By Robert Sam Anson
Vanity Fair November 2000
As MTV is fading into the sunset, I thought it would make sense to post this oral history of the first 20 years of the channel. Veteran journalist Robert Sam Anson looks into the time when the channel was an absolute cultural and media phenomenon, a genuine star maker. Participating in the dawn of a new era, as the original creative director and now considered a co-founder, was a heady time. Which, at the time, seemed exciting, and often, a lot of work.
When Music Was Still on MTV: The Birth of an Iconic Channel
The MTV Video Music Awards show at Radio City Music Hall this year was [2000], as it is every year, music at its most outrageous. There was Britney Spears doing a bump-and-grind strip; there was Eminem singing bleep after bleep; there was Jennifer Lopez flashing skin; there were Toni Braxton, āN Sync, Ricky Martin, Sting, Janet Jackson, Limp Bizkit, LL Cool J, Christina Aguilera, Macy Gray, Steven Tyler, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers acting the royalty that they are. There, midst the klieg lights and the stretch limos and the red carpets, was the cultural phenomenon that is MTV.
Now watched by more than 340 million viewers in 139 countries (among them, Russia, China, and Vietnam), MTV has been credited with creating icons (Michael Jackson and Madonna leading a long and glittering list), influencing fashion, spawning movies and television shows (Flashdance, Miami Vice), saving the music industry, even ending the Cold War. Not to mention, according to its critics, leading several young generations to perdition.
MTV has shaped so much for so long, it is hard to recall a time when there wasnāt a blocky, graffiti-sprayed M (the channelās break-all-the-design-rules logo is counted one of the most instantly identifiable on the planet) peering into the living room. But there was. Eons ago, when Ronald Reagan was in the first months of his presidency and Bill Gates had yet to make his first billion and cable television was boasting an unheard-of two dozen choices, there was no such thing as a 24-hour music channel, and many thought that just fine. A handful of those who didnāt worked at an organization called Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, WASEC for infelicitous short. A joint venture of Steve Rossās Warner Communications Incorporated and James Robinson IIIās American Express, wasec was created in 1979 to provide programming for Warner Amexās struggling cable systems. Its president was Jack Schneider, a crusty broadcasting legend whoād recently come to Warner following a long career as chief of the CBS Broadcast Group. Schneiderās number two, wasec executive vice president and chief operating officer, was 33-year-old John Lack, a Manhattan-born, self-identified āmajor rock ānā roller,ā whoād made his bones running CBSās all-news radio station in New York. The final member of the wasec management triumvirate was marketing and sales chief Bob McGroarty, another CBS Radio alum. Together, Schneider, Lack, and McGroarty oversaw the creation of two media entities (The Movie Channel, the first-ever 24-hour movie service, and Nickelodeon, a fledgling childrenās channel), had a pair of others in development (tentatively titled the Games Channel and ShopAmerica), and were on the lookout for trailblazing, cheaply produced others. They had yet to find one when, one fine day in the summer of 1979, Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, brought John Lack a clutch of videotapes.
What follows is the story of the cable television network that resulted, its building and formative early yearsāa time when everything was up for grabs, including MTVās survival. It is told by the men and women who created MTV, their words edited and sequenced to clarify meaning. The titles that follow their names were those they held when the events described were taking place.
Jac Holzman, senior vice president, Warner communications: Iād been involved with music videosāāclips,ā we were calling them thenāa long time. When we came out with the first Doors album in 1967, we made a video of them doing āBreak On Through.ā Did it with our own in-house camera, and it cost maybe $1,000. We sent it around to the afternoon dance shows, and it helped get them a lot of attention. I thought, Gee, this is kind of nice: exposure through another medium. I was thinking also that we could probably get some exposure overseas, because we were having a tough time with our really basic American music in Europe, and videos were very big over there.Years pass, and I see a video called āRioā made by Michael Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees, and it was a whole different order of magnitude from anything Iād seen. He understood that music was not just about audio, but had a visual component which would carry further the meaning of the song. At the time, people were listening to music sort of in one ear and out the other. Videos like āRio,ā I thought, would ground the experience more solidly. I brought it to the attention of Steve Ross, and Steve told me, āThereās an interesting guy over at wasec. Go over and meet him, and see what you guys can cook up.ā So I walked into Lackās office with this stuff and tales of my friend Nesmith. I said, āI think there is really something here. I think we are going to see more and more of these videos.ā
Bob McGroarty: Lack called and said, āThereās a guy in my office showing me videos. You gotta see this.ā So I went in and Jac showed us these videos they were using for promotional purposes in Europe. I said, āJesus, we ought to take these and put them on the backside of Nickelodeon and test them in Columbus.ā Lack said, āNo, letās start a network.ā
Michael Nesmith: I was living in Carmel and making videos, mostly for Europe. If you get a song on TV stations over there, itās almost assured to be a hit. āRioā was the first. It wasnāt me singing in front of a camera, but a series of disparate images that proceed from the spirit of the song. I made other videos using the same techniques. Then Jac and I talked. He told me to go see John Lack at this Warner Amex joint cable venture. Jac said, āSomething tells me heāll get this.ā I flew to New York and showed John my clips. He said, āGod, can you imagine what this could mean? You put it on 24 hours a day and you got a cable channel. Will you go make me a bunch of these?ā I said, āSure.ā I went back to Carmel and put together 10 half-hour shows and sent them off. John said, āThis is not what I had in mind at all. You have to have hits on here, and you are sending things like Towers of Babylon and Debby Boone.ā I said, āDo me a favor. Just test it and see what youāve got.ā He said, āO.K., I think Nickelodeon has some teenagers watching.ā They put them on, and according to a woman who was at Nick at the time, Gerry Laybourne, the needle just went off the meter. She said, āThis thing is a walkaway hit. Letās do this.ā I said, āNo, because what youāre talking about is setting a channel full of commercials for recordsāand that just doesnāt light my fire.ā John said, āWe are going to take this and run with it. You sure you donāt want a seat on this bus?ā I said, āYeah, Iām sure. Just pay me for what Iāve done and Iāll go away.ā
Now the idea of a 24-hour music channel had to be sold to higher-ups: Schneider first, then David Horowitz, a senior Warner executive overseeing the companyās music and cable interests.
John Lack: Schneiderās first question was āWhat makes you think they will watch a second time?ā I said, āJack, because when you listen to music, the first time is just to be introduced to the song. The second time, you get to know it. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth time, you think, This is a great song. But itās the 100th time you hear it that gives you all these psychological synapse poppings. Every time you hear it, something else happens. It reminds you of things. If we do our job right, and the videos are movies and little poems, itās going to be even more attractive. You are going to say, āOh, I just noticed that for the first time.āāā
Jack Schneider: If you have a disc jockey with a microphone, a transmitter, and 40 records, youāve got your radio station. So why donāt we put a disc jockey on TV? I knew that many Columbia artists had been making tapes of their work for some time, because in Europe all the radio networks were government-controlled, and all they played was orchestras. If you were Mick Jagger, video was how you broke something.
David Horowitz, coāchief operating officer, Warner communications: Jack said, āTheyāve got this idea for a channel,ā and since it was all-music, they wanted to discuss it with me. We went from there. Theyād present their ideas, and I would ask questions, raise objections. And theyād come back with the answers. We refined and refined. And I got more and more excited as we did.
A crucial member of the project was Bob Pittman, a Mississippi Methodist ministerās son and radio-programming wizard, whoād started in the business as a 15-year-old disc jockey. In the decade since, Pittman, whoād originally been hired to program the Movie Channel, had established a reputation for whip-smartness, otherworldly self-assurance, and obsessive attention to consumer desires as he lifted one station after another to the top of its market.
Bob Pittman: I had some experience with music videos, through a show I did for NBC in ā78 called Album Tracks. A lot of other people had been playing around, but no one had hit on a winning formula. The concept I had was to have a clear image, to build an attitude. In other words, to build a brand, a channel that happened to use video clips as a building block, as opposed to being a delivery system for videos. The star wouldnāt be the videos, the star would be the channel.
As plans began taking shape, others came aboard, including two figures who would play increasingly key roles in the channelās direction: Tom Freston, a rock-loving ex-adman, and John Sykes, an Epic Records promoter, whoād been working in the Midwest.
Tom Freston, director of regional marketing: When I got out of school, I took 18 months off and traveled. Worked as a bartender in the Caribbean and Colorado. Then I went to Benton & Bowles. First account was G.I. Joe. Vietnam was on, and we were trying to reposition him as an āaction toy.ā I kid you not. When they assigned me to a toilet-paper account, I said, āOh, man,ā and decided to go around the world. I went to meet a girl in Paris, and went on from there down through the Sahara Desert and just kept going. I ended up in Afghanistan, where I went into the clothing business. I came back to sort of change my life around, and read about this 24-hour music channel in Billboard. The idea appealed. First, I was a fan. Second, Iād spent a bunch of years doing something I really loved, and decided that whatever I did after would be something I loved. This was. I probably would have done it for a lot less money than they paid me.
John Sykes, director of promotions: In college, I thought, God, why canāt we put these bands on TV and get them out to places in America where they never tour? I M.C.ād and produced shows when bands came to campus. But I could only get them on the closed-circuit university system; the local cable company wouldnāt run it. When I got to Epic, I pitched a bunch of gray-haired old men on my idea, and they said, āCome back when you get 20 yearsā experience in Hartford.ā But, on my own, I started collecting music videos that were coming out of Europe and Australia. I persuaded my bosses to let me edit them into a one-hour show, so if customers walked into a store, they could see what a new artist like Cheap Trick looked like and maybe buy a record. Then I heard that Warner Amex had a lot of cash and wanted to get into this new business. I call Bob Pittman three times a week for five months, get an interview, and when we finally meet he hires me on the spot. But to work at this rock ānā roll channel, I have to buy a suit. The theory was: wear suits and ties because you are so young so youāll look respectable and people will think you mean business. It was like IBM had shot off a rock ānā roll division.
By early December 1980 the group was ready to make its proposal to the wasec board. Ross was assumed to be a sure sell. The worry was James Robinson III, the conservative, Atlanta-bred C.E.O. of American Express.
