by Craig Marks
MARK GOODMAN: When you look at the five of us, we had the benign black guy, the girl next door, the high-school jock, the hot video vamp, and me. I once asked Sue Steinberg and she said, “You were the stud.” I was like, “Fuck me, really? The stud? Wow!” I thought I was the guy with the Jewfro.
KEN R. CLARK: I still have a piece of fan mail that was sent to Mark. It said, “Would you like to come meet a girl who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch? If not, please send Alan. Thanks.”
Chapter 5
“A TOTAL, UNMITIGATED DISASTER”
MTV LAUNCHES WITH THE BUGGLES, BLOTTO, AND THIRTY ROD STEWART VIDEOS
AFTER MONTHS OF LATE HOURS AND SHORT PAY, MTV employees deserved a great party when the channel debuted on the air. They didn’t get one. Because no Manhattan cable operator had yet agreed to carry MTV, the staff schlepped to the Loft, a restaurant and bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the nearest town where the signal was available.
To their credit, the surroundings didn’t diminish the celebration. “When MTV came on the air at midnight, the Loft’s downstairs banquet room resembled a winning candidate’s headquarters on election night,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Hilburn, the only reporter who covered the event. “Gathered around a half-dozen TV sets, they cheered wildly when anything came on the screen: the music, the commercials, the station logos.”
No volume of cheering could drown the technical mistakes that plagued the launch. At the network operations center in Smithtown, Long Island, carefully planned segments aired in the wrong order, which made the broadcast seem like a grade school talent pageant. It’s fortunate that so few people could tune in; advertisers, cable operators, and the home audience would have been baffled by what they saw.
BOB PITTMAN: We launched on August 1, 1981. Our first video was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It was too obvious not to do it. When you see the video today, you go, “Don’t tell me that’s cutting edge.” But at the time, it was.
STEVE CASEY: Nobody wanted to launch with “Video Killed the Radio Star.” They thought we had to play a hit. I said, “Nobody’s going to be watching. It’s symbolic.” In fact, the second video we played was symbolic, too: Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” was a message to the record labels.
TREVOR HORN, the Buggles: We wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1979. It came from this idea that technology was on the verge of changing everything. Video recorders had just come along, which changed people’s lives. We’d seen people starting to make videos as well, and we were excited by that. It felt like radio was the past and video was the future. There was a shift coming.
RUSSELL MULCAHY, director: “Video Killed the Radio Star” was a one-day shoot in south London. I had a good friend who was trying to break into acting. I told her I needed a girl to dress in a silver costume and be lowered via wires into a test tube. What she didn’t know was that we would need about thirty takes. What you see in that scene is actually the wrong take; the tube falls over, which wasn’t supposed to be in the final cut. I think it’s still in the video to this day. No one really knew what they were doing, including me.
TOM FRESTON: We had a party in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just for staff, so we could watch the network launch at midnight on August 1, 1981. The party couldn’t be for advertisers, because we didn’t have any. The only cable operator who came was this great guy in New Jersey, who was the first guy to carry us. He was our only customer.
JOHN LACK: The night before we went on the air, Fred Seibert says to me, “We can’t just sign on, we have to say something. John, it’s like a time capsule. What would you say?” I told him, “I’d say, ‘Ladies and gentleman, rock n’ roll.’” He goes, “That’s it! And you’re going to say it!” That’s how we started: I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock n’ roll,” the rocket ship goes up, the man lands on the moon, and that’s it.
CAROLYN BAKER: When that Buggles video played, we started screaming like maniacs. We were all drunker than skunks.
PAM LEWIS: That night might have been the first time I was ever in a limo. I told John Lack that he looked like he’d given birth—which in essence, he had. It was jubilation.
BOB PITTMAN: The first hour of MTV was a total, unmitigated disaster. The VJs would announce, “That was Styx,” right after we’d played REO Speedwagon. They’d say “This is the Who,” and a .38 Special video would begin. We’d gotten everything mixed up. And we’d also done stereo TV for the first time. So if you’re listening in stereo, it sounds fine. If you’re listening in mono, like 99.9 percent of people, either the audio wasn’t there or it was totally muffled. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. It was probably one of the worst nights in my life. While everybody else was celebrating, I was on a telephone with the network operations center, going ballistic.
ANDY SETOS: The first hour was both comical and embarrassing. It was complete chaos. Someone handed me the phone at the network operations center, and it’s Pittman. Bob goes, “Andy, that was the wrong clip.” He sounded very nervous. I said, “Bob, are we on the air?” And he said nothing, so I hung the phone up.
We were doing things that had never been done before. I’d had broadcast equipment specially modified for stereo, a cartridge system designed by Ampex, which played the video clips. There was some video feedback a couple of times, because we had circuits that were crossed in the wiring. We weren’t even finished wiring the place! It was crazy, like any other startup. Two or three weeks before the launch, Bob had contracted with the record companies to include the artist, the name of the song, and the record label in the lower third of the screen, at the beginning and end of the clip, for a certain amount of time. Not being a TV person, Bob hadn’t realized how complex it would be to add the overlays. It was a last-minute scramble, and it meant there was no time for any real rehearsal before the launch.
