by Craig Marks
The people behind MTV had almost no TV experience, so they had no habits or allegiances to limit them—except when it came to picking videos. MTV’s programmers came from radio, where the trend was “narrowcasting,” a way of targeting a specific demographic and selling your popularity within that audience to advertisers, rather than aiming for the broadest possible audience. Broadcasting was Ed Sullivan creating a show that mixed the Beatles with Topo Gigio. Narrowcasting was embodied by MTV’s initial commitment to playing rock videos, which meant videos by white musicians.
MTV’s narrowcasting mission was challenged by Michael Jackson, whose Thriller videos transformed the network from a curiosity into a fulcrum. A similar event repeated five years later with rap, a style of music MTV feared, hesitantly embraced, and then built its brand around. Once that occurred, MTV became The Singularity, the last media force that represented an encompassing view of pop culture.
HISTORY HAS NOT RECORDED THE DATE, LOCATION, OR name of the first musician who was filmed playing or singing, but it’s likely to have happened soon after the movie camera was invented. Musicians are not modest, and the first one who saw a camera in operation probably suggested, “Hey, why don’t you point that thing at me while I play?”
Each decade had its own variation on music videos. In 1930, Warner Bros. Pictures began making “Spooney Melodies,” short performance films of popular songs, including “Just a Gigolo,” later revived by David Lee Roth. In the 1940s, thousands of black-and-white “soundies” were made with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and other suave, camera-ready jazz artists, dancers, and comedians.
Scopitones edged closer to the modern music video—the Scopitone was a coin-operated video jukebox, created in France and bigger than a refrigerator. In the 1960s, they could be found at diners and truck stops across the U.S. An article in Variety praised “the jet-paced editing, exceptionally vivid color and generally top-drawer production values” of Scopitone videos, many of which are catalogued on YouTube, where the editing seems, to modern eyes, more tugboat-paced. However, Scopitones were shamelessly lewd and provocative, full of cleavage, bikinis, and enough butt-shaking to match any gratuitous display seen in a Sir Mix-a-Lot or Poison video.
So MTV was the culmination of a fitful relationship that went back twenty-five years. “Since the beginning of time—1956—rock n’ roll and TV have never really hit it off,” said Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, shortly after MTV appeared. “But suddenly it’s like they’ve gotten married and can’t leave each other alone.” Richards picked 1956 because it was the year of Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, which delivered a giant audience of 60 million. American Bandstand, the first regular music show on TV, arrived the next year. After the Beatles topped Elvis by luring 73 million people to their first Ed Sullivan broadcast, the short-lived musical-variety series Shindig and Hullabaloo appeared in the U.S., as well as the long-lived Top of the Pops in the UK. The Monkees was a daffy mid-’60s show about a rock band who acted out their songs in a series of comic, almost slapstick vignettes.
Music shows of the ’70s centered on live performances: The Old Grey Whistle Test in England, and ABC’s excellent In Concert, quickly followed by Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (hosted by Kirshner, who, years later, claimed credit for MTV and music videos), NBC’s The Midnight Special (often hosted by the bland soft-pop star Helen Reddy), and PBS’s more homespun Austin City Limits in 1976. There were even music-video programs prior to MTV: Australia had Countdown and Sounds, neighboring New Zealand had Radio with Pictures, the unhosted show Video Concert Hall began on the USA Network in 1978, and WNBC-TV in New York had Album Tracks, hosted by future MTV execs Bob Pittman and Lee Masters.
There were plenty of precedents for what began on August 1, 1981. And many pieces of film have been cited as “the first music video”: The Beatles made short films for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”; the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, and Bob Dylan made similar films, as did TV heartthrob Rick Nelson and country star Buck Owens. Queen’s 1975 clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody” dazzled forward-thinking Britons and helped the song filibuster at number one across the UK. But the term “music video” (which barely existed before MTV) now connotes a specific set of qualities—aggressive directorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colors, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtapositions, provocation, frolic, all combined for maximum impact on a small screen—that were not formalized until MTV provided a delivery system. There is no such thing as “the first music video.”
