MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  JON ANDERSON: They were perfect timing for MTV. They sang it, "I want my MTV" — [Sting] sang that on Dire Straits. It's something that lingers with you forever. You wish, "God, I would have loved to have been in that band."

  Stories Behind the Videos: Punk, New Wave, and Alternative

  -- The Ramones --

  MARKY RAMONE: I was the "teacher" in "Rock 'n' Roll High School," dressed up in drag. I had to walk five blocks from the costume store to get to the studio, because I wanted to get used to it. So we're in a classroom, and obviously, it was a cheap production. The cameras are rolling, I'm the teacher, and I wanted to dress up like the teacher I remember I had, a conservative grey suit. I come in there, but I'm also sitting in the classroom with John, Joey, and Dee Dee. The song is playing, and I'm there with a boom-box, and the other guys are doing their thing. Johnny is on the desk. Joey has a boxing glove, and he hits the principal on the face on the blackboard which was drawn in chalk. And Dee Dee was the guy who made the bomb. There he is in a science class with test tubes and everything. And the "pinhead" is in there. He was one of our roadies. And at the end, the school blows up. It took all day to do. See, that was the beauty of it. It didn't take weeks; it took a day to do that. We were very hyper people. We were in a hotel room [circa the "Rock 'n' Roll Radio" video shoot] at the Tropicana. Then we'd go to the studio, and it looks like a room with a TV and everything else. "Rock 'n' Roll Radio" — what do you have there? You're watching the TV, and there's Buddy Holly, and you have all these guys that started rock n' roll. And at the end, we're all watching, and then John puts his guitar through the TV. It was interesting. You want to act...but you have to be yourself. And then, later on in videos, you had to act. Really, the song was about what wasn't going on at the time, or what punk was against — stadium rock/prog rock. "We Want the Airwaves" was done I think on top of Joey's apartment building, on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. It was 1981. It was hot as hell. We're up there, and I'm in my wife-beater shirt, we have our leather jackets on, and I think we take them off at some point. All the equipment is dragged up to the top of the roof. We had to talk to the manager of the building to see if we were able to do it, and permission was granted. Then we had to walk down St. Mark's Place, in our leather jackets, in mid-summer. And then, of course, everybody starts coming around. "Oh, why are the Ramones walking down St. Mark's Place?" Then, everybody wanted to be in the video. I remember I was with Johnny Thunders before that, the guitar player from the New York Dolls, who was in the Heartbreakers at the time. He goes, "What are you doing? What is this?" I go to him, "Well, we're making a video." He goes, "Can I be in it?" I say, "No, you can't." And he punches me in the mouth! "We Want the Airwaves"...we weren't getting the airwaves. You work your ass off, and no one wants to play you, because punk at that time, they didn't want to play it. Unless you went disco, like the Clash or Blondie. We didn't. We stuck to our guns. If there was any distraction from our usual style was the Phil Spector album [End of the Century]. What did we do? "Baby, I Love You," which was his song. He produced it. You weren't supposed to dance to it. It was just a modern-day version. It wasn't, "Oh, let's have a disco/dance song." So bands like that were accepted, because they were "radio friendly," and that's why we did "We Want the Airwaves." Because we didn't want to change, and we never changed.

  RICHIE RAMONE: All I remember is, when I got in the band, that is the first thing that we did [film the "Psycho Therapy" video]. We flew to L.A. I was in the band for like a week. Marky played on the album, and then he was gone. That's what the director wanted, like we were all on Thorazine. [Laughs] Putting those robes on, nobody really wanted to do it. And the girls were dancing around and all that stuff. It was a quick "in-and-out shoot," like a one-day thing. We didn't know any of those girls. They hired them. Then we did "Time Has Come Today" in New York, around the same time. That was kind of cool, because we shot that in a church, down in the Village. We had a lot of extras and friends come. That was a really cool video. [The "Psycho Therapy" video] was before I got my drums stolen, the original Ringo Starr/Black Oyster Pearl drum set. Now it's probably worth about $20,000. Our whole truck was stolen on [Richie's] first tour in L.A., right out of the parking lot. Everything went, except for Johnny's white Mosrite. Right after [the video shoot], we went on tour. The first night, we were at the Holiday Inn. It's not the Holiday Inn anymore; it's the Renaissance, where they built the hall where they have the Academy Awards. We woke up, and the truck wasn't there. We had to go to Guitar Center and get all new instruments. It was weird playing new amps. And we had to buy four leather jackets! It was the Ramones...what are the memories? Dee Dee and John hated doing anything, really. It's no real fond memories. They didn't show any of our videos, really, maybe super-late at night once in a while. Joey always complained about MTV's stiffness. He was mad at them that they never played our stuff. He was disappointed with them. He hated them.

