In 1977, Mike Nesmith released a groundbreaking video that would change pop culture forever. Four years before the launch of MTV, The Monkees alum produced a short film to promote his song “Rio,” changing the way fans would “look” at music. Nearly 50 years later, Nesmith’s vision remains a masterclass in visual storytelling.
“Rio,” from Nesmith’s album From the Radio Engine to the Photon Wing, featured a blend of country rock and Latin rhythms, and the accompanying video clip leaned into the song’s theme of escapism with whimsical imagery of Nesmith floating through the sky.
Nesmith once explained why he produced the musical movie years before MTV made it the norm—and why his was unique from the few other clips that were already out there.
“I had been asked by [Island Records founder] Chris Blackwell if I would be willing to make a clip for ‘Rio’ he could use to promote the record around the European continent. It would get played on television that way,” Nesmith explained to Wisconsin Public Radio. “Well, I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I had to go and do some research. There were hardly any out there. The ones that were out there were people standing up in front of a microphone and singing.”
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“I thought well, I want it to look like an old-time movie,” Nesmith recalled. “We went to the edit bay. We said, ‘OK, let’s just start putting pictures on this thing.’ So, we put one picture, and we added another picture to it. And after about the sixth or seventh picture a very curious thing started to happen. The music took over the narrative. The music was the continuity, and the images fit that continuity in a way I’d never seen. Once it was finished, [director] Bill Dear and I looked at him and said, ‘This is extraordinary. I don’t know what this is.’ Bill said, ‘I don’t know either.’”
Nesmith started showing the film around, explaining that it was “a way to present music in the age of video.”
“’It’s a music video,’” he told people. “Nobody had heard that word. Nobody had any idea what it was.”
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Two years after “Rio,” Nesmith produced a video for his song “Cruisin.’”
“[My] first music video, ‘Rio’, taught me a lot, as well as the second, ‘Cruisin’, where William Dear and I discovered ‘Rio’ wasn’t a fluke,” he once told Best Classic Bands.
Nesmith had an epiphany about the then-new medium, realizing he needed a place to “put” videos.
“As it became obvious that it was an art form, more people started to make them after seeing ‘Rio’,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “They started making them spontaneously, and I kept thinking, ‘Where do you play this? What would I do with this?’ The answer was that I simply needed to complete the equation. ‘Radio is to records as television is to video.’ Then it was like, ‘Of course!’ and thus MTV was born. I just took that idea and put together some programs and sent it over to Warner Bros. and so forth. Next thing you know, there it was.”
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Nesmith’s original idea was a short-lived Nickelodeon show called Pop Clips in 1980, which featured VJs introducing music videos. The following year, the all-music video channel MTV was born.
While The Monkees star stopped short of claiming that he invented MTV, he noted in interviews that he was there for the “birth” of it.
Years later, Nesmith had another vision for the future of video.
“Moving into the worlds of virtual reality will change everything,” he told Best Classic Bands in 2017. “The storytellers have more technology than ever, and they are more active than ever. There’s great stuff out there, with more to come.”
Five decades after “Rio,” Nesmith’s pioneering clip remains proof that music was meant to be seen as much as heard.
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