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

  BOB PITTMAN: If you go back to the early promos, it was all about attitude. "Don't watch that. Watch this!" It was all sort of parodying other TV and MTV. Visually, the guy I hired to be the head of the on-air look was Fred Seibert, who I hired from radio. And one of Fred's great contributions was, before MTV, everybody cut their video first, and then they rolled music under it. Fred and his guys cut the audio track first and then cut the video to the beat of the music. Now, that would seem pretty basic today, but believe it or not, it wasn't back then. Back then, everyone was doing the sort of Star Wars logos — big chrome logos coming out of a star-field, starting small and becoming big — and we didn't have the money to do any of that. So Fred was the one who said, "Instead of trying to do a cheap version of what everybody else does, why don't we come up with a whole new style that we can do cheaply, but because there is no point of reference, we'll never look cheap. We'll look innovative." And, indeed, we were. We broke all the rules at the time of design — logos can't change, they have to stay in the same position, the colors can't mutate. And we changed the logo color all the time, moved the logo all the time. It was animated. Completely new approach, and people picked up on that as an approach.

  ALAN HUNTER: When it came time for the actual launch, we all got into a bus in Manhattan — because they didn't have it in Manhattan — and we had to go out to a little restaurant/bar out in New Jersey [The Loft] to watch the actual kick-off. So we got in this bus, we got totted out there, [and] there were hundreds of MTV employers and family members. My heart racing a mile a minute. We had all been drinking pretty heavily the whole night long, and we had to wait until 12:01/midnight. And at that point, the rocket blasted off, and it was drop-dead silence in the room. The guy said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is rock n' roll," or whatever the line was. The rocket blasted off. The funny thing was the order we were to appear on camera was I think Mark, Nina, JJ, Martha, and then me. I was supposed to be the last guy. But the people out at the technical center in Long Island that do the uploading of all the video footage — that literally load the tapes into the machines — they loaded the tapes backwards, so I was the first one to come on! That's the trivia question, “Who was the first VJ on MTV?” That would be me, but it was supposed to be Mark Goodman. So after the Buggles came on [the first-ever video played on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"], we all just looked at each other and said, "Holy shit! This might just get big...if we can last." Of course, the next day, we all had to get to work. So that was pretty painful the next day, I'll tell ya.

  GEOFF DOWNES: We were told that "Video Killed the Radio Star" was used as the "launch track." I think it was more in hindsight. It was just something that they selected at the time. The impact started to progress as time went by. But nobody knew that this MTV channel was going to be quite significant.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: It wasn't just the VJs. It was everybody that worked on MTV. The office people, the suits, the crew. And then the time came — that infamous rocket — that still gives me butterflies in my stomach. When that rocket went off, we were just...I've never experienced everything like that. It was like a collective baby being born. There were tears, hugs, screaming, just such amazing energy. It was just an "Oh my God...it's real!" feeling.

  BOB PITTMAN: We click on...and it's a disaster. All the VJ breaks were on a tape, a reel-to-reel, and all the songs were on a cartridge. And normally, they did automation the other way. We set it up backwards, and everything went wrong. One of the problems was no one had done "stereo TV" before. We had a stereo system rigged up, where we would broadcast the stereo system over an FM frequency, then you could get a splitter on your cable, hook it up to your stereo system, and get the audio in stereo. It seemed somewhat simple at the time, very complicated today. Unfortunately, if you reverse the polarity of positive/negative, negative/positive in the wrong way, in mono, you can't hear it. And a couple of the production houses that we used had reverse polarities. So you'd look at something, and it would be silent. And you don't know what it is initially. It takes you a while to diagnose this problem. So every third or fourth little ID, we had no audio on it. We had a commercial break where we gave it to the local affiliate, but if they didn't have something, we ran music. Well, somebody had flipped the switch the wrong way, so if the local guy didn't have a commercial, it was silent. Everybody else was enjoying the party. I was on the phone having a heart attack, talking to the network operations in Smithtown, Long Island, trying to work all these problems out. I think I didn't sleep for about 48 hours after launch, before we got it settled down. I wished I had a couple of the drinks everybody else had had.

  KEN CEIZLER: The one distinction that I brag about is that the first five hours of the VJs on the channel I directed. That's something that I try to get people to think I'm important.

  ROBIN ZORN: But it was long hours and really crazy, crazy things that went on in that studio, with the people and the personalities. We were just making up things up as we went along...and it was great. I mean, I was on the air once, put into a garbage pail. There's a segment with Nina Blackwood going, "Oh my God, Robin's in the garbage pail!" Because the guys just threw me in a garbage pail, and that went on the air. At the time, nobody does that. It was kind of reality before reality really was, I guess, because it was how we were living and what we were doing.

  KEN CEIZLER: It wasn't like there was a lot of oversight in those early days. And there was a lot of fun, over-the-top, non-sequitur stuff that was going on down on the stage. We were having a great time. It was only until the channel started to get into Manhattan, where the executives could see what we were doing, that they started to go, "Wait a second...you guys have got to cut that out." Certainly the first six months — before we got into Manhattan — it was pretty much a playground.