  -- Talking Heads --

  ALAN HUNTER: David Byrne understood the video medium long before MTV came along. Little mini-films. My favorite, number-one video of all time remains "Once in a Lifetime." Everybody's got a different reason why a video is important to them. It could be timing, it could be where you were, it could be the song, it could be the video. To me, it seemed to be the whole package. David Byrne and the Talking Heads — I was living in New York. They were a New York-centric band. As much as I didn't grow up going to the clubs and watching early Talking Heads in the '70s, I understood their mystique. "Once in a Lifetime" was a simple video, with David Byrne against a green-screen and fun, weird graphics going on behind him. And he did that crazy little African "choppy chop" on his arm. And the sound of the music — there was something about the opening, watery synthesizer sound that was going on, that really gave me the goosebumps. When I hear that song to this day...I think that was "MTV" for me. The coolest place in the universe, and this is the coolest video. I didn't know David Byrne very well. I got to meet him thereafter. But I just felt that he was a well-rounded artist. He liked music, he liked graphics, he liked art. And he was centered enough to just stand there and act weird. Maybe it's just because I like that goofy quality of David Byrne. I felt like, "If I had to do a video, it would probably be just like that." [Laughs] And it's kind of why I like Devo, for the same reason. I like the bands that didn't take themselves so seriously, not withstanding artists of great passion and great quality.

  TONI BASIL: David and I, together, co-directed "Once in a Lifetime," so of course I'm a fan of his extraordinary talent. He wanted to research movement, but he wanted to research movement more as an actor, as does David Bowie, as does Mick Jagger. They come to movement in another way, not as a trained dancer. Or not really interested in dance steps. He wanted to research people in trances — different trances in church and different trances with snakes. So we went over to UCLA and USC, and we viewed a lot of footage of documentaries on that subject. And then he took the ideas, and he "physicalized" the ideas from these documentary-type films. From there, we discussed how they could be placed and used in the video. Then we shot this video. We shot it not on a white background, but on a blue screen, so that we could multiply him. Things were done pretty simplistically in those days. I mean, I did seven videos for my company in total for about $90,000. And, at the time, when I was making videos — whether it was with Devo, David Byrne, or whoever — there wasn't record companies breathing down anybody's neck, telling them what to do, what the video should look like. There was no paranoid A&R guy, no crazy dresser that would come in and decide what people should be wearing, and put them in shoes that they can't walk in, everybody with their own agenda. We were all on our own. I don't ever remember any record exec or anybody from any record company coming around any of us in the early days. Ever.

  -- Elvis Costello --

  GLENN TILBROOK: Elvis Costello and the Attractions really managed to capture the essence of what they were about live and to transfer that to video. That was a good thing and a smart thing to do. The cl
assic video — which is how the Attractions really were — was "Pump It Up." They were absolutely gakked off their faces, chewing madly, and spitting venom. And it's a brilliant rock n' roll moment. I think it's one of the classic moments of the '70s and '80s.

  -- Blondie --

  KATHY VALENTINE: Blondie — I loved their videos. I loved that it was low budget, but the essence of the band just shone through. I loved "Rapture." I like videos that capture the essence of the band, where it's substance over style, of the band and not the video director.

  -- Adam and the Ants --

  STEVE BARRON: Generally, 99% of the videos that we did, the director would write the ideas. The artists that really came up with their own ideas...Adam and the Ants. I did their first video, "Ant Music," and Adam was completely out of art school and really creative. He came up with a lot of ideas himself and said, "I'm going to be unplugging a giant plug, and I want it to be on an under-lit disco dance floor," and that's what the basic concept was. Most of the other artists it wasn't really about that.

  -- The Clash --

  GLENN TILBROOK: The Clash really had it all sown up as far as I was concerned. I think that the Clash's videos from that time absolutely are of that time and transcend it, which is the most you can hope for when you shoot a video. Their videos still seem really fresh to me and manage to capture the spirit of what they were about. I've got nothing but admiration for them.

