Videodrone #1: Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)

Videodrone is a weekly feature looking at music videos from the last half century.

Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) (1976) 

If you've been on social media in the last month or so (and who could blame you if you weren't?), you may have seen folks lamenting the so-called death of MTV on New Year's Eve and writing epitaphs to the once-dominant music video cable channel. As with many things on social media, this wasn't actually the case.

While it's true that MTV doesn't play music videos anymore, that's been the case for a long time now in the U.S. In the U.K. and Australia, MTV still ran some music-only channels that were shut down at the end of 2025. But let's face it, reality TV has been the name of the game at MTV for the last two decades.

MTV launched in August 1981, playing music videos 24/7 and introducing a new way for fans to experience music and a new way for artists and labels to market their wares. MTV was a cultural touchpoint throughout the '80s and '90s, and to a lesser degree in the '00s. Artists were able to become big acts thanks to a popular video and labels would drop big bucks on conceptual clips (that of course would be recouped as part of the onerous contracts artists used to sign). 

But as is well-documented in the excellent book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, MTV quickly realized that just showing videos 24/7 (and later adding specialty programs like TRL, 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps and Headbanger's Ball) wasn't a great way to make money. Starting in the late '80s with game shows like Remote Control (which was great, btw), reality TV shows became more attractive for sponsors. The Real World debuted in 1992, in which seven 20-somethings were picked to live in a New York City loft for three months and their every move was documented on video. It was clearly heavily edited and drama was often manufactured, but it was a big hit and ended running for 33 seasons. Other shows followed, like Road Rules, Jersey Shore, 16 and Pregnant, Jackass, Punk'd, filling the station's prime programming hours. By the 2010s, videos were an afterthought on MTV. 

The other factor, of course, was the internet and specifically, the 2005 debut of YouTube as a place where users could upload videos that anyone could view on demand. It took a while for the video quality to move beyond super-grainy VHS clips of vids recorded off MTV in 1982, but eventually you didn't need MTV to find videos. Labels began uploading new videos from their artists, fans using their smartphones could record live music and upload it immediately, and YouTube became the place to find just about anything (including tons of non-music-related content).

Also, the music industry obviously has changed in a big way since the dotcom boom of the late '90s. File-sharing sites like Napster ended up taking a big bite out of music sales of physical media like CDs. Streaming has started to turn things around, with $5.6 billion in revenue generated in the first half of 2025, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The artists aren't seeing much of that revenue.

Music videos are still made by most artists as a promotional tool, but there's no guarantee anyone beyond diehard fans will see them. Still, with social media, if a video gets popular on TikTok or elsewhere, it can generate some buzz. 

All of that is a long-winded intro to this weekly feature, in which I'm going to look at one video per year for the last 50 years. While they weren't necessarily commonplace, music videos were made by artists all the way back to the '60s. Mostly performance clips, but you'd get the occasional conceptual video, like Bob Dylan's iconic 1965 clip for "Subterranean Homesick Blues," in which he displays cue cards based on phrases in the song.

In 1976, which is our arbitrary beginning point, the music scene was in a state of flux. There was a lot going on, including stadium rock, AM gold soft rock, early disco. Rod Stewart was adept at all of these styles. He got his start in the early '60s but broke out in '67 as lead belter of the Jeff Beck Group. A few years later, he joined the Faces and also began a solo career. Those Faces albums are pretty great, hot slabs of blues- and R&B-oriented rock (my take on the Faces classic "Stay With Me"), but the success of his solo career and growing band tensions led Faces to split up after four releases. 

Stewart's seventh solo album, A Night on the Town, was released in June 1976 and was a huge hit, hitting #2 in the U.S. and #1 in several other countries. "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)" was the first single and it ended up spending eight weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.  

The song proved controversial in the U.S., as Stewart spends the entire 3:56 talking his girlfriend into having sex. The BBC objected to the line "Spread your wings and let me come inside," but there were arguably worse ones. In the U.S., the Rev. Jesse Jackson protested the song as leading to loose morals in America's youth. 

The video probably didn't help matters, as Stewart sings to girlfriend Britt Ekland by a fireplace. He pretends to play an acoustic guitar at first and then focuses on selling Ekland on doing the deed. Wearing a cheesy bow tie and his patented shag mullet, Stewart succeeds in convincing Ekland to go upstairs. The clip ends with Rod the Bod and his lady getting ready to get it on as Ekland's breathy French spoken-word outro plays.

Stewart was an early video adopter, filming many clips for his songs in the '70s (including "Hot Legs" and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?"), which served him well when MTV came along and was desperate for content to fill its 24-hour broadcast day. 

"Tonight's the Night" was a good predictor of Stewart's career path in the late '70s. It got progressively cheesier as Stewart delved into disco, new wave and then went into full-on MOR soft rock mode. By the mid-80s, he was churning out crappy soundtrack ballads, the most egregious being 1993's "All for Love" with Sting and Bryan Adams for the Three Musketeers soundtrack. In recent years, he's been cranking out "American Songbook" albums of standards and touring constantly. 

For me, Rod Stewart is a classic case of a guy with all the talent in the world who did what he wanted and was successful, but wasted what made him cool in the first place. But at least he left behind a wealth of cheesy music videos for us to enjoy and/or ridicule.