MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  BOB PITTMAN: The whole idea of the fast edit and "Let's just convey a mood, forget the words" worked its way into the movie business. Flashdance being a perfect example, where Jon Peters and Peter Guber said, "We had a bad movie. We didn't know what to do. We were watching MTV, and we said, 'Wait a minute...this is the solution! Let's fix the movie by turning it into a big music video.'" Which they did, and it turned out to be a hit.

  JOE ELLIOTT: About half-way through making Pyromania, we were starting to hear back from Cliff Burnstein, who was one of our co-managers, the one that was based in America, about this cable channel that was starting to play the video for "Bringin' on the Heartbreak." We probably just went, "Yeah, OK. Whatever." Because we were heavily concentrating on making a new record. But I guess it would have been about three months after that, we got a Telex — remember those? — from Cliff, saying, "High N' Dry has just doubled its sales in four months." We'd gone from like 250,000 copies to going gold. We're like, "Why?!" And he's like, "Well, this MTV thing."

  ROB HALFORD: In a very short space of time, it was just huge, and everybody was clamoring to get on MTV. It became swamped. You had to get your timing absolutely right with the release of your single, album, or tour. Everybody was wanting to get on that MTV network. It was just rammed. It was like the 101 at rush hour in L.A. Everybody was crawling to get their slot and their time spot, because of its value and importance. We didn't realize it, but then when you come back to America, there are more people. There are more fans. You're selling more records. And that's "the MTV bump."

  RUDY SARZO: Around 1981, if you wanted to build up a band, you had to do it city to city, radio station to radio station. I experienced that while I was touring with Ozzy Osbourne. Strategically, touring was a little different, too, because you would basically stick to one area. Let's say you play the Northeast. You would spend maybe four weeks playing that northeast area of the United States. Whereas, when MTV came, you could actually skip the "C markets" and some of the "B markets" and spread it around more to the cosmopolitan areas.

  GLENN TILBROOK: By '82, we were playing Madison Square Garden. We had momentum in New York, and we had radio play in New York, but I think that was the thing that pushed us over the edge — the amount of exposure we got on MTV.

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: ["Weird Al's" earlier videos] didn't change my life or my bank account very much, but the third one did. That one was "Eat It," and the day that video went into heavy rotation on MTV, my anonymity disappeared. Literally overnight, I became a celebrity. The "'Eat It' guy." After that, my albums went platinum. My concert tours sold out...the money I spent on that video production was the best investment I ever made.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: You'd be walking down the street, and somebody would say, "Hey man, I saw you on MTV." That was very groovy. It wasn't, "I saw you on TV." It was, "I saw you on MTV."

  COLIN HAY: I think that radio was still the thing that really created the success with the band, certainly the initial success. And then MTV "rammed it home," if you like. It reinforced that and gave a really strong visual to the band, that really did help. Because I think our videos had some sort of personality that people responded to.

  RICK SPRINGFIELD: The difference that I saw was, before MTV, you'd have to be on like your third successful album before people started recognizing you at the airport. But once MTV hit, you had that one hit single, and you were as recognizable as if you were around for three or four years. It was so instant. That was the power of television. And I had already had the General Hospital thing going, so I already had a pretty strong onscreen identity. Some of my videos were good. Some of them were awful. I think they helped, but they certainly never made a record successful. All my hits I felt would have been hits without MTV. But MTV was just an addition to radio. They had to be played on "saturation play" on radio, and MTV was just an added bonus. It could really catapult a song certainly, if it caught on.

  TONI BASIL: Without it, I don't think ["Mickey"] would have been a hit. Even though I recorded the song in 1979 — and I don't think it was really nominated for a Grammy until 1984 — I think that I was lucky that they never released it in America until then. Because without MTV, I don't think it would have happened. The song being a hit was truly a product of the merger of the visual and the audio. When I got the American deal, that was exactly the time MTV started. So the timing worked out. It was definitely a product of timing, because if the song would have been released in America in '79/'80, I think it would have been confusing. I don't think radio would have known what do with it or how to handle it. But you see the video, and you understand the whole concept.

  JOE ELLIOTT: Once ["Photograph"] hit MTV, over a period of three or four months, it just blew up. It literally went apeshit. The traditional route of breaking a band through radio was still very much alive and kicking, but this additional kind of media that was available now was pushing an album from two million to five million, an album from three million to six million. It was amazing.

  STAN RIDGWAY: What happened with "Mexican Radio," it was kind of a musical accident. A "happy hit," which never really got above the top 40, but it floated around, and to this day, still floats around. It became an accidental MTV hit.

  MIKE SCORE: I would say about 99%. The only other 1% is if we never had made the video, then it wouldn't have been on. They were so important to us at the time, because they put us in living rooms in Kansas and Boise, places like that, where the chances of getting out there to tour before that were probably zero, unless it was some horrible little undersized club, playing for next to nothing. But suddenly, because you were on TV, you were worth something. And every town with 5,000 kids, 500 of them would go see you.

