August 1, 2024 • 52 mins
In honor of the 43rd anniversary of MTV, we’re rereleasing a classic episode: the real story of MTV, as told by the founders. Today MTV is a cultural institution, but people forget what a long shot it was to get the channel off the ground. Bob Pittman led the team that created MTV. In this special episode, he reminisces with co-founders and friends John Sykes, Judy McGrath, Fred Seibert, Tom Freston and Jarl Mohn about what it was like to create the '80s version of a start-up and lead a TV revolution by dreaming up the rules as they went along. From why the first MTV logo was designed on crinkled paper (it spent a little time in a trash bin), to how a tiny record store in Tulsa helped save the business, to why you should really think twice about going on a Lost Weekend with Van Halen... all the way to how a terrible cereal inspired one of the greatest ad slogans of all time: “I want my MTV,” we’ve packed this episode full of stories that marketers, fans and entrepreneurs will all want to hear.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
You actually were the guy who inspired us to do
animated logos. Do you remember this? I said, well, what
are we going to do in between the videos and
the VJs? Are we going to do jingles? And he went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles? And I said, what do we do?
He said, how about this? Imagine it's a picture of
a cow. I said, yeah, he said, and all of
(00:30):
a sudden, an X comes down and cuts the cow's
head off and it falls to the ground and you
see the veins coming out and the blood spurting out,
and the cow vomits, and in the vomit is the logo.
I went, Oh, my god, I can do anything I want.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
I'm Bob Tipman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers of Marketing, and we're doing something.
Speaker 5 (00:52):
Special on today's episode.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
One of the pivotal moments of my life was leading
the team that created MTV. I've had the good of
having all the co founders of MTV on this podcast
with me and in each of the interviews, whether it
was chatting with Judye Brat or Fred Seiber, John Sykes
or Yarrol Moon, and of course Tom Freston. We've always
spent a little time talking about MTV, so all we
(01:15):
wanted to do for you today was pulled together those
stories for the first time ever. Tell the story of
the beginning of MTV through the eyes of people who
were actually in the room when it happened, because all
of us who are really in the room often laugh
about how far off other people's accounts can be.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
So let me set the stage.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
It's the beginning of the eighties. Cable TV was still
a crazy idea. Most business executives and most of America
didn't understand it or believe in how TV was about
to change. And here comes this pack of twenty year
olds with an attitude. None of us had ever done
the jobs before. All we knew is we had grown
up with rock and roll and we'd grown up with TV,
(02:00):
and the two had never successfully come together. We thought
it had always failed because TV people always wanted to
try and make music at the TV form a storia.
We intended to make TV that the music form mood
and emotion. MTV was going to be about attitude and
something people wanted to join. We run a mission. So
(02:21):
when Iheart's own. John Sykes at the time, a twenty
four year old record executive at CBS Records in Chicago,
heard what we were up to.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Well, he wanted in.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
So let's talk about MTV. It's nineteen eighty. The word
gets out that we're working on this do music channel.
How do you hear about it? What does it mean
to you? And how on earth did you really get
connected to us to get on that original team.
Speaker 6 (02:46):
I grew up with three things in my life, radio, television,
and music.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
That's all I cared about.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
When I wasn't in the radio station, I was watching
TV or listening to music. Those things, to me shaped
our culture. So at school, TV is just starting up,
and I saw the cable channels were empty, and music
was all over the radio, it was it on television.
So we used to go and shoot the concerts at Syracus,
and we'd tape them and send them to new channels,
and we'd play the concerts and people like, oh my god,
(03:15):
I can see the band. And all I wanted to
do at that point was put music on television. When
I graduated, I went to CBS, said let's put music
on Let's run concerts. These three martini lunch guys in
New York looked at me like it was crazy. I
got a job in the record business promoting radio stations.
I wanted to run the radio station. I didn't want
to promote them on the radio, but that's the job
I had. So then I heard from my friend Steve Casey,
(03:37):
was a WLS in Chicago, that his great friend Bob
Pittman was in New York and he was going to
start a video channel. And I lost my mind. It
still gives me goosebumps. I was like, this is what
I was made to do, This is what I wanted
to do. To me, it was like music belonged on television.
So I started calling you, and I called you, and
(03:58):
I called you and I called you, and thanks to
your assistant and plunk It, who I was annoying so much,
he said, all right, Bob, you please talk to this guy.
And we met that day with a borrowed support jacket
because I hadn't own it. But you and I connected
that moment because we had the same vision. Music and
television were the two biggest forces in pop culture and they.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Were about to be.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
You know, you look back on any successful product and
it seems easy. You were there when we didn't even
have approval from the board to do it. We just
had some money to develop it. So give us a
little color for people who think things are easy and
they always go exactly the way you plan.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
What that early development was like.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
It is funny and people I go, oh, my god,
you and the team that started MTV. That must have
been a magical and great ago. I don't know. I
was working too hard. We were so in the trenches
all the time. It only looks glamorous to day looking back,
but when you're in it, it's a slug fest. There
was this idea, but to make it happen, we had
no money, and we all quit jobs. You were at NBC,
(04:57):
I was at CBS. I was the promotion man of
the Year in Chicago, and I just said, I'm quitting.
People like us, we weren't going to fail. I never
thought we were going to fail. I got scared when
you'd come in and say, you know, they're going to
cut the budgets. We got a few more months. We've
got to make our numbers. That just made me say, well,
we're gonna have to work hard to make our numbers.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, Okay,
we're going to the board and we're going to pitch
this for approval, and you go, what, we don't have approval.
I quit my job. We don't have approval. So no, no, John,
this was development. All the blood ran out of your
face at that moment.
Speaker 6 (05:30):
I do remember I had to look up because there
was no Internet, I had to go in the dictionary,
look up the real definition of development. I just thought,
we're developing something going No development means it's not going
to happen yet, but you know something. But I was like,
who cares if it doesn't work, I'll go to sleep
on my sister's couch and another job.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We were young. John Sykes was so hungry he pounded
on our door. Let him in.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
He believed in music television from the start. But my
good pal Fred Cybern, the one who came out of
radio and helped create the graphic look of MTV, his
reason for getting into TV was very different. One of
your great supporters, who I'd worked with and who I
loved dearly, Dale Pond, recommended you to me pre MTV.
It was in the early days of pay TV. You
(06:13):
came over to join us in the cable revolution. Yeah,
why did you make that jump?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, you know this is going to sound flattering. I
did it completely because of you. Dale had left the
country music radio station and left me alone, and the
guy I was working for at that time in radio
I had no respect for whatsoever. So you called me
one day, he said, you want to be Intellivision. Oh,
you said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
(06:39):
the business, and there was one article about you, and
I thought to myself, you know, this guy is younger
than me and I've heard of him, so that's, you know,
one check. So we go, we have the coffee, and
I walk out and I called my best friend and
I said, this guy that I just talked to is
so much smarter than my Boston radio He goes, what
(07:00):
do you think about that? I said, Well, here's what
Dale taught me. Doesn't matter what the job is, work
for the smartest person you can find, and at the time,
you were the smartest person I could find.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That's what got me too. Toleration that truth be told.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When you first told me about it, I thought it
was the dumbest idea in the world. Because I was
a music guy and I had seen, you know, a
few Crimy music videos. I hadn't really thought about it
too much, and then luckily somebody played me a music
video that made, you know, the little light go off.
I don't know whether it was blind faith or I
(07:33):
was too naive to know that you had to have faith,
like you told me it was going to happen, so.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
I believed you was it youth totally.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I was just talking with Alan Goodman, my soon to
be partner at that point, and he said, you know,
we didn't really know what was going to happen, but
you looked at all the other people that were around
you and it just had to happen. I think that's
really true.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
I don't know if you remember, but we went to
the head of Warner Communications in American Express and we
got a meeting with Steve Ross, who the CEO of Warner,
along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And we
got Jim Robinson and his deputy Lou Gershner from American Express.
We were worried that when we showed these videos too
for American Express, go what that stuffed, so he said,
(08:14):
let's find the tamest one of my mind. I think
we found the Olivia Newton jobs, if you remember. But
in the meeting, they said you have to play that
kind of stuff, implying Olivia Newton john was too hard
to race. But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first
one to say, Okay, I'm in for my alf how
about you?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Steve so awesome we locked out.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
The MTV crew we assembled was a bunch of lovable
misfits and future Viacom MTV CEO. Tom Preston was no different.
It's been several years living in Afghanistan, importing clothes and
having adventures across Asia.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
But when things.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Got two political overseas, he made his way back. And
just so you don't think Tom went soft sitting the
top Viacom After he left the company, he returned to
Afghanistan and even has a wonderful story about lying on
a floor in a bar and football with a firefight
going on all around, the bullets whizzing overhead.
Speaker 7 (09:05):
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in in the business world. There wasn't an artist,
per se. I wasn't a writer or a musician, but
I wanted to always be around creative people. My first
grown up jobs essentially we're working in an ad agency.
My first account there I worked on was G I Joe. Now,
mind you, this was sort of at the height of
the Vietnam War and I was in an alienated state
(09:26):
to begin with. When they were going to sign me
to charm and toilet paper, that was sort of my
last straw. I called an ex girlfriend who lived in Paris.
I said, they want me to work on a toilet
paper account where they had segmented the population and to rollers,
folders and crumplers. And she says, well, you can't do that.
You should quit that job. Don't be a moron. Come
(09:47):
with me. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert
up in Paris. So I was on a plane like
ten days later. That was it for me.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
So Tom set up his clothing company Hinmdoo Cush and
ran that successfully for a long while.
Speaker 7 (09:59):
When I even out of Asia, I thought, whatever I
do next, I wanted to be something that I also
loved deeply, and that was music. So I methodically looked
around getting a job in the music business. Through connections.
I ended up in John Lack's office and I told
him I thought this was a fantastic idea. He says,
we're looking for people who have no experience in television.
I said, I'm your man. They didn't even have television
where I've been living the last eight years.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
We were both originally brought to the company for other jobs,
by the way, before the MTV development even began, by
the incredibly charismatic John Lack, who had this wonderful affliction.
He liked to hire people for roles they had never
had before, and you and I benefited from that. But
you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even recognized
as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think you
(10:42):
were getting into? I mean, this was still sort of
Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
I thought I was getting into one of the greatest
ideas that had ever come around. I had spent parts
of the summers in Europe, and I was familiar with
the music video which were largely unknown to the American audiences,
and they were infectious. And I thought MTV, like all
of us on the team, was really one of the
great ideas, and all of us were essentially on a
crusade we got paid nothing. It was the early eighties
(11:08):
version of a startup, very much so. And if you
looked at the media environment then nothing had really changed
in years. The only thing that had come around knew
had been FM radio. There was still three TV networks.
Pong was only a few years old.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Remember we used to say we're going to do to
FM what FM did to AM.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
That was our big claim.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
Twenty five channels in the home, can you imagine.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Judy McGrath was another key employee in the early days.
She eventually rose to be CEO of MTV Networks. Here
she has reminiscing about what it meant to make the
rules up as we went along.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
The beauty in the wonder of MTV was that it
was really filled with people that I thought could not
find gainful employment anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
We couldn't.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
No, it would be somebody who had never really shot
anything and just wanted to get their hands on a
camera try it. And we were willing to do that,
so I would say absolutely, But remember, don't fall in
love with your own idea. This is about someone else,
not you. This is about the person on the other side.
