In Discussion - Talking MTV with Mark Goodman

Sam Bennett and Luke Garrison introduce their guest, Mark Goodman, a former MTV VJ. Mark shares his journey from working in radio to landing a job at MTV. He talks about the early days of MTV and how they played mostly British music videos since American artists weren't making many at the time. Mark also recalls the night John Lennon was shot and how he covered the tragic event on the radio. Overall, he reflects on the growth and changes of MTV throughout the 1980s. What's up everybody? This is Sam Bennett. And I'm Luke Garrison. And welcome back to OBUFM. A really special episode today. We're not doing an album review. I think this is one of the first times that we haven't, other than when we had Sidney Moriah on. But a really special guest that we're able to have on the show today, Mr. Mark Goodman. You may know Mark as one of the original MTV VJs back in the 1980s, and a really prominent figure of 1980s culture, as well as just music history in general. So yeah, it was an honor to speak to Mark. And here is the exclusive interview. What's up, boys? Hello. How are you? All right. How are you doing? We're doing well. We appreciate you taking the time to do this. This is quite an honor. So Sam, Luke, nice to meet you guys. So we'll get right into it. Taking a look back, walk us through the early years of your career before MTV, and how you ended up getting the gig as an original VJ. I started out in radio. I started in radio in Philadelphia where I'm from in 76 at a station in Philadelphia called WMMR. I did evenings there when I started. And within two years, by 78, I was the music director there. And at that time, another PD had come and taken over the station. So I was working with him. He then left and went to New York as a consultant, and was consulting WPLJ in New York, the number one rock station in New York at the time. And he was consulting them, and he pitched me to them, and they offered me a job. And so I moved to New York in 1980 to work at PLJ, which is an ABC affiliate station, and again, the number one rock station in New York. So for me, radio, I'm at the number one station in the number one market in the country. As far as I was concerned, it's like, that's it. Okay, so now, you know, I'm going to be music director here, then I'm going to be program director, then I'm going to have my consultancy. That was my trajectory. And I had a three year deal. And by, you know, five, six months in, I was just crazy and bored. And the format was really tight. And you know, like, how many times can I play Meat Loaf? I love the record. Yeah, great. But there was so much more going on that we weren't playing. And so I was bummed about that, but didn't know what I was going to do. And a friend of mine from Philadelphia, who was in television in Philadelphia, local television, called to tell me about this company called Warner Amex. It was Warner and American Express, a combined company, and they were doing some video music thing, something, he didn't even know what it was, it was something, maybe you should check it out. The guy who called me was a radio guy, but the guy who I knew from Philly television was working for this new company as an executive producer. So I called him and set up an interview. And again, it's like, you know, this new entity, I mean, it was Warner and American Express. So I thought it was legit that I get the call, I'm supposed to go for my first interview. And it's like the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue, you know, room 304. And I'm like, Okay, this is like, date rape time, you know, literally, I walked in, and there was this guy that I knew, and another person, and I sat on the bed, you know, we chatted about this thing. And that was my intro to MTV. And at the time, they told me they set up another audition for me, which was me alone in a studio that was like 40 degrees. And like me on a stool with a camera in my face, and light was like I was being interrogated or something. And they gave me some information and stuff. And I had to just do some music news. So I just shot this about stories that were happening at the time stuff that I knew about that was that apparently that went okay, they called me for my callback. And that one was a television studio. And they had a couple of sort of areas set up. They had this one area where there was like a little couch, and an easel with stuff about the Eagles, you know, on the pad. And there was another place where there was a chair or something. And I had to do something, you know, at this one location, you know, back announce the song, talk a little bit about some of the stuff, the music news and stuff. And then I had to walk over to this other position walking on camera, I had to prove that I could do that. I walked over to this other position. And that was it. That day, everybody in radio in New York was there. I knew like the guy who was doing mornings at PLJ was there. There was people from other radio stations that were there, I knew most of the people there, you know, and we're all sort of waiting in a room waiting to get called. And the guy who was in before me comes out, and he goes, Mark, you got this in the script, everybody is throwing to Mark Goodman, he's next. Like I was like, Okay, I'm wrapping up my shift. And so if there was next, everybody was saying me. Yeah, I went out and I did what I described to you. And the executive producer was there. And she didn't commit. But she said, Yeah, you know, I'm sure you'll be hearing from us. Awesome. That was