MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: When you can see it, a picture is worth a thousand words. Well then, a video is a bunch of moving pictures, so how many thousands of words do you have? It had an impact not only on fashion, but everything. Because as opposed to just hearing it and visualizing it in their mind, it was right there in front of them. The impact that hip-hop especially had on people, and plus with video providing a visual, then it became obvious to them...people want to identify with their artists, and they want to live next door to them, or act like they can reach out and touch them. They want to look like them, talk like them. That's what hip-hop proved. On the record, he's describing the shirt, the pants, the sneakers, the hairstyle, the lifestyle, or the attitude. But the video allowed me the opportunity to actually see it. I can see the mannerisms and the characteristics. I can see what swagger is, as opposed to just hearing about it. And I think that little suburban kids, although I feel they identified with the music from an audio aspect, when they saw it visually, it gave them more ammunition, because now they didn't actually have to think about how to look, how to dress, or how to act. Now, they could see it. "Oh, I know what to get now." So the impact that video had on fashion, it's the same impact that fire had on cooked food. Before you had fire, you had to eat it like it was. And then when you had fire, you could cook it now. So, same food, just better. Same fashion, just better now. It had a positive impact.

  DEBORA IYALL: I was watching, too, and saying, "Oh, I like the way she puts that scarf in her hair" or whatever. I guess there were more people jumping on "new wave fashion," and that became pretty dominant for the next five years — once people saw musicians on stage wearing more graphic clothes, more skinny jeans. I remember it was huge when the fashion changed from flares to skinny jeans and from long hair to short hair. In the punk scene, a longhaired kid in flares would have to have a lot of courage to come to a punk club, because they'd probably get a lot of shit. But after a while, it was kind of weird to see new wave fashion in the Macy's window. It kind of ended up being shocking a little bit, how fast the marketplace could co-opt an underground shift.

  GERALD CASALE: Basically, videos became a fashion ad. And then, everybody in the country started dressing like what they would see. Specifically, all the sexy women that were in the videos. That more than anything, more than even how the bands dressed. That's how you'd see girls dressing in every town you went into, and every club you went into. There's just no doubt about it.

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: I never was a slave to fashion...I'm sure that's a shocking revelation to you! But I've certainly noticed how entertainers and their music videos have had an impact on fashion and culture. You really don't really need to look any further than Madonna. She famously changed her look every 15 minutes, and her throngs of followers and wannabes dutifully changed right along with her.

  MICHAEL SADLER: Video — especially with the women — they would dress the way that they felt like dressing as artists, so that would influence a generation or that fan base. Girls would dress like Madonna did in "Like A Virgin." But on the other hand, a lot of times the artist is just reflecting what's on the street, anyway. So it's a tough call. Unless it's really extreme — like a Lady Gaga or a Björk — I think, ultimately, it's just reflecting what's going on on the streets anyway.

  CY CURNIN: To give you my best example, when Madonna was about to launch her video in which she was wearing a tartan mini skirt — can't remember the song as much as the skirt — Wal-Mart were flooding their stores with cheap Chinese copies of the same dress. The market was feeding all the pigs at once now.

  TOMMY TUTONE: We were coming from a very style-conscious generation. My parents thought I was a rebel, but really, I don't think we were real rebels. The look was very important. When we got signed in San Francisco, how you looked was almost as important as how you sounded. We got signed because we were more into music and songs, rather than haircuts and stuff. But still, the look was important. It had to be a new kind of look, so it wasn't like, "Go out and find somebody handsome or 'movie star/tv-like.'" They're looking for anti-heroes really. Well, "Let's try these guys. These guys are really off the wall!" I'd say there was a feeding circle from MTV to fashion and back again. Fashion goes through cycles where people try to invent stuff from the top and push it down, and other stuff springs up from the bottom. People find something in second-hand stores, and it becomes fashionable. This $2 item is $100 at Macy's next year. So it all met right there in the middle in a very interesting way, and they had a big effect on each other.

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: I don't like to admit it...but yes, I had a pair of red leather pants. Whether it was Loverboy or Boy George, when you can see that on a regular basis, and you're not just seeing that at a concert situation, it has that same impact as being a national trend. So if you saw Simon LeBon with his sport jacket sleeves pushed up, you thought, "Oh OK, that's a cool look." And the next thing you know, the next 27 bands you see had their white sports coats with the sleeves pushed up.

  MIKE RENO: I wore a bandana around my neck, and sometimes, I took it off and put it around my head. And the reason I did that is because the lights were so hot that I started sweating, and I wanted to keep the sweat out of my eyes. Well, now it's a fashion statement. Still to this day, people say, "Where's the headband? Where's the red leather pants?" The funny thing is, in half the videos, Paul was wearing the red leather pants, but they always come to me, like, "Where's the red leather pants?" They tied it all in with an album cover and our live show.

