I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  BOB PITTMAN: My mission was to get the labels to give us their videos. We had Warner Bros. locked up. RCA was supportive. Then there were the other labels. There was an ex-lawyer, David Braun, running PolyGram. He said, “I’m not gonna give you those things for free. You’ve gotta pay.” Sid Sheinberg was running MCA Records. He said, “You gotta pay. Nothing’s free from MCA.” And at CBS, Walter Yetnikoff, obviously he’s gonna make a tough deal. So rather than go to him, I went to Dick Asher, his deputy, and got Dick interested. Went to Bruce Lundvall, who was a president at CBS Records. Then we went to a lot of Walter’s bands and got them interested. Sykes had worked at CBS, he knew REO Speedwagon. I was gonna flank Walter.

  WALTER YETNIKOFF, record executive: When MTV came to me, I was perfectly happy to license our videos to them. My problem was, I wanted CBS to get paid. Their argument was, they were just like radio, and radio didn’t pay royalties to labels. But it didn’t cost me anything extra to send a record to radio. With videos I’d have to spend money.

  JACK SCHNEIDER: Walter Yetnikoff was the toughest nut to crack. I chose not to involve myself personally with Walter. I knew it was going to get theatrical and vulgar and coarse, and he was deep into his chemical period at the time.

  DEBBIE NEWMAN, record executive: CBS was the last company to get involved with MTV. They’d started a foray into home video, and they were petrified that giving videos to MTV would devalue the potential for sales. And they were afraid that MTV, which was co-owned by Warner Communications, would give preference to videos from Warner Bros. Records, which was CBS’s main rival.

  AL TELLER: I wanted MTV to pay CBS for playing music videos in the same way traditional TV networks pay for the programming they put on the air. I was a lone voice in that wilderness, though. My counterparts said, “Just give them the videos. Get the exposure.” It was stupid. I fought hard to hold out, but ultimately I had to respond to the competitive realities. I wasn’t going to go down in flames on this principle. But the industry sold itself for a pittance. It was like the Indians selling Manhattan for $24 worth of beads.

  LEN EPAND, record executive: I felt MTV should pay some sort of licensing fee. This was Warner Communications and American Express, after all. This wasn’t some impoverished start-up. PolyGram’s president, David Braun, wouldn’t budge. So MTV launched without any PolyGram videos. Meanwhile, our competitors’ acts were getting all this exposure. Eventually we acceded to their demands.

  MILES COPELAND, manager: Almost everybody in the business was skeptical of MTV. I remember the manager of ZZ Top saying, “If you want ZZ Top on TV, you pay ZZ Top.” Later on, they gave everything to MTV.

  TOMMY MOTTOLA, record executive: I represented the hottest duo in pop music at that time: Hall & Oates. Pittman, Sykes, and Lack came to us hat-in-hand, because it was not an easy sell in the beginning.

  BOB PITTMAN: I started at MTV when I was twenty-six. We were all very young. And we were worried no one would take us seriously, so we wore suits. We wore suits to everything.

  JOHN SYKES: Bob thought if we looked like drug addicts, no one would give us any money.

  SIMON LE BON, Duran Duran: You thought, Who are these guys? They’re not very rock n’ roll.

  JOHN SYKES: Bob and I would sit in record company offices and wait and wait and wait for them to see us. I’d go to California and sit outside offices and a secretary would say, “He’s not ready.” I’d go to lunch, use the bathroom five times, and come back the next day. At the end of day two she’d say, “Sorry, he had to leave.” I’d come back the next day and do it all over again.

  GALE SPARROW: A lot of managers gave us their clients’ videos and said, “You have our permission to play them.” It was probably illegal. But not only did we play that manager’s big acts, we also played the baby acts they were trying to break. So they got double exposure.

  LES GARLAND, MTV executive: Pittman and I were friends—we were programming different radio stations in Milwaukee at the same time. I was discovered in my twenties by the legendary radio programmer Bill Drake, and I was given a shot to go to Los Angeles, the biggest market in the country. And that led me to Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee . . . I received a lot of Program Director of the Year awards. I’d always get great ratings and I never got beat.

