I Want My MTV (21 page)

 

MARK GOODMAN:
Garland and Sykes were living the life people thought
we
were living. We'd be in the studio at eight or nine in the morning, shooting, and Garland would show up after having been out all night. “I was just out partying with Keith Richards.”
That's great. I was in bed at eleven.

 

STEVE BACKER, record executive:
The greatest job ever invented was doing talent relations for MTV from 1981 to 1992.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
The music department—Les Garland, Gale Sparrow, Roberta Cruger—they were the gods of the place.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Gale Sparrow personified the spirit of MTV. She loved rock n' roll, she loved to party, she knew everybody. We would all get drunk at lunch, stagger back to work, sleep in the office, start drinking again later, then go out together at night. Sex, drugs, drinking—all that stuff was very much part of the company culture.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
We worked a lot of hours, but we partied a lot, too. Gale Sparrow had an expense account, and she'd take us around the corner to Cafe Un Deux Trois. We used to shut that place down.

 

DEBBIE NEWMAN:
I love Gale, but she's a complete lush.

 

JEANNE MATTIUSSI:
Gale and I drank Sambuca on my expense account until we were sick. We also drank our fair share of champagne. And we enjoyed a good bottle of wine.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
I'd be the first one in the office, and sometimes Gale was still there from the night before. She may have rested there overnight, shall we say.

 

JORDAN ROST:
No matter how drunk and stoned you were at four in the morning, no one cared. But if you used that as an excuse not to show up at the 9 A.M. meeting, you lost a ton of points.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
In the '80s, music companies had parties every night. We weren't getting paid a lot of money, but we were always able to go to a concert, and to eat and drink for free.

 

LES GARLAND:
We were a bunch of fucking crazy misfits, but we loved each other. We looked out for one another.

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
MTV was like that scene in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
where all those people are drawn together because they've all seen Devils Tower.

 

LES GARLAND:
Bob and I both suffered eye injuries when we were young. So that became kind of a joke. “Pittman, between the two of us, we have two good eyes.”

 

ALLEN NEWMAN:
Have you heard the expression, “Bob Pittman—two t's, one eye”?

 

JOAN MYERS:
When Les was a child, he was in an accident and lost the vision in one eye. They told him someday he might have to have it replaced. That day came when he was golfing in Hawaii. He had to take an emergency flight back to New York to have a glass eye put in.

 

HARVEY LEEDS:
We all joked, “You'll do anything to suck up to Pittman. You'll even poke your fucking eye out.”

 

ALLEN NEWMAN:
I was up at Garland's apartment, watching Sunday football, and he calls me into the kitchen. He takes out the biggest knife in his drawer and sticks the knife in his eye.
Clink, clink, clink.
And he goes, “Bud, glass eye.” I didn't know until he did that.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Les and Sykes managed relationships with the music industry. The wild and crazy ones dealt with Les, and the businesslike and analytical ones dealt with Sykes.

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH, record executive; MTV executive:
John Sykes knew how to build relationships with artists. He was slick, and he got the Rolling Stones and Billy Idol and Tom Petty to do things for free, for a network that barely existed. He was great at getting artists to believe in the dream, and he executed his promotions so brilliantly that artists would say thank you to
him
when they were over.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
John ran all our contests. As a kid growing up in Schenectady, New York, John entered
every
contest. He told us, “You know what the problem was? I never won anything.” And so Marcy Brafman very smartly came up with the marketing proposition, “People Really Win on MTV.” We determined that whenever we ran a contest, we would follow around the winner. Our first contest, “One Night Stand with Journey,” was won by a Margaret Doebler. She was a typical older teenager—a little chunky, a little middle-American, with permed blond hair—and when we followed Margaret around, we proved the proposition: “People Really Win on MTV.”

When we launched, we said we were in 3 million homes. We were not. We were only in a half million homes for at least the first few months. When we ran the Journey contest, we didn't know what to expect. When we counted the number of postcards, we had ninety thousand. That's when we knew we were good to go.

 

JOHN SYKES:
For “One Night Stand with Journey,” I wanted to put together the dream rock n' roll trip: We'd fly a fan anywhere in the world, they'd go backstage, hang with the group, fly home that night, and be in school or at work the next day. It was a fantasy, the ultimate one-night stand. Double meaning. And Bob loved planes. He said, “My friend Artie has a Learjet at Republic Airport on Long Island,” so we went to Artie and leased his Learjet.

We wanted to make it look like it was
our
Learjet, so Fred made up a piece of Mylar with an MTV logo, and I taped it to the outside of the plane's door. The pilot said, “You know, that Mylar could get sucked into the engine and we could all die. You've got to take it off.” So the camera shot the plane taxiing away, and once we got out of the camera range, the pilot stopped, opened the plane door, and we removed the Mylar logo. Then we'd land to pick up the contest winner, stop before the end of the runway, where like the local townspeople were waiting with their cameras, tape the Mylar back up, and taxi into view in the MTV Learjet.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
John was a great hustler. We'd always say, “Oh fuck, Sykes has another contest.” But years later, the business is now all about integration and contests, and doing things that cross over from the show to the Web. Sykes was aware of all that stuff early on.

 

CURT SMITH:
Here's the thing about John Sykes: He's impossible to dislike. My wife and I were at his wedding in the Hamptons, at [
Rolling Stone
editor and publisher] Jann Wenner's house. MTV did a good job of hiring people who could meet, mingle, and be liked by everyone. Artists would do things for MTV they wouldn't normally do for other people, because you don't want to say
no
to your friends.

MICHAEL STIPE:
John and I are still friends.

 

TOMMY MOTTOLA:
Sykes was the ultimate promotion man, a royal pain in the ass who would not leave you alone until you finally gave in. He would call me relentlessly, twenty times, until I said either
yes
or
yes
.

