VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  The first weekend I lived in New York, I had maybe one friend outside of the people at MTV—and I didn’t really know them either. Mark kindly said, “You want to go to Central Park?” I got into a cab to meet him and immediately got into a car accident. Not a big one, but there was lots of screaming and yelling. After I finally made it to Central Park, Mark and I were walking around when a bush came alive.

  Mark:

  There was some commotion in the bush, and I said, “Oh, that’s probably rats fighting. No big deal. There must be some garbage there.” Nina completely freaked out. She was so not a New York person. I thought Nina was really hot, and I was definitely attracted to her, but I was in love with Carol, so I didn’t try to instigate anything between us—and today, we’re like brother and sister.

  After a format change at KWST—it went from classic rock to top 40—J. J. was without a job. At his MTV audition, he also interviewed “Billy Joel”—and did well, despite not caring for the actual Billy Joel. When the producers told him that the job meant moving to New York City, he said, “You see that beautiful black Jensen Interceptor sitting out there? You see those mountains, that blue sky, those big, puffy clouds? All that goes away if I go to Manhattan. But I’ll go, ’cause I need the gig.”

  Nina:

  I met J. J. in the lobby of the Berkshire, where MTV had put us both up. He commanded your respect immediately, but he was a very sweet man. We were both Angelenos, so we talked about the sports cars that we had left behind. I had an MG; he had a Jensen Interceptor, which was a hand-built British car. He always pronounced it “Intacepta.” It wasn’t so much of a Boston accent as it was a J. J. accent. MTV gave the two of us tickets to see Judas Priest. Our seats were right in front of the speakers, so we lasted maybe thirty seconds and then went out to dinner.

  MTV had hired one other VJ, Meg Griffin. I knew she was an FM jock, and I thought she was really cool. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her very much, because she quit almost immediately.

  Mark:

  Meg had been at WNEW-FM for years, and was next in a long line of jocks who were being groomed for a full-time spot. She was great—I was happy she got the MTV job. Meg was a very cute all-American girl next door, bangs and freckles, a Martha Quinn type. One day, before we launched, Meg did an interview with the Equators. At the end, Meg was supposed to get up: They would play some Equators music and she would dance with the band. For some reason, they had to do a few takes, and she was really uncomfortable with the whole thing. In her mind, that sealed the deal. We shared a cab uptown together after we were done for the day, and she said, “I’m going to quit.”

  I told her, “Meg, don’t do this. You will regret this. Do not leave—you’ll work this out.”

  Later, she told me there were other factors: Bob Pittman, who ran MTV, didn’t want her to keep a part-time job at WNEW. He said, “You’re going to work harder if this is your only job.” He wanted her to have the fear that comes with no backup plan. That was Pittman—he always wanted to keep his foot on our necks.

  Meg was at MTV for the same reason I was—she was passionate about music. It became clear to her that wasn’t why they hired her: Do they want me here because I love music, or because I look like whole wheat? So she quit, and got that full-time position at WNEW. That was what made room for Martha.

  Martha:

  Even though I’d graduated from NYU, I kept my desk clerk gig at Weinstein. (Some clerks stayed there for years—the most famous being Ric Menello, who wound up directing videos for the Beastie Boys.) One afternoon in July, I was sitting on the city bus, heading back uptown to my weird apartment. Around Rockefeller Center, the traffic got really bad. The bus wasn’t moving, so I jumped off to visit my friends at WNBC. Purely by chance, a guy named Burt Stein was also visiting. He used to work for A&M Records in California, and he was hanging out at WNBC that day for no particular reason. A bunch of us were shooting the breeze in the music office. Then Burt randomly asked, “Hey, what’s Bob Pittman doing?” Bob had been the youngest-ever program director of WNBC—he left before I got there, but he was a legend.

  Buzz Brindle, assistant program director at WNBC, and a former professor of mine, said, “Oh, he’s doing this MTV thing.” And then Buzz looked at me and uttered the words that changed my life forever: “Martha, that’s what you should do. You should be a VJ on MTV.”

