The Real Story of MTV: Founder’s Edition

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.  

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart Radio.
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 that are we gonna do jingles? And he went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles? And I said, what do we do?

(00:24):
He said, how about this? Imagine it's 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. Hi,

(00:47):
I'm Bob Titman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing and we're doing something special
on today's episode. One of the pivotal moments of my
life was leading the team that created MTV. I've had
the good fortin of having all the co founders of
MTV on this podcast with me and in each of
the interviews, whether it was chatting with Judie Grath and
Fred Cyber, John Sykes or Yarramon and of course Tom Freston.

(01:11):
We've always spent a little time talking about MTV, So
what we wanted to do for you today was pulled
together those stories for the first time ever. Tell the
story at 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.

(01:31):
So let me set the stage. 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 old with an attitude.

(01:53):
None of us had ever done the jobs before. All
we knew is we've grown up with rock and roll
and we've grown up with TV, 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 story. We intended to make
TV at the music form mood and emotion. MTV was

(02:15):
going to be about attitude and something people wanted to join.
We were on a mission. So when I hearts owned
John Sykes at the time, a twenty four year old
record executive at CBS Records in Chicago heard what we
were up to. Well, he wanted in, so let's talk
about MTV. It's the word gets out that we're working

(02:37):
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. I grew up with three things in
my life. Radio, television, music. That's all I cared about.
When I wasn't listen to the radio station, I was
watching TV or listening to music. Those things, to me

(02:57):
shaped our culture. So I'm at school, ab TV is
just starting up, and I saw the cable channels were empty,
the music was all over the radio. Was it on television?
So we used to go and shoot the concerts and
sarcus and we'd pay them and send him to new channels,
and we played the concerts and people like, oh my god,
I can see the band. And all I wanted to
do at that point was put music on television. When

(03:19):
I graduated, I went to CBS that let's put music
on let's run concerts. These three martini lunch guys in
New York looked at me, and I 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 rail, but that's the job
I had. So then I heard from my friend's deep
Casey was at w LS in Chicago that his great
friend Bob Pittman was in New York and he was

(03:43):
going to start a video channel, and I lost my mind.
It still gives me goose bumps. I was like, this
is what I was made to do. This is what
I wanted to do. To me, it was like music
along on television. So I started calling you, and I
called you, and I called you and I called you.
And thanks to your assistant and Plunkett, who I was
annoying so much, she said, all right, Bob, you please

(04:04):
talk to this guy. And uh we met that day
with a borrowed support jacket. Because I don't know 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 were about to be united.
You look back on any successful product and it seems easy.
You were there when we didn't even have approval from

(04:26):
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. What that early development was like.
It is funny and people like go, oh my god,
you're in 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 that day looking back,

(04:49):
but when you're in it, it's a slugfest. There was
this idea, but to make it happen, we had no
money and we all quit jobs. You were at NBC,
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 gonna cut

(05:10):
the budgets. We've 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.
I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, Okay,
we're going to the board and we're gonna pitch this
for approval, and you go, what, we don't have approval.
I quit my job. We don't have approval. No, no, John,
this was development. All the blood ran out of your
face at that moment. I do remember I had to

(05:31):
look up because there was no Internet. I had to
go into Dictionary look up the real definition of development.
I thought, we're developing something. You development means it's not
gonna happen yet, but you know something. I was like,
who cares if it doesn't work, I'll go sleep on
my sister's couching another job. We were young. John Sykes
was so hungry he pounded on our door to let

(05:52):
him in. He believed in music television from the start.
But my good pal Fred Cyberg, the one who came
out of radio and helped create the graphic of MTV,
his reason for getting into TV was very different. One
of your great supporters, who I had worked with and
who I loved dearly, Dale Pond, recommended you to me
pre MTV. It was in the early days to pay TV.

