I Want My MTV (8 page)

 

BOB PITTMAN:
I decided we needed VJs. Nobody falls in love with a jukebox; you have to bond with a human being.

 

JOHN LACK:
Bob said, “We need a black person. We need a girl next door. We need a little sexy siren. We need a boy next door. And we need some hunky Italian-looking guy with curly hair.” They all had roles to play.

 

KEVIN CRONIN, REO Speedwagon:
I was the first person approached to be an MTV VJ, and I turned it down. My publicist, Howard Bloom, said, “I want you to meet some guys who are putting together a twenty-four-hour TV station that plays rock videos.” So we went to dinner and these guys who looked like lawyers and accountants offered me a job. I said, “I play in a rock band! We tour eight months of the year and make records the rest of the time!” And their jaws dropped, like this had never occurred to them. I thought,
These guys are clueless.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
We placed ads in
Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter
and got on the phone with agents. We had serious actors, DJs, record company executives. A broad variety of people. Richard Belzer auditioned. He was doing stand-up then. Carol Leifer auditioned. She might have been the funniest and most irreverent.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
We auditioned local newscasters. We saw a lot of radio people, who had faces for radio, unfortunately. We held auditions in a hotel room. There were beds in the room. I mean, it just reeked of sleaze.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
For the audition, we wrote up a little script for them to read. But the best part was when we had them do mock interviews. Robert Morton would pretend he was Billy Joel. They would ask, “What did you have in mind when you wrote ‘New York State of Mind'?” And he'd say something like “My mother's cooking,” and they'd have to banter off that.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
I'd be surly, I'd be falling asleep, I'd be physically touching them—whatever somebody would do who was a little drugged up. I was acting like a big asshole; rock musicians do things that are unexpected, and we were testing potential VJs to see if they could handle situations like that.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
Nina came in through an ad in the paper. She was playing the harp at some hotel near LAX.

 

NINA BLACKWOOD, MTV VJ:
I played rock n' roll–style harp: “Stairway to Heaven,” even Bruce Springsteen. I studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. And I was working on three different local prototypes for music-video programs, where I'd do interviews or introduce video clips. I sent in my résumé and an eight-by-ten photo which I drew on with watercolor pens to make it look punky.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
She looked edgy, with that crazy hair, but she wasn't sure she wanted to come to New York, so we flew her in from LA.

 

NINA BLACKWOOD:
Sue told me to come to New York and meet the head guy, Bob Pittman. He reminded me of Sherman, from the
Rocky & Bullwinkle
cartoon. Sherman was the boy genius.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
Sue and I took her to Tavern on the Green, and not three minutes after we sat down, she put a piece of bread in her mouth and started choking on it. She's turning red. I said, “Need a little Heimlich, Nina?” And she nodded her head
yes
. From working in morning television, I knew Dr. Heimlich; I'd had him on shows, demonstrating the Heimlich maneuver. I got behind her and gave her a big squeeze, and this piece of bread popped out. She said, “Now I have to take the job, you saved my life.”

 

NINA BLACKWOOD:
Morty, who I love to this day, said, “Now you have to take the job. You owe me!” I moved to New York on July 5. I was the first VJ hired.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
We decided we needed a teen idol, and that was Mark Goodman.

 

MARK GOODMAN, MTV VJ:
I was working at WPLJ radio in New York when I got a call from a friend about this twenty-four-hour video music thing. I knew of Pittman, so I arranged a meeting with an executive producer at Warner Amex. I said, “Where's your office?” He said, “We're at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue.” I'm like, “Okay, this is a gonna be a rape.” I was kind of creeped out. The first audition was March '81.

 

KEVIN CRONIN:
If you were to pull up photos from the early '80s of me and Mark Goodman, you'd notice an undeniable similarity in style. Check out those mullet-Afros, or as we call them now: mulfros. It's my contention that Mr. Goodman coattailed into his gig on my hairdo.

 

MEG GRIFFIN, radio DJ:
I really liked my job at WNEW in New York. I was content. I went in kind of begrudgingly one day to audition for MTV, and it felt good that they wanted to hire me. I was in an office next to Bob Pittman, and I overheard him say, “I have my black, my Jew, my WASP, my sex-bomb, and now my tomboy.” I was like,
What did he just say?
It rubbed me the wrong way. And to be honest, I was flabbergasted by the $50,000 a year salary for national television; I thought they were shortchanging their talent.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
Just a few weeks before we went on air, Meg didn't show up for work. We started madly dialing her house—we thought maybe she'd been in a car accident. We got her husband on the phone and he said, “Well”—long pause—“Meg has decided this is not for her.”

 

MEG GRIFFIN:
Maybe they thought I was being unprofessional. You know what? I didn't give a shit.

 

MARTHA QUINN, MTV VJ:
I had graduated from NYU, where I'd worked at the radio station, WNYU. My radio name was Tiffany and I played urban music, like Shalamar and the Whispers.

 

MEG GRIFFIN:
It was clearly typecast, because look who they hired when I turned it down! Martha Quinn was a duplicate of me. People used to call her “Little Meg,” which irked her.

 

RONALD “BUZZ” BRINDLE, MTV executive:
I was talking to Pittman, and he said, “We're looking for a VJ.” Martha was an intern at WNBC radio, where I worked, and she was standing in my office. She had a charismatic personality. Bob said, “Have her here in thirty minutes for an audition.”

 

MARTHA QUINN:
I said, “What's a VJ?” Buzz said, “It's like being a DJ, but on TV.” And I said, “What do I do while the records are playing?” Because I was thinking it was like
WKRP in Cincinnati.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
She grew into a great personality, but we never thought much of her. It was like, “Oh, she's [
Newsweek
columnist] Jane Bryant Quinn's daughter, we have to give her a shot.”