They're like you, but you can't make this just for you,
(12:16):
and there are really no other rules aside from you know,
no full frontal nudity. Go out there and do it.
And it was so much fun to have the freedom
to meet people who were far more creative than I was.
I mean when I joined, I didn't know anything about television.
I didn't even like it. My interview was with Fred,
(12:36):
who said, so, what kind of music do you like?
And I think I said Bruce Springsteen. I'm not sure.
He said, well, you're wrong, and I'll tell you why.
And then about forty five minutes later, I left, not
having said anything else. And the next thing I know,
they were like, well, you know, look, this is just
a few of us were trying to get this thing
going if you'd like to join, And it was kind
(12:58):
of like, how fast can I go out the door
of Conde ass and jump on this thing? Whatever it is?
These people are crazy.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
What's funny is that when I ask Fred about it,
he remembered the story exactly the same way.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
She said Bruce Springsteen, and I said wrong because I
don't have a good thing about Bruce.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The fact that she cared, you know, the Bruce haters
are coming after you right now.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I believe me, they've been coming after my whole life.
The fact that she cared meant all the difference to
me in the world. Not that I agreed, you know.
Speaker 8 (13:29):
I've just found the camaraderie and the purpose and the
sheer invention of something that didn't exist, so irresistible. And
again on the math side of it, I was saying,
I mean this with all sincerity. You had a map
in the creative group, you had a plan, and the
plan were promises, and I loved that. I am making
(13:52):
a promise to you. You sit here, I'm going to
deliver something that you've been waiting for. It is the
first music television network. It is exactly for you. And
I thought, wow, I want my MTV and I have
no idea what it is, but those are powerful words
(14:12):
my in an era before social media and social engagement.
Something for me that felt like mine and want what
a powerful word, right, I want my MTV. I took
that very seriously. I took those promises to heart. Twenty
four hours a day, terrific in stereo, not really, but
(14:34):
you know.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Hey, it's work. It so for those ten people who
did have stereoty brilliant.
Speaker 8 (14:40):
I remember you saying to me, we want people to
think it sounds better than regular television, and they did.
It just felt to me like if I could marry
all the things I'm interested in with these set of
principles and join this crazy band of people who have
no right and a lot of audacity and a firm
belief that this can work. What a gift. I never
(15:03):
looked back, No one second.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
Let's go back to Fred and chat about that iconic
MTV logo.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Talk about the logo. You set out, you got the mission.
You and I have these discussions. I naively say, we'll
do our own Star Wars logo because everybody has a
Star Wars logan.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
You go to bob Ours will look cheap.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
You said, look, if we do something no one's ever
seen before, they won't know it's cheap exactly. So tell
me about the logo.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Well, the logo itself actually came about because I was
too scared to go to someone famous. I wanted to
go to Milton Glazer, who's one of the most famous
graphic designers of the last fifty years. And I was like, oh, well,
he's going to be really expensive and we'll get all
the credit. And I wanted a little credit, you know,
at least, so my childhood friend, who I've known since
(15:52):
I'm four years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had
just started a little design firm behind a tai Chiese
studio above Bigelo Chemistry on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had
been the guy because he's a year older than me,
who had always introduced me to every new rock band.
He introduced me to the Monkeys, he introduced me to
the Mothers of Invention, to the Who to Jeff Beck.
So I go down to his little tai Chi studio
(16:14):
place and I go, will you guys design a logo
for this rock channel we're starting? And they're like yes,
And they didn't ask me anything. They didn't ask me
how much they were going to get paid or anything
like that. And this was right after you sent out
the first memo in June of nineteen eighty and boy
do I wish I had that memo. So for a
year they designed logos and I just rejected everything, probably
(16:39):
five hundred designs. Finally they come in the office one day,
were actually going to go on the air soon, right,
and we still don't have anything, and they bring up
pile and I'm like, no, Now I'm going through the
whole pile, and at the bottom of the pile is
a piece of tracing paper. Remember that, you know the
paper you could see through and it was all wrinkled
(17:00):
and they had flattened it out. It was just like
a sketched TV. I went, Okay, that's the one I
can see. Frank like growling. He and I now disagree.
But what I had heard is that there's three partners
and one of them wasn't really a designer. She was
a production manager and she had done it, and Frank
saw it and hated him, threw it in the garbage.
(17:22):
She fished it out and put it at the bottom
of the pile. He says, that's not true, but you know, maybe.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Or a good story.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The only reason I said yes is that Dale had
taught me one lesson about design. You need to dominate
the space, and that big block em was the only
thing they showed that when you put it on a
TV screen, filled the whole screen. Okay, we dominate the space,
and in a world of thirty channels.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
And in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
So they come to my office with about ten different
boards and then a little board where Frank had illustrated
ten or twelve of them on.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Acrylic overlays and said, this.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
One will be for the heavy Metal show and this
one will be for the New Waves show. And I'm like, Frank,
We're not going to have shows, you know.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
I put it aside.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So I put all of the boards up on my
pegboard and couldn't decide. And this went on literally for
like weeks and weeks and weeks, and then I start
looking at his little acrylic thing with all the illustration,
and I said, why don't we just use them all
at once all the time? Or television we move? Shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(18:37):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. You actually were the guy who inspired
us to do animated logos. I said, well, what are
we going to do in between the videos and the VJs?
Are we going to do jingles? And he oh, no,
we can't do jingles? And I said what do we do?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
He said, how about this?
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Imagine it's like a picture of a cow. I said, yeah,
he said, And all of a sudden, an X comes
down and cuts the cow's head off and it falls
to the ground and you see the veins coming out
and the blood spurting out, and the cow vomits, and
in the vomit is the logo. I went, Oh, my god,
I can do anything I want. This was the most
(19:23):
exciting moment of my life. And we started hiring animators
to do all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
The other thing you did when you did those promos,
you laid the music bed down first, yeah, and cut
to the music. People forget this. They don't realize that
was an innovation.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So I got that all from Dale, and when we
started making our first radio spots, we would film country
music stars and then he said, well, go to the
audio studio and cut the audio track. I went, well,
the video guy tells me, no, you have to first
do the picture. And then he goes, Fred, we own
the audio studio.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
It's free.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
If you get it right in the audio studio, then
the three hundred dollars an hour video studio will go
much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I
realized that he was absolutely wrecked. Now fast forward twenty years.
I go to MTV one day and I go, who's
the promo department? Now on the one you're the one.
What are you talking about? They said, they make us
(20:22):
do the audio first. We're filmed. People like why, So
twenty years later they were still doing it.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
So we had a logo and we were a band
of believers. But part of getting MTV to stick was
proving the channel's worth to the record companies. Artists loved
the idea of being on TV, but the labels needed
to be convinced. At the time, David said music should
be heard and not seen. We needed a case study,
a story to prove we sold records.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
I talked to John Psykes about it.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
We launch MTV, we get it underway.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
We're trying to get some evidence that it's working because
the record companies are hemorrhaging money those years. They were
thinking about cutting videos out of their budget, which of
course we've been a disaster for. So we said we
got to get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle.
And you and Tom Preston go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma,
just told on a second, because we've got so much
(21:21):
more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.
Tell me what happened in Tulsa.
Speaker 6 (21:29):
We believe this was working, we felt it, but we
needed facts. We needed to convince a record business. So
it was like, we need a story, Tom, John, go
on their own, don't come back to you have a story.
And Tulsa didn't happen until we went to Syracuse, Houston
and we went to the cable markets. So Tom and
I driving through Tulsa in a rental car literally with
a map of record stores and going into places. So
(21:53):
you sold in the least records selling Duran, Duran sold
in the Tulips to Nope, Nope, So we kept driving driving.
I still remember it was a record story in an
old house and Tom and I trudge in and we
say solely this only that so only durand Drandrin. I
sold two boxes of durand.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Dran records last week.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
What you sold two box? You sold fifty records, twenty
five records in a box. Can we have your name
and can we use your phone? We called a box
and Bob, Bob, we have story.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
We have a story. We have a record store.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
That's selling music's only played on MTV. And you said, great,
get a name, get the information. We need an article,
and so we hang up the phone. I turned to Tom.
We go Tom, we get to go home.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
And we took that and we wrote it as a
case study and we ran it in Billboard and the
music magazines to influence the record company. I keep going,
I have the of course you do. You have everything
we ever did at MTV. You are the pack rat.
Speaker 6 (22:54):
I have that one sheet MTV sells records. Joey Smith,
and boy that Joey Smith. Wherever you are and tell
us Oklahoma, thank thank you.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Talsa,
it's because those were the few markets where we had
enough cable density that we could make a point. These
cities ended up being little laboratories where we could peek
in and take measurements and show the world just how
effective MTV was going to be. So it proved our
(23:23):
worth to the record companies. But you have to remember
we still had the events cable operators to carry MTV.
They wanted to be paid to carry our channel, and frankly,
we didn't have the money. So we had to come
up with a breakthrough idea and genius campaign that could
do all the heavy lifting. Here Tom Preston and Fred
Seibert telling that story.
Speaker 5 (23:43):
Let's start the talk.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
When we launched MTV. You were the head of marketing.
The cable operator wouldn't put MTV on. They wanted us
to pay them. One we didn't have the money, and
two that was probably a slippery slope, and so we
decided we would use a whole strategy to get distribution.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I want my MTV.
Speaker 7 (24:03):
Well it was sort of a Hail Mary pass because
you know, we're about to go under. No one in
the organization knew we were about to go under, So
how are we going to get these cable operators at us?
When we knew in fact that the people who actually
had it in the few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. So we actually
had to go over their heads. And the idea was
(24:23):
that campaign I Want My MAPO, which I remembered as
a baby boomer in the fifties, some obnoxious I want
my MAPO, but I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
The actual spot said they grew up with rock and roll,
they grew up with television now they want their MTV.
George Lois, who never saw something that he couldn't copy,
had already copied a famous TV commercial from the fifties
called I Want my mapo for a really horrendous tasting
(24:54):
time r exactly and he redid it with Mick Jagger and
David Bowie. And on the beginning of the spot he
had ped Towns in doing it, America demand your MTV.
Then people go, I want my MTV. I want my MTV,
and then p Towns and again with a telephone going
call your cable operator and say I want my TAB
(25:16):
And they showed us this spot.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
So if we could get major rock stars in a
commercial to kind of hold our logo, validate it, hold
it and command people to call their cable company and
demand their MTV, make it look cool, put some animation
around it, and then put it in these markets at
very high frequency. We go into a market and it'd
be like a Blockbuster movie was opening. Most people in
(25:39):
the market had never heard of MTV.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So we went and we pitched it to you. I
think you saw the feeling of it right away.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Well, there's a lesson in this too that you've always
done very early well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
In the case of I want my MTV music stars
who were willing to be in the commercial for free
to help us accomplish goals, but you also have music
companies and others.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a strategist and a
creative guy. And as a strategist, what he understood is
that we had no money to spend on this ad.