John Lack: Schneider led off with the general overall concept. Then I got up and explained the business plan and all that crapāthe vision, so to speak. Then Pittman got up and turned on the VCR to play the music, and it worked, thank God. Then McGroarty got up and told them what sales were going to be. At the end of it, Ross turned to Schneider and said, āJack, would you put your money into this?ā And Jackāwho was 53 at the time and really didnāt think of this shit as his cup of teaāhesitated. I kicked him under the table so hard he almost fell over. And he said, āYep, yep, yep.ā
Bob Pittman: Jack was the expert on these people, and he was saying, āThese Amex guys are going to be afraid of rock ānā roll music.ā So the video clips I put on were Olivia Newton-John and the most plain-vanilla stuff I could find. Jim Robinson or Lou Gerstner, who was a member of the Amex board and is now the head of IBM, made a comment, āDo we have to play all that noise?ā I was thinking, God, if they heard the stuff we were going to play.
James Robinson III: Steve Ross turns to me and says, āWhat do you think?ā I said, āIāve got one question. Where in the world do you get your raw material?ā Steve said, āOh, thatās no problem. Every time one of these rock groups creates a new album, they do a video clip and give it away as promotion.ā I said, āYou mean, you have no cost?ā He said, āNo.ā I said, āSteve, youāve got my $10 million.ā We committed in the first two minutes. They had to spend the next 45 convincing their sister company why this was a good idea.
John Lack: Ross hemmed and hawed. Then he told a story about his daughter. He said, āYou know, she said I ought to do it, so Iām going to do it.ā
Having secured financial backing (which would total $25 million by the time of launch), the managers of the as-yet-unnamed new channel set out to enlist cable operators to carry the service, which, as an inducement, was being offered free of charge.
Andy Orgel, vice president for affiliate sales and marketing: One of our first trips was to the Greenbriar, where weād assembled all the Warner cable-system managers. Our guys. I was armed with really hot music and a great story of how cable operators could make money by appealing to a tremendously valuable segment of the audience. āSo,ā I said, after I finished my pitch, āwhat do you think?ā And there was total silence. Finally, one guy got up and said, āNow, if you sold me a channel of country music that really reflects America, Iād put that onābut Iām not going to put this on.ā Right then, we knew we had our work cut out for us.
John Lack: The cable operators were pole climbers, guys who were engineers and had a big antenna on the highest hill in town, bringing in distant signals. They didnāt know original programming. ESPN was sports nobody else wanted, CNN was news radio on TV, HBO was unedited old movies. When they saw the crazy sex shit from New York and L.A. we were trying to sell, their attitude was āWho needs it? We got good little communities. Weāre Baptist. We donāt need this crap coming in, corrupting our children.ā
Jack Schneider: John Malone, the head of the biggest operation, TCI, was a pure thug. I went to sell him MTV, and he said, āI want a piece of it, 10 percent.ā I said, āIām not going to give you 10 percent of it.ā And he said, āThen youāre not going to get into my systems.ā
Mark Booth, affiliate-relations manager: The problem was that at the time there were probably, on average, 25 channels on a cable system, and the cable operator had about 50 optionsāof which ours was probably No. 48. They were much more comfortable with putting on another sports channel than they were rock ānā roll. And most of us were kids. It wasnāt as if we had any credibility.
John Shaker, new england sales manager: I was pitching one operator in Connecticut, playing him a tape on a boom box, so he could hear the stereo sound we were going to offer. I said, āWhat do you think?ā He said, āI think nobody will ever buy it.ā I asked, āDo you have any kids?ā He said, āEighteen and 23.ā I said, āWould they like this channel?ā He said, āTheyād love it.ā I said, āThereās the reason why you should put this on your cable system.ā He said, āYeah, but Iād hate it.ā
The reception from the record companiesāthen mired in a slumpāwas only slightly warmer.
Stan Cornyn, executive vice president, Warner Bros. Records: Pittman showed up in my office and said, āWill you make these for us?ā Meaning, would we spend our money to do their programming. Trying to be a good corporate scout, I said, āWe are going to get into thisāāwhich meant nothing, of course. We did do a little bit, but the people at MTV had a huge sales job. When it comes to interest in new technology, the record business finishes just ahead of the Amish.
Bob Summer, president, RCA Records: Lack took me to dinner at the Four Seasons and tried to explain why this was going to be so good for us. When you have a good business, and someone proposes to change your fundamental marketing tactic, you have to think more than twice. But you had the sense that these guys were definitely going to go for it. We signed on and started to produce videos in the range of $15,000 to $25,000 a pop. Everyone played a little at first. But no one really dove in.
John Lack: I went out to the first Billboard video-music convention, and was on a panel with Michael Nesmith, Sid Sheinberg, the president of MCA-Universal, and the head of Arbitron, one of those research companies. The guy from Arbitron gets up and says, āThere is definitely a market for video music.ā Nesmith gets up and says, āThis is going to be the creative stuff for the next generation.ā I get up and go, āWarner is putting in $25 million, and we have to get your clips.ā Then Sheinberg gets up. He says, āThis guy Lack is out of his fucking mind, ācause we aināt giving him our music.ā
Jack Schneider: The record companies hated it. They said, āWe made this mistake in radioāyou aināt gonna catch us making it again. You are going to have to pay for the rights to this video.ā Walter Yetnikoff, the head of CBS Records, was adamant: We werenāt getting anything.
Bob Pittman: John Sykes and I used to schlepp around with a bunch of poster boards under our arms and lay out this whole presentation. We said, āWeāre even going to put the name of your company on the video clip at the beginning and at the end, so if the record store doesnāt have it in stock, the viewer can say where to order it.ā We didnāt wind up with enough videos, and most were Andrew Gold and even worse. But we said, āYou know, if we are successful, theyāll make more videos, and if we arenāt, who the hell cares? Weāll be out of business anyway.ā
The last hurdle was the advertising community, which the business plan had slated to be the new channelās sole source of revenue. The first big pitch was to be made at a convention at the Hilton Hotel in New York, where new cable channels would be shown to major agencies. Pittman commissioned a video to give the presentation some flash, assigning the job to Fred Seibert, a Columbia-educated Grammy-nominated jazz-record producer, who had come to the Movie Channel after a stint at WHN Radio, and who would be pivotal in giving MTV its hip, anti-TV look. Working with Seibert was his Columbia classmate Alan Goodman, a brand-new Movie Channel hire, whoād been an ad copywriter at CBS Records.
Alan Goodman: The first week I was at work, Pittman walked into the little office I was sharing with Fred and said, āO.K., next week weāre announcing the music channel weāve been planning, so why donāt you two guys make some sort of three-minute thing.ā I didnāt have a clue how you make a three-minute tape. I only knew that Pittman said we had to have it in a week. So we go into the studio with a bunch of slides and four promo clips weād gotten from Warner Records. We also had an announcerās track that we had cleverly thought to record in stereo, because MTV was going to be the first stereo television channel. Iād come up with this idea to switch from the left channel to the right channel on each alternating lineāwhich seemed outrageously devilish. I sat there with all this stuff, and I thought, What does my friend who produces commercials do? Thatās how we got started. And after a few days, we emerged from the studio with this tape.
Fred Seibert: It was one of those dull convention days. Ten people were onstage saying they were launching cable channels, the Nostalgia Channel, this and that, even a channel specifically targeted for āold people.ā
Andy Setos, senior vice president, engineering and operations: Everyone was bored to tears. All day long people had been talking about numbers that didnāt exist and screening tapes on a crappy little projection system. People were half asleep, or walking out in the halls. Well, weād brought a little surprise: our own videotape machine, a very large screen, and state-of-the-art speakers.
Bob McGroarty: I stood at the podium and said, āOn August 1, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company introduces music television.ā With that, Setos hits a button, and Rod Stewart is in everyoneās face. There were people, honest to God, dancing. I thought, Holy Christ! This is bigger than I ever imagined.
Fred Seibert: You would have thought weād dropped the Beatles in the middle of the thing. The room was on its feet clapping and cheering. Iām like, Oh, my God, Iām in a rock band again.
The new channelās rock bands would be presented by āV.J.ās.ā To find them, Robert Morton, later to become David Lettermanās executive producer, and Sue Steinberg mounted a bi-coastal search.
Sue Steinberg, executive producer: We wanted V.J.ās who would be part of our audience, who wouldnāt say, āIām the host of your show today,ā but āIām so-and-so and I will be with you for the next couple hours.ā The important words were āwith you.ā We wanted you to come on this ride with us.
Alan Hunter, V.J.: I was an actor and had been in New York for about a year, and bumped into Pittman and Sykes in Central Park at the āWay Up North in Mississippi Picnic,ā an annual event for people born, bred, or, like I was, educated in Mississippi. There was a lot of watermelon eating and āDixieā singing, but Pittman and Sykes were dressed up like they were loaded for business bear. Bob said he was working on some venture for Warner Amex, I said I was a bartender, and that was about it. Three weeks later I get a call from Sue Steinberg, who says, āBob thinks you should come and audition.ā I got hired three weeks before we went on the air. At that point, they must have been sweating bullets.
Nina Blackwood, V.J.:__I was in L.A. working on video projects as a host. I was always reading Billboard, and I saw this ad saying, ā24-hour music channel looking for on-air hosts. Must be knowledgeable and love music.ā I sent off my rĆ©sumĆ© and my 8-by-10s in a picture book I drew with crayons, because I wanted to make it look punkish. I was dressed head to foot in black the day I did the audition. I was dying because I was so warmābut I had to look cool. Couple of months went by and I didnāt hear anything. I called up the number theyād given me, and they said, āOh, yeah, we want you to fly to New York.ā I went, and Sue and Robert say, āWe want to hire you, but you have to move to New York.ā Knowing Iām not totally knocked out about that, they take me to lunch at Tavern on the Green, where something gets stuck in my throat. Morton jumps up and gives me the Heimlich maneuver. āNow you have to take this job,ā he says. āI saved your life.ā
J. J. Jackson, V.J.: I was on an L.A. radio station called K-West. They changed formats, and I was gone in a day. So I got an audition, where I was supposed to interview one of the producers, pretending that he was Billy Joelāwhich made it kind of difficult for me, because I didnāt particularly care for Billy Joel. But I knew my shit rock-ānā-roll-wise, and they were very impressed. They said, āYou know, of course, that you will have to move to New York.ā I said, āYou see that beautiful black Jensen Interceptor sitting out there? You see those mountains, that blue sky, those big, puffy clouds? All that goes away if I go to Manhattan. But Iāll go, ācause I need the gig.ā
Martha Quinn, V.J.: I was a senior at N.Y.U., just doing my thing, which included doing some television commercials to put myself through college, and being an intern at WNBC Radio, where Bob Pittman had been the program director. I was at the station one afternoon when a guy in the office said, āYou should be a V.J.ā I said, āWhatās a V.J.?ā And he said, āItās just like being on the radio, but itās on television.ā To which I replied, āWhat do you do during the records?ā He said, āItās videos, fool.ā I couldnāt imagine what he was talking about. But he called Pittman, who said I should come right away. Itās 5:30, my hair is stringy, Iām wearing a glitter iron-on T-shirt with country music is in my blood written on it, Iāve got no makeup on, and Iām wearing tennis shorts, but I go. Two days later, thereās a message on my answering machine from Sue, saying, āWeāve got good news for you.ā
Mark Goodman, V.J.: I was working at WPLJ in New York and getting sick of talking to Hair Bands who thought that because they were wealthy they had something to say. I heard about MTV, got an audition, was freaked and nervous, but got hired. In Sueās casting vision, I was the hunk, Nina was the vamp, Martha was the cute girl next door, Alan was the jock, J.J. was the cool black guy. I never felt like a hunk, but I thanked her for placing me in the role.