STEVE CASEY: The night we launched is still the proudest moment in my life. I’ve never experienced that level of energy at any other time. When I got up the next morning, the first thing I did was call my mother in Wichita, Kansas, and tell her. She goes, “Oh yeah, I’m watching.” I’m like, What? Wichita had a brand-new fifty-channel cable system and so MTV was on from day one. We couldn’t watch it in Manhattan, but my mom could in Kansas.
DAVE HOLMES: I’ve seen the first hour of MTV. I watched it at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. And it’s, like, three Rod Stewart videos and two Pat Benatars. It was like a haphazardly formatted radio station. A British metal band. Then an American female pop singer. But no black people. No black people.
PAT BENATAR: I got really angry when we shot “You Better Run.” I kept thinking, What do they think I am, a runway model? Fuck you! It seemed like we were making a commercial. As a musician, it was your whole life to be edgy and underground. And here come these film people, who weren’t like us—they had little shirts with collars that buttoned down. The bad attitude I had was exactly what we needed for that song—I come across as extremely sassy and aggressive, which was perfect for the lyric and for the image I was trying to project.
NEIL “SPYDER” GIRALDO, artist: My wife, Patricia, is very photogenic. MTV was made for her—it was perfect.
DON BARNES, .38 Special: MTV had sent their own film crew from New York to tape our show, and “Hold On Loosely” was one of the first videos they played. We weren’t the prettiest guys around: We were Southern dudes with hair down to our chests. And we certainly weren’t actors. You see some of our early videos, we’re standing there like zombies. Stoned zombies.
LEE RITENOUR, artist: I was the only jazz-oriented artist they showed on the first day—they played not one, but two of my videos. I mean, they were looking for content, they were trying to fill twenty-four hours a day. “My God, how are we doing to do this?” I have to laugh, because when people think of Lee Ritenour, they don’t think of MTV, and when they think of MTV, they don’t think of Lee Ritenour.
JIM DIAMOND, Ph.D.: We were the fifth song the
y played, “Little Suzi’s on the Up.” In the video, I’m supposed to be working as a butcher, and there was ballroom dancing—nothing to do with the song. When MTV played it, we said, “Oh shit, what have we done? Not only do we know it’s the worst video ever made, now the whole world knows it’s the worst video ever made!” It didn’t do anything for our career; the record was never even released in America.
KEVIN CRONIN: When MTV came on the air, our record Hi Infidelity had been number one for months, so it was pretty good timing for us. 1978 was the first time we made a video; they’d set up a couple cameras at sound check and we’d run through the song. That was a music video. For Hi Infidelity, we’d made four videos in one day with Bruce Gowers. They were horrible. “Keep On Loving You” made us look like even bigger dorks than we were. It starts with me sitting in a psychiatrist’s office—a female psychiatrist, because someone figured out that you had to have a hot chick in the video. The psychiatrist was this gorgeous model with librarian glasses. She was out of our league, big-time.
DENNIS DeYOUNG, Styx: “Best of Times” and “Rockin’ the Paradise” were among the first videos played on MTV. This is how Styx made videos in the early days: If we were playing several nights in some city, we’d go onstage in the afternoon on the second day and lip-sync three songs. Had we been aware that MTV would emerge, perhaps we would have put a little more thought into our videos.
GREG HAYMES, Blotto: We were a small indie band in Albany, New York, when MTV ran our video on day one, sandwiched between Iron Maiden and Rod Stewart. Not to be overly humble, but they needed content. I think we were the thirty-fourth or thirty-sixth video they played.
JERRY CASALE: In the beginning, they played “Whip It” all the time.
“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC: Devo was in heavy rotation, not because MTV loved Devo, but because it was a twenty-four-hour network and they needed product.
BOB PITTMAN: I think there were 250 videos in existence.
RICHARD SCHENKMAN: When new videos came in, it was like when you’re living in a small port town and the ship comes in with supplies.
ANDY SETOS: After two days, it was getting really boring. We had very few clips—and there were no commercials.
MARK GOODMAN: We must have played “Lonely Boy” by Andrew Gold every twenty minutes. He was one of the few American artists with more than one video. We also played Rod Stewart up the wazoo.
TOM FRESTON: When we went on the air, we had something like 165 videos. And thirty of them were Rod Stewart.
RICK KRIM, MTV executive: Damn, there was a lot of Rod Stewart and REO Speedwagon. But I also remember random videos like Classix Nouveau’s “Guilty,” and Tenpole Tudor’s wacky “Wunderbar.”
DAVE HOLMES: There were bands I got into because I thought they were cool, and I thought they were cool because they were on MTV, and they were on MTV because the network had played Rod Stewart too many times. Blotto, or Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns—I thought they were legendary artists. And I wanted to live in a world where Blotto was huge.
