MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  ALAN HUNTER: I remember when Martha was told that her contract was not renewed, we were all dumbfounded. When JJ and Nina were not renewed, the writing was on the wall. Both of them were let go. That was year five, and Mark, Martha, and I went, "Holy cow. This really is happening." That was good motivation for us to begin to think about our careers thereafter! I just signed a three-year extension on my contract, so I had been given sort of a vote of approval. I don't know why. But I was pretty happy about that. When JJ and Nina were let go, we thought, "Well, let's start looking around." When Martha was let go a half a year later, I just didn't understand that at all. And then Mark and I looked at each other and said, "There really is a final window here on this." I was already ready to go. I was ready to get out of my contact and go out to California. Mark and I were the very last ones to leave. I was the very last to leave by three weeks. Mark left in early August, and I left in late August [1987]. It was very moving. It was like breaking up a family, no doubt about it. It was bittersweet. I was totally jazzed to move on, because after six years, I was burnt out, to be honest. I couldn't introduce another video. I thought, like everybody that moves on, that the future was ahead of me. Little did I know that I would move to L.A., and the writers would go on strike! I wish I would have stayed on MTV for another year or two, just to keep the bucks coming.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: There was one woman who I really thought was my friend, who was on the executive level of the public relations department, and I felt like she stabbed me in the back. I don't ever say that, but she was probably the one time in my life that you'll hear me say that. She was right with the program. She was the one doing the blackout and doing the spinning. It's like, "Why?!" But the feelings didn't last, because I had many other things I was going to. And then people could see where I was anyhow, so it was no big deal, because they could actually see it wasn't the truth. You don't just magically get a job as soon as you walk away from another one, unless you were planning on it.

  KEN CEIZLER: I think there was a real sense of insecurity that [the VJs] had, as far as their place in the channel. But on the other side, they were also getting notoriety, and that fine balance, where you start to get people from outside agents and managers saying, "You're terrific. You're phenomenal. You could be doing this. You could be doing that." I think you had instances where they would go, "Hey wait, I'm worth something. I want X amount of dollars." And Bob Pittman would always say, "The VJs are not the face of the channel." Actually, it depended on when he needed to say it. Sometimes, he would say "The VJs are the face of the channel," and sometimes, he would say how completely indispensable they were. With the end of contracts came contract negotiations, and it probably was a matter of dollars and cents. And also a sense of what they individually thought their own personal value was, where they thought their future was, and where they wanted to go beyond that.

  KEN R. CLARK: It was like losing a family member. They weren't even "going off to college." It wasn't like they were going to come back and visit on holidays. We threw big parties. I've still got big boxes with party invitations for Nina and Mark. We knew it was the end of an era. And around that same time, the channel started to evolve a little bit. I think they had to, because the novelty was wearing off. Those original years, people just sat and were willing to watch for five/six/seven hours, just stoned out on music videos. After a while, the novelty wore off a bit. It wasn't something so new and exciting. And MTV began looking for ways to capture people's attention and hold them for longer periods of time. Music videos were changing, and the music world was changing profoundly, and MTV started categorizing music. If you look at those original years, everything was all mixed up. You didn't have all the dance music together, and the hard rock together, and the alternative together. It was all just a mishmash of everything. And they started doing specialty shows, like 120 Minutes for alternative, and Headbanger's Ball for heavy metal, and they hired a news anchor. They realized that packaging everything kept people in for a half-hour or an hour. Top 20 Video Countdown, Dial MTV. The whole schedule started to have a structure to it, which originally it never had, with these big five-hour blocks. There were VJs, and then there were program hosts, like Riki Rachtman, Dr. Dre and Ed Lover, Dave Kendall. Everything started to change. Everybody knew that the innocence of those very first years was over.

  LES GARLAND: I don't know if you can be an MTV VJ for ten years. I don't know if the lifespan is that. It's a funny thing about television. Glen Campbell said, "Be careful of television, Garland. It has this weird ability to chew you up and spit you out." I never forgot that, because I think Glen Campbell's TV show was once number one, and then it went to the basement. So he was talking from experience.

  KEN R. CLARK: MTV was no longer owned by Warner-Amex, which when I started, we were owned by Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Corporation. I think for a brief period of time, MTV bought themselves away from Warner-Amex, and was "MTV Inc." for about a year or two, and then Viacom came in and snatched it up. Everything became about making money, everything became about selling product, and it was all a scramble to get those ratings. The ratings had just been there in the beginning, and then they actually had to start working and employing honest-to-God programmers, who started structuring the free-form. And the staff started to turn over, the VJs started to turn over. It was still good I think for a while. There were some big successes during that time. There were a couple of really good VJs — Downtown Julie Brown and Adam Curry were two of the greatest VJs MTV had. Certainly the most famous and well-paid. I doubt they're still paid what they were for a while there. The pay scale changed considerably, too. I think the original VJs were lucky if they were getting paid $50,000 a year when they signed on in 1981. By the late '80s to early '90s, we're talking quarter-of-a-mil/half-mil contracts, with make-up artists, security, limos, agents, and managers.

