MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  TODD RUNDGREN: The irony is that my business manager at the time, Eric Gardner, after I made the investment, got the idea that we should get a satellite channel and collect all these promotional videos. And [we] came up with this idea of a VJ, as opposed to a DJ. Somebody who would sit there and just play all these videos. And we actually put a $10,000 deposit down on a transponder channel for a satellite. This is when there were very few video satellites. Video was still, in many places, being transferred over landlines. In any case, this whole idea of satellite-based televisions and more channels being available, this was happening in the industry, where every couple of months, another satellite would go up. And essentially, all of the channels on them were pre-sold. I think there were 24 channels per satellite. So we got on a wait-list to get a satellite channel.

  ROGER POWELL: Todd put a deposit down in '78 for a satellite transponder that was going to be launched in '79. We were looking at hiring VJs, and we hired a guy named John Zacherley, who was a radio personality and did vampire characterizations. So we were all set with the video studio. We were going to do live concerts from there. We were going to bring people in. And because of fate, it didn't go down that way.

  TODD RUNDGREN: What happened was, at a certain point, one of the satellites got lost! They sent up a satellite, and it didn't find its orbit, or the rocket had to be self-destructed or something like that. And everyone got pushed down on the list. At a certain point, we said, "This is taking too long."

  ROGER POWELL: I should also mention that we were one of the first bands to make separate deals for video rights in our contracts. That's the other thing that I remember about the music business. All the record company contracts, like if you were signed up by a major, the wording was they would retain the rights to "aural and visual." And everybody thought, "Well, that just means that they own the artwork for the album covers or the promotional photos." And that ended up tying up a lot of people when the video age was ushered in. These guys went, "Uh-oh...we could have made a separate deal for these videos."

  TODD RUNDGREN: So my manager and I took a meeting with Viacom and took this idea to them, because they already had the transponder channels. And they kind of didn't — or pretended that they didn't — hear the idea. They didn't think it was a cool idea. And then it seemed like, within months, Viacom announced this MTV channel. So maybe when we took the meeting, they already had the idea, but they weren't ready to talk about it or something like that. But essentially, it was at a time when the idea was just ripe to happen.

  Bob Pittman/Preparing for Lift-Off

  BOB PITTMAN: I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. I consider my hometown Brookhaven, Mississippi, but I moved around Mississippi a bit as a kid. As a teenager, I was a radio disc jockey and wound up programming radio stations by the time I was 19 in Pittsburgh. Went to WMAQ, which was the NBC station in Chicago, when I was 20, and then they gave me the FM station. The AM was country; the FM was album rock. And then I came to New York to WNBC when I was 23. It was when American Express bought half of Warner Cable. They formed a company called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, and they recruited me as their head of programming. So at the age of 25, I went off and did the Movie Channel. And the Movie Channel did very well at first, before HBO figured out what we were doing and created Cinemax, to do what we did. The company wanted to build another network, and I had done a TV show on NBC called Album Tracks, which ran after Saturday Night Live, which played a little bit of music videos, some music news. So I pitched the idea of, "Let's do a video radio station." My boss, a guy named John Lack, loved the idea, loved music, and thought it would be wonderful. John had this vision. John was the executive vice president of the company and had been a sales guy through the sales rank and had been at CBS and ran the rep firm. Really came out of that "old CBS executive mold." And unlike the CBS executives, John thought, "If this company narrowcasts, I need a radio programmer here to be my programmer, not a TV programmer." And that was a big fight. John was the executive vice president, in charge of sales, marketing, and programming. And Jack Schneider was the CEO of the company. Jack had been the president of CBS, a very big, important figure in the TV business. John wanted to hire me, and Jack didn't. So John had a great idea. There was a legendary TV programmer at CBS, Michael Dan. They had Mike Dan on retainer, so they send me to see Mike. Mike interviews me, calls Jack Schneider up, and says, "Yes, he can do the job. You should hire this kid." So off I went to put together the team, which included John [Sykes] and Tom Freston. Les [Garland] wasn't there originally — Les joined a year later — and Fred Seibert. We were also all kids. We were all in our twenties. I think Freston may have been 30/31/32. We were out trying to convince people that we were serious. One of the hallmarks of the MTV guys was, every time we went anywhere, we wore suits. And we wore suits because nobody would take us seriously otherwise. So we said, "OK, we're going to be the guys that always dress up, so it's going to be a suit and a tie." We'd go to concerts in suits and ties. That was sort of our deal. And it came about because we were trying to be taken a little more seriously than a bunch of kids trying to start this network.

