MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  ERIC BLOOM: It was watchable...if you wanted to watch rock videos. And being in the business, I would watch to compare, to say, "That was cool" or "That sucked." So I had a different eye than just a person not in the music business watching MTV.

  FEE WAYBILL: When MTV first started, it was so exciting, and it was such a great marketing tool...although, I thought that pretty much it didn't suit the Tubes. We were just too weird. MTV was too straight. It was appealing to the lowest common denominator. It was like doing a "family show." And the Tubes were never really much of a "family show of a band," at least back then we weren't. We've gotten smart now, because like everybody else, we want the gig. We want the money. But it was a family show, and we weren't huge fans.

  JELLO BIAFRA: There was still this grey area. For example, not knowing any better, the Dead Kennedys' guitarist, East Bay Ray, helped ram through a deal to hook the Dead Kennedys up with Faulty Product, which was the independent distribution arm of IRS Records, run by Miles Copeland. And around the time of our second album, Plastic Surgery Disasters, the word came down from our manager, Mike Vraney, that Faulty wanted a video clip of "Moon Over Marin," and they wanted the band to pay for it themselves. And he was all enthusiastic, even though the band didn't have that kind of money. We felt that since they were already in arrears with our royalties — deliberately as it turned out — that Faulty should be paying for this, if they wanted it that bad. Plus, we noticed that our British label wasn't as interested in that, and that would have been the main area where something like that would have been played. And the more I was exposed to MTV, the more I thought it was just plain stupid. I've never been a big fan of lip-synching, and part of what rekindled my desire to get on stage and be in a band was seeing live bands shot in the raw on shows like In Concert, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and even The Midnight Special, to the degree that The Midnight Special was bands playing live. But my favorite, by far, was In Concert, and that's what I thought good music video should reflect, is really hot performances in front of a real audience by live bands. I still feel that way.

  JOHN DOE: We were part of a pretty independent bunch of bands and felt that MTV was just part of the corporate mess. I don't think any of the members of X had a whole lot of respect for it. [Laughs] For better or for worse, saying, "This is a bunch of bullshit. This is part of 'the man.'" Meanwhile, two years later, we signed with Elektra, which is part of “the man.”

  DAVE WAKELING: It was bright and sparkly, and it was new. So I couldn't see any of the pitfalls, particularly when they were showing one of our videos. It seemed like the most natural extension of the pop world ever to me. And it did introduce you to another set of fans, like another level of mass-marketing. Because people would leave MTV on all day, like people would do with the radio on in the background. And sometimes, people would just leave it on all day with the sound down and then turn it up only if it was the band they liked or something that caught their eye enough.

  GLENN TILBROOK: I always had an ambivalent relationship with video. I was much more of a traditional "let the music do the talking" sort of guy. However, we had fun with videos. I think there were some people who decided not to get involved at all. And really, it's like trying to say, "Stereo isn't coming" or "DVDs aren't going to work," or whatever the new thing that happens. You just have to go with it, because it's going to be, regardless of what you think about it. I think also the thing about when it started up, because it was a new medium, it was a new way of getting across. The rule book wasn't in place, the same way that it was for radio. So it was tremendously free. It could do what it wanted.

  JELLO BIAFRA: Maybe I had too much of a gut-level negative reaction, but it occurred to me early on that the name "Dead Kennedys" was going to be enough that MTV would never play us anyway, so why bother? Plus, how can you turn a Dead Kennedys song into some sex, drugs, and rock n' roll thing...well no, take out the "drugs" — it's MTV — with me as the silent film comedian, mouthing the words, trying to look cute. My stuff was never supposed to be cute, any more than it was supposed to be used in TV commercials or something like that. The purpose is to provoke, not to soothe. Maybe I would have felt differently if I blundered into a video director who was so "out there" that we struck a chord from the very beginning, like I did with a collage artist, Winston Smith, who has done so many of my album covers. You never know what could have happened, but then again, who the hell would have shown it? The way they were laying it down then was, "This is the way music is going to go. From now on, there is no point in even writing a song unless you know what it's going to look like on TV." And that occurred to me instantly, "Well, even if that's what the major labels think, I think this is bullshit, and so do most of my peers, so I'm not even going to worry about it." I've realized that I'm almost alone in how little I've cared about mainstream pop culture, ever since I discovered non-mainstream culture and got off the radio grid when I was about thirteen or fourteen years old. By the time I was 15, I was just buying records whose covers I thought looked cool or had gotten negative reviews in the mainstream paper. When the review critic of the Denver Post says, "Paul Simon and the Bee Gees are the greatest composers of the 20th Century," then turns around and says, "Black Sabbath is almost as bad as the MC5," someone like me is going to know immediately to run out and search for MC5 albums the same day. To me, it kind of smelled like major labels trying to bring back the era of Pat Boone and Connie Francis, and I wanted no part of it.

  BOOTSY COLLINS: I thought of it as a very white Ed Sullivan Show that was in color but in style with the youngsters that could afford cable TV. It catered to that certain market. And for what it was, I think it worked.

