Another birthday is coming up for this guy on July 30th. Like most fellows, I don’t pay much attention after all these years. If it weren’t for my lovely family making a fuss, it would be just another day for me. When I was a kid, my birthday seemed to be a hex date in history. The USS Indianapolis was sunk and Jimmy Hoffa disappeared…on my birthday. And if you’re a late stage baby boomer, you can add another sad demise to July 30th. This year, that date will be the final day of manufacture for the VCR.
Japan’s Funai Electronics, the last company still making video-cassette recorders, will cease production at the end of this month… on my birthday. The company cites difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts as one of the reasons for halting production but in reality, that’s just tech talk for the reality that nobody wants them anymore. VCRs were launched about 40 years ago and they were the state of the art Star Wars technology of the day. Our RCA (now defunct) VCR was the most high tech item we owned and a prized possession in the Hunter household.
Ours was about the size of a Samsonite hard shell suitcase and as clunky as a ballerina in army boots. Mostly, we used it to tape my wife’s favorite soap opera, “All My Children” (also defunct) and of course, MTV. In particular the game show Remote Control. MTV, as fate would have it, made it’s debut 35 years ago. Two days after…my birthday.
On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at one minute past midnight (EST), MTV signed on as the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll” played over video clips of the 1969 Apollo 11 blastoff and the first Space Shuttle Columbia launch countdown, which took place earlier that year. Those images were immediately followed by the original MTV moon landing theme song, a guitar pounding rock tune playing over an image of a bouncing Apollo moon walker planting an MTV flag that frenetically changed colors, textures, and designs. The only constant aspects of MTV’s logo back then were its general shape and proportions; everything else was dynamic.
MTV producers used NASA public domain footage as a concept and had originally planned to use Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” quote, but lawyers said Armstrong owns his name and likeness, and Armstrong had refused, so an innocuous techy beeping sound was used instead. The shuttle launch identification ran at the top of every hour in various forms until it was pulled in early 1986 after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Until that time the shuttle ID tag ran “more than 15,000” times each year, according to MTV executives.
As every trivia fan knows, the very first music video shown on MTV was The Buggles’ prophetically titled “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The Buggles, a two-man British band, occupy a sour spot in my musical soul as the duo who replaced Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman in my favorite band, Yes (whom I followed all over the Midwest during my high school years with the devotion any Grateful Dead or Phish fan could appreciate). After that 1980 tour in support of the album “Drama,” the band broke up. So, rightly or wrongly, I equate the Buggles with the death of my favorite band. However, their one and only hit seemed to be an appropriate starting point for MTV.
Okay trivia buffs, can you name the first AMERICAN artist to have a video played on MTV? It was Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run.” Followed by Rod Stewart, The Who, Ph.D., Cliff Richard, The Pretenders, Todd Rundgren, REO Speedwagon, and Styx to round out the first ten. Todd Rundgren is now a music professor at I.U., so there’s the Indiana connection if you were looking for one. (There’s ALWAYS an Indiana connection.) The early years at MTV were rudimentary to say the least. Every once in a while during that first year, the screen would go black while an MTV employee inserted a tape into a VCR.
MTV’s earliest format was modeled after an average Sunday morning radio station playing album rock and not necessarily focused on top-40 hits. Its programming consisted of basic music videos that were introduced by VJs (video jockeys) that were provided for free by record companies. Five fresh-faced young men and women were hired to introduce music videos and provide hip, timely chatter. The original five MTV VJs in 1981 were Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, J.J. Jackson, Martha Quinn and Alan Hunter (no relation).
Alan Caldwell Hunter was, by technical snafu, the first of the VJ’s to appear on screen. He began the VJ tradition with the words “Hi I’m Alan Hunter. I’ll be with you right after Mark. We’ll be covering the latest in music news, coast to coast, here on MTV Music Television.” Ironically, Hunter had no musical background, he was an actor. Like all struggling actors, he held a series of dead end jobs: bartender, waiter, phone answering service attendant and a handful of Off Off Broadway roles, finally earning a role in the music video for David Bowie’s “Fashion” for which he was paid $50 a day and got to meet Bowie. Apparently, that Bowie gig was enough to get him the original MTV VJ job.