With the August 1, 1981, launch date fast approaching, the staff scrambled to attend to a thousand details, starting with coming up with a channel name.
Steve Casey, director of music programming: Bob wanted to call it āTV1,ā but it turned out the damned Italians had it. Lack talked about āthe Music Channel,ā but that didnāt work, either: the initials would be the same as the Movie Channel. We were under pressure to do something, so we were writing out different possibilities. Finally, I came up with āMTV.ā I didnāt like the way it sounded so much as the way it looked. It really seemed cool. No one said āGreat,ā but no one had a better idea, and that ended the meeting.
Sue Steinberg: Saturday Night Live had a set that was sort of a netherworld. Thatās what I wantedāthe viewer to use their imagination to figure out where they were. The look we gave it was somewhere between a SoHo loftāthose were really cool spaces in New York; you envied the people who lived thereāand a rec room, like the ones where Iād grown up in Pennsylvania. It was a space where you could do whatever you wanted, space where you knew your parents wouldnāt go.
Fred Seibert: We were sitting around talking about what we wanted to claim at the top of every hour, and I said, āSeems to me that the thing we are most conceited about is that we actually think that we are changing the world. Well, at least the world of television.ā That got us talking about the most famous things that have ever happened on television. Someone says the Kennedy assassination, but we know we canāt use that. Finally, I said, āThe moonwalk. I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, when it happened, and saw the streets clear out because everyone was going to a television set to watch. So letās use the moonwalk and the flag.ā And Marcy Brafman, who was running the promotion department, says, āCoolāspace is very rock ānā roll.ā
Tom Freston: We knew we needed a real signature piece that would look different from everything else on TV. We also knew that we had no money. So we went to nasa and got the man-on-the-moon footage, which is public domain. We put our logo on the flag and some music under it. We thought that was sort of a rock ānā roll attitude: āLetās take manās greatest moment technologically, and rip it off.ā
Fred Seibert: We were going to include Neil Armstrong doing his āOne small step,ā but the lawyers said, āYou canāt. Neil Armstrong owns his name and likeness.ā Iām 28 or 29 and rolling my eyes at these stupid lawyers. āItās all done,ā I say. āWeāve got to use it. It will be terrible without it.ā The lawyer says, āSorry.ā So I said, āCall Neil Armstrong.ā They do, and Armstrong says, āAre you crazy?ā We got to put in something, and Marcy comes up with āBeep ā¦ beep ā¦ beep,ā ācause nothing else will fill the space. We ran that āBeep ā¦ beep ā¦ beepā 17,000 times a year.
Patti Rogoff, Manhattan Design: Fred Seibert came to see us one day to talk about this dream of a 24-hour cable TV station. At the time, cable was nothing, but rock ānā roll was something, so we all got very excited and started scribbling away. I wasnāt a design partner; I did the billing and wrote the contracts. But I scribbled, too, on this little piece of tissue that got all crumpled up and put at the bottom of the envelope when we sent over all the ideas. Fred had said he wanted something comparable to the CBS eye. Something strong and unforgettable that said music and said television. Now, rock ānā roll was not my thing then. Iām a Detroit girl; jazz and Motown were my thing. But you could not get away from rock in that office, which was one 10-by-10 room in the back of a Tai Chi school on top of Bigelowās Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue. They played rock all day long. If things got tense, theyād crank up the music, which made me even crazier. So, even though I didnāt love it, rock ānā roll was this big, blocky, heavy thing hitting me in the head all of the time. Iām sketching, and Iām vaguely remembering walking down 10th Street in the Village and passing the playground of an elementary school, and looking at a brick wall that the kids had painted with graffiti. And it all came into my mind: a graffiti āTVāāwhich was the constantly changing television-image thingāon top of a big, three-dimensional Māthe force rock was having in my life.
Tom Freston: We took the logo over to Ogilvy & Mather, the big-time, Establishment ad agency we were using at the time, and the guy there was appalled. He said, āIāve been in this business for 20 years, and you kids donāt know anything. The first rule is that you never change anything. You need to have a static image. It needs to be consistent.ā We said, āOur consistency will be our inconsistency. Weāll turn it inside out.ā And he said, āIt looks like you are running a fucking cinder-block company here.ā When we left, he called Schneider to squeal on us: āThese guys are about to take this biz down the tubes. They have the ugliest fucking logo behind the stupidest idea you have ever seen.ā But Jack, who was about as far removed from popular culture as anyone you could find, trusted our instincts. He let it slide.
Steve Casey: We had about 120 videos total, so I couldnāt afford to be real choosy. If you could get through an entire video, and there were no glitches, it was āO.K., weāll play that.ā One of the videos we were able to get our hands on was āVideo Killed the Radio Star,ā by the Buggles, an English group. It was anything but a hit. You might think that the best way to start a channel would be with a No. 1 song. But Iām kind of a twisted guy, and as soon as I saw it, I knew we had to start with this thing.
The evening of August 1, MTVās staff boarded buses for a trip across the George Washington Bridge to the basement of a sports bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the closest place to Manhattan with a signal.
John Lack: Iād gone into the studio earlier that day to record an opening. It was āLadies and gentlemen, rock ānā roll.ā Then the spaceship went up, and then the first song: āVideo Killed the Radio Star.ā It was like a baby was born.
Sue Binford, public-relations manager: We all had our new MTV black satin jackets with the logo on the back. People were crammed into this very small room, and there were screens scattered around. Everyone felt it had been a long spring and summer, and nobody had slept getting this thing launched, so we were ready to party, no matter what. Then, at a minute past midnight, it was āFive ā¦ four ā¦ three ā¦ two ā¦ one ā¦ ,ā and we all kind of crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
Bob Pittman: I spent the entire evening on a pay phone talking to Andy Setos, trying to figure out what was going on and straighten it out. All the V.J. segments were out of sequence. They would say, āThat was,ā and it wasnāt, and āComing up is,ā and it wasnāt coming up. The polarization on the wires was also switched, so if you were listening in stereo, it was fine, but if you were in mono, it was canceling the sound out. There were all sorts of things happening. I was in sheer panic.
Andy Setos: At 12:15, Pittman calls the control room and in his best southern drawl says, āAndy, the clips arenāt playing in the right order.ā We were all bedraggled, hadnāt had any sleep for days. The building where we were working wasnāt even finished. We were using Port-O-Sans, and the air-conditioning was coming in through these big tubes. I said, āBob, are they playing?ā It was bad, and who knows who was even watching. But all the equipment functioned, and, damn it, we were on the air.
Tom Freston: There had been so much focus, so much work, on what that first hour would be like. And I thought, How foolish. Because aināt nobody saw the first hour, really. And then we had a constant stream of 24-hour days after that to fill up. Because, unless we went out of business, we would never go off the air.
The press was largely critical of MTVās debut, and with the channel not airing in the biggest media markets, advertisers, cable operators, and record companies yawned. Desperate for positive feedback, Pittman dispatched Freston and Sykes to four midsize cities with cable systems carrying MTV. The orders were to find upbeat storiesāand not to come back until they did. Their first stop was Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tom Freston: John had worn an MTV button on his suit, and when we went into the hotel, it was āOh, man, MTV! Can I have that?ā The bellhop would want it, the waitress would want it. It was the hottest thing in town. I called the people back in New York and said, āYou will not believe itāthis thing is working!ā
John Sykes: We finally hit pay dirt when we went into a record store and asked if there was any reaction to the songs we were playing that werenāt being played on the local radio stations. The manager said, āYeah, we sold a box of Buggles albums.ā We were like, āYes!ā Within two weeks, we had trade ads in Billboard, with quotes from all the store managers in Tulsa, claiming that MTV was having this profound impact on record sales.
Back at MTV, the most pressing problem was finding moreāand betterāvideos.
John Lack: The music in the beginning wasnāt that good. It was mediocre bands playing, or stupid poetry, or psychedelic bullshit.
Alan Hunter: There just wasnāt a whole lot of catalogue. I came to work one day and said to the producer, āI have seen these REO Speedwagon videos so many fucking times, I have flat run out of things to say.ā It was my shortest shift ever.
Sue Binford: Pat Benatarās video played so often, every time it came on, the whole room would break into the chorus: āYou better run, you better hide ā¦ ā We could all sing it in our sleep. When we had a new video on, everyone would just stop. Weād be so excited seeing something different on the screen.
Gale Sparrow, talent coordinator: Rod Stewart had eight videos, and we played one or two of them every hour on the hour. Thank God he had decent videos and his songs were good. We could have destroyed his career.
Gradually, the record companies began to unbend, partly because of the impact MTV was starting to have on sales, partly because their artists left them no choice.
Bob McGroarty: Weād been asking the record companies to produce videos with no guarantee of success, so weād been left with groups like Adam Ant that no one else had. But, all of a sudden, people were coming into record stores and saying, āI want Adam Antās new album.ā
Stan Cornyn: It was reported back to us that records were selling in certain cities without radio airplay. We asked āWhy?ā and it turned out that there were music videos playing on MTV. An act like Devo is dancing around in their funny masks and stuff like thatāand they take off in a market where nothing else is happening. You got to be an idiot not to say, āSomething is happening here, letās pay attention to this.ā
Gale Sparrow: We werenāt in New York or L.A., but when artists were on the road, theyād be in their hotel rooms watching us, and theyād call back to their record companies and say, āWhy arenāt my videos on this channel?ā It got to the point where artists were saying that if they didnāt send these videos to be played on MTV, they would leave the record company. As soon as the artists started insisting, that changed it: we began getting videos.
Lenny Waronker, president, Warner Bros. Records: The pressure from artists and managers was awful. Everybody wanted to do a video. You had to get on. The kids would hang around late at night to watch.