  RUDY SARZO: 200%. I'm completely honest. At the time of "Cum on Feel the Noize," it was only in selective cable systems in mostly urban areas. But I would say that everybody that had a cable system watched MTV, and our video was on every half hour. We went to number one, and we had to bump off Thriller to get to number one. Do you know what an achievement that is? We were at number two for about six weeks, with having Thriller or Synchronicity exchanging spots, and Lionel Richie the same thing. It was amazing. Finally, one week...BAM! We went to number one. If it wasn't for MTV, it would have been impossible. In the old days, in order to go to number one, you had to sell one million records in one week. That's what "number one" meant — one million records in one week. Not like nowadays, where it's far less than that.

  THOMAS DOLBY: It made a huge difference, because once it had hit on MTV, people wanted the product in their hands. Record companies, being what they are, hurried up and repackaged [The Golden Age of Wireless] and got it into the stores, saying, "Featuring the hit MTV video, 'She Blinded Me with Science.'" The album went gold, and it was really because of the success of the "Science" video that I put that down to. And I had mixed feelings about it, because on a certain level, it's not very representative of me and my music as a whole. On the plus side, it was a springboard that made millions of people discover the other aspect of my music. And it wasn't for everybody. Some of them just wanted a lot of wacky pop hits. But a percentage of them discovered the more mellow songs like "Screen Kiss" or "Airwaves." And that was the audience that I really wanted to reach. And long after my 15 minutes of stardom had faded, I still had a core audience who believed in the more mellow stuff.

  RICKY BYRD: "I Love Rock n' Roll" became a huge hit before the video came out. It was a radio hit first. The video kept kids coming to the concerts around the world. People knew who we were, what we looked like, what to expect. It was just a whirlwind, the whole thing.

  GEOFF DOWNES: In regards to the Buggles, MTV did not come out until maybe two years after the Buggles' single had been released ["Video Killed the Radio Star"], so we didn't really have the benefit to utilize that as a promotional vehicle. It became more of a history, Trivial Pursuit question — "What was the first video ever played?" But when it came to Asia, yes, it was very much part and parcel of our initi
al success, that we had another outlet, in the visual context we were being seen in.

  MICHAEL SADLER: We hit the States with I think about four or five tours in a row in that one year, jumping from Jethro Tull to Pat Benatar to Billy Squier. We would just finish one and start another one. Between that and MTV, MTV was very instrumental with getting us a kick-start in the States, for sure.

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: It was very big. Our first record — which had "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" — came out in early '80. We'd gotten a lot of airplay on radio stations across the country, but once it was on MTV, it really broke open a lot of doors, as far as it made touring a lot easier. And the name recognition. Several members of Blotto had been touring around the country for five or six years. We would always get new fans wherever we went, but you were clawing and picking them up one at a time, as you were touring around. And we'd get radio play in towns we were coming in, and we'd have some records in the stores. But MTV really helped change all that. It was like having a national radio station. We'd go to towns we'd never been in before, and there would be people in the front row singing along, which was a very strange experience for us at first.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: I think it played more in making a success of George Thorogood and the Destroyers rather than the song ["Bad to the Bone"]. I have to be honest with you, the song came into its own when they launched classic rock radio. It was about eight years later that they started classic rock, and that's when "Bad to the Bone" took off. But the video itself helped our career visually immensely. Not just the song — the video itself. The video was so good, the song was almost like secondary. People looked at the video and said, "Wow. I want to go see this guy play." It was a great advertisement for the act.

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: This was a means that you could make crazy money and crazy visibility. And everybody would know you. You'd just be a hero in the neighborhood. MTV, when the videos came, man, they gave the cat who was a hero in the neighborhood to be a hero in the rest of the world. So the impact that it had was incredible. Unfortunately, in those early days, they weren't playing too many urban artists. But we had BET, and even they were a bit selective, because they wanted a certain type of artist I think at that time — especially black. They didn't want artists that were scaring black people. [Laughs] They wanted to stay in the game, so they were a bit selective, too, so a lot of the underground artists didn't have the advantage of videos, because they didn't have the image to go along with it.

  Fashion

  MIKE SCORE: For everybody that watched MTV, to see what kind of fashions were happening, and the fact that they didn't just have to wear jeans and t-shirts anymore — I think that was a revelation to American kids. MTV was such a groundbreaker in the way it not only showed you the music, but it showed you what was going on in the rest of the world as far as fashion. I sometimes think about how many of those kids that came to see us and were dressed a bit gothic or a bit '80s or a bit wild and crazy, would have been forced into jeans, cowboy boots, and t-shirts if not for MTV. It opened up a whole new world for them.

  THOMAS DOLBY: I remember meeting a guy once, who lived in some little town in eastern California, in one of the "test markets" for MTV. It was in like Owens Valley or somewhere like that. And he said every household in his town had MTV as a teenager, and when they would go and play football against neighboring high schools, they suddenly realized they were in a different "class" really, because they were experiencing MTV, and these other kids seemed like hicks to them all of a sudden. There was a rapid export of "cool urban culture," from the cities out to the provinces. So that I think was a huge influence.

