03: I Want My MTV

It's hard to believe, but before 1981, hardly anyone watched music videos. In fact, most people didn't even know what they were. It's not that music wasn't on TV, it was, but it was packaged in the form of variety shows like Ed Sullivan, where the music act was sprinkled in amongst magicians, train seals, plate spinners, and other bizarre performers. Some shows like American Bandstand played music for a full hour and featured dancers in the hippest outfits grooving to the latest hit songs. These shows were music shows, but they were not music videos. The closest thing that came to a music video was when an actual band or a singer was invited onto one of these shows to perform a song for three and a half minutes. This was one of the rare occasions when a teenager was able to actually see the musicians they idolized. They weren't just interested in hearing the band's latest hit song, they could hear that on the radio. With TV, a teen could observe how their idols dressed, did their hair, moved around. It was a window into the artist's personality, or in some cases attitudes. Those three and a half minutes once a week weren't much, but teens lived for them. It defined the way they spoke and lived and acted and what kind of jobs they took. The adults running the television networks didn't understand this. They didn't believe people would watch an hour long music show that didn't have dancers and hipp outfits, let alone an entire network of only music videos. But there were a few adults, just when cable TV was beginning his growth spurt, who were still young enough to remember being glued to that TV once a week for those three and a half minutes. They knew teenagers wanted more, because they did too. They knew that if this crazy idea for an all music cable channel was going to work, it wouldn't be because the television executives were clever. It would be because teenagers, without even knowing it at the time, already wanted their MTV. Hi, I'm Matthew Billy, and this is Between the Liner Notes, a podcast about music, why it is the way it is, and how it got to be that way. As a disclaimer, this episode contains some words you can't say on the radio, so if you have young children around, you may want to listen to this episode at another time. This television began in the United States in 1948, but it didn't really begin to grow until the 1970s, when the federal government began to relax regulations and allow cable networks to create their own unique programming. Unlike their broadcast network rivals who aired a wide variety of shows, these new cable networks broadcast only one very specific type of programming. HBO aired only movies, CNN only news, the weather channel only weather, and ESPN only sports. In retrospect, a channel that aired only music videos should have been obvious. But it's not that simple. Today we have hundreds of cable channels, but back in 1980, even with all those specialized channels, there were only 28 networks, and plenty of room in the transmission system for more. This extra room presented an opportunity for a media company to create more channels and make huge profits off of the distribution fees and the advertising. Two companies in particular, who had very little in common, wanted to get in on the cable gold rush. Warner Brothers Entertainment, a media conglomerate, and American Express, a credit card company, decided to form a very unlikely alliance. Each invested $75 million into a joint venture that was given the mission of creating new cable networks. The company was called Warner MX Satellite Entertainment. It was a joint venture between Warner Communications and American Express. That's Fred Cybert, MTV's original head of program services. And their mission was that in this new form of distribution, satellite television distribution, there wasn't enough programming to go out on the satellite, and they decided that they would get that programming. They hired a guy called Bob Pittman, who had been a top radio programmer in New York at WNBC's AM radio station. He told me that the company was actually going to start up to 10 different channels that were specialist channels, but the one that he was really interested in was music. I said, "Well, I'm a music guy, so that's great." Bob Pittman had a long history of programming rock and roll stations. When the Warner MX Satellite Entertainment company, also known as Wasek, decided to hire Pittman, he borrowed all the strategies he learned from radio and applied them to the first channel he was placed in charge of. The movie channel. He began measuring viewers' tastes by gathering call-out data, fine-tuning how often a movie would air, gauging how quickly a movie would burn out, and then should be retired from rotation. These strategies worked, and viewership of the movie channel went up. Next, Pittman wanted to copy his success at the music channel. He wanted to take these videos, record labels were making, and air them on a 24/7 music video network. Labels were not making many of these videos, and when they were, it was usually to promote an artist overseas. It was a creative decision as much as it might have been a business decision. That's Les Garland, former executive vice president of programming at MTV. If we were signing an act from Europe, instead of bringing them to the States at the cost of all that, to our support, going around meeting radio stations and record stores and doing all that stuff, you could theoretically have a great music video that could introduce and expose that new act in North America and vice versa. So if they were used as promotional music videos, they weren't getting a lot of exposure. There were a few nightclubs, there were a few shows on television that might put a music video on, but for the most part, artists didn't make music videos, really. There were not that many music videos, but that didn't deter Bob Pittman. He and a few other people at Wasack believed it was enough to build a whole network off of and hopefully convince labels to