(06:13):
You came over to join us in the cable revolution.
Why did you make that jump? Well, you know this
is gonna 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, you said you want

(06:33):
to be in television, and oh, you said, okay, come
have coffee with me. I went to Dale's files and
he had files on everyone in 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

(06:56):
guy that I just talked to is so much smarter
than my Boston radio He goes, what do you think
about that? I said, Well, here's what Dale taught me.
It 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. That's what that means,
to truth be told. When you first told me about it,
I thought it was the dumbest idea in the world,

(07:16):
because I was a music guy and I had seen,
you know, a few crummy 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 was too naive to know that you
had to have faith, Like you told me it was
gonna happen, so I believed you totally. I was just

(07:40):
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. 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 is the CEO of

(08:01):
Warner along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And
we got Jim Robinson and his deputy Luke Gershner from
American Express. We were worried that when we showed these
videos too from Americans Press, call what So he said,
let's find the tamest one of my mind. I think
we found Olivia Newton John if you remember. But in
the meeting they said you have to play that kind

(08:21):
of stuff, implying Olivia Newton John was too. But to
their credit, Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay,
I'm in from my half. How about you? Steve so
awesome we locked out. The MTV crew we assembled was
a bunch of lovable misfits and future Viacom MTV CEO
Tom Preston was no different. It's spent several years living
in Afghanistan, reporting clothes and having adventures across Asia. But

(08:44):
when things got two political overseas, he made his way
back and so so you don't think Tom went saft
sitting to top Viacom. After he left the company, he
returned Afghanistan and even has a wonderful story about lying
on the floor and a bar and football with a
firefight going on all around, the bullets whizzing overhead. I

(09:05):
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 Money.
This was sort of at the height of the Vietnam
War and I was in an alienated state to begin with.

(09:27):
When they were going to assign me to charm and
toilet paper, that was sort of my last straw. 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 two rollers, folders and crumplers.
And she says, well, you can't do that. You should
quit that job. Don't be a moron. Come with me.
I'm gonna go across the Sahara Desert up in Paris.

(09:49):
So I was on a plane like ten days later.
That was it for me. So Tom set up his
clothing company Hidnt Do Kush and ran that successfully for
a long while. When I was riven 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'm methodically looked around getting a job in the
music business. Through connections. I ended up in John Lack's

(10:11):
office and I told him I thought, this is 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 in the
last eight years. 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

(10:32):
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 were getting into? I mean, this
was still sort of Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business.
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

(10:52):
the music video which were largely unknown to 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 version
of a startup, very much so, and if you looked
at the media environment, then nothing had really changed in years.

(11:15):
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. Remember we used to say
we're going to do to FM what FM did too
a M that was our big plane channels in the home.
Can you imagine. Judy McGrath was another key employee in
the early days. She eventually rose to be CEO of

(11:37):
MTV Networks. Here she has reminiscing about what it meant
to make the rules up as we went along. The
beauty and the wonder of MTV was that it was
really filled with people that I thought could not find
gainful employment anywhere else. It would be somebody who had
never really shot anything and just wanted to get their

(12:00):
hands on a camera and 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. And there are really no
other rules aside from you know, no full frontal nudity

(12:20):
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, who said, so,
what kind of music do you like? And I think

(12:41):
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 of like, how fast
can I it out the door of Conde nas and

(13:01):
jump on this thing whatever it is? These people are crazy.
What's funny is that when I asked Fred about it,
he remembered the story exactly the same way. She said
Bruce Springsteen. I said wrong, because I don't have a
good thing about Bruce. The fact that she cared, you know,
the Bruce haters are coming after you right now. Believe me,
They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact

(13:24):
that she cared meant all the difference to me in
the world. Not that I agreed. You know, I've just
found the camaraderie and the purpose in 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

(13:46):
creative group, you had a plan, and the plan were promises,
and I loved that. I am making 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,

(14:08):
but those are powerful words 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

(14:32):
in stereo, not really, but you know, hey, it's mart
that sounded good. People who did have stereo. 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

