I Want My MTV (10 page)

 

GREG HAYMES, Blotto:
We were a small indie band in Albany, New York, when MTV ran our video on day one, sandwiched between Iron Maiden and Rod Stewart. Not to be overly humble, but they needed content. I think we were the thirty-fourth or thirty-sixth video they played.

 

JERRY CASALE:
In the beginning, they played “Whip It” all the time.

 

“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC:
Devo was in heavy rotation, not because MTV loved Devo, but because it was a twenty-four-hour network and they needed product.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
I think there were 250 videos in existence.

 

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
When new videos came in, it was like when you're living in a small port town and the ship comes in with supplies.

 

ANDY SETOS:
After two days, it was getting
really
boring. We had very few clips—and there were no commercials.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
We must have played “Lonely Boy” by Andrew Gold every twenty minutes. He was one of the few American artists with more than one video. We also played Rod Stewart up the wazoo.

 

TOM FRESTON:
When we went on the air, we had something like 165 videos. And thirty of them were Rod Stewart.

 

RICK KRIM, MTV executive:
Damn, there was a lot of Rod Stewart and REO Speedwagon. But I also remember random videos like Classix Nouveau's “Guilty,” and Tenpole Tudor's wacky “Wunderbar.”

DAVE HOLMES:
There were bands I got into because I thought they were cool, and I thought they were cool because they were on MTV, and they were on MTV because the network had played Rod Stewart too many times. Blotto, or Joe King Carrasco and the Crowns—I thought they were legendary artists. And I wanted to live in a world where Blotto was huge.

 

GREG HAYMES:
I think they appreciated us because we were not afraid to be silly. Alan Hunter wore a Blotto sweatshirt on the air.

 

GALE SPARROW:
We had eight Rod Stewart videos. We played him, like, every five minutes. Rod was lucky we didn't ruin his career. To be honest, we'd play pretty much anyone with a video.

 

 

 

 

 

 

FROM THE BEGINNING, MUSIC VIDEOS WERE OFTEN
silly, undignified, funny (intentionally? unintentionally? It was hard to know), crass, and artificial. However, they were never dirty—until the arrival of a British band who counted on shock value to make their mark in the U.S. In this narrow sense, “Girls on Film” is the most influential music video ever made, setting in motion three decades of titillation.

JOHN TAYLOR:
“Girls on Film” is pretty fucking insane. I mean, it's like
Penthouse
or
Hustler
. It's
cheesy
. But it worked.

 

LOL CREME, director:
Duran Duran's managers, Paul and Michael Berrow, told us they were going to break the band in America by making a video, but not an ordinary video. They wanted an outrageous video. They said we could do whatever we wanted, but they suggested the concept be something sexual.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
The Berrows discovered there were clubs in the United States that played music videos. They wanted a video that would be controversial. I went to the south of France with a fashion crowd for a few weeks and my partner Lol went to LA. When we came back together, he'd seen some mud wrestling and I'd seen fashion shows. We thought,
What if we did a sort of catwalk show, but with sumo wrestling and sex?

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
There's no plot to “Girls on Film.” The only plot was to set up some sexy scenes with girls. You don't need a plot to make a cool video. You just need something that catches the eye, that's sexy or amusing. Sometimes it's enough just to have style.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
It had glamour, it had polish, it had sex, it had good-looking boys, it had girls sliding on poles. It was a dirty film. In hindsight, it had the ingredients that became MTV-able. If it was influential, I'm sorry. I can only apologize.

 

NICK RHODES, Duran Duran:
It's the kind of video people now call “politically incorrect.”

 

SIMON LE BON:
We were five randy twenty year olds, and management didn't want us around the girls when they took their clothes off. We did sneak in. It was
very sexy
for us at the time.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
Management kept the band well away from the girls. There were other shoots going on in nearby studios. Word got around, and people began flocking to our shoot.

 

LOL CREME:
We had a closed set, because there were naked ladies about. At one point, I turned around and saw Japanese tourists with their cameras, like a cliché, photographing what we were doing.

 

SIMON LE BON:
My favorite moment is definitely the ice cube on the nipple.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
Someone mentioned that at porno shoots, in order to get an erect nipple, you put some ice on it. So we said, “Why not?”

 

SIMON LE BON:
I don't know who held the ice cube. I wish it'd been me, but unfortunately it wasn't.

 

NICK RHODES:
It was funny and tongue-in-cheek.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
It definitely got the juices flowing. It brought out the alpha dog thing, where we were all unconsciously scrambling over each other to get the attention of the brunette.

 

SIMON LE BON:
Those two models in the video completely polarized the band. I liked the dark one. John liked the blond one.

KEVIN GODLEY:
Subsequently it was edited for MTV, which made it a little less raunchy than the original.

 

SIMON LE BON:
It was really on the edge. I mean, it was
banned
. That was the best thing that could ever have happened to it, really.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
It was very clear that we were a band served well by the video medium.

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN RECORD LABELS GAVE THEIR EXISTING
music videos to MTV, they were often reluctant, even though it didn't cost a cent—the videos were already paid for and were, for the most part, sitting around unused. But if MTV was going to succeed, they needed new videos, and better ones, too. This required record labels to spend money, in the midst of a sales slump, and that prospect changed their mood from reluctant to cranky. So MTV needed to present proof that exposure on the network led directly to more albums sales, or the labels would not increase their meager commitments to video.

