(This is the latest chapter of the book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” For the full thing, so far, click the category, “The Book.”)
In the halls of history, Michael Nesmith actually gets three spots.
He was a Monkee … he was a white-out heir … and he was a music-video pioneer. That last one is important here, but let’s admire the others first.
The world knew Nesmith as a star of “The Monkees” (shown here, with Nesmith at left), a bright, Beatle-ish show that had two fun seasons (1966-68) on NBC. It was about a make-believe pop band … which, in real life, then had three No. 1 hits.
Before that? As Nesmith told it, his parents divorced and he grew up with his mom, who was a good artist and a not-so-good secretary. To cover her typing mistakes, she used her art skills to create a white-out. She called it “Liquid Paper,” built up her company … and sold it to Gillette for $47.5 million.
This was the ideal combination for a music-video pioneer: Nesmith was a musical guy who had inventive roots and the financial freedom to dabble.
In 1977, he wrote and recorded the amiable song “Rio “At the time, some countries were showing little “promotional films” of songs; making one for “Rio,” Nesmith included lots of droll, whimsical twists.
The result? “Rio” was ignored in the U.S., but reached No. 28 in England, No. 20 in the Netherlands, No. 4 in Australia and No. 4 in New Zealand. It was a sign that these mini-music-films could work.
Nesmith made a few more, then conceived of a show called “PopClips,” with comedians (Howie Mandell, Charles Fleischer) and DJ’s introducing videos from several people. He tried to sell it and found universal disinterest, with one exception: Nickelodeon – a kids’channel that started in 1979 – was hungry for content. It aired it in 1980-81.
And whether Nesmith knew it or not, “PopClips” was being shown elsewhere – in boardrooms and executive suites. Those times are recalled in “I Want My MTV” (Dutton, 2011).
Warner communications, an offshoot of the Warner Bros. studio, had been in cable since its earliest days. Its Qube experiment in Columbus, Ohio, led to Nickelodeon in 1979 and to The Movie Channel.
That reflected a Warner strategy, Rob Pittman said in the MTV book. People felt “the world of cable TV was going to about specialized networks.”
Yes, a couple early channels – TBS in 1976, USA in ‘77 – tried a something-for-everyone approach. But the others would settle for small niches.
There were channels focusing on Blacks (BET, 1980), news (CNN, ‘80), education (The Learning Channel, ‘81), TV listings (TV Guide Network, ‘81), the weather (Weather Channel, ‘82) , shopping (Home Shopping Network, ‘82) and religion.
Especially religion. The biggest one started as a single station in 1960, became a satellite station in ‘77 and the Christian Broadcasting Network in ‘81. By then, several other religion mini-networks existed.
Most cable networks kept chasing a smaller slice of a very small pie.
At its peak (2018), cable reached 93 million homes. But back in 1980, that was only 16 million. Many of them were in small towns or suburbs; many were reluctant to try something new or odd.
When ESPN started in 1979, it only reached 1.3 million homes. When MTV started in ‘81, the staffers couldn’t see it from their office or homes; they had to retreat to Fort Lee, NJ, one of the few places to carry it. When Daniel Schorr of CBS agreed to work at CNN, Ted Turner gave him a satellite dish so he could actually see the network he was working for.
These primitive networks were scraping by, hoping for corporate backing.
“We were like an Internet start-up,” Tom Freston recalled in the MTV book. “We were lean and mean and didn’t know what the hell we were doing.
“At the beginning, we were working out of a couple of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown New York. We had no office equipment. My first office was a soda storeroom.”
Others in the MTV book recalled those first offices. Carolyn Baker talked of “puke-yellow walls.” John Sykes described working “in a conference room with no windows and four phones.”
“It was a dump,” Robert Morton said. “The Carnegie Deli was downstairs, so our hotel room stunk like pastrami.”
There were bigger worries, Sykes recalled. “I asked Bob (Pittman), ‘When do we start?’ And he said, ‘Well, we don’t have the money to start yet.’”
This was serious, Baker recalled. “We were all tense and nuts, because we’d given up jobs, and what if we didn’t get the money?”