  GERALD CASALE: Bill Gerber, who was working for Elliot Roberts [Devo's manager] and was our personal guy at management, he was young and gung-ho and "in the know." Plugged into all the right people. And he said, "There's this cool new thing that they're going to do, and I want you to meet these guys. I want you and Mark [Mothersbaugh] to come to lunch." I think it was at Giuseppe's in L.A. We're sitting there, and two guys walk in, completely looking like preppie, east coast businessmen. You know, navy blue suits, Brooks Brothers shirts but without the tie on, cordovon shoes. And it was Bob Pittman and John Sykes. They were very caffeinated and very up and very articulate. They started telling us about this great new thing they were going to do, but they needed our videos because they hardly had any programming. They were going to make us "huge stars"...but they weren't going to pay us anything. They were going to expose us to millions. And it was just such a strange meeting, because they were so preppie and corporate and talking like...trying to be hip about music. And what made it even stranger was, just before lunch, Bill says — and this is like a set-up, like a joke on Saturday Night Live — "Each one of these guys has one glass eye, so don't look at them funny. Don't blow it. Act normal." Of course, once somebody tells you that, it's like when somebody has a big mole, you just stare at it. And plus, it was so bizarre that these two guys that would kind of revolutionize the business of music would each have one glass eye! It was really wild. And then we find out that Bob is the son of a Baptist preacher or something, and it got even stranger. So we were elated that so many people would get to see us.

  BOB PITTMAN: It's funny the way it sort of feels like today, except instead of the Internet, it was cable. Cable had not been in the major cities. It had only been in rural America, rebroadcasting distant signals for markets that had no broadcast signals coming into it. The '70s were about beginning to build out the major cities. I think, when we launched MTV, only about 20 million U.S. households had cable. They were just beginning to build out Dallas, Houston, and towns like that. So we were right there at the beginning. Everybody was trying to figure out what it was going to be. Every cable convention had a panel about narrowcast, and Kay Koplovitz from the USA Network was on the panel, and I was on the panel. And we'd argue about, "No, no, no, it's going to be one channel for one subject, and the consumer will watch different channels and put together their own array of programming, a little bit of news, a little MTV, a little sports, or whatever they want. Instead of the network programmer programming this, the consumer will." And they would say, "No, no, no. You have to do the big rating, so everything looks like ABC, NBC, CBS." FOX didn't come along yet. So that was the tone of the period. And, by the way, everybody was talking about every subject matter was a narrowcast channel, so it wasn't like we dreamed up music out of nowhere. As a matter of fact, there were already people doing it. There was a service called Video
Concert Hall that was already on the air. It was sort of hard to claim credit for "We figured out music on TV." But I think what we did was figure out how to make music on TV work. We were more "Henry Ford" than "the inventor of the automobile." And I think one of the primary things we did was we were the first network to really make the network the identity, as opposed to the show. The second thing we did was everybody had tried to make music work on TV by making music fit into the TV form. We said, "No, no, no, that's backwards. What we're going to do is change TV to make the TV form fit music," being that TV was all about story arcs and shows, and music was about mood and emotion. So we said, "This is going to be about mood and emotion. All attitude."

