MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  DEBORA IYALL: It's the marketing people. Not everybody can think of music as art. That's the bottom line. I still do. A lot of us still do. Probably most of my fans do. But there's this structure that's between you and your fans. That's the marketing people, and they just don't get it. They're too busy being creeps. What can I say? It's funny, too, because like, Bob Dylan, if he had come up during the video age, they would have gone, "AHHH!" [Laughs] It's like, those of us with ears, that care about culture in a personal way, we've just got to keep hammering it home that we're here and not going away, and we're going to find our fans, because they're out there.

  PETE ANGELUS: I remember thinking that people were trying to push fashion as far as they could push it. And I also remember when choreography and a lot of dancers started to rear its ugly head on MTV. I specifically remember those two things, thinking, "Man, they are just pushing it and pushing it." And to me, at some point, it crossed a line where it became humorous. And I think I pointed to that in some of the videos that I did.

  BOOTSY COLLINS: It told that particular crowd exactly what to do, to wear, to say, and more importantly, what was cool to play on their boomboxes while out with their friends and their parties. You had no choice in the matter. MTV ruled the world. Well, at least the world that bought into it.

  MTV's Policies

  LES GARLAND: When you're a DJ or an air personality, maybe there would be the desire to control the music in your show, because a lot of people still had the memory of freeform radio. But everybody was smart enough to understand that we needed to have an editorial stance. We needed to have a direction. What MTV was going to be was a hybrid version of AOR meets pop. There was no radio station like MTV. It would have been a hit if it was a radio station in any major market in America. It was differentiated from everything else out there. It wasn't just AOR; it was wider than that.

  GERALD CASALE: When it went national, the joke was on Devo, because they had immense power. And they were laying down the terms, like a vanquishing army. And the rules kept changing every month — what you could and couldn't do. And before we knew it, they wouldn't play Devo videos because they were citing the fact that we weren't in the top 40. And yet, they would still play "Whip It," because it was "grandfathered in" and had been a hit before MTV existed. So then, we were thrown into that ghetto where unless we were getting a certain number of stations added with a new release, they weren't going to run our video. So it was like a cat and mouse game. It was like, "Yeah, but if you run the video, all the stations are going to add it."

  LES GARLAND: We were people who, being born young in the '60s, etc., were a bunch of freedom fighters. We didn't believe in censorship, on any level. We hated the concept of censorship. So, in the very beginning, for the first few years, there were no rules. We accepted it as our responsibility. And sometimes, that requires making judgments. When it's all said and done and finished, someone has to ultimately be responsible for what goes on this television network. And I'd tell people when I programmed radio stations, [that] that was my job. Ultimately, it was my ass hanging out there. Rule one, protect the license. Rule two, get the highest ratings you could get. And that was the way we looked at MTV. We have a heavy responsibility here, of what is OK and what isn't. And we used just good, old fashioned, gut common sense. But you can imagine how that started becoming after the first couple of years, people started analyzing everything. "Why did you turn that video down, and you're taking this one then?" They would get right down to the specific scene we found to be questionable. And then people started accusing us of messing around with the art and changing the scenes. We hated it. We just hated it. We were being attacked in the media. "What are these standards?" They forced us into doing something we never wanted to do. We created "standards and practices." And every network has such a department. And that, in some ways, was done for protection, to say we had such a department. And, in other ways, it was done because it was meaningful, and we felt like we needed to have such a department. It was kind of a double-edged sword in a way. As much as we had a disdain for that sort of thing, this is censorship. I don't give a shit how you paint this. When it's all said and done, it's censorship. And you're talking about what I consider to be art, which made it even more difficult. I didn't like it.

  GERALD CASALE: It came to a head in 1982, with a song called "That's Good," where Warner’s was really high on the song, and we were really high on the song. Radio was liking it, and we made this video. We sent it to them, and this guy that I had not met yet, who I would get to meet — Les Garland — who was kind of like their version of the Taliban...the corporate Taliban, says, "We're not playing this." He goes, "We know what you're trying to say." And we go, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "Let's talk about it. You've got a cartoon donut flying through space, and you've got a cartoon french fry going through it. And then, it cuts to a girl with a smile on her face. I know what you're saying, OK? Let me tell you something. You can have the donut, you can have the girl...but you can't have the french fry. Or, you can have the french fry and the donut...but you can't have the girl." We were unfortunately artists with integrity, like Martin Milner in Sweet Smell of Success, who screws himself by standing up to JJ Hunsecker. So we cite four or five other videos that are on the air that are so over-the-top sexual, not even with humor or animation. It's like hardcore crotch and rubbing...plenty of tits and ass, which was de rigueur. He goes, "Have it your way. That's it." Elliot tried to lobby him and wasn't getting anywhere, so we edited the video, put our tail between our legs, and swallowed the load. Sent the video back. But the process back then, it wasn't like Final Cut Pro. You had to go into a studio, and there were layers in that video, composites early on. It cost us a lot of money. I think by the time they got it back, they had this thing where they only accepted videos once a week. We got it to them within ten days, and then they let it float over into the next "acquisition day" or whatever. So 17 days later, he checks radio adds and says, "We're still not running this, because you guys aren't building a story for us here." [Laughs]

  DAVE MARSH: They don't want anything that's too emotionally down. They don't want anything that smacks of danger. They just wanted to sell tits and ass, and they were willing to reduce the music to that to get their way. That was why I hated them.

