VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  Nina:

  The waiter was named George, and he always seemed harried and hurried. His hygiene was a bit on the fragrant side, and he had a serious scar down one of his cheeks—it looked like he had been sliced by a switchblade. He would get orders wrong, and then he’d get mad at us. The attitude was a lot like the John Belushi sketch on Saturday Night Live: “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger.”

  Mark:

  I loved that neighborhood—it was like nothing I had ever seen before in my life. On one of those late nights, I was upstairs on the second floor, looking out the window. A girl in hot pants was in this guy’s parked car. He had his pants around his ankles and she was going down on him. And while she was doing that, she was also going through his pants pocket, looking for his wallet.

  Carol and I used to rent cars every weekend to get out of town. One Friday afternoon, after I finished shooting, I picked up a car somewhere in the neighborhood. I stopped at Thirty-third and Eleventh; I was about to turn right to go uptown, and I was futzing with the radio. Just as I was about to make my turn, I heard a knock on the window. I turned, and there were two giant black tits pushed up against the glass, belonging to a three-hundred-pound woman with no shirt. That was the neighborhood.

  Alan:

  When Joe Cocker came to the studio, he arrived in a taxi, nobody with him. Afterward, he was hanging around. I was a big Cocker fan, so I was chatting him up. I asked him if he needed us to get him a ride or a taxi—“No, mate, I’m all right.” Somebody mentioned something about going next door and getting a drink. Well, of course he’d like a drink. A bunch of us went to Sam’s.

  We sat there and hung out with Joe Cocker for an hour while he drank his Scotch whisky. And I thought, “This is pretty good.” I don’t know what his reasons for hanging out with me were—I was pretty sure he didn’t sit around watching MTV all day long. Honestly, it was probably alcoholism—if somebody’s buying, you’ll find a friend wherever you can. He had some interesting stories, and I thought, “Wow, this is a cool job.” He wouldn’t have left if I hadn’t said I had to go.

  Nina:

  Joe Cocker had a little crush on me. I guess I flapped my hands around a lot on the air, and he told me that he had never seen anybody gesticulate more than he did. And that’s pretty serious: The first time my mother saw Joe Cocker, she honestly thought he had Saint Vitus’s dance. I decided to take it as a compliment.

  He invited me to see him play, and there was a party afterward. He was clean and sober at this point, but Marianne Faithfull, who was also there, wasn’t. I love Marianne, just love her, but she was getting worked up. She wanted Joe to go out on the back deck at this party, and he wouldn’t. He wanted to be with me. It wasn’t a date, but he liked me.

  She thought I was stopping him from going out to the back deck with her—which I wasn’t—so she deliberately knocked over her wine on me. I had idolized her since I was a little girl, so I thought, “Wow, Marianne Faithfull dumped her wine on me! That’s pretty cool.”

  9

  Ain’t Nothing Gonna Break My Stride

  Early Triumphs and Tribulations

  Alan:

  One day, I was in the greenroom on lunch break, joking around. A producer, Liz Nealon, said, “That’s what we need you to do on camera.” She got me walking and talking, so I wasn’t stationary in a chair like a news anchorman—a simple thing, but it liberated me. I started using props the way actors do sometimes, to get themselves out of their heads by having a physical object to focus on. I brought in sock puppets, or pictures of the other VJs for the cut-a-hole-in-the-mouth gag. The crew made suggestions: “Here’s a pumpkin. You’ll carve it up and we’ll pretend we’ve got the camera inside it looking out.” I was finally having fun; everything was flowing. Much to the chagrin of Mark, who couldn’t believe my clown schtick was working.

  Mark:

  One show in particular, Alan was doing something with finger puppets. I was on right after him, and I was watching him, completely disgusted with his cluelessness. Of course, I couldn’t let it stand. When I went on air, I picked up the tennis racket that we had leaning in a corner of the set for no apparent reason, and I grabbed the finger puppets that Alan had left on a shelf. I said, “So, Alan Hunter. Thanks, Al!” And boom!—I started whacking the finger puppets with the racket, serving them off the set.

  Alan:

  Mark was definitely not passive-aggressive. I was in awe of him, and kind of intimidated by him, but I had to do what I needed to do to make myself comfortable in front of the camera. I’d start a segment lying down on the ground, upside down with my feet up in the air. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but the camera guys and the crew were supporting it, because it was kind of fun. It was 24/7 cable, and I had the overnight shift, so I did whatever I could for somebody watching at 3 A.M. I don’t think it was particularly good television, but it was different.

  Mark:

  I just thought “What the fuck is he doing here?” And I was an asshole back then, so I didn’t think about hurting anybody’s feelings. When it came to the job, I knew I was always right. But there were other aspects of Alan I wasn’t aware of, or didn’t care about. He’s a talented actor, and he’s really funny. And the sweetest guy you would ever want to meet. Over the years, we’ve become best friends.

