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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