it. Cool. Cool. Well, getting back to those early days, according to our research, you were on the air while still working in radio as the events of John Lennon's murder were unfolding. Can you tell us what you remember about covering such a tragic event in real time? Oh, man, I was in New York six months. I came in July of 1980. I moved to New York and started at PLJ in December of 1980 is when it happened. And the side note is that I was doing 10 to two at night at this radio station. And the woman on before me six to 10 was a woman who I knew from Philadelphia radio, I listened to her. And when I was listening to her back a couple of years before that she was on the front cover of Philadelphia magazine, sexiest woman in radio, and she was at Penn. She was a med student. So she's on the air before me, I met her and almost immediately in July, you know, when I got there, and we were going out within a month or so and I was basically living with her and her apartment was right next door to the Dakota. I mean, not one building away, not across right next door. And in fact, from our window, I could look out our window, which was down on the Dakota, and I could see into one of the apartments and it looked like that white piano and that white room that we've seen pictures of. I'm pretty sure that that's what it was. I've never been inside. So I'm not sure. But yeah, I was on the air that night. The first thing that happened was I started to get calls from people. It was a Monday and people were watching Monday Night Football. And I started to get calls from people who said, Yeah, you know, Howard Cosell just said something about John Lennon was shot or something. Do you know anything about that? And I hadn't heard anything about it yet. And so I went around the corner to our AM station, which was WABC. It was a news station. And they were literally just getting it across the wire at that moment when I walked into the newsroom that something happened that John Lennon had been shot. We didn't know that he was dead yet. But he was shot and that was about 11 something like that 11 at night. And as it happens, it was also Jim Morrison's birthday, we would do for someone's birthday, we would play a block of that artist three songs. When I got that call, that first call that John Lennon had been shot, the song that was on was The Doors, The End. This is the end, my lovely friend, The End. And that really just stuck with me. And you know, within 30 minutes, he was reported dead. And I talked to my program director, and we immediately started playing Beatles music. And I've only cried on the air two times. That was the second time on the air trying to describe it. And then to go home. There was hundreds of people in front of the Dakota. They're all listening to me on WPLJ. But you know, there's flowers and people were singing. And it was just this crazy thing. I wouldn't even be allowed on the street unless I could prove that I lived on the street. And I got off the air two in the morning. And that's what I came home to that night. And yeah, one of the saddest nights ever. And you know, how weird that I wound up being in New York on the rock stage, the number one rock station for that. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So getting into the surge of MTV, you were, of course, there to launch the channel back in 1981. Can you talk about those early days and how you saw the channel progress and or change throughout the course of the 1980s? When I got there, you know, we hadn't launched yet. And I started in May, I think, and we're just doing run throughs and stuff like that in the studio. And we didn't really know. I mean, they hadn't hired everyone yet. I had been hired with Mark Goodman. Nina Blackwood had been hired. I'm Nina Blackwood. And I think JJ Jackson. Hi, I'm JJ Jackson. And you're watching MTV Music Television. So we're just running through it. And at that time, because it was a brand new thing, artists weren't really making videos. The Brits did it because that was their thing for like, if they couldn't make it to Top of the Pops, they would send a video. So we had tons of Brit videos. And that was a lot of what we were running, just because we didn't have any videos, nobody was making any videos. So when we launched, that's what was going on. We had a lot of Rod Stewart videos, he made a lot of videos, he had a lot of those and a lot by, you know, weird bands that we'd never heard of, the producers and stuff like that. And it's in my book. But when I got there a month before we launched, I wrote like a four page memo to Bob Pittman, who was the head of the company, laying out what I imagined would formatically be a good idea to explaining who the audience was, and what I thought that we should do about the audience and like all of this crap, which he could have cared less about. But that's what we were. And by the time that we launched, Martha. I'm Martha Quinn. And Alan. I'm Alan Hunter. Had been hired totally last minute. And, you know, we were just cranking out whatever we could find video wise. It took a while, but things started to catch on. So piggybacking off that, what was it like working in the studio? And how were specific segments designated to the various DJs? Well, the thing about MTV was initially it was radio on television. That was the way that it was designed. There'd be a bunch of videos, and then there'd be a break and the person would come on and say, Hey, that was I am about to see this precious time from Pat Benatar at MTV. You got Mark Goodman and you also have some music