MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  ALAN HUNTER: We all had our individual dressing rooms, and we couldn't have been more excited about that. I remember looking at the plans at the old studio for the dressing rooms. That's really all any of us cared about. We had to draw straws for the dressing rooms. There was one big one, and then three or four that were about the same size. And guess who got the one big one? Martha Quinn. Up at Unitel, it was more like we were in the "real world" at that point. We were closer to the hubbub of the other studios and the television production world. We were near David Letterman. We all felt more in the game.

  KEN R. CLARK: Off reception, there were a couple of executive offices up there and the VJ lounge, which was their research area, and all the videos, and it was the studio screening room. Then you went down a long hall, and we had a big green room. The MTV green room was a cool place to see, because every celebrity that came in spent time in the green room. There was a pool table and a great big neon MTV logo on the wall, and I'm sure untold debaucherous behavior went on in there over the years. We would have probably three to five celebrities a week coming through that building, and I say, "I wish to God I was keeping a list or just the taping schedule of everybody that came through," because I'm sure anybody who was anybody on the channel during that period of time was through that building. And we had signed photos all over the walls in the green room. Just down a long hall was a series of little hallways where the VJs had their dressing rooms, and there were make-up rooms. Then at the end of the hall, you went through the big double doors and into the studio. I have to say that the original MTV set was almost as famous as the people that graced it over the years. It should have been preserved. I was actually there the day they tore it down and threw it in dumpsters, and people grabbed little pieces of memorabilia from it. The actual set was destroyed, which it ought to be in a museum, frankly. It was a total environment. It wasn't just the set on one side and the cameras on the other. The whole thing was a huge circle, so you came in through various doors onto the set, but no matter where a VJ was sitting, you could see more of the set behind them. It was very three-dimensional. And it was a large studio. They actually took that studio and cut it in half. MTV retained the lease on half of it, and the other half was leased out to Sally Jessy Raphael. [Laughs] Which was fun, because then we'd end up with Sally Jessy Raphael fans roaming around the building. But they actually started doing a lot of things with blue screen and chroma key and trying to not have the expensive sets. I think, for a while, they thought that was going to be a good way to save a lot of money. And it just never really clicked. People never really liked it. Eventually, they went back to a full-blown set, and that was after the third move, which was still in the '80s, probably '88/'89 they left Unitel, and went down to National Recording Studios on 42nd, which was where the movie Tootsie had been filmed. That was another big set.

  Big '80s/Party Animals

  ANONYMOUS: What's the saying? "If you remember the '80s, you weren't doing drugs"? I would just say that the mores at MTV reflected what was being done on the outside. There were a lot of drugs at the time in the '80s, especially in the music business. It was very prevalent, and it was very accepted. And it was very accepted in not only the music industry, but we were on set doing commercials or something, [and] it was just all over the place. But I am reluctant to go into details.

  KEN CEIZLER: I never saw anybody at the studio. Artists...listen, I probably smoked pot with a lot of people. But as far as up in the office, I know that it was definitely part of the time, and there were a lot of after hours, where we would congregate in somebody's office, and we'd be snorting. And for whatever reason — I'm not really sure — but it was referred to as "donuts." People would walk around and say, "Do you have any donuts?" I'm not really sure why. I'm speculating that there are donuts that have white powder on them.

