MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  EDDIE MONEY: Now, you buy everything on the Internet. But in those days, people used to go to record stores, and you'd have to have a diamond needle and a turntable that worked. They act like it's the age of the dinosaurs, but people used to buy albums. I used to work at a record store when I was a kid. In those days, I came out of Berkeley, California, which is a college town. We had a large college following — San Jose, Berkeley, Richmond, Oakland, Freemont, San Francisco. I think we were the first band to get a record deal off a VHS tape. We did a show called Sounds of the Cities, which is amateur night, at the Winterland. I told everybody, "They're going to film us. Everybody, get up to the front!" It was a rainy Tuesday night, and it looked like the place was packed. We did a great set and wound up getting a record deal with Columbia Records and Bill Graham Management.

  TOMMY TUTONE: It seemed to be a period where they had plenty of money, and they were signing a whole bunch of bands. They would sign 40 bands, and by the time they'd get done, maybe 15 of them would get started on records, and they'd get down to ten records, but they'd only promote one or two of them. The record companies were trying to be cool. I think there was a mixture of the old guys that did it the old way and new people. I know there would be people at the company that thought they were hip but didn't know anything about the record company. The guy who wrote a great column in the college newspaper, they might make him an A&R man.

  CARMINE APPICE: I was just getting ready to release my solo album, Rockers. Solo albums were easy to get. You released it, and you hired radio people. I had like 90 stations playing my solo record. It was a business. It was great. You were out there on tour. It was easy to get tours. In those days, I wouldn't leave LA unless I had my drums, my drum riser, the road crew, and the whole shtick.

  PETE ANGELUS: Of course, it was a completely different animal, a completely different world. The early '80s, in regard to Van Halen, it was really like a free-for-all, because once that record [Van Halen] got out of the gate, everything started moving very quickly. I think there was much more freedom for the artists, much more creative control from the artists back then, much more money being thrown around, much less — at least it was my experience — control from the label. Whether it was video or stage production or lighting design or marketing ideas or publicity stunts we pulled off, we really had complete creative control and a blank canvas to paint on. We really didn't have anybody standing in our path with too many objections or too many ideas that contradicted the way we wanted to go. So I would say it was a completely different world from where the music business is today. And in my opinion, it was a preferable world, only because there was so much more money being put up by the labels and so much more freedom in that regard.

  ALDO NOVA: It had a lot of record companies. People were actually looking for talent, rather than a fast buck like now. If you're over thirteen, you can't get a record deal. Now, if you're not Miley Cyrus or the Jonas Brothers, nobody wants to sign you. Back then, it was great. I got signed by a publishing company first that heard my stuff. Then, my demos became the record.

  TONI BASIL: I wasn't signed by a record company. I was signed for a video album deal, from Europe. So I wasn't really dealing with the American record scene. I made actually seven videos before the songs were really released. I didn't make an album. They released a song, and I made a video for that. And I did it through a European company, so I had nobody breathing down my neck. They just sent me money to do videos. I did three, they loved them, I did more, and then I got a recording deal, out of those videos.

  THOMAS DOLBY: The music business was very locked into radio and the Billboard chart. And the only way to break as an artist was to get massive radio play, and then chart, get more radio play, and so on.

  GLENN TILBROOK: The music industry...certainly, radio seemed behind the times, as far as I was concerned in America. Now, several factors played into that. I think stuff that was happening, radio wasn't really ready to pick up on. There were honorable exceptions — KSAN in San Francisco and WNEW or WPLJ in New York. Squeeze was getting airplay in some key markets. But a lot of bands that were part of the same sort of music couldn't get airplay.

  DAVE WAKELING: It was as though college radio was busting to go mainstream but couldn't do it through radio because they already had its own lock on it. And it seemed that video was the vehicle. There was a lot of stuff that had been "college darlings" for a few years were now some of the first acts to get the audio/visual side down.

  DEBORA IYALL: College radio was really the only way to get airplay when we first started. The first time we went on a tour, we pretty much only went to college radio stations to make visits. In San Francisco, we had two really strong college radio stations — KUSF in San Francisco and KALX in Berkeley. In L.A., there was college radio out of Long Beach that was big. I can't remember a lot of others, but I sure remember going to campuses and going down into basements to do interviews. It was kind of a great social thing for us, too. We felt a lot of kinship with the fandom with the DJs that we'd meet, because we were all discovering the same bands at the same time. We didn't hear what we were listening to on the radio.

  MARKY RAMONE: In '79/'80, the music business was bloated. Stadium rock, over-indulgence, who could play the fastest guitar, who could do the fastest drum solo. Songs on an album were like eight minutes long. You saw an album, and they only had like five songs on it. It was the end of the disco era, basically.

  PHIL COLLEN: I think it was nearing the end of a little cycle. You always have these cycles. When punk rock emerged in England, everything had gotten really safe and staid and a little bit boring. There was a need for a change, and there always is. Whether it's socially, politically, or whatever, music just reflects that, really. But I think you had a bit of a doldrums thing.