I remember going into our boss's office and saying, but
HBO spending ten million dollars a year in advertising, goes,
you're lucky you have two somehow or other, the people
(26:23):
in the media business didn't actually believe in advertising. It
is the weirdest thing. And so I went to Dale.
I said, look, we only have two million dollars, and
he did an incredible data dump of where could MTV
be put on against how much media cost in that
particular market, and he did three or four or five
(26:47):
cross tabs to figure out the most likely places that
if we.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Put on these spots, we'd have an embed that we
would get.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
People calling and making the cable operators insane. And god,
I think we made customer representatives from all over America
crazy within four weeks.
Speaker 7 (27:07):
Next thing, you know, every cable operator there were eleven
of them in a market, which would not be unusual.
On time, they'd all call up and surrender. So we
would move at market by market for a couple of
years across the country, going from like what was seven
million subscribers ended up being eighty or ninety million.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
I had a guy who stop me at a cable
operator and said, I hate you, and I go, why
do you hate me? And he goes because my phone
rings all day with those people saying I want my MP.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I can't get any work done.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
In my chats with the co founders, there's a lot
of fondness for this deviant culture we had. MTV was fine.
It was definitely anti establishment. And the truth is even
the promotions dripped with the brand sensibility. In some ways
they defined the brand sensibility. There's some of the crazy
stories too. It was fun reminiscing with John Sykes about them.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
You were the guy who did the promotions.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
You came up with these great ideas and fortunately unfortunately
with the women that also executed them. You did the
Paint the House paint promotion with John Mellencamp. You did
the Lost Weekend with Van Halen. What formula were you using?
Speaker 6 (28:11):
Goes back to that connecting New York thing of being
a dreamer.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Because I was the kid.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
I was the viewer who thought, oh my god, if
only I could dot dot dot.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
So when you said we've got.
Speaker 6 (28:23):
To put together some promotions, we got to go bigger
than life, we go, what are we going to do?
I just said to myself, okay, what would anybody give
their eye teeth to do? What would be the fantasy
of all fantasies? And I remember just John had done
a song called pink Houses. So let's give away a
house and you're going to paint the mother pink.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Tell us about the first house you bought.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
When you had to execute it, I mean you had
to go find a house, You had to go buy
a house, You had to go actually get a team
to paint it pink. You got to go fly people in.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
So we went and you had no money, so we
had to buy the chiefest house you could find.
Speaker 6 (28:56):
So Bob goes, take a cashier's check and just go
buy a house. And I go, okay, So I flew
in Indiana and John Mellencamp, who loved the idea, sends
his ex wife to meet me to show me around
it by some house. She's a realtor. So we go
and I go, okay. I got about two hours before
I get the flight back to New York. Show me
four houses. First house we buy, the woman is there,
(29:17):
she's cookies for me. The kids are out front, they've
cleaned it up.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
This was a shock. I felt so bad for her.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
She was a single mom. Look at this house and
I said, so, dude, it's a We can paint this pink,
so I wrote, I checked, thirty two thousand dollars, bought
the house. Her jaw dropped. No realtor just handed the
check and got in the car. Drove back when you
opened up Rolling Stone. Three weeks later, MTV buy his
house on toxic waste dump. So so I call you,
(29:44):
go Bob. I had no idea, John Mellencamp writes me
letters I have today. Dear John, I'm sure you've read
Rolling Stone by now, and I'm sure you wouldn't want
to give a house on a toxic waste stump. And
I'm going, oh my god, we're stuck with a house.
So I had to fly. I can get an other house.
But that's not the good. Double the budget, double the budget.
The good story was the Last Weekend with Van Halen.
(30:06):
That one really really defined MTV as a serious, dangerous
rock and roll brand to consumers. There was a movie
called The Last Weekend. Gray Mulland was in there and
the guy loses his mind whatever, and so we just said,
let's do a Last Week with a band. Who's the
craziest band out there right now, van Halen. Van Halen
wouldn't do any promotion because they were worried about their image.
(30:29):
We called them with the idea like we're in. We're in,
and by the way, we'll fulfill the contest. You don't
have to do anything. Just drop off the fans with
us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
So we did that.
Speaker 6 (30:40):
The kid arrives and they take him at four o'clock
in the afternoon right into the backstage, and everything you
can imagine would happened with Van Halen happened. So by
the time the band goes on stage at nine o'clock
at night, this guy is fried. There's been things that
were not a Warner Amex and Condole or MTV notice activity.
So he's standing on stage a completely out of his mind,
(31:02):
and David Lee Roth goes, we have the winner tonight
of the MTV Lost Weekend, Joe Smith. You know, Joe, Congratulations.
They bring out a giant sheet cake. He's got his
hands up from the air and the bands around him,
and they take the sheet cake and they push it
into his face and the guy is stunned and he
starts curling around swinging punches at the band.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
The Pan freaks out.
Speaker 6 (31:25):
They take him off and they bring him backstage and
we say to his friend, what's wrong with him? And
he said, we forgot to tell you. He has a
metal plate in his head. He was in an accident.
He's not supposed to drink, so they had to put
him in a room with a security guard all night.
But that kind of made the legend of MTV. I
wish we could take credit for that, but that was it.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So the contest. Maybe we're lucky we can't take credit
for it.
Speaker 6 (31:44):
You know what those contests did, They creates the fantasy
and the aspiration that makes someone want to be attracted
to a product.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
MTV could have been a flash of the Pan, but
the marketing spirit captured an attitude that young America responded to.
People tuned in just to see what was going on
on MTV. It was a place to hang out, and
as the word spread, the channel made money. Although MTV
was the most radical of the cable channels, it was
also the first cable network to actually make a profit.
(32:13):
And we had the highest AD revenue of any of
the cable networks. And remember this was a time when
people didn't believe cable networks could even be profitable. Boy
did that feel good. But part of keeping the channel
successful was continuing to think outside the mainstream and continue
to come up with new ideas.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Here's bread again.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in
and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here,
I didn't want to hire them. One of the earliest
people I hired had just come out of film school
in his first job was cutting film negatives at a
porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you won't remember this,
but one day you called me into your office and
you said, hey, I need you to be the head
(32:53):
of production. I said, Bob, you know I've never seen
even the red light on top of a camera go on,
and you went, oh, don't worry, you'll figure it out.
And that was that, and all of a sudden, I
was in television.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
And you did a really great job. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
But it wasn't just people like Fred who got an
opportunity to MTV. Here Judy and Tom talking about how
he kept an eye out for new talent and groomed
them upward, and the culture that the two of them
kept going and kept building at the company even after
I left. If you think about it, in the days
of MTV, we're probably looking back at an extraordinary number
(33:29):
of women and very important roles. Today would be crowing
about it. Probably, you know, whether you like it or not.
You have been mentoring people, You've been setting an example.
How do you handle that responsibility? What do you do
consciously about that?
Speaker 8 (33:43):
I began to see I was sort of a better
editor coach than I was a player. I can remember
some things that just felt like personal milestones to me.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
You know.
Speaker 8 (33:53):
One of the great fun things I got to do
would be hanging out in the rehearsals for the Video
Music Awards, and I was there and I was thinking, Wow,
you know, we've got a female director. We have a
female on stage managing the crew. We have a young
woman who's the head writer. We have a young woman
in charge of seating in events. But we've got women
(34:15):
in roles that were not traditionally women's roles. They were
just really good. And I do think it's incumbent on
somebody who gets an opportunity, like I got to look
out for underrepresented people in general. And so you know,
when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand, was an easy like,
(34:37):
let's let Beth direct, come on, like, she can do it.
We know she can do it. Everybody knows she can
do it. And I looked around and thought, wow, this
whole thing is kind of really looking very different than
most of the other sets that I've been on. I
once heard Tina Fey say something about it's a panel
where a bunch of women were sort of congratulating each
(34:58):
other for different things, and someone said they were lucky,
and a bunch of other women jumped on her and said,
oh my god. Women always say they're lucky. Men never
say they're lucky. You made your own luck. And Tina
was actually very thoughtful about it, and she said, I
think timing plays a role in something as well as
luck and talent. And you know, I always felt like
(35:18):
I worked with men who were not typical and young
employees who are not typical. So how ridiculous would it
be to take a typical approach to anything else. We
were upending tradition all the time, and not just for
the sake of doing it, but because you give somebody
a chance, they'll knock themselves out to show you that
(35:41):
they could really do it.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
And we actually talked about it back then.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
We said, you know, if somebody's done three or four
things and they're not great, we have empirical evidence they
won't be great.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Yeah, but if we give.
Speaker 4 (35:50):
Somebody a shot who's never done it, they could be
the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right, And the only way
we're going to find out is to take a shot,
exactly And you continued to do that through your career.
Speaker 7 (35:58):
A lot of focus was on we're eating a culture
that would attract creative people. They would want to come
and live there. I mean, we'd have at one point
Judd Apatow or Ben Stiller or John Stewart, Stephen Colbert,
you know, Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices.
Sometimes it was a hothouse atmosphere.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
You were probably the first talent incubator. I don't think
they called them that back then. How did you pull
that together? Because it is really remarkable the people you had.
Speaker 7 (36:22):
Well, a lot of it is sort of what's the
vibe of the place. We always wanted to make the
room for deviancy. I would always say, who's the odd ballperson,
Who's the intern who's going to come running in with
an idea LIKEYOMTV raps. That was like a twenty one
year old intern who came up with a demo in
his basement. Because we had these networks, there was a
lot of room for experimentation. Everything you made didn't have
(36:43):
to be really tightly organized. There was a lot of
room for improvisation and innovation. If you have a hallmark
for that, people would want to step up and follow us.
You just try and have good standards, provide guard rails
for people, celebrate risk, you know, we give creative people
a lot of freedom.
Speaker 4 (36:59):
One of the people who was crucial tim TV's early
success it was former NPR CEO y'all Mom y'arel and
I went way back. We even had a show called
album tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live. But y'arell
had an incredible eye for programming, and when MTV had
to think beyond music videos, he played a crucial role.
(37:20):
For me.
Speaker 9 (37:20):
It was a great transition from the radio world to
the television world because there were so many similarities. If
you had picked me up and tried to drop me
into a broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I
would have I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately
we all learned a lot of lessons about the fragility
(37:42):
of this brand new thing music videos, and that was
something we all kind of had to learn in real time.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
It was humbling, it was embarrassing, and do you think
it stopped working.
Speaker 9 (37:53):
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
and there were so many people watching and being really
enthralled by but I think ultimately it became less interesting.
It was television and we were using a lot I was,
at least using a lot of radio rules for a
different medium, and people were making four minute decisions of
(38:14):
what they were going to watch and not thirty minute
and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately had
to switch strategy to go to content that people would
watch for longer periods of time, long form, and that
was very controversial at the time, but.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
You know it worked. What were your first shows?
Speaker 9 (38:33):
And we started with The Week in Rock and hiring
Kurt Loader from Rolling Stone magazine and taking the MTV
news segments and making it a half hour show, and
that worked, and then Rockumentaries and Specials as the second.
The third was Club MTV is let's do an American
band stand for today, Let's play music videos and hire
(38:53):
Downtown Julie Brown.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
That was a hit.