  BOB PITTMAN: We tried to buy the company. American Express wanted out of the Warner-Amex joint venture. We had gone public, but the majority of the stock was still owned by the Warner-Amex joint venture. So that put us in play. It wound up that Warner Communications bought out American Express in a buy/sell. They wound up the acquirer. So they owned 100% of the joint venture. And to pay for it, Steve Ross needed to either sell cable or sell MTV Networks, because Atari had failed, and the balance sheet was bad. He didn't really have that money to reach like that. And he originally worked out a deal to sell half of MTV and half of the cable company — in other words, half of Warner-Amex — to Viacom. And we, as the management group, wanted to buy MTV. We worked with Teddy Forstmann's brother, Nickey, and Brian Little. Steve called me in to say, "I want you to do this Viacom deal." And I go, "Steve, look, I'm very loyal to you, and I appreciate what you've done for me, and I will go do whatever you want to do with MTV. But only if you will first listen to a pitch from Teddy Forstmann." So he goes, "OK, I'll do that." And Teddy came in and pitched him, and he agreed to sell MTV to us. So we had a deal. And then at the last minute, Teddy and Steve got in a fight about something, and a guy named Alberto Cribiore went over to Viacom and told them, "You make a big offer on MTV, and you can get it." They made a big offer to MTV and also to buy Warner out of their half of the Showtime-Movie Channel joint venture...and Viacom got it. I was disappointed and sad, although I made for the first time in my life, real money, because I owned a piece of the business. So as a seller, I got cash in my pocket, and the Viacom guys gave me a nice five-year deal, a signing bonus, and stock in Viacom. But at the end of the day, I had lost the company. And somehow, it just didn't feel right that Viacom owned it, and we were "the stepchild." So I was open to ideas, and MCA-Universal came to me, and said, "Why don't you start a company. Go buy whatever you want to buy. We'll be the check book. You'll own half; we'll own half." And I decided, "You know...it's time. It's time for me to do something else. I've done this." I was a young guy, 30/31/32. I wanted to do other things in my life besides just MTV. So I decided to leave. I think some of it was the emotion of being let do
wn that they got the business instead, and suddenly, I'm living in the house of the people that stole my business. It was the end of '86. I actually stayed as a consultant until '87, but I really gave up the day-to-day at the end of '86.

  KEN R. CLARK: Up until a point, there were the original five VJs, which was like the "original phase." And then, the second batch of VJs, which also brought something to it. After that, they kind of came and went like a revolving door, and there haven't been very many of them that have had a lasting impact, with the possible exception of Carson Daly. There was never another group like the original five VJs.

  MIKE PELECH: JJ is missed. We're all kind of dumbfounded that it's been six years [JJ passed away on March 17, 2004, from a heart attack]. It's just impossible to believe that. He was a really cool guy, funny. Just have lunch with him, tell stupid stories, and make people laugh. So entertaining. Every time I went out to the west coast, I always made it a point to have dinner with him. We would pick up the conversation and continue laughing. That's how I remember him. But I think everyone remembers him the same, as a wonderful person.

  KEN CEIZLER: What a great sense of humor. He was just a sweet guy. I made him laugh. He thought I was the funniest fuckin' person in the world. And nobody cheered me up more than he did. He was quick to laugh, and he loved the music. He's the type of person that gave you a hug. You didn't shake hands with JJ; you hugged him. He was a true lover of music and people.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: He was the elder statesman. Just a very loving man, very classy, very knowledgeable. He was a wonderful club man. Our rock n' roll beacon.

  KEN R. CLARK: Of the original five, JJ was the notorious partier. He was one of the smartest people in rock n' roll that I have ever met in my entire life. He was also the oldest of those VJs. He was significantly older than the rest of them. I don't think people realized at the time that he was older. He'd been around doing radio since the '60s and had been involved breaking Led Zeppelin in this country. JJ had a music resume that would impress anybody, and he loved to talk about music. If there was anybody that would end up sitting in the green room or in his dressing room talking about bands and albums, it was JJ. He truly was an incredibly knowledgeable person. Everybody liked JJ and respected him. He was a really sweet, big guy, with a fun sense of humor. He liked to go out and party — a lot. [Laughs] He is the one that would come in late, with puffy eyes and dark shades on, and he wore this floor-length black mink coat. He looked like a pimp getting out of that car to go to the studio, with a model on either arm! [Laughs] No one else carried on like that. Everybody else was pretty low-key. But JJ liked to go out and do the nightclub thing. He was also the only VJ...I mean, Nina would put the hood over her head and slink in that, but JJ actually wore disguises towards the end. He had fake mustaches and stuff, so when he would go out and walk his dog around the neighborhood, no one would recognize him.