make more. In 1981, after a considerable amount of persuasion, the heads of Wasack were convinced that a 24/7 music video channel was a viable idea. They gave the music video channel the green light, and now Bob Pittman and the rest of the team had to build a cable television network from scratch. They needed hosts, they needed a logo, they needed permission from the record labels to actually air the music videos. They didn't even have a name yet. Here's Fred Cybert again. Bob knew what he wanted to call it. He wanted to call it TV1. We were all coming out of remember traditional UHS television, UHS television, and UHS television had channels 2 through 13. And we said Bob, if we call it TV1, everyone's going to be looking for channel 1, and there is no channel 1 on anybody's thing, and even on their cable services, there's no channel 1. So he was resolute. It's like it had to be called TV1, whatever, whatever, whatever, and we were just as resolute. So finally, he said okay, come up with another name. So now you have this half dozen strong-willed people, all pitching whatever name it was that they thought was good, and we couldn't agree on anything. And finally, like at the last minute, the only thing we could agree on was a complete generic music television. And at the time, again, we're talking 35 years ago, there was nothing in any of our heads that said that it could be anything but three letters. And so we were music television, we said okay, we'll be I guess MTV. The president of the company came by the day after we had agreed that it would be MTV Music Television, and he sticks his head in his office, he was 55 years old, like I said, I wasn't even 30, because MTV, huh? Yeah, I guess. Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it? He doesn't quite roll off the tongue at all, but that didn't matter. Everyone at MTV agreed that was the name, and that name needed a logo. Fred Cyber was in charge of the creative department and responsible for picking the designer. He deliberately chose to avoid big name designers, and instead went with an unknown firm named Manhattan Designs. Manhattan Designs was where his childhood friend named Frank worked, so Fred, his friend Frank, and the rest of the Manhattan Designs team began sketching logos, even before MTV, had decided on the name MTV. So Frank had a little design studio called Manhattan Design with two partners, Patty Rogoff and Pat Gorman. It was so small that it was basically a desk behind a Tai Chi studio above Bigelow Chemist Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, and you would go visit, and you would like, you know, have to go through the Tai Chi studio to get to their desk. And I said, look, I have this assignment. I have no idea what I'm going to be able to pay you. We don't even have a name, but let's start coming up with something. So a year before MTV went on the air, six months before it was called MTV, they just started sketching. They just kept coming up with things, and then all of a sudden about, you know, halfway through the process, I said, oh, we have a name. And we were MTV, and they started attaching MTV letters to the designs we liked the most, and none of them really rocked too hard. But it just kept going, and it kept going, and it kept going. And finally, I was like, guys, we got to do something. This isn't working. And they came in with a big pile, and I started going through the pile, and I'm really dejected, right, because one after the other, I'm not into it, I'm not into it, I'm not into it. We get to the bottom of the pile, and there's a piece of tracing paper that has clearly been rumpled and like squeezed into a little ball and thrown away, and then pulled out and flattened out, and it was this giant M with a kind of scrawled TV. And so that one, let's start working on that one. So they went home back to the Big Low Camus II floor and Frank had a great idea that, you know, graffiti art was, you know, in New York City was taking over everywhere. Like, every building, every subway car was filled with graffiti. So Frank went out into their stairwell, took a can of red spray paint and sprayed the letters TV, like just literally with like off the shelf spray paint and it started dripping on the cardboard and he was like, okay, that's great and we'll keep the drips. The logo design had everything Fred Cybert wanted. The oversized M dominated the television screen. The spray painted letters TV appealed to a rebellious youth culture. Underneath the giant M, the words music television were written in smaller size font to clarify what the channel was all about. In Cybert's mind, the logo was great and represented the ethos of MTV, but not everyone agreed. The rest of the company first got a glimpse of the new logo when the marketing department wanted to include it on some new business cards. Cybert sent the marketing department a black and white version of the logo, but he wasn't sent business cards in return. Instead, he got a phone call. And I get a call from the president of the company, come up right away. And they're sitting there all the sales and marketing people, the head guys, and they look at me and they go, you expect us to put this shit on our business cards? Whoa. That's exactly what I said. I'm like, yes, you know, it's our logo. That can't be our logo. We'll be embarrassed. We'll never get anybody to like do any business with us. And I'm like, coming up and I'm like, I don't know what to say, right? So then the boss calls me back like in the executive vice president of the company goes, who made this logo? And I said three guys, people, you know, men and women behind a Tai Chi studio in village. He goes, Fred, you have to go to some good designers. I said, they're great. No, no, you have to go to some real designers. You know, I don't really have a budget for real designers. They're going to charge me $10,000 like just walk in the door. I said, how much do you need? I said, well, how many people do you want me to go to? He goes five. I said, that's $50,000 just to walk in the door. He goes, you got it. You know, in corporations, you never have enough money to do something, but you all just have enough money to fix something. So I'm at this point, I'm pissed off. If you've worked for a company before, you can probably empathize with Fred Cybert. He and his team worked hard on that logo. They thought the logo was perfect and we're proud of it. His boss literally told him the logo was shit and instructed him to get a new one. At this point, Cybert has two options. He can placate his boss and work with famous designers, or he can dig his heels in and protest, knowing he would probably lose the battle. It's never easy to decide between those two, but maybe Cybert had a third option. I decided I was going to sandbag the whole project. And it was the first time I really skimmed in my life. So I go into the first designer, it's about at the time he was probably in his fifties. And I explained to him what we're doing, and he looks at the logo that we have, the Manhattan Design logo, and he goes, "That doesn't say music." And he points up to this thing that he had done for someone else that was for classical music, which had a staff with music notes, and he goes, "That says music." And I think to myself, "Okay, well that's a disaster." And I look at him, I go, "Lew, you're right, that does say music." And I decided for each of the meetings, I was just going to give them really lousy direction, so they'd come up with crap. So all these high-priced, high-full-it-and-designers come up with all this junk. And I go back to my executive vice president company, I show them all the stuff, and he looks at me, and he goes, "We can't use any of this." He said, "They're the guys you wanted, like I don't blame me, I like the original one." Because let's look at that thing again. He's looking at it, he's squinting, he's scrutinizing, and he goes, "Well, I think the problem is the type where it says music television." I said, "You know, you're probably right, that's probably the problem. Let's go and get some alternatives." So I call him in hat and design, I go, "Come up with 20 different ways to do music television underneath there." So they do, and we bring it back, and he picks the most generic one of his helvetica type, like underneath. That's it, that solves the problem. After the small concession of changing the font of music television to helvetica, Fred Cybert's strategy to sandbag the competition was successful. The logo created by the little design studio located above Bigelow chemist's pharmacy on 6th Avenue prevailed, and now that MTV had its logo, the symbol of the company, they needed a face. Much the same way FM radio had disc jockeys to guide the listener through sets of music, MTV wanted video jockeys, or VJs to do the same thing. They wanted people teenagers could relate to, identify with, and maybe even develop amorous feelings for. Who MTV selected to be the first VJs was critical to the network's success because, as Bob Pittman said, "Nobody falls in love with a jukebox." Bob had established a process where he said, "We basically want one of everything." We have to represent America, you know, we're young America, and we gotta represent young America. And so we gotta have women, we gotta have men, we gotta have varying ethnicities. Go. It was really as simple as that. And we auditioned every kind of person around the country that we could find. We auditioned comedians, we auditioned television hosts, we auditioned radio DJs, like everything. They decided on five VJs, three men and two women. It was like MTV was working off of a checklist of American archetypes. First up was the boy next door. I'm Alan Hunter. We'll be covering the latest in music news, coast to coast, here on MTV Music Television. Next, the cute girl next door. I'm Martha Quinn. The music will continue nonstop on MTV Music Television, the newest component of your stereo system. The funky African American. All right, I'm JJ Jackson, I'll be sitting in with the latest video music performances, the way they were meant to be. That's in stereo on MTV Music Television, you'll never look at music the same way again. The sexy rebellious girl who's a little punk. Hi, I'm Nina Blackwood and I'll be with you after JJ, right here on MTV, the world's first video music channel all day, all night in stereo. And the heartthrob, Mark Goodman. Are those guys the best? We all are so excited about this new concept in TV. We'll be doing for TV, what FM did for radio. These five were going to be every teenager's guide through the rock and roll landscape. The VJ's role was to interview artists, transition to and from commercial breaks and of course, introduce videos. So, now that MTV had its five VJs, they needed videos for them to introduce. Getting Warner Bros. records to give MTV their music videos was easy. They were both owned by the same company, Warner Bros. Entertainment. The other record labels proved much harder to convince. They had no incentive to just give away their music videos. CBS records, the home to both Columbia and Epic records, was at that time the largest record company in the world and they had zero interest in working with MTV. Here's Robin Sloan, who worked at Epic Records at the time MTV was launched. When MTV was created, CBS was not servicing MTV with any videos. The company believed it should be paid for the videos that they didn't see them as promotional items. They saw them as programming. And so, there was no relationship. The business affairs department had really made it clear that these videos were not to be given away for free. There is precedent for record labels giving away their music for free. In 1981, not a single radio station in the United States paid a record label to use its music. Even though they weren't being paid, labels were happy to give the music to radio stations for free because they knew that radio airplay sells records and in turn makes the record labels money. But a fledgling cable network is not the same caliber