by Craig Marks
BOB PITTMAN: Les and Sykes managed relationships with the music industry. The wild and crazy ones dealt with Les, and the businesslike and analytical ones dealt with Sykes.
ABBEY KONOWITCH, record executive; MTV executive: John Sykes knew how to build relationships with artists. He was slick, and he got the Rolling Stones and Billy Idol and Tom Petty to do things for free, for a network that barely existed. He was great at getting artists to believe in the dream, and he executed his promotions so brilliantly that artists would say thank you to him when they were over.
FRED SEIBERT: John ran all our contests. As a kid growing up in Schenectady, New York, John entered every contest. He told us, “You know what the problem was? I never won anything.” And so Marcy Brafman very smartly came up with the marketing proposition, “People Really Win on MTV.” We determined that whenever we ran a contest, we would follow around the winner. Our first contest, “One Night Stand with Journey,” was won by a Margaret Doebler. She was a typical older teenager—a little chunky, a little middle-American, with permed blond hair—and when we followed Margaret around, we proved the proposition: “People Really Win on MTV.”
When we launched, we said we were in 3 million homes. We were not. We were only in a half million homes for at least the first few months. When we ran the Journey contest, we didn’t know what to expect. When we counted the number of postcards, we had ninety thousand. That’s when we knew we were good to go.
JOHN SYKES: For “One Night Stand with Journey,” I wanted to put together the dream rock n’ roll trip: We’d fly a fan anywhere in the world, they’d go backstage, hang with the group, fly home that night, and be in school or at work the next day. It was a fantasy, the ultimate one-night stand. Double meaning. And Bob loved planes. He said, “My friend Artie has a Learjet at Republic Airport on Long Island,” so we went to Artie and leased his Learjet.
We wanted to make it look like it was our Learjet, so Fred made up a piece of Mylar with an MTV logo, and I taped it to the outside of the plane’s door. The pilot said, “You know, that Mylar could get sucked into the engine and we could all die. You’ve got to take it off.” So the camera shot the plane taxiing away, and once we got out of the camera range, the pilot stopped, opened the plane door, and we removed the Mylar logo. Then we’d land to pick up the contest winner, stop before the end of the runway, where like the local townspeople were waiting with their cameras, tape the Mylar back up, and taxi into view in the MTV Learjet.
ROBERT MORTON: John was a great hustler. We’d always say, “Oh fuck, Sykes has another contest.” But years later, the business is now all about integration and contests, and doing things that cross over from the show to the Web. Sykes was aware of all that stuff early on.
CURT SMITH: Here’s the thing about John Sykes: He’s impossible to dislike. My wife and I were at his wedding in the Hamptons, at [Rolling Stone editor and publisher] Jann Wenner’s house. MTV did a good job of hiring people who could meet, mingle, and be liked by everyone. Artists would do things for MTV they wouldn’t normally do for other people, because you don’t want to say no to your friends.
MICHAEL STIPE: John and I are still friends.
TOMMY MOTTOLA: Sykes was the ultimate promotion man, a royal pain in the ass who would not leave you alone until you finally gave in. He would call me relentlessly, twenty times, until I said either yes or yes.
JOHN SYKES: I made sure the trains ran on time. Les could go toe to toe with artists. But Bob was the genius strategist. One of the record company executives called him “the guy with the ten-thousand-pound brain.”
JUDY McGRATH: Bob Pittman was very confident that MTV was going to be big, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. He made you want to paint the fence for him. He had the true sense of what this thing was going to be, and nothing was going to get in his way.
BOB PITTMAN: I was wildly passionate and naturally argumentative and incredibly inflexible. I was the programmer. I got to make the choices.
CHARLIE WARNER: If you talk with people who worked for Bob, you will find that some found him aloof, arrogant, and overly ambitious. The majority of them adore him.
MARCY BRAFMAN: I love Bob. I don’t know that everyone says that.
