I Want My MTV by Craig Marks

was not an easy sell in the beginning.
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    BOB PITTMAN: I started at MTV when I was twenty-six. We were all very young. And we were worried no one would take us seriously, so we wore suits. We wore suits to everything.
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    JOHN SYKES: Bob thought if we looked like drug addicts, no one would give us any money.
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    SIMON LE BON, Duran Duran: You thought, Who are these guys? They’re not very rock n’ roll.
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    JOHN SYKES: Bob and I would sit in record company offices and wait and wait and wait for them to see us. I’d go to California and sit outside offices and a secretary would say, “He’s not ready.” I’d go to lunch, use the bathroom five times, and come back the next day. At the end of day two she’d say, “Sorry, he had to leave.” I’d come back the next day and do it all over again.
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    GALE SPARROW: A lot of managers gave us their clients’ videos and said, “You have our permission to play them.” It was probably illegal. But not only did we play that manager’s big acts, we also played the baby acts they were trying to break. So they got double exposure.
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    LES GARLAND, MTV executive: Pittman and I were friends—we were programming different radio stations in Milwaukee at the same time. I was discovered in my twenties by the legendary radio programmer Bill Drake, and I was given a shot to go to Los Angeles, the biggest market in the country. And that led me to Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee . . . I received a lot of Program Director of the Year awards. I’d always get great ratings and I never got beat.
    Doug Morris, who was running Atlantic Records, said, “Garland, you’d be great in the music business. You’re friendly with the artists, you understand that language, you’re a unique guy.” That led to a job in 1979 as West Coast vice president and general manager of Atlantic, the biggest record company in the world: Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin.
    Pittman invited me to dinner sometime in ’80. He said, “Does Atlantic make music videos?” I said, “A few.” He said, “How do you determine who you’re gonna make one for?” A lot of it had to with touring: if a band wasn’t going to Europe, we might shoot a video to send there instead. If we got some traction, then we could send the act over. He said, “Garland, do you think music videos twenty-four hours a day, kind of like a radio station, would work on TV?” Immediately, I said, “Yes, I do. I think we’re headed into a new age with cable television.”
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    TOM FRESTON, MTV executive: I’d spent the 1970s living in Afghanistan and India. I’d made and lost a lot of money. I decided I wanted to work in the music business; my brother was working for Columbia Records, and I used to say, “Wow, this isn’t hard.” My brother turned me on to Bob McGroarty, who had started working in sales for a new venture. McGroarty said, “It’s a new form of television, and we’re looking for people who have no experience in TV.” I said, “I’m your man.” I started at MTV in October 1980, as head of marketing.
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    JOHN LACK: McGroarty knocks on my door. He tells me there’s a guy in his office he really likes, but has no experience. I meet this guy and ask him what he does. He says, “I’m kind of in the import/export business in India.” That was Tom Freston. I assumed “import/export” meant he was selling drugs.
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    TOM FRESTON: We were like an Internet start-up. We were lean and mean and didn’t know what the hell we were doing. At the beginning, we were working out of a couple of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown New York. We had no office equipment. My first office was a soda storeroom. People thought I was delivering soda to the building.
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    ROBERT MORTON: It was a dump. The Carnegie Deli was downstairs,