as a popular radio station. In 1981, MTV was on proven. Most cable companies were not going to distribute the channel, so the chances of MTV contributing to record sales was slim, so record labels gave MTV the cold shoulder. When MTV launched on August 1st, 1981, it only had around 200 music videos, most of them from Warner Bros. Regardless of the lack of videos on launch day, MTV decided to throw a party for its entire staff, but curiously, it wasn't in the same state as their office in New York City. They chartered buses for us to go out to Fort Lee, New Jersey to a bar because Manhattan didn't carry MTV on the day of the launch. So the closest we could come was this bar and Fort Lee that had a cable subscription and that cable system was running MTV. So we all piled into the bar and sat there staring at a television set. I think I got there at around 11 o'clock and we just waited staring at the screen. We sat there at midnight, watched the rocket ship go up, and that was that. At midnight on August 1st, 1981, MTV was on the air for the first time. The opening sequence was footage of the Apollo 11 space launch, which conveniently was public domain and could be used for free. The sequence ended with Neil Armstrong. on placing a flag into the moon, only it wasn't the American flag, it was a flag displaying the new MTV logo. Big M, spray painted TV, and music television written in Helvetica Font. It is this opening sequence that forever associated MTV with astronauts, until this day Moonman Awards are still given out at the MTV Music Video Awards each year. After the flag was firmly planted on the moon, the cameraman cut to Mark Goodman, live in the studio, the first video jockey to speak on MTV. This is it. Welcome to MTV Music Television, the world's first 24-hour stereo video music channel. The MTV staff celebrated the channel's launch in Fortly New Jersey, a town now nationally known thanks to Governor Chris Christie's administration and the Bridgegate scandal. A new concept is born. The best of TV combined with the best of radio. Although the staff was celebrating, there was a problem. A problem made clear by the fact that everyone had to drive out of Manhattan, to New Jersey, just to find a bar that subscribed to a cable service that carried MTV. Most cable companies refused to air MTV. They didn't believe people were going to watch it. Without distribution in the major markets, MTV wasn't having much impact on record sales, so most record labels continued to shrug off music videos as a serious promotional tool. MTV wasn't making any headway, so they did what most companies do when they want some attention. Advertise Fred Sibert suggested that MTV hire his mentor Dale Pond, the man who originally introduced him to the head of MTV. Dale Pond had partnered with a legend in the ad business named George Lois, whose volatile personality was as storied as his ads. They created a print ad for trade publications. At the top, in huge bold font in red, America is fast becoming a land of cable brass. The cable brass ad was unremarkable, but it was the final line of the copy that triggered Dale Pond and George Lois' next idea. That line was the cable brass. Rock and roll wasn't enough for them. Now they want their MTV. The tagline had in that clause now they want their MTV. So George saw that and put it together with a really bad ad campaign he had done about 10 years before for Mapo Sirials. There had been a famous animated campaign done in the 50s by one of the most famous animators of the 50s that I called John Hubley, and it was I want my Mapo and it was a really famous animated commercial. George had gotten the account 10 or 15 years later and done a version with sport stars who were holding a spoon in the Mapo box and they were literally like tear was going down there. I want my Mapo. And it was completely failed campaign. Everyone hated it. But George, who is an unbelievable spendmeister, had put it in one of his famous books about advertising and made it seem like it was the biggest, most famous campaign ever. So George comes up, sees that line. Now they want their MTV goes I know what to do. And he storyboards up a thing with Mick Jagger, Pete Towns and David Bowie all crying, going, I want my MTV. And I'm like looking at this thing and I'm looking at Dale and go, are you fucking crazy? Right. I'm going to go and ask Mick Jagger to cry for us. Well, not cry exactly. Most people in that room agreed with Cybert that asking Mick Jagger to cry was not such a great idea. So Dale Pond tweaked it a bit. Rather than have rock stars crying, they would say, I want my MTV indignantly and with an attitude. No one knew if this idea would be successful, but MTV wouldn't even be able to try it out if they couldn't convince rock stars to say the line. And for free, they didn't have a budget to pay them. It was a Hail Mary pass and the guy they picked to throw it was Les Garland. You heard from him a little earlier in the show. Les Garland was hired by MTV as the point man to manage the artists and record label relationships. His connections in the music business and his charismatic personality made him the perfect person for the job. Before MTV, he had worked for Atlantic Records who the Rolling Stones happened to be signed to at the time. So in another meeting, Dale Pond and George Lois approached Les Garland with the idea. And he turns to me and he goes, Garland, do you think you could get Mick Jagger to come on camera and say, I want my MTV. And the room was kind of silent. And the light just went on and I went, oh my God, I get it. I get it. Yes, I think we can have a shot at Mick doing this. And I hopped on a plane within two days, grabbed my assistant Joan off we went to Paris France and ended up in a room with Mick. I had known him from my years in radio and from my years with Atlantic Records. I actually did have a life before MTV. When I sat down with him in his room in France, we did the normal friendly pleasantries and we chatted for a few minutes and caught