Guitar Gods And Molten Metal
Tired of today's music? Wish you could run your own music channel? With YouTube, you can have a great time being your own video mixmaster. The first thing I started looking for was music, and cruising YouTube reminded me of when my family first got MTV. In the channel's early days, they played a wide variety of music that wasn't segregated into specialty shows like it would be later.
Looking up great classic hard rock, I was pleasantly surprised to find footage I had no idea even existed. Before video equipment was portable and available in every store, fans snuck in eight millimeter cameras to bootleg shows. Here you can find very rare footage of Ozzy Osbourne with the late great Randy Rhoads. There's also ancient 8 mm footage of Van Halen. The visuals aren't that great - Eddie Van Halen looks like a blurry Christmas tree light - but you can hear him ripping it up just fine. That's a common symptom of YouTube content: sometimes the video and/or audio quality isn't the best.
There is, of course, a lot of professionally shot Van Halen stuff of much better quality, but as collectors know there is a certain charm to handmade concert videos. They are usually done all in one take, whoever is shooting the gig has to push through the people in front of him blocking the view and the fan focuses on what he or she wants to watch. Metallica was probably the first band to put together a home video that was all comprised of bootleg footage and many bands followed suit.
A lot of the old footage of bands you find on YouTube clearly wasn't preserved well and is falling apart badly. The technology that was around in the 1970s just couldn't capture a loud rock show that well, which is why Led Zeppelin's manager Peter Grant rarely allowed the band to be filmed or video taped (nowadays when you see concert footage of a band, you can usually spot people in the crowd filming the action on their cell phones).