  ALAN HUNTER: It's hard to tell what the pedestal was for others. Artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince were the stars of MTV, and all of the other bands just provided the platform, kind of the meat and the glue. The Clash gave MTV its credibility, along with the Peter Gabriels and the David Byrnes of the world thereafter, who were popular but also seemed credible. And U2 and any other band you can name, like Springsteen. But those were the people that classed the joint up a little bit. I think the Clash gave some of it street cred. "Rock the Casbah" was, to me, so not the Clash. I'd read interviews where Joe Strummer said, "We loved that stuff," but to me, it was like, "That was just your more poppy stuff, wasn't it?" It wasn't their true punk roots. Nonetheless, they had so much fun with the video. It was kind of like a Madness video, it was so underproduced. Or, if you go back to Men at Work, it was like them hanging around the outback with a camera crew following them around, doing silly shit. That's what the Clash videos seemed to me. I think that goes hand-in-hand with their persona. "Oh fuck it, we're not going to be overproduced here." But still though, it seemed like they had a sense of humor, which surprised me. The Clash wanted to kill you...but really, they just wanted to have fun.

  -- Joan Jett & the Blackhearts --

  RICKY BYRD: We were on the beach [for "Do You Wanna Touch"]. We were on the boardwalk, in Long Beach [New York]. There was a bar involved, I remember that, and Joan was boxing some guy. Some "muscle thing" going on. I just remember doing it over and over and over, and they were filming us walking and Joan boxing and standing by the bar singing. It's very tedious work, as anybody that does any kind of videos or movies will tell you. It's certainly not interesting for the performers, because you do it a million times, so they can get all the angles they want. For Joan, she did way more stuff in the video than we did, because we're "the band." So focus on Joan, then a shot of Ricky playing the lead, him walking down the boardwalk, him walking down the boardwalk with Joan. But a lot of my time was spent sitting around.

  MARTHA DAVIS: Loved Joan Jett. I think everybody you've mentioned, more than anything I can say, they were captured. And each one is so diverse, from my video to Joan's video to Devo's video. You had such a diversity of direction, and it made it nice, because you didn't have the same video. If you look back ten years ago or the hip-hop thing, you see the same-same-same, even in the hair band thing you'd see the same-same-same. But in that sort of eclectic, weird '80s time — because everyone was striving for something so different — it became so unique in each band's representation. It was a glorious time. You could watch TV for hours and not get bored, because it was completely different. There is something about "I Love Rock n' Roll," it just kicks ass. She is amazing. I've known her since the beginning, when they were the Runaways, and the Kim Fowley days. I'm glad she survived, because those were dark times. But to emerge with this anthem, and to do it so proudly and beautifully, it's great.

  DEBORA IYALL: I was always fascinated with Joan Jett. She's a true rocker chick, of the kind that I never really knew and wasn't. But I always felt like I really respected her. She's got really catchy songs, so you can't argue with that.

  LITA FORD: God, honestly, I couldn't tell you how they go. I don't remember sitting there and watching a Joan Jett video.

  RICKY BYRD: ["I Love Rock n' Roll"] was done at a place called Private's in New York City. It was on Lexington Avenue and 80-something Street, and it was a really cool club that was owned by Leber-Krebs. That's where Joan worked out of, where they sold her first record, Bad Reputation, out of a little office in the back of Leber-Krebs. But they owned this club, Private's. It was a big room upstairs, and then there was a bar downstairs, which I don't remember the name of, and that's where we filmed the video. I remember walking in the bar in the video, and all the fans were there.

  ALAN HUNTER: She was the opposite of Madonna. She was not about glitz and glam. I don't think any of us understood what "bisexual" necessarily was back then. We didn't really know what she was. She just couldn't have been more appealing to a guy like me. I had a big-ass crush on Joan Jett. But she seemed to be one of the most healthy holdovers from the '70s. She seemed to be connected to "the real." Kind of like the Clash were. It felt like Joan Jett was the real deal. Certainly, I wouldn't say Madonna wasn't the real deal — she was — but she was manufactured. She was the one in charge of her manufacturing. So she wasn't like a boy band, created by a producer. But Joan Jett felt real. She — along with Chrissie Hynde and some other stalwarts — was kind of "pop Patti Smith." What Patti Smith might have wanted to be, if she wanted to sell a whole lot more records. But she's also just so sexual. I think she drove a lot of guys wild, there's no doubt.

