by Greg Prato
GREG HAWKES: Probably my favorites were Nina and Martha, for obvious reasons. [Laughs] Nina Blackwood was sort of the "rock n' roller type." They seemed like they became part of the culture. They were like the face of the channel. Almost like TV personalities.
RICKY BYRD: The lovely Nina Blackwood...which, of course, all the guys in bands had crushes on!
NINA BLACKWOOD: I guess you look at it as a compliment. But it's funny. In hindsight, you look at it, and you go, "God, why wasn't I more powerful with that?" But — and my VJ cohorts can vouch for this — at the time, I was just a much more fragile person. Now, of course, I would be able to be stronger about it. Because I didn't really consciously think about that. It was kind of strange for me. But then as I got older, and people would say stuff like...I remember this one guy, I was interviewing Ozzy Osbourne at a show, and he goes, "I had my first sexual relationship watching you...but I was alone." It was like, "Oh God!" I could kind of laugh at it.
ART BARNES: I absolutely loved Martha Quinn. She was turbo-cute.
FRANKIE SULLIVAN: Martha I was closest to. I always liked her. She came out and did a thing on the band. MTV did a special on the band. She spent four or five days on the road with us. We had some really good conversations. She gave me a book on Buddhism. I still have it. I just remember she had some spunk to her and was kind of fun and bubbly.
MARTHA DAVIS: I've seen them since, and I've got to say, Mark Goodman is looking good. [Laughs] He was kind of a goofy guy on [MTV], but he's grown up all nice.
ANN WILSON: Mark Goodman — I've had the pleasure to speak with him a lot of times over the years since. What a great guy.
DEBORA IYALL: I remember I liked JJ. I felt like he knew the history of music a certain way. He had a real genial attitude toward discovering new things and being a champion of new music. Some of the VJs seemed like, "Where did they come from?" It's like, "This guy was on the football team one week, and now he's a VJ?" Or, "She was trying to be a model, and now she's a VJ?" I guess I was attracted more towards music fans in the VJs, ones who really loved the music and not necessarily were that photogenic or whatever.
JON ANDERSON: Over the years, I used to enjoy a lot of the VJs. They were just funny and comical. They made fun of the silly videos and made light of the good videos. Sometimes you'd watch MTV just for the VJs, because they'd have their show and in-depth talks about, "What does this video really mean?" or "Is this music any good?" They're actually very early Entertainment Tonight shows, very early TMZ. The music, a little bit of chat, a little bit of rumor, a little bit of gossip. But it was actually very fun, because it was fresh.
GLENN TILBROOK: They had a youthful irreverence I think, which all the best "presenters" throughout time have that, and they have that for their own time.
BOB PITTMAN: People would say, "Wow, I love Martha Quinn." "Why do you love Martha Quinn?" "Because she plays great videos." It had nothing to do with Martha. "I loved that contest." It had nothing to do with Martha. They attribute all the attributes of the channel to human beings. So that was why we needed them.
KEN CEIZLER: You're given the title of "director," but the reality is that I was a novice at that time. I think there was definitely "give and take." I was giving [the VJs] instructions probably out of context, because I wasn't going to be seeing the whole thing. People above me would say, "Do this, do this," and I would try to instruct them, and they would give me a weird look, like, "Where did that come from?" We all role play to a certain extent. I think that's natural. But I would say, for the most part, the thing about directing, it was mostly just about keeping the crew and everybody organized, to get done on schedule. That was a very important aspect of it. We didn't want to pay extra for overtime and studio time. So we had to be fiscally responsible. And I think the director's role was mostly that.
ROB HALFORD: I think they were really growing with the experience themselves. Massive rock n' roll acts were coming into that little studio, and I'm sure they were as overwhelmed as a lot of people were in that time. But I think they all had their own distinctive style. Everybody warmed to them immediately. They became stars very quickly. It was a bit of a mash-up, really, because they all did different kinds of things. None of them were exclusively into any particular side of rock n' roll. They just did everything that was thrown at them. That was a really cool, organic way to accept genres of all types of music from that time frame. It was just very unprejudiced, very open-minded. Anything that was hot or exciting was brought in.
FRANKIE SULLIVAN: Those VJs. I think about them sometimes, because some of them took a liking to an act. Some of them made a difference. I really believe some of them pushed a song over-the-top, enough to maybe it went to a number one spot, where it was sitting at number two. Because they liked it. And people would watch them and like them. They were fans and devoted, so they followed. I did like that beginning camaraderie and those original five. It's kind of like watching The Right Stuff, only musically. They were like the pioneers of that stuff.
"WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: They became celebrities in their own right. If you were a fan of MTV, it's like they lived in your house. They were all fun and immensely likable. They seemed like people you'd want to hang out with. It's kind of like SNL. There have been many cast members over the years, but nothing ever quite matches up to that original group. There was something just kind of perfect about it.
