Why USA Network's Night Flight Was So Important In the 1980's

USA's Night Flight aired from 1981-1988

MTV debuted on August 1st 1981. USA Network's overnight video and music show Night Flight debuted June 5th 1981, featuring not only a healthy dose of videos from alternative bands, but B movies, interviews with artists and cultural figures, cult movies, short videos, cartoons, and stand up comedy. It was a lifeline to those of us living in small towns where there was little to no access to anything alternative or weird. In fact, in the town I lived in MTV was banned until 1985, but since they couldn't ban an entire network I looked forward to Friday and Saturday nights and Night Flight. 

The show began at 10 p.m. Central time, and lasted four hours. It was then reshown at 2 a.m., and the rising sun often found me sitting there watching that second showing in its entirety even though I had also watched the earlier showing. 

There was no "host" in the early years, just the voice of Pat Prescott doing an introduction to the individual pieces. It was the first place I encountered the Church of the Sub-Genius in the segment Love That Bob, and most likely the first time I saw the Devo video for "Whip It." other segments included New Wave Theater, featuring punk and New Wave bands, Atomic TV, featuring Cold War era videos, The Video Artist, and Tales From Tomorrow. No doubt about 99% of it was going right over my head at 13 years old, but I knew I liked it and longed for a world that was more like Night Flight than the small town reality of conformity and Revenge of the Nerds type bullies I existed in. The 80's really were a lot like the high school John Hughes' type movies about cool kids and jocks and freaks and geeks. Despite current fashion standards that geek is sheik, and being a nerd is cook, it sure wasn't in 1983. And that's what made Night Flight such a lifeline to geeks like me who were so outnumbered and so isolated in small towns across America.

Night of the Living Dead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dementia 13, Eraserhead, and The Terror were shown in their entirety on Night Flight. There was nothing like it. MTV was nothing like it. Nothing like it existed before, during, or after its original run from 1981-1988. I guess you had to be there and know what it's like to live in a world without 24 hour access to every cool and new and interesting thing, and social media blasting out and sharing it all so we all virtually instantaneously can share in every new zeitgeist to understand what it meant to have just that one source of connection to someplace out there that contained people who thought and believed and created the way you did, and weren't punished or ostracized for it, they were revered. 

By the time Night Flight left the air in 1988 the era of grunge was about to sweep out the long national nightmare of Reagan, hair metal, and blind conformity. By 1990, everyone in America was cool, and  Night Flight was just one of dozens of ways one could access what was cool and hip and new. It was there for those who needed it at a time where there was almost no alternative. 

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My Vinyl Collection: Devo, Freedom of Choice

Well, I've finally taken the plunge and started collecting vinyl records. At least a few vinyl records. Most likely there's less than 100 albums in the world I'm even interested in owning, again. Hell, I don't even have a turntable right now. I think as I acquire albums I'll post a little bit about why I bought that album and maybe what it meant to me when I bought it the first time as a teenager, and now as a middle-aged man. My first acquisition was The Monster Club soundtrack. I've already written rather extensively about that, so here's the first album I decided to buy for the second time...

Devo's Freedom of Choice LP is the first piece in my vinyl album collection.

One of the very first vinyl albums I remember buying with my own money is Devo's Freedom of Choice. As a younger kid I spent most of my birthday money on Kiss albums, so this is probably the first serious album I ever bought, although most people seemed to think of Devo as little more than a novelty band and a one hit wonder. To me that never seemed to be true. I just got it from the beginning. Even at 12 I knew this was some serious shit to be dealt with. I probably got almost none of the lasting significance of what this band was about back then, I just dug it more than I had previously dug anything else. I couldn't have told you what albums they had done before this one, but I was hooked. Oh No, It's Devo only solidified my affection for the band. 

We rarely watched Saturday Night Live in our house because my father was off work and if he wasn't dragging us off somewhere to drink beer and work on cars, he just didn't like the show very much, but on Friday night there was a comedy show called Fridays, and that one we did watch. I remember seeing Devo perform "Gates Of Steel" and "Girl U Want" before the album ever came out, so "Whip It" wasn't even the first song I heard from this album. Fridays developed a reputation for showcasing a lot of the alternative and new wave music of that era, bands that weren't established enough for SNL. It was just the more cutting edge show, and skits like "Diner Of the Living Dead" were proof of that. 

Where did I buy Freedom of Choice? At the Ben Franklin store in Byron, Illinois. Same place I bought most of my albums. I believe albums generally cost $8.99 then, so I don't feel too badly about paying roughly twice that much for the album 25 years later. The owner and his family lived across the street from us, and for 25 years I've wanted to unburden the guilt and confess we nicked AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album from his store the night of my 12th birthday party. Sorry.  We played it 27 times  that night, and that's not even possible. We always had a pretty high end setup in our house, with expensive Kenwood and Pioneer products, so it's likely unless I invest in some expensive gear that I'll never hear this album the same way I did when I first heard it. 

I'm hoping to save enough money this month to buy an original energy dome, but that seems a little extravagant. I'll probably pass this year and wait until they come around again next Halloween. It makes me happy to have this album again facing outward from the shelf into the room like a monument to the enduring power of geekdom. 

August 10, 2026 update:

In our family we had a communal record collection that seemed to begin when the family did. My parents bought records, my brothers and I added our own as we got older, but nobody thought much about whose album was whose. They all went into the same collection. Those records were simply part of the household, and consequently part of my childhood.

When my mother died, we lost access to that record collection. Strangely, I didn't think very much about the records themselves at the time. Records disappear pretty easily when a household disappears. Years later, though, vinyl came back, and I started thinking about those albums again. Not just the music, but the objects themselves—the covers I had stared at, the labels I recognized instantly, the records somebody brought home and put into the family collection forty or fifty years ago.

I had said I would never buy vinyl records again. Eventually I started buying back some of the albums that had meant the most to me. That's really what these posts were about. I wasn't trying to assemble the world's greatest record collection. In some way I was trying to reconstruct ours.

Of course, I eventually realized that's impossible. I can buy another copy of Freedom of Choice, Jailbreak, Abraxas or In Search of the Lost Chord. It can be the same pressing, have the same cover and make exactly the same sounds. But it can never be that copy. It isn't the record my uncle brought over on the weekend or the one my brothers and I put back on the shelf. It wasn't sitting in our house when I was seven or twelve or fifteen years old.

Those records are gone. These are replacements. I suppose collecting them again was my way of discovering that there's a difference.

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