  -- A Flock of Seagulls --

  MIKE SCORE: ["I Ran"] is just basically being stupid. [Laughs] You know, "Stand here, the camera is going to be in the middle, and you're going to try and do something." And, of course, we had no idea what to do in a video. Videos were not the "mini-movies" yet. If it was up to the band, we probably would have just stood there in our wild gear and gone, "OK, we'll just pretend to play." But they wanted a little bit more, a little bit more angular and quirky. It seems to me that all the early videos had to be quirky. I guess nobody was taking them seriously until somebody dropped a million dollars on one. I think "Space Age Love Song" we did on top of a club called Danceteria in New York. All of that era became a bit of a blur, because there was so much going on every day. It wasn't like, "Oh, we've got to wait a month, and then we'll make a video." It was, "OK, we've got a day to make this video. We're going to Danceteria. And then tomorrow we're going to do this TV show." So there was other stuff going on every day. For that video, I got my hair to stand up better than it had ever stood up before. It was like the perfect day for doing your hair up like that. [Laughs] And actually making a video more or less in public was a little strange. It was kind of like doing a live show but without playing anything — with cameras there, and people stopping you and saying, "Change this. Change that." Like all videos, you really had no idea what it was going to look like until you saw it on TV. Whereas these days with digital, you can play back stuff immediately, look at it, and say, "I don't like my nose," or that kind of stuff. But in those days, it was still basically film or video, and they would take a quick look at it for quality reasons, but not necessarily for content. They seemed to do a lot of content and then just go into the editing room and pick it out. Other memories of ["Space Age Love Song"] — I was thinner. That was nice. [Laughs] I think we just partied out after at the club. That was our life in those days — do something, and then
just spend the night partying. "Wishing" was a bit of a different spin for us, because they spent a lot of money on the video. It wasn't so much that the band was involved in it; the band was just part of what the director wanted. He could have made a video without us, probably. Some things that were put in that video I don't particularly like. Basically, what was happening was we were on tour, we had a meeting with a director, he went away, put the whole thing together, we came in, did our part. It was put together, everybody seemed to like it, and we just went, "OK, that's it. We're done with it." [Laughs]

  -- Wall of Voodoo --

  STAN RIDGWAY: "Mexican Radio" came about by us sitting in our car, going to rehearsals, and we were really tired of listening to boring music that we knew all about, and [we] would try to find a Mexican radio station. I couldn't understand the language very much, and it was something on there that was like, "What is this?" It was almost like when Wolfman Jack would broadcast over the border, from Tijuana. We'd pick up stuff like that, and say, "Oh look, I'm on a Mexican radio!" So that's where the title came from. Doing the video, we thought we would go down to Tijuana on Labor Day weekend and just shoot some shots down there. And that turned into a wild bacchanal, that probably is best left in the past. There it is, all on film. And the rest of it was shot in a very small office space that I had rented for the band, off Hollywood Boulevard, right by the old punk rock club, the Masque. All the props, we made it up in a weekend. When we were all finished with it — as these things go — personally speaking, the director and I were somewhat disappointed, because we got some of what we wanted but not everything. And we thought, "Oh God, this is just not working. This is going to go nowhere. We're just losers. It's time for us to all join bartender school and get out of here." But nobody else thought that after a while. We pulled in a lot of people — our friends from Hollywood — to appear in the video as extras. We had quite a party doing that. The woman who pulls off the pot at the end of the video — where I come up from out of the beans — I think she was on acid for most of the night. Building up anticipation for her scene, which we did last. And I had to get underneath the table and put my head up through this hole in a big salad bowl and breathe through a straw for a while, until they got the camera ready. It was a "one-shot thing." We did it once, and that was it. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but leading to one of my disappointments, we also wanted to make a video for "Factory." And one of the ideas that we had for "Factory" was the character in the song, who's a zombie worker, would go to the kitchen, open up the oven, and pull out a meatloaf...and that my face would somehow be plastered into this meatloaf, singing a line or two. A little like the old Alice in Wonderland black-and-white, the way they did make-up for Humpty Dumpty. We didn't have any opportunity to do that. There was no money to do it, and we didn't do the song at all. So we kind of transferred somewhat of that idea to the beans, you see.