You'll be disappointed to see I haven't led this article with a clever quote from Bruce Woolley’s popular tune, “Video Killed The Radio Star." Rock video hasn't killed its radio stars yet, nor has it made them, but in the very near future it may well do both. 

To most of us, the term “rock videos” has meant Don Kirshner, Midnight Special: boring embarrassments and stilted flash, an all-too-obvious hard sell. The Tubes and Toronto's obscure avant feminist troupe the Hummer Sisters (who played a few gigs here over the past couple of years) made intriguing use of live video reproduction (as well as pre-taped material) in their extravaganzas, but they remained fringe curiosities. 

DEVO, those recombinant pop-satirists from Akron, Ohio, took the first real step towards self-produced rock 'n roll video several years back when they hired filmmaker Chuck Statler to direct several of their own videotapes to accompany their Songs: like their music, the tapes dripped with playful/serious perversity and chilling wit; they were well made and didn't put you to sleep. DEVO was among the first to prove it could be done, and thus was set the Great Divide in rock-video technique and intent: product vs. art: profit vs. prophecy. The weapons: portapacks and electric guitars at 20 paces.  

Prophets and Profit: Since that time more and more bankrolled rock acts have dipped their toes into video; the steady rise of cable TV has seen a preponderance of rock video shows (Paul Tschinkel's performance-documentary Inner Tube. Glenn O'Brien's goofy / intellectual chat show TV Party: Moogy Klingman's talk with-clips Manhattan Alley); and now local rock clubs like Hurrah (with about a dozen overhead monitors and a wide range of source videos) and Max's Kansas City (with only two poorly placed monitors and a more limited range of tapes) have put in their own installations and jumped aboard the bandwagon. The debut showing of Blondie's Eat to the Beat videodisc at Hurrah two months ago seems to have been the cue that rock video was about to make it to the Here and Now.

But there are problems with the Blondie videodisc. For one thing, it's still in tape form, and the botched negotiations between Blondie's record company, Chrysalis, and the American Federation of Musicians means the tape may not become an actual videodisc for some time. For another, it proved to be a stultifying. indulgent failure, nothing more than the typical Midnight Special fare (band goes through self-conscious routines while studio audience tries to look excited) extended over the unendurable length of an entire album. Well-heeled corporate flatulence strikes : another blow against the enrichment of The Image Bank. John Roseman Productions made the Blondie videodisc, and they've produced similar showcases for Rod Stewart, Queen, Boomtown Rats, Alice Cooper, Flying Lizards and David Bowie. Roseman is probably the biggest and most prolific of the biggies who freelance for record companies, and Roseman's product is just that: easily digested direct outgrowths of the Kirshner video-as promo-tool concept, hallmarked by flashy, staccato editing in time to a song's rhythms, and an atmosphere of opulent superficiality so oppressive it's decadent. 

Most Roseman productions fall into this image/package camp. Exceptions include the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays," which actually fleshes out the song's context through various location shots and characterizations; Cooper's "How You Gonna See Me Now?," possessed of Alice's usual lumpen sanitorium wit; XTC's "Making Plans For Nigel," the colorful, accomplished dementia of which no doubt reflects the input of the art-school-trained band in question; and Bowie's three ingenious tapes from his Lodger album.  

 Do It Yourself: Later that same day I met 26-year-old Brooklynite Danny Cornyetz, who recent ly finished a videotape of Brooklyn's own Speedies performing their single. “Fotograph". Like the Speedies themselves, it's à surprisingly accomplished piece of work that's all about fun, youthful energy and great rock 'n' roll: we see the boys cavorting with exuberance on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, carrying their un-plugged instruments through the motions, having an obvious blast. What saves the Speedies is their unself-conscious teen ebullience, and what's great about Cornyetz's video is that he captures it all, the final effect being much closer to American Bandstand or The Monkees TV show than Kirshner's certain-death woodenness. "It took four hours to shoot,” said Danny, "and five days of editing to come up with several workable versions. Since I already had some inexpensive, workable video equipment, it only cost $20 to get a generator to run the I equipment, and that was it. That's what's great about video: It's cheaper, it's easier - to use than film. Almost anyone can do it themselves." Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong have been doing it themselves for over five years now, making their own unpretentious, straightforward performance documentaries of New York's new wave scene since it exploded out of CBGB in 1975. Their Nightclubbing video series just finished a run at the Anthology Film Archives, and can be seen on Cable Channel 10 (Tuesdays at 11 p.m., Saturdays at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.). “We just dug the whole scene," Pat said, "the fashion, the visuals, and we'd both been working at Manhattan Cable, so we figured why not bring our twin obsessions together and tape everything we saw?'' They did literally that, building up a vast library of just about every new wave rock act to play a local club in the past five years. They showed me some rare and valuable gems like Talking Heads at CBGB in 1975 doing “96 Tears," and the Heartbreakers with Richard Hell on bass and Johnny Thunders with loooong hair. Ahh, memories. Plainly, it's a labor of love for Pat and Emily, and they let nothing - no fancy edits, no interview splice-ins - get in the way of (Emily speaking), “The Nightclubbing idea: it's all about the fun, the late nights, the craziness, rock 'n' roll. Just like it says." Art for Video's Sake”.

