VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  At a certain point, we were getting low in Dave’s vial and he said, “Y’all have any?” When we told him we didn’t have anything to contribute, he became less charitable.

  Mark:

  When things started to go really badly with my wife, I needed to get away. Dave was on his first solo tour, and I was friends with Pete Angelus, who had become Dave’s manager. They invited me out on the road—I flew out to meet them in Detroit and rode the bus with them for a week or so.

  Dave wanted to cheer me up. So in Buffalo or someplace, whatever hockey arena we were in, Pete sent me into the locker room. I thought Dave was going to be there and we were going to do some blow. I walked in and this girl came out of the showers. She was hot, in a slutty rock ’n’ roll kind of way, and she started chatting with me. After a short time, she got onto her knees and started to unzip my pants. And I felt weird about it—I had to tell her, “I can’t.” I think that may have negatively affected my friendship with Dave; he just wanted to make me feel better.

  When Dave was touring, both with Van Halen and solo, he had the barriers in front of the stage painted different colors on the side that faced him: red, blue, and green, to denote the different areas of the audience. He’d look for hot girls in the crowd, and between songs, go to his assistant Eddie on the side of the stage, and say, “Green, right, fourteen rows back, three seats in.” The assistant would go out into the audience and stick a pass on her tits. So after the show, there’d be twenty-five girls in the dressing room who all thought they’d been singled out to be with Dave that night. In fact, a number of them would be. The others would end up with other band members—or, if necessary, the crew.

  I would hear stories from these guys about the stuff they would do on the road. Pete told me about overhearing a band member with a girl on the back of the bus. She was saying, “I don’t want to blow you.” His line to her became a catchphrase with the band and the crew for the rest of the tour: “Just fucking do it.” They thought that was hysterical, and I couldn’t handle it. They would have girls do headstands in toilets—they thought it was the funniest thing ever, but it was just gross and sad. It wasn’t lost on me that these girls were there by choice and at any time could have said, “Fuck off, I’m not doing that!” Still, I couldn’t treat another human being like that. I wish I could have gotten it together for that girl who came out of the showers, though.

  Another time, I was in L.A., staying at L’Ermitage. Dave met me at the hotel, and decided we would go to this kickboxing competition—he was into mixed martial arts way before anyone. I followed him over the hill from Beverly Hills to Van Nuys, and he pulled into a strip mall. We walked past the 7-Eleven to the dojo; Dave told me that we had to bow as we walked in. All the fighters shouted hello at Dave—he was just as comfortable there as when he was onstage or backstage. We watched a bunch of matches, and while these guys kicked the shit out of each other, Dave explained what was happening: who each fighter was, his history, and what he was doing right and wrong. He was doing color and play-by-play for each match as only fast-talking Dave could.

  Afterward we went to a place called the 0-1 Gallery on Melrose. It was an art gallery, but it was really just an excuse for a club where you could drink after the bars closed. You paid to get in, but not for drinks—that was their workaround for the alcohol laws in L.A. Around four in the morning, Dave and I were in the bathroom doing a bump or two, when all of a sudden, we heard screaming. Somebody came running into the bathroom saying, “The cops are here! The cops are here!”

  Dave immediately sprang into action. He tied his hair back and tucked in his shirt. He had a big vial that he dropped out the bathroom window. I threw my vial out and we casually strolled out into the club. The LAPD came in with their guns drawn. They were really over the top. There was a lot of shouting and pushing and gun waving as we tried to get out of the club without being noticed. That wasn’t happening: They had all of us go out on the street. They lined us up on Melrose and were looking at us, literally shining flashlights in our faces. This was a rare moment where I saw Dave not trying to be David Lee Roth; he just wanted to blend. But nobody recognized him—the cops didn’t, anyway. They made us disperse, meaning that they yelled, “Get the fuck out of here.” I looked the other way for a second, and Dave had already taken off.

  Nina:

  Actually, I was more of a Sammy Hagar person.