  PAUL DEAN: I wore a headband the first night, and Mike liked the idea and stole it off me...the son of a bitch! [Laughs] But I don't care. He still wears it. We don't wear the leather pants anymore...somehow, they "shrank" or something. [Laughs]

  MIKE RENO: I guess it’s just what happens. You see somebody do something, and that's the way you think of them for the rest of their lives. I just thought it was funny, because what people don't understand is the reason why we had the leather pants to begin with was because our manager, in the office, they had a publicist. And her husband owned a clothing store that made leather clothes. She said, "Go down to the leather shop, take whatever you want, and we'll make a note of it. When you make some money, you can pay for it." So I went down and picked out a few things, and the only reason why I picked out the red ones was because they fit best. So it's not like I sat down and said, "If I wear red leather pants, I'm going to be hugely famous...and I'll even be more famous if I wear a headband." I didn't plan any of this. I wore headbands because the sweat would go in my eyes and I couldn't see. At first, I started cutting off the sleeves of my shirts, because a shirtsleeve fits right on your head perfectly, a t-shirt sleeve. And it's also made of cotton, so it sucks up the moisture. So if you look back at a lot of the videos, actually what I have is a sleeve of a t-shirt on my head. It's not an official bandana. I just created it with whatever I had.

  FRANK STALLONE: That's why I wore it [in the "Far from Over" video] — Mike Reno! Mike was a friend of mine, and that's exactly what I did. He used to wear a red headband and red leather pants...when he could get into them. Mike's put on a little weight since then. Yeah man, I told him that. I bumped into him a few years ago. And that's why I wore it, because I thought it looked cool — black leather pants, a red headband...and also, red wristbands. I thought I looked pretty good at that time, but now I look back on it...you'd never see Clapton do that. But Clapton also had some clothes that would look a little dated now.

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: To be honest with you, I don't remember a whole lot of Loverboy videos. I remember the headband and red leather pants.

  MIKE RENO: I'd imagine we did a little of copying ourselves. We were swayed a lot by the group the Cars. I used to listen to their music and say, "This is great," and they wore all kinds of cool, weird, handmade clothes that I'd never seen before. So it wasn't like I created any of this. I was just going with the flow of what was going on out there, too. As soon as you wore it on TV, that's when the general public starting going,
"I'm going to do that 'Mike Reno look.'" And even to this day, people come up to me and say, "I had the Mike Reno look down pat. I got laid so many times!" We did have a plan to wear some colors, as opposed to wearing just bland black and whites. Paul and I did discuss having some colors, so we said, "Let's wear some red, some yellow, and some black. Let's work with those three colors." I think we actually got that idea, though, from the Cars, to tell you the truth. I don't think it was an original idea. If it was an original idea, it was motivated by the Cars, because they were way ahead of their time — musically, sound-wise, the way they looked, their haircuts, the whole nine yards. I think we looked up to the Cars. I know I did.

  PAUL DEAN: It's funny. There are a lot of people that show up in red leather pants and headbands — and still do! Especially if they have an '80s theme or something. We did a show a while back with an '80s theme, and everybody showed up like that. I had a big curly wig on, like Dee Snider. But I think videos still leave a very big impression on people style-wise. Van Halen was a huge influence, because I don't remember seeing ripped jeans until Eddie was wearing the ripped jeans.

  ALDO NOVA: I don't think anybody borrowed the "Flock of Seagulls haircut," but it was definitely a fashion statement back then.

  MIKE SCORE: I was a hairdresser for years and years. I was a punk hairdresser, fashionable hairdresser. To me, it was part of my world already. I was in hairdressing. I was doing all kinds of weird styles. I had a shop called Oz the Magic Hairdressers. Anybody that was a little bit crazy or wanted to be a bit different came to us, and we styled them up by chopping all their hair off. [Laughs] And if they didn't like that, we just colored it green and kicked them out.

  JOE ELLIOTT: Things that become iconic are totally accidental, like the Union Jack shirt. It became the biggest-selling t-shirt of the Pyromania tour. But it wasn't like we had sit-down meetings about, "We've got to use the Union Jack." I had a £25 budget to dress myself for this video ["Photograph"], and I had £8 left. I had bought the trousers and boots or whatever. And the shirt was £7.99. I thought it was loud, bright, British...it'll do. No great thought went into it. It was just instinct. But the way that David Mallet edited the video and what we called "bled out all the colors" — he made the whites whiter than white and reds redder than red and the blues bluer than blue — it just leapt through the TV screen. And I think that really set up an entire look that lasted a good 18 months to a year on MTV. All the rock bands seemed to copy that theme, because it worked. We were just very lucky that we were one of the first to do it.

  PHIL COLLEN: It wasn't a conscious effort. It was just what we were wearing at the time. I actually think we were pretty interesting when it came to our look, because we didn't really have one. It was kind of culled together with bits and pieces from Kensington Market, this place that used to be in Kensington, High Street. And King's Road — whatever that was floating around. Joe had bought a Union Jack shirt, and Rick had bought some Union Jack shorts. When we got to America and we started doing videos and we were wearing them in our videos, it really crossed over. Us being British and everything. Totally unconscious, but it struck a nerve somewhere.

