do you remember rock and roll video

The object of the I "Heart" is Robert Smith. Maura wanted to keep her old headboard, so she has to keep the shame as well.
V-66, "The Beat of Boston," was the short-lived, but sorely missed local music video station that was the only thing that made 8th grade tolerable for this poorly socialized example of nerdy adolesecent angst...

A time machine and a dope slap, that's all I'm asking for.
It lasted for little more than a year before selling out to the Home Shopping Network in late 1986, but it was a blast while it lasted. Its playlist was ecumenical, if a bit too skewed at times to the AOR end of the spectrum (though the magic of music video could make the most commercial drek palatable by adding a visual narrative or sci-fi art direction), yet it remained fiercely parochial (sometimes embarassingly so), spotlighting music by a host of local acts of the day.

Some, like the Del Fuegos and Til Tuesday, mananged to register on the national scene. Others, like Ball and Pivot, November Group, and the Dogmatics, never broke free of the Boston-Providence axis. V-66 had a tremendous impact on the youth of this region. Mere mention of it can inspire near-fatal bouts of nostalgia in those who were enraptured by its low-budget UHF spell, yet much (but not all) of the recorded evidence has been lost to the ages. (The same goes for the "I'm Robillard and I'm from Mars" PSA that used to run early weekend mornings on WCVB.)

The music can still be found with a bit of digging (and it would be nice if CDBaby would get around to reissuing the Lizzie Borden & The Axes compilation), and this promises to be a fucking hoot:



Ordinarily, I'd be the last person on earth to defend the use of that particular Starship song, but a Bostonized version of the track did figure heavily into the station's promotional efforts. Hey, it was the mid-1980's, what can I say?

Speaking of awkward memories, there is one track and video that represents the V-66 era above all others. It's the one that inevitably gets mentioned whenever the subject of V-66 is brought up. While I cannot produce the video, which was shot on Newbury Street (and featured a feminist-positive image of woman as the devil), I did recently manage to locate a copy of the LP featuring the song, a dangerously infectious bit of Latin-inflected new wave pop that has been indelibly burned into the brains of a generation of Bay Staters.

New Man - Bad Boys (from New Man, 1986) - Like getting sacpunched by the zeitgeist of twenty-two years ago....

(This post is dedicated to thirdmate and Jack. They know damn well why.)