(14:52):
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 looked back,
not one second. Let's go back to Fred and chat
about that iconic MTV logo. Talk about the logo you

(15:14):
set out, You've got the mission. You and I had
these discussions. I've naively said, we'll do our own Star
Wars logo because everybody has a Star Wars log and
you go to bob Ours will look cheap. You said, Look,
if we do something no one's ever seen before, they
won't know it's cheap. So tell me about the logo. Well,
the logo itself actually came about because I was too

(15:34):
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 gonna 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 I'm four
years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had just started

(15:55):
a little design firm behind a tai Chief studio above
Bigelow Chemists on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had been the guy,
because he's a year older than me, who would 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 Taichi studio place and I go, will
you guys design a logo for this rock channel we're starting?

(16:18):
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, and
boy do I wish I had that memo. So for
a year they designed logos and I just rejected everything,
probably five hundred designs. Finally they come in the office

(16:43):
one day. We're actually going to go on the air soon, right,
and we still don't have anything, and they bring a
pile and I'm like, no, no, 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
and they had flattened it out. It was just like
a sketched TV and went, Okay, that's the one I

(17:05):
can see. Frank like rowling. 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.
She fished it out and put it at the bottom
of the pile. He says, that's not true, but you know,

(17:27):
maybe a good story. 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
e M 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 in a day when the screen was square exactly right.

(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 acrylic overlays and said
this one will be for the heavy metal show, and
this one will be for the new Wave show. And

(18:11):
I'm like, Frank, we're not gonna have shows, you know.
I put it aside. So I put all of the
boards up on my pegboard and couldn't decide. And this
one 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

(18:32):
television we move, shouldn't the logo move? And to be
honest with you, that 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

(18:54):
and the VJs that are We're gonna do jingles? And went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles. And I said, what do we do?
He said, how about this? 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,

(19:15):
and the cow vomits, and in the vomit is the logo.
I went, oh my god, I can do anything I want.
This is the most exciting moment of my life. And
we started hiring animators to do all that stuff. The
other thing you did when you did those promos, you
laid the music bed down first and cut the music.

(19:35):
People forget this, They don't realize that was an innovation.
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, we'll go to the
audio studio and cut the audio track. And I went, well,
the video guy tells me, no, you have to first
do the picture. And then he goes, Fred, we own

(19:57):
the audio studio. It's free. If you get it right
in the audio studio, then the three an hour video
studio will go much faster. By the time we got
to MTV, I realized that he was absolutely right. 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, Well, what are you talking about?

(20:20):
And they said they make us do the audio first,
we're filmed. People like why, so twenty years later they
were still doing it. But boy, what it did is
it brought rhythm. 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.

(20:41):
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. I
talked to John Sykes about it. We launch MTV, we
get it underway. We're trying to get some evidence that

(21:02):
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 disaster for. So we said
we gotta get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle.
And you and Tom Freston go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Just hold on a second, because we've got so much
more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.

(21:28):
Some mean what happened in Tulsa. We believe this was working,
We felt it, but we needed facts we needed to
convince a record business. So I was like, we need
a story, Tom, John, go on their own, don't compact.
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

(21:48):
car literally with a map of record stores and going
into places. So you sold any please records selling Duran
Duran sold in the Tulips to Nope, Nope, So we
kept driving driving. I still remember it was a regord
store in an old house, and tomize trudgin and we
say solely this only that's only Dan grand Ran. I

(22:12):
sold two boxes of Duran Duran records last week. What
is you sold to back? You sold fifty records records
in a box. Can we have your name and can
we use your phone? We called the box, said Bob, Bob,
we have a story. We have a story. We have
a record store that's selling music only played on MTV.
And he said, great, get a name, get the information.

