I Want My MTV (6 page)

 

SUE STEINBERG:
John knew I loved music, so he plucked me from Nickelodeon and told me and Bob to work on a music channel. I became the founding executive producer.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
I'd worked with Steve Casey in radio, and he knew the science of music programming. He had call-out research down pat.

 

STEVE CASEY, MTV executive:
Bob asked me to fly to New York and see what they were doing. The experience would have turned most people off; there was nothing at the time, only one other employee—Sue Steinberg—and the offices were like an insurance company.

 

FRED SEIBERT, MTV executive:
When I was six weeks into being a chemistry major in college, I was learning how to kill a rat so I could dissect it. I looked at my lab mate and said, “The Beatles are more important to me than this,” and I walked out. That was it for being a chemistry major. I marched uptown to the college radio station at Columbia University, because I heard I could get free records if I worked there.

After college, I took a job at a huge country music radio station in New York, WHN. I found a mentor, Dale Pon. He was the head of promotion, and I was his assistant. And one day Dale quits and goes to work at WNBC radio, where Bob Pittman is running the station. I made commercials at night for Bob and Dale while working for WHN in the day. I saw Bob on TV all the time, because there was an ad campaign he ran for WNBC, with him on camera going, “Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, program director of WNBC, and we're gonna make you rich.” During that period he also wrangled a gig where he and Lee Masters did a fifteen-minute show called
Album Tracks.
It was the MTV format in fifteen minutes.

From my standpoint, radio guys were idiots. Bob was much smarter than my boss. He offered me a job at The Movie Channel and I took it the next morning.

 

LEE MASTERS, MTV executive:
Bob and I met in 1972, when we were both teenage disc jockeys, working in the South. A few years later, Bob hired me to work for him at WNBC as on-air talent, and we did
Album Tracks
together, which was a precursor to MTV in many ways. There weren't many outlets for music videos, so Bob had an idea for a show that would run after
Saturday Night Live
on NBC stations in New York, Chicago, Washington, and LA. We wrote the show and we were the on-camera talent, so to speak. We showed “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and some Styx clips from
The Grand Illusion
. It was always album rock.

 

ANDY SETOS, MTV executive:
I got a call from John Lack, because I was a cool engineer, and I'd had experience doing stereo television at WNET, the public TV station in New York. I think I was the tenth employee at WASEC. All the professional television equipment, all the TV sets, and all the video clips were monaural. I said, “Look, music
is
stereo, just like television is color. If this network is about music, it's gotta be in stereo.” Jack Schneider said, “But it's gonna be hard.” I said, “The hard part's my problem. Don't worry about that.” So we were off on designing a television network in stereo—the first one anywhere, ever.

 

ROBERT MORTON, MTV executive:
I was working at NBC, on
Tomorrow
with Tom Snyder. I got fired by none other than Roger Ailes, who came in as producer. I instantly disliked him, and he disliked me, I guess. Sue Steinberg offered me a job at this new music channel as creative director. I hardly had any experience, but I was the only person there with
any
TV experience.

BOB PITTMAN:
My assistant said, “You've got to see this guy named John Sykes. He's calling you all the time.” I didn't want to see him. We were done hiring. Finally he came in, and John is one of the more persuasive guys in the world.

 

JOHN SYKES, MTV executive:
This is all I ever wanted to do: music on television. I'd worked for CBS Records as the regional promotion rep. It was my job to deliver radio airplay for our bands: Cheap Trick, Charlie Daniels, REO Speedwagon, James Taylor.

The international department sent promotional videotapes to our branch from England and Australia. VCRs had just been introduced, so the tapes would be played at a band's in-store appearance. And I loved these tapes. I wanted to pitch CBS Television on a late-night video show. In those days, they were airing a test pattern with an Indian on it at night. CBS Records gave me $5,000 to edit together these videos and present them to a guy at CBS Television. He was sixty-five years old, I had no jacket or tie, and he had no interest whatsoever.

