Listen to the story of the Videofreex, from some of the original members of the video collective that began in the late 1960s in New York City. After meeting at Woodstock, the video art group was hired by CBS to do “60 Minutes”-meets-“Saturday Night Live” show that gets one pilot made. After that pilot, several CBS executives are fired. But Abbie Hoffman hires members of the group to write the pirate broadcasting chapter in “Steal This Book” and pays them with video transmission equipment. So the Videofreex head upstate to Greene County and start Lanesville TV, what might be America’s first pirate television station. Interviews are excerpted here from many sources: Skip Blumberg and Parry Teasdale speak at a recent Dorsky Museum talk about the group, broadcast by Wave Farm Radio. Jon Nealon, the filmmaker at the helm of the just-released documentary, “Here Come the Videofreex!” is also interviewed here, as is Andrew Ingall, the curator of the show about the group that is at the Dorsky Museum through July 2015. Videofreex are represented by Video Data Bank in Chicago.