  2

  Changes Come around Real Soon, Make Us Women and Men

  Life before MTV

  J. J. Jackson (from a 1999 interview):

  My mom was in Paris in the 1950s as a fashion model. She told me, “J. J., you acquire true sophistication experiencing the music and the food of the different cultures of the world. Doing so will enrich all areas of your life, wherever and whatever you decide to pursue.”

  She said this to me when I was just a kid and I always remembered it. She also practiced what she preached. She encouraged me to listen to everything. She took me to see everyone from Count Basie and Josephine Baker to Chuck Berry. I also got into Elvis Presley and Clyde McPhatter. She taught me that you didn’t necessarily have to love everything you were exposed to, but the opportunity to experience it was what was most important. To have an open mind to what other people create and experience—that will make one’s own life that much more rich and meaningful.

  Eventually, I joined the Marine Corps. When I got back, I worked at the New England Data Systems. Computers in those days were mammoth and all the information had to be keyed into these monsters. Hugely intimidating machines they were! I was dating a girl I worked with. She was already a keypunch operator whose job was to enter data into these computers for the New England Board of Education. She had a real passion for music, and I enjoyed it as well. In particular, she got me interested in . . . I think it was the Jefferson Airplane.

  I’m almost embarrassed to talk about it, but I enrolled in a correspondence course to become a DJ! Even though it’s corny to talk about, it turned out to be one of the best moves I ever made.

  I’ll never forget the day that changed it all for me. This was 1967. I was in a three-piece suit at a school in Connecticut, working for the Board of Education, and I had all these computer cards that we would take and load into the computer. So I was driving back to Boston when I saw two hippies hitchhiking along the road. I stopped and picked them up in my station wagon. In those days, there was no quandary as to whether or not you would pick someone up. You just did it.

  They asked me if I minded if they lit up a joint. I said, “Sure, go ahead,” and we started to talk. They asked me if I’d heard of the hip underground station in Boston, WBCN. I hadn’t, and when I heard it, it freaked me out! They were playing everything, right across the board. Anyway, those kids were going to the “Mods and Rockers Ball,” which was going to be held the next day at a place called the Boston Tea Party. I dropped my new friends off and told them I hoped they would have a good time. I became extremely curious about what was going on in Boston on the music scene.

  At my job at the computer center, there was a guy who wanted to take a computer operator’s course at Tufts University in Boston. This guy was involved with radio. He wanted me to show him how to operate a computer, and he needed someone to do a radio show for him. I did the show, the program director liked what I did, and he kept me for six months! I worked all day at my day job and then did the radio show at night. I was playing and learning everything they had in their music library.

  During this time, I became intrigued about that place on Berkeley Street in South Boston called the Boston Tea Party. I was always hearing about what a trip it was to be part of that scene. So I started to go there and experience what it had to offer. In particular, there was this dance—the band was called the Hallucinations, and Peter Wolf was playing. He was right into the R&B stuff. Man, he was the blackest, whitest kid on the block.

  He saw from the stage how much my girlfriend and I were into it and he came over to see us. Wolf said he w
as a DJ at WBCN and they needed some help. Would I be interested in doing “whatever” at WBCN at night? I jumped at the chance. What it amounted to was me working my computer day job and being a WBCN gofer at night. I didn’t care what I did—I would be around the hippest station in town and that was good enough for me.

  It was a real crash course about how a radio station runs. I got my big break when one of the major DJs at WBCN relocated to the West Coast. They gave me a job doing the midday show and I just loved it. People seemed to enjoy what I was doing, I was enjoying what I was doing—it was a very satisfying experience.

  Mark:

  My parents weren’t musicians, but they played a mean hi-fi. They turned me on to Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday and, of course, Frank Sinatra. My dad was a jeweler. He did manufacture and repair, but he was very creative. In later years, he became a jewelry designer. He taught me the trade. When I was thirteen, I made a ring that I still wear today. After the hot gold was poured into a cast, I had to carve out the rough casting with little saws and files. And because I was a thirteen-year-old boy, I picked a design with snakes running up the sides.