  Doug Morris, who was running Atlantic Records, said, “Garland, you’d be great in the music business. You’re friendly with the artists, you understand that language, you’re a unique guy.” That led to a job in 1979 as West Coast vice president and general manager of Atlantic, the biggest record company in the world: Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin.

  Pittman invited me to dinner sometime in ’80. He said, “Does Atlantic make music videos?” I said, “A few.” He said, “How do you determine who you’re gonna make one for?” A lot of it had to with touring: if a band wasn’t going to Europe, we might shoot a video to send there instead. If we got some traction, then we could send the act over. He said, “Garland, do you think music videos twenty-four hours a day, kind of like a radio station, would work on TV?” Immediately, I said, “Yes, I do. I think we’re headed into a new age with cable television.”

  TOM FRESTON, MTV executive: I’d spent the 1970s living in Afghanistan and India. I’d made and lost a lot of money. I decided I wanted to work in the music business; my brother was working for Columbia Records, and I used to say, “Wow, this isn’t hard.” My brother turned me on to Bob McGroarty, who had started working in sales for a new venture. McGroarty said, “It’s a new form of television, and we’re looking for people who have no experience in TV.” I said, “I’m your man.” I started at MTV in October 1980, as head of marketing.

  JOHN LACK: McGroarty knocks on my door. He tells me there’s a guy in his office he really likes, but has no experience. I meet this guy and ask him what he does. He says, “I’m kind of in the import/export business in India.” That was Tom Freston. I assumed “import/export” meant he was selling drugs.

  TOM FRESTON: We were like an Internet start-up. We were lean and mean and didn’t know what the hell we were doing. At the beginning, we were working out of a couple of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown New York. We had no office equipment. My first office was a soda storeroom. People thought I was delivering soda to the building.

  ROBERT MORTON: It was a dump. The Carnegie Deli was downstairs, so our hotel room stunk like pastrami. We’d explain that we were starting a music channel and we’re gonna play videos, and people didn’t even know what videos were. It was a crazy pitch. We had, like, three videos we could show to people and say, “Here’s what a video is.” We were just idiots in hotel rooms.

  CAROLYN BAKER, MTV executive: We worked out of a hotel room with puke yellow walls. We were all tense and nuts, because we’d given up jobs, and what if Bob didn’t get the money?

  JOHN SYKES: I went to work in a conference room with no windows and four phones. It was Carolyn Baker, Sue Steinberg, Steve Casey, and me. I asked Bob, “When do we start?” And he said, “Well, we don’t have money to start yet.”

  BOB PITTMAN: The Warner Amex board of directors said no to the idea. They thought it was too crazy, too risky. Then Jack Schneider got us a meeting with Steve Ross and Jim Robinson and Lou Gerstner, the president of American Express. And we loaded it with some friends: Doug Morris from Atlantic Records, whom I’d known since I was a teenager in Detroit, when he had Big Tree Records, and Stan Cornyn from Warner Bros. Records. We played a videotape of what the channel would look like. We tried to make it very tame for them, and Jim or Lou said, “Oh that’s such noise. Terrible stuff.” And we’re thinking, Boy, you should see the stuff we’re really gonna play.

  JOHN LACK: We were asking for $25 million, half from Warners and half from American Express. Ross turns to Schneider, the gray-haired guy, and says, “Jack, do you believe in this?” I fucking kicked Schneider hard under the table. He said, “Yes, Steve, I believe in it.”

  JACK SCHNEIDER: The programming concept for MTV was very
simple. It was radio with pictures. I spent my whole life working in radio and television at CBS. I knew what a radio station was: It was a microphone, a transmitter, and a stack of records. We were simply adding the video aspect to it.