news coming. We're going to update you on Billy Joel momentarily. So that was the way that it went. And, you know, we each got assigned shifts and we recorded those shifts. Initially in the first few months, there was four breaks per hour, 24 hours a day. The studio was shut down on Saturday and Sunday. So we had to double up on Thursday and Friday. And instead of doing 24 hours of MTV, we had to do 48 hours of MTV. That wound up being a crazy studio schedule. And we instituted this thing called lean hours, where overnight there would be two breaks an hour instead of four. So that cut down our time. And for a long time, I want to say a few years, we didn't think I don't know why, but like we would record in sequence, you know, so I was doing evenings. So, you know, before me was JJ. JJ was on in afternoons. I forget everybody's shifts now. Nina I know was on overnight. We would record in sequence. And so I'll do my show. And then I'm sitting there for hours waiting for me to come around again, you know, and all of us had to do that. And it was huge pain in the ass. And what it meant was these insane, like 18 hour days. So they fixed that with the lean hours that made it a little bit better. And after a couple of years was like, Oh, yeah, well, here's Mark. So let's have Mark do the two shows that he was going to record today. Here he is. Let's do those back to back. And we started doing it that way. The studio in the earliest days, it was nuts because none of us knew what we were doing. What was a VJ? There was no such thing as a VJ. And you know, the people who were in the studio, the camera people, that was a separate company that we contracted with for the studio. And then, you know, there are nice guys, young guys and lighting director and two cameramen. And our people were the director and producer and stuff. But we were just winging it. You know, we just had no idea what to do. And JJ and I, because we came from radio, had a bit of a better sense of it. I knew about back announcing a record. I knew how to talk about an artist. I knew how to incorporate news or something about the artist into my break and throw to the next song. I knew how to do all that stuff already. Nina had never really done radio and she was a music person. So she had to learn the presenting part of it. She knew music pretty well and loved music. Ellen and Martha, Martha was 21. She was still living in the dorms at NYU when she got the job. And literally, she came by accident. The way that she got into audition was just ridiculous. And she wound up getting in. She showed up for her audition in a T-shirt that said country music is in my blood. And she proceeded to do this rap about, you know, how, hey, you know, it's all rock and roll, you know, from Helen Reddy to... And I was just like, oh, Christ. And Helen was an actor, a struggling actor, a bartender, basically, at the time. And that's why he moved to New York. He was an actor. That's what he planned on doing. And in fact, he kept his bartending job for three or four months after we launched, because who knew who was going to last? We had no idea. Those early days were crazy. Those were the days that really cemented the five of us like family, because we went through this insane thing together. You know, the five of us, three guys, two girls, we shared a dressing room. And like, we had a rack of clothes. And the girls would go like behind the rack of clothes to change. You know, there was one sink and it was like really low, low rent, you know. But at the same time, the company was Warner and American Express, these massive, huge companies. But we sort of came on corporate. You know, we couldn't help that. But at the same time, what we were doing, the five of us on the air, I mean, you've seen old tape. You know, I mean, we were just trying to figure it out. Video games. We had like three video games that were free behind the set. Yeah. Nice. A long time coming. Michael Jackson's Thriller, the piece written by John Landis, the director, and also by Michael Jackson. Now, John Landis, you probably remember, is the guy who directed things like Animal House. He was also responsible for An American Werewolf in London. Landis, Michael and George Falsey, Jr. produced the short music film. It's being shown in selected movie theaters. It was shown last week. So it'll be eligible for this year's Academy Awards. The only place on TV you can see Thriller is here on MTV. And we are proud of it. It is more than just a video. It's a short film and quite a piece of art from Michael Jackson and John Landis. We're real happy to have it here. So you were there to premiere the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller, which, of course, took the world by storm. You were also on location for the film premiere of Princess Purple Rain. You've gotten to take part in some of the most iconic moments in music history. Can you walk us through what that's like? And do you have any other moments that you're most proud of? I got to do a lot of exciting stuff there. I mean, Live Aid was crazy fun. And again, an insane amount of work. And it was in my hometown. So that was a really cool thing for me to be able to be up there and be on stage. We were at the main stage. And then we were right to the right of the main stage. And we had our cameras and our lights and everything. And people would come off stage and come right over to us. So that was amazing. And, you know, I remember at one point going backstage and I was having a drink and standing in front of this trailer. And I look in the window of