Early MTV
ROBIN ZORN: [The VJs] all came at different hours, because they were on shifts. They came into the office, would look over the copy. Nobody had assistants, so they were just pitching in like everybody else. We did have wardrobe and make-up for them, but they really just came in and hung with everybody, and that's why we became so close. It wasn't like they were treated like superstars by the staff at all. It was just the same as everybody else. So our days were all long. There was a McDonald's right around the corner from Teletronics, and we would go grab french fries and milkshakes, sit on the roof of the building, and have lunch, all of us. That's a pretty typical lunch for us — milkshakes and french fries. We were working like 15/16 hours a day. And as much as it was fun, we were making very little money, and we were exhausted. I left to go work for Good Morning America.
KEN CEIZLER: We really were split in two. There was the world of the studio, and there was the world of the office. I can tell you that, certainly in the studio, a typical day was we started pretty early, and each of the directors was responsible for a certain amount of shifts, which was basically like directing five hours worth of VJ segments. Now, that doesn't mean that we were recording literally five hours. What we were doing was recording...John Fisher was a production manager, who from my understanding, created "the wheel of the VJs," which meant that we had a full hour, and there were five or six breaks per hour. Those were in the prime time hours, and those VJ breaks were anywhere from a minute to two minutes long. I think the first break after the hour was music news, and the fourth break was also music news. The ones in between were to promote on-air stuff or lead-ins and lead-outs to music. So early on, I think the directors were taking real care in doing these VJ segments, and we worked long days, because we wanted to make sure we got it right. But then once we got the hang of it, everybody started to know the drill. Through time, we were able to do these things pretty quick and efficiently. So our days got shorter and shorter. But in the beginning, it was full days. Each director was responsible for getting down at least five hours of programming a day.
MIKE PELECH: It would start around 9:00, and they would do the intros and outros. They would have a list of what the videos were or would be, so they could do a little bit of color commentary on the video. We would occasionally get some of the videos in, so we could see them, but that was a luxury. Usually, that stuff didn't come in until later, and that was usually integrated in an editorial suite or out at the uplink. The original format of the show was very stiff. It was very heavily blocked. It was almost like a very traditional television show. The executives didn't like
the way it looked. Coming out of a video, where people would be running around and going crazy, coming out to a very stilted, formal, newscaster type of presentation just didn't work. So the blocking went out the window, and pretty much, they said, "Loosen it up. You can talk to the VJs off camera. You can do nutty stuff, whatever you want." As the day would go on, we would just develop stuff. One of the things that I developed was something called "runaway camera," which originally, the director was Jeff Bolton, and I think Nina was in a funk. Her father was ill, and she had very little energy. So Bolton said, "Michael, do something. Get her animated." With two cameras, you were cross-shooting, so you were probably always 45 degrees away from each other. I just came up with the notion of runaway camera, so I started yelling, "Runaway camera!" And pushed the camera out between Nina and the second camera, so the camera rolled through the shot, and I chased it. Nina was totally surprised, and that became a semi-regular part of the schtick that we used to do there. People from the office would come down and dress in costume, and we'd do runaway camera. The camera would go running through the set. I would go chasing it and would be followed by up to ten people. So it became a thing that people really looked forward to and liked. We almost planned doing them, so people could get involved in it.
NINA BLACKWOOD: I was always first up to tape. So I'd be in there really early. In our first studios, for the first couple of years, I would take a cab down there, do my own make-up, and start with recording the show. About once a week, we'd get a reel of the new clips, and we would watch them and take notes on what we were watching, so we knew what we were talking about. In the early days, again, it took a long time for the bugs to work out. We sometimes were in that studio all day, into the night. But once the bugs got worked out — a year or two down the line — then it was basically you come in, do your show, and then you'd take care of whatever other VJ business you had for the day. Going back to the office, answering the fan mail. And as it progressed, we'd be going with a wardrobe person. You'd get your script — we called it "a log" — the night before. So I'd do all my prep work at night. For a while, everything was scripted. Then, everything was not scripted. Then, there was kind of a hybrid. I loved doing the research and the prep work. And then, in the evening, we're going around. Since we're in New York, we're seeing the bands that we're talking about. It really was a 24/7 job.
ALAN HUNTER: Early on, it was all day. We were all very vigilant, until we started taking the job for granted about three years into it. We were starting to "live the lifestyle" in the '80s, and it was hard to get up early. I don't know how I turned out to be "the early guy" on the stage. I just drew the short straw, I guess. For me, I was probably the first or second to tape my shows. I went to bed at a good hour and studied my news reports, which weren't scripted. In the very early days, we had some scripts, but they threw those out pretty quickly and just said, "Ad lib. Here's the news. Read the news. But everything else that you say about the song, it's got to be extemporaneous." Easier for Mark and JJ being in radio. A little harder for me, the actor, who needed a script. But I started getting into it. There was a lot of homework. If I wasn't on the soundstage doing my show, I was up at our offices, pouring over the new videos and studying videos. Since we weren't sitting there watching them — we were just doing our little bits in-between — I had to have a good idea what I was coming out of. I was studying videos, going over material, looking at bios. So that was two, three, four hours in the middle of the day. Frequently, we'd have to go back to the studio across town to do another part of our shift or a weekend shift. After a year, we started to get the hang of it. We were going out to rock n' roll shows every night. You bet I wasn't doing quite as much homework, because now, I was starting to really know what I was talking about. I knew all the bands. I knew the members. And if a new band came on, like a Kajagoogoo or a Haysi Fantayzee, they were new to the world as well, so it wasn't like I was having to bone up on something that everybody else already knew about. The middle of the day meant that now I was starting to go to the gym, going to have lunches with people, and enjoying my life in New York, around the edges of taping my show. And towards the end, it was, "How can I get in and out of the studio faster?" Because it might have been that I did my morning shift from 8:00 to 10:00, then I'd have a noon interview with Frank Zappa or Andy Warhol or some other band somewhere in New York, where they would come into the studio, or I was boning up for that interview that afternoon. As happened a lot, we would have interviews at the clubs.