  STEVE CASEY: My first meeting was with Jack Schneider, the guy in charge of the company. He spent the entire meeting telling us it was not going to work. His exact words were that music and television were “an unnatural marriage.” I thought, What a hell of a pep talk.

  LES GARLAND: Jack Schneider was great, he was the big papa, but he didn’t really get it. Putting people on TV with purple hair, he just thought it was silly.

  JACK SCHNEIDER: I was never comfortable in my role at MTV. I was the only adult there. I was fifty-four. They treated me like the old man, which I was. I always wore a coat and pants that matched. I thought that was an appropriate uniform, and it always served me well. Those kids didn’t scare me. I was tougher, smarter, and more successful than any of them could ever dream of being. I had credibility. I had a presence, a maturity. When I met with Jim Robinson and Steve Ross, it was as equals. No, I wasn’t chief executive of Warner, but I knew people like Steve Ross and dealt with them all my life. I didn’t meet with Steve or Jim as a supplicant. I met with them as a peer.

  JAMES D. ROBINSON III: We gathered in a conference room off of Steve Ross’s office. Jack Schneider opened up the meeting and turned it over to Bob Pittman. For twenty minutes, Pittman laid out the concept of how to build a music-video channel. Bob was articulate and clearly knew what he was doing. After his presentation, I said, “Where in the devil do you get your raw material?” And he said, “That’s not a problem. Every time a recording group creates a new album, they make these promotional films and give them away.” I said, “You mean you don’t have any cost of goods sold?” He said, “No.” I said, “Steve, you’ve got our $10 million.” It was literally as fast as that.

  JOHN SYKES: They were in the conference room for three hours, and we waited outside. It was like waiting for a verdict from the jury.

  SUE STEINBERG: We were all pretending to work. Some of us were playing a board game to occupy ourselves.

  TOM FRESTON: If they’d said no, we would have all been fired.

  JOHN LACK: We got the okay in January 1981. I said, “We will be on the air in seven months.” Once I got approval, I said to Michael Nesmith, “Come be my creative consultant, I’ll give you a piece.” He said, “I don’t want to do it the way you’re doing it, and I don’t like Bob Pittman.” He didn’t need the money.

  JOHN SYKES: Pittman said, “We have to get it on air by August 1.” We hardly knew where to begin. My business card said, “Music Program Development, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company.” There was no MTV yet.

  JACK SCHNEIDER: People wonder why we picked August 1 for the launch. It was my knowledge that most fads start in the summer. I wanted the kids who saw it to go back to college or their high-school cafeteria and say, “Did you see this new channel?” I told everyone, “We’re gonna make it by August 1 or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  FRED SEIBERT: Once they got the green light, right away I said to Pittman, “Hey, I know more about music than anyone here.” And he said, “You’re right. Start working on the music channel.” I said, “Great! Should I find somebody to replace me at The Movie Channel?” He said, “Oh no, no. You have to do that job, too.”

  One of the first things we needed to do was come up with a name for the new network. At first, Bob wanted to call it The Music Channel. Like The Movie Channel. Then he decided it should be called TV1. We all rebelled. We were adamant about it, so we walked into his office one day and told him we didn’t like the name. He said, “Well, come up with a better one.” There were six or seven of us, and no one could agree.

  STEVE CASEY: I was scribbling down different names, and I liked the way MTV looked when I doodled it. I said, “Let’s call it Music Television.”

  FRED SEIBERT: Music Television became the final compromise. Nobody liked it. We all hated the name MTV.

  RICHARD SCHENKMAN, MTV staff: Fred ran the program services department. I’d never heard the phrase “program services” in my life. Fred explained to me that his department was going to make all the stuff that came in between the videos. And even though what he was making would occupy only two minutes an hour, it was the most important stuff on the air, because it explained to the viewers who we were.

  FRED SEIBERT: I called my oldest friend, Frank Olinsky, who had started Manhattan Design with two partners. I asked them to design a logo. All I told them was, it’s radio on television, and I don’t want any musical instruments or notes. At this point it’s April or May, and we’re down to the wire. Bob is tapping his foot, saying “Where the hell is the logo?”