Mark Goodman was supposed to be the first of the five to be broadcast at MTV’s premiere but due to errors sequencing the clips, he was the last of the VJs to introduce themselves after the first two video clips played. Goodman had been in the music business since the 1970s. He started in radio in his hometown of Philadelphia, at WMMR and in 1978, became the music director of that station. In 1980, he moved to New York City to work at WPLJ, the number-one rock station in New York where he was snatched up by MTV.
MTV VJ Nina Blackwood’s claim to fame before her MTV was as an actress/model who appeared nude in the August 1978 Playboy pictorial, “The Girls in the Office,” as a brunette. She moved to California afterwards, and studied acting at the legendary Strasberg Institute whose famous alumni include Steve Bucsemi, Alec Baldwin, Claire Danes, Matt Dillon, Scarlett Johannson, Sissy Spacek, Uma Thurman, Christoff Waltz and Lady Gaga. In a weird crossover moment, Blackwood was the subject of the 1984 John Waite hit single “Missing You.” She undoubtedly introduced the song many times on air.
VJ Martha Quinn began her career at New York University performing in TV commercials (she was McDonald’s first Chicken McNuggets girl) as well as in ads for Country Time Lemonade, Clearasil and Campbell’s Soup while working at the college radio station. Quinn’s MTV stint ran through 1990, the longest of any of the first five. Quinn was voted by Rolling Stone magazine readers in 1991 as “MTV’s Best-Ever VJ.” Critics dubbed Quinn’s departure from MTV as “the day the video music died.”
J.J. Jackson was the elder statesman among disc jockeys, with his own L.A. radio show, before landing the MTV gig. Along with Goodman, Jackson was considered the network’s real musical expert. Triple J first gained prominence as a Boston DJ in the late 1960s, then at KLOS in Los Angeles for a decade. Jackson was one of the first DJs to introduce Americans to The Who and Led Zeppelin. On March 17, 2004, while driving home after dining with a friend in Los Angeles, Jackson suffered a fatal heart attack and died at age 62.
Mark Goodman said he was floored when he heard the news. “I was at home, I actually got a call from Martha Quinn. I almost couldn’t understand what she was saying, she was so upset…I knew he a had a bad heart. He was driving. Typical of J.J., he didn’t even hurt anybody,” Goodman said. “He was somehow able to ease his foot off the gas. He eased his car over to the side of the road. By the time the paramedics got there, they could not revive him there or the hospital either.”
“J.J. was really a gentle man,” he remembered. “He was smart. As I think of him, I think of him laughing. The guy had this huge laugh. He was a rabid music fan. Rod Stewart was a friend of his, guys in Led Zeppelin were friends of his. He championed these bands early on when they were kind of just getting going. He did Bruce Springsteen’s first television interview. J.J. was a great guy. For the five of us, he was the wise DJ. He was the guy who had been through it all and was able to always put a mature perspective to things. He wound up handling the spotlight that was thrust on us better than any of us.” Pre-MTV movie fans would be interested to know that it was JJ’s voice that was used for the DJ in the 1976 movie “Car Wash.”
J.J. Jackson died a couple weeks before he was scheduled to meet, alongside VJ Alan Hunter, for a new gig on Sirius FM radio. All four of the original five currently host their own shows on the Sirius network. By 1984, the popularity of these VJ’s had transformed MTV into a promotional powerhouse. The MTV effect was epic. Record stores began selling out of music that local radio stations were not playing. MTV made stars out of relative unknowns like Men at Work, Bow Wow Wow, and the Human League. MTV sparked the Second British Invasion, with British acts who had been using music videos for half a decade in their native UK, featured heavily on the channel. MTV went on to revolutionize the music industry and influence pop culture and the entertainment field as a whole in the United States and all over the world.
As soon as record companies recognized MTV’s value as a promotional vehicle, they began investing money in making creative, cutting-edge videos. Some directors, including Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Three Kings) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), began their careers by making music videos. By the mid-to-late 1980s, MTV had turned performers like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and Duran Duran, into superstars. MTV’s rise was not without controversy though.
Next week: Part II
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
