MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  GEORGE LOIS: I've always called Mick Jagger the "patron saint of MTV." To me, I credit him with the fact that MTV made it and prospered.

  LES GARLAND: When Dale and George put those babies together, the first time we saw them, they raised the hair on your arm. "America, call your cable company and demand your MTV!" It was a real "call to action campaign." Who would have known that the young people would actually do it? And they did. We hit the air with these things, and we were very smart. We bought cable spots around the country, for five bucks a pop. And it looked like we were everywhere. We threw the million out in about two weeks. The most important part of the whole thing was how effective it was. We went back out into the field, did another study, and the awareness to MTV had gone from south of 20% to somewhere around 88%. Everybody knew what MTV was. The cable companies couldn't believe the thousands of calls they were getting, and all of a sudden, MTV was totally for real, and we were being launched. We'd have weekly program meetings, and every week, I would walk in and go, "We picked up another 400,000 homes this week. We picked up another 500,000 this week. We picked up another 250,000 this week." It just took off, truly. Like that rocket ship every hour, it took off. And we were rocking.

  ALAN HUNTER: Garland was instrumental in that whole thing. He was definitely the one who got Mick Jagger and others. When he got Mick Jagger to say, "I want my MTV!" we all thought, "Holy cow, this is big." It was like, "Yeah! Mick Jagger is hawking us now!" [Laughs]

  GEORGE LOIS: I produced the first three commercials, and we run the first one...I think it was in San Francisco. And I think they spent a couple of g's to run three or four spots. It was probably late night. The cable operator early in the morning — his 5:30 in the morning, gets a hold of Bob Pittman at 8:30ish — and he says, "Get that fucking commercial off the air! I'm getting thousands of phone calls." So what happened is basically what we had planned and did was we went into every market — mostly west coast I think at the beginning — and only ran a couple of days advertising in each market, and the same response was happening. Also, at that point, the buzz got around about this MTV starting to get cable operators, and the cable operators heard about it in the other cities, and before you knew it, we came up with the advertising. I think six months later or something, it was so successful that Time magazine ran a front-page cover story saying, "America wants its MTV." And then, at that point, it turned from you couldn't get a rock star to do anything to all of a sudden they were calling, busting our balls, begging for us to include them in our spots. I think I shot a hundred of them, maybe more. We produced them. Sometimes, we had to shoot on the west coast; sometimes, we had to shoot here. People say, "What should a great campaign have?" And I said, "Two mnemonics" — mnemonics is a Greek word for memory — "One should be a visual mnemonic. You should see something you remember physically. And the other thing is there should be a mnemonic using words." So, Mick Jagger picking up the phone and screaming at the phone, "I want my MTV!" — that's two mnemonics. That's the words and copy working together that makes something so fucking memorable that you remember it all your life.

  MIKE PELECH: You look back at that stuff, and you go, "Oh, it's so dated," but that stuff was really earth-shaking. The way the stuff was hand-tinted and really funky stuff. Nancy Paladino was the original art director. All the stuff was originally hand-drawn. The titler that puts the titles on the television image only had about ten fonts. Now, it's virtually limitless what you can do with different software packages for graphics. But a lot of that stuff was very labor-intensive, and I know she had to hand-draw a lot of those things. I know the "stereo hook-up" graphic she did by hand, and she would just hand-paint a lot of stuff. You really take for granted the technology nowadays, because you can do virtually anything.

  GEORGE LOIS: About a year after the campaign ran and was incredibly successful, Bobby Pittman calls me up and says, "George, let's go out for lunch." "OK, where?" "21." "I hate 21." "Eh...let's go to 21." We go to 21, and he says, "I don't know how to say this to you. 'I want my MTV!' saved our ass, but just between you and me, I want to stop using the line." And I said, "Why? It's so incredibly famous." He says, "Yeah, it's too famous. Wherever I go, if I go to a party, I say, 'I'm Bob Pittman from MTV.' They'll say, 'I want my MTV!' It's driving me crazy." So I had to do a new set of commercials. I did a commercial with a guy imitating Castro, and he's in the jungle, and he's talking about MTV. "MTV is gar-baggge." He's attacking MTV. And then another commercial was a born-again preacher talking about, "MTV is a disgrace. All they do is party, party, party!" So I had these guys attacking MTV because it was decadent. At the end of the Castro commercial, right behind him, there's a parrot. The commercial ends, and over his shoulder, the parrot says, "Awk...I want my MTV!" Bob Pittman looked at me and said, "Touche, George. Touche."

  ALAN HUNTER: That was all a major turning point, and it was an immediate success. That commercial didn't take but a few months to get people to wake up. The record industry said, "Oh wow, this is huge." And then advertising dollars started coming in...and MTV started selling out.

  Success!

