Photo by Jay Allen Sanford

Mojo Nixon at the San Diego Comic-Con circa 1992

"Ever since I was a little bitty boy, a race car had to be my toy. 

Got a club card at the age of eleven. Now I'm in racing heaven."  

Local Reelin' in the Years has found another rare gem - local psychobilly hero Mojo Nixon in a rare television performance of "I Wanna Race Bigfoot Trucks." “We feel very strongly how important footage is and why it needs to be preserved,” says David Peck, president of Reelin’ in the Years. Founded in 1992, Reelin’ maintains and licenses over 30,000 hours of music footage and more than 8000 hours of interviews spanning 90 years (including The Merv Griffin Show and The Tonight Show), as well as representing television stations and independent archives in the U.S. and overseas. Among his San Diego rarities are clips from a December 1969 Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young concert at Balboa Stadium filmed by famed rock photographer Henry Diltz.

Born Neill Kirby McMillan, Jr., on August 2, 1957 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Nixon first earned national notice for doing a series of hyperactive MTV promos. He became notorious when he insulted contemporary celebrities such as MTV VJ Martha Quinn ("Stuffin' Martha's Muffin"), Rick Astley, and Deborah Gibson ("Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child"). Nixon appeared in several promotional spots for MTV during this period, but the network's decision to not show the video for "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child," which starred Winona Ryder, prompted him to sever ties with the network. He also lampooned contemporary American culture and social issues in songs such as "I Hate Banks," "Burn Down the Malls," and "The Amazing Bigfoot Diet." 

The "Bigfoot Truck" clip unearthed by Reelin' In the Years dates back to 1991, although the song itself comes from Nixon's 1990 album Otis. David Peck explains "We recently signed a deal with Rick Dees who from July 1990 to October 1991 had a late night talk show that aired on ABC called Into The Night With Rick Dees, although he left the show in June 1991 his production company still produced the show until it went off the air a few months later [which is why he is not the one introducing or interviewing Mojo]. A few weeks ago, we began the process of transferring the 300 original one-inch masters that have never been touched in over 30 years. There are no logs, so I have to go thru each show and enter into my database the guests and what they perform and such. I was quite surprised to find this appearance by Mr. Nixon. I will say that why some of the guests on his show were not exactly legendary, he also did have some unique appearances by major artists of that time. It’s always fun for me to go thru new archives and discover something that aired once or, in some cases, never at all."

Reelin' In the Years made a major splash in 2010, when Peck uncovered a 30-minute film of home movies from the 1950s featuring the legendary Hank Williams Sr. along with Marty Robbins, the Carter Family, Merle Travis, Lefty Frizell, Hank Snow, Maddox Bothers & Rose, Bill Monroe and a host of others. These images, shot in pristine 16mm color film, capture these classic artists in performance and in rare candid moments. Highlights include Hank Williams singing at a disc jockey convention in Nashville, Marty Robbins playing guitar on a front lawn, Kitty Wells standing in front of her tour car and Merle Travis preparing to board a small plane. The footage was shot by John Banks, part owner of radio station KRDU in Dinuba, CA while these artists were at the station and his home. In addition to filming these artists in California, Banks took his 16mm camera to Nashville and captured many artists backstage during a convention of disc jockeys held in the early 1950s.

Peck says one of his most important discoveries was an archive featuring thousands of hours of American jazz, blues, rock, and folk performances dating back to the ’50s. However, it never would have happened if he hadn’t annoyed Baby Spice of the Spice Girls while trying to arrange a green room autograph for his nine-year-old niece backstage at The Late Show With David Letterman. After getting booted by Baby to a different green room, he chanced to meet Rolling Stones/Allman Brothers keyboard player Chuck Leavell, who was thrilled to find that Peck had rare footage he’d been seeking, sparking a new friendship.

“That summer, I was in Amsterdam to see the Stones, and I was backstage with both Chuck and [Stones drummer] Charlie Watts. They introduced me to a friend of theirs from Belgium, who had a large library of material. It was through that friend that I became aware of the Belgian TV station RTBF, which subsequently became my first client.”

“So, were it not for pissing off a member of the Spice Girls, I would probably not have the company I do today.”

For a while, Reelin’ in the Years was heavily invested in putting out DVDs. Their first platinum seller (100,000 sales) was 2006’s Marvin Gaye – The Real Thing In Performance, a rare DVD sales benchmark also attained by a release featuring The Temptations. The next few years saw archival concert DVDs starring Pete Seeger, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, a Jazz Icons series, and the only known 1958 footage of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan and Benny Golson. The Pretty Things: Midnight To Six 1965-1970 features 20 full-length performances, including their historic, riot-inducing R&B period, their highly influential, rock-opera/psychedelic SF Sorrow period, and ending with their proto-heavy metal Parachute period. The Hollies: Look Through Any Window 1963 – 1975 includes 22 full-length performances sourced from television appearances filmed at the time the songs were hitting the charts for the first time.

The company also built up business licensing footage to television networks like MTV, as well various TV specials. Peck earned an associate producer credit on the HBO Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, for which Reelin’ in the Years licensed material. VH1 probably couldn't make shows like I Love the '70s and Behind the Music without Peck's ever-growing database of footage.

But the future seems to be in streaming services such as the Coda Collection, launched in February 2021 on Amazon Prime utilizing Reelin’-curated content, including the company’s American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 series, which earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Long Form Music Video. Last year, the company announced the discovery of forgotten footage from Bob Dylan’s famed 1969 concert at The Isle Of Wight Festival.

According to Peck, “It has always frustrated me to see how YouTube has allowed bootleg versions of concerts and TV appearances by music’s greatest artists to be readily available to millions of viewers with no compensation to the rights holders. What I truly appreciate most about the way The Coda Collection has approached this music video channel is their respect for the artists and the footage rights holders...since DVD is, for all intents and purposes, now a dead market, this platform allows us to share our unique content with the music-loving public in a fair and equitable way, a way which not only benefits my company and clients, but which will revolutionize the way music video is consumed.”

Aside from Mojo Nixon, the company holds footage of several performers with San Diego ties, including Iron Butterfly, Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder, and others. One piece of historical footage features longtime local radio DJ Jim McInnes (best known from KGB FM), which it has licensed for use to VH1. "I got ahold of a piece of film that was shot at a backyard party here in San Diego , around 1981," says Peck. 

"Weird Al Yankovic was there, before he really broke big, when he was still doing 'Another One Rides the Bus' on [syndicated radio show] Dr. Demento. Jim is playing with him, and he's playing Weird Al's accordion and somebody comes by and spills beer on the thing. Weird Al got really upset with him, because it was a brand new accordion! And Jim is just shrugging his shoulders, like, 'hey, it's just an accordion, not a Les Paul,' but Weird Al wasn't laughing." 

"Shows which one of them actually had the sense of humor, huh?"