MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  JELLO BIAFRA: I wrote a song called "MTV Get off the Air" for a reason. There were a few "I Hate MTV" songs kicking around by then, but I knew from our "Moral Majority" song and others that, once I made my lyrical mark and put some really cool music to it, that the Dead Kennedys song was going to be the one that everyone remembered. And there was so much to make fun of there. How could I resist? But part of the message of the song also was "Keep your bullshit detectors on, people. You don't have to automatically be sucked into this. If you don't want to buy, you don't have to." That's what I've told people since, when they've said, "Punk is so awful now, now that Green Day, Rancid, Bad Religion, and the rest got so big." And I keep telling them, "Well, if you still love punk and you're so troubled by that, why don't you ignore what those bands are doing, and go out and support something you like?" Life's too short to waste my time to listen to bad music or watching bad television. I wish more people would realize they have more of a choice on that. All you have to do is stop being afraid of your own creativity and intelligence, and then you'll never be bored.

  STAN RIDGWAY: Videos went through a period of time where they became more and more ambitious in the storytelling department. A lot of videos turned into bad versions of a soap opera or something, pasted over a song that really had no story to begin with. Or the song didn't have much to say, but the video was very ambitiously put together, as if it was Gone with the Wind. That became kind of stupid. But some people enjoyed those. I think the whole thing as it evolved over time, the tables turned, and all of us artists were kind of "at the knee of MTV," having to placate to them. It became really frustrating, because it began to cost more and more money to make these things. Then record labels started to say, "Hey, we don't want to pay for all this. So now, we're going to have the artists pay for at least half of it." And then you started getting into situations where you could make a video, it could not be played very much, and you're in the hole for 50 grand. Or more. The whole thing got larger and larger, and even more gargantuan, in terms of budgets and spending. But I think, even now, there's something obscene...maybe the word "obscene" is not right — "unseemly" — to be able to spend so much money on basically these advertisements for a song, or a culture, or a lifestyle in a band, when really, they're just too damn expensive. I say feed the poor. It's just too much.

  LITA FORD: That's what I liked about the earlier videos. They didn't have a lot of effects and a lot of crap that takes away from the music. Sometimes people will pay tons and tons of money — and I've done it myself. I've been there, done that, and I look back and think, "Why didn't I just sit in a chair like Whitney Houston, and sing the damn song? Why do you have to go out and spend $300,000 on some fancy video?"

  GEOFF DOWNES: Record companies in those days had a lot of money, and they could get a director and spend $400,000 or $500,000 on one video. It was that crazy. And then people realized that was more than they spent making an album.

  JON ANDERSON: It just got crazy, where I remember the last video that we proposed to do was going to cost us $150,000, and the last two we'd done hadn't been picked up by MTV. So the argument was, "Why make a video if there's nowhere to play it?" And, of course, at that time, it was like us against them — the musicians against the corporate — to make you into a commercial entity like ketchup, y'know? What's the point? That's why I was always aggressively against wasting money on something that might not get picked up. I might as well go to Vegas with a hundred grand.

  GEDDY LEE: You're sitting there going, "Wait a second...we have to fight to get a decent recording budget, yet we can get a video budget that dwarfs it?" It didn't make any sense to us.

  DAVE MARSH: The record companies were really left holding their ass in their hands, because first of all, probably upwards of 60% — maybe even 75% or 80% — of what they made as videos never got showed anywhere. And they became enormously expensive. $250,000/$300,000 was sort of the buy-in price, not the high price. They got very little for it, and it cost them career development. And for a long time, they didn't know what to do with that. And then they figured out they could just make stupid shit, rotate Jessica Simpsons, and it would work out well for them. It did for a while, and they reaped the whirlwind. But that's what happens when you sow it.

  TONI BASIL: I started to see when I would be working for people, "the director's cut." And I would look at this director's cut and think, "This is a cut that makes the director look good, not the artist." We went back to the record company in one particular instance and said, "This director is making this video for himself, not for the artist." And quite frankly, it's the artist that pays for it. I mean, "Hey, let's get the better shots of the singer." Please. It's shocking what goes on. It's not a world I really want to be in. Unless you're really a major star and you can keep people out of your hair, it's everybody's video but the artist.

  GEDDY LEE: We went through a number of years where we really struggled with the idea of how we wanted to present ourselves on video. And it was always uncomfortable, and we always used to talk to these directors and say, "Look, just show us playing." And, after a while, that wasn't enough for what MTV wanted out of their bands. They wanted little movies. So it was a strange time for a band like us, who were forced to deal with that whole issue.

