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

  RIK EMMETT: I don't think it's any mystery that there are some people that the closer the camera gets, the more it loves them. That's why there's movie stars and people in daytime soaps, because they're beautiful people, and the closer the camera gets, you go, "Oh my God, her skin is flawless," or "Oh my God, look at how big and beautiful her eyes are," or "Oh my God, look at that guy...does he have a flaw anywhere?"

  MICKEY THOMAS: You mean, aside from the fact that we were just so damned good looking? [Laughs] I don't know. Looks is part of it. I think we had a pretty interesting looking band for the time. I mean, shit, we had Grace Slick. [Laughs] And then the fact, too, that most of us in the band were open to expanding our horizons visually and theatrically. I've always been interested in movies and incorporating other forms of art into the music. Paul Kantner was not afraid of that. Craig Chaquiço was very much into it. Grace of course. So we were not afraid to take risks and some chances and not afraid to fall on your face and make a fool of yourself if you look stupid.

  FEE WAYBILL: A lot of those bands — Grateful Dead and stuff — they didn't even look up when they played. They were playing in Levi's. They had their head down and half the time their back to the audience. They just didn't translate to TV. Whereas we — that was our whole deal. We were all about TV and doing a big theatrical presentation, and we're very gregarious kind of guys and really put it out there. A lot of people weren't.

  DAVE MARSH: I think the prog bands had more trouble, because first of all, the prog bands didn't have concise songs. And secondly, they didn't have poppy songs. They tended to be more morose. It wasn't something that MTV was terribly good at displaying. No great loss.

  JON ANDERSON: Some bands were just good musical bands, and video doesn't translate whether the talent is good on stage when you're on cameras, and you've got make-up, and you've got all that stuff. It puts people off, because they're not actors. They're musicians. So they couldn't "transfer." They weren't funky-looking. [Laughs] They weren't great looking. They didn't dress correct or whatever. They weren't hip enough to carry it over. Even though the song may have been very good, the videos generally...50% of the videos weren't very good, because it wasn't their forte. It wasn't what you become a rock musician for — to make videos? That's what movie stars do or pop stars or whatever. A lot of people — like Queen — worked amazing, because they actually started off as a visual event. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was a great video, and Bowie had great videos. Certain people were great videos. Yes, we're lucky. We had ten minutes of success [on MTV], but the music of Yes survives everything.

  ALAN HUNTER: I think music was the key there. The other ones grew and evolved. I'm not saying they got different. The Grateful Dead didn't have to do anything different. But we played one of their videos, did we not? David Bowie was built for the video age. He was making videos in the '70s. "Ashes to Ashes" was one of the stalwart first ones. He was OK to evolve. Bands like Yes were the ones that worried me. I was a huge Yes fan, but I didn't know how they were going to work. Not because of the visuals, so much as how was their "prog rock" going to work? 90125 came out in 1983, and mainly due to Trevor Rabin, their sound was so updated and cool that it worked, and I was happy for them. ZZ Top — I don't know how they worked as well as they did. I love ZZ Top. I think they had a real good sense of themselves and knew exactly what they needed to do, and that was nothing but have fun little videos. Their little bearded personas were so fun. But it's amazing how much accolades their videos got. "Legs" was a Video Music Award winner. It's like, "Really? That video?!" And Heart — Ann and Nancy were so pretty and photogenic. I think they kept relevant musically with their music during the '80s. Whether they came from the '70s or not, they so updated everything. They were still vital. And Ann and Nancy were easy on the eyes. With their costumes and highly conceptual videos. They sold a lot of albums, so they had some pretty good budgets, and they remained relevant. I think if you didn't remain relevant with the music, you weren't going to live through the '80s anyway.

  RICKY BYRD: Look, ZZ Top are not a good-looking band, but they're great, and they're cool as shit. What they did is they took advantage of the visuals and said, "What can we do to make ourselves look really cool? Dude, fast cars and women...and fuzzy guitars!" And they took advantage of that. And look at Robert Palmer. Same thing with Power Station. That was huge MTV stuff. Always putting hot girls, half-dressed. I mean, look at "Hot for Teacher." The stuff that stands out is that kind of stuff. And then there's interesting stuff like Tom Petty.