  My mom wanted to make money and improve. She brought in all these clients for my dad: major department stores like Gimbels and Strawbridge & Clothier. We lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia—first in a row house, and then in a split-level. I could never figure out my parents’ relationship. He was an artsy introvert; she was an outgoing businesswoman. He wasn’t interested in debating philosophy or politics; she thrived on it. Where other guys had a strong father figure and grew up with a more macho attitude, I always saw the woman’s side. My mom was a classic narcissist, and proud of it: Her motto was “Me first.” When my sister, Maris, was a little girl, she asked my mom for the banana that she was about to eat with her lunch. When my mom said no, my sister asked why. The answer was, “Because it’s mine!”

  Maris and I were really close growing up. My sister, who is four years older than me, wasn’t one of the popular girls in school: She was really shy, and she went through a dorky-looking phase. But I knew she was the coolest person on earth. She turned me on to great music, from Bach to the Band. It was a shock to me that Maris had trouble getting dates—and when she came home, she’d often tell me stories of how the guys mauled her, trying to get into her pants. I took to heart how those guys were assholes, and when I got older, I avoided being “the mauler” at all costs, because I knew what a drag it was for the girl.

  I think I was a difficult kid. I was always getting suspended from school—I wasn’t beating up other kids, just getting in trouble. I was probably just trying to get my parents’ attention.

  When I was in junior high school, almost all the kids at my school were into pop music, but I had five friends that I hung around with, and we were all into black music. We dressed the way black people dressed back then: super-starched highboy collars, bright blue pants, white alligator shoes, and Italian knit sweaters. We even had “black” names we used—Steve Stoll, who started the group, was Moe. Richie Slack was Tyrone, Ricky Abrams was Otis, and I was Leroy. I was into these cool soul bands like the Intruders and the Manhattans. I got to see Otis Redding, the original Temptations, the Supremes, all of those acts—some of them I saw down in Atlantic City, long before the casinos came in. This DJ on an AM soul station, Georgie Woods, had a dance TV show on a UHF station (remember UHF?), channel 17, called 17 Canteen. I would cut school and go dance to Jay Wiggins’s “Sad Girl” and the Mar-Keys’ “Philly Dog.”

  I sold meth when I was in high school, making money to buy a stereo and clothes; I had been working in a deli before that, but I quit. My parents were blissfully unaware. A good friend of mine had this connection, Thierry, a French guy married to a nurse. I don’t know where Thierry got it from, but he had garbage bags full of crystal meth, in chunks the size of basketballs. And my friend was an amazing marketer—at a time when people were just folding up drugs in a piece of paper, we were using beautiful little glassine envelopes. When we sold hash, my friend came up with the idea of putting in key filings, which we got from the local hardware store. When you make a key, you shave off some of the brass, and it looks like gold powder. We called it “The King’s Hash.” When you lit up, the powder would disappear, presumably into your lungs, but because it was “The King’s Hash,” it was twice the price. And it sold like crazy.

  I graduated from high school, Mitchell Prep, in 1970. I had been selling meth for two years, and the summer before I went to college—Pitt—we had one gigantic deal planned with Thierry. I had invested all the money that I had saved, thousands of dollars. I was planning to go to school with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. And then, boom, Thierry got arrested and deported. I still have the article from a Philadelphia newspaper, with a picture of this guy and his little dog Budeu, getting busted with all my money.

  Five weeks after I got to college, my girlfriend broke up with me. I took it really hard—she was the first girl I slept with, the first girl I fell in love with. I didn’t realize that when people go to college, things change. A month later, she was living with this lowlife idiot. He worked at a gas station that he ended up robbing. She and I would still talk, and because it was basically the ’60s, I would be saying, “Hey man, it’s cool,” even though the whole situation was humiliating. And this guy turned her on to heroin. I thought, “Oh yeah? I can do that too.” For a while, heroin was a big part of my life; my period of heaviest drug use was eighteen to twenty-five, and I did everything. Luckily, I don’t have an addictive personality, so I never, ever had a habit—I was never strung out, and I never blew all my money on it. But I did see some of my friends die.

