Golden Airings

The next hurdle faced by the producers was securing clearance for each respective film clip, some of which dated as far back as the mid-'50s. Zalaznick says that the network secured the rights to ''almost all'' of the footage it sought. ''We tried not to let anything change our list,'' she says. ''In those instances where footage was rare or restricted, we used different elements — file footage or whatever — to tell the story.''

Case in point: Moment No. 17, Bob Dylan's performance at the 1998 Grammy Awards — and its memorable disruption by a madcap dancer (later identified as 26-year-old New Yorker Michael Portnoy) with the words ''Soy Bomb'' scrawled across his chest. Dylan, the network learned, ''was just not comfortable being shown on stage with that Soy Bomb guy,'' says Zalaznick. The solution? ''We show the guy and we show the stage manager hauling him off, but we never show him [in the same frame] with Bob.'' (For added yuks, VH1 appends a clip of an apparently chemically addled Ol' Dirty Bastard bum-rushing the same awards show with a loopily extemporaneous, unscheduled speech.)

The network tapped hunky actor Rick Schroder (NYPD Blue) — at 30 years old, roughly the age of VH1's average viewer — to host the series. Schroeder readily admits he had no recollection of many of the moments, but says he came away impressed by the historical breadth of it all: ''These VH1 guys really did their research, their homework. And even though I wasn't there, I think the Beatles deserve to be No. 1. They changed everything — they were a new frontier.'' If virtually no one questioned the Fab Four's right to the top slot, there were plenty of folks willing to shoot down more arcane choices. ''I was the lone voice holding out for the Buffalo Springfield playing on Mannix,'' chuckles Flanagan, who was unable to convince anyone else of that moment's resonance. ''I also tried to bring up [Little Feat's] Lowell George guest-starring on F Troop, and they told me to go take a nap.'' He sighs. ''Maybe those will make the mutant, bizarro, local-access version: The Bottom 100 Moments of Rock on TV.''