The Drake Hotel may have celebrated its fifth anniversary recently, but one of the boutique hotel's most unique attractions was not a part of the festivities. Early visitors to the Drake's Underground venue back in 2004 will recall the east-wall Video Jukebox installation, which allowed patrons (often armed with those three loonies leftover from the tenner they handed over for a pint) to select favourite music-television moments from a computerized archive of videos, which would then be projected onto the venue's various wall screens. So if the band you just saw at the Underground sucked, you could erase the memory by dropping a coin into the machine and watch The Replacements rip it up at the American Music Awards in 1989. Back in that distant pre-YouTube era, the Video Jukebox was as close to music-nerd nirvana as you could get.Coincidentally, the proliferation of YouTube and on-demand streaming video occurred just as the Video Jukebox's brain trust, Barnaby Marshall, vacated his programmer post at the Drake, taking his magical fun machine with him. However, he hasn't been letting that encyclopedic music-vid knowledge go to waste: this week, he announced the launch of RockPeaks.com, a database that he's likening to "the IMDB of rock 'n' roll." Though unlike IMDB, the goal isn't so much a comprehensive collection of every music video ever created as a carefully culled archive of artists' "peak" performances in film and on television (the more bizarre, the better). Users are invited to fill in information about the clips, though, consistent with the site's curatorial ethos, they aren't able to upload them. The site currently hosts 5,000 clips — ranging from footage of The Beatles at the Cavern Club in 1962 to U2's recent Letterman run — though given the relative rarity of the footage it deals in, RockPeaks still has a few blind spots to fill in (searches for My Bloody Valentine, Nick Cave and Guns N Roses turned up empty thus far). However, with its discriminating taste, RockPeaks should prove to be a handy resource for anyone growing increasingly frustrated by the fact that searching for your favourite rock songs on YouTube more often produces videos of people playing Guitar Hero to them.
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