I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  During a panel titled “Video Music—Tomorrow Is Here Today,” John Lack declared his intention to start a twenty-four-hour video music network. “I got up and gave the presentation, which was pretty classy and elegant,” Lack recalls. After he finished, Sidney Sheinberg spoke—Sheinberg was president of MCA and probably the most powerful executive at the conference. “Sheinberg gets up and goes, ‘We ain’t giving you our fucking music,’” says Lack, still sounding indignant about the slight.

  So Lack phoned his boss, Jack Schneider, and quoted Sheinberg’s snub. “And Schneider says, ‘We’ll kick his ass, don’t worry about him.’” MTV didn’t even have a name yet, and the fight had already begun.

  JOHN LACK, MTV executive: A video radio station—that was my dream. I said “video radio” a thousand times.

  JAMES D. ROBINSON III, CEO, American Express: American Express was interested in selling financial services into the home, and that led to my buying half of the Warner Cable Corporation in 1979 for $175 million. I did the deal with [Warner Communications chairman] Steve Ross, who was a fascinating guy. A simple deal bored him; a complex, tax-advantaged, convoluted structure really got his focus. Warner Cable had founded QUBE, a state-of-the-art interactive TV programming system, and the technology was desirable for us. So Amex and Warner jointly formed Warner Amex Cable Communications. That eventually split into two divisions: Warner Amex Cable Company, which built local cable systems; and Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, or WASEC, which created and supplied programming, and was run by Jack Schneider.

  JACK SCHNEIDER, MTV executive: I came to Warner Amex when it was created in 1979. I was president and chief executive officer of WASEC. I inherited The Movie Channel and Nickelodeon. I said, “What can we do next?”

  BOB PITTMAN, MTV executive: John Lack hired me in 1979, when I was a young, hot programmer at NBC Radio. John and Jack Schneider, the CEO of WASEC, decided that the world of cable TV was going to be all about specialized networks. Radio was a good model for that, so they wanted a radio programmer to work on The Movie Channel, which was the first twenty-four-hour movie service.

  JOHN LACK: Bob Pittman had long hair, one eye, and was out of his mind. But he was brilliant. Jack Schneider said, “I’m not hiring some kid from radio to program movies. What are you, crazy?” Jack and I fought and fought and fought about it. One day, he said, “Look, if we hire him, do I have to listen to your shit anymore?”

  BOB PITTMAN: I grew up in Brookhaven, Mississippi, the son of a Methodist preacher. Not only did I have one eye, but I was a small, skinny kid, plus I moved towns—we’d live in a town two years, four years, in towns where people had lived there for centuries, so it made me a bit of an outsider. I think it made me a pretty good observer of people, because you do that to keep from getting beat up.

  I started in radio at fifteen, because I needed a job to pay for flying lessons, which was my hobby. I went to a couple of other stations in Mississippi, then Milwaukee, then Detroit, where I called myself “The Mississippi Hippie.” I talked someone into letting me program my first station in Pittsburgh at nineteen and had a big success. I went to Chicago, and they said, “We’re gonna change the station to country.” I didn’t know anything about country. And they go, “That’s okay, you know all about research.” I was one of the first programmers to use consumer research to figure out what music to play. In college, I’d been majoring in sociology with an emphasis on social methods research, and I used a lot of that.

  CHARLIE WARNER, radio executive: Bob had long hair down his back and a full beard. He looked like he stepped out of a commune. His coiffure got shorter and more conservative as he moved up the corporate ladder.

  BOB PITTMAN: I programmed The Movie Channel like a radio station. I figured, Okay, these are the five most popular movies, I’m gonna show them twice a day. These are not so popular, I’m only gonna show them every four days.