(22:35):
We need an article, and so we hang up the phone.
I turned to Tom, Tom, we get to go home.
And we took that and we wrote it as a
case study, and we ran it in bill Board and
the music magazines to influence the record company keep going.
I have, of course you do. You have everything we
ever did at MTV. You are the pack rat. I
have that one sheet MTV sales records, Joey Smith, and

(22:58):
boy that Joey Smith. Wherever you are tell us Oklahoma,
thank you. If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Tulsa,
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

(23:20):
effective MTV was gonna be. So it proved our worth
to the record companies. But you have to remember we
still had to convince cable operators to carry m TV.
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

(23:42):
Seibert telling that story, let's start the talk. 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 too that
was probably a slippery slope, and so we decided we
would use a whole strategy to get distribution. I want

(24:03):
my MTV. Well, it was sort of a Hail Mary
passed 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 a 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

(24:23):
was that campaign I Want My Mapo, which I remembered
as a baby boomer in the fifties. I'm obnoxious, I
want my MAPO, but i want my MTV. 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

(24:44):
copied a famous TV commercial from the fifties called I
Want my Mapo for a really horrendous tasting, and he
redid it with Mick Jagger and David Bowie, and on
the beginning of the spot he had Pete Townsend doing
it America demand your MTV and people go, I want

(25:08):
my MTV. I want my MTV. And then Pete towns
and again with a telephone going to your cable operator
and say I want my And they showed us this spot.
If we could get major rock stars in a commercial
to kind of hold our logo, validate and hold it
and command people to call their cable company and demand
their MTV, make it look cool, put some animation around it,

(25:31):
and then put it in these markets at very high frequency.
We go into a market and would be like a
Blockbuster movie was opening. Most people in the market had
never heard of MTV. So we went and we pitched
it to you. I think you saw the feeling of
it right away. Well, there's a lesson in this too
that you've always done very very well, which is harnessing
the power of partners. And in the case of I

(25:54):
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. 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

(26:15):
going into our boss's office and saying, but HBO spending
ten million dollars a year in advertising, goes, you're lucky.
You have to somehow or other. The people in the
media business didn't actually believe in advertising as 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

(26:41):
how much media cost in that particular market, and he
did three or four or five cross tabs to figure
out the most likely places that if we put on
these spots that we would get people calling and making
the cable operators insane. And god knows, I think we

(27:01):
made customer representatives from all over America crazy within four weeks.
Next thing, you know, every cable operator of there were
eleven of them in a market, which would not be
unusual time they'd all call up and surrender. So we
would move a 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. I
had a guy stopped me at a cable operator and

(27:23):
said I hate you, and I go, why why do
you hate me? And he goes because my phone rings
all day with those people saying I want mam people.
I can't get any work done. 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

(27:46):
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. You were
the guy who did the promotions. You came up with
these ideas and fortunately, unfortunately the one that also executed them.
You did to Paint the House Paint promotion with John Mellencamp,

(28:07):
you did the Last Weekend with Van Halen. What formula
were you using? Goes back to that connected New York
thing of being a dreamer, because I was the kid.
I was the viewer who thought, oh my god, if
only I could dot dot dot. So when you said
we've got to put together some promotions. We gotta go
bigger than life. We go, what are we gonna do?

(28:27):
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 gonna paint the mother pink. Tell us
about the first house you bought. When you had to
execute it, I means you got to go find a house,
got to go buy a house. You had to go

(28:48):
actually get a team to paint it pink. You gotta
go fly people in. So we went, and you had
no money, so we had to buy the chief house
you could find. So Bob goes, take a cashier's check
and just go buy a house. And I 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

(29:09):
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 just cookies for me. The kids are out front,
they've cleaned it up. This was a shock. I felt
so bad for her. She was a single mom. Look
at this house, and I said, we'll do It's a
we can paint this pink. So I wrote a check
thirty two dollars, bought the house. Her jaw dropped. No realator,

