MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video Read online

  MIKE PELECH: Alan was in a music video, "Fashion," by David Bowie.

  ALAN HUNTER: [Before joining MTV] I was an actor making the rounds, putting my headshots in every casting director's hands. I did a couple of little small bits in movies. I was in the movie Annie. My kids to this day love watching the DVD and catching me on three frames. I did a couple of way-Off Broadway shows, and I went to a casting session for a David Bowie video. They put me in a line-up in a cattle call, and they called a couple of weeks later and said, "You're in the video. Can you dance?" I told them I was a pretty good dancer, and I was one of the six featured dancers in that video. So I was nothing more than a face. I did get paid 50 bucks a day, and I got to meet David Bowie. It was totally worth it. But that was only about three months prior to me getting the job at MTV. Nobody really knew what video music was all about. It played on Midnight Special. That's where I got to see it for the first time.

  BOB PITTMAN: We set about trying to find a somewhat representative group of people. Some people were very serious about music. JJ had been recommended by the manager of Queen, Jim Beach, who said, "Man, this guy does the best interviews. He's the most solid guy. He's a DJ in L.A." Mark Goodman had been on WPLJ in New York, which was much more mainstream album rock, but had the qualifications.

  MIKE PELECH: Mark and JJ were the most knowledgeable. Both of them had a lot of experience in FM radio. Between the two of them, they almost had an encyclopedic knowledge of music. They would know the a-side, the b-side, the whole history of albums, what groups people had come from. [The others] did not have that background, so they had to rely more on the producers to give them information. But you could talk to JJ for hours. He just knew so much about the groups, knew so many of the groups personally. He was very good friends with Rod Stewart and Robert Plant. Those were his two closest buds. And I know he was very close with Aerosmith. They had even mentioned that he had broken them in Boston and that they were very indebted to his support. Mark at that time was married to Carol Miller, who was a radio celebrity also from WPLJ. So the two of them were a real dynamo couple. I would say that was the brain-trust of the music information, those guys.

  ROBIN ZORN: JJ was like "the big dad." JJ took care of everybody, had a big smile for you, was in on everybody's secrets. JJ knew everything. JJ walked around with a long fur coat. JJ was larger than life, and his smile would knock you out. The fact that he was on MTV really established us, because everybody — especially on the west coast — knew who JJ Jackson was.

  MIKE PELECH: JJ had the most spectacular radio voice and the most infectious laugh. I think everybody mentions that when they speak about JJ, what a wonderful person he was. We would just laugh with him doing stupid stuff.

  ROBIN ZORN: And Mark was the same thing for New York. Mark was on WPLJ and a pretty established DJ. And knew a lot about rock n' roll but hadn't done as many interviews as JJ, I don't believe. But Mark was a good rock n' roller. Alan was this country guy. He just didn't seem to know much about rock n' roll, and he'd mispronounce names all the time. He came to the interview wearing a flannel shirt. He looked really cute, but I remember me and Liz were on the floor that day, looked at each other, and said, "No way is he getting hired." Alan became one of my closest friends. Alan was with me my first date with my husband. Alan and his wife came, because I didn't want to go by myself. Nina was this ditzy/sexy blonde, you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. She was smiley...but ditzy. Really, really ditzy. Had this effervescent, sexy personality all at the same time. That was definitely a draw, and we knew was going to be a draw for the teenaged boys out there.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: They hired me first, then Mark, and [then] Meg Griffin. Meg Griffin decided she didn't want to do TV. She wanted to stay with radio.

  ROBIN ZORN: I worked with Meg Griffin, before we went on the air. My recollection of this was that Meg thought she would have more autonomy and that she would be able to pick videos. Not that they do it anymore on the radio, but they used to. When she found out there was a list that was preordained, I don't think it was along her liking.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: Martha was the last one. They hired Martha to replace Meg.

  BOB PITTMAN: Martha Quinn was the last one, on the last day of auditions. I programmed WNBC in New York, and my assistant called me up, and said, "Hey, we got this intern over here who's really good and really talented. You ought to interview her for that thing you're doing." And I'm going, "Shit, OK, as a favor, if she can get there at 5:00, we can put her on tape." The next day, the guys came in and go, "Wow, that girl you sent was great. A lot of warmth, a lot of energy." So they brought me the tape and that was the way she got in. They all got in a little different way.

  ROBIN ZORN: Martha was just this sweet, preppie, little girl. If you look at some of the haircuts...she was there for the preppie contingent, people that weren't stoned all the time. And Martha was really excited about rock n' roll. Loved David Lee Roth. She had such a crush on him.

  ALAN HUNTER: In general, I think everybody was pretty down to earth. I think there was a "gee whiz" quality for all of us, maybe more severe for me. JJ and Mark had been in the music business and had some notoriety before that, but for me, I was fairly awe-struck.

  ROBIN ZORN: Everybody was pigeonholed. Like, Nina was the ditzy blonde/sex symbol, Martha was this preppie little girl, Alan was the sweet southern guy, and Mark and JJ were the rock n' rollers.

