Book Review: I Want My MTV by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum

I Want My MTV:
The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
By Craig Marks & Rob Tannenbaum
Dutton; 608 pp; $29.95

At a minute past midnight on Aug. 1, 1981, a new cable channel announced its launch by playing a two-year-old clip by a one-hit-wonder. The group was the Buggles. The song was Video Killed the Radio Star. The cable station was MTV. It was not an auspicious start. MTV’s initial hours on air were a disaster. The inexperienced presenters—the first VJs—flubbed their lines, announcing Styx as REO Speedwagon and 38 Special as the Who; the programming was broadcast in stereo, which almost no television sets at the time could properly receive; and there was no advertising, because MTV hadn’t been able to persuade anyone to buy any. None of this mattered, since almost nobody was watching. Even MTV’s staff had to celebrate liftoff in Fort Lee, N.J., because they couldn’t get a Manhattan cable operator to carry them. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” recalls MTV founder Bob Pittman, one of a stellar cast of contributors to I Want My MTV, an oral history of the network. “It was probably one of the worst nights of my life.”