(29:33):
just handed the check and got in the car, drove back.
When you open up Rolling Stone, three weeks later, MTV
buys house on toxic waste dump. So so I call
you 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

(29:53):
want to give a house on a toxic waste dump.
And I'm going, oh my god, we're stuck with a house.
So I had to fly back and get an other house.
But that's not the good double the budget, the budget.
The good story was The Last Weekend with Van Halen.
That one really really defined MTV as a serious, dangerous
rock and roll brand to consumers. There was a movie

(30:16):
called The Last Weekend. Gray Millan was in there and
guy loses his mind whatever and so we just said,
let's do a laws week with the 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.
We called them with the idea that we're in. We're in,
and by the way, will fulfill the contest. You don't
have to do anything, just drop off the fans with

(30:37):
us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday. So we
did that. The kid arrives and they take him aout
four o'clock in the afternoon, right into the backstage, and
everything you can imagine what 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 m X and condoned

(30:57):
or MT VOUS activity. So he's standing on age completely
out of his mind, and David Lee Roth goes, we
have the winner tonight of the MTV Lost Weekend, Joe Smith,
you know, Joe Congratulations. They bring on a giant sheet cake.
He's got his hands up from there and the bands
around him, and they take the sheet cake and they
push it into his face and the guy is stunned

(31:19):
and he starts twirling around swinging punches at the band.
The band feaks out, They take him off and they
bring him backstage. We say to his friend, what's wrong
with him? And he said, we forgot to tell you.
He has a middle 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,

(31:41):
but that was it. So the contest. Maybe we're lucky
we can't take credit for it. You know what those
contests did, They creates the fantasy and the aspiration that
makes someone want to be attracted to a product. MTV
could have been a flash in the pan, but the marketing, spirit, capturing,
and attitude that Young America responded to. People tuned in

(32:01):
just to see what was going on in 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, and we had the
highest that revenue of any of the cable networks. And
I remember this was a time when people didn't believe
cable networks could even be profitable. Boy did that feel good.

(32:23):
But part of keeping the channel successful was continuing to
think outside the mainstream and continue to come up with
new ideas. Here's bread again. 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 and his first job was cutting

(32:44):
film negatives at a pornell 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 you know, the head of production. I said, um, 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 and

(33:06):
you did a really great job. Thank you. But it
wasn't just people like Fred who got an opportunity to MTV.
You're Judy and Tom talking about how he kept an
eye out from new talent and groom 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

(33:27):
probably looking back at an extraordinary number 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?
I began to see I was sort of a better
editor coach than I was a player. I can remember

(33:48):
some things that just felt like personal milestones to be.
You know. One of the great fun things I got
to do would be hang 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

(34:11):
a young woman in charge of seating and events. But
we've got women 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

(34:32):
you know, when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand, was
an easy like, 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

(34:54):
about a panel where a bunch of women were sort
of congratulating each 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,

(35:17):
I always felt like I worked with men who are
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 up ending 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

(35:39):
to show you that they could really do it. And
we actually talked about it back then. We said, you know,
if somebody has done three or four things and they're
not great, we have empirical evidence they won't be great.
But if we give somebody a shot who's never done it,
they could be the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right, And
the only way we're gonna find out is to take
a shot. And you continue to do that through your career.
A lot of focus was on eating a culture that

(36:00):
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 Cobra, you know,
Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices. Sometimes
it was a hothouse atmosphere. 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. Well, a lot of is

(36:23):
sort of what's the vibe of the place. We always
wanted to make the room for deviancy. I would always say,
who is the odd ball person, who's the intern who's
gonna come running in with an idea like Yo, MTV 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 to be really tightly organized.

(36:44):
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 what's he Just try and
have good standards, provide guard rails for people, celebrate risk,
you know, we give creative people a lot of freedom.
One of the people who was crucial tim TV's early
success was former MPR CEO y'ar al Mong. Y'arll and

(37:05):
I went way back. We even had a show called
Album Tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live. But y'all
had an incredible eye for programming and when MTV had
to think beyond music videos. He played a crucial role
for me. It was a great transition from the radio
world to the television world because there were so many similarities.