What aired on MTV was so strange and unfamiliar that explaining it proved difficult. The channel’s first mention in Time magazine contained language you might use to explain a laptop computer to a caveman: “The main ingredients in MTV’s programming are ‘video records’ or ‘videos’: current recordings illustrated by 3- or 4-minute videotapes.” A year later, Time writer Jay Cocks was still struggling to familiarize the magazine’s audience with MTV, referring to videos as “illustrated songs, little three- or four-minute clips” and “production numbers soaked in blotter acid.”
Even as MTV struggled financially, and employees worried the network could be shut down any day, its influence rippled across the culture, most quickly in film. In a review of the smash 1983 film Flashdance, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wrote, “Basically, the movie is a series of rock videos.” She did not intend this as a compliment. The next year, Flashdance producer Jerry Bruckheimer got even more MTV-ish with Beverly Hills Cop, which spawned videos for the soundtrack songs “Axel F,” “Neutron Dance,” and “The Heat Is On.” “It was free promotion,” says Bruckheimer, “another platform to reach a young audience, and it helped enormously.”
Network television followed; the hit series Miami Vice launched in 1984, according to legend, after NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff wrote the phrase “MTV cops” on a piece of paper. Michael Mann, Vice’s executive producer, dismisses this as “a nice anecdote without much basis in history, as far as I know.” But Mann imbued the show with a video sensibility: “I watched MTV a lot in those days. And Miami Vice was a radical departure from everything else on the air. The conventional way of using music in Hollywood was to apply the music to picture, more or less. But MTV influenced editing—now, we were cutting picture to music. And the content of videos on MTV was often what you would today call ‘fractals.’ They didn’t have the beginning, middle, and end of a story. MTV forced feature filmmaking to evolve: you didn’t need to bring an audience through so much clunky, conventional exposition of the story. That kind of stuff was obsolete.”
Also, John Sayles says, “MTV had a huge influence on independent films.” Sayles, who had been directing independent films since 1980, explains that music videos gave novice technicians access to state-of-the-art equipment; previously, someone would “start as a camera loader and fifteen years later might touch a Panavision. Twenty-three-year-old technicians had horror stories about working on videos, and then they’d say, ‘But you should have seen the camera they gave me!’”
THIS BOOK INCORPORATES INTERVIEWS WITH MORE THAN four hundred people who were significant, even if only briefly, in MTV’s Golden Era. It’s been thirty years since the network signed on with a few videos and a flurry of technical mishaps. Memories change over the years and agendas can conflict, so two people might recall an incident in different ways—when this occurs, we’ve let each side have his or her say. MTV lent assistance to us; however, this is not an MTV book. No one from the network had any say in its content or read the book prior to publication. We thank them, collectively, for their faith that we’d tell the story with candor, affection, and, where appropriate, criticism.
Throughout our research, the people we interviewed almost unanimously looked back at this period with joy and happiness, even if they now regret some of the clothes they wore, and we hope their enthusiasm—and ours—is obvious on the page. This is the story of how an asinine idea changed the culture of America, and then the world,
for better or worse.
—Rob Tannenbaum
Chapter 1
“IT’S THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD”
FIRST GLIMPSES OF MTV
BILLY GIBBONS, ZZ Top: One night I got a phone call from Frank Beard, our drummer. He said, “Hey, there’s a good concert on TV. Check it out.” So a couple of hours went by while I watched TV, and I called him back and said, “How long does this concert last?” He said, “I don’t know.” Twelve hours later, we were still glued to the TV. Finally somebody said, “No, it’s this twenty-four-hour music channel.” I said, “Whaaaat? ” MTV appeared suddenly—unheralded, unannounced, un-anything.
STEVIE NICKS, Fleetwood Mac: I was living in the Pacific Palisades and I would sit on the end of my bed, watching video after video, just stupefied.