  DAVE MARSH: I'm a journalist. I train myself to see what's there and what's not there. And there were some pretty glaring absences. There was an absence of history, to start with. Pittman, who was one of the most idiotic PR people I've ever come across, made a big point of their all-white playlist. And I was outraged by that. The videos themselves weren't much. Now, my wife works in the record business. I've been around record companies since I was 19/20 years old, so I knew how new — particularly live clips — were and weren't. They were new to America, but people were making live clips for Europe for a couple of decades. And that never gets talked about.

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: It was unfortunate, but they were a bit strict in who they let in the club in those days. It got better as time moved on. But when I first saw video, I knew this was the next level. This was where it was going.

  JOHN DOE: My introduction to MTV was them coming to interview us at our old rehearsal space. I clearly recall them asking me to do a promo and me saying, "Hi, I'm John Doe, and you're watching 'Empty TV'" because I didn't have a lot of respect for television. I still don't. Television is kind of crap, and I thought, "What, this is another means to remove fans from the music? Excellent. Not excellent. This is dumb." It's kind of like Facebook right now. It's another marketing tool, and marketing is always at odds with art.

  DARYL HALL: My memories are almost like we were living there. We were so involved in MTV on so many levels. They would invent contests just to use us. Like John and I did this thing where John got in a jet in California, and I got in a jet in New York with MTV winners and we raced across the United States to see who would win the jet race with these people, and we raced to the center of the United States. Crazy things like that. And we used to do commercials for MTV. Like anything that's new, they didn't really know what they were doing. They obviously had an idea, a very strong idea, that it was going to be a show that was going to show music videos. In between, they were sort of clueless of what they were doing. They had all this time to fill in between. They had their VJs, but they didn't really know how to script. They treated it as if it was it used to be in the early '70s, the underground radio format, where people would sort of talk. And at the end of whatever little conversation they had — stream-of-consciousness thing — they'd say, "Oh, and here's a Pat Benatar video." They had so much time
to kill, they used to ask us with a certain amount of regularity to come on and just fill time. I remember a Christmas show where it seemed like we were on for four hours. I don't know how long, but it seemed that long, and we did a whole shift. We would just say pretty much anything that we wanted to, and they'd say, "OK, now it's time to introduce the video," and we'd just babble on and introduce the video. I remember one time, we had our band come on, and we all just cooked. We made scrambled eggs! It was really, really loose.

  JOE ELLIOTT: It was brand new, the way it was edited together. The little stuff they did between [sings the "MTV top of the hour theme"], the big M and the spaceman holding the flag. They had some wacky little stuff between programs that probably gave a video director a break. Like, "We need you to make this thing. It's only going to be 20 seconds long." That's where a lot of people get their breaks to do stuff.

  KATHY VALENTINE: That was back in the days where there were a lot of all-nighters, so it was great to have "somebody" to stay up with.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: Here's the scene in '81/'82/'83. In the early days of MTV, around the New York/Philadelphia area, if someone had an apartment and had cable, the thing to do is people would have MTV on the TV, and they'd turn the sound down. And then, they would play loud music, like the best of Motown or the Rolling Stones or something. You'd have trash cans full of beer, and you'd have these "MTV parties." People would all come over and talk. They'd have MTV on, but they wouldn't have the sound on. And people were so hooked on it, they were just watching it. "Oh, that's my favorite video," or "I saw this guy play in Detroit," or "This band, the Go-Go's, is going to be really big."

  ANN WILSON: When you turned it on, you felt, "We can invite people over and sit down and have a party and have MTV on." It was a great gathering point for people. I can remember going over to England when it first came out in America — they didn't have it over there yet — and going out to dinner with a bunch of English record guys and just expounding the whole time about this brilliant new thing that's on TV.

  JOE ELLIOTT: We used to watch MTV, and if you saw a video that you'd seen enough, you'd go and pour yourself a drink, come back, and sit on the edge of the bed.

  JELLO BIAFRA: I didn't have cable in my house for 20 years, in part because, that way, no bands crashing on my floor could watch MTV on my time.

  GREG HAWKES: Back then, it really was a rock n' roll channel.

  VJs

  GEDDY LEE: It's hard to say. They were personalities, and I think they wanted to establish these personalities in a way that would garner them a following, much like the early days of FM radio. Obviously, that kind of fell by [the] wayside over time. But I think it was very personality-driven in the early days.

  COLIN HAY: Well, they brought themselves. They brought their own personalities. I think that they were quite largely responsible for the success of the channel as well, because people had someone they could relate to on camera. It wasn't just a face-less channel. They had personalities to connect to.

  KATHY VALENTINE: They seemed more like fans than celebrities or people that wanted to be celebrities. I thought that had a sincerity to it that was really, really nice.

  ANN WILSON: I loved those guys. They were all amazing. They weren't quite as sarcastic and ironic as the VJs are now. They were still really behind rock, and they really seemed like rock fans. Like, "We've got something in our pocket we want to show you."