Billy Idol, musician: Radio guys would take one look at my picture with the spiky hair and say, āPunk-rocker. Not playing him.ā Then MTV airs my videos, and kids start calling up radio stations saying, āI want to hear Billy Idol!ā It really broke the thing wide open. Weād never touched the charts, and the next minute we had a Top 10 album. It was amazing. Nobodyād ever noticed me before. Now Iām walking down the street, and people are yelling āBilly!ā
Brian Setzer, musician, the Stray Cats: We put out āStray Cat Strut,ā radio didnāt play it and it flopped. We put it out again, but with a video. Our girlfriends were in it, because we didnāt want frigginā fashion modelsāwe wanted cool people: rockabilly chicks. MTV played the hell out of it and it clicked. We were playing Tulsa, place called Old Lady of Brady, and cowboys with skinny ties and stuff were coming to see us, guys with black leather jackets and big pompadours and motorcycle boots. It brought us to the masses, MTV.
As more videos came in, so did new hires, including a self-described ānice, straightforward, middle-class girlā whoād be pivotal in MTVās later years.
Judy McGrath, copywriter: I was at Mademoiselle and Glamour, writing stuff like āModelsā Party Tips,ā when I got a call from a friend who knew I loved music. āThey are starting this thing called MTV, and their promotion department is looking for a writer,ā she said. āYou should meet them.ā I go over, and the first thing the person who is interviewing me says is āWho is your favorite band?ā I tell him. He goes, āYouāre wrong,ā and proceeds to spend the next hour trashing my choice. Then he says, āYou really want to work here? Gee, youāre hired.ā I went into the creative group, where they made the TV equivalent of liner notes. It was filled with all these crazy creative types who probably couldnāt find gainful employment anywhere else. The kind of people you know you are going to want to hang out with.
There was a chance for everyone to hang out that December 31, when MTV staged its first New Yearās Eve Rock ānā Roll Ball.
Judy McGrath: We decided we canāt do Dick Clarkās New Yearās Rockinā Eve one more time. Thereās got to be another choice. We had it in the ballroom of this bad hotel on 44th Street. Sykes was at the door, and John Belushi was in the stairwell, and Bow Wow Wow was onstage. It was the first time I ever saw a mix of Saturday Night Live people, music people, movie people, downtown art people, even a few celebs, all finding a common place to hang out.
Brian Diamond, production assistant: I saw John Belushi leaning on a support beam and taking a drink. And then he just slid down in slow motion and fell into a pile on the floor. This was three months before he died.
Fred Seibert: Weāve only been on the air since August, so I got the bright idea, Why not invite everyone? All the Warner Amex employees, all the cable operators. Paper the house. Itās New York, itās New Yearās Eve. Theyāre going to come from Wisconsin? I show up, and itās raining and snowing and 30 degrees, and there are people in tuxedos lined all the way around the block into Times Square. Vice presidents of Warner Amex I canāt let in, because the fire marshal is going, āOne more person comes in and the thing gets shut down.ā
Andy Setos: That was the craziest New Yearās Eve of my life. People were trying to get into this thing, saying, āI am the sister of the guy that shines the shoes of the agent of the band that is up there right now.ā
Sue Binford: People were standing there under umbrellasādressed-up-for-a-New-Yearās-Eve-party-type people who looked like they could be advertisers. I thought, My God, this is a hot ticket, and now they may never give us the time of day again. So we had an army going up and down the line trying to identify anyone who could keep us afloat, bringing them food and drink. It became a block party outside.
More fun was to come, courtesy of the new vice president for programming, Les Garland, a much-traveled, southern-Missouri-born radio jock who addressed one and all as ābud.ā
Marcy Brafman, director of on-air promotions: The weekly music meetings were every Tuesday in Lesās office. All the department heads would come, and theyād be such fun. Theyād put on the new videos, and Les would crank up these huge speakers, and weād all get to talk about why we thought something should come in, and whether it should be in heavy rotation, which was three or four times a day, or light rotation, which was once or twice a day, or ālunar rotation,ā which was, like, once a month. It was exciting, because the music was very exciting then, and it hadnāt been for a real long time.
Andy Setos: Les had theater speakers in his office five feet tall and two feet wide. And he would play them so loud we would get tenants in the building two stories up complaining. Iād say, āLes, you are not going to be able to hear anything anymore after a while.ā Heād go, āYeah, but itās cool while itās happening!ā
Rick Krim, business manager: I was living outside Philly, working for Price Waterhouse as a first-year accountant, about as far removed from the music business as you could be. One weekend I went to the wedding of my friend from my hometown and bumped into a girl from home, Joan Myers. She tells me she is the assistant to the head of programming at MTV, Les Garland. I said, āWow! How can I work there?ā She says, āWell, it just so happens that my boss, who is not so financially oriented, is looking for someone to, like, run the companyās money.ā I go for an interview. Les says, āMyers says youāre cool. When can you start, bud?ā That was it. I was 22.
Ronald E. āBuzzā Brindle, director of music programming: I was in a closed-door meeting in Lesās office with Sykes and a couple of other guys, and it happened to be Lesās birthday. Thereās a knock, and Lesās secretary ushers in an attractive young woman in a business outfit, whoās carrying a boom box and what appears to be some presentation papers. She starts talking about some product sheās trying to sell. Les is listening and checking her out. Then she starts playing this cassette of bump-and-grind music, and begins stripping. Next thing you know this rather buxom young woman is prancing around Lesās office in her panties. Lesās immediate response is to get up and pull his pants down. Meanwhile, weāre still trying to conduct the meeting. Iām sitting there trying to make a point, while she is bouncing her breasts on top of my bald pate. I thought, This is the perfect Les Garland meeting.
Things were bopping all over MTV, day and night.
John Lack: You put out a product like Clorox, it doesnāt change much in 25 years. You do MTV every day, you better be good and smart and hot and quickābecause this generation is changing every 10 minutes. A lot of friends of mine left because they couldnāt keep up. But if you were good, it was the best life you could have, because it was rock ānā roll, it was drugs, it was alcohol, it was good-looking women, it was everything that kids love.
Brian Diamond: We were having a big staff meeting, after weād been on the air about a month, and John Lack walks in. Heās wearing a three-piece suit and smoking a big cigar and all these words start coming out of his mouth. āThings look good, but they have to look great. We have to be different. This canāt look like any television anybody has ever seen. If J.J. is in a lousy mood, let him be in a lousy mood. We want to see that. If he wants to pick up a chair and throw it through a window, let him do it.ā Our jaws were on the ground. Weād never heard anybody talk about television like this before.
Les Garland: We had people that slept under their desks. Maybe they passed out. Because we rocked a little bit, too.
Tom Freston: Youād be out five or six nights of the week easily. A lot of relationships got burnt, a lot of people got burnt. I lost a marriage, and a lot of other people had drug or drinking issues, or just couldnāt take it. It was survival of the fittest.
Gale Sparrow: After work, weād all go over to the restaurant across the street, where everybody from the owner to the dishwasher were wearing MTV T-shirts and buttons. Weād write our ideas on tablecloths until two in the morning, then go out to a club to see a band. Show would be over at three, and weāre back at work at nine, Garland greeting us with Tom Jones singing āItās Not Unusualā at top volume. āO.K., buds,ā Garland says. āWe know weāre tired, but weāre going to make it through another day.ā
Joe Davola, associate producer: Sue Steinberg came in with these stringer reports we were getting across the country. āWe need you to edit this thing,ā she said. āYeah,ā I say, like I know what Iām doing. I didnāt know anything. I just got a stopwatch, went into an editing room, and figured it out. Thatās how it was all the time at MTV. Just: āHere, go off and do it.ā We had huge testicles. There was no fear. It was us against the world.
Bob Pittman: We were a bunch of kids, and when you are a kid, you are just completely sure that you are right. You are maniacal. All of our social life was hanging out with each other. We had some of our best ideas over dinner, drinking and talking and laughing. Someone would say, āLetās buy a house and give it away in a contest.ā And it would be āHey, why not?ā
Mark Pellington, production assistant, promotion department: Weād wear bathing suits and flip-flops and blast music, like kids in a playground. āWhat if I just throw this shit under the color camera and we turn it negative?ā weād say. āOh, that looks cool.ā And you would see it on the air. Nobody would be telling you what you were doing was wrong. Nobody was saying, āThis isnāt linear, this isnāt the right way to do graphics.ā Theyād just say, āThis is our spirit, great.ā
Bob Friedman, director of marketing: We didnāt have purple hair in my department, and a couple of us had been to business school, but no one was letting on that they had. MTV was the one place where youād never admit youād gone to business school. It was like a collective. We were kids, though, and one day, a very important client was coming, and we were wondering what we could do to seem more mature and grown-up. Someone said, āLetās buy some of those pictures of fake families and leave them on our desks.ā Thatās what we did: put pictures of fake families on our desks.
Judy McGrath: I had a friend who went to the Wharton business school who came over sometimes. Heād shake his head and say, āThis cannot be a business. This cannot be working. I mean, look at these people! Itās just wrong.ā
The contests and promotions MTV used to build viewership projected the lunatic spirit.
John Sykes: Iād sit back and say, āAll right, what wild, insane, off-the-wall dream can I come up with, put it on TV, have someone actually win it? How about a lost weekend with Van Halen? If you win, weāll pick you and your buddy up in a Learjet and fly you off for 48 hours of pure decadence with the greatest rock ānā roll band in the world.ā If you are 18 years old, thatās a great fantasy.
Richard Schenkman, production assistant: Kid from Pennsylvania wins, and we fly him to Detroit, where Van Halen is performing. The first night, he goes to the show. The band has a big sheet cake onstage, David Lee Roth brings him out, and, as the crowd go apeshit, they dump the cake on him and spray him down completely with bottles of champagne. Showās over, they go backstage. Van Halen is drinking Jack Danielās and the kid is drinking Jack Danielās and everyone is getting drunker and drunker. Finally, they throw the kid into the shower to wash him off. A few minutes later, I hear āAAAAAAhhhhhhh ā¦ ā coming from the shower. Turns out, they threw one of their groupies into the shower, too.
The music, the mayhem, and the message were beginning to have an effect.
Mark Goodman: I was making a record-store appearance in Wyoming. I thought it would be like Spinal Tap and that thereād be four people there. Well, we round this bend and there are, like, 1,500 people. I thought, My God, whoās here? Then I realized: Iām here!
Marcy Brafman: I knew we were doing something right when I gave my dad an MTV T-shirt. Heād wear it, and the kids would want to mow his lawn for free.