Speaker 9 (38:56):
Every show that went on did well. Then we're really
cocky and thinking, man, we really know how to make hits.
But I think it was more reflection of the fact
that music videos at the time had run their course.
The most controversial one remote Control of the Game Show,
and all the research came back said you can't do
a game show. And I remember saying to our good
(39:18):
friend Marshall Cohen, we worked with an MTV research guru, Yes,
I said, I think we're asking the wrong question. The
question should be if we were to do a game show,
what would it look like? And the answer came back, well,
it should be Irreverence'd be crazy. We used all the
information and hired Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam
(39:42):
Sandler was a regular on the show and it was
a monster. But the additional research the way we asked
it indicated that there would have been a disaster.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
It worked out great for Were you able to sell
that to advertisement?
Speaker 5 (39:53):
Yep?
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Oh I loved it?
Speaker 5 (39:55):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
So MTV started to play with new formats, but as
Preston remembers it, the limited budgets were actually an engine
for creativity.
Speaker 7 (40:08):
We couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix
or changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We
just couldn't play the top ten videos all day long.
There was always new shows coming around. We would add
shows onpackaged music and like on hip hop music with
the OMTV raps and so forth, and it kind of
came down to the real world. That was in nineteen
ninety three, and that was like, well, we've tried everything else,
(40:29):
we should probably do a soap opera because young people
are interested in what other young people are doing. So
they came in with a presentation to me and we
had the hire writers, and I said, well, you know,
we don't have any money to hire writers, so we
can't do this. So then Doug Herzog came back and said,
you know, we're really good at post production, that's our
major skill. What if we just rented Aloft and Soho
(40:51):
and stuck some cameras in there and bring these kids
in and then let them live, and then we'll post
it afterwards and make it into a show. And that
was That was sort of the birth of reality. It
was an idea that was not born of brilliance but
born of cheapskateness.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
MTV was a success story finally, but it wasn't long
before the competition started circling. Here's Tom with the story
of what motivated us to start VH one.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
Ted Turner wanted to come in and basically p in
our parade. He said he was going to launch a
music channel that played none of the Devil's music. Let
me say first that the cable music channel lasted one
hundred and one days on the air and he had
to fold up and go home. But we decided we
can't let this happen, and if there's going to be
a second music channel, we should have a second music channel.
And we made the case the cable operators, we have
(41:37):
a second music channel. You don't want to add the
Ted Turner channel. That's just going to go head to
head against the one you already have. Add VH one,
which we call the very Hot one at the time,
because it would be more compatible and it would play
artists for another demo and we would sell it to
you on a combo basis. Basically it was free if
you already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms
(41:59):
of not being able to get distribution. Therefore no advertising,
no revenue, no light on the end of the tunnel,
and he went out of business and we went forward.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Of course, launching EH one was one thing. It was
a savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential
and fighting off Ted Turner's channel. But once that was over,
the team had to figure out what to do with it.
The network struggled for years. Ratings were abysmal, so John Sykes,
who had left MTV by then, was called back to
lead the charge. Tom Preston calls job says, come home,
(42:33):
need you to fix a VH one.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
What did you do?
Speaker 6 (42:36):
As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much
of the stuff. A brand is only valuable if there
is an underserved segment of the audience that needs it.
Hip hop was starting to happen. ALTERNI music was exploding,
and a lot of the traditional rock bands in R
and B bands were being pushed out and they're going
like an off of the cliff. And I said, there's
a market here, because having run a record company, a
(42:58):
publishing company, we were seeing these artists that used to
be called middle of the road back then, but now
they were actually vibrant pop bands. They didn't have a place.
And then I saw who are the most powerful buyers,
young adults, young college graduates. Here's a generation it's grown
up on MTV. They have money, they're affluent, and they
have nowhere to go. So I was as excited actually
(43:21):
about VH one as I was about MTV. I mean,
MTV is iconic and it will be there forever. But
the other thing about VH one to me also was
it was my own and I knew if I fell,
it would be on me.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
It would be likes out.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
If VH one fails, they used to call it VH
point one.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
It was the rating of it again.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
And for those people who ratings, ratings are from zero
to whatever, and point one's of zero to one hundred.
VH one is the ugly step child at MTV Networks.
I used to say it was nails out the backseat
of a car to put flats in the tires of
the cars behind us, because we didn't want anbody compete
with MTV. But I said, now it quietly has thirty
(44:00):
million homes. There's a market for this. And I looked
in the room and have the people like or a
sleep bicycle that quit and staying they had a job,
but they didn't believe in the product, but they were
reflecting a paycheck. So I said, listen, if you don't
believe in this, it's okay. We won't make a big
thing and we're going to fire you, but we'll work
out a package and you should leave because we need
(44:20):
people going to believe in this. There's a market for this,
and I believe that this is gonna be a three
hundred million dollar business in the next three years if
we all focus on that. So people came to me
and said I don't want to do this.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
I didn't think they.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
I don't think they would come like, I don't think
you're right. I'm like, okay, well, thank you God, bye.
They all came back three years later looking for jobs.
But it was about believing in yourself, believing your idea,
hiring people around you who are better than you at
executing what they did. And we put together a team
at VH one hooping under run, NBC, Nintendo, Bravo. We
(44:55):
put together an all star trip. So it made me
proud and working with some of the red I mean
some Redstone nineteen ninety four was on his game. You
walked in and said, here's my plan, here's what I
want to do. And he'd just said, fine, go do it.
If you don't do it, I'll fire you. I said,
that's all I want to know. Just give me the rope,
and he did. It was a great nine years. We
(45:15):
shattered all the records there, but all good businesses you
got to reinvent them otherwise they paid it off.
Speaker 4 (45:22):
MTV was the starting point of a cable revolution. The
channel and the creative engine we built gave birth to
so much more. Here's Tom talking about just that topic.
Speaker 7 (45:32):
I was ambitious and I was highly motivated for this
to succeed. I thought that we were in this TV revolution.
We had the wind at our back. It was all
going to come true. It was too good of an
idea to fail. You know, a lot of life is
about timing and luck, and I had somehow ended up
once again in the right place at the right time,
and this was sort of my destiny. I was going
(45:54):
to meet my opportunity and.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
What you did, you know, I would say my time there.
We really proved it was a business. Were the first
cable network to make a profit. But it was really
you and your team, including Juden Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there?
Speaker 7 (46:15):
There's a compliment to you, Bob, I mean, you are
the guy I always keep your eye on the consumer,
find out what the consumer wanted. We would always see
this research the consumer wanted what we were selling, and
we could tune it up a bit. And we also
had this sort of slightly subversive, underground feel and you know,
there was nothing really around like that. And we would
continue to launch new networks Comedy Central or tv Land,
(46:35):
and the whole international world of television began to deregulate
in the late eighties. All these countries really only had
State TV pretty much as you know. So the confidence
I had built from my years living in Afghanistan and
India was actually very transferable because I really knew we
could go anywhere and do anything. And if we could
go to Europe, we could go to Asia, we go
to Latin America. So we built really the first worldwide
(46:58):
television networking company, and we rolled out not just MTV,
but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a lot of others
right down through Africa. So the business gradually evolved from
one where we would package other people's product like a
music video, to where we would increasingly own what we did.
But at the heart of it all was a creative machine,
which again was something that you put in at the
(47:19):
inception of the company.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
When we first started MTV, it wasn't just entertainment. We
built a channel to be the voice of young America
and that included doing good and my time there, MTV
made its mark with massive events, with important missions AMNSKY International,
band Aid, Farm Aid and of course Live Aid. But
it was Rock the Vote that truly took the channel
into politics, and some say even got a president elected.
(47:45):
Here's Judy talking about it. You've always done good, rocked
the Vote, juice or lose AIDS awareness? How did you
think about that inside of a company, and how do
you think of it for you as a as a.
Speaker 8 (47:58):
Person, Well, you know, inside MTV, it was very interesting
when we decided to get into you know, and certainly
Rock the Vote was not our idea. Politicians Jeff airaf So,
Jeff was very passionate about this, and it sort of
grew into Rock the Vote. And I remember talking to
Tom Preston, with whom I had an extraordinarily great creative relationship,
(48:21):
and this was one of the rare instances where we
had a blowout. Really we really didn't agree, but I
listened to what he said. He said, this is a
terrible idea. It's not going to work. This is an
entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're going to get
laughed out of town. We do not have permission to
(48:42):
do this. There's nothing about us that says we should
be stepping anywhere near an election or voting or any
of this. So I went back and I thought about
it a little bit, and I thought, Okay, this is
where I come into the picture. I think I grew
up in an era where one of the many things
I loved about music was it's social commentary, and it
is about the times we live in and it's about
(49:03):
all the things that affect you in a very deep way.
And I thought, I think there's a way to do
this where it will be engaging. This was not about
telling young people you need to vote. That's not the
way I looked at it at all. It was saying
to people who make big decisions in this country, this
is a generation that is disengaged from you, and you
(49:24):
need to address them on their turf, their way, and
we'll invite you to do that. That's your shot. It
wasn't about trying to be parental or any of that
kind of stuff to them, or give them boring facts
or anything like that. And so we got as smart
as we could get. And I think I didn't tell anybody.
That's another thing. I sent tabitha'sre and Tabitha went to
(49:45):
New Hampshire and she called me at like midnight. She said,
you know, I got up here in like a bunch
of candidates are like, what's MTV? And she said, and
then a couple of them like got back off the bus,
primarily Bill Clinton and said I'll talk to you, and
then we were sort of off and running. And you
know that partnered with incredible creative work on those rock
(50:08):
to Vote spots, I mean Madonna wrapped in a flag.
Speaker 4 (50:11):
Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston quickly embraced the idea.
Speaker 7 (50:14):
We knew it was important to our audience. I also
knew it was extremely important to the employee base. Employees
would feel better about working there if they knew we
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had one hundred and sixty eight
hours a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It
also turned out it legitimized us in the eyes of
advertisers who formerly wouldn't come near us, like American Express.
But most importantly, the audience liked it.
Speaker 8 (50:36):
And then fast forward to you know, we're going to
throw an inaugural ball that's not official and see if
anybody comes to the party, and our EM's going to
play and Vogue's going to play. We tried to make
it as spirited as MTV, but at a little bit
of gravitas, if you will, and meaning you know, like
you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and
(50:57):
you deserve to be heard and listen to, and we
were going to help you.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
MTV was a wonderful ride. From the very beginning.
Speaker 4 (51:07):
My co founders and I knew we were doing something
that was important to culture, but we had no idea
we were going to change culture.
Speaker 5 (51:14):
MTV change TV.
Speaker 4 (51:17):
It changed music, it changed graphic design, and it certainly
changed my life. No matter how old I get or
whatever else I've done, MTV is still an important chapter
of my life, and all of us as co founders
are still very much a very tight family. But the
truth is, looking back, I think we all feel the
same way Tom Freston felt when he joined the team.
Speaker 7 (51:39):
I was happy to have a job. I couldn't believe
anyone was going to hire me, and lucky.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
For all of us, we all kept getting hired again
and again. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat Nikki Etoor for pulling research
bill Plax and Michael Azar for their recording help are
editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel,
(52:17):
Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to
your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
You actually were the guy who inspired us to do
animated logos. Do you remember this? I said, well, what
are we going to do in between the videos and
the VJs? Are we going to do jingles? And he went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles? And I said, what do we do?