And MTV had a second reluctant business partner: cable operators. “Remember, cable was in rural communities,” John Lack says. The federal government had been moving toward deregulation of cable, but cable operators were still subject to regulation on the municipal and state levels, and they feared that rock videos would incite controversy, viewer objections, protests, and maybe even cause them to lose the virtual monopolies they'd worked hard to win.

The cable operators were MTV's mightiest obstacle, and the network needed a quick solution. If MTV was going to survive past its first year, it had to outsmart the cable operators. The strategy devised inside the network involved a memorable four-word phrase, mixed with the power of celebrity.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
We needed to be very scientific about the impact MTV was having on the record industry. So I sent John Sykes and Tom Freston to Tulsa, Oklahoma. And one night, Sykes and Freston called me
very
excited. They'd been to a record store, and the store had suddenly sold out of the Tubes, and we were the only people playing the Tubes, so it had to be because of us. We had our first evidence that MTV was selling records.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Tulsa was one of the markets where we had the highest concentration of subscribers. We had dinner with guys from the local radio station, and they told us MTV had made them change their format, because people would see all this music they had never been exposed to, like the Stray Cats and Duran Duran, and call to request their songs. Then we met with the record-store guys and they said, “My god, we're selling out of Buggles records.” That was the one-two effect of MTV: Exposure on MTV would lead to radio airplay, and together that would lead to sales.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Before MTV, if you were a big act, no one knew what you looked like. Artists loved MTV, because suddenly people were stopping them on the street and saying, “I saw you on MTV.”

 

AL TELLER:
The big challenge for record companies was to build a roster of long-term artists. To do that, you not only had to get your artist on the radio, you had to develop an image for the artist, through live appearances and national and local press. Videos accelerated the artist-imaging process dramatically.

 

GARY GERSH, record executive:
It could take years and several albums for an audience to understand who the artist is or what they mean, but even what they look like. All of a sudden, what you look like is instantaneous. You make a video, and the next day, you're recognized in Peoria.

 

MICK KLEBER, record executive:
Once Duran Duran records started selling in record stores in Oklahoma, it opened up the eyes of everyone who was initially resistant to music video. There was a hiring and spending freeze in the music business in 1981. But not for the video departments. We got our own new offices, we got new equipment, we got our own editing bays. We got everything we needed to move forward.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN, manager:
Def Leppard's
High and Dry
came out in '81, and it didn't do well. They came to the U.S. and opened for Blackfoot; that was as good as we could do. Then in early '82, I looked in a trade magazine and saw
High and Dry
listed as a top seller by a record store in Lowell, Massachusetts. A couple of weeks later I saw it listed by a store in Tulsa. I thought it was peculiar, because there was nothing I knew of to link Lowell and Tulsa. I started piecing things together, and here's what I found: MTV had come to Lowell and to Tulsa. MTV had been playing “Bringin' On the Heartbreak” in substantial rotation. MTV wasn't available in New York, so I had no idea.

 

LES GARLAND:
In my travels, I had gone through Tulsa, and I had a buddy there. I called him and said, “There's a new channel on your cable lineup that plays music. Do me favor, hit your VHS machine for me, give me a twenty-four-hour tape.” I started getting a tape once a week. And I'd put together constructive feedback for Pittman. I sent notes to him, like “Maybe you ought to try this . . .” He comes out in October to Los Angeles. We go to dinner and he hits me with it: “I want you to come to New York.” I go, “To do what?” “Take over MTV.” I go, “Done.” He goes, “
What?
” No deal, no nothing. He goes, “Garland, between the two of us we'll make this thing huge. One day we'll have jets.”

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Les came in to see me at MTV and gave me the big pitch of why he should join. And Les came aboard. Les was a character. Still is.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Les Garland was like a bolt of lightning. He was a pure rock n' roll animal. Constantly vibrating. He loved to have a good time, had a very infectious personality, had a big ego. He brought MTV's profile to a whole other level within the music industry.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
When I saw Justin Timberlake in
The Social Network
, I had a flash of Les Garland. He called everyone “Bud.” “How are ya, Bud?!” It was a perfect greeting if he couldn't remember your name. And Pittman was like Marc Zuckerberg. He had the true sense of what this thing was going to be, and nothing was going to get in his way.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Les was the most interesting character of us all. He could say anything to anybody, wild things, and people would just accept it. He had a high-energy, show-business personality. He loved living the rock-star life.

 

RANDY PHILLIPS, manager:
Les Garland and I went to school together at Stanford. We were best friends in San Francisco, and we moved to LA around the same time. One day, I was sitting in his office on Sunset Blvd., and he said, “Bob Pittman has gone to New York to start a thing called music television. They're going to play videos.” Now, I was one of the few managers who knew what a video
was
, because I managed Rod Stewart, and he'd made so many. I said to Les, “That's a
terrible
idea. Who the hell is gonna watch back-to-back videos?” He said, “Well, I think I'm going to take the job.” I said, “Les, are you crazy? You have a perfectly good job, you're living in LA, the weather's beautiful, you play golf every fucking day. You're gonna move to New York and work for a start-up? That thing is never going to work.”

 

LES GARLAND:
There were moments after I got to MTV that I thought we weren't gonna make it. I thought the plug would be pulled. We weren't getting distribution, advertisers weren't coming along, we weren't on the air in LA or New York. We burned through $25 million and had to go back and get $15 million more.