  Alan:

  About a half year in, Mark and I started to bond. We’d make jokes in the dressing room—I could always crack him up with this schtick where I would pretend to throw up. One day, we were getting dressed, and the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” was playing on the monitor. We looked at each other and agreed we had a very cool job. I told him, “I hope this MTV thing lasts.” It was a good moment.

  Martha:

  The great thing about those early days was that everyone on the crew had a role. Everyone felt important and everyone was inspired. The audio guys, the video guys, the cameramen—if anyone had an idea, it was tossed in the mix and experimented with. It really was, “Hey kids, let’s put on a show.” The VJs were part of the team like everyone else. There were tons of times when I would go into the control room and time the VJ segments. Usually a production assistant would do that, but if there weren’t any PAs around, I’d sit next to the assistant director with a stopwatch and write the times in the shift log.

  Alan:

  We started stretching for anything to fill up the segments. Sometimes it would be a gag with chroma-key—green-screen technology—that put us in front of some weird picture or made us look like we were three inches tall. When we weren’t reporting the news, we would do anything to make our segments mesh with the fun of the videos.

  Mark:

  One day, Alan dressed up like an actual clown, in full costume and whiteface. This gave him license to act like an even bigger dick. He came on Martha’s show and did this bum-clown schtick, saying, “Show us your nipples!” You could hear through the cameramen’s headsets that everybody in the control room was going crazy and applauding.

  Nina:

  I had lost my grandfather a year earlier, and then my dad died. Having the work kept me going. But I guess one day I wasn’t as sparkly as usual. Cameraman Michael Pelech wanted to cheer me up, so he created “runaway camera.”

  Alan:

  One day, out of nowhere, Pelech thought up this gag in which the camera had gone rogue. He gave me and the director a heads-up, and when we came out of a video, he screamed “Runaway caaaaameraaa!” and pushed the camera hard enough that it rolled through the set, between me and the other camera. He ran behind it as if he were trying to catch up with it.

  The runaway camera became a regular bit that happened with all the VJs. The rest of the crew—floor producers, set guys, interns, whoever was available—would all run behind Michael after the camera gone loose. The jock on air would placidly continue with the business at hand.

  I’m not saying that David Letterman copied us, but when you look at his early shows, you can see him doing the same mess-wi
th-the-camera schtick. Clearly, something was in the air.

  Martha:

  When I see runaway camera now, it just looks like love. We were all together, fighting for this unified goal: a dynamic rock ’n’ roll environment on TV. Once a lighting guy streaked behind me on camera.

  Mark:

  Stark fucking naked, bounding across the set behind Martha, who was shrieking.

  Nina:

  Sometimes we flagrantly misbehaved by locking the doors to the studio and having epic water fights. That would happen around ten at night, when everybody had been there for fourteen hours.

  Martha:

  Sometimes on long days, the crew could see that the VJs were getting tired, and would do whatever they could to wake us up: wear hats, sing songs, tell jokes, anything to make it work.

  Nina:

  Every morning, our two main cameramen, Jerry and Michael, would give me a “cameraman sandwich”—they’d come on each side and squeeze me as hard as they could. Being an only child, it felt like having brothers.

  Martha:

  We were really lucky that MTV wasn’t on Manhattan cable for the first year. The executives and their friends couldn’t see it, which gave us an opportunity to bond and figure out how to make our segments work, without 127 outside opinions.

  Mark:

  Radio is an individual sport and TV is a team sport. The hierarchy on the set when we were shooting segments wasn’t really clear. My sense of the situation was that I knew what I was doing, so I was the boss. But I was working with the associate producer on the floor, who would come to me before a segment and say what was planned. “Okay, you’re going to some music news and then we’re going to these graphics for the concert dates. Okay? Great, count him in. Five, four, three, two . . .” The structure of the segment was determined by what visual elements they had set up in the control room.

  Nina:

  The three associate producers rotated on the floor. Each of those producers clicked with different VJs. I always felt that Liz Nealon was a Nina producer—she knew how to handle me. And maybe Brian Diamond was more of an Alan and Martha producer.

  Mark:

  At the time, I was about thirty, and everyone was younger than me, except for J. J. And in some cases, a lot younger—right out of college. I could get along with them just fine, but I didn’t really want to take orders from these associate producers. Brian Diamond was a cool rocker kid, funny and knowledgeable, and straddled the line between getting the job done and being easy to work with. Whereas Liz Nealon was a nut-crusher who knew that she was in charge. She was really smart, and kind of terrifying. Alan did a great impression of Liz getting disgusted with a segment: She’d throw up her hands and walk away. But I trusted her feedback. I didn’t know that she was helping Alan out with how he should present himself; she never said anything like that to me. I guess she thought I was all right and I did my job.