up. Because as I said, I didn't know him a bit. And he says, okay, I know you're here for a reason. Can you tell me what it is? And I said, well, true with me. And at some time in the next two days, I'd like to get it in front of the camera and have you say, I want my MTV. And he did ask if he was going to be paid for that. And I said, no, you know, budgets are too tight. We don't have the money to do that. And, you know, we can't pay. And he goes, well, this is a commercial. We don't really do commercials. And it accrued to me in the late 70s. There was a rolling stones to her that was actually presented by a fragrance back in those days because she was on. I don't know if there's still around. And I reminded him of that. I reminded him that I had a rolling stones poster on my wall, you know, as a collectible from a stones tour. And he goes, well, yeah, but you know, we got paid a lot of money to do that. And I got, so this is coming down to the money. And I don't know what came to mind just something kind of crazy. And I reached in my pocket and I pulled out a dollar pill and I laid it on the table between it. And I said, I give you a dollar out of my pocket. And he looked at me and he thought I was crazy, of course, really? And I go, yeah. And he agreed to do it. Mick Jagger said, I want my MTV in front of a camera the next day. Now that MTV had Mick Jagger saying it doors began to open and other rock stars agreed to say the line. If it was good enough for Mick Jagger, it was good enough for them. Stars like David Bowie, Pep Benatar and Cindy Lopper all hopped on board. They edited all the clips into one thirty second ad. And at the end, there was a call to action pouring the youth of America to call their table company and demand MTV sounded something like this. America, demand your MTV. I want my MTV. I want my MTV. I want my MTV. I want my MTV. I want my MTV. Call your cable company and say I want my MTV. So our sales guys go crazy. They go, you're going to have everyone call up the cable operator. They're going to throw off the movie channel. They're going to throw off Nickelodeon. They're not going to take on MTV. And we argued about this for months. And finally, the powers that be in management at the company overruled the sales people and said, look, we're getting nowhere. Nobody's signing up. If we don't do something dramatic and the dramatic thing is that we have customers on our side, we have the population on our side. They are going to overwhelm the cable operators and they are going to have no choice. So with a limited budget, they began running the ad in one market at a time, scoring victories in each one. We run the commercial in the few markets that we're going to run it because we only have two million dollars. One of those markets happens to be Manhattan, which is the most difficult market to get in America. They were so overwhelmed with phone calls by so many thousands of people. They couldn't keep up and they were like, please stop the commercial. We'll put it on. And Manhattan cable capitulated inside of a week. And I don't think anybody could have estimated any more than they could have estimated how, you know, what a huge hit MTV would become in the 80s. But this I want my MTV campaign has gone down into history as one of the great marketing campaigns of all time. And man, we started lighting up cable distribution, 500,000 to a million a month. It was just very historic in that way. And I'm indebted to this day to Mr. Jagger for doing that. The I Want My MTV ad campaign was the inflection point for MTV. What seemed like overnight, they went from having no name recognition and hemorrhaging money to be nationally known and flushed with cash. As cable companies and more and more major markets began to distribute the channel, the bands on MTV began to sell more records in those markets. The record companies noticed this and finally began making music videos for every single they released. For labels, the bump in sales generated by MTV far outweighed the cost of making the videos. Even the last holdout, CBS records capitulated. Music videos were now mandatory for everybody. Almost no one had any experience making them. A brand new canvas for creativity had opened. And being so new, there were no standards, no precedence, no rules. Any of the cliched terms like Wild West or the inmates running the asylum can be applied. And Robin Sloan, who produced numerous landmark music videos for several record labels embraced the chaos. What I didn't like was when we, let's say we sent out a song to a director and we got back a five-page treatment with every adjective under the sun. you know, the band will be in blue and the, you know, will be on a beach and the sun will be rising and, you know, the girls will be dancing around and all that, but, you know, there was no idea. So what I looked for was like an idea. One simple idea that anyone watching could hook into. For me, the worst feeling I ever had was when we went into production and I knew what the piece would look like. At the end, I knew that it would stink if we did that. If we went in and I was terrified, it was either going to go great or bad, but at least I couldn't predict what it looked like. So that's really the kind of person I looked for. Putting faith in the creative vision of the directors and the artists was a gamble and sometimes the stakes were high. One of the earliest videos Robin Sloan produced was for the car song "You Might Think" one of the first music videos to incorporate computer graphics. This video cost about $80,000 to make, which in 1984 was triple with the average video cost. The video features lead singer Rick Ocasic in a series of bizarre and kind of stalkery encounters with the model Susan Gallagher. Ocasic appears in her bathroom mirror inside a submarine in her bathtub in her mouth as a fly as King Kong swanning away attacking airplanes on top of the Empire State Building. It's abstract, but visually really fun to watch. The idea for "You Might Think" was brainstormed