  JOHN LACK: HBO went off the air at 2 A.M. Research showed that people wanted uncut, unedited movies twenty-four hours a day. So the Movie Channel went from 300,000 customers to 2 million in less than a year. The second channel we did was Nickelodeon—it wasn’t called that in those days, but we began developing children’s programming. The third channel I had on the drawing board was music. I’d traveled around Europe, and in every country you would see music shows with video clips. I thought we could show them twenty-four hours a day, if we had permission.

  JACK SCHNEIDER: We needed cheap programming, which meant we needed somebody to give us the programming. And the record companies had videos. The world did not know that the record companies had videos. I knew. Why did I know? I knew because Columbia Records once reported to me when I was executive vice president at CBS. They were very cheap videos, maybe one camera shooting at Rod Stewart while he’s singing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” No productions values. But it was something.

  MICHAEL NESMITH: I haven’t talked about my role in the development of MTV, but this would be a good time to do that. I was driving in my car, it was an early evening, and I thought, What you could do is, you could put together a television show or a television channel that played videos all the time. And the name PopClips came into my mind. I talked to Jerry Perenchio, who was my first agent and has since made a big name for himself as a media tycoon. Jerry was in business with Norman Lear and they had All in the Family. We made a pilot, with half a dozen of these clips—“You Light Up My Life” and Paul McCartney’s “Mull of Kintyre”—introduced by comedians like Howie Mandel and Charles Fleischer. And we were unable to sell it. The pushback from television was profound. I went to a meeting with one guy who said, “Look, let me tell you, music doesn’t work on television. It never has, and it never will.”

  GARY LIEBERTHAL, TV executive: I was working with Norman Lear and Jerry Perenchio, running their syndication business. We had All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Maude, The Jeffersons, Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes. We were a significant presence in the TV business.

  We financed a pilot, and I went to try to sell it. I sat down with the head of programming at Metromedia—they owned stations in New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington—and after he watched the pilot, he said, “But nobody’s dancing.” He was thinking of American Bandstand. He said, “Gary, I’ve been a programmer for a long time. You’ll never have a music show on TV without kids dancing.” I was known as a pretty good salesman in the syndication business. But I tell people, “I’m the guy who couldn’t sell MTV.”

  JOHN LACK: Michael Nesmith came to see me. Michael had been in the Monkees and he had funding to do a show he called PopClips.

  MICHAEL NESMITH: I said, “John, this is a music video. Have you ever seen anything like this?” He said, “No, I never have.” I said, “Artists are starting to make these things, you could play them all day long.” And he said, “Like a music channel? Like music television?” I think John was the first guy I ever heard use the words “music television.” He called a few days later and said, “I want to test the pilot on our children’s channel.” And once they did, from what I understand, the needle went off the meter. They called and said, “Can you make more of these?”

  SUE STEINBERG, MTV executive: PopClips was a half-hour show with music videos, hosted by comedians. The content wasn’t great—it had to be repackaged—so Bob and I flew to LA to meet with Michael Nesmith. And he was not in a good mood. He didn’t like the changes we suggested.

  MICHAEL NESMITH: John said, “You’ve got to make these shows better for us. If you want to come to New York and maybe head this thing up, that might be interesting.” My plan had always been to build it and sell it. They paid me a nice number. That was my exit.

  TODD RUNDGREN, artist: I developed an interest in video before MTV. In the early 1970s, I saw a program called Video Tape Review, which was on Channel 13 in New York, WNET. They showcased the work of Nam June Paik and some other video experimentalists. I bought a lot of video equipment and set up a studio in the Bearsville, New York
, area, mostly to experiment with leading-edge techniques. Since there were a lot of videos around and I had built a studio, my manager got the idea of having a twenty-four-hour music-video channel with a video DJ. To that end, for about $10,000, we bought a transponder on a video satellite, SatCom2. They sent it up and it didn’t find its orbit, and it essentially turned into junk.

  We took the idea to Bob Pittman, who feigned no interest. Eight months or a year later, they announced MTV. It’s just an idea that was too damn obvious at that point. Things were reaching a critical mass in terms of video, so I think somebody eventually was going to do it.