  Martha:

  The best-kept secret about MTV was that the VJs weren’t actually watching the videos. It doesn’t pay to have a television crew sit around and watch “Hungry Like the Wolf” fifty times. So we would just say, “Hey, that was Pat Benatar, ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot.’” Cut. Move. “Oh my God, Quiet Riot, aren’t they amazing?” Many times we would introduce videos that the channel hadn’t received yet. We were working a couple of days ahead of the broadcast, and then the videos got delivered straight to the satellite uplink center on Long Island. We’d say, “Wow, that was the new Rolling Stones video,” hoping that it didn’t end with babies being decapitated or something else that we should be reacting to.

  Nina:

  We didn’t reshoot very much—sometimes if a producer thought we could do something better, we’d do it again. We tried to avoid burning back the tape, unless there was a big problem. Early on, we played a video by Carlene Carter, June Carter’s daughter (not with Johnny Cash). She was married to Nick Lowe, and she had put out a rockabilly country album. I did a segment, sitting on the set in the barber chair, and I said, “Carlene Carter, she came out with that album and said she’s the one who put the ‘blank’ in ‘country.’” To this day, I have never said that actual word—years later, I did The Vagina Monologues, and I made sure to pick the pieces that didn’t have that word in it.

  We shot the segment, the floor producer was cool with it, and everyone thought it was fine. Then it got out to Smithtown, the broadcast center in Long Island, and the guys at Smithtown freaked out. I got in trouble and we had to reshoot it, but I didn’t actually say anything! Carlene Carter could have been the one who put the “tree” in “country”!

  Martha:

  When we first started MTV, we’d finish a segment—“I’m Martha Quinn, and right now, Split Enz”—and wait for the light to go off, indicating we were off the air. And you’d get panicked and sweaty while you were waiting, staring at the camera.

  One day, Mark came into the studio on fire, and said, “Guys, I saw Dan Rather do something. We have to do it too. At the end of the segment, turn and look as though you’re looking at a monitor.” It sounds obvious, but it was huge. It was a godsend.

  Mark:

  I was always trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between the segments and the videos. The videos were so amazing, and I always felt like our segments would bring everything to a screeching halt. The other thing I came up with was us moving as the segments opened—that ended up being overkill.

  Martha:

  Walking and talking? I thought that was helpful.

  Mark:

  What wound up happening was we ran all over the freaking set, like little Energizer bunnies. Eventually one of the executives told me, “I’m getting exhausted watching you. Stop running around all over the place. Where are you going?”

  Alan:

  I did a cartwheel into the shot one time. I was always trying to break free of that “Three, two, one, go be a talking head” routine. So I suggested, “Why don’t I start the segment off-camera? And then enter with a back handspring.”

  Everybody said, “That sounds good to me, I’m bored too, let’s go.” I came crashing into the shot and slammed into the camera. I broke the teleprompter and glass went flying all over the place. I sprang up and said, “Well, there you go, and here’s the Go-Go’s.”

  Martha:

  My senior year in college, when I heard John Lennon got shot, I went up to the Dakota with all the other devastated Beatles fans and left flowers. If you check the front page of the New York Times, you can see the back of my head in a photo, in my Eddie Bauer parka. Six months later, in June 1981, I went back to the Dakota, but this time as a VJ interviewing Yoko Ono. It was surreal walking past the area where I’d stood and grieved with hundreds of other mourners. I kept telling myself, over and over, “Don’t cry.” No one knew what to think of Yoko at that point—some people were still nursing the “she broke up the Beatles” resentment. But she was 100 percent lovely, and even invited me to one of Sean’s birthday parties.

  December 1981, on the first anniversary of Lennon’s death, I was taping a segment in the studio, and I was going on and on about John and what he meant to me, practically having an emotional breakdown on the air. The director stopped me and came out to talk to me. He was trying to console me, but the message boiled down to “You’re going on way too long.”

  Nina:

  My worst moment was interviewing Frank Zappa. There’s nothing else even close to it in my whole career.

  Mark:

  Three months in, Nina hosted a show in New York that was broadcast live, a concert with Frank Zappa on Halloween. Zappa ripped her to shreds and she didn’t even realize it.

  Nina:

  He gave me trouble from the rehearsal on. He was just condescending and rude the whole time. I came in wearing a beautiful handmade poncho from Argentina, and he kneeled down in front of me, like he was pretending to be a midget, because I was shorter than he was! He sarcastically called me the “little MTV lady.” I had some experience interviewi
ng the punks in L.A., but they were nothing compared to that obnoxious guy: He asked me to jump up and down on camera. If it happened today, I could put him in his place, but back then, I did not know how to handle it. As soon as the camera went off, I ran into the bathroom, not wanting to come out. I just was not ready for him.

  Alan:

  People loved Nina’s vulnerability and her sweet nature. She didn’t do well with people who were being dicks—she got flustered and gave everybody the benefit of the doubt. She wasn’t made to be around people with a mean or cynical spirit.

  Nina:

  J. J. probably should have done the interview. Zappa never would have acted that way with him. Mark, possibly. Al and Martha, it would have been the same as me, if not worse.