  LES GARLAND: It was a real party scene...but there were no drugs. There had been stories, but there were no drugs. Drugs were not allowed on the inside of MTV. What went on outside of MTV, I'm not a cop. But inside, we didn't do that — never. If it happened, I never saw it, and I never did it. I had experimented in my life, and I never held any secrets about any of that. We grew up in the rock n' roll world, survived it, and had a lot of fun in it.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: Not in our studio. That was not happening at all. Maybe for lunch, or after we would go to this little Greek diner and have a beer or Courvoisier or something. As far as the studio and what we were doing, nothing. Clean as a whistle. Just clean, clean, clean. But certainly, living in New York and being in the world of rock n' roll, I witnessed the clichéd things. I was not a druggie, so I did not partake in that. You know, I did like to drink. I will admit that. [Laughs] But those were especially the days of cocaine, so I would see that just rampant in the clubs and bathrooms. Some of the artists would come in — and I don't want to name names about that — pretty loaded. Well, I can actually mention one, because he did get clean and sober, and he's the first one to talk about it. I remember Steven Tyler coming in. It was during the period of time that Jimmy Crespo was in the band. They had me do his make-up. It was like, "What am I?!" He was upstairs, and he didn't act out of it, but he looked at me and said, "Oh, your pupils are as pinned as mine are." He was wired. And a famous punker with a "whiplash smile." I did an interview with him, and he was gone. But he too straightened himself out years down the road. But there was a lot of excess, definitely. Even with the artists' managers and record people...people didn't think cocaine was dangerous, so they were doing it like no tomorrow, and it really affected business decisions, and people's careers fell by the wayside, because they made stupid decisions or did not handle business. I saw some of that type of destruction. But as far as the personal part of that, like I said, I pretty much steered clear of drugs. I was around people that did it, but I wouldn't preach to them. I just really didn't partake in it at all. I'm too hyper. With coke, I would have been dead! Why do I have to be any more hyper? I'm already hyper.

  KEN R. CLARK: For the most part, the gang at MTV that worked there were pretty professional folks. I don't recall an inordinate amount of drug use amongst the staff, other than going out to the bar up the block after a long day of shooting, and having a few cocktails. There were a few potheads that would step out to the loading bay and smoke a joint in between things. But there wasn't rampant drug use going on amongst the MTV staff, at least that any of us were publicly aware of at that time. There were a number of the artists, though, that came through that were obviously fucked up, and a few of them in general spent a lot of time in their dressing room, with loud snorting noises coming out. And a couple of them were so fucked up on set during the interview that we were afraid they may just sit there and have a heart attack. Chaka Khan, for example. [Laughs] Buckets of sweat pouring off that poor bitch. [Laughs] She later did admit that she had a raging drug problem. David Cassidy — after he had supposedly had gone through rehab — was in for something, and he was obviously just blown out. I remember bands like Poison and the really raucous hair bands of the day — Mötley Crüe and stuff — there were empty booze containers and residue from what looked like blow on the pool table after they tore up the green room a little. But nobody ever caused mass-destruction. Most people were respectful of the space. I don't recall any real rampant, crazy drug use. It was a relatively professional environment.

  MIKE PELECH: One thing I do remember about MTV were the parties. And the parties were usually impromptu. Usually somebody had tickets someplace, and we were invited to go to a lot of parties or concerts. The extracurricular stuff on MTV was just great. There were always passes or backstage entrances. And Mark and JJ were always very generous with that stuff. I'd go to concerts with Mark.

  ALAN HUNTER: I remember those executives, man, they were throwing back the shots like nobody's business and got up the next day, before everybody. They were machines. They were cool cucumbers. They knew how to party, pretty highfalutin’ lives. John Sykes was dating Carly Simon for a while. That w
as the other weird thing. We grew up with these people. And three years into it, it seems like they were the ones that were really benefitting from MTV's money-making machine. They were starting to date the stars, hanging out. I remember Les Garland was dating Maria Conchita Alonso. And we were like, "Les is?!"

  MICKEY THOMAS: Starship had a spring break concert in Daytona Beach, Florida. So Les came down, because he would sometimes meet up with us on the road and hang out a little bit. We stayed over in Daytona for an extra day, and we were going to have a game of golf. It was myself, Starship's manager Bill Thompson, and Les. At the time, he was dating Maria Conchita Alonso, so she showed up with Les, not to actually play but to ride around in the golf cart with us. So Maria Conchita is riding around in the golf cart, we're having a golf game, we get up to the green, she starts walking out on the green, and she has these spiked heels on. So the marshal comes over and tells Les to tell his girlfriend that she can't walk on the greens with her spiked heels, because she was "air raiding" the greens. So I guess the fact that Les got kicked off the golf course because of Maria Conchita Alonso's shoes...that's a story at least I can tell.