That money needed to come from a board that was half Warner and half AT&T. There weren’t a lot of rock-n-rollers there.
The MTV people tended to show them Nesmith’s “PopClips” and a few other pleasant-enough videos, while asking for patience and money.
The same extremes happened to the ESPN people, two years earlier. They recalled that in “ESPN: Those Guys Have All the Fun” (Little, Brown, 2011).
Yes, there was a corporate board. The ESPN funding as from Getty Oil.
And yes, there were shabby facilities, in this case in Bristol, Conn.
“The town was nothing but a broken-down shopping center,” Andy Brilliant said. “Most of the stores were closed. I remember there was shattered glass all over the place.”
The real offices and studios were being built, so people crowded into makeshift quarters. “They didn’t have TelePrompters, nobody had computers and they only had one old wire machine,” Bob Ley said.
There were two mobile trailers, Bill Shanahan recalled – one for the tape “library” (except it had no shelves, just tapes on the floor) and one optimistically called the executive office.
“We didn’t have indoor plumbing for at least a month,” Shanahan said. “You had to go outside and find one of the construction company’s Porta-potties. Now, during the day, that’s one thing, but at night, when it’s raining and you’re out in the dark with a flashlight ….”
And yes, there was lots of night work. There were 18-hour days, Chuck Pagano said, with most of the meals coming from a nearby restaurant. “You can only eat so many grinders and soup.”
Those young networks had something else in common – awful debuts.
“The first hour of MTV was a total, unmitigated disaster,” Pittman recalled in the MTV book. “The VJ’s would announce, ‘That was Styx,’ right after we’d played REO Speedwagon. They’d say, ‘This is the Who’ and a .38 Special video would come on.”
Two years earlier, ESPN had the same problem.
“It was a technical nightmare,” producer Bill Creasy recalled in the ESPN book. “It was dark in the truck and you couldn’t see what you were doing.
“We carried a god-awful night game of slow-pitch softball from Milwaukee …. The lighting was just abysmal.” That was followed by an interview from Colorado … except the sound didn’t work.
The saving grace? Only an estimated 30,000 people saw that first night.
The night also included a half-hour “SportsCenter,” plus wrestling and college soccer. It accented the key question for both start-ups: How, exactly,
were they going to fill all that time?
ESPN began with two big advantages: It had bought a prime spot on a satellite transponder and it had a deal for college games, via the NCAA.
That ncluded basketball, which was key. But it didn’t include football, which was what sports fans really wanted.
The problem was obvious in 1982, when the NCAA finally had a two-year package of games from Division II schools (the ones that, nowadays, are rarely on TV). The ESPN people struggled, analyzed, came up with what they felt was the precise number. The result:
— The USA Network bid $900,000.
— ESPN bid $7 million,
— Ted Turner’s TBS bid $17 million.
As it turned out, Bob Gutowski said in the ESPN book, the $7 million was probably right; TBS reportedly lost $10-12 million on the deal. “We believed Turner bid 17 because in Atlanta he was Channel 17.”
Whatever the reason, it showed that early cable was still make-a-guess. It also showed how networks were scrambling to fill all that time.
The ESPN founders had hedged their bets by including the “E.” This was the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network; it was free to wander outside of sports.
It did sign Denise Austin for a half-hour show (twice each morning) doing exercises from glamorous locations. It briefly had a fashion show, an auction of Elvis Presley’s car and more.
But mostly, it scrambled for sports – any sports. “The only rights we had for football were for two- or three-day delays,” Brilliant said in the ESPN book, “and from conferences that no one really cared about.”
At the weekly conferences, he said, ESPN boss Chet Simmons was downbeat. “He would bemoan the state we’re in and say: ‘I’m used to doing the Olympics and now I’m running ping-pong tournaments and slow-pitch softball games.’”
MTV at least knew exactly what it was going to do – show music videos, all day. But how many were they? And were they any good?
Music videos had sort of been around forever. There were “soundies” in the 1940s, showing songs by jazz greats. Scopitone, created in France, offered a sort of video jukebox. And some directors – not many– were merging sight and sound beautifully.