  MIKE PELECH: I was a staff cameraman at a company called Teletronics in New York, which was just a great, high-end videotape company. The company was on the east side of New York. We purchased a film studio, called Flickers, and converted it into a video studio, with the lighting grid and air conditioning. We were probably going to keep doing television commercials and industrials, until the MTV people were looking for a studio. I forget the exact connection. I think it was a salesperson by the name of Shelly Reiss that brought them in to look at our facility. We were doing videotape from beginning to end, so the editorial process was very important also. We wound up using that studio on 33rd Street, between 10th and 11th. The studio is still there. I believe it is owned by a company called NEP. It's right behind a McDonald's, the only drive-through McDonald's in Manhattan. The neighborhood was terrible when we first moved in, a lot of prostitutes and derelict buildings. It was an awful, awful neighborhood. But it was a great little studio. We worked that whole spring and summer of '81, so probably around January of '81, we threw a lot of stuff out and got ready for all the renovations to make it a functioning cable television studio.

  ROBIN ZORN: I was the first production person really hired. Sue Steinberg was the original executive producer, and she was there before me, but I was the first person on the actual production team I believe that was hired. The production team are the people that did all the VJ stuff, all the segments in the studio. I got there because I had worked with some people at ABC as an intern. One interview led to another, and I met someone at Warner-Amex, and they were setting up MTV, the Movie Channel, Nick — there were four or five channels — and said, "You'd be perfect for a PA on any of these. Which one do you want?" And I was like, "I'm 22...I want to work in rock n' roll!" That's how I got to MTV. In the very beginning, it was just a few of us in a hotel. We were at I think the Sheraton, and what I remember about the early days is it was myself and Susan Strong, who was a woman who worked in promotions, and a few other people.

  KEN CEIZLER: I was initially hired as a director. I graduated from NYU Film & Television, and while there, I had a good friend, Rene Garcia. While I was out in Los Angeles looking for work, he told me that there was a new cable company starting up. They were doing something with music, and they were looking for directors. And I happened to be coming home. I was born and bred in New York. I came back and got an interview with Sue Steinberg. We hit it off, and she walked me down the hall to meet with Robert Morton, who at that time, I believe was the creative director, and we also hit if off. The next I know, I was hired, and I was one of three directors. And the three of us were responsible for the VJ segments that would be recorded at the studio.

  BOB PITTMAN: The challenge we had with VJs — and I'd programmed radio a good bit — what you realized is listeners/viewers want to bond with a human being. They don't want to bond with a machine. No one says, "They've got the best jukebox down at Bob's Restaurant." But they'd say, "Wow, Z100 is fantastic!" It has a human feel to it, and that's because there are human beings on it. And what we realized is we didn't need VJs. We didn't need human beings to play the videos. We could just play the videos. But then there would be nothing to bond to. We'd look like a delivery system or a vending machine. And so the idea was to hire human beings to give it something for the consumer to bond to.

