Bands make music videos to make people aware of their latest single. Well, usually. Here is a bit of music trivia about a handful of videos released much later than usual.

“Night Moves”

To promote a greatest hits album in 1994, Bob Seger did something kind of strange: he shot a video for “Night Moves,” a song initially released in 1976. A big hit on MTV and VH1, it starred Daphne Zuniga of Melrose Place and Matt LeBlanc, just a few months before he’d become a huge star on Friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgOA24hAe60

“Estranged”

In 1991 and 1992 Guns N’ Roses released sprawling, cinematic, big-budget videos for “Don’t Cry” and “November Rain,” respectively to promote its double album Use Your Illusion I and II. Both were based on short stories written by Del James, the band’s road manager, as was the third part of the trilogy, a video for the Use Your Illusion single “Estranged.” But it wasn’t released until late 1993…confusingly, in order promote the band’s newest album, The Spaghetti Incident?

“96 Tears”

? and the Mysterians released the garage rock classic “96 Tears” in 1966, and it went to #1. Music videos weren’t really around then, and it took the band until 1997 to shoot a video for the song. Why? By then the band had lost the rights to their masters, so they re-recorded all of their old songs, including “96 Tears,” trying to make them sound exactly like the originals. Then they released them, and promoted the album with a video.

“Space Oddity”

The world had “moon fever” in 1969, brought on by Apollo 11’s lunar landing.

Despite that, David Bowie couldn’t gain any traction with “Space Oddity,” a song about an astronaut losing contact with Ground Control. Three years later, RCA Records bought the rights to Bowie’s back catalog and re-released “Space Oddity” along with a video. This time the song went to #1 in England and #15 in the U.S.

For more music trivia, check out Uncle John’s Plunges into Music.