I Want My MTV-The Book
"Hey, Cher, where’s Sonny?"He’s home, fucking your mother."
It’s that kind of book. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry…and it settles scores.
I couldn’t put it down. I read it from start to finish. But you can keep it in your bathroom, to thumb through and entertain yourself in short spurts.
None of these books are ever honest. Either the writer is worried about his future career or has a chip on his shoulder. And even though I believe some of the interviewees stretch the truth (it’s hard to get an old rock star to swear off hyperbole, they’re always into what makes a good story), the fact that you hear about these incidents from a number of different people means you end up ferreting out the truth, in most cases anyway.
Like John Lack started MTV. Not Bob Pittman, he’s been stealing credit for years.
And Joel Gallen did not create "Unplugged", no matter what he tells everybody.
And swings are taken at taboo subjects. In the business, you won’t find a single person to say a bad word about Hale Milgrim, former head of Capitol Records, marketing maven extraordinaire. But Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys decks him. Whew!
And despite defending himself, the book spends pages excoriating Abbey Konowitch, how he was drunk with power.
And I know the book is true because you couldn’t find one single person to say a negative thing about Tom Freston, everybody loved him. I feel the same way. I wonder what’s in his DNA?
Now there are multiple stories here. The business story, the cultural impact and the gossip.
There are some fascinating behind the scenes nuggets, you’ll enjoy them, hell, we all watched MTV, we know each and every one of these videos. But the real story is the business one. How the network barely got off the ground and had trouble getting on cable systems… The bands may be long gone, but John Malone is still a cable kingpin, MTV had to go through him, he wouldn’t add the station to his systems.
And the company was losing money hand over fist. Until, like a band, it all flipped and revenue came cascading down. And just like a band jilting a manager, like Madonna breaking up with Jellybean Benitez, the network used the record labels and then abandoned them, broke and busted on the side of the highway, wondering what the hell happened.
And Les Garland comes off as a bigger rock star than those on the screen. He parties all night but shows up in the office at the crack of dawn, a veritable Yogi Bear. And he seduces everything that moves. Yes, the original MTV crew were not employees doing a job, they were renegades on a MISSION!
Which is probably why Bob Pittman’s had no success since. He wasn’t a team player. It was about him rather than the network. Hell, someone even takes a swing at his social-climbing ex-wife! In other words, if you weren’t in it for the music, for the good times, for the tequila and the laughs, you were on the wrong team, you had to go. Unless you were willing to work day and night for bupkes, MTV was not for you.
This is the best book I’ve read on how the music business really works. Outsiders and wannabes think it’s about getting an internship, doing your job, working your way up the corporate ladder. That’s horseshit. Are you a larger than life character? Are you a renegade? Are you willing to call your boss on the carpet when he’s gone too far? THEN you’re ready for the music business, where the only rules that exist are the ones you make.
It’s all about leverage. David Geffen and Michael Jackson exploit it. If you think these big names are saints, you’ve never left the neighborhood. These people have more flaws than an Armani suit at an outlet mall. They make it via chutzpah and innovation, they fly by the seat of their pants, knowing if you haven’t done anything for me lately, I won’t take your phone call, no matter how big you once were.
And Sinead O’Connor sums it all up, where we are today:
"MTV has quite a lot to answer for. When video came around, the business transformed, and it became important how you looked. It became more visual and more materialistic. I mean, I hold MTV entirely responsible for the bling culture. It started when they made that show ‘Cribs.’ Now you have a whole generation of young people who’ve been brought up to believe that fame and material wealth is what it’s all about. You don’t have young people saying, ‘I really want to be a singer,’ they say, ‘I really want to be famous.’ Then you’ve created a culture of people who feel they’re nothing unless they live in a huge house and have seven cars."
Ergo, "Jersey Shore". Sure, it’s a cheap target, but it’s all about lifestyle and little about substance.
But those days are over.
Everybody got a good ride in the eighties. The bands, the labels, MTV itself. Then the Internet came along and wiped it all clean. As Paul McGuinness states:
"MTV and Viacom’s utter failure to transfer their huge, worldwide audience from cable television onto the Internet will go down in history as a disaster."
You see, ultimately MTV is like the bands it promoted. It’s date-stamped, it’s got a shelf-life, with no underlying substance, it ultimately hits a wall. But at least an old band can go on tour and play its classics. MTV has to constantly reinvent itself, its hold on youth culture is very tenuous.
As are the careers of so many in this book. They were gods in the last century, so many can’t even work today.
So I guess you should enjoy it while you can.
But the big star of "I Want My MTV" is David Fincher. He catapulted from videos to movies in a big way, as in being nominated for an Academy Award. Why? Because he put in his 10,000 hours. He worked for George Lucas, he didn’t come out of nowhere. And when people saw what he could do, they clamored for it.
So you might feel lucky today, you might even gain some notoriety, but unless you’ve paid your dues, your odds of surviving tomorrow are slim.
It was a crazy era. MTV was the culture, there was almost no alternative. Then it was all blown to bits and those in power back then are still yearning for a return to the old days.
It’s sad.
And we don’t only see it in music, we see it in newspapers and magazines. Somehow, these industries thought they were immune, that the gravy train would last forever. Want to last forever? Change. But change is scary.
MTV changed to survive. There’s a channel with that moniker on your system but it’s nothing like the station of yore. It’s not about music.
But once upon a time MTV was. It made and destroyed careers. Hell, you’ve got to love a tome that spends pages delineating how Billy Squier killed his career with just one video… I tell that story constantly to the younger generation, as a warning to only do what feels right, because one mistake and…
I could go on and on. I could even point out the proofreading mistakes.
But I’ll just say this was like reading the story of my life. Like someone shot video of my complete experience of the eighties. Read "I Want My MTV". If you’re an oldster, to reminisce. If you’re a youngster, to see what it takes to make it, on both sides of the camera. There are lessons here for everybody. It’s too long, the vision isn’t coherent. There are too many stories of the making of the videos at the expense of the underlying business and cultural issues… Then again, "I Want My MTV" is just like the channel, just like the eighties, a bunch of stuff thrown up against the wall…you’ll like it.