  Once I realized that I didn’t have the patience to be a musician, I focused on radio. After a couple of years, I transferred to Temple and moved back to Philly. I was a communications major and I worked at the school radio station. I wanted to get on-air experience, but the station played jazz. I knew nothing about jazz before I started working there, so I pulled out records and read the liner notes on the air. My senior year, I did two internships. At night, I worked in the news department at WMMR, the cool FM rock station. During the day, I was at WFIL, a huge AM pop station. They had me call people randomly from the phone book and ask them questions about what music they liked. “Callout research” was just being invented, but it would soon become the industry standard, contributing to the homogenization of radio. Research replaced the taste of DJs.

  The WFIL program director, a guy named Jay Cook, took a liking to me. They bought an FM adult-contemporary station and he hired me to do weekend overnights. On Saturday, I would go until 4 A.M. and then I would play the religious tapes until 6 A.M. The first one was an hour, and then there were two half-hour tapes. One night, I fell asleep and got woken up by the guy who was on at 6 A.M. “I wondered why there had been thirteen minutes of dead air,” he said. I was terrified, but they didn’t fire me.

  I also did afternoon drive at an adult contemporary station in Delaware and free-form radio in Allentown, Pennsylvania. All the time, I was sending tapes to WMMR. Finally, they hired me. The program director, Jerry Stevens, was one of my idols—he had programmed the original WMMR, left to pioneer the disco format, and then returned. What I didn’t expect was that he was abusive and a huge egomaniac. My idol used to torture me on the air—I’d be talking on the mike and he’d be flicking the back of my head and writing on my sneakers. Around 1978, after Jerry had been replaced by a young whiz-kid programmer named Jeff Pollack, we explored the possibility of my hosting a video show, probably an hour long, on Friday nights, simulcasting on WMMR and on a UHF channel. I ended up not doing that because I got promoted to music director. Which was great, but I had to be at the station all day, plus I did my show from six to ten at night. We were kicking ass, though—number one in the ratings.

  I used to say that it wasn’t enough for me to have just my friends and family love me—no, I had to have the whole city love me. And ultimately, the whole country.


  Nina:

  I grew up in Massachusetts, and I was a pretty solitary kid. I had three imaginary friends: Jamie, Beanie, and Cold Cuts. I also had one little tomboy friend—she liked frogs so much, she’d pick them up and squeeze them until she killed them. But mostly I didn’t like being around other kids; I thought they were smelly. I was shy then and I’m still shy.

  When I was seven, we moved to the suburbs of Cleveland—my dad was an executive in the Defense Department, and he got offered a good position in Ohio. I liked writing poetry, and my poems were always about horses and trees and the golden waves of Ohio grain. I was studying piano and acting in children’s theater: My favorite part was Wendy in Peter Pan, because I got to fly. As shy as I was, I blossomed onstage—I loved living in an imaginary world and pretending to be a character.

  In sixth grade, I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I was hooked immediately, like millions of other people. I bought every Beatles album, every Beatles book, even all the Beatles cards with the chewing gum. I had three girlfriends, and we pretended to be the Beatles together—we’d talk with these phony Liverpool accents. I was Paul. And on sleepovers, we’d pretend that we were the Beatles’ girlfriends, and try to do our hair like Jane Asher and Pattie Boyd did.

  Before I was born, my mom was a clothing buyer for a boutique in Massachusetts, so she used to order my clothes from New York. She always complained about the clothes in Cleveland—her expression was “The clothes here are from hunger.” She’s Italian, not Jewish, but she got that from the schmatte business. She was ahead of the curve, and she bought me two pairs of Beatle boots before the Beatles even came to the States. At first other kids teased me, but suddenly, the boots were really cool.