  GREG HAWKES: It just enhanced the pop radio sense of fashion, because then you could see it on TV, and see what artists were wearing. It just sort of carries over and affects regular fashion. It probably just made it more intense with MTV, because it was right in your face now, and you could see it all the time.

  ROGER POWELL: Even if you couldn't attend a band's concert, you could get the flavor of what rock n' roll was all about by watching MTV. It was a way to "get backstage," if you will, or up to the front row at a concert. Now, all of a sudden, there was all this additional exposure to the rock lifestyle and rock fashions. You didn't have to guess that something you bought was going to be cool or not. All you had to do was double-check it against what was on MTV. So it had an enormous effect, because this thing was happening 24 hours a day, compared to getting a fashion magazine or Rolling Stone every month or whenever it came out. You're being bombarded, and it was always the latest whatever was there. And it started to differentiate the genres of music a little bit more, because the visual element became a reinforcing brainwave thing of, "Now I've got the whole picture of the band I like and what they're all about." The subtleties and the not-so-subtleties of it was much more reinforced and allowed you to feel like you were participating more.

  RICKY BYRD: Oh, come on man, it led everything. Billy Idol was great with videos. People would see them and start dressing like him. Look at Madonna. Would Madonna be so big if video wasn't around, so people could see what she does? If you were a kid, and you just heard one of those songs on the radio, would you be as impressed as if you saw her rolling around on the floor? Shock value is hard to put across on the radio, unless you're Jim Morrison or something like that...if it's just outward sexual appeal that's in the words. Listen, Elvis was amazing, but when they shot him from only the waist up? Dude, that was his ticket. Look at the Stones. When they told Mick Jagger he couldn't sing "Let's Spend the Night Together," well then it became a thing. "What was he saying? 'Let's fuck tonight?!' What did he say?" That's the mystery of rock n' roll that's totally not there anymore. When all of a sudden you could see everything, it kind of put everything in front of everybody. It took a lot of the mystery away. But some people took advantage of it and made whole careers out of being video stars.

  JOHN OATES: I see the parallel between what American Bandstand did for teenagers in America, in that for the first time — even back in the '50s — teenagers in different parts of the country saw what teenagers were doing, what they were wearing, what they looked like, what dances they were doing in Philadelphia. And all of a sudden, Philadelphia became the arbiter of style for teenagers. It became kind of the benchmark of "Hey, this is what cool teenagers do," because they were on TV. MTV kind of took that to another level. All of a sudden, kids all over the country could see their favorite groups and what they were wearing. You didn't necessarily have to see them in person and wait until they came to your town, or if you lived in Topeka, Kansas, they may never come to your town. So this was an opportunity all of a sudden to see what English bands were wearing, and the clothing and the hairstyles. It was so much easier to all of a sudden be part of a new music culture.

  MARKY RAMONE: That all started in the '50s, with Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. Fashion and music go together. It was obvious in the videos. Cyndi Lauper — look what she wore. The Ramones — leather jackets and jeans. Everything was more colorful, just to enhance the situation of the video. Remember, it's only two and a half/three minutes long. You have to put everything you have into that. You want to set trends, purposely or not. That was definitely a reason to integrate the two, the fashion and the music. And to set a standard, to who you were trying to appeal to.

  PHIL COLLEN: Music is an art-form, so it's had very close links to fashion anyway. But all of a sudden, it was brazen. It wasn't just, "Oh, I saw this band in a magazine." You were on TV. So everything from Duran Duran to Prince, you had an automatic influence, and it was far-reaching. TV is the biggest thing out there. It just took over from all the radio stuff and was totally influential.

  DAVE MARSH: Probably the worst thing that came out of MTV in one way was the idea that models should be taken seriously. Where that idiocy came from has to be MTV. It made no sense to me.

  GEDDY LEE: Well, we've never been a very fashionable band, never been a very trendy band, so it's hard to say. But cert
ainly, bands became much more conscious of what they looked like. I think management was much aware of assembling bands that would look good on TV. It didn't obviously affect us, but I could see it around us, with the kind of bands that were starting to open for us, that management was looking more towards what they could sell via television.

  STEWART COPELAND: They must have had an effect on trends. But my sense is that it was the other way around. The guys making the videos would pick up on the trends and try and get them into the video. Certainly in our case, I don't recall Kevin and Lol [Godley & Creme] saying, "Hey look guys, plaid is in this year. Let's get you dressed in some plaid." I think it was the other way around. We'd show up wearing something, and the next thing you know, everyone else is wearing it. But we were never conscious of any of that, actually. We would shoot ourselves if we ever discussed wardrobe.

  ROB HALFORD: I'm sure that people were frantically looking around their local store, dashing off to some place where they could pick up a bit of this and a bit of that, and try and emulate what their favorite act was wearing. Because they'd seen it on MTV. I think that, right from the get-go, the MTV execs probably realized the potential of the influence of that side of what they were about. Previously, you had Creem magazine, Hit Parader magazine, and Circus magazine. They were across America, so people would buy them and flip through the pages, look at the pictures, and copy it. But when you actually saw the stars in the studios or the stars on the screen, that again was an influential moment. All the fans try to emulate the way your favorite artist looks on stage or on video.