He said, how about this? Imagine it's a picture of
a cow. I said, yeah, he said, and all of
(00:30):
a sudden, an X comes down and cuts the cow's
head off and it falls to the ground and you
see the veins coming out and the blood spurting out,
and the cow vomits, and in the vomit is the logo.
I went, Oh, my god, I can do anything I want.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
I'm Bob Tipman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers of Marketing, and we're doing something.
Speaker 5 (00:52):
Special on today's episode.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
One of the pivotal moments of my life was leading
the team that created MTV. I've had the good of
having all the co founders of MTV on this podcast
with me and in each of the interviews, whether it
was chatting with Judye Brat or Fred Seiber, John Sykes
or Yarrol Moon, and of course Tom Freston. We've always
spent a little time talking about MTV, so all we
(01:15):
wanted to do for you today was pulled together those
stories for the first time ever. Tell the story of
the beginning of MTV through the eyes of people who
were actually in the room when it happened, because all
of us who are really in the room often laugh
about how far off other people's accounts can be.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
So let me set the stage.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
It's the beginning of the eighties. Cable TV was still
a crazy idea. Most business executives and most of America
didn't understand it or believe in how TV was about
to change. And here comes this pack of twenty year
olds with an attitude. None of us had ever done
the jobs before. All we knew is we had grown
up with rock and roll and we'd grown up with TV,
(02:00):
and the two had never successfully come together. We thought
it had always failed because TV people always wanted to
try and make music at the TV form a storia.
We intended to make TV that the music form mood
and emotion. MTV was going to be about attitude and
something people wanted to join. We run a mission. So
(02:21):
when Iheart's own. John Sykes at the time, a twenty
four year old record executive at CBS Records in Chicago,
heard what we were up to.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Well, he wanted in.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
So let's talk about MTV. It's nineteen eighty. The word
gets out that we're working on this do music channel.
How do you hear about it? What does it mean
to you? And how on earth did you really get
connected to us to get on that original team.
Speaker 6 (02:46):
I grew up with three things in my life, radio, television,
and music.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
That's all I cared about.
Speaker 6 (02:52):
When I wasn't in the radio station, I was watching
TV or listening to music. Those things, to me shaped
our culture. So at school, TV is just starting up,
and I saw the cable channels were empty, and music
was all over the radio, it was it on television.
So we used to go and shoot the concerts at Syracus,
and we'd tape them and send them to new channels,
and we'd play the concerts and people like, oh my god,
(03:15):
I can see the band. And all I wanted to
do at that point was put music on television. When
I graduated, I went to CBS, said let's put music
on Let's run concerts. These three martini lunch guys in
New York looked at me like it was crazy. I
got a job in the record business promoting radio stations.
I wanted to run the radio station. I didn't want
to promote them on the radio, but that's the job
I had. So then I heard from my friend Steve Casey,
(03:37):
was a WLS in Chicago, that his great friend Bob
Pittman was in New York and he was going to
start a video channel. And I lost my mind. It
still gives me goosebumps. I was like, this is what
I was made to do, This is what I wanted
to do. To me, it was like music belonged on television.
So I started calling you, and I called you, and
(03:58):
I called you and I called you, and thanks to
your assistant and plunk It, who I was annoying so much,
he said, all right, Bob, you please talk to this guy.
And we met that day with a borrowed support jacket
because I hadn't own it. But you and I connected
that moment because we had the same vision. Music and
television were the two biggest forces in pop culture and they.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Were about to be.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
You know, you look back on any successful product and
it seems easy. You were there when we didn't even
have approval from the board to do it. We just
had some money to develop it. So give us a
little color for people who think things are easy and
they always go exactly the way you plan.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
What that early development was like.
Speaker 6 (04:37):
It is funny and people I go, oh, my god,
you and the team that started MTV. That must have
been a magical and great ago. I don't know. I
was working too hard. We were so in the trenches
all the time. It only looks glamorous to day looking back,
but when you're in it, it's a slug fest. There
was this idea, but to make it happen, we had
no money, and we all quit jobs. You were at NBC,
(04:57):
I was at CBS. I was the promotion man of
the Year in Chicago, and I just said, I'm quitting.
People like us, we weren't going to fail. I never
thought we were going to fail. I got scared when
you'd come in and say, you know, they're going to
cut the budgets. We got a few more months. We've
got to make our numbers. That just made me say, well,
we're gonna have to work hard to make our numbers.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, Okay,
we're going to the board and we're going to pitch
this for approval, and you go, what, we don't have approval.
I quit my job. We don't have approval. So no, no, John,
this was development. All the blood ran out of your
face at that moment.
Speaker 6 (05:30):
I do remember I had to look up because there
was no Internet, I had to go in the dictionary,
look up the real definition of development. I just thought,
we're developing something going No development means it's not going
to happen yet, but you know something. But I was like,
who cares if it doesn't work, I'll go to sleep
on my sister's couch and another job.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We were young. John Sykes was so hungry he pounded
on our door. Let him in.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
He believed in music television from the start. But my
good pal Fred Cybern, the one who came out of
radio and helped create the graphic look of MTV, his
reason for getting into TV was very different. One of
your great supporters, who I'd worked with and who I
loved dearly, Dale Pond, recommended you to me pre MTV.
It was in the early days of pay TV. You
(06:13):
came over to join us in the cable revolution. Yeah,
why did you make that jump?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, you know this is going to sound flattering. I
did it completely because of you. Dale had left the
country music radio station and left me alone, and the
guy I was working for at that time in radio
I had no respect for whatsoever. So you called me
one day, he said, you want to be Intellivision. Oh,
you said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
(06:39):
the business, and there was one article about you, and
I thought to myself, you know, this guy is younger
than me and I've heard of him, so that's, you know,
one check. So we go, we have the coffee, and
I walk out and I called my best friend and
I said, this guy that I just talked to is
so much smarter than my Boston radio He goes, what
(07:00):
do you think about that? I said, Well, here's what
Dale taught me. Doesn't matter what the job is, work
for the smartest person you can find, and at the time,
you were the smartest person I could find.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That's what got me too. Toleration that truth be told.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When you first told me about it, I thought it
was the dumbest idea in the world. Because I was
a music guy and I had seen, you know, a
few Crimy music videos. I hadn't really thought about it
too much, and then luckily somebody played me a music
video that made, you know, the little light go off.
I don't know whether it was blind faith or I
(07:33):
was too naive to know that you had to have faith,
like you told me it was going to happen, so.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
I believed you was it youth totally.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I was just talking with Alan Goodman, my soon to
be partner at that point, and he said, you know,
we didn't really know what was going to happen, but
you looked at all the other people that were around
you and it just had to happen. I think that's
really true.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
I don't know if you remember, but we went to
the head of Warner Communications in American Express and we
got a meeting with Steve Ross, who the CEO of Warner,
along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And we
got Jim Robinson and his deputy Lou Gershner from American Express.
We were worried that when we showed these videos too
for American Express, go what that stuffed, so he said,
(08:14):
let's find the tamest one of my mind. I think
we found the Olivia Newton jobs, if you remember. But
in the meeting, they said you have to play that
kind of stuff, implying Olivia Newton john was too hard
to race. But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first
one to say, Okay, I'm in for my alf how
about you?
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Steve so awesome we locked out.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
The MTV crew we assembled was a bunch of lovable
misfits and future Viacom MTV CEO. Tom Preston was no different.
It's been several years living in Afghanistan, importing clothes and
having adventures across Asia.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
But when things.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Got two political overseas, he made his way back. And
just so you don't think Tom went soft sitting the
top Viacom After he left the company, he returned to
Afghanistan and even has a wonderful story about lying on
a floor in a bar and football with a firefight
going on all around, the bullets whizzing overhead.
Speaker 7 (09:05):
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in in the business world. There wasn't an artist,
per se. I wasn't a writer or a musician, but
I wanted to always be around creative people. My first
grown up jobs essentially we're working in an ad agency.
My first account there I worked on was G I Joe. Now,
mind you, this was sort of at the height of
the Vietnam War and I was in an alienated state
(09:26):
to begin with. When they were going to sign me
to charm and toilet paper, that was sort of my
last straw. I called an ex girlfriend who lived in Paris.
I said, they want me to work on a toilet
paper account where they had segmented the population and to rollers,
folders and crumplers. And she says, well, you can't do that.
You should quit that job. Don't be a moron. Come
(09:47):
with me. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert
up in Paris. So I was on a plane like
ten days later. That was it for me.
Speaker 4 (09:53):
So Tom set up his clothing company Hinmdoo Cush and
ran that successfully for a long while.
Speaker 7 (09:59):
When I even out of Asia, I thought, whatever I
do next, I wanted to be something that I also
loved deeply, and that was music. So I methodically looked
around getting a job in the music business. Through connections.
I ended up in John Lack's office and I told
him I thought this was a fantastic idea. He says,
we're looking for people who have no experience in television.
I said, I'm your man. They didn't even have television
where I've been living the last eight years.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
We were both originally brought to the company for other jobs,
by the way, before the MTV development even began, by
the incredibly charismatic John Lack, who had this wonderful affliction.
He liked to hire people for roles they had never
had before, and you and I benefited from that. But
you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even recognized
as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think you
(10:42):
were getting into? I mean, this was still sort of
Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business.
Speaker 7 (10:45):
I thought I was getting into one of the greatest
ideas that had ever come around. I had spent parts
of the summers in Europe, and I was familiar with
the music video which were largely unknown to the American audiences,
and they were infectious. And I thought MTV, like all
of us on the team, was really one of the
great ideas, and all of us were essentially on a
crusade we got paid nothing. It was the early eighties
(11:08):
version of a startup, very much so. And if you
looked at the media environment then nothing had really changed
in years. The only thing that had come around knew
had been FM radio. There was still three TV networks.
Pong was only a few years old.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Remember we used to say we're going to do to
FM what FM did to AM.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
That was our big claim.
Speaker 7 (11:27):
Twenty five channels in the home, can you imagine.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Judy McGrath was another key employee in the early days.
She eventually rose to be CEO of MTV Networks. Here
she has reminiscing about what it meant to make the
rules up as we went along.
Speaker 8 (11:44):
The beauty in the wonder of MTV was that it
was really filled with people that I thought could not
find gainful employment anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
We couldn't.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
No, it would be somebody who had never really shot
anything and just wanted to get their hands on a
camera try it. And we were willing to do that,
so I would say absolutely, But remember, don't fall in
love with your own idea. This is about someone else,
not you. This is about the person on the other side.
They're like you, but you can't make this just for you,
(12:16):
and there are really no other rules aside from you know,
no full frontal nudity. Go out there and do it.
And it was so much fun to have the freedom
to meet people who were far more creative than I was.
I mean when I joined, I didn't know anything about television.
I didn't even like it. My interview was with Fred,
(12:36):
who said, so, what kind of music do you like?
And I think I said Bruce Springsteen. I'm not sure.
He said, well, you're wrong, and I'll tell you why.