  So one day Frank comes to my office. I’m flipping through one after another. I’m depressed. This one’s not gonna work, that one’s not gonna work. On the bottom of the pile is a piece of tracing paper that looks like it had been crumpled up and then flattened out. And on it was the M that we now know. I’m like, “That’s great.” Frank spray paints TV onto the M, leaves the drips on, and comes back. We go, “That’s it!” Graffiti. Done.

  Then I said, “Okay, what colors will it be?” They do a couple dozen treatments, and each one looks good to me. So I put them up on my wall in my cubicle, and for weeks I looked at them, every hour, every day. Finally I said, “What if we use all of these in a single piece of animation? What if the logo was constantly changing? Isn’t that kind of a rock n’ roll thing to do?” You’d see twenty logos in one ten-second piece.

  ANDY SETOS: It was changing like every eighth of a second. We had a discussion about that, so it wouldn’t go too fast and give people epilepsy.

  TOM FRESTON: John Lack hired Ogilvy & Mather to be our ad agency. It was a bad fit. We showed the logo to their creative director, Jerry McGee. He said, “This is the single worst thing I have ever seen. It violates every rule of logo-making. If you do this, you’ll ruin your business.” Fred said, “Well, too bad, we’re gonna do this.” Jerry McGee was appalled.

  Twenty years later, when I was running MTV, I was at the car park at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA and I saw Jerry McGee getting into his car. He looked at me and said, “I know, I know.” It’s hard to remember now, but MTV was revolutionary in its day.

  MARCY BRAFMAN, MTV staff: We had a sign above the monitor where we viewed the day’s work, and it said, THIS IS NOT TRUE. We wanted people to question the voice-of-God aspect of television.

  RICHARD SCHENKMAN: Fred Seibert is brilliant. When he walks in the room, he’s the smartest guy there.

  JACK SCHNEIDER: I have great respect for Fred. He gave MTV a look. The variations he did on the logo were simply brilliant. He did one with French fries and ketchup that was the best of its kind I ever saw. I remember it to this day.

  JUDY McGRATH, MTV executive: Fred asked me what bands I liked, and no matter what I answered, he said, “You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why.”

  PETER DOUGHERTY, MTV producer: As someone said to me, Fred thinks he invented television. I like Fred, but he’s not humble.

  FRED SEIBERT: We were the most conceited, arrogant people. We actually thought what we were doing was important. We thought, We’re gonna change the face of television! And we needed a station ID that reflected how arrogant we were. So we thought, “What’s the most famous moment in television history?” We were gonna steal it. The Kennedy assassination? No, that’s not gonna work. And I said, “I think the most famous moment is the moon walk. Why don’t we take that footage, and put the MTV logo in the American flag?”

  TOM FRESTON: Pittman never gave us any money to do anything. This was a fucking shoestring operation if there ever was.

  BOB PITTMAN: We hit upon the NASA moon-landing footage, because it was public domain—it was cheap—and it seemed big. Our original concept was to have Neil Armstrong saying, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” We sent a letter to his lawyer
: “If we don’t hear back from you, we’re going to run this.” And like a day before we launched, we got a letter back saying, “No, you do not have our permission.” Shit.

  FRED SEIBERT: At first I wanted Joe Jackson to do all the music for our promos. But I was too scared to call him. So I hired a company called Elias-Peterson. I told them I need ten-second pieces of music, and we picked a dozen of them.

  JONATHAN ELIAS, musician: They showed me the moon-landing picture and said, “Because people are so used to seeing that image as holy, let’s rip it apart with some rock music.” Who knew the MTV theme would turn into a generation’s standard-bearer? They still use it every now and then, in various parts of the world. About seven years later, I went on to produce Duran Duran. Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes said to me, “You’re the only person who’s on MTV more than we are.” That’s how they introduced me to people; not “He’s our producer,” but “This is the guy who wrote the MTV theme.”