  DAVE WAKELING: What we did best really was just to try and have a bit of a story going around what we did normally, which was play the songs. Because of the list of the "30 things," you could imagine what would happen if you ever came up with a good idea for a video! It just got emasculated to the point you wished you never mentioned it. Which was embarrassing, because I had plenty of friends who had managed to make very exciting, homemade short movies — three or five minute clips — for very little money. And had managed to do something that moved you. I used to be embarrassed, because they could make such great short films for $5,000 or much less. And for $100,000, we couldn't seem to do anything that excited the band or the director by the time it had been finished editing. So we generally tended to do a live performance-ish kind of thing and make up some cute-but-simple story around it — that never included a woman with big hair, packing her suitcases on the bed, and a lamp swinging. Menacingly. You know she's leaving this time...she's going straight down to the car, she's going to roll all over the car for a couple of minutes, then she's off. And that's it.

  RICKY BYRD: After a while, the years went by, and all the videos started to look the same. Everybody just ran out of ideas. It's like a sitcom. How many times can you do the same thing? And then, after a while, it didn't even have anything to do with the storyline. It was just gratuitous girls or muscle-bound guys, depending on who it was.

  ROGER POWELL: You had the overexposure thing. It was "a danger" we never experienced ourselves. [Laughs] I would have liked to have been in that position, where it was like, "Oh no, stop playing it...it's hurting sales."

  CARMINE APPICE: It got ridiculous. It was always the same bands. You'd see the same however many there were, 20 bands. Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, Journey, Foreigner — it was always the same bands. They never gave airplay to the other bands after a while. I remember when it first started, it was always these guys calling my manager, saying, "When Carmine's in town, can he do an interview?" So they used all of us to help get it going, but then when it got going, it was like, "Oh, forget about you guys."

  RICKY BYRD: When I was a kid, everything was different. The only thing we knew from the stars that we loved — like the Stones or the Who — was the stuff we read in Rolling Stone or Circus magazine. We didn't know people's deep, dark secrets. We knew Keith was a junkie, but we read that. There was an aura of "cool" that was around when I was a kid. Everybody wanted to be a rock star. Maybe not everybody, but the kids I hung out with. Everything was so mysterious. It was like movie stars. "What do they do in real life? What are they like?" With the onset of MTV, videos, and Behind the Music, now you know everything. You know what shoe size the person wears. You know how many girls he's screwed
. It all became this other thing.

  FRANK STALLONE: I came up in the era of the Beatles, the Stones, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens — all that good stuff. And now, I'm trying to communicate with guys who know nothing about music. They're just sitting there, sampling with a synthesizer. So the music went like that. The music got cheesy. People like Madonna — I can't put her down, she's successful. I don't really particularly care for her music, but she would have been stoned off stage when I was coming up. If you came on stage like *NSYNC, they would have stoned you and killed you. You couldn't play the Fillmore, guys out there dancing in syncopation? Forget it. Or Madonna dancing...the girls we were listening to were Janis Joplin, Tina Turner — hardcore stuff. I mean, choreography? That was like Broadway.

  ANGELO MOORE: I remember going on MTV, and I had just had this zoot suit made. It was a marijuana/hemp zoot suit. It was made out of hemp. It had purple stripes that were horizontal, and it had glow-in-the-dark marijuana leaves on the pants and the jacket. I had a hat with a marijuana glow-in-the-dark leaf that spun around. And they wouldn't let me wear it. I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, it has marijuana leaves on it." I went back-and-forth with the programmer for a while. I was just like, "Well, come on man. It's a nice outfit." Long story short, they didn't let me wear it. I had to change my clothes. Which really upset me, because I thought, "This isn't what art and music is all about. It shouldn't be about censorship."

  DAVE WAKELING: Why MTV moved onto television without the music part...for a few years, you could have a laugh flicking on when the commercials were on the station you were watching, and see how many times they were playing a video. But after a year or two, the game got kind of sad, because you could get all ten hits with quite easily never getting a music video. So that was the end of it, really. What was it, the Internet killed the video star? Or was the list of 30 transgressions that made it that there wasn't enough to capture the imagination? It was already a cold medium, and with the broadcasting rules, which have always been about what 40-year-old people think 14-year-old people are offended by. And they're usually totally wrong. The combination of all that meant that it was a very shiny edifice, like the beautifully polished car, but it didn't have no engine. So we just looked at it...and that was that.

  STAN RIDGWAY: Videos are garbage after a while. They all just become like garbage. I'd much rather see a performance of somebody. Something that just came out recently was the rerelease of The TAMI Show from the early '60s. The TAMI Show was a show that was made in 1964, that probably has James Brown's best filmed performance you've ever seen in your life on it. And there's also performances from the Rolling Stones, Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys. It's all filmed in one night. That is something to me, the beauty of being able to capture things on film or video, that becomes very valuable. These other things, videos and things like that, become nostalgic moments for some part of a memory that I might have been going through at that time.

  FRANK STALLONE: MTV had changed quite a bit. When I first started, it was Pete Townshend going, "I want my MTV!" and no commercials. And then slowly but surely, commercials and political crap. So I didn't even pay attention to it anymore. I think it ate itself.

