MTV

MTV is awful in this day and age, but at one time I watched quite a bit of it – back in the silent commercial days. I was just a kid. My dad brought a box home one day to attach to the top of the TV. You would punch buttons and get like 8 more channels - pre-cable. I had heard about a 24 music channel called MTV. We hooked the box up and I hunted for MTV… The first video I saw was Romeo Void “Never Say Never…”

“I might like you better if we slept together/ 
But there's somethin'
 in your eyes that says
 / Maybe that's never
 / Never say never…”

I’ll never forget that moment. MTV was better than I had imagined. But, my mom - Irish Catholic and annoying - was in the room with me, so I had to act like I wasn’t interested in the video. In truth, it was all I could think about. Funny thing: I never saw the Romeo Void video again on MTV - or anywhere else for that matter (until years later on You Tube). It took me years to track down the name of the band and song.

I did see other cool things on MTV in the early days - Eddie Grant, David Bowie, Pat Benatar, the Pretenders, DEVO, Blondie, Duran Duran (Girls on Film and Rio videos in particular– yeah, I thought the boat shit was cool at the time - still like the keys/synths from Nick Rhodes in general), and a handful of other things. That first year or so of watching MTV introduced me to a bunch of music that I didn’t know anything about – being a kid from the sticks who was literally listening to Styx.

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