  JONATHAN ELIAS: I always laughed about the fact that we were doing this stuff, and they didn't even have cable run to our building. It took a while to get cable in New York.

  BOB PITTMAN: The reality was we launched into maybe a couple of million homes. Tulsa, Oklahoma, was one of our big markets.

  ROBIN ZORN: There was an old guy named Leo who worked at Teletronics, and he was the "prop guy." He was great. He would appear on camera, handing props to the VJs. That was the kind of thing we would do. The prop guy was on the air. Things like that are done now, weren't done then. It was loosey-goosey. Whatever happens, happens. We would just go with it. We didn't re-do things. If they really made a bad mistake, maybe we'd re-do it. But often, we didn't. And that's why things went out on the air mispronounced. You'd think, "Oh my God, we can't have a VJ mispronouncing a name." But we did.

  ALAN HUNTER: I was a huge Bowie fan, and as I said, I was in his video. When I was introducing Bowie, I said "Bow-wee" one time. The producers just thought, "Oh God...how did we hire this guy?" I was fairly nervous the whole first year of MTV, no doubt. Certainly, that's why I liked interviewing the younger bands, because who were they, for God's sakes? At some point, a year or two into MTV, we were more known than these bands were, so that gave you a little bit of confidence. You were introducing them, which happens. Ryan Seacrest interviews everybody in the world, but he's like Dick Clark now. He's more well-known than these new bands. But it's weird. Bono is maybe three years younger than I am. And when I interviewed him, it was like '82. I think, "Wow, how young that guy was."

  ROBIN ZORN: One time we were on the air, and JJ had to describe why sometimes there were outages. Cable was really new then, so he was trying to explain how the Earth's rotation and the sun was blocking why cable couldn't come. He had a couple of us on camera. I was supposed to be "the sun" or "Earth." I can't remember which, but he would walk us around in circles. Basically, it was like a grade-school demonstration. Nobody was doing that kind of stuff on TV, and we were doing that. The first time that we did a contest, we had names in a thing, and I was out there with JJ, just sticking our hands in there, pulling names out. "I don't like this name. Let's pick another one." The feeling was we
were just a bunch of kids making this stuff up as we went along. It was definitely TV production value, but it was just fun. Pretty much that was the definition of everything we did there. All of us went to concerts together. We hung out together.

  BOB PITTMAN: We did TV a different way. The big fight was the guys who had done TV said, "Oh no, we can't do that. We have to rehearse. They have to stand on this mark." We'd go, "Why do they have to stand on a mark?" "Because there may be a shadow in their face." "We don't care if there's a shadow in their face!" So again, you're changing the production of how it was done. The hallmark was it was cheap. We decided we didn't want to own any facilities, because the equipment would change so quickly that we'd be stuck with old equipment, and we'd have to run that instead of being able to change studios for whoever had the newest equipment that could do cool effects for us.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: We didn't have a whole lot of videos. I think the number was about 300. I seem to remember around that number. Which, when you're running a 24-hour video channel, you burn through those pretty quickly. I remember a lot of Rod Stewart, Pat Benatar, the Buggles, Nick Lowe, Carlene Carter, Aldo Nova, Iron Maiden, Lena Lovich. [Lovich] was one of the first people I ever saw a video of, and I just loved her. I think we were playing Blondie at the beginning, "Heart of Glass." When we play one of the songs that we played back then on Sirius, it just all comes flooding back.

  ALAN HUNTER: It was a pretty limited library. When you have to include the Charlie Daniels Band, you know you're hurting. The majority was Rod Stewart. My favorites were David Bowie videos — "Fashion," "Ashes to Ashes" — because his were so dreamy and hallucinogenic. We had a lot of Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon. The early days of video were pretty much a literal translation to song. Rod was standing in the rain next to a light pole, smoking a cigarette, thinking about his honey, y'know? Pretty right on the nose. I think of Barnes & Barnes' "Fish Heads," those type of videos. But it was really pretty lame.

  CARMINE APPICE: Rod [Stewart] definitely had a good time with the videos. We all had a good time with the videos. We made a lot of videos. He knew the value of them at the time.

  ALAN HUNTER: The other interesting thing about the channel that a lot people didn't understand is we didn't have any commercials the first year. MTV was literally not selling any ad space, because no one wanted to buy. The filler was stock footage of astronauts floating in space. And people thought that was great. "Wow, no commercials, and this interstitial material of cool graphics and just space people." And then about a year into it, when we started selling ads, people would come up to us in the streets and say, "MTV is selling out." I'm just like, "No...they're just trying to make my salary!" I don't know what the others were making. I won't quote a figure, but my only criteria for a good job was to get as much money as a good chorus boy makes on Broadway. That was my dream. I lived in an apartment on 55th and Broadway. I used to look out down Broadway and dream about being on Broadway some day. I wanted to be in musical theater. If I could just make 550 bucks a week, which was the going union rate for an equity actor, that would be just great. If I could make that, I'm home free. I made better than that. But I was not getting rich on MTV for the first year or two. I renegotiated my contract with them a year into it. We extended things, and I started doing a lot better. But I'll tell you...we were like the early sports stars. We played hard, we got a lot of fame, and we started the whole business of MTV. But we did not enjoy huge salaries.