  ALAN HUNTER: JJ was a beautiful spirit. A classy man. He was sort of a big brother for the whole crew. He kept us all together. Whenever there was an issue with MTV or fights that we had with the higher-ups, he was the leader. He wouldn't take shit from anybody. He had a big old laugh and a big old heart. We loved him for his big heart. Ultimately, that's exactly what killed him. He had a heart attack and died on the 401 Freeway in L.A. I just loved his passion. He was so passionate about everything. It showed on television. It showed about the music that he loved. We all really appreciated that. I was sort of irreverent about things, and JJ liked that about me. What I liked about him was that he was sincere and passionate about stuff.

  ROBIN ZORN: JJ just had a big, huge heart. When he died, it left a big hole in our family. JJ was just "one of the guys." He kept everybody's spirits up. I don't think there's anybody that would talk about JJ and not mention his smile or his laugh. Just really special. JJ caught me in a compromising position with one of the people that I worked with — in a doorway on the street outside the studio — and JJ kept that secret long past its time that it needed to be kept secret. JJ was great to everybody. Took care of everybody, was always there, and was always happy to answer questions and talk to people. A really warm, loving man. Huge smile, big heart.

  LES GARLAND: He had a lot of credibility with people. He was a man of dark skin who came from a rock n' roll world, so he had a great place at MTV. Funny, I used to think, "How can a bunch of guys accuse us of being racist, when we have a person of color as one of our main hosts?" And we were very early in doing that sort of thing. We didn't even look at [it] as any sort of a barrier. We never thought like that. That wasn't our mentality. But I would like to think that people knew him on radio, they knew him on television. He had a lot of credibility.

  BOB PITTMAN: A really down-to-earth, nice guy, who was passionate and knowledgeable about music. A prince of a guy.

  MTV Today

  DARYL HALL: I don't think anything of it. [Laughs] There's a name called MTV, but there is no MTV.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: Oh boy. I never thought it would end up being the way it is. And it has nothing to do with sour grapes, because I would say if I thought it was really cool. I am not a fan of reality TV on any network, let alone MTV. And the fact that they dropped "Music Television" [from the MTV logo in 2010]...OK fine, you're making money. Great. But you completely destroyed the whole reason that MTV started. It's gone. It's like, "Why don't you just take the whole thing away and rename the channel 'Reality Garbage?'" It appalls me. I'll read about something — because I'm not watching it — about some new show that is going to air, and I'm like, "You're kidding." It's like the most asinine...horrible. For a while there, I'd actually try and see if there was anything on there. Now, I don't even stop on the channel. It worries me about the entire state of the nation, if these shows are watched. I really wonder how the intelligence level has fallen. Because it's not just escapism. It's awful. It shows the worst — other than war — the really worst part of humans. Not even the common denominator. It's below that. I'm not saying it should be "back in the old days," but stick to the music. The Video Music Awards I actually liked this year [2009]. I don't know why. I usually turn it off after 15 minutes. I don't know why this year I ended up watching the whole thing. But it's like, "How can you have these awards when you don't even play music?" I remember a few years ago when they did it in Miami, Florida, all these artists are pulling up in their yachts. I'm going, "Oh my God! What is this?! I think rock is alive...you're just oblivious to the fact that it is." Ugh.

  ALAN HUNTER: I tune into it every so often. I believe that they have evolved over 30 years. They dropped the "Music Television" slug line this past month, if you noticed, which is telling. They are not about music, necessarily. They are about the lifestyle. I've got no beef with what they've done because they knew they were all about lifestyle. I think they still try to be the place where they break ground, even though I think they've gotten stale with the reality television programming. I think they're going for the lowest common denominator. Still seems to make them money, but seeing the ratings degrade, they're having to rethink their attitude a little bit.

  GEOFF DOWNES: Reality probably killed the video star!

  GERALD CASALE: My God, I have to be honest — I don't even watch it. Their "reality programming" — which is not really different than any other reality programming — is just hard to watch, and total proof of de-evolution. I'm watching a bunch of people that are proud to be stupid, with really bad values...like indulgent/entitled brats acting horribly, where I just want to take a laser gun and get rid of all of them. If I was like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they wanted to put me in hell, they'd put those things on my eyes, watch those fucking reality shows, and I would definitely go mad. Imagine being strapped to a chair and not being able to go homicidal? You'd just want to die.

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: I'm disappointed, because I remember how great it used to be. It's such a cliché to talk about how there's no music on Music Television anymore, but that's still the obvious problem with the channel. The last show that I e
njoyed on MTV was Human Giant, which was brilliant. But frankly, I haven't really been following their line-up lately. The last time I looked, the bulk of their programming consisted of reality shows, and I'm really not a fan of that genre.

  GEDDY LEE: It seems to be all reality shows every time I click onto it, while I'm sitting in my hotel room. I see some depressing scene of people that shouldn't be on television being filmed. I find the whole reality aspect that they've gone to really low quality, so I don't really think much of it.

  PHIL COLLEN: The thing about MTV is it was the first place to see reality TV, so they were definitely ahead of the curve there. I'm surprised at the level the public are still interested in reality TV. It's way out there. People are not just fascinated with celebrities, but some kind of reality. And MTV started that off, with The Real World, and even VH1 with Behind the Music. It was real, and people were just clamoring for it. They were just loving it.