Dom Fioravanti, general manager: I was living in suburban New Jersey and really getting it from the coaches of the local Pop Warner football team. They were accusing me of wrecking their program, because little boys were coming home from school and watching MTV all afternoon, instead of going out for football. But with my kids and all the kids in the neighborhood, I was something sort of special.
Judy McGrath: Tom Freston was in a barbershop one day, and everyone was asking for Rod Stewart haircuts, saying, āI saw it on MTV.ā When it begins creeping into that part of the culture, you realized this was not just a couple of unemployed rock fans hanging around watching TV all day. Other people were starting to notice.
Alan Hunter: I kept my bartending job for a month, because I didnāt really know how MTV was going to do. Actorās mentality. One night, Iām making a daiquiri for a guy, and heās cocking his head, staring at me the longest time. Finally, he says, āMan, you look so damn familiar.ā Then he snapped his fingers. āMan, your voice is familiar, too.ā I said, āWhere are you from?ā He says, āJersey.ā I say, āYou ever watch that MTV show?ā He says, āYes.ā Thatās when I began to realize that maybe MTV is going to be a job I can keep.
For all the buzz, MTV was hemorrhaging cash, as advertisersāthe sole source of revenueāhung back, spooked by the continued refusal of most cable operators to carry the channel. Numbers told the story. At launch, MTV publicly claimed 2.5 million cable customers. In fact, MTV executives admit, the total was well below a million.
Beverly Weinstein, ad sales: The first year, we were lucky if we made $1 million in sales. There was no interest, no ratings, no nothing. The ad biz is very risk-averse, and this was something that was brand-new. People just werenāt standing in line to buy it.
Jordan Rost, vice president, research: The people we needed to sell were not in the demographics, didnāt have passion about music, didnāt care what was happening in Council Bluffs. Until they saw their own kids going wild, they werenāt going to buy.
Fred Seibert: I went to a cable convention after we launched, and the talk on the floor was the Weather Channel, not MTV. Because thatās how old the operators were. They didnāt spend their weekends thinking, Whoās on Top of the Pops? They spent their weekends going, āThank God itās nice out.ā
George Lois, ad-agency executive: Everyone considered MTV the stupidest idea in the history of communications. Rock ānā roll 24 hours a day? Talking to 16-year-old idiots? Sex, drugs, blah, blah, blah? It was a joke.
In early 1982, Pittman instructed Loisās partner Dale Pon to devise an ad campaign that would break the logjam.
Dale Pon: They were scared. Everybody I ran into told me: āThis has got to work. Weāre counting on you, Dale. Donāt fuck up. In 45 days, new stuff has got to go on the air.ā So Iām thinking about rock ānā roll and everything that is related to rock ānā roll. And the question I put to myself was āWhatās your favorite rock ānā roll song of all time?ā For me, it was the Rolling Stonesā āSatisfaction.ā That helped me understand the true nature of rock ānā roll: insatiable desire. Weād done an earlier trade ad campaign called āCable bratsāāāRock and roll wasnāt enough for them. Now they want their MTV.ā We just shortened it to āI want my MTV,ā an homage to a famous cereal campaign George did in the 60s. Then a partner of mine, Dick Gershon, had a brilliant idea: āLetās advertise where there is no distribution, where the cable operator has said no. We say, āCall your cable operator, America! Demand your MTV! Hereās the phone number. Make them fucking sorry they said no.āāā
Lois presented the pitch to MTVās senior staff.
Les Garland: George comes rolling in with his easel and says, āGarland, who does MTV belong to?ā Warner Amex. Wrong. āPittman, who does MTV belong to?ā Heās got this trick-question thing going with everyone in the room. Finally he says, āMTV is the color-TV phenomenon, you guys. If you are the kid on the block with the first color TV, all the other kids come to your house to watch it. Same with MTV. Itās that cool. Itās theirs, the kidsā, it belongs to them. I came up with a campaign for a breakfast cereal called Maypo. We had sports stars like Mickey Mantle and Wilt Chamberlain saying, āI want my Maypo!ā This campaign is going to be a bunch of rock stars saying, āI want my MTV!ā Garland,ā he goes, ācan you get Mick Jagger to say that?ā I go, āI think so.ā He goes, āThatās who we got to get first. Mick Jagger is the most important rock star in the world. If we can get him to do it, the rest of them will be easy.ā And I go, āI fucking love it.ā
The others present were more cautious, but came around.
David Horowitz: The cable operators were so strong, you were warned not to go behind them to the public. That was a real no-no. They would break you if you did that. But it came to the point where we didnāt have a choice.
John Lack: We have this big powwow, and the question is āDo we go around the gatekeeper and go right to the customer?ā āCause we knew this product was going to be hot with young peopleāwe just had to get to them. But we couldnāt get to them without distribution, and, of course, these cable operators held the keys. After much agony, long hours of fighting, we decided to go for it.
Bob Pittman: This was a Hail Mary. āCause if it didnāt work, we were never going to make it.
The trick now was getting Jagger to agree.
Les Garland: We find out that Mick is touring in Paris and will see us. So we jump on a plane. Itās a gamble: we donāt know whether we are going to get Mick to do it or not. But we are in the hotel, ready to meet. Truth be told, I disappeared for a day and a half, and found a couple of women that were just so much fun. If I have the time, I will rock. Anyway, the phone call comes. I go to Mickās room, and went into the rap: We were about to embark upon this campaign, and he being who he is, it was vitally important that he say yes to my request. Which is that he agrees to us shooting him the next day saying, āI want my MTV!ā He says, āI donāt do commercials.ā I say, āI prefer to look at it as more of an endorsement for a new phenomenon called music video. We just happen to be the only venue that plays them.ā He goes, āItās still a commercial.ā I go, āIf you were paid, does that change it?ā And he goes, āWell ā¦ā So I say, āAll right, Mick,ā and I reach into my pocket, pull out a dollar bill, and lay it on the table. And I say, āWill you take it?ā He starts laughing and says, āGarland, Iāll do it.ā The next day, we do the shoot and then hightail it back to New York, where Sykes is, dialing in rock stars left and right. Pete Townshend and David Bowie and Pat Benatar and John Cougarāwe have a bunch of them in the can. We had the campaign on TV within 14 days.
The impact of the $2 million ad blitz in March 1982 was instant and overwhelming.
Bob McGroarty: I got calls from cable operators saying, āTake those spots off the air! We are getting flooded with phone calls and itās screwing up our business!ā I said, āOh, really?ā and called Dale Pon and said, āPut more spots on.ā
John Lack: We bought $300,000 worth of airtime in Denver, where TCI is, and we blew Denver away: āI want my MTV! I want my MTV!ā The phones rang like it was an avalanche. After two weeks, Malone calls and says, āI give.ā
Tom Freston: Weād go in and attack a town and weād run like three or four weeks of this advertising and the phones would ring off the hook and every cable operator in the market would add the service. And weād be off to another city. We were rolling across the country and adding a million subs a month. It was fantastic.
Les Garland: Before the campaign, we did a study of the target audience and found that the awareness factorāpeople who had seen MTV or heard of itāwas just under 20 percent. Four weeks later, we do the same study. The recognition factor now is 89 percent.
The last bastion to fall was Time Inc.āowned Manhattan Cable.
Dale Pon: New York was hard. The āI Want My MTVā campaign would run periodically, but the guy who ran the system said, āThe phone can ring all it wants. I donāt care. The other cable operators are just weak. Iām not going to be bullied or blackmailed. Donāt fuck with me. Iām not doing it.ā
Jack Gault, president, Manhattan Cable: My 13-year-old son wanted his MTV. What teenage kid didnāt? But we clearly were the most important cable TV system in the country. I thought they should pay. They thought that was heresy. So the negotiation was protracted. Finally we got creative and came up with a deal where they would buy some of my unsold ad inventory.
To celebrate the deal, MTV executives hosted a party for cable operators at a tony Manhattan nightspot. To buck up the staff, which had been excluded, Garland came up with a counter.
Les Garland: I went to Pittman and said, āI want to do something really cool for the staff. Have a first-birthday party. Not real big.ā He said, āGar-man, neat idea, but we just canāt do it. Money is too tight. It wouldnāt look good corporately.ā Iām pissed, so I get my department heads and said, āGuys, put together a party and donāt tell me anything.ā One of them says, āGar-man, where are we going to get the money?ā Iām like, āPlease, give me a break. Surely each of you can find a few thousand dollars in your budget and make it look like something else. I mean, we arenāt beginners here.ā I start hearing rumblings in the hallways: This thing is going to be a blowout. Iām still playing dumb, but at some point they come to me and say, āGarland, we are really struggling for a theme.ā I said, āWhatās more fun than gambling?ā They find some unbelievable location, and the night of the party I show up at 10:30, and the kids are having a ball. Everyoneās got a wad of fake moneyāmy face is on it, itās Garland moneyāand there are prizesāTVs and stereo systems and motorcycles and all kinds of shitāand everybody is getting hammered. āSpeech, speech,ā they are saying. I get up on the stage half snockered and go into my best Bob Pittman imitation. And who do I see in the audience? Bob Pittman. He says to me, āWeāll deal with this Monday.ā All weekend Iām going, Iām outta here. Monday morning, Iām sitting in my office, and Dwight Tierney, whoās in charge of human relations, calls. I think, Oh, shit, here we go, theyāre blowing me out. I say, āYou want me to bring my lawyer?ā He says, āWhat are you talking about? All we need to know is where you got the prizes. Other than that, no problem.ā Thatās why I love Pittman.
With MTV airing in New York and Los Angeles by the turn of the year, everyone was breathing relieved sighsāand encountering sudden celebrity.
Martha Quinn: J.J. and I were walking down 57th Street, and a homeless guy lying in a doorway looks up, and says, āHey, arenāt you Martha Quinn?ā We said, āYeah, howās it going?ā We walk away and I say to J.J., āHowās that guy have cable?ā
Jordan Rost: When I worked for NBC and wore my logo baseball cap, no one cared. Iād wear an MTV jacket, and I couldnāt get three blocks without being asked four times, āYou really work for MTV?ā
Gale Sparrow: When people like Elton John started calling to say, āCan I be a guest V.J.?,ā you knew we were making it. Everyone wanted to come on board. People werenāt calling about their lower actsāthey were calling about their main acts. It was like, āDo you have room for an interview?ā I had a staff of eight, and we couldnāt even cover the calls. We were getting 250 a day.
Nick Rhodes, keyboardist, Duran Duran: Weād go over to their studio several times a week whenever we were in Manhattan. Andy Warhol was a friend of ours and we took him down there. He loved it. Just sat taking photographs the whole time of absolutely nothing. But Andy was thrilled to see what the MTV experience was all about.
