#1 Rhodesmither

NESMITH: Well I don’t know if you’re familiar with Red or not, Red Rhodes, the pedal steel guitar player. I would hope that you are because Red’s like, uh, my cosmic partner. Between he and I we plod on keeping Saturn in orbit. Which is a far cry from, uh, [singing] I tried so hard, my dear, to find you and you’re my everything… [speaking again] uh, which we did for a while, but then me and Red got kind of spaced out and hanging out with each other and… eating donuts and stuff and… [audience laughs] …ended up doing a lot of strange things.

Now the pedal steel guitar’s really an interesting instrument. It’s about as complex as a pinball machine to play because a lot of it’s catch-as-catch-can. There’s also an overriding factor which is that after Red gets through playing everything he’s playing which both hands and both feet and his knees so that there’s very little occasion for any external boogie. I mean you ain’t gonna see Red set it on fire or take his shirt off or nothing like that. However, if you could get up real close underneath and watch him as he’s playing that, you’ll see him grimacing and a lot of funny things going on in his eyes.

And, uh, what I guess we’ll do is let Red play a couple of instrumentals now, if you’d like to hear that. [applause] That’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough. Not too much. What I think you should do is you should go Red Rhodes circa 1964 Palomino with Biff Adams and Dennis Hromek, uh, and Bud Weiser, [audience laughs] and [unintelligible]. What are you gonna play?

RHODES: Rose City Chimes.

MTV, the channel that revolutionized the music industry, has today said its final Goodbye by moving to a digital-only model. Its 24-hour music channel has ceased to be officially its transmissions.

The end came with a nod to its beginnings, the last broadcast was the iconic videoclip of “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, the same one that inaugurated the history of MTV on August 1, 1981. In this way, the channel closed after 44 years, with the same song that defined its birth

RIP 1st Aug 1981 - 31st Dec 2025