I want my MTV

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The First Four Hours: 12am Saturday August 1st 1981 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

MTV launched to the world on August 1, 1981. It’s not any kind of Official Anniversary (43 years is not a round number) but I watched some of this the other day and it was strange and weird and delightful how many memories came flooding back, and what it was like at the very beginning (not later, this is not about the cool things that happened later) as the culture shifted for avid music consumers around the existence of this new thing. 

You knew who your friends were by who would call you when something you needed to see was on; there were so many times that my best friend at the time and I would pick up the phone to call each other and the other person would be on the line already, some kind of weird quirk where they’d dialed the number and you’d picked it up before it had a chance to ring. It felt like magic when there’s definitely some kind of other scientific explanation for it, but it was always one of those moments where your friendship was indelibly affirmed. Like, “they’re showing this video of the Byrds from Beat Club” (omg thank god for Beat Club. They somehow saved their tapes while other television outlets just threw them out and recorded over them, we would all learn) or “THEY ARE SHOWING ‘YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE’ AND IT’S NOT EVEN 120 MINUTES.” Love is a ring/the telephone.

I’d chase people out of the room when 120 Minutes was on. Roommates, significant others, people who thought that they could just come in and yammer like what was being shown wasn’t important or vital. It was the only chance we had to see some of these bands, period, especially the British bands or definitely BANDS FROM AUSTRALIA. Or New Zealand! But also, a chance to see these bands on television were not exactly thick on the ground. Let’s remember that at the time, your options for music on broadcast television were: Saturday Night Live and their paltry two songs (which would always sound like shit), you had to have major label support to even get the chance; the occasional rogue late night program (anyone remember Fridays?) that was forgettable except that they let the band have more songs than SNL and they sounded better; Friday Night Videos, Night Flight, and other random video programs you might find out about through the grapevine.

Letterman was better in terms of accessible possibilities, and you could set your VCR to record it; I fought bitterly with my junior year college roommates because they always wanted to watch the Star Trek reuns at 11:30 when I wanted to watch Iggy or R.E.M. or whoever – they had seen every episode, they knew them by heart, they were not even open to occasional negotiation, e.g. “Can we just not watch it tonight because there’s a band I really care about,” let alone have the opportunity to just watch Letterman when it was odd and genuinely funny. Before you ask, not everyone in college had a television in their room so it wasn't as simple as going over to friends, plus it was 11:30 at night and people had early classes. I did meet some cool dudes once when I literally ran from floor to floor listening at doors hoping I’d hear someone watching the show, whereupon I knocked on the door and begged them to let me hang out and watch it. You did what you had to do! 

If you didn’t have MTV (and I didn’t have it until I moved to Hoboken after I graduated college, because MTV was only available in Manhattan and not the outer boroughs for a very long time) you were constantly tortured by the ads for it featuring people like Bowie or Pete Townshend or the Police telling you to call your cable company and tell them “I Want My MTV.” WE CANNOT DO THAT, PETE, IT DOES NOT EXIST IN THE BRONX, I would yell at the television as though he could hear me. (One of many reasons my junior year roommates did not like watching television with me. These were women who slept in their makeup in case A Man showed up. We did not have a lot in common, and I was intense in my own ways, to be fair.)

When a big video came out, MTV would hype them up by doing “world premieres” but they didn’t always tell you exactly what time, for obvious reasons. I was living at my parents’ house the summer of 1984 (it was between junior and senior year of college) and the day the “Dancing In The Dark” video debuted for the first time I was in charge of making sure to take out the frozen chicken for dinner so it could defrost while my mom picked up my younger siblings from day camp, and this unfortunately coincided with a showing of the video, during which our dog, Rocky, enjoyed some chicken for dinner. 

In my defense, we had a microwave! We had owned a microwave since the early 70s because my father didn’t want to have to decide what he wanted for dinner at 6 in the morning when he was leaving the house, and he had a friend whose company made the boxes for Panasonic so he had a chance to buy one at a reduced price. I’M JUST SAYING THAT YES IT IS MY FAULT THAT ROCKY ATE THE CHICKEN BUT IT DIDN’T NEED TO BE SITTING ON THE COUNTER.

I did not live this down for years, because when I explained that the reason that I left the chicken unattended was that MTV was showing the new Bruce Springsteen video, everyone wanted to see the video to try to understand what was so engrossing that I abandoned my post guarding the chicken. Once they had seen it, there were a bunch of hushed “but what was in the video that made her so emotional” conversations I overheard. This was a thing in our family for fucking years. I could not live it down.

(PERSONAL to my nephew who is a newsletter subscriber: ZACH, DO NOT TAKE THIS AS AN INVITATION TO RE-OPEN THE DISCUSSION BY ASKING YOUR MOM ABOUT IT.)

Another aspect of life with MTV was the notion of the videotape that was always in the VCR (or immediately adjacent to the VCR opening, the shortest possible distance, which you sometimes had to negotiate for if you had roommates) so that you could at least stand a chance of taping the video you wanted to tape, so that your friends who didn’t have MTV could see it. This meant that you had at least half a dozen recordings of the video in question because it’s rare that you had any kind of advance warning, even if you did no one’s VCR started taping instantly (at least not the VCR’s that we could afford). I tripped over coffee tables, I knocked into roommates, I banged my shin countless times flying across the room to get the tape in the machine and hit record (or even just hit record). Yes, you might have a remote, but sometimes the remote was corded, so you might as well not have a remote, and if you walked around with the remote in your pocket or whatever you risked misplacing it and then angering the roommate the VCR belongs to. (I'm not saying that this happened, I'm just saying it was a risk.)

The other strategy was if MTV said “And coming up, the Bangles and ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’!” was that you’d hit record in the hopes that it would be soon enough and then you’d at least have a copy of the video that didn’t have the first 5-25 seconds cut off of it. It meant that you then “wasted tape” on videos you didn’t care about and various local commercials that are definitely hilarious to watch now but back then were just A WASTE OF TAPE. Video tape wasn’t cheap! You could buy the 6-packs from J&R Music World or in a pinch pay the premium to get them at Tower Records, which was open later/more conveniently located, but it was still an investment. The geeky dudes would buy them from mail order catalogs along with their boxes of Maxell XL-90’s. I was too busy buying records and concert tickets and was not investing in future video taping.

I still have some of these compilation tapes; I had to suck it up and get rid of a bunch of them in a move in 2016 because I literally did not have the room or the mental bandwidth to try to sort through them. I offered them up to anyone who wanted them and the only taker expected me to schlep them to Bushwick for them, which is not how giving things away works. I didn’t own a working VCR at the time, and I only ever watched them when either an old friend who was around back then came to visit. Plus, they’re not archival, and watching them over and over was going to make what was an already degrading format further deteriorate. But it was always like stepping into the Twilight Zone whenever I did. Here’s U2 walking down the Las Vegas Strip filming a video; here’s Kurt Loder with a news story about Madonna, what's she wearing; here’s the Replacements with no eyebrows; here’s a bunch of commercials, what the hell was I hoping to tape, did I ever actually get it, doesn’t look like it. One of the reasons I decided to get rid of the VHS tapes was advice from a fellow obsessive: it’s all on YouTube now. She was right, but it’s not the same. Nothing is, but I'm not sure it's better in this case.

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