  “What’s a VJ?” I practically scoffed.

  Buzz said, “It’s like a DJ on the radio, but on television.”

  This sounded like WKRP in Cincinnati to me, so I asked the logical question, “What do I during the records?” I was thinking they’d film a DJ studio.

  “No, it’s videos,” he explained. “They’re playing these clips.”

  I said, “Oh, I can’t do that. You know who should do that? Evan Davies, he’s really good at music.” Evan was another radio major from NYU.

  Buzz said, “No, I really think you should do it.” He picked up the phone and called Bob Pittman. It turned out it was the last day of auditions. Buzz said, “You gotta get down there—they’re closing up shop at five-thirty.”

  It was already 5 P.M., and I didn’t know how I would get to Thirty-third Street and Tenth Avenue in time. I knew I’d never get a cab, so I called my friend Adam, the only person I knew who had a car. Adam picked me up, dropped me off on Thirty-third Street, and went to get a pizza. I walked into the studio and said, “Hey, I’m here to audition.” And they were like, “Uh, who are you?”

  Nina:

  As I was running out the door, in came this young woman, barely five feet tall. As I remember it, she had a flower hat, and a T-shirt that said I LOVE COUNTRY MUSIC. I thought, “Hmmm, not very rock ’n’ roll.” Not being judgmental—I just didn’t think she was what they were looking for.

  Martha:

  I was in the outfit that I’d put on that day to go work at Weinstein—I was dressed for sorting mail and handing out toilet paper. I had a T-shirt with an iron-on glitter transfer that said, of all things, COUNTRY MUSIC IS IN MY BLOOD. My junior-year roommate (not the Wilhelmina model—this one left school when she got pregnant and married a Bible salesman) gave it to me. And I was in a white tennis skirt and Keds. Not one speck of makeup. I didn’t even have a brush for my hair.

  After they figured out that I was supposed to audition, they sat me in a barber chair in front of a camera. I read the teleprompter for a bit, and then they said, “Okay, now tell us about a concert that you’ve been to.” I talked about an Earth, Wind & Fire show at Madison Square Garden. I had no idea what was at stake—if I did, I probably would have been too jittery to get the job! The audition was literally three minutes, but by the time it was over, I had a pretty good idea of what this MTV thing was about and I really wanted the gig. I called my brother and said, “I auditioned for something that is perfect for me.”

  A couple of days later, after getting my hair cut at the Plaza—courtesy of Jane Bryant Quinn—I checked my messages from the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street. That was back when you had to access your answering machine with a little beeper. There was a message: Sue Steinberg saying, “Come to the studio, we think we have good news.”

  I hailed a cab right away. When I got to the studio, I was escorted upstairs to a conference room with executive producers Sue Steinberg and Julian Goldberg. They asked, “So how would you like to have a job where you fly around the country and interview rock stars and go to concerts and be on TV?”

  I said, “Okay, I’ll take it.” I didn’t even ask, “How much?” I was twenty-two years old.

  Mark:

  We were doing run-throughs, practicing as we led up to the channel’s debut on August 1. Martha and Alan joined very late, in mid-July. I watched Martha and thought, “Who is this kid? She has no idea what she’s doing.” Neither did I, but I did know music. It was clear to me that they were desperate as we got closer to the launch: They wanted five VJs, and they didn’t have them.

  Alan:

  In th
e summer of 1981, I went to a “Way Up North in Mississippi” picnic in Central Park, an event for anybody born, bred, or educated in the state of Mississippi. There were hundreds of people at the picnic, eating watermelon, spitting seeds, doing the barbecue thing. They even—oh, Lord—sang “Dixie.”