  ROBIN ZORN: We were in a room, literally, going through audition tapes of the VJs. That's how early I was there. It was totally arbitrary. "That one's cute. That one's not cute." A lot of people there didn't have a lot of experience with anything. I mean, I had worked in TV, but again, I was 22 and [had] not done a lot of TV.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: I was born in Massachusetts, but I grew up in Cleveland, which is "the rock n' roll capital of the world." I just had a deep love for rock n' roll and loved radio. I had a manager [Danny Sheridan] — he's still my manager, all these years later — and you can only get so far with the things I wanted to do in Cleveland. So I remember one wintry day, Danny took out a map and said, "Should we go to New York or L.A.?" He hates cold weather, so he put the push-pin into L.A. We packed up our stuff, and he went out first. He found a house, and he also had a band. So the band moved out, and then I moved out, drove cross-country in my little MG Midget that was overheating every few hundred miles. Got to L.A. and started pursuing the same things, more on the acting front. Got the agent and studied at Strasberg. My day gig — which was actually at night — was playing my harp. I played six to seven nights a week. And then my manager met a guy, Michael Seinherdt, who was already working with video. He had tapped into this video music thing that was happening in Europe at the time, promotional films. Michael and I came up with this television pilot, basically, that I was functioning as a host, kind of like a VJ, but it didn't have a name. Interviewing and going out on the street. The punk and new wave scene was happening out there, so we'd go down to Chinatown at Madame Wong's, and do "man on the street" things. It was really much more punk-oriented. I don't like needles, so I never got a real tattoo, but I had this fake tattoo on the side of my arm that said "BAD." I was working on that, and then I ran into two separate other producers, one was a film student at UCLA, but he wanted to do a video show. I was working with him. His name is Brad, but I don't remember his last name, and another guy, Stan Neon. He actually came up to me and said, "I'm working on this idea of a show with music." It was this TV show that was music-driven but really out there, like had me playing harp and then hitting me in the face with a pie and working with visual artists. So I was working on those three things, and I always read Billboard and the trades. One morning, I was having breakfast, reading the trades, and I saw this article about this 24-hour video music channel that was looking for hosts that they were calling "video jockeys." And I go, "Oh my God, that's what I'm doing!" I wanted to stand out, so I'm getting my 8 x 10 and my bio together, and my manager walks by and sees me. I had these crayons out. You know, trying to make it look real "punk." [Laughs] And I remember him saying to me, "You know Nina, there's such a thing called 'color Xerox'." So he doctored up the picture. It was cool. Sent that and hadn't heard from them...then I got a call, and they were holding auditions. People from New York were coming to L.A. I went down dressed head-to-toe black in L.A. I remember sweating. Did the first audition and thought it went well. They came back out and did another audition, this time with a mock interview, and I thought it went well. And then I didn't hear from them for a while. I'm not cocky, and I don't ever assume that I got a job or deserve to get a job, but for some reason, for this one I kept saying, "How many other people in this country at this period of time are even working on these projects?" Because, really, it was not even a glimmer in most peoples' eye — video music. So I said, "If they don't hire someone like me...who are they going to hire?" And I don't mean that in an egotistical way. It was just like, I was already doing it. And sure enough, I got a call, and they said, "We want to fly you to New York and meet with Bob Pittman. We think we want to hire you." They said they were going to hire me, but the big thing was, "You have to move to New York." I didn't know that. I thought, "Satellite communication, you can do it from L.A." Moved to New York.

  ROBIN ZORN: Alan's audition was really funny, because nobody there thought he would get hired. He wasn't great. He was funny and really cute, but he just didn't seem to really hav
e it together and didn't seem really "rock n' roll-ish."

  ALAN HUNTER: I'm a southern boy, born in 1957. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and went to college in Jackson, Mississippi, at a place called Millsaps College, a fine liberal arts school. I got a degree in psychology and had every intention of becoming a psychologist, probably a counselor of some sort. But did a lot of theater, so after I got out of school, I did a year of theater in Birmingham. After that year [1980], I went to New York. I became a bartender and a waiter and acted in some stuff. It was less than a year that I got the job at MTV. The right place, right time. Because I went to school in Millsaps, most every state has some sort of summer picnic up in New York City, and they'll take over the park for a day and scare everybody. Obviously, the Confederate flag waving at the Mississippi picnic was scaring everybody else in the park! So I was at what was called "The Way Up North Mississippi Picnic," hanging out in my shorts, wondering what my career was going to be. And Bob Pittman is a fellow Mississippian. He just happened to be there, and we bumped into each other. I told him I was a lonely actor, and he said he was starting this new cable channel soon. I had no idea what he was talking about. But two or three weeks later, I got a call from the executive producer, who said, "Bob bumped into you. Maybe you should come and audition." It was total serendipity up to a point. If I wasn't in New York City, I wouldn't have bumped into the right people. That was the summer of 1981, I think May or June. And MTV started August 1, so I got hired the first week of July. I had three weeks to get my act together before we started on the air.