Someone posted on YouTube the first two hours of MTV from way back in 1981. Since I was five years old at the time, didn’t have cable, and my parents pretty much controlled what music I listened to, I don’t remember the earliest years. The very first time I saw MTV was in 1986 when we finally got cable and the first video I saw was Bananarama’s “Venus.” Just for funsies, I thought I’d watch this and here are some of my impressions.
Mark Goodman, one of the original MTV VJs, sure says MTV and stereo a lot. I mean, A LOT. I suppose they wanted to make sure the audience understood what this new cable television station was all about.
I had forgotten that stereo was not the standard in most people’s homes at the time. Goodman is constantly reminding us to contact our cable comany and have stereo connected directly to our FM radios to enjoy the music as it should be heard.
It’s a little weird seeing a lot of acts I never heard of. Did you know there was a band called Shoes? They had a video by Lee Ritenour and I had to look up who he was. He’s a fairly accomplished jazz guitarist which might explain why his song seemed out of place on MTV and why I’ve never heard of him.
It was a little weird seeing acts I was familiar with. Robert Palmer in a video from before he cloned all those women, The Who (whom I never saw on MTV that I can recall), and The Cars.
It’s weird seeing people smoke during interviews.
Is there some reason “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” didn’t list Tom Petty? They just credit Stevie Nicks.
I’ve never heard of Rupert Hines, but I kind of like “Surface Tension.”
It’s weird seeing two hours of pop music and not a single black artist.
Love that sax on Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” though he’s trying hard to look like John Lennon except without the round glasses.
*Juice Newton’s version of “Angel of the Morning.” I remember this, or maybe Anne Murray’s version, was something that would play on whatever radio station my mother listened to. Yet another odd choice I think, but what do I know?
I’ve got a bit of nostalgia for MTV from 1986-1994. After I graduated high school, I didn’t have as much time to watch it. And even then, the station was producing more and more shows like The Real World (barf!) and I would have been less inclined to watch anyway. While I might lament that MTV changed so much, I’m sure it was necessary if they wished to survive in the long term. The original format was getting less viable even before the ubiquity of online access to music.
Goodman and most of the other VJs were all radio DJs with little to no experience with television. Martha Quinn was basically right out of college. I believe the story is they intentionally hired people who didn’t really have experience in TV because they wanted it to be “edgy” and “new.”
Why yes I do!!! Was there a video of theirs in the first two hours? They’re known in power pop circles. They’re from Zion, Illinois, which is about an hour up the road from me in Chicago. I only learned of them in the late 90s, early 00s, as they were somewhat obscure. I would not have expected to run into them on MTV. Great songs!
Yeah, and that was the first time I can ever recall hearing them. It’s even mentioned on the Wikipedia entry for Shoes that they were among the first bands to air on MTV. They played “Too Late.”
I loved MTV in those early days! That was the year I got married, and we didn’t have cable TV money, but I used to look after a friend’s parents’ house and pets frequently, and they had it. Their cats got way more lap time than they would have otherwise.
I didn’t have MTV when it first came out, but we had it a few months afterward.
MTV ended up playing a lot of artists that weren’t well known in the beginning. They had a hard time filling up 24 hours with music videos, because very few people made them.
Oddly, the first video I saw for a song was by Kansas, in a movie theater. I never saw it broadcast on MTV or any other music video program. I don’t recall what song it was, but the video seemed to have something to do with malaria.
I sent the link to a friend (in the wee hours, after I should’ve stopped watching it and gone to bed). And I said:
Well, I just had to watch this. Ooh, I was not ready for how homemade it was, but not in a good way. Funny cuts where you still hear studio noises, dead air with a pattern spinning, and REO comes on for a few seconds, then cuts out, black screen, over to a “Vee-Jay” who comes up mid-sentence and they never go back to the video. And a few surprises: one of the first videos was a band called… PhD? Anyhow, some fun nostalgia, especially for Pretenders and Split Enz videos.
But I got thinking, were those funny cuts and dead air a result of someone editing this? Did someone take out commercials (but, left many of them in), and butcher it?
Or was MTV still a bit rough around the edges?
I was wondering the same thing. There’s an interview with a guy about rock 'n roll memorabilia, but during the whole segment there’s music playing so loudly you can’t hear what he’s saying. During the Rupert Hines song there’s a section where they throw up some text saying their copy of the original broadcast didn’t have the whole song so they replaced the missing part with a copy of the video from another source. At this point, I’m inclined to say the errors were broadcasts that way.
I was 14 when MTV started…perfect age for it. So sad MTV lost its way. It was SOOOOO much more cool back then. infinitely more cool. It just sucks now.
Sadly, we did not get cable for a few years after MTV started so my friends and I would stay up to watch Friday Night Videos.
Can you imagine being a band without a video when MTV started?
“Joey, you got one o’ them VHS cameras, right? We’ll find an abandoned warehouse for am-bee-yance, but we’ll need reeeally long extension cords for the lights. Can we rent some girls to be fans? …They cost HOW much?”
We did have cable, but I still didn’t have MTV at first. Not all cable systems carried it in the early days. Friday Night Videos was also my introduction to music videos. I can well remember staying up after midnight on Friday nights to see what videos would be shown that week. It was so cool and exciting.
I’m trying to remember when we got MTV in Austin…we watched it addictively, I just can’t remember when it started. But boy did that video bring back memories, though I didn’t watch the whole thing.
I was in college in 1981, so no TV. (I thought I remembered music videos from the late 70s?? Maybe they were on other stations before MTV)
Anyway, it’s an art form I’ve never personally enjoyed. I have a moderate interest in listening to music, but never had any desire to watch music videos.
Have you ever seen the tapes of the early episodes of SportsCenter? They give the same feel as this, a badly-designed stage set and a bunch of guys sitting around pretending to know what they’re supposed to be doing. And they were badly limited by the availability of tapes to show on air.
MTV rolled out nationally in 1982, which is when it finally reached me. I’d heard a lot about it so I tuned in. It hooked me instantly even though I was 32 and an old 60s guy. I loved the British New Wave acts in the same way I loved the British Invasion groups. Fresh and new and intensely musical.
The set designers and directors learned their business by then so the images appeared more professional. A year of experience put the Fab Five VJs at ease. More importantly, their growing fame made them equals in interviews; they no longer came across as pathetic fans. Confidence shows visually. MTV had it in just a year.
Their era didn’t last much longer than the 60s did. Didn’t matter. The world changed.
Another one who found videos through Friday Night Videos. I think the first ones I saw were Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics and We Can Dance If We Want To by Men Without Hats.
My daughter was born that year. I had the distinct feeling I was already old.
I was a bit surprised that the videos from the two hour premier weren’t really that bad from a production point of view. Don’t get me wrong, some of them were down right unimaginative, .38 Special I’m looking at you, but a few of them were trying their best in what was a fairly new medium.
Our local cable company had MTV but only for half of the day. It had to share the channel with the Comedy channel (whatever it was called then). Both were too edgy for our small town I guess.
I remember listening to the audio portion of MTV by hooking my stereo receiver to a cable splitter, since our TV didn’t have stereo yet. I thought it was so high-tech!
I recorded a few hours of videos from that era, including the unforgettable Fish Heads. Now I just have to find a VHS player so I can watch them again.
