Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
If I remember correctly, Afterimage was done for a compilation of videos they put out at around that time, I think it was called The Camera Eye or something like that. If I remember correctly, it had Vital Signs, Subdivisions, Countdown, Distant Early Warning, Afterimage, and probably both The Body Electric and The Enemy Within. Keep in mind, I'm quoting what I remember from renting the VHS more than 30 years ago at the video store that used to be at Cedar Center (it might have still been an Erol's at the time, before they got bought out by Blockbuster), so I'm probably leaving something out.
But I remember the back cover had a blurb identifying Afterimage as being exclusive to the video release (i.e. it wasn't being shown on TV at the time, and I don't remember ever seeing it on TV). It also referred to Vital Signs as "rarely seen", which can't be right because I remember MTV playing that video a lot in the early days.
As has been said, MTV did play Distant Early Warning a lot, and I remember once or twice seeing either The Enemy Within or The Body Electric, on MTV. There was one about a guy escaping from some sort of enforced labor camp or whatever.
I've always the selection of videos MTV played or didn't play, or put into heavy rotation or didn't, curious, and Rush is a good example. As I said, I remember seeing Vital Signs a lot. The other two videos they did for Moving Pictures, I don't ever remember seeing on MTV, though I've been told they were played at some point. Limelight I think I saw on Radio 1990, which was a circa 1982-1984 music show that aired on the USA Network, hosted by Lisa Robinson, who was a well known music journalist at the time. But I don't think I even knew there was a video for Tom Sawyer until sometime in the 21st century, either I saw it on VH-1 Classic or on Youtube.
But something MTV did air a lot was some of the clips from the Exit...Stage Left video, specifically Limelight, Tom Sawyer, and Red Barchetta, the latter two with the first few seconds (where one of the band members is talking a bit) snipped off. I remember they had them chyroned as "An MTV Concert" instead of the album or EP title they usually listed at the beginning and end of the videos.
So it's funny to me that they played the live clips of Tom Sawyer and Red Barchetta but not the studio versions. And they were playing them a lot later than you'd expect, because somewhere I have a cassette I made of one such broadcast, of Red Barchetta, via the FM stereo hookup we had, and we didn't get that until 1983 or 1984, after we moved. I don't know how many years it was before I realized that song had a longer intro than what MTV usually aired.
I remember a retrospective thing on the history of MTV being done for one of their anniversaries, and I Think it's Kurt Loder or someone like that saying, "I can remember watching MTV when it first started, thinking, 'They should be playing more videos than this'". But it's weird to me that there were a lot of videos they either only played a little bit, or not at all. Queen was another band where there were a lot of videos they weren't playing. I mean, they were playing Bohemian Rhapsody (presumably because the original Greatest Hits album had just come out), but not (apparently) any of the other 70's era Queen videos, and even the new stuff at the time, the only Hot Space video I remember seeing was Calling All Girls. OK, I know they probably couldn't show Under Pressure, but what's the excuse for not showing Back Chat?
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