(37:27):
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 of this brand new thing, music videos, and that
was something that we all kind of had to learn

(37:48):
in real time. It was humbling, it was embarrassing, and
it didn't think it stopped working. There was so much
heat around music videos at the time, and there were
so many people watching and being really enthralled. But 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,

(38:10):
and people were making four minute decisions of 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 you know, it worked. What

(38:32):
were your first shows, And we started with the Weekend
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 a specials
as the second. The third was Club MTV, Let's do
an American band stand for today, Let's play music videos

(38:53):
and hied Downtown Julie Brown. That was a hit. Every
show that went on did well, and then we're gonna
really cocky and think, man, we really know how to
make hits. But I think it was more a reflection
of the fact that music videos at the time it'd
run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
the Game show, and all the research came back said

(39:14):
you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
to our good friend Marshall Cohen. We worked with an
MTV research google. 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 irreverencey crazy.

(39:36):
We used all the information and hired Ken Ober and
Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a regular on the
show and it was a monster. But the additional research
the way we asked it indicated that that have been
a disaster. It worked out great, yep, oh yeah, yeah.

(39:58):
So MTV started to a with new formats, but its
Preston remembers it the limited budgets were actually an engine
for creativity. 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 on package music and like on hip hop music

(40:20):
with the OMTV raps and so forth, and it kind
of came down to the real world that was and
that was like, well, we've tried everything else, 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 to
hire writers, and I said, well, you know, we don't
have any money to hire writers, so we can't do this.

(40:43):
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 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 TV. It was
an idea that was not born of brilliance but born

(41:04):
of cheap skateness. 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 v
H one. Ted Turner want 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

(41:26):
a hundred 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 gonna be a
second music channel, we should have a second music channel,
and we made the case to cable operations, we have
a second music channel. You don't want to add the
Ted Turner channel, because that's just gonna go head to
head against the one you already have. Add VH one,
which was called the Very Hot One at the time,

(41:47):
because it would be more compatible and it would play
artists for another demo and we would sell it tu
on a combo basis. Basically, it was free if you
already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms 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. Of course,

(42:08):
launching v H one was one thing. It was a
savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential and
fighting off ted Turner 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 left MTV by then it was called back to
lead the charge. Tom Preston calls Jop says, come home,

(42:33):
needs you to fix a H one. What did you do?
As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much
of the stuff. A brand is only valuable if there's
an underserved segment of the audience that needs it. Hip
hop was starting to happen. Alternate music was exploding and
a lot of the traditional rock bands in R and
D bands were being pushed out and they're going like

(42:53):
kind off of the cliff. And I said, there's a
market here because having run a record company, a 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 those powerful buyers, young adults,
young college graduates. Here's a generation. It's grown up on MTV.

(43:15):
They have money, they're affluent, and they have nowhere to go.
So I was as excited actually about VH one as
I was about MTV, and MTV is iconic and it
will be there forever. But the other thing about v
H one to me also was it was my own
and I knew if I fell, it would be on me.
It would be like out at VH one fails. They

(43:36):
used to call VH point one the rating of it
again and for those people ratings, ratings are from zero
to whatever and point one zero. VH one is the
ugly step child at MTV Networks. I used to say
it was nails out the back seat of a car
to put flats and the tires of the cars behind us,
because we didn't want anybody compete with MTV. But I said,

(43:58):
now it quietly has their million homes. There's a market
for this. And I looked in the room and half
the people like or asleep bicycle that Quenton staying. They
had a job, but they didn't believe in the product,
but they're reflecting a paycheck. So I said, listen, if
you don't believe in this, it's okay. We won't make
a big thing you. We're gonna fire you, but we'll
work out a package and you should leave because we

