I am the perfect age to remember and love the golden age of MTV (you know, the period when they played music videos and were about music). I remember coming home each day from elementary school, immediately running over to the TV and grabbing a healthy snack (bowl of ice cream, usually), and watching my MTV. Without fail, for about 5 months, they would play Spandau Ballet's "True" at the same time every day (approximately 3:30). Reading the 572 page oral history of MTV's golden years (1981-1992) was kind of like getting a backstage pass to my childhood entertainment, I got to see the inner workings of my many hours of viewing television during the 80's. It is an oral history, so aside from brief overview introductions to each chapter (which are very well done), the book consists of quotes from the actual players that are weaved together to tell the story. Executives, artists, video directors, bit players and main characters all are brutally honest in telling the sordid tales behind the cable channel that forever changed the music industry. Since it is divided into 53 digestible chapters that are clearly labeled topically, if you are not an obsessive like me you don't have to read cover to cover.
There is so much here. If you were fortunate enough to watch VH1 Classic over the summer, they aired the first hour of MTV to celebrate the 30th anniversary of MTV, you saw just how by the seat of their pants MTV was run in those early days. They had maybe 50 videos in their vaults, almost half of which were by Rod Stewart. Technical and editing problems galore, ad-libbing and ill-prepped VJs (of course, you cannot top those original five VJs, what kid in the 80's wasn't in love with Martha Quinn?)...it was a glorious disaster. (VH1, by the way, was created by MTV as a "fighting brand." It was created as a sacrificial lamb, to be a cheaper and dirtier vesion of MTV to run competitors out of business. Nobody expected it to last, in fact they were instructed not to be profitable).
ABOVE: Early ad trying to get cable companies to add MTV to their subscriptions. As this book reveals, the cable companies resisted mightily, so MTV ran these ads in markets where MTV was not yet available.
BELOW: Another of those great ads (featuring Mr. Bowie)...
MTV was funded and owned jointly by Warner Brothers and American Express, and neither company took their little channel seriously. That is why those early years were so glorious, they were completely ignored by meddling corporate hands. Budgets were shoestring, directors were creating a new artform with the music video that had no established rules yet, through some loopholes in the law the video shoots were not controlled by union rules so they could shoot for 48 hours straight and get it done in a couple of coke-fueled days...it was the wild west with no rules at all. Naturally, there are many tales of destruction, crazy behavior, sex, drugs and rock and roll (hell, even the purposefully annoying Pauly Shore got laid constantly, as per Pauly: "There were groupies, all the time. That was kind of my thing...In the back of the bus, which I called 'The Wood Den,' I had a basket of buttons that said GRINDAGE, and another basket that had condoms. I'd have sex with them with a condom, and they'd leave with a button. So it was win-win.")
ABOVE: MTV was so powerful that it even allowed the extremely irritating Pauly Shore to have prodigious amounts of sex
The book masterfully tells hundreds of humorous, sad, joyous or fascinating individual anecdotes, but it also tells an overarching story of a little start-up with a novel idea that was dismissed by an essentially conservative record industry, then that same channel came to change that very industry and call the shots on which artists would succeed and who would not. A television channel that changed the basic rules of the music industry, as video budgets grew from $10,000 in the early 80's to millions of dollars in the early 90's. A channel that had to eventually betray its own model and charter to survive in part due to a music industry that rebelled against the monster that MTV became (hello reality programming). The book is filled equally with interesting discussions of the business side of the network and rock and roll history during the 80's. While there are many great stories here, I'll mention two or three in particular that I enjoyed...
