I Want My MTV (9 page)

 

JACK SCHNEIDER:
Nina Blackwood was every teenager's wet dream. That's why she was hired. We knew what we were doing. This thing was designed to appeal to young men.

 

DAVE NAVARRO:
I liked Nina Blackwood—she was a little more heavy metal. I always fall for the woman with the smoke and mirrors.

 

CONAN O'BRIEN:
I remember thinking,
Martha Quinn's cute
. She seemed attainable to me. She was the only one whose name I could remember early on. Of course, now they're all in prison.

 

“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC:
I think everybody in North America had a small crush on Martha Quinn.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
Nina was the vamp, and Martha was the girl next door. Guys always said to me, “What's Nina like? I want to sleep with her.” And “What's Martha like? I want to date her.”

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Martha looked like the little girl next door, and Nina was thought to be the “video vamp.” In reality, Nina was timid. She loved animals. Nina blushed if she even said
damn
. And Martha—I love Martha, we're still close—but she was scrappy. She could be in your face. Martha was the one dating the rock star, [Dead Boys singer] Stiv Bators. Nina was going home to her apartment full of cats.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
Everybody was hot for Nina at some point. There were those who were hot for Martha, too. But by 1983, Martha was already dating rock stars.

 

JULIAN GOLDBERG, MTV executive:
I shared a cab once with a major executive in the business world. I won't tell his name. We were coming back from a party, and he was making friendly small talk about MTV. All of a sudden he said, “How can I fuck Martha Quinn?” A lot of guys I ran across had that same thought.

 

JOHN KALODNER, record executive:
From the second I saw Martha on MTV, I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I met her a few times, and when she moved to LA in 1989, she was my girlfriend for about a year. She was one of my true loves. She was like having a girlfriend and a child in the same person. She was the messiest, dirtiest person. She would throw her clothes everywhere. You'd have to throw her in a bathtub to clean her up.

 

STEVE SCHNUR, MTV staff; record executive:
I was a college intern in the programming department of MTV, and I had a major thing for Martha Quinn. I tried so hard, and I got nowhere. It was pathetic. I went to her house a couple of times, but I failed miserably. Every artist I became friendly with would ask if I could hook him up with Martha, because we all had the same idea, that this girl next door was secretly wild.

 

MARTHA QUINN:
I can't believe more guys didn't ask for my phone number. I was a young girl, cute. I remember going
after
Michael J. Fox. I
begged
his publicist, Bobby Zarem, to give Michael J. Fox my phone number.

 

STEVE LUKATHER:
Steve Porcaro, Toto's keyboardist, dated Martha Quinn on and off for a while. I remember being up all night with her and Steve in a bar. When I walked out, it was eleven in the morning.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Martha attracted the weirdos. Of the five original VJs, she was the one with the disturbed fans. A couple got so obsessed that Martha had to have security with her all the time. Police got involved.

MARK GOODMAN:
When you look at the five of us, we had the benign black guy, the girl next door, the high-school jock, the hot video vamp, and me. I once asked Sue Steinberg and she said, “You were the stud.” I was like, “Fuck me, really? The stud? Wow!” I thought I was the guy with the Jewfro.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
I still have a piece of fan mail that was sent to Mark. It said, “Would you like to come meet a girl who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch? If not, please send Alan. Thanks.”

 

 

AFTER MONTHS OF LATE HOURS AND SHORT PAY,
MTV employees deserved a great party when the channel debuted on the air. They didn't get one. Because no Manhattan cable operator had yet agreed to carry MTV, the staff schlepped to the Loft, a restaurant and bar in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the nearest town where the signal was available.

To their credit, the surroundings didn't diminish the celebration. “When MTV came on the air at midnight, the Loft's downstairs banquet room resembled a winning candidate's headquarters on election night,” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
' Robert Hilburn, the only reporter who covered the event. “Gathered around a half-dozen TV sets, they cheered wildly when anything came on the screen: the music, the commercials, the station logos.”

No volume of cheering could drown the technical mistakes that plagued the launch. At the network operations center in Smithtown, Long Island, carefully planned segments aired in the wrong order, which made the broadcast seem like a grade school talent pageant. It's fortunate that so few people could tune in; advertisers, cable operators, and the home audience would have been baffled by what they saw.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
We launched on August 1, 1981. Our first video was the Buggles' “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It was too obvious not to do it. When you see the video today, you go, “Don't tell me that's cutting edge.” But at the time, it was.

 

STEVE CASEY:
Nobody wanted to launch with “Video Killed the Radio Star.” They thought we had to play a hit. I said, “Nobody's going to be watching. It's symbolic.” In fact, the second video we played was symbolic, too: Pat Benatar's “You Better Run” was a message to the record labels.

 

TREVOR HORN, the Buggles:
We wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star” in 1979. It came from this idea that technology was on the verge of changing everything. Video recorders had just come along, which changed people's lives. We'd seen people starting to make videos as well, and we were excited by that. It felt like radio was the past and video was the future. There was a shift coming.

 

RUSSELL MULCAHY, director:
“Video Killed the Radio Star” was a one-day shoot in south London. I had a good friend who was trying to break into acting. I told her I needed a girl to dress in a silver costume and be lowered via wires into a test tube. What she didn't know was that we would need about thirty takes. What you see in that scene is actually the wrong take; the tube falls over, which wasn't supposed to be in the final cut. I think it's still in the video to this day. No one really knew what they were doing, including me.