  NINA BLACKWOOD: All of a sudden, the fan mail started getting more and more. The VJs were also used as little ambassadors. Again, I have to reiterate the fact that this was the baby stages of cable. So we would be sent out on personal appearances to owner-operators of the cable channels, and MTV was actually used as a tool to get cable into certain parts of the country. As that happened, we still weren't in New York. I think it was two years that we were on the air, but we weren't on in Manhattan. So we didn't really have any idea, other than getting more fan mail. We were all trying to answer our own fan mail, and then it got so much that we couldn't. I remember being sent out to San Antonio for a personal appearance. The limo is taking me to an autograph signing session at a record store. We're going into this shopping center, and I see this line wrapped all around. I'm going, "Oh wow, who's here?" And my minder says, "Well...you." I go, "WHAT?!" There were hundreds of people there. But because we still weren't in New York, we weren't really aware of it. And then once we got in New York, I'm flagging a cab, and I get picked up by the police, and they'll take me to where I was going, and the clubs all "opened." If more than one of us were together, like going to a concert…we used to go to Brendan Byrne Arena [in New Jersey] a lot. We couldn't sit in the audience anymore. We had to sit in the boxes, because we'd get mobbed.

  ALAN HUNTER: I remember my first [personal appearance]. I can't remember if it was in Oklahoma or somewhere in Iowa. I was so excited. I got to get shipped out on someone else's dime, to have the company pay for your first class plane ticket. You arrive, and you've got a little bit of an entourage there. People are excited. It was totally foreign to me...foreign to all of us. None of us had really been that kind of celebrity. But to have the local cable people just freak out to have you in their town, it still didn't dawn on me. I remember going in the limousine to go to the record store where we were having an appearance. And it was that clichéd moment, where I think anybody that is thrust into the limelight has, where they see 500 people lined up around the block and wonder who it's for. And the cable handler is like, "They're here to see you." You're like, "WHAT?!" Just made no sense at all. So I walked into a throng of people that just couldn't believe I was in this small town. Each of us had the same story when we'd come back from these appearances. We'd look at each other and go, "This is huge." Because we were living in Manhattan in a bubble. There was no recognition whatsoever. The occasional "bridge and tunnel" person would come in from Jersey and recognize us in a restaurant or something. But other than that, we were anonymous, and it felt just fine. When we went on those promotional appearances and it built bigger and bigger — every one we would go to later would be an even bigger crowd — and we'd come back with the tales of "This is huge."

  MARK WEISS: They were all rock stars on their own. Wherever they went, everyone knew who they were. They were like newscasters, but I think everyone thought they were responsib
le for who got on there, so they were treated like gold wherever they went.

  ALAN HUNTER: After a year, we realized that MTV was just driving Middle America crazy, because they didn't have anything else. It was CNN and ESPN when it came to 24-hour cable. When MTV came along, it was like the life of everybody's party. They were watching videos of bands they'd never heard of before, from the new wave in the U.K. to the Stray Cats. This was not albums or music that was being stocked in their local record stores. Imagine a kid in a small town with a little record store that was barely making it, and he sees these videos on MTV. The music business was tanking in the late '70s/early '80s, interestingly enough, kind of like it is now. They just weren't selling. And MTV absolutely revived the whole thing. I think I kept my calm throughout my time, through today. I appreciated fans, but it didn't turn my head around. I really liked people, and I liked the people that liked me. I feel bad for bands or celebrities that have a job like Jerry Springer, where they must just hate their fans. Who would want to hang around with those kind of people? But I liked the people that liked what I did, and they all had their different taste. Every one of us had a different fanbase. They hated me and loved Mark, they loved JJ and hated Mark, and Martha was their favorite. It's just the way that goes.

  LES GARLAND: People said, "Did you ever know?" Of course not. I really believed it could work. I believed people would like it. I believed it would be successful. We even made jokes, "If we really do this right, maybe one day, we'll have private jets." But that was a joke. We were all in our early 30s. We were youngsters. The average age at MTV was 24. So it was a bunch of young people not knowing that, in a lot of ways, we were changing the course of history. We were changing this landscape that wasn't just music. It was music, it was the presentation of music, it was television, it was advertising, clothing styles, hairstyles, film, international, the breaking of new artists. Nobody could have ever envisioned all of that. I remember — I don't know what year it was — but within two years, around '83, back in those days, it was like getting an Oscar, but to be called the Billboard magazine "International Innovator of the Year" was quite prestigious. To go to Greece and be handed such an award. Global, not just in the U.S. It was pretty amazing. I was in the greatest job of all time in that seven-year period that I was involved. I told somebody, they were asking me about the impact of MTV, and I said, "Look, I hope this doesn't come off in any way egotistical. It's just my analysis of what I've seen, but I've never seen anything have the impact on the youth culture like this since the Beatles. What it did and effect and change people." And that comes with a great deal of responsibility. I think, hopefully, history will say that "There was Pittman and Garland," and "There was Pittman, Garland, and Sykes," and "There was a John Lack," and "There was a Gail Sparrow," and "There was a Julian Goldberg." There were so many other people that we could name that all contributed, and that's why it was this great team. I was the lucky guy who got to be the coach. And I don't take sole credit for anything. That's just not the way it is. I have seen where some have — or at least it got twisted that way — but funny enough, there is not one person. And that's good.

