VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  Martha:

  I can’t believe how smooth I was back then, just talking from bullet points. I don’t think I could do it now.

  Alan:

  Martha was very good extemporaneously, and Mark had it down pretty well. Nina wanted the total script, the way I did. She would pore over every word.

  When I got home at night, the packet for the next day would be waiting by the door of my apartment, delivered by car service. It had the music log for my shift, which was the list of videos I’d be playing, and the scripted news segments. I’d do my homework, buzzed or not: I dutifully went through it and underlined everything, and then I went to bed.

  Nina:

  Sometimes I’d take a break from the next day’s script and go to Radio City Music Hall. I lived on Fifty-sixth Street, so it was easy to walk over there, and I always had tickets. I’d see a couple of songs and walk home. It was like walking to the corner bar, except it was Radio City.

  Mark:

  At the time, we thought our set was so relaxed and funky, but really, it was just a brick wall with a tennis racket leaning up in the corner. It was supposed to be like a kid’s rec room, I guess, but it looked like a bare, empty loft. There was almost nothing there: A bicycle, a barber’s chair, two steps up to a wooden platform, and a bay window that looked out on nowhere. It took them a long time to figure out we needed more stuff in there.

  Alan:

  It was a pretty basic set. There were three or four different areas you could do setups.

  Mark:

  Alan always seemed to be by the brick wall, which had a monitor built into it. They could move that in and out. Either that, or he was doing stupid shit up on the platform. There’s footage of him literally falling off the thing.

  Alan:

  It was a fun little playground for a while.

  Mark:

  I was having the best time ever. I was out of the WPLJ job, which I hated. I was making a little more money, and I believed in MTV’s potential. I had been doing the WPLJ job on autopilot, but now I was coming to work every day feeling passionate about what I was doing, and that was phenomenal.

  Excerpts from a September 1981 memo (four pages, single-spaced) from Mark Goodman to Sue Steinberg, on the subject “Ideas”:

  The audience of MTV will not be like the average TV audience. They will be, in many cases, more musically aware than many people involved with this project. The fact that some of our audience may not notice some of the fine points of our presentation is no reason for us not to strive for perfection in that area. All people involved in the research for scripting and on-air presentation must be authorities. In a time when cable TV means specialization and precise targeting of audience, we cannot afford to fall back on lowest common denominator programming. All of us must have a clear picture of who we are and want to be if we target on the demo.

  We should strive to involve our listeners at every turn. Make the channel one-to-one. Never refer to “all of you watching.” Instead of asking for comments, let’s ask a question of the week and offer bumper stickers or one of our other fabulous promotional items to all who respond.

  If we are, in fact, a new and alternative entertainment form, then let’s do something new with music on TV. We’ve got 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to do it. Wild idol humor and “in-jokes” are not new, nor do they represent an alternative. With the immediacy of video, we can thrust the excitement of rock ’n’ roll into living rooms like never before, not just with video performance tapes.

  The concepts I have mentioned here are essential for success against our inevitable competition. We have the chance now to position ourselves as the standard for the genre, the ones to emulate, or face the possibility of being the ones who took that bold first step and stumbled.

  7

  Don’t Talk to Strangers

  The Wages of Semi-Fame

  Martha:

  J. J. almost quit a couple of weeks after we started. It might have been because it was John Lee Hooker’s birthday. He wanted to mention it on the air, and the producers said, “Oh, who cares about that?”

  Nina:

  It was because J. J. wore his beloved black jumpsuit. I wasn’t in the studio at the time, but I heard he was told in no uncertain terms by one of the executive producers never to wear it again. This didn’t sit well with J. J., who thought he should be able to wear what he wanted.

  Alan:

  Was the jumpsuit showing too much of his package? Or was it that he was wearing it with some tan Beatle boots?

  Mark:

  Jumpsuits were kind of cool back then, I guess. Pete Townshend used to wear them. J. J.’s wasn’t flattering—he was a little chubby—but it wasn’t horrible either.

  Nina:

  I thought he looked just fine in it. The jumpsuit fit his personality. And management can’t have taken offense with jumpsuits per se—I wore many of them during my time at MTV, and can even be seen in them in some promo photos. But the whole incident was so unpleasant for J. J., he seriously considered bailing from MTV.

  Martha:

  After work, I passed by J. J.’s hotel on Madison Avenue, and thought, “I’m going to talk to him.” I can’t imagine how I got the nerve, but I called him from the house phone in the lobby and he let me come up.

  He had a huge suite in this fancy hotel, and he was in a spa bathrobe, like Hugh Hefner. For some reason, that didn’t seem weird. I said, “You were right about what you said today, but I think that maybe you’re blowing it out of proportion. If you don’t mind me saying so, you might be a little homesick. But you should stay—if you leave, I think you’ll wind up regretting it.” I thought MTV was the greatest situation ever, and I couldn’t imagine how anybody else might not feel the same way.