  JOHN LACK: Every time PopClips aired, the phones rang off the hook. I walked into Pittman’s office one day in early 1980 and said, “It’s time to do music. Let’s start the research. I want to go to the board of directors in ninety days.”

  JORDAN ROST, MTV executive: John loved the idea of putting rock n’ roll on television. That interested him much more than The Movie Channel or Nickelodeon. He was the first guy there who owned a Sony Walkman.

  We had to do some research, to prove there was a market for the channel, and to get the Warner Amex board to approve it. I was the head of research. The first study had basic questions about the hosts and the sets. And then we asked, What kind of music should we play?

  BOB PITTMAN: John Lack was the biggest supporter I could have and a great pal. I hung around with John a lot. In fact, all of us hung around a lot. You went to dinner with your MTV friends, you went on vacation with your MTV friends.

  SUE STEINBERG: John knew I loved music, so he plucked me from Nickelodeon and told me and Bob to work on a music channel. I became the founding executive producer.

  BOB PITTMAN: I’d worked with Steve Casey in radio, and he knew the science of music programming. He had call-out research down pat.

  STEVE CASEY, MTV executive: Bob asked me to fly to New York and see what they were doing. The experience would have turned most people off; there was nothing at the time, only one other employee—Sue Steinberg—and the offices were like an insurance company.

  FRED SEIBERT, MTV executive: When I was six weeks into being a chemistry major in college, I was learning how to kill a rat so I could dissect it. I looked at my lab mate and said, “The Beatles are more important to me than this,” and I walked out. That was it for being a chemistry major. I marched uptown to the college radio station at Columbia University, because I heard I could get free records if I worked there.

  After college, I took a job at a huge country music radio station in New York, WHN. I found a mentor, Dale Pon. He was the head of promotion, and I was his assistant. And one day Dale quits and goes to work at WNBC radio, where Bob Pittman is running the station. I made commercials at night for Bob and Dale while working for WHN in the day. I saw Bob on TV all the time, because there was an ad campaign he ran for WNBC, with him on camera going, “Hi, I’m Bob Pittman, program director of WNBC, and we’re gonna make you rich.” During that period he also wrangled a gig where he and Lee Masters did a fifteen-minute show called Album Tracks. It was the MTV format in fifteen minutes.

  From my standpoint, radio guys were idiots. Bob was much smarter than my boss. He offered me a job at The Movie Channel and I took it the next morning.

  LEE MASTERS, MTV executive: Bob and I met in 1972, when we were both teenage disc jockeys, working in the South. A few years later, Bob hired me to work for him at WNBC as on-air talent, and we did Album Tracks together, which was a precursor to MTV in many ways. There weren’t many outlets for music videos, so Bob had an idea for a show that would run after Saturday Night Live on NBC stations in New York, Chicago, Washington, and LA. We wrote the show and we were the on-camera talent, so to speak. We showed “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and some Styx clips from The Grand Illusion. It was always album rock.

  ANDY SETOS, MTV executive: I got a call from John Lack, because I was a cool engineer, and I’d had experience doing stereo television at WNET, the public TV station in New York. I think I was the tenth employee at WASEC. All the professional television equipment, all the TV sets, and all the video clips were monaural. I said, “Look, music is stereo, just like television is color. If this network is about music, it’s gotta be in stereo.” Jack Schneider said, “But it’s gonna be hard.” I said, “The hard part’s my problem. Don’t worry about that.” So we were off on designing a television network in stereo—the first one anywhere, ever.

  ROBERT MORTON, MTV executive: I was working at NBC, on Tomorrow with Tom Snyder. I got fired by none other than Roger Ailes, who came in as producer. I instantly disliked him, and he disliked me, I guess. Sue Steinberg offered me a job at this new music channel as creative director. I hardly had any experience, but I was the only person there with any TV experience.