And then about forty five minutes later, I left, not
having said anything else. And the next thing I know,
they were like, well, you know, look, this is just
a few of us were trying to get this thing
going if you'd like to join, And it was kind
(12:58):
of like, how fast can I go out the door
of Conde ass and jump on this thing? Whatever it is?
These people are crazy.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
What's funny is that when I ask Fred about it,
he remembered the story exactly the same way.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
She said Bruce Springsteen, and I said wrong because I
don't have a good thing about Bruce.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The fact that she cared, you know, the Bruce haters
are coming after you right now.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I believe me, they've been coming after my whole life.
The fact that she cared meant all the difference to
me in the world. Not that I agreed, you know.
Speaker 8 (13:29):
I've just found the camaraderie and the purpose and the
sheer invention of something that didn't exist, so irresistible. And
again on the math side of it, I was saying,
I mean this with all sincerity. You had a map
in the creative group, you had a plan, and the
plan were promises, and I loved that. I am making
(13:52):
a promise to you. You sit here, I'm going to
deliver something that you've been waiting for. It is the
first music television network. It is exactly for you. And
I thought, wow, I want my MTV and I have
no idea what it is, but those are powerful words
(14:12):
my in an era before social media and social engagement.
Something for me that felt like mine and want what
a powerful word, right, I want my MTV. I took
that very seriously. I took those promises to heart. Twenty
four hours a day, terrific in stereo, not really, but
(14:34):
you know.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Hey, it's work. It so for those ten people who
did have stereoty brilliant.
Speaker 8 (14:40):
I remember you saying to me, we want people to
think it sounds better than regular television, and they did.
It just felt to me like if I could marry
all the things I'm interested in with these set of
principles and join this crazy band of people who have
no right and a lot of audacity and a firm
belief that this can work. What a gift. I never
(15:03):
looked back, No one second.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
Let's go back to Fred and chat about that iconic
MTV logo.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
Talk about the logo. You set out, you got the mission.
You and I have these discussions. I naively say, we'll
do our own Star Wars logo because everybody has a
Star Wars logan.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
You go to bob Ours will look cheap.
Speaker 4 (15:23):
You said, look, if we do something no one's ever
seen before, they won't know it's cheap exactly. So tell
me about the logo.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Well, the logo itself actually came about because I was
too scared to go to someone famous. I wanted to
go to Milton Glazer, who's one of the most famous
graphic designers of the last fifty years. And I was like, oh, well,
he's going to be really expensive and we'll get all
the credit. And I wanted a little credit, you know,
at least, so my childhood friend, who I've known since
(15:52):
I'm four years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had
just started a little design firm behind a tai Chiese
studio above Bigelo Chemistry on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had
been the guy because he's a year older than me,
who had always introduced me to every new rock band.
He introduced me to the Monkeys, he introduced me to
the Mothers of Invention, to the Who to Jeff Beck.
So I go down to his little tai Chi studio
(16:14):
place and I go, will you guys design a logo
for this rock channel we're starting? And they're like yes,
And they didn't ask me anything. They didn't ask me
how much they were going to get paid or anything
like that. And this was right after you sent out
the first memo in June of nineteen eighty and boy
do I wish I had that memo. So for a
year they designed logos and I just rejected everything, probably
(16:39):
five hundred designs. Finally they come in the office one day,
were actually going to go on the air soon, right,
and we still don't have anything, and they bring up
pile and I'm like, no, Now I'm going through the
whole pile, and at the bottom of the pile is
a piece of tracing paper. Remember that, you know the
paper you could see through and it was all wrinkled
(17:00):
and they had flattened it out. It was just like
a sketched TV. I went, Okay, that's the one I
can see. Frank like growling. He and I now disagree.
But what I had heard is that there's three partners
and one of them wasn't really a designer. She was
a production manager and she had done it, and Frank
saw it and hated him, threw it in the garbage.
(17:22):
She fished it out and put it at the bottom
of the pile. He says, that's not true, but you know, maybe.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Or a good story.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
The only reason I said yes is that Dale had
taught me one lesson about design. You need to dominate
the space, and that big block em was the only
thing they showed that when you put it on a
TV screen, filled the whole screen. Okay, we dominate the space,
and in a world of thirty channels.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
And in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
So they come to my office with about ten different
boards and then a little board where Frank had illustrated
ten or twelve of them on.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Acrylic overlays and said, this.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
One will be for the heavy Metal show and this
one will be for the New Waves show. And I'm like, Frank,
We're not going to have shows, you know.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
I put it aside.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So I put all of the boards up on my
pegboard and couldn't decide. And this went on literally for
like weeks and weeks and weeks, and then I start
looking at his little acrylic thing with all the illustration,
and I said, why don't we just use them all
at once all the time? Or television we move? Shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(18:37):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. You actually were the guy who inspired
us to do animated logos. I said, well, what are
we going to do in between the videos and the VJs?
Are we going to do jingles? And he oh, no,
we can't do jingles? And I said what do we do?
Speaker 3 (19:00):
He said, how about this?
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Imagine it's like a picture of a cow. I said, yeah,
he said, And all of a sudden, an X comes
down and cuts the cow's head off and it falls
to the ground and you see the veins coming out
and the blood spurting out, and the cow vomits, and
in the vomit is the logo. I went, Oh, my god,
I can do anything I want. This was the most
(19:23):
exciting moment of my life. And we started hiring animators
to do all that stuff.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
The other thing you did when you did those promos,
you laid the music bed down first, yeah, and cut
to the music. People forget this. They don't realize that
was an innovation.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So I got that all from Dale, and when we
started making our first radio spots, we would film country
music stars and then he said, well, go to the
audio studio and cut the audio track. I went, well,
the video guy tells me, no, you have to first
do the picture. And then he goes, Fred, we own
the audio studio.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
It's free.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
If you get it right in the audio studio, then
the three hundred dollars an hour video studio will go
much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I
realized that he was absolutely wrecked. Now fast forward twenty years.
I go to MTV one day and I go, who's
the promo department? Now on the one you're the one.
What are you talking about? They said, they make us
(20:22):
do the audio first. We're filmed. People like why, So
twenty years later they were still doing it.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
So we had a logo and we were a band
of believers. But part of getting MTV to stick was
proving the channel's worth to the record companies. Artists loved
the idea of being on TV, but the labels needed
to be convinced. At the time, David said music should
be heard and not seen. We needed a case study,
a story to prove we sold records.
Speaker 5 (20:54):
I talked to John Psykes about it.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
We launch MTV, we get it underway.
Speaker 4 (21:00):
We're trying to get some evidence that it's working because
the record companies are hemorrhaging money those years. They were
thinking about cutting videos out of their budget, which of
course we've been a disaster for. So we said we
got to get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle.
And you and Tom Preston go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma,
just told on a second, because we've got so much
(21:21):
more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.
Tell me what happened in Tulsa.
Speaker 6 (21:29):
We believe this was working, we felt it, but we
needed facts. We needed to convince a record business. So
it was like, we need a story, Tom, John, go
on their own, don't come back to you have a story.
And Tulsa didn't happen until we went to Syracuse, Houston
and we went to the cable markets. So Tom and
I driving through Tulsa in a rental car literally with
a map of record stores and going into places. So
(21:53):
you sold in the least records selling Duran, Duran sold
in the Tulips to Nope, Nope, So we kept driving driving.
I still remember it was a record story in an
old house and Tom and I trudge in and we
say solely this only that so only durand Drandrin. I
sold two boxes of durand.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Dran records last week.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
What you sold two box? You sold fifty records, twenty
five records in a box. Can we have your name
and can we use your phone? We called a box
and Bob, Bob, we have story.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
We have a story. We have a record store.
Speaker 6 (22:30):
That's selling music's only played on MTV. And you said, great,
get a name, get the information. We need an article,
and so we hang up the phone. I turned to Tom.
We go Tom, we get to go home.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
And we took that and we wrote it as a
case study and we ran it in Billboard and the
music magazines to influence the record company. I keep going,
I have the of course you do. You have everything
we ever did at MTV. You are the pack rat.
Speaker 6 (22:54):
I have that one sheet MTV sells records. Joey Smith,
and boy that Joey Smith. Wherever you are and tell
us Oklahoma, thank thank you.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Talsa,
it's because those were the few markets where we had
enough cable density that we could make a point. These
cities ended up being little laboratories where we could peek
in and take measurements and show the world just how
effective MTV was going to be. So it proved our
(23:23):
worth to the record companies. But you have to remember
we still had the events cable operators to carry MTV.
They wanted to be paid to carry our channel, and frankly,
we didn't have the money. So we had to come
up with a breakthrough idea and genius campaign that could
do all the heavy lifting. Here Tom Preston and Fred
Seibert telling that story.
Speaker 5 (23:43):
Let's start the talk.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
When we launched MTV. You were the head of marketing.
The cable operator wouldn't put MTV on. They wanted us
to pay them. One we didn't have the money, and
two that was probably a slippery slope, and so we
decided we would use a whole strategy to get distribution.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
I want my MTV.
Speaker 7 (24:03):
Well it was sort of a Hail Mary pass because
you know, we're about to go under. No one in
the organization knew we were about to go under, So
how are we going to get these cable operators at us?
When we knew in fact that the people who actually
had it in the few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. So we actually
had to go over their heads. And the idea was
(24:23):
that campaign I Want My MAPO, which I remembered as
a baby boomer in the fifties, some obnoxious I want
my MAPO, but I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
The actual spot said they grew up with rock and roll,
they grew up with television now they want their MTV.
George Lois, who never saw something that he couldn't copy,
had already copied a famous TV commercial from the fifties
called I Want my mapo for a really horrendous tasting
(24:54):
time r exactly and he redid it with Mick Jagger and
David Bowie. And on the beginning of the spot he
had ped Towns in doing it, America demand your MTV.
Then people go, I want my MTV. I want my MTV,
and then p Towns and again with a telephone going
call your cable operator and say I want my TAB
(25:16):
And they showed us this spot.
Speaker 7 (25:18):
So if we could get major rock stars in a
commercial to kind of hold our logo, validate it, hold
it and command people to call their cable company and
demand their MTV, make it look cool, put some animation
around it, and then put it in these markets at
very high frequency. We go into a market and it'd
be like a Blockbuster movie was opening. Most people in
(25:39):
the market had never heard of MTV.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
So we went and we pitched it to you. I
think you saw the feeling of it right away.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
Well, there's a lesson in this too that you've always
done very early well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
In the case of I want my MTV music stars
who were willing to be in the commercial for free
to help us accomplish goals, but you also have music
companies and others.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a strategist and a
creative guy. And as a strategist, what he understood is
that we had no money to spend on this ad.
I remember going into our boss's office and saying, but
HBO spending ten million dollars a year in advertising, goes,
you're lucky you have two somehow or other, the people
(26:23):
in the media business didn't actually believe in advertising. It
is the weirdest thing. And so I went to Dale.
I said, look, we only have two million dollars, and
he did an incredible data dump of where could MTV
be put on against how much media cost in that
particular market, and he did three or four or five
(26:47):
cross tabs to figure out the most likely places that
if we.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Put on these spots, we'd have an embed that we
would get.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
People calling and making the cable operators insane. And god,
I think we made customer representatives from all over America
crazy within four weeks.