  MICKEY THOMAS: They just loved exposing the music, videos, and art to people and were truly excited about it. And were fans of all the bands and musicians that they were promoting.

  STAN RIDGWAY: They were hosts, so you did get some information from them, about how something was made or what they were up to. My goodness, it seems really innocent and naïve at this point remembering it, almost like a fireside chat or something.

  TOMMY TUTONE: They looked like they were picked by some committee somewhere. But I think they did a good of picking one of each kind of person. They were all completely different. They each had their own charm, but they were a nice mixture. I thought they were all great.

  FRANKIE SULLIVAN: I thought that they were integral. I thought they were an important part of it, the way that they presented themselves. And they were pretty unbiased back then, just kind of did their gig, played videos, and entertained the audience. It was more about "entertaining" to them. We went from "DJ to VJ." We probably all didn't realize it, but when you look back on it, it's monumental.

  RICK SPRINGFIELD: It was a tough call, because I think nobody knew exactly what to do. Again, it was an unknown quantity. Do you get someone who is more of a TV personality? Do you get someone who knows something about music, like a DJ? I think they did a great job of the first casting of the VJs. They covered a lot of ground with it.

  PHIL COLLEN: It's just like DJs. What do you think of DJs? It's the same thing. It was just a visual version of that. Everyone was very polite and nice, and it changed a little bit as you went on. But you're on the air, so you can't be too edgy or cutting-edge if you're a VJ, really. You've got to just talk about the bands or the artists.

  TODD RUNDGREN: I'm trying to remember if I was particularly impressed with any of them. [Laughs] I don't think I was. They are an "on air personality," and that's their strength. And in that particular sense, you never got any sort of gravitas that these people knew much about either the video and its comparative quality or the artists that were making the videos. You just kind of got the sense that they were essentially personality, there to set up a playlist that somebody else had come up with.

  JELLO BIAFRA: I kind of had a Beavis and Butthead reaction. One of them came on, and I was like, "Who is this dolt?" And off went the TV. That's about all I know. Now, I'm sure they have every modeling agency pounding at the door, if they even have VJs at all. But otherwise, to some degree, they just scooped up the first people they could find and threw them out there. And consequently, none of them are anywhere to be found today.

  JOHN DOE: I think everybody thought they were kind of silly. [Laughs] But I did know that Martha Quinn was pleasant, and she was professional. She was nice to us...that's good. [Laughs] But it was an impossible task, to be on that and be a professional journalist and be hip. Especially at that time.

  JOE ELLIOTT: I loved them all. I thought they were all cuddly and smart. JJ reminded me of Harry Belafonte! He was such a great guy to do interviews with. I was in and out all the summer of '83 with voice problems, canceling gigs and rescheduling them and coming on and telling everybody I'm alive and kicking and everything's fine. Martha Quinn — I remember our manager Cliff Bernstein had a crush on her big-time. They were great. They had great personalities. They were some great characters. They really were.

  MICKEY THOMAS: The different personalities and the two cute little girls. [Laughs] When I say "little," I mean they were diminutive in size — Nina and Martha.

  MIKE RENO: Nina was the sexy little thing, and everybody wanted to get an interview with her. Alan was funny. Alan reminded me of my brother. He could have been in my family. Martha was the "big sister" kind of thing...that's probably why they were so very successful. They were kind of like big brother/big sister hotties that you want to meet. They had all their bases covered. JJ Jackson was in there, too. He was a very cool guy. He kind reminds me of that guy now who's on American Idol, Randy Jackson. It's almost like they could be in the same family. A very entertaining group of people. I always enjoyed going to MTV. It was a big rush. When we went to New York, we always were like, "Let's go on MTV and say hi to everybody!" It was a drop-in center for us young rockers. Whether the camera was going or not, we dropped in to say hi. I loved that big "MTV" logo. We always tried to scoop up some t-shirts or hats with the MTV logo on it, because MTV was becoming bigger than anything. It was becoming the biggest thing out there. If you had an MTV jacket, you were "the shit." So you'd try to get in there and get an MTV jacket and get one for your brother.

  STEWART COPELAND: Martha Quinn was kind of a friend
of ours. Rather, she was assigned to us, or we were assigned to her. I'm not quite sure how that worked. But anyhow, whenever we would talk to MTV, it would be her. And since it was her, we got along real well with her. Apart from dealing with the "business suit" — which was John [Sykes] — it would be her. She was nice enough. After a while, she knew the band. She knew what to ask. So I guess it was a good fit. She was the only one, for that reason, that we ever interacted with, I think. And usually, they were not highly regarded, the VJs. It was kind of a geeky gig. The voice on the radio, it's just a voice. You imagine somebody with great charisma behind the voice. But when you actually see the guy on camera, I seem to recall that they didn't have a lot of credibility in the beginning. I don't say because they were geeks or anything like that, but I think that's how they were regarded in the beginning.