when Robin Sloan, who was now working at Electro Records, introduced the right people to each other. There was a video of Billy Idol, Rebel Yellow, that was directed by Jeff Stein. I looked at it and I thought, "You know, there's an amazing energy. It's a live video, it's nothing new, but there was this great energy in it." So I called Jeff and I said, "You know, I want to meet you." So I introduced Rick to Jeff, Rick Love Jeff, and he said, "I'm just met these guys from a company called Charlex." Charlex was a computer animation company that had made a name for itself creating commercials for the National Enquirer. They were using a brand new technology called the Quantel Video Paintbox. It looks like an old computer with a big white pad attached to it. The designer would use a stylus on the white pad to control the software. Paintbox revolutionized video graphics, but it took a long time to use. You might think that a three and a half minute music video wouldn't take long to make, but the cards video took months. We were really lucky. Charlex shut down for months. They did no work. I would say two to three months at a minimum, and it wasn't finished. It was 24 hours around the clock, seven days a week. I mean, no one had ever done anything like that before. Some versions of the story hold that when Charlex finished the video, they held it hostage. Representatives of the company showed up at the Electra Records New York office with the video on a locked briefcase. The briefcase was handcuffed to the CEO. Charlex wanted more money. Everything was eventually worked out, and when the video was released all the time and hard work paid off. It won best video the year all every country in the world. What I realized with that video is the power of music video to shape an artist image. Because the cars did not have an image of being a fun, humor-filled band. Visually, they're not a particularly visual act. They're not these dynamic guys who are like, they're not the Rolling Stones. Jumping around on stage, you're not springsteen. But that video catapulted them into their image into a whole new modern, fun kind of band. This phenomenon was not just isolated to the cars. Music videos were influencing every aspect of popular culture. The influence fashion, how movies were edited, even the advertising industry felt a change. How an artist appeared in a music video became as important as their music. When Cindy Lauper dressed in funky thrift store clothing, everyone started doing it. When Adam Ant dressed like a pirate, everyone started dressing like a pirate. Some bands recognized pretty quickly the power of music video had in crafting their image, and they took advantage of it. Proof, for example, used the visuals to enhance the reputation for partying hard and being beloved by the ladies. No video exemplifies this better than Motley Crew's video for their song, Girls Girls Girls. Well, obviously, the video is really just a visualization of what the lyric is about them going to strip clubs. Shot all in LA at different strip clubs. And one of the girls was Vince's girlfriend at the time, who warned me to keep my hands away from her man. I said, "You don't have to worry about it. I don't think he's interested in me anyway." So, in the strip clubs, right, the girls are dancing. So we sent it to MTV. They've never seen anything with that much flesh. And they're not sure with their sensors if they can air it. So I have to go over there. And we're going frame by frame, looking at the girls' breasts, her rear end, stopping it, saying, "This can stay in. I have to go out, and I'm making a list." But the time code of what can stay in and go out for it to not get stuck with their sensors. Again, I sit here as a woman, and I can't even believe that I did that in those years. It's so opposite of who I am. As MTV's influence on popular culture grew, so did their criticism. Critics slammed MTV for being junk culture or even satanic. One director named John Scarlett Davie said that the music videos on MTV were, and I quote, "Masterbation fantasies from Middle America. They just sit there with their cans of beer tossing off while these scantily clad girls do this and that with men with their big electric guitars like prick extensions." The haters were many, and even if their criticisms were accurate, MTV had no trouble just ignoring it. But even with MTV's thick skin, there was one rebuke they couldn't simply just shake off. In the fall of 1981, Rick James released the song "Super Freak." The track was a bullet and hovered near the top of the billboard charts for 10 weeks on a row. In December of 1981, back when MTV was still begging artists to make music videos, Rick James released a video for "Super Freak." It had a slick production, and for the time it looked amazing, but MTV rejected it. Rick James was, of course, super angry. How could MTV reject one of the biggest hits of the year? It made no sense. James came to believe that MTV rejected his video because the network was racist and he let everyone know it. He went to national newspapers and magazines publicly calling out MTV for discriminating based on skin color. MTV fought back and denied the racist accusations. They claimed MTV was not a top 40 channel. MTV was supposed to emulate FM radio stations, and just like FM radio stations still do today, they were focusing on a narrow slice of the population who likes a narrow slice of contemporary music. MTV's slice was rock and roll. They argued publicly that the African American artists who were making hit songs were not making rock and roll, and therefore did not fit into MTV's format. In the case of Rick James in the "Super Freak" video, they were also concerned about the visual content, mainly the scantily clad women dancing around. One video, particularly that you may have read about, really was denied access because of its content, not because of any colors, and it was a Rick James video. And you might remember, Rick James came out very vocally. In one interview, he actually