Judy McGrath: We got Motƶrhead to tape an MTV I.D. At the shoot, Sykes was saying, āI want you to say, āHi, Iām Lemmy from Motƶrhead, and youāre watching MTV.āāā The camera rolled, and Lemmy said, āThis is Motƶrhead, and if you donāt watch MTV, Iām coming to your house and rip up your lawn and tear your poodleās head off.ā We run this thing, and all of a sudden I am getting calls from Steve Tyler and Tina Turner saying, āHey, I want to do one of those.ā And I thought, You do?
MTVās corporate parent, Warner Amex, meanwhile, was posting heavy losses, in part because the Movie Channel was taking a clobbering at the hands of Cinemax, a competing āflanker brandā recently released by HBO. Fed up, American Express persuaded Ross to sell most of the Movie Channel to Viacom, and ousted Warner Amexās C.E.O. The new chief was Ronald Reaganās transportation secretary Drew Lewis, whoād shown his tough-mindedness by firing the nationās striking air-traffic controllers. The first casualty at MTV was Lack, who left in January 1983. McGroarty departed shortly thereafter. Though Schneider remained in his post, MTVās master was now Bob Pittman.
Brian Diamond: Physically, Bob wasnāt around much, but everybody felt his presence. The running joke was that Bob would call and say, āGet the plants off the set.ā Three days later: āPut the plants back on the set.ā It was like, āOh, my God, Big Brotherās watching. We canāt get away with anything anymore.ā We all knew who was driving the ship.
Tom Freston: Bob made the old suits at Warner and Amex feel comfortable that they were in good hands with a smart guy who was ready to exploit popular culture in a smart way. He had a relentless focus on āWhat does the consumer really want? If we get into his head, everything else kind of comes together.ā
Gale Sparrow: Pittman lost his eye when he was a child, and Garland lost his eye when he was at MTV because they sent him the wrong medication, and John Sykes had a sort of an astigmatism, though the rumor was that he would have knocked out both his eyes if he had to. One day, I came down with an eye inflammation. Pittman looked at me and said, āGale, I always knew you were executive material.ā
Fred Seibert: One night we are at a company retreat out at the end of Long Island, and eight or nine of us end up in a rental car. Everyone is sitting on someone elseās lap, including Bob, whoās in the backseat behind Dwight Tierney, whoās driving. Itās dark. There are no streetlights anywhere. Bob reaches up and puts his hands over Dwightās eyes. āKeep driving,ā he says. Weāre all thinking, God, we are going to die. Bob goes, āAw, we did this in Mississippi all the time.ā The woman who is sitting next to me says, āThatās what I like about him. Heās fearless.ā
Pittman would need courage to handle MTVās finances. In two years on the air, the channel had racked up a reported $33.9 million in losses and was projected to lose $20 million more in 1983. Lewis had other ideas.
Bob Pittman: Drew Lewis took me out to lunch and said, āBob, either you get the loss down to $12 million or weāre going to shut it down.ā So we had to start whacking everything to make it happen.
Mark Booth: Penetration of cable was modest, ad sales were modest, expenses were high. Warner Amex was saying, āEither you crack the economics or youāre gone. Weāre not the Salvation Army.ā
Doug Herzog, director, MTV News: All of a sudden, every dime was being watched. The whole idea was to see what we can do for nothing.
David Hilton, head of affiliate sales and marketing: It went from being āCan we do this?ā to āHow can we make it profitable?ā
To Pittman and Horowitz, it was evident that neither cost-cutting nor ad revenues would be sufficient to lift MTV from the red.
Bob Pittman: No one in the cable business had been successful being entirely advertiser-supported. If we were ever going to make any money, we had to get the cable operators to pay.
David Horowitz: Thatās when it hit the fan. The attitude of the cable operators was that we were damned lucky they were letting us onto their systems.
Mark Booth: We went back and said, āThis isnāt going to work out the way itās been working. Hereās our new rate cardā10 cents per home per monthāand we will give you a much better deal now than if you wait.ā The cable industry saw that if they wanted to have a more robust content community, they needed to re-distribute the wealth. We basically created a strategy that enabled everyone to win.
John Reardon, vice president, national accounts: Mark Booth and I walked out the door of a cable operator in Colorado after doing our first contract. And right there in the parking lot, we jumped up in the air and slapped hands, and said, āJesus God, we are actually going to get money for this thing!ā
While cable operators were having their arms twisted, MTV was coming under increasing fire for its nearly all-white playlist. The most vocal critic was āSlickā Rick James. After MTV passed on his āSuper Freakā video, he publicly accused the channel of ātaking black people back 400 years,ā setting off a torrent of charge and countercharge.
John Sykes: Racism was the furthest thing from our minds. We were trying to build a very narrowly focused channel, just like radio. The problem was, we were the only game in town, so the media was expecting us to be like traditional TV and put on all things for all people. From everything weād learned in radio, that didnāt work. No one from the country community was picketing out front, saying, āWhy arenāt you playing country artists?ā
Tom Freston: If you look at who was making rock music in those days, it was pretty much white boys with guitars. There were some black artists who got rotation on MTV, but not many, because there werenāt a lot of black artists playing rock ānā roll. When clips came in, the programming guys were a bit overly religious on the issue. The playlist was a lot stricter than it had to be, because we really didnāt have any competition out there.
Charles M. Young, writer, promotions and shows: I was coming home on the subway wearing my MTV jacket, and this black kid comes up to me, and he was so excited. He wanted to work at MTV; he just loved it. We got off at the same stop, and we talked about MTV all the way to my apartment. I went in feeling so rotten that there was no black music on MTV. I thought, God, this is completely unfair.
Carolyn Baker, director of talent acquisitions: MTV was supposed to be a white-boysā channel, and it was really set in stone. Iām black, and Rick would talk to me about it, Stevie Wonder would, Teddy Pendergrass would, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson would. But it was not a subject that I ever really talked about at MTV. But it did come up with Bob when he wouldnāt let me buy a long James Brown piece. He said, āMy audience doesnāt think that rock ānā roll came from James Brown; they believe it came from the Beatles.ā
J. J. Jackson: I was sent to cover a birthday party Bill Cosby was throwing for Miles Davis. We sit down and Miles looks me dead straight in the eyes and says, āTell me, young man, how come MTV doesnāt play any black videos?ā I said, āWell, at this point, our format is rock ānā roll, and Jimi Hendrix didnāt make any videos. We donāt play Elvis Presley, either, and some people consider him the father of rock ānā roll. Or Dwight Yoakam, or any of those people. Believe me, if I thought they werenāt playing black artists because they were black, thereās no way in hell I would be their patsy for that.ā He looked at me for like 20 secondsāman, it felt like a lifetimeāand said absolutely nothing. Finally, he went, āVery good, young man.ā
Mark Goodman: People would say, āPittmanās from the South. What do you expect?ā But I bought the corporate line, which was MTV is like rock radio. Rock radio would not be playing the Temptations or James Brown. We play rock artists. Then Letās Dance came out, and I sat down to interview David Bowie. He had a camera crew with him, and heavy executives were standing around, watching. I said, āGet ready, because Iāve got all the tough questions lined up for you.ā David said, āGood, because I want to ask you some punishing questions.ā I chuckled, not knowing what he had in store. After the interview, he asks me, āWhy do you think MTV doesnāt play black music?ā I said, āWe try to play music for a particular type of demographic and genre.ā He said, āWhat about all the black kids?ā I said, āYou got to talk to MTV about that.ā I got hung out to dry.
Pittman refused to budge. Then, in January 1983, Michael Jackson released a single from his new album, Thriller. āBillie Jean,ā an up-tempo pop tale of the travails brought on by a trumped-up paternity charge, bulleted onto the Billboard Hot 100. A video soon followed, but despite its quick climb to No. 1 and intensive lobbying from CBS Records, āBillie Jeanā received no airplay on MTV. Why it was finally added to the channelās rotation is hotly disputed.
David Benjamin, vice president for business affairs, CBS Records: I was sitting in my office, and Susan Blond, who was in charge of videos at Epic, came in, in tears. She says, āWe just spent all this money on Michael Jacksonās video. Itās brilliant, but they wonāt play it.ā Immediately, I call Pittman; heās in a meeting. Then I call Garland; heās busy. Then I call Sykes; he picks up. āJohn,ā I say, āthe fickle finger of fate is pointed at you. I am now invoking the 24-hour kill clause in our contract. By tomorrow at this time I want every CBS video off MTV.ā I walk to the other side of the floor to tell Walter Yetnikoff what Iāve done, and his secretary Bonnie is laughing. āWhat the fuck did you do? Pittman just called and heās going crazy.ā Walter waves me in, and heās laughing, too. āDavid,ā he says to me, ālook whoās on the phone. Our good friend Bob Pittman.ā āNo kidding,ā I say. āYes,ā Walter says. āHe says that all we had to do was call and ask. Of course they would play the video. No problem.ā āGee, Iām sorry, Walter,ā I say. āThatās O.K.,ā Walter says. āBut in future you just call up Bob. Heāll do whatever we want.ā
Les Garland: āBillie Jeanā came in, and it blew my mind. The whole staff flipped over it. I phoned Pittman, who was in California, and said, āBob, Iām FedExing the most amazing video to you. Wait till you see it.ā He calls the next day, and heās like, āGod, this is great.ā I said, āThere is no question here, is there?ā He says, āYou do what you want to do.ā I said, āYou know what I am going to do.ā And he says, āFine.ā The problem was, we waited three or five days to put it on, ācause of whatever, and someone misinterpreted it as us holding back. The next thing you know, this whole thing with CBS blows up. Weāre looking at each other, saying, āWhere did this thing come from?ā
āBillie Jeanā was followed by āBeat It,ā and both were among the most popular videos in MTV history. Their repeated airing helped propel Thriller to sales of 800,000 per week, and prompted CBS Records to commission the title cut as the third video from the album. Directed by John Landis ofBlues Brothers fame, āThrillerā ran an unprecedented 14 minutes and cost an equally unprecedented $1.1 millionāmore than 20 times the most expensive video to date. Yet another precedent was shattered when Pittman agreed to pay $250,000 for first-air rights, the expenditure disguised as a cost of a āmaking ofā documentary. While shooting was in progress, Garland visited the set.