  MIKE PELECH: Nina would get flustered, and then she would start bobbing her head. But she's a very endearing and engaging person. She's a good friend. Martha, also, is just a lovely person. One of my codewords to JJ when he needed some make-up, I'd say, "Can someone please get Mr. Jackson's bags?" That meant the bags under his eyes were needing a touch-up of make-up. We would just have things that we do with the VJs to either help them or annoy them or get them to laugh. It was a nice rapport with them.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: [JJ] was the guy that gave us the tip, "If you have bags under your eyes, Preparation H works really well."

  ROBIN ZORN: I would say Alan and Martha were probably on the outs at the beginning. They didn't have any background in rock n' roll. So not to say that Mark and JJ felt superior to them, but I think there was a little bit of, "This is a legitimate rock n' roll venture, and I want to be a legitimate rock n' roll guy...why are they here?"

  ALAN HUNTER: Mark and I didn't get along very well in the beginning. He was snobbish to me, and he'll admit that. He thought I was an actor, and he didn't like that I didn't have any expertise in the music business. And he thought that I was a joker...which I kind of was. I relied on comedy, not musical knowledge. Nina and I got along the best, because she was an actress. She and I relate on that level. And she, in fact, would give me advice after my shift. My first three/four/five months were horrible. I just wasn't getting in the swing of it at all. And she would take me aside and give me some tips on how to relax and just be me. So I appreciated that. Martha and I were...I don't know. Everybody thought Martha and I had a thing going. And that did not make my first wife happy. She wasn't happy because I wasn't wearing my wedding ring the first little while because I thought this was "a part" I was playing. Until she said, "Oh no, you're part is you're married!" So, I had a little push-pull between the wife and the producers of MTV, who were begging me to keep it off. So Martha and I got along very well. I think, after a time, it became that she and I were going to be kind of "the kids next door" of the MTV world.

  BOB PITTMAN: I think they were much more "middle America" than MTV is today.

  ROBIN ZORN: Then we met everybody on the staff, and more people got hired — producers, directors, associate producers — and I think I was there less than a few weeks before I was moved from a PA to associate producer, because I could write. I was on the first team working with the VJs, and what we did was write the news break segments. I wrote interviews for the VJs, and we were on the floor of the studio producing the VJ segments.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: The launch was scheduled for August 1
, and they flew me in the fifth of July. So those weeks leading up to the launch were spent in rehearsal, working at the studio, from early in the morning until midnight at night. Working out the bugs with the technical aspect, working with the set. Figuring out what we were actually going to do. So it was a lot of preparation, rehearsal.

  KEN CEIZLER: This was the invention of the term "non-linear television," so it wasn't programs and half-hour breaks. We were trying to break down what the channel would look like for an hour and where the VJ segments were going to be and what the role of the VJ segments were going to be. So there was a lot of discussion about that role that they had, as far as from my end, because I was working with the VJs in the studio, as far as what they were going to do. And since we did the VJ breaks, it wasn't live. They were all integrated later in Smithtown. It was called NOC, Network Operations Center. What we were doing was we were creating the VJ segments kind of without context. The VJs worked with associate producers on the floor that would instruct them what music they were about to come out of, and they had to do a great job of pretending like they just listened to the music and saw what you did. In the same regard, they would have to do these lead-ins and lead-outs. That was certainly a learning curve, and it was always interesting to see when it was finally put together how much it worked.

  MIKE PELECH: The studio was a former film stage. Film stages don't have the technological backbone of a television studio. It was pretty much just a pipe grid for hanging lights, with a hard cyc [cyclorama] and lights on stands. To turn it into a television studio meant that the [lighting grid] had to be electrified. We had to install a lot of air conditioning and build a control room with a switcher and video tape machines. The technical infrastructure was pretty extensive. And it was a real job to finish the work on schedule, because August 1 was just not enough time. It might have been six months to turn the studio around. You would just walk in one day, and people were walking around. The pipe grid is on the floor, and there are people with ladders and equipment installing stuff. It was a madhouse. But we finally got it together, and we started to do some rehearsals. The schedule for taping would be Monday through Friday, and by the end of Friday, we had enough footage for the weekend, so that all that footage went out to the uplink, and the videos were integrated into the studio footage. By Monday morning, we were probably about a half a day ahead. So what we were shooting Monday morning would probably air Monday evening. Our end of it was pretty much 9:00-7:00 every day. It was fairly long days.

  ALAN HUNTER: It was crazy. The preparation was insane. I was immediately thrown into a world that I did not know anything about. I was going to be an actor, for God's sake, and here I was, being asked to be a television host. I guess I fit the demographic bill. They had the Jewish guy, the blonde vamp, the girl next door, and the black guy, and I was "middle America," I suppose. But it was kind of like cramming for a test in college. I had three-ring binders. I was looking through all the bands that existed in the video catalog at the time. I was totally into music, but I liked a lot of jazz. I was a Joni Mitchell and James Taylor fan, loved the Who and the Stones, but I didn't know a lot about bands like Def Leppard. So I really had to "go to school." We did tons of rehearsals. They were building the set. They were putting new potted plants on and taking them off. It was total chaos, because no one had ever done this before, and the entire crew, except for the tech guys who ran the cameras and did the stage managing, they had done television before. But in terms of the producers, the floor producers, and the content people, they were all throwing this stuff against the wall for months prior to the launch, trying to really figure out what was going to happen on day one. What was the format? What was going to happen? Were we going to just sit and read news all day? They didn't even know what the name of it was, up until a couple of days before we went on air. It was called "The Music Channel." No one had said "MTV," right up until the last moment.