  RUDY SARZO: I'm not like the most fashionable guy. I do most of my shopping at malls. I was on tour with Quiet Riot, and I needed to get a shirt. So I went to a shopping mall, and there was a store called The Merry Go Round. And I saw a shirt that had a target. That's what I wound up wearing in the "Cum on Feel the Noize" video. That shirt kind of became an iconic shirt for metal or Quiet Riot. So then The Merry Go Round started running their own ads on MTV, but instead of having us, they had Slade! [Laughs] It was their song, and I guess that was the only way they could get permission for "Cum on Feel the Clothes" or something. So if you're talking about fashion, my contribution to fashion on MTV was that round target shirt from Merry Go Round.

  FRANK STALLONE: Olivia Newton-John and the ankle warmers and all that stuff like that. And I think Pat Benatar wore that type stuff. It was kind of a "stretchy period," a stretch material period.

  RUDY SARZO: Metal bands were wearing spandex before MTV. The tighter the trouser the better, whether the cameras were rolling or not. And nothing is tighter than spandex. You can date David Lee Roth wearing spandex way before MTV was around. It's just that MTV was able to bring it to the home, rather than just leave it at the arena. It's like going to ballet. You see a dude wearing tights and say, "Hey, I think I'm going to wear that to the grocery store." No. But if you watch him doing that on MTV, then it becomes fashionable.

  FRANKIE SULLIVAN: Duran Duran set the tone for all that stuff. It overshadowed a little bit how good they were and how good musicians they were, because they're really good players. But they were more on the fashion side of it, in a cool way. You had other bands that had very different looks, like Flock of Seagulls, but I think the pinnacle of it was what Duran Duran did with it, because they were a very stylish and hip band. They set that tone and ruled in that area for a long, long time. I think Robert Palmer did a great job. He was on the style end of it.

  STAN RIDGWAY: People started to view music. They literally started to hear music with their eyes. And I always thought that there was a downside to that, because it kind of allowed more of the "false marketing" to come into play. Whether something was really musically challenging was questionable, but if someone was dressed up in a provocative way, then the audience thinks, "This is really edgy." I remember once, listening to — and I have nothing against this guy — Boy George, when Culture Club first came out. I heard their song, and my head was turned from the TV. I thought, "My God, what is that? It just sounds like middle-of-the-road mush." And then I turned to see the video, and of course, Boy George is dressed up and has all these things on, outrageous combinations of fashion. And that was an example right there, kind of an edgy look, but the music was starting to go backward in terms of challenging. But I still think music is best listened to, not watched.

  ART BARNES: Ugh. Heinous fashion in those days. The dawn of new wave fashion or whatever you wanna call that was awful. Bad hair, bad shoes, over-the-top looks, too much make-up, and sadly, a lot of weak songs, lame synths — not all of 'em — guitars gone missing for the most part. Lame.

  MARTHA DAVIS: It may have taken something that was already over-the-top and pushed it a little. It was almost like everyone escaped from art school. For some reason, that decade was kind of an indulgent decade in a lot of ways.

  MICKEY THOMAS: We have a lot of laughs looking back at our videos and photo shoots from the mid '80s, because I'm buddies with a lot of the guys that were caught in the same "video trap" that we were. Mike Reno from Loverboy is a good buddy of mine, and Bobby Kimball from Toto and Jimi Jamison from Survivor. We look back now, and you're like, "What in the hell was I thinking?" I guess I wasn't thinking. It worked at the time, but boy, some of the clothes I was wearing in the mid '80s...now, it's frightening for me to look at it. But a lot of it was the effect of MTV and the effect that MTV had on the fashion world. A lot of the more popular bands, like Duran Duran, were really having a big effect on fashion. And it had an influence on us, too. I think with being the singer, [being considered a "sex symbol"] comes with the territory. It's kind of understood that the singer is going to be featured in the video, or the singer is going to be the one who's going to do most of the interviews. And I think most of the guys in the band understand that, but you can't help but have a little animosity along the way. It always reminds me of Almost Famous, which is a great movie for capturing that behind-the-scenes competitiveness and resentment. Usually, it's competition between the lead singer and the lead guitarist, because those are two kind of "out front" positions and sort of ego-related. [Laughs] But like I said, it comes with the territory. I try not to take it too seriously, myself. It's like, "Alright, this is the way it's got to be. Somebody's got to do this...but I'm not a sex symbol."

  DAVE MARSH: There are no "ugly people" in American mass media, whether you're talking movies, television, or anything else. U
gly doesn't exist, unless it's grotesque ugly. And there's not even any "average," really. Look at the background figures in North by Northwest [a 1959 film]. You'll find a group of people that were quite a bit better looking, slimmer, and well-groomed than you would have if you actually had been in a Mt. Rushmore cafeteria or wherever the hell they are. It's just a fact. And the idea that that began with MTV? No. What began with MTV maybe is a more libertine take on "look," but that was going to happen anyway. I think MTV proved to be a real driver of it, but I don't think it was an initiator of it. I think what initiated it were changes in the society, that had something to do with the fact that women were freer to use their bodies for display, and men still controlled the media.