  BOB PITTMAN: The other issue was trying to get the record companies to keep producing music videos. If you remember, in 1981, the record industry was in a slump. It was the first time in many years they'd got in the red ink, and one of the problems was the radio playlist had been so tight that they couldn't get new music exposed, and they were heavily dependent upon radio. So we went to them and said, "Look, do MTV." We had to fight some of the record companies. MCA and I think PolyGram didn't give us their videos at first. They wanted to be paid for them. So we launched without them. A&M gave us their videos, and a guy named Gil Friesen, who's a good pal, said, "I don't know if this is going to work or not, but you've been really good to me, and you've broken a lot of records in radio, so I'll give you my videos." And we had other people say, "Yes, absolutely. We believe in it." The record industry was churning over so much red ink. One of the obvious areas to cut back in the budget was music videos. And if they did that, we were going to be dead. So the risk we took was, we'll launch with 200 videos. It ain't enough to have a network, but if we work, the record companies will make more videos. If we don't work, it doesn't matter. We don't work. We took that gamble. So a lot of the fall was trying to prove that we were working. And one of the reasons we pushed the launch August 1 is we needed to be on the air before the budget sessions went on at the record companies, and they made a decision to cut the videos out of the budget. As soon as we launched, we ran in Billboard and Radio & Records. We'd do this "Case Study #1." And it was actually just stories. "Tulsa, Oklahoma: MTV Launches." We'd quote three or four record stores that had some records by the Tubes that weren't being played on the radio, sitting around, gathering dust. Suddenly, they blew off the shelves. So it was this music that only MTV was playing was selling. The reality is we didn't have much quantity, but we were able to pick locations where it was beginning to create the understanding that we did sell records. I think the influence worked. Record companies kept it in their budget, and they produced more videos. In the early days, we begged everybody to make a video. In five years, there was more videos than we could play. You had the opposite problem. How do you tell people no? But in the early days, we were scrounging for almost every video we could get. I remember playing Andrew Gold and going, "Whew, boy, we've reached the bottom of the barrel."

  ALAN HUNTER: Everybody else had dropped whatever job they had, but I kept my bartending job a month or two into the gig. I literally went and taped the show during the day, and then I'd go to a place called the Magic Pan — it was on 57th and Sixth Avenue — and I had a nighttime bartending job. I didn't let go of it in the beginning. I don't know why. I just thought, "We'll see how this MTV thing works out." So about maybe two months into it, I was mixing a daiquiri, and this guy was sitting at the bar, two sheets to the wind, looking at me. He said, "You look familiar," and it still didn't dawn on me. He said, "Aren't you 'Mark somebody,' on this music channel?" And it dawned on me that he was talking about the gig I was doing during the day. I corrected him, and said, "No, I'm Alan Hunter." Pretty much, the next day or two, I put my notice in and quit the job, because I thought, "I don't want to be here making drinks while people are checking me out." It was kind of hard to let go of that gig. I was going to be an actor, if not a TV host, so for me, I took a diversion in my career. I think I made the right choice.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: We did a rock n' roll Christmas video with John Lee Hooker, which they put on ["Rock and Roll Christmas"] exclusively for MTV. I remember talking to some of the MTV people, saying, "We've got this rock n' roll video we made about Christmas, and we want to get it on." And they said, "Sure!" They hired Dave Edmunds to produce the single, and then we made the video right there in New York at the MTV studio. It was real fun to be part of that whole time.

  ALAN HUNTER: Collectively, the live New Year's Eve show was the most nerve-racking. Four hours. But ultimately, the most satisfying. I was much better live than on the pre-taped stuff. And the audience didn't know better. They thought we were all sitting there 24/7, anyway.

  KATHY VALENTINE: What stands out a lot to me is MTV used to throw these big parties, New Year's parties. It was a big deal. For a few years, it was just the highlight of the year. They were amazing, great parties. There was one in New York that was really cool. I remember being there with John Belushi. I just remember getting a message at my hotel [from Belushi] — "Are we on for tonight?" — and going together.

  ROBIN ZORN: My favorite New Year's of my entire life was the first New Year's concert. I was an associate producer in the truck, and I rememb
er, at one point, people said, "Robin, go out there and see who's there." It was the first time we did a New Year's show. We didn't know if we would get anybody there. And I remember I walked outside, and John Belushi was just stoned out of his mind, sitting at a table with his head on the table. I was all excited, like, "John Belushi's here!" And, of course, he was stoned, and we couldn't even get him on camera. Also about that first New Year's show, I was responsible for keeping us on track time-wise. We had to hit four midnights. The first midnight was right on, the second midnight was a little off, and the third and fourth we weren't even close to being midnight. Again, it was MTV, so we just had the VJs announce that it was midnight. That was very typical for us. We were way off, and yet, we were on the air going, "Yeah, Happy New Year, it's midnight out there on the west coast," and meanwhile, it wasn't midnight. We just flew by the seat of our pants.