  GEDDY LEE: I think some bands were better at focusing on what they were, what they wanted to look like, and could exploit the whole image that they had already garnered. For a band like us, we didn't really have an image. We were "players," whose image evolved over many years. And I guess our image — even today — are one of players. And the fact that we don't really have a visual image outside of that, in a strange way, worked in our favor. It's the lack of image that became our image. [Laughs] I think that made it very difficult obviously in those "image-driven times." And other bands — especially hard rock bands that had the big hair and all the hard rock accoutrements — I think they leaned on that, and that was their image.

  FRANK STALLONE: I remember Bonnie Tyler was at the Grammys with us, and she did "Total Eclipse of the Heart." It was such an amazing vocal. And she looked like a hairdresser. She looked like she could be at the Jersey Shore as a hairdresser. And she was a fucking amazing singer. But again, she didn't really translate to the screen, whereas you get someone with zero talent, and they translate wonderfully.

  MARTHA DAVIS: I think it really just depended on the acts, and sadly, it was like if you're more visual, you got more out of it. And I think that's always a problem in the industry, like nowadays, if you're fourteen and have a good bellybutton. We're too wrapped up in that stuff anyway as it is, and that sort of heightened that aspect of it. The cuter you were, that came with it. And it's sad, because there are really talented people that maybe didn't have quite the stage presence or appearance that everybody was looking for. I think it probably did take a toll on some people. There was a downside to it.

  PETE ANGELUS: When you say "They couldn't," I think maybe your point is that "They didn't." I think they could have, actually. Maybe they just couldn't figure out the proper way, which is really not so difficult, to present themselves in that medium. And I don't know why that would be problematic, because even for the bands that wanted to shy away from any humor and just present who they were, that could have been done in a very creative way, as well. I don't know why they couldn't, and I don't know why they didn't. But for the people that saw MTV for the opportunity that it was, a lot of people made a lot of memorable videos that had a lot of impact on a lot of people during those years.

  JOE ELLIOTT: You have to remember there were a lot of people that were actually threatened by this channel. A lot of bands that were established before we came along looked at it with scorn. I've talked to them about it — bands like Journey, Kiss, Styx, maybe even REO Speedwagon — they were like, "Why do we have to shoot videos? We never had to do this before." They took this...I wouldn't say a lazy stance, but like a stance against it. They reluctantly shot videos, and consequently, they didn't make very good ones.

  ROGER POWELL: I think some bands just didn't know what to do. You handed them this powerful power tool, and they didn't know where to plug it in.

  Les Garland and John Sykes

  BOB PITTMAN: There were two guys that really dealt with the artist community day in, day out — John Sykes and Les Garland. Les sort of dealt with the people who really wanted to go have fun, and just loved Les for being the pied piper. John hung out with the ones that were very serious about the business, and wanted to understand exactly how and where, and much more management-oriented on the business. They sort of split up the artists and the managers based on that approach.