 

JOHN LACK:
See, the whole pitch to the board of directors at WASEC had nothing to do with music videos. It had to do with demographics. At that point, there was no television aimed at the twelve- to thirty-four-year-old demographic. Half of the
Saturday Night Live
audience was over thirty-five. If you were an advertiser buying time on
Saturday Night Live
to reach young adults, half your money was wasted on thirty-five-plus. We said,
If this music channel reaches twelve to thirty-four year olds, we can deliver an audience for advertisers they can't get through broadcast television
. Cable providers would sign up new subscribers, because this would be available only on cable. We would sell second-set hookups because mothers and fathers would not allow this shit to be played in the living room: “Here's a TV, go play it in your own bedroom!”

We needed to get the videos for free, the same way radio got singles. I went to Allen Grubman, a hotshot lawyer. I said, “I want to meet the presidents of the eight large record companies, as quickly as we can.” Some agreed because Steve Ross and Warner Communications were involved. PolyGram said no. Clive Davis at Arista laughed at me. He said, “Give us a year or two, let's see how it goes.”

 

ALLEN GRUBMAN, attorney:
John Lack invited me to lunch at the Four Seasons Restaurant. He explained that he was launching MTV and needed my help to get videos from the record companies. As a music lawyer, I was wired into all the labels. He said he'd like to retain me as a consultant, to introduce him to the head of a different record company every week, and he would pay me $50,000 a year. I said, “That sounds fair,” but inside I was jumping up and down. Fifty-thousand dollars in 1980 was like somebody giving me $10 million today. And from that lunch until this very day, I've been a consultant to MTV.

The meetings were every Monday night, if I remember correctly. We would meet in the Pool Room at the Four Seasons, and John would present what MTV was about. For CBS, it was Walter Yetnikoff; for RCA, it was Bob Summer.
Boom, boom, boom
. Lack was a brilliant salesman. Smooth, well spoken, looked good. He was a great face for MTV. I believe Lack has never been given the appropriate credit that he deserved for MTV, because he left very early on.

 

JOHN LACK:
There was the Walter Yetnikoff meeting. We go to the Four Seasons, Yetnikoff is with his little blond girlfriend, some bimbo with huge tits. Every fifteen minutes, one of them goes to the restroom. They come back sniffing, wiping their noses. By the end of the dinner, Walter is so high that whatever he said, the next day he doesn't remember.

 

ALLEN GRUBMAN:
Walter was—how do I say this politely?—he was
meshuggah
. I'd call him extraordinarily eccentric.

 

GALE SPARROW, MTV executive:
We went on the road to sell the labels on MTV. Bob Pittman would explain the channel, how many videos would be played, and how we'd chyron the artist's name and the song title at the beginning and end of the videos, which was a big deal to the labels, because half the time you'd hear a song on the radio and the DJ would never say who it was. That was a big selling point for us. Still, we hit a lot of brick walls.

 

JEFF AYEROFF, record executive:
Pittman told me he was going to take all A&M Records' international films—that's what we called music videos—and put them on a cable channel. I was like,
What the fuck are you talking about?

 

BOB PITTMAN:
My mission was to get the labels to give us their videos. We had Warner Bros. locked up. RCA was supportive. Then there were the other labels. There was an ex-lawyer, David Braun, running PolyGram. He said, “I'm not gonna give you those things for free. You've gotta pay.” Sid Sheinberg was running MCA Records. He said, “You gotta pay. Nothing's free from MCA.” And at CBS, Walter Yetnikoff, obviously he's gonna make a tough deal. So rather than go to him, I went to Dick Asher, his deputy, and got Dick interested. Went to Bruce Lundvall, who was a president at CBS Records. Then we went to a lot of Walter's bands and got them interested. Sykes had worked at CBS, he knew REO Speedwagon. I was gonna flank Walter.