DAVE NAVARRO, Jane’s Addiction: I was fourteen when MTV came on the air. My record collection at the time consisted mainly of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and here I was being exposed to a cross section of hard rock, new wave, and pop music. I still listen to Musical Youth every day. Okay, maybe not.
DAVE GROHL, Nirvana; Foo Fighters: It seemed like a transmission from some magical place. Me and all my friends were dirty little rocker kids in suburban Virginia, so we spent a lot of our time at the record store or staring at album covers. With music videos, there was a deeper dimension to everything. On Friday nights, you’d go to a friend’s house to get fucked up before going out to a party, and you’d have MTV on.
“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC, artist: I was living in a $300-a-month apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed and a tiny TV, but man, I wanted my MTV. It was a luxury for me to get cable TV. I would watch all day long. At the time, MTV felt like a local, low-budget station. The VJs would make glaring errors, or forget to turn off their mics. I mean, it was horribly produced and great. I felt like, This is television for me.
JANET JACKSON, artist: I loved watching it. How exciting back then, being a teenager and having something so creative, so fresh, so new. It was about waiting for your favorite video, and not really knowing what hour it would hit, so you’d have to watch all day long.
CONAN O’BRIEN, TV host: I was a freshman in college and a friend of mine was staying at her grandfather’s apartment in New York. She said, “Come over and hang out.” When I got there, she said, “I’m watching this new channel, MTV.” What a weird thing. What do you mean, they’re showing music videos? What’s a music video? Why would you show that? I can’t stop watching! We watched for six hours. It’s one of those things you can’t describe to anyone who’s younger than you, like the first year of Saturday Night Live. It was like a comet streaking across the sky.
DAVE MUSTAINE, Megadeth: My mom moved out when I was fifteen, so I’d been living alone in my apartment for a few years. People would ditch school, come over, buy pot from me, and watch MTV. I’m telling you, man, I had the coolest house in the town.
LARS ULRICH, Metallica: I lived with my parents, and we didn’t have cable TV. We had three channels, and PBS. Dave Mustaine was a couple years older, and he had cable. And as I’m sitting here now, I can clearly see his apartment. In the right-hand corner, under the window, there was a wood-cabinet television and it was tuned to MTV 24/7.
LENNY KRAVITZ, artist: The first time I saw MTV, I was on vacation with my parents in the Bahamas. They had MTV in the hotel we were staying at. It was beautiful outside, eighty degrees and sunny, and I spent the whole week in my hotel room, watching MTV, 24/7. My parents were like, “My god, what is wrong with you?” I did not want to come out. I just wanted to watch videos all day. Duran Duran, Prince, Hall & Oates, Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Talking Heads, Bow Wow Wow, Haircut 100, Adam & the Ants. That’s when MTV was MTV.
LADY GAGA, artist: The ’80s was such a magical time. We’d just come off Bowie’s’70s glam rock, and disco was spiraling into this incredible synthetic music. Everything was so theatrical. Once the video was born, all these visuals found a new medium.
PATTY SMYTH, Scandal: I remember watching MTV at my boyfriend’s house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, in the summer of ’81. A year later, I was on it.
PAT BENATAR, artist: I was in a hotel in Oklahoma, just this little roadside motel, and it was one of only about eight places in the United States that actually had MTV on the day that it aired. We were all sitting on my bed—the whole band, my manager, everybody—with our mouths open. I’m telling you, within a week, we couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. It changed everything, in one week.
AL TELLER, record executive: The timing of MTV was perfect. The music industry was in the doldrums and trying desperately to reinvent itself.
CHRIS ISAAK, artist: I had a TV that was from, like, 1959, a portable with rabbit ears and tinfoil. I got two and a half channels, and MTV was not one. My buddy was a photographer for the San Francisco 49ers, and it was a big treat when I went to babysit his kid, because I could watch MTV. At first, it was almost underground or counterculture. I don’t think people had gotten to the payola yet.