GREG HAYMES: I think they appreciated us because we were not afraid to be silly. Alan Hunter wore a Blotto sweatshirt on the air.
GALE SPARROW: We had eight Rod Stewart videos. We played him, like, every five minutes. Rod was lucky we didn’t ruin his career. To be honest, we’d play pretty much anyone with a video.
Chapter 6
“GIRLS SLIDING ON POLES”
THE FIRST DIRTY MUSIC VIDEO
FROM THE BEGINNING, MUSIC VIDEOS WERE OFTEN silly, undignified, funny (intentionally? unintentionally? It was hard to know), crass, and artificial. However, they were never dirty—until the arrival of a British band who counted on shock value to make their mark in the U.S. In this narrow sense, “Girls on Film” is the most influential music video ever made, setting in motion three decades of titillation.
JOHN TAYLOR: “Girls on Film” is pretty fucking insane. I mean, it’s like Penthouse or Hustler. It’s cheesy. But it worked.
LOL CREME, director: Duran Duran’s managers, Paul and Michael Berrow, told us they were going to break the band in America by making a video, but not an ordinary video. They wanted an outrageous video. They said we could do whatever we wanted, but they suggested the concept be something sexual.
KEVIN GODLEY: The Berrows discovered there were clubs in the United States that played music videos. They wanted a video that would be controversial. I went to the south of France with a fashion crowd for a few weeks and my partner Lol went to LA. When we came back together, he’d seen some mud wrestling and I’d seen fashion shows. We thought, What if we did a sort of catwalk show, but with sumo wrestling and sex?
JOHN TAYLOR: There’s no plot to “Girls on Film.” The only plot was to set up some sexy scenes with girls. You don’t need a plot to make a cool video. You just need something that catches the eye, that’s sexy or amusing. Sometimes it’s enough just to have style.
KEVIN GODLEY: It had glamour, it had polish, it had sex, it had good-looking boys, it had girls sliding on poles. It was a dirty film. In hindsight, it had the ingredients that became MTV-able. If it was influential, I’m sorry. I can only apologize.
NICK RHODES, Duran Duran: It’s the kind of video people now call “politically incorrect.”
SIMON LE BON: We were five randy twenty year olds, and management didn’t want us around the girls when they took their clothes off. We did sneak in. It was very sexy for us at the time.
KEVIN GODLEY: Management kept the band well away from the girls. There were other shoots going on in nearby studios. Word got around, and people began flocking to our shoot.
LOL CREME: We had a closed set, because there were naked ladies about. At one point, I turned around and saw Japanese tourists with their cameras, like a cliché, photographing what we were doing.
SIMON LE BON: My favorite moment is definitely the ice cube on the nipple.
KEVIN GODLEY: Someone mentioned that at porno shoots, in order to get an erect nipple, you put some ice on it. So we said, “Why not?”
SIMON LE BON: I don’t know who held the ice cube. I wish it’d been me, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
NICK RHODES: It was funny and tongue-in-cheek.
JOHN TAYLOR: It definitely got the juices flowing. It brought out the alpha dog thing, where we were all unconsciously scrambling over each other to get the attention of the brunette.
SIMON LE BON: Those two models in the video completely polarized the band. I liked the dark one. John liked the blond one.
KEVIN GODLEY: Subsequently it was edited for MTV, which made it a little less raunchy than the original.
SIMON LE BON: It was really on the edge. I mean, it was banned. That was the best thing that could ever have happened to it, really.
JOHN TAYLOR: It was very clear that we were a band served well by the video medium.
Chapter 7
“A HAIL MARY PASS”
HOW $1 SAVED MTV FROM BANKRUPTCY
WHEN RECORD LABELS GAVE THEIR EXISTING music videos to MTV, they were often reluctant, even though it didn’t cost a cent—the videos were already paid for and were, for the most part, sitting around unused. But if MTV was going to succeed, they needed new videos, and better ones, too. This required record labels to spend money, in the midst of a sales slump, and that prospect changed their mood from reluctant to cranky. So MTV needed to present proof that exposure on the network led directly to more albums sales, or the labels would not increase their meager commitments to video.
And MTV had a second reluctant business partner: cable operators. “Remember, cable was in rural communities,” John Lack says. The federal government had been moving toward deregulation of cable, but cable operators were still subject to regulation on the municipal and state levels, and they feared that rock videos would incite controversy, viewer objections, protests, and maybe even cause them to lose the virtual monopolies they’d worked hard to win.
The cable operators were MTV’s mightiest obstacle, and the network needed
a quick solution. If MTV was going to survive past its first year, it had to outsmart the cable operators. The strategy devised inside the network involved a memorable four-word phrase, mixed with the power of celebrity.
BOB PITTMAN: We needed to be very scientific about the impact MTV was having on the record industry. So I sent John Sykes and Tom Freston to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And one night, Sykes and Freston called me very excited. They’d been to a record store, and the store had suddenly sold out of the Tubes, and we were the only people playing the Tubes, so it had to be because of us. We had our first evidence that MTV was selling records.