Shine A Light On Me: The Midnight Special Gets Daring

by Howard Cressi-Stallworth

Back in the mid 1970s if you were a kid living outside of a major city in '60s America, your access to music was limited. Radio, television and magazines like Teen Beat, Rolling Stone and Creem were the sole points of access. Even then, Radio was mostly limited to Top 40 hits, and music television hadn't fully developed. 

Many of these shows and performances offered access to concerts and live performances to kids who didn't have the money, transportation, or permission to experience live music. This included television programs such as Saturday Night Live and Don Kirchner’s Rock Concert, and magazines such as Rolling Stone and Creem. These outlets were a viewfinder into the world of 70’s music, and outside of your usual live performance if you were lucky, television took strides to experiment past delivering just every day programming. 

The industry itself by the mid 1970s music was one of the largest media markets going into the billions with ease. From larger and larger concert tours into arenas, the cassette and the 8 track becoming an available medium for portable music, and music magazines and radio shows popping up each and every day to fill the appetite of music fans willing to take in this new and longform music seemingly 24 hours a day 7 days a week. So it made sense to make musical based television for the American viewing audience. Also think about how special it must have felt having Don Kirchner’s Rock Concert air bi-weekly, then watch the Midnight Special Friday Nights, then watch Saturday Night Live every weekend. By 1975 that is potentially four nights of music a week not including The Tonight Show, Merv Griffin, etc. That is how much music dominated culture and aided the multi-billion dollar music business in the 1970s. 

Television as a medium was begging to be experimented upon, but was rarely used in such a way due to fear of alienation of advertisers and the straight laced 50’s family. Rare examples being Ernie Kovac’s mind-bogglingly brave television comedy experiments were praised but rarely viewed due to his early death (though many can be seen and were thankfully preserved for future viewing online) and even Steve Allen who’s jazz inspired rhythms played into the first iteration of The Tonight Show were daring yet somewhat reeled in for a generation of dressed down suburbanites. At the forefront of the medium the late night era of television was young and ready to take bold risks but only in small bite sized pieces. Even when rare examples of Captain Beefheart creating a Dadaist ad for his album Lick Off My Decals Baby was aired only a handful of times due to viewer complaints and confusion, it was taken off the air (however such an experiment is wonderfully appreciated nonetheless). 

Keeping this in mind, musical performances and music programming was a sort of large format experiment that turned to television as a way to continue the ever growing market of money flowing into the musical world. Could or would anyone watch this?

Early on in The Midnight Special’s history progressive rock music had become a huge market. Double albums, six to seven minute songs, and importantly various side projects were being released from artists to deliver upon the hype and sales of artists. Artists such as Yes and Pink Floyd were quickly going multiplatinum and selling out larger amphitheaters and halls on both sides of the Atlantic. Even groups such as Roxy Music, who were considered a critics band in America were huge in England, and because Roxy Music were such a hot commodity with both the glam pop crowd and intellectual progressive art types they had two major audiences, the pop singles audience and the album buying and critic audience. 

So when the formerly mentioned show was launched, it had an immediate following of rock and pop fans who clamored for a live show featuring their favorite artists with a cool 70’s set with bright lights and a large stage at the height of Glam Rock. One of the peaks of experimental television in a more musical sense came to air on October 5th 1979. Along with Blondie and Rick James who were also performing on the program, Robert Fripp thanked Rick and pronounced “I am Robert Fripp and this is Frippertronics. I think this is a very brave thing the producers of this show are doing since they have no real idea of what it is that I’m about to do. But, dedicating this performance to the proposition of hazard, neither do I, but, if we did maybe it wouldn’t be quite as interesting.” Fripp then delivers a wonderful short performance of his guitar playing to a loop of music, maybe one of the first live demonstrations of ambient music on television to be seen in front of a wide audience. This kind of footage at the time was quite the marvel of how music of the time was being constructed let alone created. How many kids and even adults were glued at any mention or use of technology in the music they loved being given to them like secrets closely guarded for them to freely use? 

It was the only time I can think of that an idea that was created in an academic and cultural environment in one era was openly demonstrated for a large format middle class audience within the idea of executing it for pop musical purposes that I can think of. It also exposed one of the “secrets” that audiophiles and record nerds were salivating over since they heard it in small quantities across the Fripp and Eno records and could then go home themselves and try it out. Within this performance you have the merging world of high art and modern classical music merging with the pop and progressive world meeting the growing technological world of audio engineering being presented as a pop performance piece to listen to and further experiment with. Now the worlds and minds of teenagers and young adults everywhere had access to the same materials middle and upper middle class adults had access to previously, information on how to create interesting new types of music, an artist from a “progressive” genre usually familiar to college crowds, and a then brand new style of music essentially being invented in front of their eyes. This kind of door opening and experimentation is something to be valued and treasured for those who did not have the opportunities that others did. In my lifetime the only event I can equate it to was watching a musician show how they made a beat in a documentary and that pales in comparison to this event. 

Since then there have been moments of music programming that have attempted to return to this level but to less overall fanfare. With the advent of cable television it allowed the home viewer to have access to more than three channels, which meant less and less people would be exposed to such anomalies as Robert Fripp’s performance on The Midnight Special (your parents weren’t joking when they said there were only three channels on when they were kids!) MTV and later on VH1 would have their own dedicated channels and programs along with NBC and ABC attempting to re-create the success of The Midnight Special while also competing with MTV but to significantly less success. David Sanbourn’s Night Music was an attempt to bring the NYC Downtown Jazz scene to television but only lasted a couple of seasons. Jon Brion shot a pilot for VH1 at Largo in Los Angeles in the late 90’s as a way to capture the then thriving LA Singer Songwriter scene but was shelved. 

The most successful example of live performance and experimentation was MTVs Unplugged, a massively successful television stunt where typically electric artists would perform acoustically. It was often a big success for artists such as Mariah Carey, Nirvana, and Paul McCartney. It also broke new ground for having artists who were seen set in stone sound wise to experiment with more acoustic ideas. Hip Hop, Grunge, and Metal were all brought down to a more coffeehouse level and therefore allowed the audience to see these songs work in a different light. With MTVs Unplugged, television was daring again even if it was covered in a blazer with the sleeves rolled up. Even on MTV, television as an experimental medium had returned, even if it wasn’t as daring as we’d hoped. 

Ultimately the television medium as an outlet for the growing experimental avant garde thrived due to the sheer massive success of the music industry. Additional monies are only allocated to artists willing to break down new walls if everything else around them makes money. It’s always been that way in the music industry, and that directly impacted television which was used as supplemental advertising for this industry. 

Since the birth and widespread access to the internet, the channel access has become splintered and the idea of the nuclear family accessing something akin to an avant-garde performance on television as a form of experimentation has dwindled from the television set, to the back corners of the cult internet where it will thrive but reach a smaller audience. Possibly as it should? The avant garde experimentation of music merged with the medium of television was a bright and potentially great opportunity but was only destined to exist during one moment of the media’s existence, but what a bright light it was.