Speaker 7 (27:07):
Next thing, you know, every cable operator there were eleven
of them in a market, which would not be unusual.
On time, they'd all call up and surrender. So we
would move at market by market for a couple of
years across the country, going from like what was seven
million subscribers ended up being eighty or ninety million.
Speaker 4 (27:21):
I had a guy who stop me at a cable
operator and said, I hate you, and I go, why
do you hate me? And he goes because my phone
rings all day with those people saying I want my MP.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I can't get any work done.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
In my chats with the co founders, there's a lot
of fondness for this deviant culture we had. MTV was fine.
It was definitely anti establishment. And the truth is even
the promotions dripped with the brand sensibility. In some ways
they defined the brand sensibility. There's some of the crazy
stories too. It was fun reminiscing with John Sykes about them.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
You were the guy who did the promotions.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
You came up with these great ideas and fortunately unfortunately
with the women that also executed them. You did the
Paint the House paint promotion with John Mellencamp. You did
the Lost Weekend with Van Halen. What formula were you using?
Speaker 6 (28:11):
Goes back to that connecting New York thing of being
a dreamer.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
Because I was the kid.
Speaker 6 (28:16):
I was the viewer who thought, oh my god, if
only I could dot dot dot.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
So when you said we've got.
Speaker 6 (28:23):
To put together some promotions, we got to go bigger
than life, we go, what are we going to do?
I just said to myself, okay, what would anybody give
their eye teeth to do? What would be the fantasy
of all fantasies? And I remember just John had done
a song called pink Houses. So let's give away a
house and you're going to paint the mother pink.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
Tell us about the first house you bought.
Speaker 6 (28:44):
When you had to execute it, I mean you had
to go find a house, You had to go buy
a house, You had to go actually get a team
to paint it pink. You got to go fly people in.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
So we went and you had no money, so we
had to buy the chiefest house you could find.
Speaker 6 (28:56):
So Bob goes, take a cashier's check and just go
buy a house. And I go, okay, So I flew
in Indiana and John Mellencamp, who loved the idea, sends
his ex wife to meet me to show me around
it by some house. She's a realtor. So we go
and I go, okay. I got about two hours before
I get the flight back to New York. Show me
four houses. First house we buy, the woman is there,
(29:17):
she's cookies for me. The kids are out front, they've
cleaned it up.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
This was a shock. I felt so bad for her.
Speaker 6 (29:23):
She was a single mom. Look at this house and
I said, so, dude, it's a We can paint this pink,
so I wrote, I checked, thirty two thousand dollars, bought
the house. Her jaw dropped. No realtor just handed the
check and got in the car. Drove back when you
opened up Rolling Stone. Three weeks later, MTV buy his
house on toxic waste dump. So so I call you,
(29:44):
go Bob. I had no idea, John Mellencamp writes me
letters I have today. Dear John, I'm sure you've read
Rolling Stone by now, and I'm sure you wouldn't want
to give a house on a toxic waste stump. And
I'm going, oh my god, we're stuck with a house.
So I had to fly. I can get an other house.
But that's not the good. Double the budget, double the budget.
The good story was the Last Weekend with Van Halen.
(30:06):
That one really really defined MTV as a serious, dangerous
rock and roll brand to consumers. There was a movie
called The Last Weekend. Gray Mulland was in there and
the guy loses his mind whatever, and so we just said,
let's do a Last Week with a band. Who's the
craziest band out there right now, van Halen. Van Halen
wouldn't do any promotion because they were worried about their image.
(30:29):
We called them with the idea like we're in. We're in,
and by the way, we'll fulfill the contest. You don't
have to do anything. Just drop off the fans with
us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
So we did that.
Speaker 6 (30:40):
The kid arrives and they take him at four o'clock
in the afternoon right into the backstage, and everything you
can imagine would happened with Van Halen happened. So by
the time the band goes on stage at nine o'clock
at night, this guy is fried. There's been things that
were not a Warner Amex and Condole or MTV notice activity.
So he's standing on stage a completely out of his mind,
(31:02):
and David Lee Roth goes, we have the winner tonight
of the MTV Lost Weekend, Joe Smith. You know, Joe, Congratulations.
They bring out a giant sheet cake. He's got his
hands up from the air and the bands around him,
and they take the sheet cake and they push it
into his face and the guy is stunned and he
starts curling around swinging punches at the band.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
The Pan freaks out.
Speaker 6 (31:25):
They take him off and they bring him backstage and
we say to his friend, what's wrong with him? And
he said, we forgot to tell you. He has a
metal plate in his head. He was in an accident.
He's not supposed to drink, so they had to put
him in a room with a security guard all night.
But that kind of made the legend of MTV. I
wish we could take credit for that, but that was it.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So the contest. Maybe we're lucky we can't take credit
for it.
Speaker 6 (31:44):
You know what those contests did, They creates the fantasy
and the aspiration that makes someone want to be attracted
to a product.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
MTV could have been a flash of the Pan, but
the marketing spirit captured an attitude that young America responded to.
People tuned in just to see what was going on
on MTV. It was a place to hang out, and
as the word spread, the channel made money. Although MTV
was the most radical of the cable channels, it was
also the first cable network to actually make a profit.
(32:13):
And we had the highest AD revenue of any of
the cable networks. And remember this was a time when
people didn't believe cable networks could even be profitable. Boy
did that feel good. But part of keeping the channel
successful was continuing to think outside the mainstream and continue
to come up with new ideas.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Here's bread again.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in
and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here,
I didn't want to hire them. One of the earliest
people I hired had just come out of film school
in his first job was cutting film negatives at a
porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you won't remember this,
but one day you called me into your office and
you said, hey, I need you to be the head
(32:53):
of production. I said, Bob, you know I've never seen
even the red light on top of a camera go on,
and you went, oh, don't worry, you'll figure it out.
And that was that, and all of a sudden, I
was in television.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
And you did a really great job. Thank you.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
But it wasn't just people like Fred who got an
opportunity to MTV. Here Judy and Tom talking about how
he kept an eye out for new talent and groomed
them upward, and the culture that the two of them
kept going and kept building at the company even after
I left. If you think about it, in the days
of MTV, we're probably looking back at an extraordinary number
(33:29):
of women and very important roles. Today would be crowing
about it. Probably, you know, whether you like it or not.
You have been mentoring people, You've been setting an example.
How do you handle that responsibility? What do you do
consciously about that?
Speaker 8 (33:43):
I began to see I was sort of a better
editor coach than I was a player. I can remember
some things that just felt like personal milestones to me.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
You know.
Speaker 8 (33:53):
One of the great fun things I got to do
would be hanging out in the rehearsals for the Video
Music Awards, and I was there and I was thinking, Wow,
you know, we've got a female director. We have a
female on stage managing the crew. We have a young
woman who's the head writer. We have a young woman
in charge of seating in events. But we've got women
(34:15):
in roles that were not traditionally women's roles. They were
just really good. And I do think it's incumbent on
somebody who gets an opportunity, like I got to look
out for underrepresented people in general. And so you know,
when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand, was an easy like,
(34:37):
let's let Beth direct, come on, like, she can do it.
We know she can do it. Everybody knows she can
do it. And I looked around and thought, wow, this
whole thing is kind of really looking very different than
most of the other sets that I've been on. I
once heard Tina Fey say something about it's a panel
where a bunch of women were sort of congratulating each
(34:58):
other for different things, and someone said they were lucky,
and a bunch of other women jumped on her and said,
oh my god. Women always say they're lucky. Men never
say they're lucky. You made your own luck. And Tina
was actually very thoughtful about it, and she said, I
think timing plays a role in something as well as
luck and talent. And you know, I always felt like
(35:18):
I worked with men who were not typical and young
employees who are not typical. So how ridiculous would it
be to take a typical approach to anything else. We
were upending tradition all the time, and not just for
the sake of doing it, but because you give somebody
a chance, they'll knock themselves out to show you that
(35:41):
they could really do it.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
And we actually talked about it back then.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
We said, you know, if somebody's done three or four
things and they're not great, we have empirical evidence they
won't be great.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Yeah, but if we give.
Speaker 4 (35:50):
Somebody a shot who's never done it, they could be
the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right, And the only way
we're going to find out is to take a shot,
exactly And you continued to do that through your career.
Speaker 7 (35:58):
A lot of focus was on we're eating a culture
that would attract creative people. They would want to come
and live there. I mean, we'd have at one point
Judd Apatow or Ben Stiller or John Stewart, Stephen Colbert,
you know, Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices.
Sometimes it was a hothouse atmosphere.
Speaker 4 (36:13):
You were probably the first talent incubator. I don't think
they called them that back then. How did you pull
that together? Because it is really remarkable the people you had.
Speaker 7 (36:22):
Well, a lot of it is sort of what's the
vibe of the place. We always wanted to make the
room for deviancy. I would always say, who's the odd ballperson,
Who's the intern who's going to come running in with
an idea LIKEYOMTV raps. That was like a twenty one
year old intern who came up with a demo in
his basement. Because we had these networks, there was a
lot of room for experimentation. Everything you made didn't have
(36:43):
to be really tightly organized. There was a lot of
room for improvisation and innovation. If you have a hallmark
for that, people would want to step up and follow us.
You just try and have good standards, provide guard rails
for people, celebrate risk, you know, we give creative people
a lot of freedom.
Speaker 4 (36:59):
One of the people who was crucial tim TV's early
success it was former NPR CEO y'all Mom y'arel and
I went way back. We even had a show called
album tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live. But y'arell
had an incredible eye for programming, and when MTV had
to think beyond music videos, he played a crucial role.
(37:20):
For me.
Speaker 9 (37:20):
It was a great transition from the radio world to
the television world because there were so many similarities. If
you had picked me up and tried to drop me
into a broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I
would have I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately
we all learned a lot of lessons about the fragility
(37:42):
of this brand new thing music videos, and that was
something we all kind of had to learn in real time.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
It was humbling, it was embarrassing, and do you think
it stopped working.
Speaker 9 (37:53):
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
and there were so many people watching and being really
enthralled by but I think ultimately it became less interesting.
It was television and we were using a lot I was,
at least using a lot of radio rules for a
different medium, and people were making four minute decisions of
(38:14):
what they were going to watch and not thirty minute
and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately had
to switch strategy to go to content that people would
watch for longer periods of time, long form, and that
was very controversial at the time, but.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
You know it worked. What were your first shows?
Speaker 9 (38:33):
And we started with The Week in Rock and hiring
Kurt Loader from Rolling Stone magazine and taking the MTV
news segments and making it a half hour show, and
that worked, and then Rockumentaries and Specials as the second.
The third was Club MTV is let's do an American
band stand for today, Let's play music videos and hire
(38:53):
Downtown Julie Brown.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
That was a hit.
Speaker 9 (38:56):
Every show that went on did well. Then we're really
cocky and thinking, man, we really know how to make hits.
But I think it was more reflection of the fact
that music videos at the time had run their course.