  At the end of our conversation, he said, “Okay, I’m going to stay.” Then he took me out to dinner at some seafood restaurant. MTV pulled people together—here I was, just graduated from college, and I was hanging out with a fortysomething black guy, ex-marine, rock history out the wazoo. There’s no other situation in a thousand years where I would have come in contact with J. J., but that night cemented our friendship. From then on, he treated me like his little sister—he always looked out for me.

  Alan:

  Everything I do, sports or acting or dance, I either get it the first time and it’s totally natural to me, or I get a handle on it around the thirtieth take. Everything in between is this awful purgatory. And the second scenario was happening to me at MTV. I didn’t know what I was doing and I felt miserable.

  One day, Nina took me across the street to a bar called Sam’s. She was so diplomatic. She said, “Al, you’re doing really good.” And then she told me just to think about it as an acting job. I was looking at her sideways, thinking, “You’re trying to tell me something, aren’t you?” She didn’t say, “They’re going to fire you”—she just said, “I think we all need to step up the game a little bit.”

  I said, “Am I on thin ice?”

  She said, “I don’t know. But there’s ways you can work this. Just use that acting.”

  Nina:

  I was coming from the Strasberg school of acting that you help your fellow actor. I didn’t know they were upset with Alan, but I was concerned for him—he was bouncing off the walls of the studio, and what he was doing just wasn’t rock ’n’ roll.

  Martha:

  A few days after I started, the producers told me, “You’re going to do your first interview. How about you interview Daryl Hall and John Oates?”

  I panicked: “Oh, no, I can’t do that. Don’t you have an intro artist for me to interview? You should give them to Mark or J. J.”

  MTV insisted—I guess it was a trial-by-fire philosophy.

  Nina:

  I liked doing interviews because I could keep quiet. I liked being able to listen.

  Mark:

  In the early days, one of the big questions we had to ask everybody we interviewed was “Have you done a video?”

 
; Alan:

  One of my first interviews was with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, when they reunited for a free concert in Central Park. I was excited—I used to listen to my big brothers’ Simon and Garfunkel albums and I dug their music. I studied, and wrote questions with the producer. When they sat down, Paul Simon pegged me right off the bat as a twenty-four-year-old pup. Every question I asked, he answered yes or no or “Why do you ask that, Alan?” I was sweating, and Art was embarrassed because Paul was beating up on me so bad. He kept saying, “Come on, Paul, be nice.”

  Martha:

  Another interview I did early on was with Rick Springfield. When MTV launched, he had the number one single in the United States, with “Jessie’s Girl.” Not long ago, I asked Rick what his first impression of MTV was, and he said, “Well, actually it was you, Martha.” He told me that when he came in, he looked around and thought, “Who is this kid talking to me?” I’m sure his interviews before then had been with actual journalists. He must have thought, “What kind of operation is this? Can’t I talk to an adult?”

  I had a huge crush on Rick—who didn’t? I had visions of being Mrs. Rick Springfield. I was hoping he’d ask me out, or whisk me away in his limo. But I did that interview wearing a big cowl-neck sweater, with yards of fabric wrapped around my neck. Cleavage did not enter the picture in any way.

  Mark:

  Rick’s a good friend of mine now, but back then I thought of him as a soap star who wanted to sing. I always loved great pop tunes, and Rick delivered them pretty consistently, but soap operas meant nothing to me. The only connection I had with him at the time was that Alan used to do a hysterical impression of how Rick played guitar in the “Jessie’s Girl” video, with that extra-wide stance and a guitar strum that looked like he was sawing wood.

  Nina:

  Adam Ant visited MTV in August, the first month we were on the air. I thought, “He’s not really a handsome guy, but he’s beautiful.” He had exquisite lips and skin. Adam invited me to his show—New York used to have summertime concerts on the Pier, which was an actual pier on the Hudson River, near the Intrepid aircraft carrier. I didn’t feel like Adam was making a move on me, so I went to the show, and then hung out backstage afterward. He asked me to go back to his hotel—he wanted some rice pudding. So we sat in the restaurant at the Sheraton and ate rice pudding.

  Afterward, everybody at MTV was convinced we had a thing going on, which wasn’t true at all. The most intimate thing we shared is that he told me how he got his lips to look so good: He used gold lip gloss. So I started using gold lip gloss on top of everything else.

  But from then on, every morning in the dressing room, our stage manager would knock on the door and say, “It’s Adam, ship’s here.” I never heard the end of it.

  Mark:

  Early on, the plan was to do a Saturday night concert, live, from somewhere every weekend. So in September 1981, MTV sent me to Houston to introduce Journey. It was an arena show, eighteen thousand people or so, and we weren’t on most cable systems in Texas yet. The crowd had no idea who I was; Journey had no idea who I was. But we were on in College Station, which is about a hundred miles away from Houston. I went onstage and my rap was something like, “Look, you people don’t know who I am, but hopefully, you’re going to be watching MTV in the future.” And I said, “Anybody here from College Station?” There were about a hundred people, making a lot of noise, and it was shocking to me that they recognized me. Of course, the other 17,900 people didn’t.