ALLEN NEWMAN: The directors who were working for MTV went out on strike, because they wanted to join the Directors Guild of America. I got called into Bob Pittman’s office, and he told me my new job was to run the studio while our directors were out striking. He doubled my salary from $11,500 to $25,000 a year. It was the first time I’d ever sat in the director’s chair, and I had to learn on the fly. I was basically a scab, but I was a scab who had just doubled his salary, from the man himself.
FRED SEIBERT: Bob wanted the final word on everything. And when it came time for the credit, he would assume it as the biggest guy in the room: “Everything that happens under me is mine.” The thing that drove me crazy about Bob was that when awards were handed out on a specific piece of work, he would collect it, rather than let the person who did the work collect it.
He had an incredible ability to drive you crazy on a project, but he knew when to back off. John Lack didn’t always know how to do that. John would do things like mess with a typeface. Bob didn’t know what a typeface was and didn’t care. But that was John, all the way. I felt he was ultimately disrespectful to creative people.
SUE STEINBERG: John Lack was Batman and Bob Pittman was Robin. And ultimately, Bob became Batman.
JOHN LACK: Look, John Sykes will say he was the father of MTV. Bob Pittman will say he was. They’re all saying it.
TOM FRESTON: Bob was the young star, he was the guy the press was attracted to. How could somebody that young be so articulate, smart, and committed? So Bob got a lot of ink, and that created dislocation and envy. I don’t know for sure that John Lack felt that way, but he could rightly say that he was the father of MTV—it was his idea, he put the team together, he sold it to the board—yet the credit was evading his grasp. It was accruing to Bob. Bob would say, “I never took credit for having the idea, but I did make it happen.” And in a way, Bob was right. Bob did lead the creative process for what MTV became. But conceptually, it was John who had the idea to do it.
BOB PITTMAN: John Lack fell out of favor with the board of directors. We’d projected $10 million in ad revenue, and we’d done $500,000. The ad agencies would buy national programming only when it had a two-thirds reach of the country and a 3.0 rating. Cable networks don’t even have that today. The board began to get nervous. It all got crazy, at which point I came close to leaving. Barry Diller, the CEO of Paramount, was wooing me to leave MTV. David Geffen tried to hire me to become president of the Geffen Company.
An old-line Hollywood film producer named Marty Ransohoff said, “Why should you have to leave? MTV’s your idea. You’re the one doing it. If you have a fight, you don’t have to leave.” So I stuck it out.
Drew Lewis, who’d been President Reagan’s secretary of transportation and was famous for firing all the air traffic controllers, came in as chairman and CEO of Warner Amex Cable Communications [in February 1983]. Drew pulled me aside and said, “Look, you’re gonna take over MTV eventually. But only if you fix this thing. And if you can’t get us to break even by the end of the year, we’re shutting it down.”
TOM FRESTON: He’d fired the air traffic controllers. He would have had no problem firing forty hippies who were working out of some dump.
JOHN SYKES: Those were bumpy times for MTV. Drew Lewis was really pressing us to cut costs. Cable was a more expensive business than anyone at Warner Amex had anticipated. It was expensive to wire neighborhoods. And we were still just getting going. The buzz was getting bigger and bigger, but the cash wasn’t coming in like it did later. We were very much the Facebook of our time. Every kid loved us, but the financial model wasn’t quite working yet.
JOHN LACK: Jack Schneider came into my office one day and said, “John, we’re consolidating. There’s only room for one of us and it ain’t gonna
be you.” So I left MTV towards the end of ’83. The Movie Channel had just about gotten to break-even. MTV wasn’t making money. Steve Ross said, “We’re spending millions. We can’t do this shit anymore.” They paid me big dough to go away, paid me for the three years left on my contract. I exercised all my stock options. I was richer than I should have been at thirty-five years old, so I wasn’t too upset with Jack. When you’re playing in big-boy land, the air gets kind of thin at the top. I learned that you can’t stay too long at the party when the party’s over for you. And a year later, Schneider got fired. When I left, Schneider promoted Pittman to take over some of my functions; he didn’t give him Nickelodeon to program, but he made him executive vice president of MTV and The Movie Channel. Now, Bob Pittman was the smartest guy I ever met. He believed MTV was his dream, too. Unfortunately, he tried to make it his own dream by taking credit for it when I left. The world finally said, “Bob, weren’t you an employee hired to do this?” If I was the architect, he was the general contractor.
