Mark:
I cried. I was so overcome with the fact that we were all there at the beginning of this big thing.
Alan:
We bonded that night. The rocket blasted off, and we looked at each other and realized we were the only five people on the planet doing what we were doing.
The first fifteen videos MTV ever played:
1. The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”
2. Pat Benatar, “You Better Run”
3. Rod Stewart, “She Won’t Dance with Me”
4. The Who, “You Better You Bet”
5. Ph.D., “Little Susie’s on the Up”
6. Cliff Richard, “We Don’t Talk Anymore”
7. Pretenders, “Brass in Pocket”
8. Todd Rundgren, “Time Heals”
9. REO Speedwagon, “Take It on the Run”
10. Styx, “Rockin’ the Paradise”
11. Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, “When Things Go Wrong”
12. Split Enz, “History Never Repeats”
13. .38 Special, “Hold on Loosely”
14. April Wine, “Just Between You and Me”
15. Rod Stewart, “Sailing”
Mark:
People stayed for at least an hour, watching videos. I had seen “Video Killed the Radio Star” and the Pat Benatar video before, but I don’t think I had seen .38 Special. There was a fair amount of drinking. It was one of the few times that people at the company all felt that we did this thing together. The company was small enough that everybody was doing all they could for the channel, and their job was important to the final product. I didn’t know any of these other people, so I was hanging out mostly with Carol.
Nina was wearing a fishnet top. It wasn’t a fine net, and I believe she had no bra on. I thought, “Wow. Okay.”
Nina:
I can’t believe Mark remembers that. You could have given me fifty million dollars, and I wouldn’t have been able to say what I was wearing that night. I owned only one fishnet top: a blue shirt that originally belonged to Kevin, my high-school sweetheart. But if I was wearing it that night, I’m sure you couldn’t see through it—because if you could, I wouldn’t have left the house.
Mark:
That night, after the launch, I thought about how now MTV was on forever. That was in my head all night: “Now we have to feed the beast.” Over and over and over again, and it’s never, ever, ever, ever going to stop. Shit. How are we going to do that?
5
Let’s Make Lots Of Money
Contracts and Paychecks
Nina:
My MTV salary wasn’t extraordinary—I know the second generation of VJs got way more than we did. But it was enough to live comfortably in Manhattan. I was able to go out to eat and treat my friends. We could have made a lot more money, except MTV had exclusive contracts with us. Procter & Gamble came to me once: They wanted me to endorse a skin-care product, and they were going to buy time on MTV. I was excited, and I took it to John Sykes, one of the top executives. I felt like the cat that brought the mouse home—in the early days, we were hurting for advertisers. John was really nice, and he went to bat for me. But Bob Pittman’s philosophy was that he never wanted the VJs to be bigger than the channel. I’m not greedy, but that sucked. It would’ve been a nice chunk of money to put away for my retirement.
Alan:
In the beginning, I made $27,500. I had been bartending and auditioning for shows, so my criterion was that I wanted to make as much as a chorus boy: On Broadway, they made about $550 a week. I was paying $550 a month in rent. Looking at the apartment buildings across the street that cost $700 to $1,000 a month, I dreamed of living there—if I could just make chorus boy money.
When I got the job at MTV, I didn’t have a lawyer. I called Bob Pittman, the executive at MTV who brought me in, and asked if he could suggest a lawyer. I knew it wasn’t the smartest move, but he was a family friend and I had no other connections in New York.
Bob was amused but helpful. He said, “Call this guy—he’ll take care of you.”
I went with Bob’s lawyer. He was a good guy, but whose interest was he protecting? My first year was $27,500, then there was a bump in the second year to $35,000, and then $40,000 the third year. I was making $520 a week—it was close enough to my chorus boy goal.
Martha:
When they first signed me, it was a three-year deal. It was $26,000 my first year, then $28,000, then $32,000. I didn’t have an agent—my dad was my lawyer.
Alan:
Martha making less than me was pure discrimination—we were equally inexperienced.
Mark:
I think I started at $75,000, maybe $80,000. Because when I was working at WPLJ, I was making about $50,000.
Nina:
I knew how much Mark made, because they accidentally sent his contract to my house. I thought it was mine and opened it—oops!
Martha:
After I signed my MTV contract, I had a whopping 26K coming in. I started looking for apartments so I could move out of African erotic art central. I found a place I liked, and my stepmother, Jane, came to look at it. Being the personal-finance guru that she was, she recited the formula that my rent should be one-quarter of my income. The rent was $750, so I was very close. My own apartment!
I moved into One Astor Place, back in my beloved Greenwich Village, just blocks from the Weinstein dormitory. I had a job, I could pay my own rent—I could even get a kitten without having to ask anyone, “Can I keep it? Can I?” I went to the Elmsford Animal Shelter and got the first of my Beatle-named cats, Prudence.