Les Garland: Iām invited to Michaelās trailer. Iām waiting in the living room when all of the sudden a pair of socks comes flying out from this dark room in the back and lands at my feet. His assistant says, āThat means Michael is ready to see you.ā So I pick up his socks and go back. Heās lying down and I sit and we talk for an hour. He said, āGarland, I just want to thank you so much for everything youāve done through MTV to support my career.ā I said, āStop, man, I am the guy who should be saying āThank youā to you for making such great music for such great videos.ā When āThrillerā came out, weād play it two or three times a day. We also pre-promoted every time it was going to play, and every time it did, it spiked the ratings. Thatās when we knew that event programming would work within the confines of what we were doing at MTV.
MTV, which had already made the careers of Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, and Duran Duran, would fuel other made-for-video mega-stars, none brighterāor more controversialāthan the Material Girl.
John Sykes: The first time I met Madonna was at CafĆ© Un Deux Trois on 44th Street. She was very quiet and very controlled and kind of was letting her attitude be known. Which was this kind of street-smart, tough woman who wanted to do business. She had like a Screaming Mimiās kind of retro outfit on, a little veil over her face. She wanted to find out what we were doing and talk to us about her music. But she was very guarded and wasnāt going to offer her friendship that easily. Basically, she was setting her image with us that we were going to have to come to her. She knew exactly how to package herself, exactly how much to give each time, exactly how to make the look as important as the sound. She really represented, along with Michael Jackson, the beginning of a new video generation. A lot of artists that only cared about the look, or only cared about the sound, never made the transition and kind of went by the wayside. But she understood the balance.
Gale Sparrow: She had one video, a disco-like thing, called āElectricā something, and she asked if, as a favor, weād play it late at night, so she could watch it herself. We werenāt sure, because it really wasnāt our format. But Garland said, āSheās so sexy, letās just play it really late or early in the morning and Pittman will never know.ā But Pittman did watch, and every now and then heād call Garland and say, āBud, whatās going on? You guys are getting out of line.ā But the channel was looking nice, and Pittman let us do it. And, boy, did that favor pay off. Because her next video wasāwow!ānight-and-day better. We played the hell out of that. āBorderlineā was next and Madonna was a star. Thatās when everything started changing. It wasnāt just AOR music. It was a little more pop. The image became as important as the music.
Marcy Brafman: We fought about putting Madonna on. There was this feeling that she was too pop, too dance-music, and we werenāt about dance music. When her stuff took hold, it changed something in not a good way. It became more glitz and showbizzy. It was not that free, wildness-of-youth, born-to-raise-hell kind of rock ānā roll. It was engineered. It was entertainment.
Jeff Ayeroff, creative director, Warner bros. Records: Madonna was the first act I worked with at Warner, and I was wheeling and dealing with Sykes and Gale Sparrow, saying, āThis girl is going to be the biggest star on MTV.ā They got her right away, but they didnāt get her music right away, so they were sort of hesitant. We did a series of videos, and one of themāwhere sheās this street girl who gets picked up by the photographer and she spray-paints his carāstarted the phenomenon. They realized they had something that brings their audience to them. She was the right person, the right artist, the right product, at the right time. Madonna fed them, and they fed her. They went hand in hand together.
The success of Madonna and Michael Jackson sent video-production costs spiraling, enraging record-company executives and artists alike. The airwaves, meanwhile, were filling up with music-video shows, hoping to ape MTVās exploding popularity. To stanch the competition on the one hand, and placate the record companies on the other, Pittman began offering labels payments for hot videos in return for āwindows of exclusivity.ā Under pressure from increasingly vocal interest groups, as well as image-nervous American Express, MTV also began cracking down harder on video content.
Stan Cornyn: We gave Madonna a video to do, and the cost was going to be $10,000. Then the producer says, āWe want to shoot it in Italy, so itās going to be 25.ā Madonna is starring for us, so we come up with the 25. Well, the whole thing ends up at $100,000. At this point, the management of record companies are shitting cornerstone-size bricks.
Bob Summer: One video we did for George Michael was something in excess of a low-budget movie. The artists were demanding it, and if you didnāt have a video available at the time of launch, you werenāt competitive. Itās that simple. The all-powerful record companies found themselves in the position of being leveraged by the MTV gang.
Bob Krasnow, president, Elektra Records: We were spending $300,000 on a video more often than not. And I started seeing a very subtle change in the bands. All of the sudden, they were starting to realize that they couldnāt go out in this national format with bellies. They needed to take care of their whole appearance. They were getting slimmed down, more muscular. Appearance became important. People were realizing, āHey, this is a professional business weāre in thatās grossing millions of dollars.ā The whole mentality of how we approached our business was changing dramatically.
Billy Idol: You saw the big guns move in on MTV. Suddenly, you were competing on a level that was ridiculous. People like Michael Jackson moved everything up. Instead of $200,000, it was $2 million. It stopped the homegrown effectāit became video hell.
Stan Cornyn: MTV asking for exclusives was another astonishing, throw-them-out-of-the-office thing to do. The ballsiness of these guys. I sometimes thought that maybe thatās why Horowitz and Pittman wore glassesāso they wouldnāt get hit too badly.
Bob Krasnow: It was a small amount of money, but the point was, MTV was actually paying us, which was a lot better than us paying disc jockeys to play our records. This was a total turnabout. You had to grovel to get your records played on most radio stations, and here was this huge new ideaāactually cultivating relationships.
Tim Newman, video director for ZZ Top: It pissed everybody off. The labels had a chance to encourage competition. Instead, they delivered themselves into the hands of MTV, which was a winner. It changed the whole game.
Jack Schneider: There was one Mick Jagger thing, where you opened a refrigerator and there were decapitated heads. Iāsaid, āWhat? I canāt put that on the air.ā āWell, you must,ā I was told, ābecause if you donāt, Mick said heās never going to give us anything again.ā āIn a pigās ass,ā I said. āMick will give us anything we want, because we sell records.ā
Jo Bergman, video-department head, Warner Bros. Records: Anything that Standards and Practices decided was a little too risquƩ, had too much flesh, would get kicked back for recut. You had to go frame by frame because somebody thought they saw the shadow of a nipple. There was crying in the editing rooms. Tempers were raw.
Billy Idol: Pressure groups started to look in on what you were doing, and say, āOh, you offended womenās liberation,ā or whatever. In the beginning, you could have a lighted cross behind you, and people didnāt think you were trying to be the Ku Klux Klan. It wasnāt being taken quite so seriously. Now MTV wanted to control more and more what you said. You were getting, āPeople should do this in videos, they shouldnāt do that.ā
More changes were in the offing, after MTV and Nickelodeon were listed as a publicly traded company, MTV Networks Inc., in the summer of 1984, with Warner Amex retaining a controlling interest. The first alteration was the removal of Jack Schneider, and the naming of David Horowitz as president and C.E.O. A move that caused far more internal consternation was the lopsided award of stock options. Corporate behavior was now the order of the day.
Chip Rachlin, director of long-form acquisitions: Bob got 100,000 shares, vice presidents and above 10,000 shares, and then it dropped for everybody else to 25 shares for every year of service. When youāve got people in their 20s and early 30s really into what they are doing, not looking at the clock and giving you everything theyāve gotāI felt that didnāt translate.
Dom Fioravanti: Going public made you realize that MTV was more than just funāit was a big-money game. There was intense pressure every day: how we spent and managed our money; issues of ratings and demographics; how we were going to hit certain targets in order to satisfy the financial community. The ad-sales people, of course, were always interested in making money. But the programming peopleāit was difficult to get them to recognize that a corner had been turned, and that this was now a business, which needed to go in some direction other than just plain fun. That was my mission from Bob Pittman. I was supposed to be the one to provide maturity to the playpen, so to speak. It was almost sad, because it had started off in a very innocent wayāall these young kids, and all they wanted to do was create art and participate in this incredible phenomenon. But when the money began to flow, it went 180 degrees in the other direction. This was the rock ānā roll generation grown up.
Marcy Brafman: People were jockeying for positions and power. It was as if suddenly there was a realization that there was something to protect. The minute that happens, it kills the entrepreneurial edge that drives something. I noticed the change in lots of ways: the number of people who had to approve creative; the chances we were willing to take with the statements we made; the second-guessing on almost everything. They wanted everything to be corporate. It stopped wanting to be new.
Andy Setos: Everything started to get out of hand when we made money. Because then everyone realized that whoever holds on the hardest gets a lot. Thatās when it got darkāwhen the building was over, more or less, and we were much more into a maintenance mode.
Dwight Tierney, head of personnel, WASEC: I was in a meeting one day with an executive who professed long and loudlyāmore than any other exec in the companyāabout the importance of decency to people, how people were the most important thing and blah, blah, blah. And I said to her, āLook, Iāve got to talk to you about one of your execs. She humiliated a new hire in the hallway, screamed and yelled at her in public. It was absolutely appalling.ā And this executive said to me, āYeah, but did you see the numbers she brought in?ā I thought to myself, Things are really changing.
Gale Sparrow: My old boss, the nicest guy in the world, learned heād been fired when he came to work and found that all his belongings had been moved out of his office. My new boss calls me in and says, āGale, youāve been way too kind to these record company people. We have to play hardball. We want only the biggest acts, and we arenāt going to play anymore of this little bullshit stuff.ā I said, āThis ālittle bullshit stuffā put us on the map.ā I think about it for a week, decide Iām not buying it, that itās time to leave. I tell my boss and he says, āYou must have PMS.ā I say, āIām outta here.ā
Alan Hunter: Weād been loose as a goose for three or four years. There was nothing I couldnāt do, no irreverence I couldnāt be involved in. If I wanted to pick my nose on-air, I knew I could. Then one day we found we couldnāt be little kids anymore. Bob wanted more respectability for the channel. So we were sent to this communication lady, whoād coached George Bush and Dan Rather and heavy-duty people like that. Weād sit down with her and go through our little tapes. I might have made some offhand remark, like āCheck that out.ā Sheād stop the tape and go, āAlan, we need to work on your full-sentence skills.ā We did this for an hour every week for six months. It drove you crazy.
Jo Bergman: Periodically MTV would have meetings to pump you up about the new acts you were coming out with. Somehow, I got the wrong invitationānot to the label pump-you-up meeting, but to the advertiser pump-you-up meeting. It had nothing to do with music. The focus was on āYou should be buying time with us, because we are going to deliver the demographics, whatever it takes.ā That was whipping a Band-Aid from the eyes. We felt we were inventing something new. It turned out we were actually making commercials.
But MTV could still put on a great show. That was demonstrated in September 1984, when, in an extravaganza featuring Tina Turner, Huey Lewis and the News, Rod Stewart, and channel queen Madonna, the first annual MTV Video Music Awards were staged at Radio City Music Hall.