MIKE PELECH: Martha Quinn, her trivia questions, she would always ask the people behind the camera if they knew the answer, and we would yell out the wrong answer. The official wrong answer was "Trini Lopez," which nobody of that age group knew, but she would ask questions about Squeeze, the Shoes, or the Cars. She would ask the question, we would yell out from behind the camera, "Trini Lopez!" And she'd go, "No, no, no. It's not Trini Lopez." Those things just kind of evolved. It was from the executives loosening up the reins and making it a more freeform type of studio and getting us involved in the anarchy. There was a lot of anarchy behind the cameras that you kind of got wind of but never really saw. It was fun. Then we'd take a lunch break, and everyone would usually go out to a bar on the corner called Sam's, and everybody would pretty much go to lunch together. Go to Sam's, have a cheeseburger, and they had booths. Everybody would take over Sam's. At that time, everybody had MTV tour-jackets, which were great. The Warner-Amex people were really nice. They gave us a lot of their merchandise for free, and we'd wear it on camera and walk around the streets with it. Everybody would have their black satin MTV jacket, with the original logo on the back. Everybody would be at lunch together and carrying on the conversation from the studio. Occasionally, guests would come in, like Joe Cocker or somebody like that, and we didn't really have much of a green room, so Mark would just take them to the bar and have a beer or something. It was a real typical Greek greasy spoon restaurant that we gave a lot of business to.
BOB PITTMAN: John [Lack] left about a year after we launched. When the business didn't do well financially, John I think got — unfortunately — the brunt of that. So he left, and then I took over John's job and a little more, became the chief operating officer [and eventually, Pittman became CEO].
Some Struggle in the Video Age
ANN WILSON: Suddenly, you had to be able to do some minimal amount of acting, and you had to be able to take direction from a "visual director." Some people just were a little bit too...some of the southern rock bands, you saw them once, and said, "Oh, OK. I can go see them live, and that's who they are." Suddenly, there was a whole new role put upon you that I think some people couldn't handle. I keep alluding to the silent pictures and the talkies. Some of the big silent screen actors couldn't make the break because their voices weren't cool enough. Some of the bands couldn't make the jump because they didn't have enough creativity and wonder in their look or in their ability to act or translate the song visually.
GEDDY LEE: It suddenly shifted everybody's thinking, because bands that were not image-oriented — in a way, that was us — suddenly had to start thinking about doing a visual presentation. And I think, for some people, it came naturally. Obviously, the pop stars were more used to that, because it was "face first" for those bands and those singers, anyway. But we were a band that didn't think of ourselves in terms of anything other than guys that liked to play.
JOE ELLIOTT: It also wrecked a few careers, too. If you were one of them bands that had that horrible, balding bass player with a mustache, that was "career gone," because now, they knew what you looked like. It really was much more beneficial to Duran Duran than, say, Uriah Heep.
FRANK STALLONE: It wasn't even about the music anymore. It was like, Christopher Cross came out with one of the best break-out solo albums I'd ever heard [Christopher Cross]. But then all of a sudden when they saw him — and he looked like this truck driver — it killed him. I mean, I saw him at the Roxy. This guy had a beautiful voice, and you're figuri
ng this really cool-looking guy will come out, looking like Charlie Sexton. And he came out looking like Bluto. I felt really bad for him because he was really good. So he was definitely not "MTV friendly."
DARYL HALL: There's the anecdote that I find offensive, but they always said that Christopher Cross was too ugly to be a rock star. Which I think is a terrible thing...but I think there might be a little truth in that kind of thing.
JOHN OATES: I think some were better looking than others. After all, it is a visual medium.
ROGER POWELL: Some of those guys were just butt ugly. [Laughs] From the 40th row, it's OK, but once you start really seeing people...it's kind of an odd comment, but whatever, God bless 'em all.
ERIC BLOOM: You might have a handsome lead singer that would carry the whole thing because he's hot. [Laughs] Maybe the music isn't so good, but he is, or she is. There's that phenomena that you would never know from the airplay, but now you see who's singing. And vice versa. I can think of a few acts that were just not particularly photogenic.