 

WALTER YETNIKOFF, record executive:
When MTV came to me, I was perfectly happy to license our videos to them. My problem was, I wanted CBS to get paid. Their argument was, they were just like radio, and radio didn't pay royalties to labels. But it didn't cost me anything extra to send a record to radio. With videos I'd have to spend money.

 

JACK SCHNEIDER:
Walter Yetnikoff was the toughest nut to crack. I chose not to involve myself personally with Walter. I knew it was going to get theatrical and vulgar and coarse, and he was deep into his chemical period at the time.

 

DEBBIE NEWMAN, record executive:
CBS was the last company to get involved with MTV. They'd started a foray into home video, and they were petrified that giving videos to MTV would devalue the potential for sales. And they were afraid that MTV, which was co-owned by Warner Communications, would give preference to videos from Warner Bros. Records, which was CBS's main rival.

 

AL TELLER:
I wanted MTV to pay CBS for playing music videos in the same way traditional TV networks pay for the programming they put on the air. I was a lone voice in that wilderness, though. My counterparts said, “Just give them the videos. Get the exposure.” It was stupid. I fought hard to hold out, but ultimately I had to respond to the competitive realities. I wasn't going to go down in flames on this principle. But the industry sold itself for a pittance. It was like the Indians selling Manhattan for $24 worth of beads.

 

LEN EPAND, record executive:
I felt MTV should pay some sort of licensing fee. This was Warner Communications and American Express, after all. This wasn't some impoverished start-up. PolyGram's president, David Braun, wouldn't budge. So MTV launched without any PolyGram videos. Meanwhile, our competitors' acts were getting all this exposure. Eventually we acceded to their demands.

 

MILES COPELAND, manager:
Almost everybody in the business was skeptical of MTV. I remember the manager of ZZ Top saying, “If you want ZZ Top on TV, you pay ZZ Top.” Later on, they gave
everything
to MTV.

 

TOMMY MOTTOLA, record executive:
I represented the hottest duo in pop music at that time: Hall & Oates. Pittman, Sykes, and Lack came to us hat-in-hand, because it was not an easy sell in the beginning.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
I started at MTV when I was twenty-six. We were all very young. And we were worried no one would take us seriously, so we wore suits. We wore suits to everything.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Bob thought if we looked like drug addicts, no one would give us any money.

 

SIMON LE BON, Duran Duran:
You thought,
Who are these guys? They're not very rock n' roll.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Bob and I would sit in record company offices and wait and wait and wait for them to see us. I'd go to California and sit outside offices and a secretary would say, “He's not ready.” I'd go to lunch, use the bathroom five times, and come back the next day. At the end of day two she'd say, “Sorry, he had to leave.” I'd come back the next day and do it all over again.

 

GALE SPARROW:
A lot of managers gave us their clients' videos and said, “You have our permission to play them.” It was probably illegal. But not only did we play that manager's big acts, we also played the baby acts they were trying to break. So they got double exposure.

 

LES GARLAND, MTV executive:
Pittman and I were friends—we were programming different radio stations in Milwaukee at the same time. I was discovered in my twenties by the legendary radio programmer Bill Drake, and I was given a shot to go to Los Angeles, the biggest market in the country. And that led me to Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee . . . I received a lot of Program Director of the Year awards. I'd always get great ratings and I never got beat.

Doug Morris, who was running Atlantic Records, said, “Garland, you'd be great in the music business. You're friendly with the artists, you understand that language, you're a unique guy.” That led to a job in 1979 as West Coast vice president and general manager of Atlantic, the biggest record company in the world: Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin.

Pittman invited me to dinner sometime in '80. He said, “Does Atlantic make music videos?” I said, “A few.” He said, “How do you determine who you're gonna make one for?” A lot of it had to with touring: if a band wasn't going to Europe, we might shoot a video to send there instead. If we got some traction,
then
we could send the act over. He said, “Garland, do you think music videos twenty-four hours a day, kind of like a radio station, would work on TV?” Immediately, I said, “Yes, I do. I think we're headed into a new age with cable television.”