  LES GARLAND: Are you asking me, as Les Garland, if I lived the rock n' roll lifestyle? The answer to that question is...yes, I did. [Laughs] What's interesting is it wasn't new to me. In some ways, as a youngster, what, 31 years old I think, was considered quite young, really. But not in the rock n' roll game. Probably more considered to be in my prime. And I tell people, I'm so glad that I had the past that I had. I'm glad that I was wild as I might have been accused of being, and as wild as I would admit that I was. I had a very serious side, too, that understood responsibility, creative, and the business. I grew up in this rock n' roll world. And I admit, I lived the lifestyle that went along with that. And I just carried that on through MTV. That life that I had already been living probably got a little..."bigger" is not the right word. I had curtailed things. Let me put it to you this way. I have never ever in my life — and I say it to this day — been addicted to anything other than fun. Love, fun, family, and golf — those are my addictions. I've never been addicted to booze. I've never [been] addicted to a drug or anything. I experimented. I did things for fun. I'm a social guy. I tell people that I've never had a drink by myself in my life. If I did cocaine, I never snorted a line all by myself. I was more of a social kind of a person, and I knew when to moderate things. I've got to tell you, the passing of John Belushi [on March 5, 1982] was a huge change in my life. He was a friend of mine. I had been with him in that hotel room seven to ten days before he died. Attending the funeral and seeing the sadness and the loss of a great, great star to something that we nicknamed "the enemy." Those horrible, hardcore drugs that were killing people and ruining people's lives. Being around that ended for me about the time Belushi went to the other side. Not that I had anything personally to worry about. I just realized how evil that really was and how far away from that we needed to get. To the extent that, honestly, if there had ever been any detection of that sort of thing going on within the walls of MTV, someone would have had to be toasted for it. There's no way that I would tolerate it. I saw it ruin lives, and it was not going to ruin MTV. What you do when you go out of here, and if you're at a club at 2:00 in the morning, I don't care about things like that. Creative people get things done in their own way, just get it done. I don't judge you. Don't come crawling into MTV hammered, drunk on Scotch with a gram of blow in your pocket, because you'll be asked to go home. You don't do that.

  BOB PITTMAN: I'm sure whatever was going on, I didn't see all of it. But it was the typical '80s. If you go to a concert, you'd smell weed in the audience much more so than you do today. Beyond that, I don't know. The problem of being the guy who runs the business is you're the last guy to know.

  The US Festival

  -- September 3-5, 1982: San Bernardino, California --

  MARKY RAMONE: It was a precursor to the Warped Tour and Lollapalooza. That's really what it was. But the bands were much bigger. It was a one-off thing...and then it happened again a year later. This was an experiment that went well. [Apple Computers co-founder/US Festival organizer Steve Wozniak] was a Ramones fan, and he contacted Gary Kurfirst, our manager at the time, and that was it. He probably felt that the Ramones deserved a little more at that moment, to perpetuate what they were doing. So that was a really nice thing of him to do. He could have got anybody.

  KEN CEIZLER: [The shows] were hot, dirty, and dusty. They probably blend into all the festivals. What I remember is I would [be] driving around with our camera guy and producer. And as we would drive around taking pictures, there would be a lot of people screaming. I think MTV invented the whole thing of people getting on camera and just screaming, "AHHH!" I think I recorded about ten and a half hours of people going, "AHHH! ROCK N' ROLL!" In the beginning, when we showed up at these things, we didn't have much access to the artists, and that was always a big issue.

  MARKY RAMONE: 115 degrees in the San Bernadino desert in 1982...with leather jackets on. I was smart. I went up there and put my leather jacket over my shoulders, and I had my black tank-top on. Me and Dee Dee decided we were going to wear black tank-tops. We go on, and at that point, there may have been 50-60,000 people watching us. There were other bands coming on that sold more records than us, but the audience liked us. It was a good show. We played very tight, but at one point, Joey's mic went out. That was not good, because we were trying to appeal to a larger crowd, and of course, the first impressions are very important. After the show, there were oxygen tanks for pure air, because of the heat. I remember Johnny and Dee Dee using the oxygen tanks. They thought that was going to do something. It didn't. I tried it, and it didn't do anything, because the heat was still there. It was blazing. You could see the heat rise, a haze. And besides, the sand and everything else, the dust that was in the air. We felt weird that other bands wanted our autographs, and a lot of them were bigger than we were, not bigger in name but bigger in sales. So that was an unusual part.