  LES GARLAND: Small town boy. Came from a little town in southwest Missouri near the Arkansas border, calle
d Forsyth, Missouri, which is by Branson, Missouri. I was mischievous and a bit of a rebel at a very young age, out to express myself. I'll never forget as a teenager, when my father took me aside, and gave me "the speech" about, "Very few people are given this gift of what's known as 'leadership skills,' and you need to be very careful with that, because you can very easily lead people — including yourself — down the wrong path. And you need to find that right path, and you need to be positive about your leadership skills. It's a gift. It's like soul — some people have it, some people don't." So now I'm a teenager, and I'm messing around with bands. I want to be in a rock band, and I'm booking rock bands in high school. Meantime, I'd go home at night and go to bed, and I'd have my little transistor radio, and I'd be dialing around and try to pick up distant radio stations. And the two that come to mind is one in Chicago, WLS, and another one out of Little Rock, Arkansas, KAAY. Those started influencing me. The music was really influencing me. So off I go to college. I'm supposed to go to school in Dallas, and I ended up hanging out at the local rock n' roll radio station down there, KLIF, one of the top radio stations in the history of radio. Then I decided I was going to secretly get my third class license, which was a license you had to have back in those days to be a DJ, because you had to read transmitters. So I snuck into a school and took a twelve-week program to get my radio license. [After radio jobs in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston] I went to the pinnacle of it all, which I thought was the greatest radio station in America, a station in San Francisco, KFRC. I stayed over four years, and it was "Radio Station of the Year" three or four years in a row. I was "Program Director of the Year." We had number one ratings. After about four years in San Francisco, I had been approached by each of the major networks — NBC, CBS, and ABC — in various capacities. I felt that I had reached the top of the mountain, and there was nothing left to prove in radio. I was challenged to do something else. One night, I was with Doug Morris, who has been the most powerful guy in the music business now for a good ten years. We were having dinner in San Francisco, and he asked what I was going to do after my radio career. And I said, "It's funny that you bring that up, because I've been thinking about that. I don't really know, but I'm intrigued to do something." And he said, "Would you be interested in coming over to the music company side? There's something going on at Atlantic that maybe we can talk about." He was with Atlantic, which at the time was the number one record company in the world. So that led to a couple of meetings, and the next thing you know, I was the vice president and general manager of Atlantic Records.

  MICKEY THOMAS: Les was irresistibly lovable, a bigger than life character. He's one of those guys that seems like he can seamlessly and effortlessly do anything he wants in life and get away with it. Extremely charming, just dripping with charm. A lot of that might go back to that radio voice of his. The voice, the looks, the charm, the charisma — Les had it all. And whenever you were in his presence, you knew a good time was going to be had by all.

  LES GARLAND: Bob Pittman and I had known each other for a long time. Bob and I had crossed paths when we were youngsters in Milwaukee, in the formative years of our radio career. Small-town southern boys that did well in radio and achieved a certain level of success. He came out to Los Angeles, and we were having dinner together one night. During the conversation, he says, "I want to talk to you about something. How many artists on Atlantic would you say are making music videos?" I'm like, "Not that many, actually." He goes, "So you think that music videos could work on television?" And it just hit me. I go, "You're thinking 24 hours a day, like a radio station? Yeah. I absolutely do." So we had another conversation, in the fall of 1980. Then came the spring of '81. The vote was coming down, whether to put up the funds to launch this music channel. Doug Morris became a very critical vote in that process, because it was Warner Communications, and don't forget, he was over at Atlantic. And of course, the smart people at Warner would want to know how the heads of the labels would feel about the company starting this thing to put music videos on television — would it benefit the artists, would it benefit the music company, etc. I remember Doug phoning me and asking what I thought. I said, "I think it's a brilliant idea. In fact, Pittman and I have been talking about it several times." He goes, "I should vote for this, right?" And I said, "Absolutely." Which he did, and then the green light was go.

  BOB PITTMAN: Les was a promoter. Les was a great character.