  BOB PITTMAN: My assistant said, “You’ve got to see this guy named John Sykes. He’s calling you all the time.” I didn’t want to see him. We were done hiring. Finally he came in, and John is one of the more persuasive guys in the world.

  JOHN SYKES, MTV executive: This is all I ever wanted to do: music on television. I’d worked for CBS Records as the regional promotion rep. It was my job to deliver radio airplay for our bands: Cheap Trick, Charlie Daniels, REO Speedwagon, James Taylor.

  The international department sent promotional videotapes to our branch from England and Australia. VCRs had just been introduced, so the tapes would be played at a band’s in-store appearance. And I loved these tapes. I wanted to pitch CBS Television on a late-night video show. In those days, they were airing a test pattern with an Indian on it at night. CBS Records gave me $5,000 to edit together these videos and present them to a guy at CBS Television. He was sixty-five years old, I had no jacket or tie, and he had no interest whatsoever.

  JOHN LACK: See, the whole pitch to the board of directors at WASEC had nothing to do with music videos. It had to do with demographics. At that point, there was no television aimed at the twelve- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. Half of the Saturday Night Live audience was over thirty-five. If you were an advertiser buying time on Saturday Night Live to reach young adults, half your money was wasted on thirty-five-plus. We said, If this music channel reaches twelve to thirty-four year olds, we can deliver an audience for advertisers they can’t get through broadcast television. Cable providers would sign up new subscribers, because this would be available only on cable. We would sell second-set hookups because mothers and fathers would not allow this shit to be played in the living room: “Here’s a TV, go play it in your own bedroom!”

  We needed to get the videos for free, the same way radio got singles. I went to Allen Grubman, a hotshot lawyer. I said, “I want to meet the presidents of the eight large record companies, as quickly as we can.” Some agreed because Steve Ross and Warner Communications were involved. PolyGram said no. Clive Davis at Arista laughed at me. He said, “Give us a year or two, let’s see how it goes.”

  ALLEN GRUBMAN, attorney: John Lack invited me to lunch at the Four Seasons Restaurant. He explained that he was launching MTV and needed my help to get videos from the record companies. As a music lawyer, I was wired into all the labels. He said he’d like to retain me as a consultant, to introduce him to the head of a different record company every week, and he would pay me $50,000 a year. I said, “That sounds fair,” but inside I was jumping up and down. Fifty-thousand dollars in 1980 was like somebody giving me $10 million today. And from that lunch until this very day, I’ve been a consultant to MTV.

  The meetings were every Monday night, if I remember correctly. We would meet in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons, and John would present what MTV was about. For CBS, it was Walter Yetnikoff; for RCA, it was Bob Summer. Boom, boom, boom. Lack was a brilliant salesman. Smooth, well spoken, looked good. He was a great face for MTV. I believe Lack has never been given the appropriate credit that he deserved for MTV, because he left very early on.

  JOHN LACK: There was the Walter Yetnikoff meeting. We go to the Four Seasons, Yetnikoff is with hi
s little blond girlfriend, some bimbo with huge tits. Every fifteen minutes, one of them goes to the restroom. They come back sniffing, wiping their noses. By the end of the dinner, Walter is so high that whatever he said, the next day he doesn’t remember.

  ALLEN GRUBMAN: Walter was—how do I say this politely?—he was meshuggah. I’d call him extraordinarily eccentric.

  GALE SPARROW, MTV executive: We went on the road to sell the labels on MTV. Bob Pittman would explain the channel, how many videos would be played, and how we’d chyron the artist’s name and the song title at the beginning and end of the videos, which was a big deal to the labels, because half the time you’d hear a song on the radio and the DJ would never say who it was. That was a big selling point for us. Still, we hit a lot of brick walls.

  JEFF AYEROFF, record executive: Pittman told me he was going to take all A&M Records’ international films—that’s what we called music videos—and put them on a cable channel. I was like, What the fuck are you talking about?