JACK SCHNEIDER: John Lack was an enormous disappointment. I was very disappointed in his conduct and development. He wasn’t a good executive. I think John has always represented himself as being a bigger player in this than he was.
JOHN LACK: When I left, Bob did an even better job than I did, but he didn’t invent the thing. He was great at implementing the vision. But it wasn’t his vision. After I left, he took the vision and went left and right with it, God bless. That’s what all good executives do. But he was married to a strange, upwardly-mobile lady by the name of Sandy. A famous, controversial character. She was obsessed with building his image as a media giant. They lived above their means in an apartment they couldn’t afford. She was a social climber. They’re long divorced now.
CHARLIE WARNER: A lot of people expected, when somebody did a story about MTV, for Bob to say, “Well, it wasn’t my idea, it was John Lack’s idea and he gets all the credit for hiring me.” And when he didn’t, people were angry at him. But that’s the game. That’s how you get ahead.
ANDY SETOS: Bob tried to climb over everyone to the top, even though he was but one of the people who contributed to the enterprise. He took credit for everyone else’s work. And that put a bad taste in people’s mouths. People were grumbling about Bob as early as 1982.
JORDAN ROST: It’s disgusting that anyone would take credit away from John Lack. It shouldn’t be a controversy. I was in the room after we got an okay from the board, and Schneider said to Lack, “You’re in charge. You’ve gotta make this happen.” But Bob was very savvy in working with the press and managing his career. When people interviewed him and attributed him as the creator, he let it lie. He never dissuaded anyone or said, “No, you got that wrong.” Silence can be telling.
CAROLYN BAKER: MTV was John Lack’s idea. He hired Bob Pittman. But there is no way this would have been achieved without Bob. He had that killer instinct. Nobody worked harder than Bob. He worked so hard that I thought he was going to drop dead.
STEVE LEEDS: John Lack is the unsung hero. Most people go, “Oh, it’s Bob Pittman.” No, it’s John Lack and Michael Nesmith.
MICHAEL NESMITH: The word invent, it’s inapt. There’s not one moment where you flip the switch and it starts running. It’s a gradual coalescence of different things, a confluence of energies. It’s one of those ideas that nobody really thinks up. It’s like justice. Or kindness. Nobody thinks that up.
Chapter 11
“THEY FIGURED OUT A WHOLE NEW PERSONA”
HOW THREE GNARLY OLD DUDES BECAME UNLIKELY VIDEO STARS
NOT EVERY STAR ON MTV WAS BEAUTIFUL, OR EVEN young. When ZZ Top released Eliminator in 1983, the three band members were a combined ninety-nine years old. They’d been recording since 1971 and, in the course of seven albums, had built a sturdy career as a touring band, mostly in the Midwest and South. Texans who wore cowboy hats, boots, and jeans—two of whom had grown long beards—they were unlikely video stars. But these shit-kickers were not stodgy (singer Billy Gibbons adored Depeche Mode), and Eliminator suddenly propelled them to pop stardom, selling 10 million albums, as director Tim Newman paired their deadpan cool with much-younger women in sheer clothing. ZZ Top’s success cemented the video meme of shapely females used as decoration.
Newman, whose family was a Hollywood dynasty, and who’d come to music videos from the world of commercial directing, became baffled by the economics of videos. A smart director could make a band rich—why shouldn’t the director get rich, too? The story of what happened after Eliminator, and how Newman was replaced as director without the band’s knowledge, illustrates the struggles that continuously emerged between bands, directors, and record companies—usually over money.
TIM NEWMAN: I met a girl who was dating Jerry Casale from Devo, and she had a VHS tape of her favorite videos, including Devo and Duran Duran. I was a very successful commercial director, and when I saw “Girls on Film,” I thought, I would like to do this. For someone who did ads for airlines and detergent and cereal, this looked like a lot more fun.