singled me out, and I'd never even met the man. And I was personally insulted. I was offended. I think he learned a little bit about me over the few weeks that followed that, and you know, within a matter of, I don't know, four to eight weeks, I actually met him in person. And he was a pure gentleman. He came up to me. He gave me a hug. He apologized for what he said. He admitted that he was wrong, and I forgave him, and we went on to become friends. I was in his, uh, Eddie Murphy video. My girl wants to party all the time. I mean, in that video was Rick and Eddie. We became friends, and it was all put under the rug. It was all put into the past. Les Garland may have been able to settle things between MTV and Rick James, but the African American artist still couldn't be found on MTV, and the racism accusations didn't fade away. Then, in 1983, the conflict came to a head when one particular African American made a video that MTV could not simply ignore. Michael Jackson releases album Thriller in the fall of that year. The first single off of Thriller was Billy Jean and Jackson filmed the groundbreaking music video for it. Jackson and everyone at his record label, Epic Records, thought the video was going to blow people away and couldn't wait to get it on the air. What happens next isn't agreed upon. The Rasha Man Effect seems to kick in and everyone has a different story. When people who worked at Epic Records tell the story, they assert that MTV flat out rejected the video. Epic was shocked that MTV would say no to the biggest pop star in the world, and of course, the label was determined not to take no for an answer. The president of the parent company of Epic Records, CBS Records, was Walter Yetnikov, and Yetnikov was notorious for his hardball tactics and plain rough. He remembers calling Bob Pittman, the president of MTV, an issue in an ultimatum. If MTV does not play Billy Jean, then CBS was going to pull their entire catalog off of MTV. That would have been a huge blow to MTV, considering CBS was the largest record label at the time. MTV capitulated an aired Billy Jean, and of course, their viewers loved it. Now the thing is, people who worked at MTV don't tell the story that way. Here's Less Garland again. First of all, Walter Yetnikov. was a very dear friend of mine in those days. I've not seen him in a number of years, but I had huge respect for him. Unfortunately, that story that's sort of taken on its own life out there never occurred. There was never any sort of a threat from anybody, Walter or anybody else. Billie Jean arrived in my office on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. It was delivered by the manager, Michael's manager, Fettida Mann and his partner. I remember calling, I don't even know how many people into my office. We packed my office. We had a huge audio system, video system. I cranked up Billie Jean and the room went crazy. We really believed unanimously that that was groundbreaking, and it was probably the best video anyone in the room had ever seen to that date. There was never a question ever, the story about threats and all that, just not true. No matter how it happened, there is one thing everyone can agree on. After Billie Jean, race was no longer an issue. In fact, when Michael Jackson submitted his video for Thriller, MTV not only agreed to put it into heavy rotation, but also paid $250,000 for the exclusive right to broadcast the video for a short period of time. Led by the popularity of Michael Jackson's music videos, MTV had its first profitable year in 1984. But, as MTV's finances began to look better and better, the finances of its parent company, the Warner MX satellite company, or again Wasek, were beginning to deteriorate. Again, Wasek was a joint venture between American Express and Warner Brothers, and the partnership was beginning to unravel. By 1984, American Express lost interest in the venture. They had envisioned a version of cable that was interactive and would allow people to perform financial transactions using their cable boxes. That vision never became a reality, so MX sold their half of Wasek back to Warner Brothers, who renamed the company Warner Cable. Warner Brothers, now the sole owner of MTV was in trouble. Even with MTV's newfound profitability, it wasn't enough to balance out the problems of another unrelated division of the company. Atari Interactive. Atari was at the forefront of the first video game Gold Rush. The Atari 2600 home console had sold 25 million units and everyone was looking to capitalize. A gluttony of games flooded the market, many were of poor quality leaving Atari fans dismayed and jaded. And, like with all economic bubbles, everyone who felt irrationally exuberant and believed the boom times would never end had the floor collapse underneath them and the bubble burst in 1983. Atari, which was once the crown jewel of Warner Brothers, became a limb infected with gang green and the infection was spreading to other divisions of the company. The video game recession left Warner Brothers hemorrhaging money and the fastest way to stop the bleeding was to sell one of their divisions for lots of cash. Warner Brothers decided to place MTV along with Nickelodeon and Showtime on the auction block. Most of MTV's senior management had started MTV and built it from scratch and of course, felt a bond with the television network, a sense of ownership. "Well, you know, when you start something, you do have a sense of this is my little baby." Even though the people who birthed MTV were forced to watch as their baby was given up for adoption, none of them wanted to see their baby get adopted by a parent company that wouldn't nurture MTV and stay true to the core mission. They determined that the best way to ensure their baby was taken care of was to buy it themselves. Senior management pooled their money, partnered with a private equity firm and began negotiating to purchase MTV from Warner Brothers. In the eleventh hour, just when it looked like the deal would close, Viacom