  LES GARLAND: So then they launch this crazy thing. I was still with Atlantic. In reality, the two markets that MTV had had at that time — it was a rollout, but it wasn't getting rolled out. The cable guys didn't get it. And it was in Des Moines and in Tulsa. I had gone through Tulsa as a youngster in my radio years, and I had a friend there that I had produced concerts with. I phoned him up and said, "Have you noticed this new channel that is playing music all the time? Do me a favor. VHS it for me once a week, 24 hours, and send me the tape." Which he would do, and I would ramble through them and check them out. I would call Pittman or send him a note — "I saw this, and I think you may want to consider doing this instead." Kind of constructive feedback. And he was intrigued with what I was doing. Within 60 days of launch, I get a call. He's going to come to California and can we have dinner. By the way, a lot of what I was doing was talk our artists on Atlantic into making music videos for this new channel. And even people that weren't on Atlantic, for that matter. So Pittman comes out to Los Angeles, and he was aware that my contract with Atlantic was expiring soon, and he asked me what I was going to be doing. I was like, "Here we go again...funny you bring that up, because I don't know if the music business is for me." I've done this for a couple of years, and I learned something about business in a sense. I learned that you can be on one of two sides. You could be a buyer, or you can be a seller. And I didn't even know until after I did it that I went from buyer to seller, and I liked the buyer side a little better. I said, "I'm considering things right now." He's like, "Garland, would you be interested in coming to New York and running MTV for me?" I just looked at him, and I'm like, "Done. I'll take it...did you just offer me a job?" [Laughs] He goes, "You believe that big?" And I go, "I believe that big, absolutely I do." He goes, "Can't pay you the money you're getting paid now." I go, "We'll worry about that later." We agreed that he would put the first call into Doug Morris the next morning, which he did. Doug phoned me around 7:30 California time. "Garland, Pittman called me. I think this is brilliant, and you've got to do this." Then we started putting everything together. I came down to Florida. We had some corporate meetings. That was in late November/early December of '81. I was on board by January, and off we went. I was senior executive vice president. I was the highest-ranking officer inside MTV.

  ALAN HUNTER: Then Les came on board. I remember him taking the five VJs to lunch at Chow, the Chinese restaurant in New York. Very upscale. He was like — and I mean this in a good way — a vacuum cleaner salesman. Y'know, one of those door-to-door guys that could sell anything. He was a radio guy. I think Mark and JJ knew him from the radio days. He was slick, and I thought, "I am in the big leagues now." He took us to this huge, fancy restaurant, which was meant to show we were on a fast track now, and that he was there to make sure that we understood how big a deal this could become. But I'll tell you, Les was everybody's pal. He called you "pal" and put his arm around you. He was very huggy in a "radio promotion guy" kind of way. I never felt like I had to watch my back, but I definitely thought, "What's going on here?" I remember him and Bob Pittman, six months into it, sat me down and gave me a raise. Without my asking. They said, "We think you're going to be big here at MTV, and we want to give you a raise." It was their way — I understood later — of staggering the VJs out, so they could fire us five years later, in staggered order. [Laughs] He liked to play golf a lot. I figured, "You live in New York City...and you play golf?"

  KEN CEIZLER: Bob Pittman did have a glass eye, and then Les Garland did. Les Garland was "your rock n' roll guy." He was the antithesis of Bob Pittm
an. He knew all the rock stars and everybody. And he lived the rock n' roll life. In that regard, sometimes you have to pay the devil, and I think he had to pay the devil and give up an eye. He might have also given up another part of his body...but I'm not too sure about that! Bob Pittman had a glass eye since day one when I met him, but it wasn't very noticeable.

  ALAN HUNTER: The top three executives had fake eyes. They had one fake glass eye. So we thought, "Wow. Is that a prerequisite?...or is that what happens when you get the gigs?"

  ANONYMOUS: Les Garland — I didn't have a whole lot to do with him, but I just remember thinking, "He's just a blow-hard. He's so loud, and he thinks he's really cool. And maybe he is really cool...but he's not as cool as us."

  ALAN HUNTER: Les would go out and let it down every so often, but always keep his "mature cool." Les was the party animal. Without a doubt. With Les, he was going to drink you way under the table and be out four more hours. We didn't hang that much with the executives — Bob Pittman and Les, and the upper guys like John Sykes. We'd always catch wind of a big party that they were at the night before. And early on, we were like, "Well, what are we...chopped liver?" Like at the New Year's Eve show, the executives had on these fantastic tuxedo suits with these cowboy boots, with silver inlays. They were always edgy enough. The MTV executive suit — in the business — they were like the wild boys to the rest of the corporate community. There they were with Warner Communications and American Express. But Les wasn't "trying." The other ones were trying to exude rebelliousness in the corporate suit. But Les just was. He truly had fun with it. And if I hadn't seen him years later — way after MTV — down in Florida where he lives now, I would say that it was kind of a veneer. But it was wasn't. Les just loves life. He's a big gambler. I mean he'll gamble on things. But again, he could just sell anything.