted from concert films or TV appearances. MTV would soon change that forever.
Through the Shattered Lens 