  ALAN HUNTER: It was bizarre to be thrust into the middle of that kind of fandom. The young ladies were into Mark, JJ, and myself, and obviously, the guys thought that Martha was the cutest thing ever, and they wanted to sleep with Nina Blackwood. I was happily married at the time, so it was certainly not what I was looking out for.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: It bonded us, because nobody other than the five of us knew what we were actually going through. We would share our stories, and we had each other as a family — to gripe about stuff, to complain about things. When the five VJs would get together, like say we'd go over to Alan's house, you could bet that, before the evening was done, there would be a huge gripe session. We'd be moaning, saying, "This should be done differently." But we all loved what we were doing, or else we wouldn't have been there. I think that's how we did get through that. For me, it was a complete dream job, combining things that I loved my whole life. If something like a VJ existed when I was a little girl, I would have said, "I want to be a VJ." Living in New York and having the red carpet rolled out for you in a city like New York, it was just great. And for a shy person, it was a little bit of a double-edged sword for me, because I was shy, but it was kind of a cool thing, because any type of affair, I'm the one sitting in the corner getting up to get a drink and go to the bathroom, that's it. So it was kind of nice, because people were coming up to me, so I would meet people. I didn't have to move from my little wallflower corner. But it was phenomenal. I think all of us look back in the fondest way of that period. And very happy to be part of the beginning of it, not any other time, but the beginning was perfect.

  LES GARLAND: I believe it was around '83 or '84, and Pittman and I did most of the interviews for the network — magazines, all over the world. I spent half my life doing interviews once we got to a certain point. I was being interviewed, and I forget who, but it was probably like a Time magazine or something. And the writer says, "Mr. Garland, do me a favor. I want you to look into your crystal ball, and tell me where you see the music industry in 25 years." No one had ever hit me with such a question. I'm like, "Whoa." I thought for a minute and said, "Well, here we go. I believe what I see in my crystal ball is that music will be up there somewhere. You won't be able to touch it. You won't be able to see it, but it will be there. It will be in people's 'devices.' Maybe it will be their telephone. It might be something on their wrist, but they'll be able to source it in all of their devices, whether it's their car, their home stereo, or their telephone. You won't have to pick something up, open it, put it in something, and play it. You won't have to do that anymore. I don't know how we're going to do that, but I think that's what may happen one day." And I remember almost being embarrassed, like, "I hope that reporter didn't think I was nuts." I don't even know where that came from. A little bit before the Internet, right?

  BOB PITTMAN: The board of directors in the first couple of years made enormous pressure, because some people wanted to shut it down. It's called the civ. We were supposed to lose $20 million, and we lost $30 million before we broke even. And when it was getting close to $20 and we weren't breaking even, it was howling. And Steve Ross — to his credit — told the other people, "Look, the consumer loves it. We'll figure out how to make money." And I think we all had a consumer hit, but the money side and the market side was not happening. And again, that's where I went from the programming guy in charge of the product to being the guy who's supposed to make money. There was a point in which a guy named Drew Lewis, who had been Ronald Reagan's transportation secretary, came in as the head of the Warner-Amex joint venture. I remember my first meeting, we were sitting around the table talking about something, and I mentioned Mick Jagger. And I just kept talking, and one of the people that worked with Drew a long time looked at Drew and said, "Drew, do you know who Mick Jagger is?" And he goes, "Uh...no." "Have you ever heard of the Rolling Stones?" "Uh...no." I go, "Holy shit, I've got a lot of work to do here." And Drew gave me a mandate. He said, "If you can't get this thing profitable by the end of the year, I'm gonna shut it down." So there was a period of MTV — and I probably have a reputation of being the cheapest bastard alive — when I went through and slashed everything we could. And you know what? In 1983, by the end of the year, we were profitable.

  ALAN HUNTER: The other moment that we realized MTV was a real powerhouse was probably year two. We sat down in a meeting, where we were told that this new band, INXS, was going to be "our baby," that we were going to break the band. It was going to show MTV's power, that we were going to work alongside the record company and try to break a band. Nothing nefarious — it wasn't Machiavellian or underhanded — it was just we were going to see if we really had an influence on people's music-listening. It was a little awkward to have to talk a lot more about INXS than any other band during your shift — promos, world premiere videos from this new band from down under, I
NXS. But lo and behold, INXS became a major, major band. And it was due to MTV's influence and the five VJs talking them up.

  The "MTV Effect"

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: I suppose it could also be argued that MTV had a profound effect on the TV and film industry as well, as the quick-cutting edit style found in many music videos made its way into movies and popular television series, i.e., Miami Vice.