(44:20):
need people who going to believe in this. There's a
market for this, and I believe that this is gonna
be a three 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.
So I didn't think they I don't think it would
come and like, I don't think you're right, Like, okay, well,
thank you, by bye. They all came back three years

(44:41):
later looking for jobs. But it was about believing in yourself,
believing your idea of hiring people around you are better
than you at executing what they did. And we put
together a team at v H one hooping on to
run NBC, Nintendo, Bravo. We put together an all star
trip so maybe proud and working with some of the
read Stone, I mean Sun of red Stone was on

(45:03):
his game. You walked in and said, here's my plan,
here's what I want to do, and he just say, fine,
go do it. If you don't do it, I'll fire
you and say that's all I want to know. Just
give me the rope, and he did. It was a
great nine years. We shattered all the records there, but
all good businesses you've got to reinvent them otherwise they
paid it off. MTV was the starting point of a

(45:23):
cable revolution. The channel and the creative engine we built
gave birth to so much more. Here's some I'm talking
about just that topic. 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 that
our back. It was all going to come true. Was
too good of an idea to fail. You know, a

(45:44):
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 to meet my opportunity. 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 Shooting Grath, who built MTV and the

(46:07):
other networks into this incredible media giant. What drove that in?
Where did that vision come from? And how did you
get there. There's a compliment to you, Bob, I mean
you are the guy. Always keep your eye on the consumer,
find out what the consumer one. We would always see
this resource 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,

(46:29):
there was nothing really around like that, and we would
continue to launch new networks Comedy Central or TV Land,
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

(46:51):
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 build really the first worldwide
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.

(47:14):
But at the heart of it always a creative machine,
which again was something that you put in at the
inception of the company. When we first started MTV, it
wasn't just entertainment. We built the 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 and the Sky International, Band Aid farm Ade,

(47:37):
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. Here's Judy talking about it.
You've always done good, Rock the Vote, chooser, lose AIDS awareness.
How did you think about that inside of a company
and how do you think of it for you as

(47:57):
a as a 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 politics
Jeff ear Off. So Jeff was very passionate about this,
and it's sort of grewing to Rock the Vote. And
I remember talking to Tom Freston, with whom I had

(48:18):
an extraordinarily great creative relationship, 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 gonna work.
This is an entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're

(48:38):
gonna get laughed out of town. We do not have
permission to 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,

(49:00):
and it is about the times we live in, and
it's about 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,

(49:23):
and you 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 store, and

(49:44):
Tabitha went to 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

(50:06):
creative work on those rock the Vote spots, I mean
Madonna wrapped in a flag. Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston
quickly embraced the idea. 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 a
hundred sixty eight hours a week. We could certainly squeeze

(50:28):
it in. It also turned out it legitimized us in
the eyes of advertisers who formally wouldn't come near us,
like American Express. But most importantly, the audience liked it.
And then fast forward to you know, we're gonna throw
an inaugural ball that's not official, and see if anybody
comes to the party, and our em is gonna play,
and and Vogue is gonna play. We tried to make
it as spirited as MTV, but add a little bit

(50:50):
of gravitas, if you will, and meaning you know, like
you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and
you deserve to be heard and listened to, and we're
going to help you. MTV was a wonderful ride from
the very beginning. My co founders and I knew we
were doing something that was important to culture, but we

(51:12):
had no idea we were going to change culture. MTV
changed TV, 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 in my life, and all of us as
co founders are still very much a very type family.

(51:32):
But the truth is, looking back I think we all
feel the same way. Tom Freston felt when he joined
the team. I was happy to have a job. I
couldn't believe anyone was gonna hire me, and lucky for
all of us, we all kept getting hired again and again.
I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode.

(51:57):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
wrangling are wonderful talent, which is no small feat Nikkiatore
for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their
recording help. Our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gail Raoul,
Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this

(52:19):
show to your ears. Until next time, m