I loved that apartment. It was a tiny studio with a sleeping loft—you climbed up there on a wooden ladder. To me, it seemed like a one-bedroom apartment, even if the bedroom had a three-foot ceiling! I bought a mattress from 1-800-MATTRESS—two, actually, because I used the second one as a couch. I bought a giant TV from Crazy Eddie’s, a discount electronics chain in New York. It had a push-button channel-changing panel, which felt very high-tech. I do not believe it had a remote. I got cable courtesy of a guy who hot-wired my Manhattan Cable. I felt guilty afterward, paranoid I would be exposed: “Cable Star Arrested for Stealing Cable!”
Alan:
As soon as I got the job, we went to our creepy German landlord and got a new apartment on the same block. Life picked up from there. I could afford new tennis shoes.
A couple of months into the whole thing, J. J. and I were talking about money. Laughing, he said, “Ah, these cheap bastards. I’m sure you made a pretty good deal with them. I mean, I’ve been in the business for a while, so I’m at a certain level, but you’re new to the game. I hope they’re doing right by you.” We weren’t saying numbers at first, but then J. J. got specific: “If they’re not paying you at least 40K, then you’re totally getting ripped off.”
I laughed awkwardly: “Ha ha ha—no, I’m good.” That was the first time it dawned on me: I should have asked for more money. And if J. J. said forty for me, he had to be making eighty.
Martha:
After a year or so, they told me they’d rip up my old contract and give me a new three-year deal for $40,000, $50,000, and $60,000. I would have stuck with the first one—they didn’t have to do that. A couple of years later, they tore it up again and I got an even better deal.
Alan:
Six months in, the company told me, “We like what you’re doing—we want to renegotiate your contract.” Now I can see that they were staggering the contracts. Hire everybody at the same time, and then space out when the contracts expire so you can control them a little more.
Mark:
I would have loved to rip up my contract. By the end of my time at MTV, I was making something like $150,000. I got an agent, and I turned Alan on to him. Many years later, I found out Alan ended up making more money than me.
Alan:
I made almost $200,000 at the end, which was good money for 1987. I had a contract for three years; it would have been $225,000
and $250,000, but I only took advantage of one year. I heard that after us, VJs like Carson Daly and Duff were well into the seven figures. That’s okay—we were like the early sports stars.
Mark:
I was astonished that Alan had a better deal than me. I thought I was hot shit—I’m the guy with the history in radio and the knowledge and he’s getting more than me? I couldn’t believe I didn’t even get a favored-nations clause. In retrospect, Alan was the future of MTV: someone who could be wacky and fun, not a music fanatic.
Alan:
With all of us, our fame far outstripped what we were getting paid. If I was traveling on my own dime, I’d be in coach, because I didn’t want to pay for first class—I was too cheap. But during the prime of MTV, people would have funny reactions, clearly wondering, “Why are you back here with the cattle?” It made some of the other VJs uncomfortable, but I didn’t care. I was going on vacation with my wife, so what was the difference? But people who knew me from TV couldn’t figure out how to respond. The stewardess would bring me a bottle of champagne, even though I was sitting in row 32.
6
There’s Always Something Happening And It’s Usually Quite Loud
The First Days of MTV
Alan:
We filmed at a place called Teletronics, in the worst part of Manhattan, near the corner of Thirty-third Street and Tenth Avenue. Before we came there, they were doing commercials and industrial films and talk shows. It was a small studio, so all five of us had to share a single dressing room. Being physically confined like that forced us to relate to each other.
Mark:
I couldn’t have cared less that there was only one dressing room. That felt punk rock to me.
Nina:
I didn’t mind sharing, but before I went on the air, I would go into the bathroom and lock the door, just so I could have some solitary headspace. I needed some quiet time.
Mark:
It was an unusual situation—a whole new staff, and suddenly we were together all the time, at the studio from seven in the morning to eleven at night. Martha was like a little girl; Nina was spacey but cool; J. J. was pompous, but at least he knew what he was talking about! And I thought Alan was an idiot. Just a buffoon, possibly gay—even though he was married. And we were all changing clothes in front of each other.
Alan:
Inevitably, there was dressing room exposure. It’s not my fault that the makeup mirror reflected Martha and Nina trying to get ready behind me.
Martha:
I loved that we were all sailing together on the SS MTV. I had no life, so I didn’t give a rat’s ass about working until eleven at night. We didn’t really have any place to sleep, but sometimes I would lie down on a couch at the back of the control room.
Alan:
We were working sixteen-hour days, mainly because nobody, from the crew to the office to us, had a good handle on the job. The whole machine was incredibly inefficient—with the exception of the props guy at the studio, who was this old union guy that I loved, named Leo. Behind the scenes, we kept getting memos changing the strategy, because nobody knew how anything was going to turn out. “Get rid of the green plants, they look too corporate.” “Forget the scripts.” “Tell the VJs to stand on their heads.”
