Recalling MTV's glory days: 'Thriller,' VJs, Duran Duran and more

Donna Cashman and her husband set out snacks and drinks in their Islip apartment, allowed their two young daughters to stay up late and invited a couple of neighbors over to watch television on the evening of Dec. 2, 1983. They had gathered to witness a historic event: The premiere of "Michael Jackson’s Thriller" on MTV.

"Everybody in the world was waiting," Cashman, 71, says today, recalling her amazement at the 14-minute horror-musical that pushed the boundaries of the music video — a new but already ossifying medium. What’s more, Cashman says, seeing Jackson on what was then a mostly white MTV felt like a victory for all people of color. "It was an event," explains Cashman, who is Black. "He broke through."

It’s been a long time since the world paused to watch MTV. Once known for changing the musical landscape, creating stars and shaping the tastes of generations, MTV is now largely remembered as the brand behind the Video Music Awards, a yearly ceremony that still draws high ratings and press coverage. But the channel itself is all but devoid of music videos, instead airing mostly reality TV shows and sitcom reruns. This past Dec. 31, MTV’s owner, Paramount, pulled the plug on several MTV spinoffs overseas, including MTV Music and Club MTV.

Nevertheless, Paramount CEO David Ellison may have ambitious plans for the channel. He’s looking for ways to bring back its glory days and has spoken to other companies about possible partnerships, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The publication also described a dinner attended by Ellison, Paramount President Jeff Shell and several former MTV executives. (Paramount declined to comment for this story.)

A modern-day MTV "wouldn’t look anything like it has previously," says Terry Tompkins, associate professor and program coordinator for music business at Hofstra University. Once upon a time, MTV was a must-watch thanks to shows like the all-acoustic "Unplugged" and the pop showcase "Total Request Live," but no longer. "Our current students in the program," he observes, "have no idea about any of that stuff."

In the years before MTV, music videos were mostly just clips of artists performing their songs. For record labels, the clips often came in handy: Rather than fly a band overseas to perform, for instance, the label could simply send a video. Most were bare-bones productions, but some were artistically adventurous; Queen’s visually striking "Bohemian Rhapsody" (1975) is often cited as one of the first modern music videos.

The driving force behind MTV was John Lack, according to "I Want My MTV," a history of the channel written by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. Lack, then an executive at what was called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, believed music videos could help cable reach an elusive audience: teenagers.

"There were maybe 200 or 250 music videos that existed" at the time, says Marks, a Stony Brook native who is now executive editor of Hits magazine. "And MTV was a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week music video channel. So the proposition was, essentially: Build it and they will come."

IN THE BEGINNING

Modeled on radio, MTV would initially feature five VJ’s, or video jockeys, each with a distinctive persona: new-waver Alan Hunter, rocker Nina Blackwood, girl-next-door Martha Quinn, earnest Mark Goodman and laid-back J.J. Jackson. (Goodman, Hunter and Blackwood can still be heard on Sirius XM's '80s on 8 channel; Quinn works for iHeart Radio and Jackson died in 2004.) The playlist would be whatever the channel could find. And it would have an all-important logo, designed by Huntington natives Fred Seibert and Frank Olinsky.

Seibert, a sometime record producer, became MTV’s head of program services and oversaw the logo’s creation. The goal was something "kinetic," Seibert, 74, recalls. "Not just another logo that could be slapped on the side of a bank." He turned to his childhood friend Olinsky, head of the startup Manhattan Design firm, which came up with dozens of logos: dotted, spotted, zebra-striped and more.

Seibert was struggling to pick one, he says, when an idea came to him: "We should use all of them, all the time." The resulting 10-second spot used 21 different logos, he estimates.

Seibert also takes credit for MTV’s famous moon man mascot, which he calls "the only thing I personally ever brought to MTV." The idea, he recalls, was to irreverently compare the channel’s launch to some momentous event in television history. "I said, let’s take the moon landing and misappropriate it for MTV," Seibert says.

BRITISH BANDS BOOSTED MTV

MTV launched at midnight on Aug. 1, 1981, with footage from the actual Apollo 11 moon landing followed by Lack’s voice stating: "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." A crunching guitar theme (played by Ray Foote) kicked in while Seibert’s moon man planted a flag that vibrated with his raucous multi-logo. The channel’s now-famous first video was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles, followed by "You Better Run" by the Lindenhurst-raised rocker Pat Benatar, the first female artist to be played on the channel.