  KATHY VALENTINE: It just seemed like the music industry was on the tail-end of realizing that the scope of music had changed. That taste had changed. There was an audience for bands in the late '70s — the Eagles, Yes, Genesis — and all that big, over-produced stuff. It seemed to me that the music industry by '81 had woken up and realized that there was a new thing going on.

  JOHN DOE: There's a lot of revisionist history about punk rock. People wanted to have impact and wanted to make a living and be an artist. If I were to sum it up, I'd say the music industry was pretty naïve at that point. There were so many fewer bands, so many fewer media outlets. It's like the reverse of now.

  STAN RIDGWAY: There were independent labels that were popping up, because there was a scene that had started in 1975/1976 with punk rock, so there were a number of people that were just enthusiasts more than business people that were putting out records, even singles. Labels like Dangerhouse in Los Angeles. Greg Shaw had his Bomp! Records thing going on. And once that grew a little larger, people tried to hook up with distributors, and I remember one of them being Greenworld Distribution. It was pretty exciting, because we were all just starting out.

  JELLO BIAFRA: In the early '80s, the "business side" of the music business was at least as ugly as it is today, but the biz and the underground were a lot less friendly towards each other. There seemed to have been a pattern, if not a policy, starting in early '78, where there was a "We don't want another '60s. We will not sign any punk bands...but new wave is OK. So if you want your record contract, you better put on those skinny pink ties and become a little more harmless, or you'll be pushed out to the fringe." And the beauty of that was punk and some of the related, more artsy music got more unusual and extreme in response because there was no more constraints. "Getting signed," so to speak, was no longer an option anyway, and some of us never wanted that to begin with. We'd seen how strong the independent scene had become in Great Britain, to the point where it was penetrating the mainstream on its own terms. So we thought, "Even if we don't penetrate the mainstream, why not just continue to operate on our own terms?"

  WALLY PALMAR: We were just trying to find our niche, and the record company was trying to find the nic
he for us. And sometimes, that came from categorizing, "Where do we fit in?" They were always trying to label us at that point. Us coming out in '77, we were a punk band but didn't really fit the punk "image." We were then classified as a new wave band and then a power pop band at some point. Trying to put labels and trying to fit you in a certain category.

  JOHN MURPHY: The bottom sorta fell out in mid-'79. Returns were pouring in, and it seemed record companies across the board weren't selling what they thought they had, after a flush few years during the phenomenal success of albums like Rumours, Frampton Comes Alive, and the debut Cars LP. By the time our record, Present Tense, came out in the fall, they were banking on two long-awaited albums to "save" the industry, The Long Run and Tusk. So the early '80s were a bit tentative for the record companies. Tastes were changing, the tried-and-true dinosaur acts had gotten a swift kick in the pants from the already-fizzled punk movement, and everything coming down the pike was labeled new wave. A lot of fresh and exciting stuff was popping up, but the companies had to figure out how to market it…I mean, what was a song like "Heart of Glass"? New wave? Disco? Rock? Bands like Talking Heads, Devo, the Ramones, and Cheap Trick were mixing it up as well. Disco music per se had finally been kicked to the curb, but the beat survived, and a rash of synth bands with extreme haircuts were prancin' around. It really felt like a period of transition.

  ART BARNES: That time period is certainly not a great one. Lots of cocaine floating around the big money companies, and many vintage artists seemed to dry up then. I liked what the Stones were doing...Bowie was interesting then. Springsteen, the Pretenders, Devo, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police...all that was good and musical and interesting. But there was a lot of fashion bullshit, and it was the dawn of drum machines, which, looking back, was really lame. It eliminated dynamics, created a template of sterile perfection, and made it easy for non-musical people to have dance hits. There was also a lot of disco still being made and overblown arrangements on big hits. Not my favorite era at all.

  MARTHA DAVIS: But the '80s, everybody just went their own way. Nobody wanted to sound like anybody else. Nobody wanted to look like anybody else. Everybody wanted their own identity. And I think the diversity of the era is what made it so fantastic and wonderful.

  JEFF MURPHY: The industry was in flux, as it always seems to be. There was a growing backlash to the success of the Knack, mainly because of the overt Beatles marketing approach, and a lot of "pop" bands were being dismissed off-hand. New wave — whatever that was — was being tossed around as the latest musical term for almost any new band, regardless of musical genre. LP sales were on the decline, and the industry blamed tape copying. Bands were encouraged to be more flamboyant and flashy, neither of which we were comfortable with.

  BOOTSY COLLINS: The music business was changing, a lot with the sound of it and the way it was exposed to the public. For the raw street music, it started to get more difficult to get play for your music, because it had to be more polished than previous years. But the change was good for some that fit this mode.