  LES GARLAND: I tell people, "You've got to understand something. I'm a programmer. I think I'm born to do that and to build these media entities. Whether they're radio, TV, whatever. But being a censor is being a whole other assignment." I'm just a curator of this art museum called "MTV." These "pictures" come in, and they fit the feel of our gallery. We don't judge them. We just say, "That fits. It's got a good feel," and we put it on the wall. And if people like it, we know that. If we don't, we take it down. It's not our decision. We're just doing this for people. We're not doing this for our satisfaction. Censorship is a very scary thing. So here comes standards and practices. Now, you can imagine the battles we used to get in, because standards and practices starts feeling like a pretty powerful little department. And where there comes a little power, there might come some abuse. And then it started getting silly. There would be fights — who could over-rule who? Could standards and practices over-rule programming, or could programming over-rule standards and practices? Because you would have to over-rule sometimes. So that became very, very difficult. It became time-consuming. It became difficult to manage. It was a bit of a nightmare, but it had to be done. So the first couple of years, it was wide open. We just used good, common sense, and it was a responsibility that we had.

  DAVE WAKELING: You lived in mortal fear of this "woman," who I don't know if she actually existed or she was an archetype. But she supposedly sat in this room, with a list of 30 things, ticking them off as she watched your video and how many of those 30...that was how much editing you had to do, if you wanted to be on "her MTV." Unless it turned out that you were Madonna, because she had all 30 in every one of her videos! That was the benchmark. So there was that part to
it. The quality control could be lowest common denominator.

  FEE WAYBILL: They constantly censored us. We tried to do the "She's a Beauty" video, [and] they censored a whole bunch of stuff. We had a topless mermaid, and of course, that was right out. We had to change that and a bunch of stuff. It was just a little too weird for MTV. We had a great big paper breast, a big screen with an air-brushed breast on it. And the guy in the ride for "She's a Beauty" would go crashing through it. Well, that was too weird, and they had to kind of soft-focus that whole thing, so it looked like a big fuzzy ball. For bands like Duran Duran, that changed their whole career, and they spent a fortune on exotic videos and locations. And they wouldn't let us spend the money. At that point, Capitol Records was worried that we weren't selling enough records to outlay that kind of money. Originally, we were going to do the "She's a Beauty" video as this kind of freakshow/sideshow thing. Kind of a la Tod Browning's Freaks, have like "the chicken woman" and "the sausage man" and "the bearded lady." Sideshow freaks. That was too weird, way too weird. They said, "Nah, forget about that." Then we had to rethink it and came up with this idea of the kid on the ride. And that kid was Robert Arquette [who later became Alexis Arquette], because Rosanna was a friend of ours. She was the girlfriend of one of the guys in Toto, and we were at the same management company.

  MARKY RAMONE: There was controversy [surrounding "The KKK Took My Baby Away"] because of the subject matter. A hornet's nest. I can see that. Today, it wouldn't be a big deal, it was a humorous song. It wasn't "pro-KKK." It was just a song. Then when I was out of the band, they did "Psycho Therapy," that was the next video. And that created controversy. They stopped playing it because, obviously, a lot of people got agitated because it was supposed to be inside of an insane asylum.

  STAN RIDGWAY: I had a video of my own, from my first solo record, The Big Heat, where I made a video for "The Big Heat," and it was a film noir-ish, dark video, about a chase. I thought it came out great and was very intriguing. There was one point where somebody — and in a melodramatic way, almost like a 1940s film — gets stabbed in an alleyway. Kind of in a shadowy way. And MTV said that they couldn't play it, because "it was too violent." And we looked at that and knew, "That's not really why, because it's not really any more violent than these other examples over here. In fact, those are even more." Suddenly, the mix was changing, and certain things weren't fitting in.

  WARREN DeMARTINI: I continued to be surprised that we were played at all. If we were on there, it was like, "Can you believe it? They're still playing this video?" I think on the record company's side — from hearing stuff in the hallways — there was a real shift of...it was MTV that decided what was going to be played and what wasn't going to be played. But I guess we were helping to cause them to get big advertising dollars, so we were a mainstay on there for quite a while.