  Bob Pittman showed up in a jacket, snazzily dressed for a hot summer day in New York City. I was wearing some grungy shorts. Bob’s father was friends with my father-in-law; they were both Methodist ministers. So I was introduced to Bob; I didn’t know a damn thing about him except he was big in radio. I told him I was a struggling actor, bartending at night, going to auditions, trying to catch a ride somewhere. He told me he was working on a new cable channel for Warner AmEx: music video, twenty-four hours a day. “Really? I was just in this David Bowie video.” I told him about “Fashion.” I couldn’t imagine how spinning videos twenty-four hours a day would work, but I was polite about it. Bob was a nice guy, but aloof. A very cool cucumber.

  Two weeks later, I got a phone call from Sue Steinberg. I don’t know how she got my phone number, but she said, “Bob bumped into you at the park and thinks you should audition for this thing we got going, called The Music Channel.”

  I went to the audition totally blind. I had to read some teleprompter copy, no problem. I was a good cold reader, if a little stiff. When it came time to describe a recent concert I had seen, that was trouble: The last show I had seen was the Doobie Brothers, about a year earlier, hardly a target band for the channel. I would get halfway through my extemporaneous chitchat, and not know where I was going. I laughed and giggled a lot. Lots of flop sweat, but I was jovial enough in my embarrassment. I ended up doing three torturous auditions, and each one, I just wasn’t good at it. I couldn’t even pronounce my own name correctly. I kept hitting a hard T instead of a soft t: “Alan Hun-TER.”

  A few weeks later, I came home from some other audition, about to go work at the bar. I hadn’t heard a lot of good feedback that summer—I had been in the Bowie video and Annie, and that was about it. Rejection, that’s the actor’s life. I checked the messages on my answering machine. Sue Steinberg had left a message, saying they wanted to offer me the job. It made no sense at all.

  In a state of total disbelief, I went to meet with Sue. It didn’t appear to be a joke or a mistake: She told me how much they would pay me and gave me an envelope with five hundred dollars cash in it to buy some clothes. Totally overwhelmed, I walked home to Jan. I shuffled across the room like a zombie, collapsed on the bed, and said, “Oh my God, Jan, this is fucking real.” We both cried: I had a steady gig in New York. The weight of the world was off our shoulders. We could buy a new couch.

  Mark:

  Carol auditioned for MTV—pretty much anybody who was in radio in New York went down and tried out. Carol was a big star in New York, and beautiful, and smart. It seemed like she would have been perfect. But as it turned out, she was stiff on camera. I think part of the friction that developed in our relationship was that I got the gig and she didn’t.

  I found out many years later that they cast us as types. According to Sue Steinberg, my niche was that I was the hunk. Which I didn’t necessarily agree with, but thank you for the compliment. J. J. was the benign black guy, Nina was the video vamp, Alan was the jock, and Martha was the girl next door that every executive wanted to fuck.

  Meg Griffin told me that the day she was supposed to sign her contract, she overheard Bob Pittman on the phone in the next room, only his list was a little different: “We’ve got our black guy, our Jew, our vixen, and our jock.”

  4

  Step Right up and Don’t Be Shy

  MTV Blasts Off

  Martha:

  The first week I rehearsed with the VJs, we practiced news segments. I’d say, “Here’s Billy Joel talking about his new album,” and then they would roll one of the audition tapes, where everybody had pretended to be interviewing Billy Joel. But the tape they rolled was always this one particularly goofy audition, done by a guy with longish blond surfer hair.

  Then they hired Al—I was shocked when I met him, because he was the guy in the goofy audition tape!

  Alan:

  I met the other VJs at dinner, downtown at Odeon with some of the executives: Sue Steinberg, who hired us; John Sykes, who was the director of promotion; and John Lack, who came up with the idea of MTV. J. J. was extremely gracious and big-hearted, a fatherly huggy-bear type: “Welcome aboard, kid, let me show you the ropes.” Mark seemed pompous—maybe because he didn’t know what to make of me. Martha had a coy quality, so I connected with Nina much quicker. That’s partially because Nina is Nina and she engages everybody with love and energy. But it was also because we were both actors and we were able to talk about that.