 

TOM FRESTON:
We had a party in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just for staff, so we could watch the network launch at midnight on August 1, 1981. The party couldn't be for advertisers, because we didn't have any. The only cable operator who came was this great guy in New Jersey, who was the first guy to carry us. He was our only customer.

 

JOHN LACK:
The night before we went on the air, Fred Seibert says to me, “We can't just sign on, we have to say something. John, it's like a time capsule. What would you say?” I told him, “I'd say, ‘Ladies and gentleman, rock n' roll.'” He goes, “That's it! And you're going to say it!” That's how we started: I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock n' roll,” the rocket ship goes up, the man lands on the moon, and that's it.

 

CAROLYN BAKER:
When that Buggles video played, we started screaming like maniacs. We were all drunker than skunks.

 

PAM LEWIS:
That night might have been the first time I was ever in a limo. I told John Lack that he looked like he'd given birth—which in essence, he had. It was jubilation.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
The first hour of MTV was a total, unmitigated disaster. The VJs would announce, “That was Styx,” right after we'd played REO Speedwagon. They'd say “This is the Who,” and a .38 Special video would begin. We'd gotten everything mixed up. And we'd also done stereo TV for the first time. So if you're listening in stereo, it sounds fine. If you're listening in mono, like 99.9 percent of people, either the audio wasn't there or it was totally muffled. Everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. It was probably one of the worst nights in my life. While everybody else was celebrating, I was on a telephone with the network operations center, going ballistic.

 

ANDY SETOS:
The first hour was both comical and embarrassing. It was complete chaos. Someone handed me the phone at the network operations center, and it's Pittman. Bob goes, “Andy, that was the wrong clip.” He sounded very nervous. I said, “Bob, are we on the air?” And he said nothing, so I hung the phone up.

We were doing things that had never been done before. I'd had broadcast equipment specially modified for stereo, a cartridge system designed by Ampex, which played the video clips. There was some video feedback a couple of times, because we had circuits that were crossed in the wiring. We weren't even finished wiring the place! It was crazy, like any other startup. Two or three weeks before the launch, Bob had contracted with the record companies to include the artist, the name of the song, and the record label in the lower third of the screen, at the beginning and end of the clip, for a certain amount of time. Not being a TV person, Bob hadn't realized how complex it would be to add the overlays. It was a last-minute scramble, and it meant there was no time for any real rehearsal before the launch.

 

STEVE CASEY:
The night we launched is still the proudest moment in my life. I've never experienced that level of energy at any other time. When I got up the next morning, the first thing I did was call my mother in Wichita, Kansas, and tell her. She goes, “Oh yeah, I'm watching.” I'm like,
What?
Wichita had a brand-new fifty-channel cable system and so MTV was on from day one. We couldn't watch it in Manhattan, but my mom could in Kansas.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
I've seen the first hour of MTV. I watched it at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. And it's, like, three Rod Stewart videos and two Pat Benatars. It was like a haphazardly formatted radio station. A British metal band. Then an American female pop singer. But no black people.
No
black people.

PAT BENATAR:
I got really angry when we shot “You Better Run.” I kept thinking,
What do they think I am, a runway model? Fuck you!
It seemed like we were making a commercial. As a musician, it was your whole life to be edgy and underground. And here come these film people, who weren't like us—they had little shirts with collars that buttoned down. The bad attitude I had was exactly what we needed for that song—I come across as extremely sassy and aggressive, which was perfect for the lyric and for the image I was trying to project.

 

NEIL “SPYDER” GIRALDO, artist:
My wife, Patricia, is very photogenic. MTV was made for her—it was perfect.

 

DON BARNES, .38 Special:
MTV had sent their own film crew from New York to tape our show, and “Hold On Loosely” was one of the first videos they played. We weren't the prettiest guys around: We were Southern dudes with hair down to our chests. And we certainly weren't actors. You see some of our early videos, we're standing there like zombies.
Stoned
zombies.

 

LEE RITENOUR, artist:
I was the only jazz-oriented artist they showed on the first day—they played not one, but two of my videos. I mean, they were looking for content, they were trying to fill twenty-four hours a day. “My God, how are we doing to do this?” I have to laugh, because when people think of Lee Ritenour, they don't think of MTV, and when they think of MTV, they don't think of Lee Ritenour.

 

JIM DIAMOND, Ph.D.:
We were the fifth song they played, “Little Suzi's on the Up.” In the video, I'm supposed to be working as a butcher, and there was ballroom dancing—nothing to do with the song. When MTV played it, we said, “Oh shit, what have we done? Not only do
we
know it's the worst video ever made, now the whole
world
knows it's the worst video ever made!” It didn't do anything for our career; the record was never even released in America.

 

KEVIN CRONIN:
When MTV came on the air, our record
Hi Infidelity
had been number one for months, so it was pretty good timing for us. 1978 was the first time we made a video; they'd set up a couple cameras at sound check and we'd run through the song. That was a music video. For
Hi Infidelity
, we'd made four videos in one day with Bruce Gowers. They were horrible. “Keep On Loving You” made us look like even bigger dorks than we were. It starts with me sitting in a psychiatrist's office—a female psychiatrist, because someone figured out that you had to have a hot chick in the video. The psychiatrist was this gorgeous model with librarian glasses. She was out of our league, big-time.

 

DENNIS DeYOUNG, Styx:
“Best of Times” and “Rockin' the Paradise” were among the first videos played on MTV. This is how Styx made videos in the early days: If we were playing several nights in some city, we'd go onstage in the afternoon on the second day and lip-sync three songs. Had we been aware that MTV would emerge, perhaps we would have put a little more thought into our videos.