First is the chapter about what many consider to be the worst video ever made (chapter title: A Whopping, Steaming Turd). That would be Billy Squier's "Rock Me Tonite." Squier was a respectable rocker up to this point, but this one video killed his career. While much of this book focuses on how MTV made careers (Madonna, Duran Duran, even resurrecting ZZ Top), it also killed or diminished certain careers of artists who could not adapt or who made mistakes. Like the cringe-inducing "Rock Me Tonite" video. It is a hilarious and sad chapter, with Squier and others involved pointing fingers and blaming eachother for what occurred. Squier: "When I saw the video, my jaw dropped. It was diabolical. I looked at it and went, 'what the f*ck is this?' I remember a guy from the record company saying, 'don't worry about it, the record's a smash'...The video misrepresents who I am as an artist...The video had a deleterious effect on my career...[about director-choreographer Kenny Ortega] The guy crippled me." As another observer noted, "The lessons from 'Rock Me Tonite' are that fame can be oddly fleeting in show business - and that rock stars should always think carefully about wearing pink." Indeed. But as others point out in the chapter, maybe Billy should have thought about this while he was filming it, jumping on the feather bed in his pink muscle shirt. Enjoy "Rock Me Tonite" (as you watch it you can see a career dying over 5 minutes)...
ABOVE: The flipside to the Billy Squier tale. No band used MTV better or benefited more than Duran Duran. They would not have been nearly as big as they were without the iconic trilogy of videos from Rio: "Rio," "Hungry Like the Wolf" and "Save a Prayer" (above). It helped that they had pin-up good looks and that from the beginning they concentrated on mixing fashion and image with their music. These videos had a gorgeous style to them, and they were played incessantly. for the record, Duran Duran were/are also great musically, something often overlooked.
A story that is told throughout the book is MTV's complicated relationship with Michael Jackson. The racism issue is addressed in an entire chapter and it is a contentious issue amongst those involved (the popular wisdom is that Jackson's groundbreaking "Billie Jean" video broke the unspoken race barrier on MTV). Evidently MJ monitored MTV extremely closely, to see how often they played his videos and how they portrayed him. Jackson decided that he wanted to be called "King of Pop," so he threatened to withold his "Black or White" video from the channel unless they dubbed him King of Pop. It was all Jackson's idea. There was a memo that circulated around the MTV offices that stated, "I know this is a bizarre request, but..." and then outlined the rules that each VJ had to follow regarding Jacko's new title, calling Jackson "The King of Pop" twice per week on air, and "Please be sure to note which segments you do this in case we need to send dubs to the King of Pop himself." On a meeting with MJ for a video around the same period with MTV executives: "I met Michael at Sound Recorder Studios...The meeting was supposed to start at 6 p.m., but Michael - and Bubbles, his chimp - didn't arrive until eight. We started the meeting, and at 8:30 Michael suddenly says, 'Oh, we have to stop. The Simpsons is coming on.' We stopped the meeting and watched The Simpsons."
I would also recommend the great chapter about the Lost Weekend With Van Halen contest about how the band almost killed the contest winner with a debauched weekend of booze, drugs and strippers. I'll let the winner, Kurt Jefferis tell it: "They gave me a 'Lost Weekend' T-shirt and a hat. I met Valerie Bertinelli when I was backstage smoking a joint and drinking Jack Daniel's. They brought me onstage and smashed a cake in my face, then about a dozen people poured champagne on me, including two midgets. After the show, we went backstage and they brought a girl for me. She was a stripper in a short black leather skirt. David Lee Roth said, 'Kurt needs to meet Tammy.' They put on some music so she could dance and take her clothes off for me. David told her to take me into the shower. And I had Tammy in the shower." One of the MTV execs who was present added, "I could hear him howling from where I was sitting." Turns out the kid had a metal plate in his head and wasn't supposed to drink or do drugs. Exec Tom Freston: "They gave cocaine to the guy who won the contest. It turned out he had a plate in his head."
ABOVE: David Lee Roth loved MTV, and MTV loved David Lee Roth
If you love the 80's, if you are one of those people who look back angrily to the early 90's when MTV moved away from videos and music, if you want to know how the music industry was fundamentally altered in the 1980's, if you love tales of rock and roll excess and debauchery, then I Want My MTV is a must-read. Oh, and the fight between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain is worth reading about too.
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