Les Garland: Up until a week before the show, Madonna didnāt know what kind of a set she wanted. But one day she calls and goes, āGarland, Iāve got it. I want a tiger. I want to lay around and sing āLike a Virginā to the tiger.ā I said, āI donāt think we can do that at Radio City. If that tiger went nuts and ate Walter Yetnikoff, Iāve got a fucking problem.ā She died laughing, and I said Iād check it out. I did, and I call her back and say they are not going to let us have any tigers at Radio City. So she comes back with a 17-foot cake we only had five days to build for her. It threw us overbudget, that frigging cake. At rehearsal, sheās climbing up the cake and has on this wedding thing with nothing else on underneath. Iām standing below her and looking up, and going, āHmmm ā¦ ā She looks down and says, āHow does my butt look?ā āLooks good from down here,ā I say.
Andy Setos: Midtown Manhattan was MTV for that evening. There were limos up and down Sixth Avenueāit was just un-freaking-believable. It was the ticket in town.
Beverly Weinstein: Everybody wanted to go: every advertiser in the world, every client in the world. I was thinking, Whoa, look at this. We are a big deal.
John Reardon: All the cable operators are in their tuxedos, and their wives are dressed to the nines, and theyāre not believing what theyāre seeing: Mayor Koch with a gloved hand, acting like Michael Jackson, Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd in their space suits. My wife and I are sitting in the fourth row, pinching ourselves. Then Madonna comes out in a wedding dress with a jeweled boy toy belt and lies down on the stage and is humpinā up and down, singing āLike a Virgin.ā Iām saying to myself, Oh my God, what are the cable operators thinking? But I didnāt lose a single customer. They talked about that night forever.
In the midst of the gaiety, MTV was girding for war. Ted Turner, whoād been railing that MTVās āsatanicā videos threatened to transform the nationās teenagers into āHitler Youth,ā unveiled plans to launch his own cable music networkāthis one to be offered free to cable operators. To lead the āCable Music Channel,ā Turner selected Scott Sassa, now the West Coast president of NBC, who had run Night Tracks, a weekly music-video show on Turnerās TBS.
Scott Sassa: Ted calls me into his office, points a finger at me, and says, āHow old are you?ā I say, āTwenty-five.ā He says, āYou are about to become the youngest person to ever run a network. How does it feel?ā Ted never had a problem with sex on TV; it was violence. Twisted Sister, for instance, had a video where they threw some kidās father out the window. We decided we were going to be family video. The announcement was in August. We launched in November.
MTV struck back with a fierce, all-fronts campaign, which included relegating performers who provided videos to Turner to the bottom of the playlist, or barring them from the channel altogether.
Tom Freston: We used every trick we could find, because basically he was attempting to put us out of business. If he could destroy our economics by making his service available for free and having people dump us, we were over. Because if you donāt have distribution in this business, you donāt have a business.
Dwight Tierney: First of all, he called us āsatanic.ā Then, when he launches on TV, he pushes a button and says, āTake that, MTV!ā He unleashed the gods when he did that. Our affiliate sales and marketing guys just went nuts. Youāre talking about a religious crusade. They worked 16, 20 hours a day, because they were not going to lose.
John Shaker: Ted Turner to that point had never had a failure. When he set his sights on MTV, we realized we were fighting the programming gorilla. We were told, āThis is it. Beat Turner or weāre finished.ā The message was in our blood. We were fighting for our lives.
As the battle heated up, MTV wheeled out the ultimate anti-Turner weapon, with its plan to launch āVH1ā (for āvideo hitsā), an adult-oriented clone of Turnerās new network. It would also be offered to cable operators without charge.
Bob Pittman: Before MTV, I was at The Movie Channel, which was going great guns until suddenly one day HBO announced this thing called āCinemax.ā So I learned about flanker brands; theyād almost killed the Movie Channel. We decided to do the same thing. Instead of MTV fighting with the Cable Music Channel, we started another service, called āVH1,ā to do battle. It was our Cinemax.
Kevin Metheny, director of programming: We picked three musical genres that wouldnāt cannibalize MTV: R&B, country, and adult contemporary. Weād have Tony Bennett, followed by Kool and the Gang, followed by Willie Nelson; the Judds, followed by Latoya Jackson, followed by Air Supply. It was very odd, and it didnāt work, but the point with VH1 was to monopolize shelf space, rather than create a successful entity.
Marcy Brafman: Around the office, we were saying that an MTV person and a VH1 person have the same Jimi Hendrix poster. The MTV person has it sort of ripped and wrinkled and curled up at the edges, and itās stuck to his wall with thumbtacks of different colors. The VH1 person has it in a frame with glass.
MTVās tactics achieved the desired results: about a month after it went on the air in 1984, Turner folded the Cable Music Channel and unloaded its assets to MTV for a token $1 million.
David Horowitz: We were at the cable Ace Awards, and I heard a familiar, hoarse voice yelling, āDave! Dave!ā I looked around and thereās Ted. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and got down on his knees and waved it in front of my face. āDave,ā he said, āyou beat our ass.ā
Kevin Metheny: One of the affiliate-relations guys had black buttons made with white text on them. The copy read something like ā696:59:59.ā We passed them out at the cable show. People would say, āWhatās the 696:59:59?ā It was the number of hours, minutes, and seconds that Ted Turnerās Cable Music Channel was on the air.
American Express, however, had tired of MTV.
James Robinson III: This was a very different business than what American Express was all about. Because of the programming, we were also getting a lot of flakāand we are supposed to be a financial-services company, with all of the proper imaging that goes with that. So both the board and some of the senior management within Amex were concernedāin some instances beyond the point I thought justified. But I had to agree that this was not core and central, and therefore not a proper allocation of manpower and capital, relative to the other things that the company should be doing.
In June 1985, American Express opened talks to sell its stake in Warner Amex to Warner Communications. Warner, in turn, negotiated to sell MTV to Viacom, purchaser of the Movie Channel. Alarmed at the prospect of being owned by the notoriously tightfisted media conglomerate, Pittman and Horowitz found financing to mount a senior-management-led leveraged buyout from Theodore Forstmannās investment firm, Forstmann Little & Co. As the dickering over terms with Warner got under way, an Irish rocker named Bob Geldolf was laying final plans for a gargantuan benefit concert to aid the victims of famine in Ethiopia. The July 13 event was christened āLive Aid.ā MTV televised the entire proceedings.
Joan Myers, les garlandās secretary: The first interview of the day was Jack Nicholson. Mark Goodman asked him some questions. And all Jack says is āI sure wish I knew how to play guitar.ā
Brian Diamond: After Jack, everything was cake. Mark Gastineau of the Jets was there; we talked to him. The Pretenders, Phil Collinsāgot them. All kinds of characters were running around backstage. I went up to the Beach Boysā manager, explained what we wanted, and he said, āHang on a sec.ā He then sits down on a bench and puts his arm around Brian Wilson and says, āO.K., Brian, we are going to do this interview, and we are going to feel good about this interview.ā I was like, āWow!ā
Joan Myers: The only one who wasnāt very cool was Madonna. She had tons of people around her saying, āDonāt look at her.ā We were all āExcuse me? I just had coffee with Bob Dylan and this one and that one, and she is saying, āDonāt look at meā?ā
Tom Freston: It was great validation for us. ABC was there, but they telescoped everything into three hours, and our ratings were in line with theirs. We were viewed as a real, legitimate player in the music and the media business. We were the centerpiece of a force in the culture. āLive Aidā took us up to a whole other level.
Sue Binford: That was a moment when you thought, This has gone beyond being a 24-hour music channel that is playing a lot of bands and selling a lot of records. That was a moment when you really appreciated where MTV was taking you.
The self-congratulation was brief. In late August a last-minute snag in the negotiations with Ross allowed Viacom to up the bidding and seize MTV.
John Sykes: We had the press release written up announcing the buyout, and we took one of the Forstmann brothers to the Springsteen concert at the Meadowlands to celebrate. And at the eleventh hour, Viacom came in and offered $525 million. We went back to Forstmann Little, and Teddy Forstmann said, āNo cable channel is worth over half a billion dollars. Weāre out.ā
Tom Freston: The new owners came in, and the first thing they say is āWe know that a lot of you have stock options and that you expect them to be paid out. Weāre not sure that legally we have to do that.ā Those were their first words. So, like, āNot only do you not know us, but weāre going to fuck youā was the message. Then it was like, āWhoa, this party is over.ā
John Sykes: They spoke to us at a management retreat. It kind of felt like I was watching a Republican convention. Basically they said, āYouāre a bunch of kids. Weāre going to show you how to run this.ā It was like having your grandfather telling you, āDo this, donāt do that.ā At that point, we all knew we were gone.
Kevin Metheny: I guess if there was one big blinding glimpse of the obvious it was that the limo rides around the block were about to be over. It seemed like a good idea to take the check and go.
Many of those whoād created MTV did go, among them Sykes, Brafman, Brindle, Rachlin, and Garland. The original V.J.ās soon departed as well, and bit by increasing bit MTV replaced its all-video programming with a more traditional āshowā format, covering aspects of the youth lifestyle beyond music. Ordering the initial changes was Bob Pittman, who replaced David Horowitz as MTV president and C.E.O. in December 1985. But after eight months Pittman resigned to embark on a high-profile career path that eventually led to his current position, president of America OnLine. Tom Freston took over Pittmanās duties at MTV, which received a welcome jolt of support when Sumner Redstone took over Viacom in June 1987. Freston continues as C.E.O. of MTV Networks, a multibillion-dollar combine that transmits in 12 languages and includes Nickelodeon, VH1, and Country Music Television (CMT). In 1994, Sykes returned to lead a top-to-bottom renovation of VH1, where he remains as president. Under the leadership of another veteran of the old days, Judy McGrath, the MTV mother ship recently launched āMTV2,ā whose programming is close to that of the channel that changed the culture, one minute past midnight, August 1, 1981.
John Lack: I said one time, āGuys, you are going to get up on a wave, and this baby is going to roll a long way. Because we are onto something here that this country is going to jump on. So donāt fuck this up, we have a big one ahead of us.ā And they believed itābecause if you looked on the screen, it was the most exciting thing you ever saw. It was television that didnāt look like television. This was rock ānā roll. And for my generation, rock ānā roll was our passion, our poetry, really. I mean, āDesperadoā is still as good as anything in any poetry book. Who said, āYou better let somebody love you before itās too lateā? Wasnāt Shakespeare, wasnāt Yeats, it was Don Henley. You better let somebody love you before itās too late. That was this generation.
