It’s after midnight on a weekday at the Ritz. A thousand or so lower Manhattanites are talking and drinking beer and checking each other out as an English sex-rock troupe called Shock mimes some kind of bondage drama with swords onstage. The act ends in a plume of sulphurous black smoke to mild applause and a huge screen descends with regal slowness from the ceiling to the front of the stage. The house sound system starts pumping out The Clash's "Magnificent Seven," a tart rock tune that asks, "What do we have for entertainment?" and answers, “Cops kicking gypsies on the pavement." On the screen the Blob is ingesting the White House and there's panic in the streets. The torpid crowd is suddenly electrified. They dance and watch the screen at the same time, dance with the images on screen it seems, as the visuals shift to the swank party scene from "Midnight Cowboy" and the music shifts with it to feature the Funky Four Plus One rapping “That's The Joint!" The unassuming wizard choosing and projecting the video from a booth in the back is 20-year-old Christopher Dunham-one of the first of a new breed, the veejay.

Hurrah (formerly at 32 W. 62d St., shuttered since the end of May) set up the first "environmental video installation" in the fall of 1979—and baptized it with the world premier of the first rock videocassette, Blondie's “Eat to the Beat." And ever since, there's been a need for a new kind of artist to provide visual programming that would synch up with the arty but high energy dance music found in the city's rock clubs. Two years later, a new club doesn't dare open up without video monitors, and there are dozens of video jockeys, or veejays, running this equipment. It is their job to create the light shows of the '80s. 

The image is not exactly crystal clear, but it is better than any large screen action you might catch at the corner bar. This is the state of the art, and it helps to put things in perspective to know that video, according to Boston video artist Bill Sebastian, "in terms of its ability to reproduce the range of visual experience, has come about as far as sound reproduction in the 1920s.” In other words, it's young technology harnessed by even more youthful art.

The youth is marked by adventurousness. The city's rock veejays are plundering the entire span of existing movie and television footage, restitching the parts in whatever order pleases them, and going on to create the missing pieces themselves. Everything — from Astaire-Rogers musicals to Betty Boop cartoons, from vintage newsreels to Army training films, and from home-made scratch animation to rock films to shots of people dancing at the club at that moment is grist for the montage.

And, aware that exposure at the clubs translates into prime promotion, more and more record companies are producing videocassettes of the acts on their rosters performing their latest would be hits. More than ever, a group has to look good on screen as well as sound good. Indeed, the Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company has just launched MTV, music television, a national stereo cable station (not yet available in New York) that makes the meat of its programming recent videocassettes by rock's top 50. 

But the most innovative programming is being made in the clubs. It is there that the canny veejay pushes buttons he knows link right up with dark red bonus scorers in the minds of post-literate TV babies whose perceptual apparatus were long ago split-screened and flash-forwarded. 

A fair-haired, soft-spoken 22-year-old named Charles Libin is credited as the first veejay. Libin worked at Hurrah until May of 1980 and has since gone on to form his own production company. A film school drop out from Purchase College, Libin recalled having to get past thinking of TV as "a background medium" after he realized that “people were getting sort of bored with going into a club and just listening to music." His initial concept was to alternate music and video. At the time there were eleven small monitors hung above the dance floor and bar at Hurrah, and Libin soon noticed that presenting anything on TV in a public/social situation subverted it. "Showing a clip from the old Bonanza series out of context, and adding music, lent a funky, humorous edge to the original intention," he said.

That, of course, is the crux of the appeal and the challenge of the veejay's art; stripping an endlessly wide variety of popular program material from its original context and spontaneously linking it up with some new music to create new meaning and new entertainment. The collective unconscious is the veejay's playground. There are times, to be sure, when a successful juxtaposition may seem to be the result of pure luck, as when a Busby Berkeley chorus line high stepping atop a flying biplane's top wing is perfectly in time with the new single by Adam and the Ants. 

The veejays themselves, though, insist that the degree of cooperation between the veejay and the deejay is crucial to their success. "It can be an exciting exchange, but it takes a lot of intuition and sensitivity," 29-year-old Merrill Aldighieri explained. Merrill and her partner Joe Tripician worked at Hurrah before it shut down, in concert with deejay Bill Bahlman. "We can work together or we can work in opposite directions. It's all live improvisation, like a jam session."  Joe noted that the club used to be | mostly for dancing, that the video was meant "as a complement to the environment" there, and that, anyway, the fragmented nature of their video programming didn't require constant attention on the part of the dancer viewer. "You can get immediate gratification in two or three seconds," he said as he itemized the club's library of feedback tapes, scratch animation, found footage, comedies, and live tapes of the various bands who'd played at the club. Joe said he and Merrill only occasionally taped off of the TV. "We played the Reagan assassination attempt for awhile, but the stuff wore out," he said. “We usually erased it after a week or so."

No one's erased the name or the red and white candy-striping over at the Peppermint Lounge (122 W. 45th St.), but there's no hiding the fact that a lot's changed in the 20 years since Joe Dee and the Starlighters ruled that roost with "The Peppermint Twist," and the Beatles were dropping by to pay homage on their first visit to the city. These days, visiting pop royalty is more likely to be a member of the Talking Heads, and the entertainment puts the accent on video. “There is a hierarchy at most clubs, and the deejay is on top," said head veejay Maureen Nappi. "The situation here is unique; we've changed the hierarchy around. We have two rooms; one with a deejay, where the bands play; and one where we choose the video and the audio." In the control room at the back of the club, Maureen chooses to play a video she made herself to accompany a song called "No Love Lost" by a local band called Polyrock. It is a sound-triggered abstract animation that uses various oscillators to produce a sensual plaid tapestry that moves to the music. 

Like Maureen, many of the club veejays produce as well as reproduce video programming, which is creativity beyond the call of duty for the veejays on Warner Amex's MTV. To be fair, the MTV veejays are a completely different breed. “In a club you've really got the guy running; spinning the video, if you will,” said MTV's Vice-President of Programming, Bob Pittman. “On our channel, you've got the veejay as a personality, a host who guides the viewer through the music." This doesn't mean, though, that the individual MTV veejays make the programming decisions. “They don't have time to," Pittman said. "This is a network. It's a very complicated business. The shows are pre-taped and there's a production staff of 20 people." 

As part of the on-air entertainment themselves, it's important that the MTV veejays look as presentable as the rest of the programming. “We don't want somebody 60 years old," Pittman said. "We don't want Phil Donahue. We don't want Ed McMahon. You know, on network TV they say, you're too young. Well, we have the opposite. Those people who are probably too young to be on network TV are just right for us." MTV had openings for five veejays. Three thousand hopefuls applied. Rock video, you see, runs from an experimental underground in the clubs to a national network establishment. In the pivot, a new culture hero, the veejay, has just begun to spin.