 

MARTHA QUINN:
I walked in to audition and they looked at me like, “Who are you? A messenger?” A couple of days later, Sue Steinberg called me to the studio and said, “We would like you to work for us.” That was two weeks before launch.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
Martha was so young, her father had to sign her contract for her.

 

MARTHA QUINN:
I was still involved with my high school boyfriend when I started at MTV. That's how young I was.

 

KEN R. CLARK, MTV staff:
I was hired as production assistant to the VJs. I was the sixth VJ—if they were there, I was there. And they were easy to work with. There was no ego, they loved each other like siblings. There wasn't that animosity or jealousy that came to plague the later years.

 

JOHN SYKES:
The J.J. Jackson we hired wasn't the J.J. we meant to hire.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
That's true. Pittman's one direction to us was “Find a black VJ.” He told us about a guy named J.J. Johnson, and said, “He's really good. Track him down.” So I looked all over for J.J. Johnson. Subsequently, I found out who he was; a very good-looking black guy who had a great voice. But I couldn't find him. I called every radio station in the country. Finally I called KMEL in San Francisco and said, “Do you have a guy named J.J. Johnson working for you?” They said, “No, but we have J.J.
Jackson
.” I said, “Well, let me talk to him.” We auditioned him and I said to Pittman, “Here's your J.J.”

 

MARTHA QUINN:
J.J. was the elder statesmen of the VJs. He had Rod Stewart's home phone number. And he was the partier. He knew every doorman at every club.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
J.J. was the most rock star of the VJs. He would be out at the clubs, surrounded by gorgeous, exotic models, and imbibing all the '80s had to offer. He kept a tube of Preparation H in his dressing room to shrink his swollen eyes after a hard night of partying. Apparently it's something models had known and used for years. I recall him saying, “It reduces the swelling brought on by a night of intense partying with the lovely Katrina and Nadia.”

 

ADAM CURRY, MTV VJ:
Our car service, Communi-Car, called J.J. “the franchise.” He lived it, man. He'd be out all night and leave the car sitting outside for hours. He was larger than life.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
J.J. always came flowing into the studio in his floor-length, black, pimp-daddy mink coat just moments before he was due on set.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
I used to call J.J. “Club Man,” because he was always out all night, and he would roll straight from a club to the MTV studio. J.J. had a neverending stream of women, and they were all pretty and exotic. He was a very unusual guy. He was erudite, a great storyteller. You couldn't help but love him. He was a hugger and a kisser, too; within weeks of knowing him, he was hugging me. He was that kind of guy.

 

PAM LEWIS, MTV staff:
The first major celebrity interview we did was with Robert Plant, who went way back with J.J. Plant walked in, with all his sex appeal and swagger, hugged J.J., and said, “You're wearing fuckin' makeup.” Our budget was pretty bare bones and we had no makeup artist. J.J. would apply his own makeup and sometimes he'd overdo it, and get a kind of ocher color. He looked like a brick with eyes.

ALAN HUNTER:
I have no idea why they hired me. I think they were desperate. They opened the auditions to every critter on the face of the earth who could speak. Even after I was hired, I kept my bartending job. About half a year into it, J.J. said, “If you're not making at least $40,000, then you got screwed.” I was like, “Oh, I'm doing fine!” I couldn't admit to him that Mark and I were making less than that. They picked me out of nowhere, and I was fine with it.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
Martha Quinn was the girl next door. Alan Hunter was Martha's counterpoint, the boy next door.

 

MARTHA QUINN:
Al was the funny one. He was our in-house Mork, complete with rainbow suspenders. He was always doing cartwheels, being goofy.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
For the first six months, they thought they'd made a horrible mistake by hiring me. I don't think I was very good on the air. I was only a year out of college, I was scared and uneasy, and speaking extemporaneously about a Styx concert was hard for me. I'd come home every night and say to my wife, “They're gonna fire me tomorrow.” One day I actually did a cartwheel into the teleprompter at the studio, broke the glass all over the place, and popped back out again. Bob Pittman sent me a note that said, “Beautiful.” They loved that.

The goal that first year was to break every television mold, by being funny and clowning on camera. Pittman wanted the VJs to be as irreverent as the videos.

 

JOHN LACK:
I took the VJs to dinner at Odeon before the launch, the hot new restaurant in New York. Keith McNally had just opened it, cocaine was everywhere, it was the rock n' roll cafeteria. I stood up and said, “Next week you're going to be famous.”

 

TODD RUNDGREN:
I was put off by the slickness of the VJs. They were no different from radio DJs.

 

THOMAS DOLBY, artist:
They'd roll the camera, and J.J. Jackson would go, “So Thomas, you're over here on your first American tour.” And I'd say, “No, I'm over here to make a record.” It was literally that stupid. It was like a joke; they had to keep stopping and starting.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
They asked me to not wear my wedding ring on the air, so I took it off for a week. One producer told me that if Martha and I were to become more than just friends, it wouldn't hurt ratings.

I was alive and I was a male; who wouldn't have lustful thoughts about Martha and Nina? Martha's kinda flirty anyway. And we all shared the same low-rent dressing room, so I caught a glimpse of Nina naked. I didn't mean to, but I also didn't mind it.

 

NINA BLACKWOOD:
In 1978, when I was living in Cleveland, I posed for
Playboy
. When
Playboy
got wind of my MTV job, they decided to reprint the photos. I got called into the MTV offices over this. I remember feeling like a scolded little girl, having to go to the principal's office. They weren't real thrilled, which I find pretty ludicrous considering what MTV turned into.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
I was doing a personal appearance in a record store, signing autographs and shaking hands, and a guy came up and popped this
Playboy
open to the page where Nina was. I couldn't take a mental snapshot quick enough. There were a thousand people in the store, and all I could think about was Nina naked.