MTV’s early playlist was a hodgepodge: prog icons Styx, the sleek synth group Ultravox and Southern rockers .38 Special shared space with Iron Maiden and Blondie. Soon, though, it was the English New Wave bands that dominated the station with videos that could be cinematic (The Human League’s "Don’t You Want Me"), fashion-forward (Adam and the Ants’ "Antmusic") or highly sexual (Duran Duran’s "Girls on Film").

British bands were inherently more theatrical and stylish than their jeans-clad American counterparts, Marks explains. "Their music was based on creating new identities," he says. "They liked dressing up and doing silly things in front of the camera. And a lot of American artists thought it was beneath them to sully the authenticity of their music with lip-syncing." (In Marks’ book, Bruce Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, describes the singer’s attitude toward videos as, "Well, I guess we’ve got to.")

Initially available mostly in suburbs rather than cities, the channel launched its famous "I Want My MTV" campaign to encourage viewers to call their local cable operators and demand it. The ads worked. As MTV spread across the country during the early 1980s, it helped break one artist after another, from Duran Duran to Culture Club to Madonna. Classic rockers such as Billy Joel, Elton John and Stevie Nicks joined the video trend. Even an unfashionable group like the bearded, bluesy ZZ Top could score a hit with the right video. ("Legs," with its alluring lead actress and teen-movie narrative, helped ZZ Top reach No. 8 on the Billboard chart in 1984.)

MTV effectively became "the first national music broadcaster in America," according to Denis McNamara, then program director for Long Island’s taste-making FM station WLIR. As an example of the channel’s growing influence, McNamara points to "Take on Me," a 1984 pop ditty by the Norwegian band A-ha, which got little traction on WLIR until MTV aired its eye-popping animated video in 1985.

"The video hit and we had a tremendous response," McNamara recalls. "Many of these bands that weren’t known, got known because they had this immediate national coverage."

BLACK ARTISTS BREAK THROUGH

Meanwhile, MTV faced controversy for its lack of Black artists. Rick James complained about the issue publicly and David Bowie famously confronted Goodman about it in 1983, while MTV executives pointed to a rock-oriented format that simply had few Black artists. The color barrier gradually dissolved thanks largely to Jackson, although Prince also made inroads and hip-hop icons Run-D.M.C. joined Aerosmith for "Walk This Way," a 1986 video that helped bridge the gap between rap and rock.

"Not only were they racially scared, they were rap scared," Chuck D, frontman for the Long Island rap group Public Enemy, says of MTV during that period. Nevertheless, he gives the channel credit for its show "Yo! MTV Raps," which launched in the United States in 1988 and helped boost hip-hop’s profile. On tour with Public Enemy during that era, Chuck recalls, "we were discovering all these hip-hop and rap enclaves around the country, and that was the focus: They all wanted to get their music on MTV."

Even in the 1990s, as MTV shifted away from music videos to longer-form content (such as the pioneering reality show "The Real World"), the channel remained hugely popular. Clive Young appeared on the MTV game show "Remote Control" as a Hofstra student in 1990 and became marginally famous for about a year, he says.

"I would be walking through Target and somebody would say, ‘You’re that guy on MTV!’ " says Young, 57, who now edits the music-industry publication Mix. "I was like, ‘I was on one episode.’ "

Eventually, MTV began losing viewers and — like so many cable channels — found it difficult to compete in the world of streaming, says Tompkins, the music business professor. Music video content first migrated to YouTube and Vevo, he says, but today’s videos are no longer designed to keep viewers engaged for the length of a song. "The purpose of the music video now is to chop it up into short clips for TikTok," he explains. "The attention economy doesn’t allow for the average viewer to watch for even 4 minutes."

STILL WANT YOUR MTV? GO HERE

There’s still one place you can find hours upon hours of music video programming: MTV Rewind, a fan-run website (wantmymtv.xyz) that recreates the experience of plopping down with the channel and waiting to see your favorite band. Launched in early January, MTV Rewind features several nostalgic playlists — called "curated collections" — such as "MTV 1st Day," "MTV 90s" and "Live Aid 1985."

As a kid growing up in rural Oregon, "when I’d get some home from school or skateboarding, I would just put MTV on in the background and let it play while I was doing homework," says the site’s creator, a 43-year-old American developer in Albania who goes by the online handle Flex and will reveal only his first name, Louis. "I knew what MTV had become and I just felt like, ‘Man, that’s really sad. It would be cool if there was a way to recreate these memories.’ "

In the first few weeks of MTV Rewind’s existence, Flex says, he has received $25,000 in donations and numerous emails from grateful fans. "A lot of the older generation have said, ‘Wow, I can show my kids what MTV meant to me now,’"  Flex says. "One said he put it on and held a dance party where they danced around the living room."