There was Richard Lester’s brilliant direction of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” (1964) and “Help” (1965) … or the Beatles’ TV work, including “Magical Mystery Tour” (1967) … or John Boorman’s work in the Dave Clark Five’s “Having a Wild Weekend” (1965) … or Jack Haley Jr.’s Emmy-winning direction of his then-wife Nancy Sinatra’s “Movin’ With Nancy” (1967) … or many of the “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” numbers.
All showed what could happen when music and video merged in clever ways. Others tried to make “promotional films” stamd out. There were enough for Nesmith to make “PopClips” and Todd Rundgren to try bouncing a 24-hour video channel off a satellite; when the satellite failed, his plan died.
So there were videos, but MTV needed permission to use each one.
Pittman estimated there were 250 videos in existence; Freston said there were about 165 at MTV – some from unknowns and many from Rod Stewart.
“We played him like every five minutes,” Gale Sparrow said in the MTV book. “Rod was lucky we didn’t ruin his career. To be honest, we’d play pretty much anyone with a video.”
Some didn’t expect to be there, including Lee Ritenour (a jazz guitarist, not a rocker) and Blotto.
Blotto – a whimsical indie band in Albany, New York — linked with college students to make a video of “I Wanna Be a Lifeguard.” It was in heavy rotation on MTV, as were some of the subsequent videos.
The band members soon went elsewhere (with some reunions); one became a lawyer, another directed operas. But they could tell the world that they were on the first day of MTV, between Iron Maiden and Rod Stewart.
This was wobbly. If a typical video ran five minutes (counting introduction), you could go through all 165 of them in 14 hours. And you had 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s a lot of Blotto, a lot of Devo, a LOT of Rod Stewart. MTV was shaky.
Except …
As Brian Graden tells the story, his world transformed when MTV arrived.
He was 16 or 17 at the time, he said, and in a rock band. In Hillsboro (an Illinois town of 6,000), one kid could get MTV via satellite dish.
This became an obsession. Graden quit his other activities and spent long hours in his friend’s basement, staring at the wonders of rock videos. Much later, he became president of MTV.
The story has some flaws. (When MTV debuted, Graden was 18 and a month from college.) But he tells it with such zest that you get the idea: There was a wondrous, obsessive quality to these videos.
Yes, they attracted the likes of Beavis and Butt-Head, fictional airheads who stared for hours. But they also drew folks like Graden, who would go on to Oral Roberts University and then Harvard.
People liked the VJ’s. (“I think everybody in North America had a small crush on Martha Quinn,” Weird Al Yankovic said, quite accurately, in the MTV book.) And they were fascinated by the videos – even the overwrought, overweird ones, of which there were many.
And the videos kept getting better, as record companies saw that MTV propelled sales. From Madonna to Michael, from Bowie to Britney, there were people whose careers soared with music videos.
At the same time, ESPN was creating a huge change.
At first, it begged cable systems to take the channel for free; now it wanted to be paid. The first attempt (with the giant Cablevision system) was heated.
“But at the end of the day, they blinked and agreed to pay a dime (per month) per household,” Brilliant said. “We breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was the first time we actually received validation that our service was worth something to the cable operators.”
It was worth a lot, actually. Eventually, ESPN had college football (including most bowl games), plus pro football (on Mondays), pro hockey and pro basketball. Its “SportsCenter” drew praise; Aaron Sorkin (“West Wing”) became a big fan and created “Sports Night,” a superb ABC drama.
And it became worth more than a dime. A 2023 account in the Sportico website said ESPN was getting $9.42 per month per household. The next closest was Turner’s TNT, at $3.
Those fees brought in $8.1 billion a year, Sportico said. Others weren’t close, but there were six other channels that lean heavily on sports and topped $1 billion a year from cable-0system fees – TNT, TBS, USA, Fox Sports1, NFL Network and even ESPN2.
Cable, it seems, had gone far beyond its days of ping-pong and slow-pitch softball.