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: It was like the Wild West. Music was a mecca you could just come to and take your shot. It was like the "gold rush days," going to California for the gold rush, that's what the music business represented for inner-city cats, especially. The music business was like the Wild West. Cats went to the West to try and strike it rich, and they got there, and there was no blueprint, no guideline, no floor plan. They just got in and did whatever they could do and hope for the best. But a couple of cats had a little more going for them. What I think happened is when music was on the street — especially with hip-hop — a lot of cats that really could have blew up huge as far as the music was concerned, they lacked the tools necessary to take them, as far as their ability, to handle business. So that's why the mentality wasn't really geared towards handling business at that level, because cats were used to going to work or hustling or whatever.

  ANGELO MOORE: It was a time of innocence. We got raped, we were taken advantage of and were just paying attention to our music, and we didn't know how to pay attention to the money. And a lot of people ripped us off, like the record company, the management, and probably the agent, too. You're an artist, and you don't know what the fuck is going on, and they're just booking you, and you're making this money, and you see all the thousands of people out there, and you come home, and the accountant says, "You ain't got no money." Somebody's fucking up somewhere. Somebody's stealing from somebody. We signed a contract with Sony/Columbia. We signed contracts, and we didn't know what the fuck we were signing. We didn't know we were selling our soul to the damn devil, all kinds of shit. Getting into contracts that last up to 15 years, and you can't use your own music. It's just the education, man. Being in the music business was, and still is, an education. “The education of hard knocks.” Reading in between the lines, because we didn't read in between them lines. They've got shit in there that says, "For perpetuity," and you know what that means...that means forever.

  COLIN HAY: The record label that we signed to was CBS, which then became Sony-CBS in Australia. I supposed we had a mistrust of record companies, and we were very suspicious of their motivations. We were given reason for that, too. I mean, we had almost a criminally bad record deal, even for then. It wasn't as bad as the acts would have gotten in the '50s and '60s, but our deal was horrible. But it was the only game in town. It was the only label that was interested in us, and it was really one of the only labels that we were interested in. We had supporters from CBS affiliates in different parts of the world. There was a convention around that particular time, and they played "Who Can It Be Now?" at that convention. And there was the CBS label in Switzerland, the CBS label in Israel, different countries around the world that saw the potential of our band and released the album, and it did very well. But the country that really was the hardest country to crack was the United States, because our album was actually rejected twice. The A&R department didn't want to release our album, because they didn't think there was a hit on it. Even though it was gaining all this success in different parts of the world, they couldn't see it. We were amazed at the level of idiocy that we struck with record company executives, who were in strong positions of power. We just thought, more than anything, the music business was like an obstacle course. It had nothing to do with what we were interested in, which was to be as creative as possible and get to as many people as possible. This was an obstacle course that had to be maneuvered and negotiated.

  Todd Rundgren Has an Idea...

  TODD RUNDGREN: I had a video studio at the time. It was a fascination I had, and I leveraged a lot of the initial royalties that I got from Bat Out of Hell [which Todd produced for Meat Loaf] to build a video studio in Bearsville, New York. We started producing videos of all kinds and allowing other people to come in. Most of it involved more conceptual or experimental things, in that we had a big green screen up, chroma key, and other effects-oriented stuff. At one point, I think we did a Utopia [video], and we had a very highly choreographed and conceptual sort of approach to it. I remember sending it to England, where the record label wanted to have some promotion, and them just being incredibly upset. It wasn't the typical kind of stuff of either singing a song or getting a bunch of pretty people around while you sang the song. Essentially, that was what the expectations were out of video.

  ROGER POWELL: We started experimenting with video technology in the late '70s. Todd and I were "the technologists" of the group. He built a two-million dollar, state-of-the-art video studio. Albert Grossman was the manager of the band and Todd. He was also Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin's manager. I had a contact at EMS Studios of London, which was a company that made very early sound synthesizers, around the time that Moog was first becoming popular, and the resident genius there in London had put together a video synthesizer. A digital video synthesizer. I hooked Todd up with EMS, and he got one of the first digital synthesizers. So then he started accumulating other equipment. He got Umat
ic tape recorders and cameras. First, it was in his home, but then it got so that there was too much stuff, so the thought was to start a company, Utopia Video. Then it got to the point where it was, "We should build something with a soundstage." So we had a pretty big soundstage, 43 x 41 feet, everything all done up, the latest cameras, a mini-computer controlling things, computerized lighting. So we were starting to make videos at that time. Actually, the first thing that he was going to work on was a video disc project using Tomita's The Planets. This was before the record companies had any inkling of what was going to happen with video, and they didn't have anybody in the record company departments who knew anything about all this or could see any market for it. So they just couldn't figure out what they were going to do with this. He pitched it to RCA, I think. RCA and MCA were the earliest video disc companies. And they were like, "We don't know what to do with this." So it remained as a demo. But that got the whole studio thing started. And then we did a handful of videos. We were one of the first bands to do music home videos. This was negotiated by our manager, Eric Gardner. One of them I know came out on Sony. These are VHS or Beta tapes. This is '78 and '79. So then we started thinking there might be a market for these things on TV. And by the way, I'm refreshing my memory by a book by Billy James, A Dream Goes On Forever: The Continuing Story of Todd Rundgren, Volume Two.