  Soon after that, Les Garland took us all out for a “get to know me” dinner—he was second in command under Bob Pittman, our head honcho. Les was a wild man, a big schmoozer. His big early triumph was convincing Mick Jagger to join the “I Want My MTV” ad campaign. When Mick asked what was in it for the Stones, Les whipped out a single dollar bill. Years later, Les became the answer to a trivia question by being the voice of the DJ on Starship’s “We Built This City.” And, like Pittman, Les had one good eye and one glass eye.

  Martha:

  I honestly thought the other VJs were the coolest people that I’d ever met in my life. I was starry-eyed and felt so lucky that they had to hang around with me. I have two older brothers who I always thought were the coolest guys around. Being with the VJs made me feel like our mom forced them to babysit me; I was the thrilled little sister.

  Mark:

  In the earliest days, I thought Martha was just a kid. I was like, “Wow, what is she doing here?” It wasn’t really her age that bothered me—it was that she had no sense of the history of rock ’n’ roll! It made me question the direction of the channel.

  I was so serious and pompous back then. It was because I loved music so much—but geez, Goodman, lighten up. It’s only rock ’n’ roll.

  Alan:

  Martha was immediately really good at what she did. Nina was doing great and she was obviously loved by the brass. In the beginning, she was the one they were banking on—a hot rocker girl. She was sexy and she read the prompter well. She was a very good ambassador for the likes of the Scorpions.

  Nina:

  Alan seemed like an actor, a musical-comedy guy. I thought he had talent, but he didn’t seem very rock ’n’ roll.

  There was a lot of experimenting in the studio, and a lot of kinks to be worked out. You could feel the anticipation because the deadline—August 1, 1981—was coming fast.

  Mark:

  It was easy and full of excitement—it never crossed my mind that there would ever be a problem. That was my naïveté, I guess.

  Other news stories on Saturday, August 1, 1981:

  Air traffic controllers announced they would strike on Monday if they didn’t receive a new contract (a strategy that didn’t turn out well for them); the Reagan administration announced a plan to intercept boats carrying Haitian refugees. In sports, a seven-week baseball strike was settled, while the Detroit Pistons signed their number one draft pick, Isiah Thomas (in a four-year deal that paid him a total of $1.6 million). Movies released that weekend included the POW drama Victory, directed by John Huston and starring Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone, and Under the Rainbow, a comedy about the little people playing Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, starring Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher.

  The top five singles in the United States:

  1. Rick Springfield, “Jessie’s Girl”

  2. Air Supply, “The One That You Love”

  3. Joey Scarbury, “The Theme from ‘The Greatest American Hero’ ”

  4. Kenny Rogers, “I Don’t Need You”

  5. Oak Ridge Boys, “Elvira”

  Mark:

  For the launch, everyone at MTV, which can’t have been more than a hundred people, got in a school bus and went across the river to Fort L
ee, New Jersey. We weren’t on the cable system in Manhattan, so we had to go to Jersey to see the network. The launch party was at a blue-hair restaurant called the Loft. There were a lot of old people upstairs, and we were downstairs in the basement. We watched on a television—not a big screen, just a TV wheeled in on a cart like a high-school AV club project. I don’t think we even had it in stereo—and they had us plugging the shit out of how MTV was in stereo.

  MTV launched with public domain footage of the Apollo 11 mission—a rocket taking off, and then astronauts cavorting on the moon. After a couple of videos, the VJs were introduced in prerecorded clips, touting the awesomeness of MTV. Due to a technical glitch, the clips were played out of order: Mark was supposed to be first, saying “Just moments ago, all the VJs and the crew here at MTV collectively hit our executive producer Sue Steinberg over the head with a bottle of champagne and behold, a new concept is born.” Alan ended up being first, saying, “I’ll be with you right after Mark,” and even today, he playfully touts his “first VJ” status.

  Martha:

  At 12:01 A.M., the rocket went off and you heard John Lack—one of the network’s executives—say, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” People in the room were sobbing. I had been at MTV for only two weeks, and it was amazing for me. There were people in the room who had started the channel in a hotel room and had been fighting for it for years.