I come from a musical family: My father Alfred and uncle Lionel were screen composers, and heads of the music department at 20th Century Fox, and my cousin is Randy Newman, who had signed at Warner Bros. Records. So I called Lenny Waronker, the president of Warner Bros. Records, and said, “What’s this music-video deal?” Lenny had been friends with Randy since they were boys.
Jo Bergman at Warners said, “You direct commercials, and we don’t spend much money on these things—maybe $50,000.” Even in those days, that was hardly any money. But I got a call to do the video for my cousin Randy’s song “I Love L.A.” We did a day of camera-car work and I wanted to do a lot more. It turned out to be about as much fun as I had ever had filming, probably to this day.
JO BERGMAN: “I Love L.A.” became a classic video, so we had Tim direct ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’.” He was responsible for reinventing the band. That key chain? The girls? That was Tim. On the day of the shoot, their manager was looking at the models, who were neither made up nor in costume, and he said, “I don’t think these are the right girls. They’re not sexy enough.” When they came out of the trailer all dolled up, there were smiles everywhere.
TIM NEWMAN: The creative brief from ZZ Top’s manager, Bill Ham, who was kind of a Svengali type, was “Use the car and put some girls in it.” Yeah, I can work with that. By then, music video was on everybody’s lips—there was a cover story in Time magazine.
BILLY GIBBONS: Tim was the hands-down favorite, because his reel showed commercials he had done for Coca-Cola. If you can do it in thirty seconds, then three minutes is an epic tale. Many of the same elements—cars, pretty girls—felt right for what ZZ Top is: loud, raucous, a good time.
TOM PETTY: ZZ Top were brilliant at transitioning into the MTV era. They figured out a whole new persona.
BILLY GIBBONS: Let me brag on Tim, because directors are rarely credited in the public’s perception. When we speak of the early days, support from the label was scant. Tim said, “If we do this as a union shoot, we’ll chew up the budget in the first hour.” To avoid falling into the union’s hands, we started at 6 P.M. on a Friday, when union hours close, and that gave us until Sunday at 6 P.M. We drove to Palmdale, California, in the high desert, and there was a stretch of road with an abandoned gas station. It was freezing cold. Tim assigned three guys to hold big Mexican blankets to wrap the girls up, because they were so scantily clad.
The little red car was a 1933 Ford three-window coupe. I bought it in 1976, and it had only just come off the finishing line in 1983. When the car was finally completed, there was an outstanding balance, which I didn’t have. All told, the coupe cost well over $250,000. I was in debt, but my accountant said if I used the car as a business expense, I would get a tax deduction. So it became the focus of the Eliminator album cover. On the day the shoot took place, I was able to go to the bank and borrow the money I owed to pay off the car. Not only did the car become a celebrity, thanks to
Tim placing it front and center in the videos, it was a milestone vehicle in the hot-rodding world.
When I saw the girls Tim picked, I said, “Gosh, you’ve got the eye.” And he said, “Yeah, I’ve also got the Playboy modeling booklet.” There was Daniele Arnaud—she was French and could barely speak English—Jeana Tomasina, and a third girl who mysteriously disappeared. She never came to collect her money. It was just weird.
DANIELE ARNAUD, model: I was born in Nice, in the south of France, and I didn’t know ZZ Top. I’m the blonde one who shows the garters. I come out of the car, put my leg up on the hood, and I put my money in the garter.
JEANA TOMASINA KEOUGH, model: People recognize me now only if they know me from The Real Housewives of Orange County. I’m the only brunette in “Gimme All Your Lovin’.” When Tim asked me, I said no. It was against the union—the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA—to do those things, because videos didn’t pay residuals. And I’d never heard of the band. All their songs sounded alike to me. Not paying attention to music hurt me a lot, because when I had a chance to audition for a guy named Prince in Minneapolis, for Purple Rain, I refused to go. I said, “There’s no prince in Minneapolis, they must think I’m stupid.”