  DAVE MARSH: The record industry figured out at some point along the line that having replaceable stars was ultimately more cost-effective than having stars with longevity. Because even though the stars with longevity sold a lot more records, at the back end of that were royalties being paid. And since their only business model ever was stealing from artists, now, it's pretty conscious that they're not interested in having acts that last more than a couple of records. And that really was generated from the MTV kind of, "Let's go back to top 40." It was really an attempt in some ways to go back to the early '70s or even late '60s top 40 radio. There was a superficiality about it. They'd rather have the Archies than the Stones, it seemed like.

  STAN RIDGWAY: Nothing lasts forever. It was a bright moment. For one bright, shining spell, we had Camelot.

  The Team Breaks Up/JJ Jackson Remembered

  KEN R. CLARK: The original VJs started leaving in '85. Nina Blackwood was the first to go, followed shortly thereafter by JJ. The two of them left pretty close together. Mark, Alan, and Martha stayed on a bit longer. It was a bittersweet time. I think the channel didn't renew everybody's contracts and felt that it was time for some fresh blood on the air. Other people like Martha, there was such a public outcry after they didn't renew her contract that they wound up bringing her back. There were a couple of shows that we brought Martha back from L.A. to host after that.

  BOB PITTMAN: Suddenly, [the VJs] were being talked about. People were coming to them, saying, "You could be a movie star. You could host The Tonight Show." And some of them had to try it. They believed it; they wanted it. They were only going to make so much money as a VJ. So I think they went out and tried their hand at it, and understandably so. They began to replace some of the VJs. And one of the big decisions we had to make was, Rolling Stone grew up with its audience. Originally, it was younger, and now, people my age read Rolling Stone. We made the decision to do the opposite, consciously. We said very early on, "Strategically, we're not going to get old with our audience. We're going to let them go, and we're going to replace them with a new audience, so we're never 'your older brother's channel.'" And, by the way, one of the reasons that Saturday Night Live would stop doing bits that were working was they had done it. And they had to do something new. I think the challenge of MTV is to give up what they're doing that is a big success and continue to do new things, so that they turn over the audience and never look like they've been around too long or like they're the last generation's service. And I think that required turning over the faces on the air and getting rid of shows that work, because they'd just been around too long. It's counterintuitive, because most of us work toward getting it just right and then hanging on to that. And at MTV, mentally, you have to get in the idea that we're always going to be changing. And I think the VJs became a part of that.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: I was broached a year before I actually left by Solid Gold, to co-host with Rick Dees. I was getting a lot of offers through my agents. I was getting offers for a lot of things that I had to keep turning down — commercial sponsorships, worth thousands and thousands of dollars. I actually had a television show that I was given permission to shoot the demo for. It was Merv Griffin, and it was Live from the Hollywood Palace. I was the host. And his words were, "I don't care who we get as the co-host...as long as we get Nina." They let me do that, and they put a lot of money into that, even took it to the big convention where they sell TV shows to sponsors, NATPE. They had the brochure with me. My name was on the marquee when we did the shooting. Those guys at MTV...again, I got called into their office. [Laughs] They gave my manager permission for me to do this. And then, when push came to shove, they reneged. They said, "You have a choice — either do that or do this. You can't do both." And I'm going, "You gave me permission!" I picked MTV. Because of the camaraderie and the family that we had, I wasn't ready to leave MTV yet. So I turned down a lot of things. That last year I was there, things were changing. You could feel something in the air. They were taking a lot of the duties that the VJs had before away from us. They had Doug Herzog in there. There was now a "news department," whereas we always did the news before. And they again didn't let us expand — if we wanted to produce a special show, we weren't allowed. That wasn't part of the plan. So this is my fifth year. With all that going on, my manager is still out in L.A. with my agents, and he had kept the fires going on a couple of these offers. So now, Paramount Pictures upped the ante. They really wanted me, and they said, "Not only do we want her to co-host Solid Gold, but we want her to be the music correspondent for Entertainment Tonight. So those two offers were on the table, plus another one for a syndicated radio show through United Stations, and then another one through I think CNN. So all those things were happening, and my manager and I had decided, "OK, now is the time to jump." I
was ready. So that is in reality what happened. I didn't just get thrown off MTV. I had three jobs that I went to, immediately. Howard Stern — who worked with some of the executives at NBC — somehow sussed out what was going on. I didn't tell anybody. But somehow, he knew the truth. And I remember him calling me and having me on his radio show, because he was giving "the finger" to the MTV executives. I'll never forget that, and I was always very indebted, in thinking, "Thanks, Howard." It was pretty cool. It really hurt me that they spun it around, like, "We're not renewing her contract." "Well, no. I'm leaving." And they forbid me to talk to the press. I was not allowed to speak my opinion or say anything. But I did Howard, because that wasn't press. That was a radio show.