The Genius of "Weird Paul" Petroskey
Musician, comedian, and maybe the first of what we would call a vlogger.
Back in the eighties, when most people were still using camcorders just for birthdays or graduations, Weird Paul was pointing his lens at himself while reviewing a McDonalds breakfast and talking straight to the camera like it was another person. This wasn’t meant to go viral or rack up views. It was just something he did. That’s what makes it interesting now.
“Weird Paul” Petroskey has been making music since the 80s if you knew where to look (being in Pittsburgh certainly might help). He started recording his own music on cassette when he was a kid. It is noisy homemade stuff with humor and strange lyrics and completely charming. His work is the type you might find in your local record shop. Hand printed or photocopied labels wrapped around what turns out, in “Weird Paul’s” case, to be fun lo-fi music.
I will need to write about his music more later, because what I really want to talk about his video work. You will hear stories of people who work in film and how it all got started when they got their own camera. We rarely see much of that early footage and what sort of experiments they did. With Paul we do get to see it because from what I can tell of his online presence, he has kept everything and has been slowly sharing it on his YouTube channel.
So what will you see when you go there? Music videos that he made of his own music, lots of interactions with his family, including some great lip sync homemade music video of popular artists from the time. But the real gem, and the thing that made me stop in my tracks was this video from 1984.
Paul gets access to a video camera and he does what comes naturally to him. He doesn’t wait to learn editing or lighting or anything like that. He just turned on the camera, points it at himself and starts filming himself sitting down with a McDonalds breakfast and describing what he is eating. He talks about the pancakes. the sausage. and that hash brown. He looks at the camera and makes jokes. He says what he thinks. It’s basic, real, and now, very familiar.
At the time nobody called what he is doing vlogging. YouTube didn’t exist. The Internet isn’t in people’s home. But what he was doing is exactly what people would be doing twenty years later. Talking to a camera like it’s a person and sharing their day. Its uncanny to watch. It looks like something from 2006 except it was from 1984. So much so that I paused the first time I watched to see if someone was just using old equipment to make something new. But no, this is 100% authentic if you watch his other videos, you will see, 100% Weird Paul.
The trove of video he must have keeps unfolding and I subscribed to his channel looking forward to his next release. Its a combination of other old videos new ones and most of them feature music. Amazingly, it all has the same tone. Personal. Casual. Silly. He integrates the world and people around him, the kind of artist who treats his own life like a project.
Today there’s a lot of talk about internet content and how it got started. But if you look back at what Weird Paul was doing with a VHS camcorder in his bedroom or over a tray of fast food you start to realize he was doing it before there was even a word for it. Sure, he didn’t invent the internet or coin the word vlogging. But he was using tape the way others would come to use the web. He realized the format as interesting decades before he had a means to distribute it. I would describe all of his work, both videos and music as one-word, authentic. That McDonalds breakfast is probably the best proof of that, and why I keep coming back for more.