MTV Turns 30

Can you name the five original MTV VJ's?  I can, without googling, name them all. In no particular order...the perky Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter (who was featured in the video for David Bowie's, "Fashion"), the frizzy-haired Nina Blackwood, the curly-haired Mark Goodman, and the best presenter of the bunch, J.J. Jackson.

Today marks the 30th birthday of MTV.  The anniversary has given me reason to scare myself with just how much I can remember about the early days of the video music channel.

TBS, USA, and HBO (anyone remember "Video Jukebox"?) had been presenting music video segments for a while, but MTV was the first channel that devoted all of its programming to music and music videos when it signed on August 1st, 1981.  An unknown band called The Buggles became a footnote in history when "Video Killed the Radio Star" was MTV's debut video.

I can still recall the first time I happened on MTV; it was on my family's upstairs black and white TV.  The cable system in my hometown of Amherst was, to say the least, unreliable.  The first video I saw was "Big Log" by Robert Plant, only there was no audio.  MTV was silent for the first two days it was on in Amherst.

Because there weren't a lot of videos available at the time, I remember the early days of MTV featuring oddball music by avante-garde artists Laurie Anderson and The Flying Lizards.  The song, "Knights of the Round Table," from Monty Python and The Holy Grail was shown at least once a week.  And there was a LOT of British music, mainly because few American bands had produced videos for their music.

The term "New Wave" initially referred to the new "British Invasion" of bands like Soft Cell, The Human League, Eurythmics and The Fixx (I've just described most of my early tape collection).  But New Wave quickly came to represent the synthesizer-driven music those bands played.

I remember MTV's "Friday Night Video Fights" and my feeble attempts to vote in them using a rotary phone.  There was an hour long concert every Saturday night.  And I remember the guest VJ's, musical acts that would take over the channel for an hour and play their favorite videos.

MTV once stood for "Music Television" but the channel long ago dropped music videos for another innovation.  The network that first brought us music in video form was also the birthplace of "The Real World," America's original reality TV show.