  Martha:

  Cable TV had no cachet in 1981. Cable meant HBO and Ugly George—he resembled MTV’s “Moon Man” in that he was always dressed in silver, a tinfoil outfit. Somehow Ugly George could convince girls to take their clothes off.

  Mark:

  At the time, cable in New York was basically Robin Byrd, a porn actress who hosted her own program, and this other guy Al Goldstein, who had a naked talk show. That blew my mind when I moved to New York—naked people on TV talking about politics. And this guy named Ugly George had a show on one of the public-access channels. He walked around Manhattan in a tinfoil suit—it looked like a giant oven mitt—and a portapak for his camera on his back. And he would talk women into getting undressed in alleyways or the vestibules of apartment buildings. They wouldn’t have sex, they would just get naked on camera. I had tons of respect for the guy. I couldn’t speak to anybody, and this guy would walk up to hot women, total strangers, and regularly convince them to get undressed on camera.

  One day, Carol and I were walking on Eighth Avenue; we looked up the street and saw Ugly George. He had just begun this conversation with a woman, and they hadn’t gone into the vestibule yet. Carol jumped in front of the camera and said to this girl, “Don’t listen to this guy, he’s a fucking asshole. You’ll make a fool out of yourself in front of the three people who are watching his show.” We watched the show later that week and he did a funny voice-over about “Oh, here comes Miss Tight Ass walking up the street, watch her, she’s going to be trouble.” So Carol was on his show, and she was great.

  Alan:

  Even after MTV launched, I kept my bartending job. I told my coworkers, “I’ve got this job—I go down to the studio on Thirty-third and Tenth and I do television.” They’d say, “Oh, good, you got a gig. You’re keeping this job, right?” Cable was all about public access, where pretty much anybody with a camera could get on the air. On channel 10, you had Ugly George, Robin Byrd, and the crank-call show. When I told people I was working on a music channel, they were happy for me, but they had no idea what I was talking about—MTV wasn’t on cable in New York City at that point, so they assumed I had to be doing some sort of porno thing.

  Mark:

  We had these MTV bumper stickers—our slogan at the beginning was “You’ll never look at music the same way again.” Every single cab I got into in 1981, I slapped one of those stickers on the partition. Normally, when you work at a radio station, you never, ever wear the radio station T-shirt. But I wore the MTV T-shirts because I was really proud to be associated with the network and I wanted to spread the word.

  Nina:

  Because we weren’t on in New York, we weren’t aware of how popular we were in other parts of the country. They used to send us on personal appearances—one of my early ones was in San Antonio, Texas. I was in a limousine with my minder, going to a record store in a mall. We drove into the parking lot, and there was a line around the block. I figured there was some rock star in town doing autographs at the same time and I asked, “Who’s here?”

  He said, “You.”

  Alan:

  I was bartending at the Magic Pan, the cabaret where Jan was performing. I wasn’t a very good bartender—I was a one-drink-at-a-time kind of guy. I couldn’t line up five glasses and pour ’em all down, and I’d always have to look up how to make a Rob Roy or a Manhattan. But I could make a mean daiquiri, because that’s what the place was famous for.

  I was working fourteen- and sixteen-hour days at MTV, but I kept bartending on weekends. It wasn’t that I thought MTV was going to go away, because it seemed like there was a lot of money involved—I just convinced myself that I was ensuring the success of MTV by keeping that job. I thought that if I said, “Fuck the bartending job,” the next day it would all blow up.

  One night, about a month after MTV launched, I was at work making daiquiris, and this dude from New Jersey was sitting at the bar, looking at me funny. He’d already had a couple, and I had no idea why he was at this cabaret by himself. Finally he said, “You look familiar.”

  I didn’t help him out, because it didn’t dawn on me. “I don’t know, do you want another daiquiri?”

  Then he said, “There’s this music show all the time on my cable station. You look like one of those guys.”

  I said, “Ohhhhh, you watch MTV.”

  “Yeah, MTV, that’s it. You look like that guy—Mark.” I swear he used Mark’s name.

  “Actually, I’m Alan Hunter.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, that’s it, Alan Hunter! I’ve seen you on MTV. What the fuck? Why are you here?” He was confused, and for the life of me, I could not figure out how to explain why I was there mixing daiquiris. I thought, “Wow, I don’t think I’m going to be a bartender anymore.” I finished my shift and quit.

  8

  Sometimes You Tell the Day by the Bottle That You Drink

  Life in Hell’s Kitchen

  Alan:

  Thirty-third and Tenth was a pretty scenic area—we were right at the bottom of Hell’s Kitchen, just before you hit Chelsea, and we had hookers on the street right outside the studio. There was a dive bar and grill next door to Teletronics called Sam’s—we all repaired there during lunch and after hours. If you bellied up to the counter, there’d always be some working girls hanging out.

  Mark:

  The only reason we took breaks when we were shooting was because we had a union crew. So when they had their contractual rest periods, we’d all go hang out at Sam’s and have some beers.