Mark:
Everybody was so young. We had technical limitations, and we didn’t even know that we needed to invent what we needed. One of the big things for me was that we couldn’t really segue. There was no machine that did that yet—going from one video to another was handled with the fader bar, and it felt very stiff. It killed a lot of momentum.
We had people on staff who had never directed TV before or floor-managed before—they could have been interns. Everybody was just trying to figure it out.
Alan:
J. J. and Mark would come into the studio with a New York Times and sit there reading it while they waited for their shifts. I would think, “How can you even read the paper? Why aren’t you prepping?” They weren’t being cavalier; they knew how to do the gig. I was serious about it, because I had to be: sweating over everything, doing my homework, trying to make every segment brilliant. In the beginning, they rarely were.
Mark:
Alan and Martha had challenges that J. J. and I didn’t have. Nina hadn’t done this sort of gig, but she had a background of being a fan of rock ’n’ roll. I thought J. J. did a great job. He was like, “Well, all right, here we are, it’s MTV, how you doing?” And I would be doing this intense whisper. Viewers used to think I was high on the air—my eyes always looked like slits. That was bad makeup application, nothing else. I was never high during VJ segments.
It took me a while to get to where I felt comfortable enough to say what I wanted and be relaxed the way that I was by myself in a radio booth. I was experienced enough in relating to a microphone, knowing that on the other side of that were people. I knew I had to do the same sort of exercise for a camera.
Alan:
I sucked in the beginning. I didn’t know what to do without a role to play! I was just supposed to talk and be natural, but I was watching my southern accent really carefully, and I ended up with this weird, almost Shakespearean accent. I was being diligent about my diction, and every day, they’d say, “Just loosen up and be yourself.” I’d go home and tell Jan, “They’re going to fire me. This is not good.”
Martha:
J. J. was the top dog. And Mark, he’d been on WPLJ, so he was second. They were the pros—they knew about music, how to deal with executives, all the ins and outs of the business. Alan, Nina, and I were far less experienced and way more starry-eyed. We called ourselves the Junior VJs. Nina actually came up with the “Junior VJ” term, but she might not have felt like she belonged in that club. She had a lot of history in music, but it wasn’t as high-profile as those guys’. She’s like me—confident on the outside but not on the inside.
Nina:
I think I was in the middle. Mark and J. J. were too cool to say they were the Senior VJs, but when I was with Martha and Alan, we were the JVJs—the Junior VJs.
Alan:
I wasn’t particularly in league with the women, but I did feel shunned by Mark and J. J.—I wasn’t part of the boy team.
Mark:
I hated Alan. He seemed like a nice enough yokel, I guess. But I was totally precious about whether something or somebody was rock ’n’ roll. I was completely passionate about music—that was all I cared about. So I resented people who got into the business for different reasons. And I knew that Alan and Martha didn’t know anything about music. Martha did a rap early on that included the line “Hey, it’s all rock ’n’ roll, from Helen Reddy to Abba.” I was watching in the control room, thinking, “Whaaaat? Are you fucking kidding me?”
Martha:
In the early days, I would write down every little piece of information that I wanted to talk about in my “off-the-cuff” segments. So I was constantly studying, reading Billboard magazine, Trouser Press Record Guide, biographies, anything I could get my hands on. I wish I still had my copy of Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia—I thumbed through it so much, it was totally dog-eared. We saved our Rolling Stone magazines, and our Creem and Kerrang! magazines, because there was no Internet or Wikipedia. You either had the information in your hand, or you had to make five thousand phone calls. Every day, it was like we were cramming for finals. I wasn’t partying—I was just a studious little VJ.
Nina:
Martha really put her nose to the grindstone. To this day, we are both meticulous with our research.
Martha:
Nina and I would sit in the library, surrounded by rock encyclopedias and magazines: “Oh, look, here’s the Random Note on Adam Ant.” We actually held the scripts in our hands and read them. Nina used a clipboard, but I went with index cards. We didn’t have a teleprompter.
Alan:
We didn’t have electronic teleprompters—but early on, they got us paper teleprompters. Cutting-edge, right?
Martha:
That’s right—the script would be typed out on sheets and then they put it through a conveyer belt, basically. They put us on teleprompter, and then they took us off teleprompter.
Alan:
That was another flip-flop. In the beginning, it was totally scripted, and we all came off very stiff, so Bob Pittman said, “Throw the scripts out, no teleprompters.” That was a crisis for me, because I didn’t have the knowledge to improvise about all the music: “Uhhhh, Def Leppard’s concert was really neat.” But after a while, the only things that were scripted were the news segments.
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave Page 6