BRET MICHAELS, Poison: I was eighteen or nineteen, working as a fry cook and maintenance man, and singing in a covers band. We got cable just so we could watch MTV. I’d go to parties, and girls would ask me, “Why are you watching the TV?” I’d say, “I’m waiting for Van Halen.” I’d sit there with a little smokage and wait for their video to come on.
MICHAEL IAN BLACK, comedian: We did not have cable. Cable was for millionaires. I grew up in Hillsborough, New Jersey, a terrible place, but there was a local UHF station, U68, that hopped on the MTV bandwagon. If the weather was clear and the antenna was pointed just so, we could watch videos on U68. It was a ghetto MTV.
CHYNNA PHILLIPS, Wilson Phillips: I saw MTV the first day it aired. I was in New Jersey, visiting my dad, and our friend had MTV. We all crowded around the TV, and “Video Killed the Radio Star” played. I was hooked.
DAVE HOLMES, MTV VJ: I grew up in St. Louis, and when I was ten, somebody told me there was gonna be a thing called MTV and it was just gonna show music videos. First of all, I didn’t believe them. And second, I thought, If that’s true, it’s the greatest thing in the world.
B-REAL, Cypress Hill: I think it was the greatest invention ever.
RICHARD MARX, artist: I spent a ton of time watching MTV. I’d set my VHS machine to extended-play mode, to get six hours on a cassette. I videotaped midnight to 6 A.M., because they’d play videos overnight that they wouldn’t play during the day. I was studying it.
SEBASTIAN BACH, Skid Row: I’m from Canada, where there was no MTV. Every summer, my dad would send me and my sister to California to be with my grandma. I went to my cousin’s basement, put on the TV, and saw the Scorpions on fuckin’ television. I was a huge heavy metal fan, and I couldn’t believe my cousin had the Scorpions on his TV set! I didn’t leave the basement all summer. His parents said, “Are you okay? Do you do this at home?” I’m like, “I’ve never seen music videos, so you’ve got to leave me alone.”
CHUCK D, Public Enemy: These days, everybody has a hi-def camcorder in their pocket. It’s accepted with shrugging shoulders. “Okay, so what? A video.” But back then, it was a main event.
RUDOLF SCHENKER, Scorpions: We came on an American tour in 1982 and I exactly remember every night coming from the concert into the hotel. I went in the room, switched immediately MTV on. It was so fantastic.
NANCY WILSON, Heart: Everybody wanted their MTV so bad. I remember craving it like crazy.
ANN WILSON, Heart: It was like the difference between silent films and talkies. All of a sudden, records could be seen. You could just put it on and party around the TV.
JANE WIEDLIN, Go-Go’s: It was the go-to place to find new music, and you could find out right away what you need to know about a band, like if you liked their style or if they were cute.
STEVIE NICKS: When “Video Killed the Radio Star” came out, we took it with a grain of salt. We thought, Well, video’s not gonna kill the radio star. It did. The song was prophe
tic.
Chapter 2
“I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PLUG IN A LIGHT”
MUSIC VIDEOS (ONLY THEY WEREN’T CALLED THAT) IN THE 1970s
THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN MUSIC AND PICTURE, WHICH went a long way back, took a different perspective in the ’70s. Low-budget video novices were influenced by experimental filmmakers: Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, and Bruce Conner, who spliced together existing film footage like a cinema DJ, and was hired by Devo, pre-MTV, to create a video for their song “Mongoloid.” The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, writing an obituary for Conner in 2008, noted the wide influence of his “shocking juxtapositions and propulsive, rhythmically sophisticated montage,” and concluded, “MTV should have paid him royalties.” Later on, music videos would reflect the influences of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shining, West Side Story, film noir, Russ Meyer’s breast-laden film farces, and Saturday-morning cartoons. But here at the beginning, they were bold and wild.