swooped in and offered an amount the private equity firm refused to match. In 1985, just four years after the launch party in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Viacom won the auction and acquired MTV. It remains owned by Viacom today. Many of the founders left before Viacom took over. The few that stayed couldn't help but feel that something had changed. "It didn't quite feel the same to me anymore and I don't know maybe I'm kind of a Viac guy and for me at that time that was the longest I had ever been anywhere and I was having thoughts and maybe it's time to go do something else." Over the course of the next two years, Les Garland and the remaining founders exited MTV. Although the company culture instantly felt more corporate, MTV's programming didn't change right away. It still had some of its best years ahead of it. What did change was the belief that MTV didn't need its own programming. The new way of thinking was music videos are not enough and in order to grow MTV it needed to end its dependence on content being made by other companies. MTV began to move away from music videos and substitute shows like Beavisand Butthead and The Real World, which both first broadcast in 1992. The Real World kicked off MTV's decade-long evolution away from being a music-oriented channel towards becoming a reality show-based channel that featured shows like Jersey Shore and Sixteen Impregnant. Eventually, in 2010, the change in programming led MTV to drop the words music television from the logo, a Vedica typeface and all. Music videos are now an endangered species on MTV and that leaves us to wonder if we compare into a parallel universe where MTV's original founders had been successful in buying it. What would we see? "Oh man, it would just take such a clear crystal. Paul number one, you know, to look backwards and probably, you know, in retrospect, things can really seem a lot easier, you know? And I do have a million questions. Sometimes that I ask myself, you know, I've been asked the question, if I were still doing what I did at MTV, where would it be? I'm a bit of a traditionalist. An MTV music television met MTV music television. I would have been inclined to keep it pure. There could have been other networks. There could have been other spin-offs. There certainly could have been an MTV too, etc. But I think I might have tried to maintain the integrity and the purity of what MTV was all about. So, you know, in the ideal world, could I spend 25 years there in TV? I would like to think would be deeply involved in the promotion, marketing and the commerce of music. It's easy to believe that if the deal went the other way and the founders bought the company, MTV would still have music videos as the center of their programming. Others, including some of the founders have made their peace with the idea that even if they were programming MTV, it still would have succumbed to reality and the situation MTV is in today wouldn't look much different. The founders fought hard to make MTV's original format work, but like an aging championship boxer, its moment had passed and it became time for newer younger ideas to take its place. I have to say in retrospect, even though I was like a complete jerk about whether or not they should move away from music programming, I think in retrospect they were 100% right and I was 100% wrong because here's what MTV wreaked on the culture. Up until MTV came around, no matter how popular popular music had gotten, it was still somewhat an underground movement in that you had to be a certain age to be in the rock and roll headset. And then like I said, you got married, you know, you had kids and you left it behind. That was the sort of convention of how things went and how the culture moved. What MTV did is moved pop music from being underground culture to being mainstream culture. And you know there's one thing that culture cannot stand being, which is mainstream. Being mainstream is the beginning of the end of any kind of culture. It is those things that sort of pop up from underneath and shake the status quo and make everyone rethink everything else. And that's what popular music did from the 1950s to the 1980s. But we've been shook up already. Rock and Roll wasn't alternative at that point. It wasn't edgy at that point. It was in commercials at that point. And there was no need for a place to celebrate that kind of culture anymore because it had just sort of, you could turn on USA Network and they were using Rock and Roll as their sound track. Whereas when MTV went on the air, they were using old movie things and violins and standards. So I think ultimately if Bob had stayed and he was the guy that was sort of leading the charge and trying to buy it, I think he would have made exactly the same decision I think you had to. Look, music has been a part of people's lives and an integral part of their lives for centuries, right? This is not new. What's new all the time is how do people get it and how does it get to them? And, you know, through the technological advancements of the last hundred years, it's gotten to them in millions of different, you know, it started in theaters with Caruso singing opera and like, and going around the world and singing directly to people. It went to Vaudeville, it went to network radio, it went to music radio, it went to cable television, it's gone to the internet and God knows where it's going to go next. The show was produced and edited by me, Matthew Billy. Jason Silverman created the graphics and website, Laura Vandiver, assisted with production. Special thanks to my guest Robyn Sloane, Fred Cybert, and Les Garland. If you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, A Cast, or whatever application you use to listen to podcasts. You can also find us at our website between thelinernotes.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Feel free to write to us. We'd love to hear from you. And of course, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Between the Linernotes. [Music]