Tag Archives: 120 minutes

VCRitage

A Few Minutes with 120 Minutes, 1991

Recently rediscovered within the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives: A nearly complete episode of 120 Minutes, MTV’s “alternative music” program. This aired December 15, 1991, and provides some insight into what exactly constituted alternative music (at least as far as MTV was concerned) during the waning days of the First Bush administration.

I’ve chopped this up into three pieces to ease playback and preserve some of the flow of the original. The first half hour of the show is missing from my tape, so we pick it up with host Dave Kendall introducing a clip from a live Cure pay-per-view special. I remember more than one friend ordering that special and borrowing the tape from them, then trying to figure out a way to copy it. Never cracked the code before I had to return it.

Though this apisode aired and was presumably taped after Nirvana “broke,” you’ll notice very little Seattle stuff here. Grunge would soon dominate the 120 Minutes playlist, but during this particular episode the videos leaned heavily toward industrial (Ministry, Nitzer Ebb), British shoegaze, and indie rock like Urge Overkill.

If you watched that first video, you heard Mr. Kendall tease a mini-documentary on The Clash, and here it is, narrated by Kurt Loder. There’s some amazing live footage here that I’ve never seen anywhere else, from the band’s early days, their 1982 concert at Shea Stadium, and lots of stuff in between. Also, some interesting testimonials from Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, and Paul Simonon.

And here’s the last half hour of the episode, which contains some curious Christmas music from Hoodoo Gurus and The Wedding Present. Stick around past the end credits to catch an episode of the weird animated omnibus Liquid Television. This show does not seem quite as mind blowing to me as it did back when I was in junior high, but then what does, really?

Finally, if you’re one of those weirdos like me who enjoys watching old commercials, here’s a playlist with ads that aired during this episode, plus a few spots from 1992 I found on the same tape. Highlights include:

  • Promo for MTV’s Best of 1991 programming featuring Cindy Crawford and background music of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which is as much 1991 as is legally allowed by law.
  • In the same dated vein, a promo for an issue of People Magazine that promises the lowdown on all the dirt from the set of Hook.
  • Casio Rapmaster keyboard, which looks and sounds exactly like what you think it does.
  • An unsettling Christmas-themed commercial for Playboy.
  • The now-forgotten TurboGrafx 16 gaming console.
  • Weird wrap-around promo for the band The Ocean Blue, which starts with an ad asking you to stick around the real ad.
  • A Super Nintendo commercial featuring a fresh-faced Paul Rudd.
  • Strange ad for Introspect jeans; can’t decide if this is misogynistic or simply dumb.
  • Foot Locker spot featuring Karl Malone’s LA Gear Mailmans, which, yes, was a thing.
Pointless Nostalgia Video, Tuneage

Pointless Nostalgia: The Pixies on 120 Minutes, 1991

As I eluded to last week, when I found the bounty of Steampipe Alley tapes, I was looking for something else. That something else was an episode of MTV’s 120 Minutes from 1991 that featured an episode-long appearance by The Pixies, mere months before they broke up.

When this show aired, I did not actually have cable in my house. But my grandparents, who lived next door, did. So I would monopolize their VCR in the wee hours, taping either Mystery Science Theater 3000 or 120 Minutes. Despite being an MTV product, 120 Minutes was a pretty decent window into the amorphous world of “alternative” music back then, and also the only way that I could hear about new-ish stuff in the pre-internet days, since I lived nowhere near a cool records store.

This particular episode is an odd time capsule piece, because it comes from one of those in between periods of music. The indie music scene that launched The Pixies was largely dead. The Nirvana phenomenon had yet to begin, although it was just about to (the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” aired during this episode, and had just debuted a few weeks previous). So in most cases, alternative = British. By my rough estimate, 75 percent of all the videos that air in this episode come from English bands, most of them being shoegazer types like Ride, Curve, Lush, etc.

But my main reason in presenting these clips to you is not to highlight this very brief era. I’ve digitized them because they’re some of the most uncomfortable video you’ll ever see.

For one thing, The Pixies were already well immersed in the tensions that would doom the band. But rather than exercise that misery on each other, they aim it squarely at the show’s host, Dave Kendall. The poor man has to dig and scrape to get the most mundane answers out of them.

This first clip is benign enough. The band is introduced, and Frank Black talks briefly about the inspiration behind the “Here Come Your Man” video. But the fact that he’s wearing a panama hat and sunglasses for this interview should have thrown up some huge red flags. As should have Joey Santiago’s weird fuzzy hat.


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