  DAVE WAKELING: We were lucky. We played both US Festivals. Only us and Oingo Boingo. That was very odd that new wave had now become "the establishment." You could see it because it was a quarter of a million people. So that I suppose was our own little Isle of Wight or Woodstock moment. There weren't millions of people there, but from the "millions" of people that told me that they were there, there was approximately between 15 to 30 million. [Laughs] We got to see a lot of our favorite bands.

  STEWART COPELAND: We had to wait a long time for the Talking Heads to finish up. I remember that the B-52's "burnt down the house." They played at that magic hour, when the sun is just setting, and when the lights are beginning to have effect on the stage. And they were on fire. They completely rocked the joint. Then the Talking Heads came on and played for two hours. Then it was our turn, after a very long day. So I don't remember it being one of our most stellar gigs. For my little super-8 movie [Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out], I cut some footage of it, and it actually wasn't that bad. It was just our sense that we were tired and didn't feel our most electric that night.

  GREG HAWKES: I can just sort of picture being on stage now and looking out. It was huge, something like 300,000 people. I remember it being really hot and dusty, and down in front of the stage, the people pushed up. The front row always tends to get a little crushed against the front fence or whatever they had. And they had security people with hoses, just hosing down the people in front, because it was so hot. I do remember a scuffle with Bill Graham and the Kinks, because they kept trying to delay their set, because they wanted to wait until it was dark, so they could use the lights on stage. It seemed like Bill Graham was really having it out with their management. The way I remember it, Bill Graham eventually had one of his guys get a forklift and dump their manager's car on the other side of the fence! It was definitely the biggest we had played at that point. It was huge. Plus, Steve Wozniak was sitting over there in a lawn chair on the side of the stage, watching everybody. />
  -- May 28-30, June 4, 1983: San Bernardino, California --

  STAN RIDGWAY: We went on at like 1:00 in the afternoon, so it was pretty hot. I remember we got there the day before and stayed at a hotel about three or four miles away from the event. I did have an opportunity to helicopter in, which at the last moment, I turned down. So we drove in, and that was quite an adventure, because it was just a mass of really stoned-out people, out in the sun. The show was well put together and done well. I think all the bands thought to themselves, "Gosh...who's paying for all this?" And, of course, we found out it was Wozniak, who was basically throwing his own party. He was a wonderful guy. Everybody had a little trailer they provided. I went out and walked around, just to get an idea of what was going on out there. There were a lot of people that were just really enjoying themselves. Some of them with no clothes on! And there were booths set up for computer types of things. Pretty damn innocent, really.

  MIKE SCORE: The US Fest was presented as "The biggest show you will ever play." And it was. I remember flying over the crowd in a chopper. It seemed that the crowd went on for miles. As for the stage, it was so incredibly huge. I remember the other guys on the stage seemed only an inch tall, and our gear looked tiny. I don't remember much about the performance. Everything was so distant, and I was really trying to hear what everyone was playing. I remember going on...and then being backstage. Also, we were exhausted by interviews and flying in from playing in Paris the night before. Like I said, the crowd seemed to go on for miles. I remember thinking, "Where do they all take a piss?" and "How do you feed all these people?" As for crowd response, I don't really know how it was. I never do, really. I'm in my own little world on stage. If the front row is smiling and singing, I know we got it right. Backstage, we met a lot of people. Eddie Van Halen was one — he was super nice. But most of the time, I didn't really know who I was talking to. I spent most of my backstage time being interviewed by one mag or TV show after the other. There was so much going on, and we left quite early to get some sleep before leaving to start our own U.S. tour.