  LES GARLAND: We looked at heavy metal music as just another category that was made up by music companies. Radio stations like to categorize things. We tried to destroy all the categories. If it was great, call it what you wanted to call it, we didn't care. It was great. If it was Iron Maiden and it was great, play it. Now, we never got into day-parting. Day-parting is an old game that was always played in radio, where back in the early days, top 40 radio stations have different demographics at different times of the day. So they might not play something that was really appealing to a young, hardcore male — like Iron Maiden or something — they may not play that during the daytime, because they had more women listening during the day, for example. We believed if something was on MTV, it was "on." On is on, and it plays in all day-parts. As we became bigger, more viewership, we found ourselves applying some of the old "sciences" that we had learned in radio. And there were certain instances where things might be day-parted a little bit. But for the most part, if something was on, it was on. We didn't have Headbanger's Ball yet. We didn't have specific shows that were dedicated to one thing. The only "shows" we had back in those days...a lot of people thought that the second generation team at MTV put all those shows on. But I remind people, we did "stunts." In my seven years there, we called them stunts. A lot of people came up with wacky ideas to make shows, but I said, "This ain't about shows. This is a music channel. That's why it's called MTV: Music Television." We wouldn't even consider it. Somebody would come up with a wacky show, and we'd go, "That's really cool, but that belongs on another network, not one called 'MTV.'" So we turned down a lot of that stuff. Instead, we did stunts, and we did some fun things.

  BRUCE KULICK: I thought we got a fair amount of coverage. We weren't always the darlings, but it all depended. I had no complaints about our support from MTV. Unfortunately, every year, there was a different flavor of the month. Where one year, it's Whitesnake they want to show. But we used to get a fair amount of coverage.

  DAVE MARSH: It's funny. When they did let metal in...metal's like hip-hop. They didn't want metal, because look, what's the problem with metal and hip-hop from the point of view of an advertising-driven medium? They're down-market. Who listens to heavy metal? Poor kids, whether they're Anglo or Mexican-American, that's always been the "metal audience." Who's the "hip-hop audience"? Black kids who are mostly poor in this country. And MTV just didn't...I mean, Bob Pittman didn't want that. He couldn't sell it. And what it was really all about was selling, because that's what broadcasting in America is about.

  LES GARLAND: We did a show called...I ripped it off 60 Minutes, the show from CBS that had been number one forever. We used to do things irreverent against the networks just to fuck with them. So I came up with 120 Minutes, which was two hours of music, and we did it on Sunday nights at midnight. That thing developed an audience. People loved it. Then we had Basement Tapes, because we knew there were tons of young people out there making music in their garage — get a camera, shoot it, and send it to us. We'll create a show. So we started having a little fun like that.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: There was an acquisition committee, and there were various members at various times. We would call them "the suits." And as time went by, I think they opened up. This was a little later on, but we had a VJ assistant named Ken Clark. And he was part of the acquisition committee. And nothing against Ken, because Ken was a music aficionado, but go figure, they have the VJ assistant in there at the acquisition, but the VJs aren't even invited to the damn meeting! You had to pick your battles on stuff like that.

  BOB PITTMAN: No, [the VJs] had no say. It was a guy named Steve Casey, who was the one that sort of figured out...once the song was known, we'd sort of figure out which audience liked it and how did it go. Now, in the early days — because we had such pressure on the "sex, drugs, and rock n' roll" — we actually had a standards committee that would review it to see if it met our standards. And, actually, there were some videos we wouldn't play because they were — it might sound ridiculous today — too raunchy. We said, "There can be something about drugs, but it can't be glorifying it. It can have a little bit of a sexy situation, but it can't be abusive or demeaning." Again, it's a 30-years-ago standards versus today. So that was sort of a veto on it. And then on the new music, we were trying to figure out what we should play, and a lot of that was working with the record companies, to figure out what they were really going to get behind, and what there was a good shot at working. We used a lot of research. We made phone calls, random surveys to people's houses, asked them if they knew these songs, if they liked it, rate it on a scale. And from that, we had all kinds of scores. As it turns out, when you went through the Nielsen stuff and looked at the meter, the thing where you lost most of your audience was not commercials. It wasn't "I hate the song and change the channel when it comes on." Actually, the one that people tuned out the most was "I like it, but I'm tired of seeing it so much." Called burnout. So we'd always try to calculate when to get a video off the air when it has 10% burnout, 20% burnout. It was all sort of statistical stuff.

  ALAN HUNTER: We were part of a committee of people that sat down, along with some executives and pro
grammers. So we had a say, and every time they would sit down on a weekly basis and review all the new videos, we had a seat at that table. Sometimes we made it; sometimes we didn't. To be honest, we got so busy that we just didn't have time to do it, and we had to rely on the programmers. A record company would send a video to the programmers. Obviously, that was a big department. So we weren't likely to be getting a hand-off of a video in a coffee shop or a club by a manager. But quite frequently, a manager at a show or out and about would say, "Hey, I'm about to send Mellencamp's new video. I want you guys to see it." And it would already be in the hands of the higher-ups that were making those choices. So we really didn't have any say in that. But we got great record service. The record companies knew that the VJs were the face of the channel, and we were the ones who were going to be excited about the music or not. Certainly, we were nonpartisan, but you could bet that I was going to talk about one artist more than I was another. I might come out of Mötley Crüe making fun of the video — and have a yawn — but I was probably going to really talk up the new Howard Jones video, because I really liked his stuff. So people got to know the kinds of music that we liked, because of what we would talk about, and they would identify the various differences between all of us jocks. But that didn't bother me at all that we didn't have a say-so in it, because the pool of videos, there was very little that was rejected. To be honest, it wasn't like programming a radio station.