Then they showed me a videotape to accompany future-shock electronic rockers Suicide's harrowing epic, "Frankie Teardrop." Produced by Super-8 filmmakers Michael Robinson and Edit DeAk and video editor Paul Dougherty, this was the real thing: A stunning non-performance visual complement replete with striking, haunting images, precisely timed rhythmic edits that manage to avoid Roseman's ostentatiousness, and advanced techniques like superimpositions and solarizations. What makes it a benchmark in truly artistic rock video is its aesthetic fidelity to its subject, its degree of technical accomplishment and its mesmerizing watchability.

According to Dougherty, “The whole video circus is in such an infantile stage right now nobody can tell where it's going to head. There are no experts. The field is wide open for people with a knowledge of what they want to do and how to do it, which is why it's very important for people to learn the craft. It's not that hard. Video, like rock 'n' roll, should be a mass medium, a pop medium.” He added, “It won't do much good if these innovative video artists stay in their tiny St. Mark's Place screening rooms making ramshackle tapes, patting each other on the back. They have the ideas to really expand and intensify video; they should clean up their act a little bit and get out there."

One such low-visibility artist who plans to get “out there" is Julia Hayward, who's been on the local “performance-loft" scene for a while. She's currently working on a videotape with Jody Harris and Donny Christensen (ex-Contortions, more recently with the Raybeats). As of now there are only some rough song structures and unedited video images filmed in California, but given Julia's strong sense of herself and her medium, the situation looks promising.  

Confused about the plethora of divergent video artists and styles? Want to see it for yourself? The best place to go is Hurrah, where you can see the Bowie, XTC and Flying Lizards Rose man tapes; other corporate tapes by the likes of Iggy Pop (whose “Five Foot One" and "I'm Bored” are made magnificent by the indomitable Ig himself); independently produced videos, such as those made of English bands like The Slits and The Pop Group by Don Letts and Mick Calvert; and videos taped live at Hurrah. 

Charles Libin serves as Hurrah's video curator, and he explained, “We got our own camera recently, so now we can tape bands ourselves, and on a really crowded night we can broadcast the onstage action in house as it happens. A lot of people think it's a real future-shock situation: you're in the back watching the show on video while it's actually happening 50 feet away. It's disorienting, but it has advantages: if it is crowded it's more convenient, and it can be like video binoculars, giving you close-ups you couldn't otherwise get."

Not only is Hurrah setting the pace for video presentation, they're also forging ahead with their own production concern, Hurrah Video Music. “We're working on major-label affiliation and distribution through Time-Life Video,” said Libin, “and it'll mean that any group that plays here will have the option to sign a contract with us. Then we'll make a videotape of them and send it to clubs around the country as well as to record companies. If they don't sign, we'll make a cassette of them anyway and they buy the master; we keep a few songs to be shown in-house, and they take the tape around themselves. Either way, it means that rock video could phase out A&R men in the record industry. The first real example of this is a tape we shot of Defunkt a few weeks back, which then got shown on the CBS news a week later. Likewise, we could soon see cable channels dedicated entirely to rock 'n' roll, which could put rock radio on the back burner or phase that out, too.”

Where will it all end? As the old saying goes, stay tuned. To quote from “Video Killed the Radio Star" (couldn't get away from that one, now could we?), “We can't rewind, we've gone too far / Blame it all on VTR."