 

JOHN SYKES:
I made sure the trains ran on time. Les could go toe to toe with artists. But Bob was the genius strategist. One of the record company executives called him “the guy with the ten-thousand-pound brain.”

 

JUDY McGRATH:
Bob Pittman was very confident that MTV was going to be big, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. He made you want to paint the fence for him. He had the true sense of what this thing was going to be, and nothing was going to get in his way.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
I was wildly passionate and naturally argumentative
and
incredibly inflexible. I was the programmer. I got to make the choices.

 

CHARLIE WARNER:
If you talk with people who worked for Bob, you will find that some found him aloof, arrogant, and overly ambitious. The majority of them adore him.

 

MARCY BRAFMAN:
I love Bob. I don't know that everyone says that.

 

ALLEN NEWMAN:
The directors who were working for MTV went out on strike, because they wanted to join the Directors Guild of America. I got called into Bob Pittman's office, and he told me my new job was to run the studio while our directors were out striking. He doubled my salary from $11,500 to $25,000 a year. It was the first time I'd ever sat in the director's chair, and I had to learn on the fly. I was basically a scab, but I was a scab who had just doubled his salary, from the man himself.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
Bob wanted the final word on everything. And when it came time for the credit, he would assume it as the biggest guy in the room: “Everything that happens under me is mine.” The thing that drove me crazy about Bob was that when awards were handed out on a specific piece of work, he would collect it, rather than let the person who did the work collect it.

He had an incredible ability to drive you crazy on a project, but he knew when to back off. John Lack didn't always know how to do that. John would do things like mess with a typeface. Bob didn't know what a typeface was and didn't care. But that was John, all the way. I felt he was ultimately disrespectful to creative people.

 

SUE STEINBERG:
John Lack was Batman and Bob Pittman was Robin. And ultimately, Bob became Batman.

 

JOHN LACK:
Look, John Sykes will say he was the father of MTV. Bob Pittman will say he was. They're all saying it.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Bob was the young star, he was the guy the press was attracted to. How could somebody that young be so articulate, smart, and committed? So Bob got a lot of ink, and that created dislocation and envy. I don't know for sure that John Lack felt that way, but he could rightly say that he was the father of MTV—it was his idea, he put the team together, he sold it to the board—yet the credit was evading his grasp. It was accruing to Bob. Bob would say, “I never took credit for having the idea, but I did make it happen.” And in a way, Bob was right. Bob
did
lead the creative process for what MTV became. But
conceptually,
it was John who had the idea to do it.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
John Lack fell out of favor with the board of directors. We'd projected $10 million in ad revenue, and we'd done $500,000. The ad agencies would buy national programming only when it had a two-thirds reach of the country and a 3.0 rating. Cable networks don't even have that today. The board began to get nervous. It all got crazy, at which point I came close to leaving. Barry Diller, the CEO of Paramount, was wooing me to leave MTV. David Geffen tried to hire me to become president of the Geffen Company.

An old-line Hollywood film producer named Marty Ransohoff said, “Why should
you
have to leave? MTV's
your
idea.
You're
the one doing it. If you have a fight,
you
don't have to leave.” So I stuck it out.

Drew Lewis, who'd been President Reagan's secretary of transportation and was famous for firing all the air traffic controllers, came in as chairman and CEO of Warner Amex Cable Communications [in February 1983]. Drew pulled me aside and said, “Look, you're gonna take over MTV eventually. But only if you fix this thing. And if you can't get us to break even by the end of the year, we're shutting it down.”

TOM FRESTON:
He'd fired the air traffic controllers. He would have had no problem firing forty hippies who were working out of some dump.

 

JOHN SYKES:
Those were bumpy times for MTV. Drew Lewis was really pressing us to cut costs. Cable was a more expensive business than anyone at Warner Amex had anticipated. It was expensive to wire neighborhoods. And we were still just getting going. The buzz was getting bigger and bigger, but the cash wasn't coming in like it did later. We were very much the Facebook of our time. Every kid loved us, but the financial model wasn't quite working yet.

 

JOHN LACK:
Jack Schneider came into my office one day and said, “John, we're consolidating. There's only room for one of us and it ain't gonna be you.” So I left MTV towards the end of '83. The Movie Channel had just about gotten to break-even. MTV wasn't making money. Steve Ross said, “We're spending millions. We can't do this shit anymore.” They paid me big dough to go away, paid me for the three years left on my contract. I exercised all my stock options. I was richer than I should have been at thirty-five years old, so I wasn't too upset with Jack. When you're playing in big-boy land, the air gets kind of thin at the top. I learned that you can't stay too long at the party when the party's over for you. And a year later, Schneider got fired. When I left, Schneider promoted Pittman to take over some of my functions; he didn't give him Nickelodeon to program, but he made him executive vice president of MTV and The Movie Channel. Now, Bob Pittman was the smartest guy I ever met. He believed MTV was his dream, too. Unfortunately, he tried to make it his own dream by taking credit for it when I left. The world finally said, “Bob, weren't you an employee hired to do this?” If I was the architect, he was the general contractor.

 

JACK SCHNEIDER:
John Lack was an enormous disappointment. I was very disappointed in his conduct and development. He wasn't a good executive. I think John has always represented himself as being a bigger player in this than he was.

 

JOHN LACK:
When I left, Bob did an even better job than I did, but he didn't invent the thing. He was great at implementing the vision. But it wasn't his vision. After I left, he took the vision and went left and right with it, God bless. That's what all good executives do. But he was married to a strange, upwardly-mobile lady by the name of Sandy. A famous, controversial character. She was obsessed with building his image as a media giant. They lived above their means in an apartment they couldn't afford. She was a social climber. They're long divorced now.