  BOB PITTMAN: The original idea was it was going to be "TV1." Not very sexy, but the idea of TV1 was it was a different kind of TV. So we tried, and we couldn't clear the name. There was some production company called TV1. But we could clear "TVM." So it was going to be TVM, and we sort of began to work on that a little bit. We were in a meeting, and we always did this "group brainstorming," and the driest, most research-oriented, least creative guy in the bunch, a guy named Steve Casey, who programmed the music, said in a very dry way, "How about MTV...doesn't that sound better?" Everybody goes, "Yeah, MTV. That sounds better!" So it went from TVM to MTV, based on Steve Casey.

  MTV's Theme Song/Launch of MTV

  JONATHAN ELIAS: My background — I was more of [a] classical composer, still am. I have one foot in classical music and one foot in pop. At that point, I was working with John Barry, who was the James Bond composer, as an arranger and orchestrator with him, doing synthesizer/orchestration things. And I had also done a bunch of movie trailers, the original Alien trailer. So I had started doing a few things in the city. My brother [Scott Elias], we had just started doing some advertising music, too, some commercials. I had done a bunch of stuff for Sesame Street and a few logos. Somehow, he met Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman, and they were doing some of the marketing stuff [for MTV], the promo materials and whatnot. So it was such a small project at the time, because none of us really believed it was going to happen. Who believed that you could actually do something where you were going to see videos all day and night, 24 hours a day? I think that was about the only 24-hour thing going on then, other than CNN. I had a loft, and it was a seven-story walk up, because our elevator was out, and having Fred and Alan come up to the loft was always a pain in the butt for them. [Laughs] There were a bunch of different pieces we did for them, and eventually, they settled on this one. They ran a bunch of these different interstitial commercial logos for MTV. It was everything from the original moon landing, which is the one they ended up playing the most, obviously, but we must have done eight or ten that were running at the time. It was funny. I think it was my college roommate who played guitar. And the drummer was an old friend of mine, too. This guy, Alex, he's a microbiologist now. I don't even remember Alex's last name. And the guitarist was Ray Foote, another old friend. It was just like you put together your friends back then. I don't even remember who played bass. It was all kind of "low tech." Everything was low tech then.

  BOB PITTMAN: We were trying to figure out what icon we were going to use to say, "This is a change in TV." So we had this idea that we were going to use the words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Those were Neil Armstrong's words, so we sent a letter to Neil Armstrong, saying, "We're going to use this...unless you tell us no." Sort of negative option. We had the video already cut. Every hour, it's supposed to say, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" [then sings top-of-hour music]. Literally, the week before, we get a letter from him, saying, "No, you can't use it." Then we have the decision, do we have to scrap this whole iconography? And Fred Seibert convinced ourselves that it was OK to be more abstract, that we didn't have to say it. We could just still have the video there and the guy jumping around on the moon. We didn't have a face. You couldn't see a face, so we didn't have to worry about name and likeness. And that's the way we went. But the idea was to use the whole space motif, which was very hot at the time. You know, the shuttle was just coming out. To really say, "We're new, different, cutting edge, etc."

  JONATHAN ELIAS: That was written exclusively for the MTV theme. There were a lot of things John [Petersen] and I were writing for the MTV theme at the time. Some I wrote on my own, and some I wrote with him. They were ten, twelve-second small pieces. So for a couple of weeks, we were just writing a bunch of things, throwing them against the wall. This was something that was pre-scored. We hadn't gotten the film of the moon landing yet. And frankly, I wouldn't have known how to synch it up back then, anyway. I didn't even have a 24-track back then. I think I was working off of a half-inch TASCAM deck. We went into this cheap little studio with a cou
ple of friends and just knocked out a bunch of these things. They weren't polished studio players...we weren't polished studio players, John and I. We didn't make enough money to pay anyone. All the guys got 50 bucks or 100 bucks to play it. There was no money involved in this, because none of us thought it was going to amount to anything. I think in those days, they were paying a thousand dollars a logo. You get a writer's share [each time the song is played], which has been extremely lucrative over the years. It was funny getting a thousand dollars...and becoming an icon. But it gave you instant credibility in the commercial market, which is what I went on to do, and becoming a rock producer. One of the bands I produced later was Yes, who were old burnouts, even they knew the MTV stuff. No one knew it would become an icon, especially me. I think we all were like, "Wow, a thousand dollars!" In those days, a bunch of us were living in a loft in Manhattan on 17th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway, which was the costume jewelry district. It was no man's land when I was there, '80/'81. It was unexpected, and like a lot of things you do in your career, some things stick, and some don't.