The most controversial one remote Control of the Game Show,
and all the research came back said you can't do
a game show. And I remember saying to our good
(39:18):
friend Marshall Cohen, we worked with an MTV research guru, Yes,
I said, I think we're asking the wrong question. The
question should be if we were to do a game show,
what would it look like? And the answer came back, well,
it should be Irreverence'd be crazy. We used all the
information and hired Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam
(39:42):
Sandler was a regular on the show and it was
a monster. But the additional research the way we asked
it indicated that there would have been a disaster.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
It worked out great for Were you able to sell
that to advertisement?
Speaker 5 (39:53):
Yep?
Speaker 3 (39:54):
Oh I loved it?
Speaker 5 (39:55):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:58):
So MTV started to play with new formats, but as
Preston remembers it, the limited budgets were actually an engine
for creativity.
Speaker 7 (40:08):
We couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix
or changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We
just couldn't play the top ten videos all day long.
There was always new shows coming around. We would add
shows onpackaged music and like on hip hop music with
the OMTV raps and so forth, and it kind of
came down to the real world. That was in nineteen
ninety three, and that was like, well, we've tried everything else,
(40:29):
we should probably do a soap opera because young people
are interested in what other young people are doing. So
they came in with a presentation to me and we
had the hire writers, and I said, well, you know,
we don't have any money to hire writers, so we
can't do this. So then Doug Herzog came back and said,
you know, we're really good at post production, that's our
major skill. What if we just rented Aloft and Soho
(40:51):
and stuck some cameras in there and bring these kids
in and then let them live, and then we'll post
it afterwards and make it into a show. And that
was That was sort of the birth of reality. It
was an idea that was not born of brilliance but
born of cheapskateness.
Speaker 4 (41:06):
MTV was a success story finally, but it wasn't long
before the competition started circling. Here's Tom with the story
of what motivated us to start VH one.
Speaker 7 (41:16):
Ted Turner wanted to come in and basically p in
our parade. He said he was going to launch a
music channel that played none of the Devil's music. Let
me say first that the cable music channel lasted one
hundred and one days on the air and he had
to fold up and go home. But we decided we
can't let this happen, and if there's going to be
a second music channel, we should have a second music channel.
And we made the case the cable operators, we have
(41:37):
a second music channel. You don't want to add the
Ted Turner channel. That's just going to go head to
head against the one you already have. Add VH one,
which we call the very Hot one at the time,
because it would be more compatible and it would play
artists for another demo and we would sell it to
you on a combo basis. Basically it was free if
you already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms
(41:59):
of not being able to get distribution. Therefore no advertising,
no revenue, no light on the end of the tunnel,
and he went out of business and we went forward.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Of course, launching EH one was one thing. It was
a savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential
and fighting off Ted Turner's channel. But once that was over,
the team had to figure out what to do with it.
The network struggled for years. Ratings were abysmal, so John Sykes,
who had left MTV by then, was called back to
lead the charge. Tom Preston calls job says, come home,
(42:33):
need you to fix a VH one.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
What did you do?
Speaker 6 (42:36):
As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much
of the stuff. A brand is only valuable if there
is an underserved segment of the audience that needs it.
Hip hop was starting to happen. ALTERNI music was exploding,
and a lot of the traditional rock bands in R
and B bands were being pushed out and they're going
like an off of the cliff. And I said, there's
a market here, because having run a record company, a
(42:58):
publishing company, we were seeing these artists that used to
be called middle of the road back then, but now
they were actually vibrant pop bands. They didn't have a place.
And then I saw who are the most powerful buyers,
young adults, young college graduates. Here's a generation it's grown
up on MTV. They have money, they're affluent, and they
have nowhere to go. So I was as excited actually
(43:21):
about VH one as I was about MTV. I mean,
MTV is iconic and it will be there forever. But
the other thing about VH one to me also was
it was my own and I knew if I fell,
it would be on me.
Speaker 3 (43:33):
It would be likes out.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
If VH one fails, they used to call it VH
point one.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
It was the rating of it again.
Speaker 6 (43:39):
And for those people who ratings, ratings are from zero
to whatever, and point one's of zero to one hundred.
VH one is the ugly step child at MTV Networks.
I used to say it was nails out the backseat
of a car to put flats in the tires of
the cars behind us, because we didn't want anbody compete
with MTV. But I said, now it quietly has thirty
(44:00):
million homes. There's a market for this. And I looked
in the room and have the people like or a
sleep bicycle that quit and staying they had a job,
but they didn't believe in the product, but they were
reflecting a paycheck. So I said, listen, if you don't
believe in this, it's okay. We won't make a big
thing and we're going to fire you, but we'll work
out a package and you should leave because we need
(44:20):
people going to believe in this. There's a market for this,
and I believe that this is gonna be a three
hundred million dollar business in the next three years if
we all focus on that. So people came to me
and said I don't want to do this.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
I didn't think they.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
I don't think they would come like, I don't think
you're right. I'm like, okay, well, thank you God, bye.
They all came back three years later looking for jobs.
But it was about believing in yourself, believing your idea,
hiring people around you who are better than you at
executing what they did. And we put together a team
at VH one hooping under run, NBC, Nintendo, Bravo. We
(44:55):
put together an all star trip. So it made me
proud and working with some of the red I mean
some Redstone nineteen ninety four was on his game. You
walked in and said, here's my plan, here's what I
want to do. And he'd just said, fine, go do it.
If you don't do it, I'll fire you. I said,
that's all I want to know. Just give me the rope,
and he did. It was a great nine years. We
(45:15):
shattered all the records there, but all good businesses you
got to reinvent them otherwise they paid it off.
Speaker 4 (45:22):
MTV was the starting point of a cable revolution. The
channel and the creative engine we built gave birth to
so much more. Here's Tom talking about just that topic.
Speaker 7 (45:32):
I was ambitious and I was highly motivated for this
to succeed. I thought that we were in this TV revolution.
We had the wind at our back. It was all
going to come true. It was too good of an
idea to fail. You know, a lot of life is
about timing and luck, and I had somehow ended up
once again in the right place at the right time,
and this was sort of my destiny. I was going
(45:54):
to meet my opportunity and.
Speaker 4 (45:55):
What you did, you know, I would say my time there.
We really proved it was a business. Were the first
cable network to make a profit. But it was really
you and your team, including Juden Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there?
Speaker 7 (46:15):
There's a compliment to you, Bob, I mean, you are
the guy I always keep your eye on the consumer,
find out what the consumer wanted. We would always see
this research the consumer wanted what we were selling, and
we could tune it up a bit. And we also
had this sort of slightly subversive, underground feel and you know,
there was nothing really around like that. And we would
continue to launch new networks Comedy Central or tv Land,
(46:35):
and the whole international world of television began to deregulate
in the late eighties. All these countries really only had
State TV pretty much as you know. So the confidence
I had built from my years living in Afghanistan and
India was actually very transferable because I really knew we
could go anywhere and do anything. And if we could
go to Europe, we could go to Asia, we go
to Latin America. So we built really the first worldwide
(46:58):
television networking company, and we rolled out not just MTV,
but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a lot of others
right down through Africa. So the business gradually evolved from
one where we would package other people's product like a
music video, to where we would increasingly own what we did.
But at the heart of it all was a creative machine,
which again was something that you put in at the
(47:19):
inception of the company.
Speaker 4 (47:22):
When we first started MTV, it wasn't just entertainment. We
built a channel to be the voice of young America
and that included doing good and my time there, MTV
made its mark with massive events, with important missions AMNSKY International,
band Aid, Farm Aid and of course Live Aid. But
it was Rock the Vote that truly took the channel
into politics, and some say even got a president elected.
(47:45):
Here's Judy talking about it. You've always done good, rocked
the Vote, juice or lose AIDS awareness? How did you
think about that inside of a company, and how do
you think of it for you as a as a.
Speaker 8 (47:58):
Person, Well, you know, inside MTV, it was very interesting
when we decided to get into you know, and certainly
Rock the Vote was not our idea. Politicians Jeff airaf So,
Jeff was very passionate about this, and it sort of
grew into Rock the Vote. And I remember talking to
Tom Preston, with whom I had an extraordinarily great creative relationship,
(48:21):
and this was one of the rare instances where we
had a blowout. Really we really didn't agree, but I
listened to what he said. He said, this is a
terrible idea. It's not going to work. This is an
entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're going to get
laughed out of town. We do not have permission to
(48:42):
do this. There's nothing about us that says we should
be stepping anywhere near an election or voting or any
of this. So I went back and I thought about
it a little bit, and I thought, Okay, this is
where I come into the picture. I think I grew
up in an era where one of the many things
I loved about music was it's social commentary, and it
is about the times we live in and it's about
(49:03):
all the things that affect you in a very deep way.
And I thought, I think there's a way to do
this where it will be engaging. This was not about
telling young people you need to vote. That's not the
way I looked at it at all. It was saying
to people who make big decisions in this country, this
is a generation that is disengaged from you, and you
(49:24):
need to address them on their turf, their way, and
we'll invite you to do that. That's your shot. It
wasn't about trying to be parental or any of that
kind of stuff to them, or give them boring facts
or anything like that. And so we got as smart
as we could get. And I think I didn't tell anybody.
That's another thing. I sent tabitha'sre and Tabitha went to
(49:45):
New Hampshire and she called me at like midnight. She said,
you know, I got up here in like a bunch
of candidates are like, what's MTV? And she said, and
then a couple of them like got back off the bus,
primarily Bill Clinton and said I'll talk to you, and
then we were sort of off and running. And you
know that partnered with incredible creative work on those rock
(50:08):
to Vote spots, I mean Madonna wrapped in a flag.
Speaker 4 (50:11):
Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston quickly embraced the idea.
Speaker 7 (50:14):
We knew it was important to our audience. I also
knew it was extremely important to the employee base. Employees
would feel better about working there if they knew we
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had one hundred and sixty eight
hours a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It
also turned out it legitimized us in the eyes of
advertisers who formerly wouldn't come near us, like American Express.
But most importantly, the audience liked it.
Speaker 8 (50:36):
And then fast forward to you know, we're going to
throw an inaugural ball that's not official and see if
anybody comes to the party, and our EM's going to
play and Vogue's going to play. We tried to make
it as spirited as MTV, but at a little bit
of gravitas, if you will, and meaning you know, like
you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and
(50:57):
you deserve to be heard and listen to, and we
were going to help you.
Speaker 5 (51:04):
MTV was a wonderful ride. From the very beginning.
Speaker 4 (51:07):
My co founders and I knew we were doing something
that was important to culture, but we had no idea
we were going to change culture.
Speaker 5 (51:14):
MTV change TV.
Speaker 4 (51:17):
It changed music, it changed graphic design, and it certainly
changed my life. No matter how old I get or
whatever else I've done, MTV is still an important chapter
of my life, and all of us as co founders
are still very much a very tight family. But the
truth is, looking back, I think we all feel the
same way Tom Freston felt when he joined the team.
Speaker 7 (51:39):
I was happy to have a job. I couldn't believe
anyone was going to hire me, and lucky.
Speaker 4 (51:46):
For all of us, we all kept getting hired again
and again. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (51:55):
That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1 (51:57):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat Nikki Etoor for pulling research
bill Plax and Michael Azar for their recording help are
editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel,
(52:17):
Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to
your ears. Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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