the trailer and there's Keith Richards and Bob Dylan, like, working out something that they were going to be doing on stage later. And I turn around and I start to walk back to our set and there's Chrissy Hynde. And I start chatting with Chrissy Hynde. And then, like, later on, Phil Collins showed up. You know, he had just come over on the Concord. I mean, it was just an insane day. Definitely life-changing and career-changing moment. But the launch was a big moment for me. August 1st, 1981, we weren't on in Manhattan. So we all had to go over to Fort Lee, New Jersey, just over the bridge to this, what I call the Blue Hair Restaurant. And all these people in there having dinner. And we had to go downstairs in the basement. They shoved us down there and we had like a monitor and a couple of speakers. And there was only about 50 people that worked in the company at that point. So we were all down there for the launch of MTV. No, we couldn't see it at home. So we all had to go there. And that was a crazy night. I mean, to see that rocket take off after we had been working for months, doing segments and doing interviews that we were banking for the future, just trying to figure all that stuff out. When that rocket took off, I kind of teared up. It was like, this is never going to go off. This is it. It's on forever. And the launch of a television channel, who gets to experience that? It's bizarre. What else? I don't know. I got to do a ton of fun stuff. Great interviews, travel. You know, I was really lucky. Really lucky. Yeah, that's awesome. Thursday, an exclusive MTV press conference. Daryl Hall and John Oates announce their upcoming tour live on MTV. And you're the press. We'll give you the numbers. Daryl and John will take your calls and answer your questions. Get ready to call on Thursday night, 10 Eastern, 9 Central. Daryl Hall and John Oates live on MTV. For a good time, call their number. Keep watching for more details. So this is kind of a longer-winded question. There's a Rolling Stone article from 1985 detailing the release of the Hall and Oates album, Big Bam Boom. It recounts the night that Daryl, John and their band came on MTV to talk about the album and its corresponding videos, as well as to unenthusiastically partake in a live Q&A, none of which, according to the article, went very well. When it comes to doing in-studio interviews, how do you manage artists that don't give you much to work with? And do you have any memories of that specific night? Oh yeah, I got stories. I forgot about that story. I was pissed off at that story. Tommy Mottola? Yeah, I was really pissed at that. And Daryl, those guys are from Philly. I know those guys. I played their music long before MTV, and it was okay. The problem was it was the first ever phone-in thing that we ever did, live, live. We hadn't done anything live. And the technological stuff wasn't great. It just wasn't working that great. So it was difficult, and the phone calls were hard, and the questions. And he's Daryl. He just doesn't like talking. It is what it is. It was okay. Tommy made a bigger deal out of it than I think was necessary, and it went better than he thought, I think. And even Daryl, I've spoken to Daryl since, and we remember that night and kind of laugh about it at this point. But again, just trying to figure shit out. It was the first time we ever did it. In terms of interviews, though, the big one for me, in terms of great and exciting, I got flown to London to interview Paul McCartney. So that was that. That was insane and amazing, and I couldn't believe that I got to do that. Sadly, to give my regards to Broad Street, which I don't know if you know, but it was a movie that he wrote and starred in, and he wrote some music for it for the soundtrack and also redid some Beatles songs for the soundtrack. So I was supposed to get 15 minutes with him, and he was in the studio. He was working on the soundtrack. So we interviewed him in the studio, and I was supposed to get 15 minutes. And 15 minutes comes, and I'm talking to Paul like this, and behind Paul is his publicist who's running back and forth going, and so I just, I said, Paul, I'm sorry. They're telling me we have to stop. And he just leans in, and he goes, let's not. I was like, yeah, man, Paul McCartney wants to talk to me. It was like that. It was mind boggling. And then we talked for an hour, talked about a lot of stuff, and it was interesting. And then I was invited, he went back into the studio to work on what he had been working on. And I wish it was a time when I would have had a cell phone in my hand, but they weren't a thing yet because I sat in the control booth of the studio. Right to my right is George Martin, and in the booth in front of me is Paul McCartney with his violin bass, and he's singing, I forget which song, but a Beatles song that he was redoing for this soundtrack. I mean, I grew up with the Beatles, so it was ridiculous. I just, there's no way I could ever top that. That was amazing. The other side of the story of an interview, Frankie goes to Hollywood, came to New York. When that record hit, Relax, they came to New York for the first time. It was the first time Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, the duo, were the front people. They'd never been to New York before. Came to New York and just went berserk and literally rolled into the studio for my interview after having been clubbing all night long. And you could see it. I mean, you could see it in their face. And I don't give a shit. Great. Have fun. And I love this band. I had heard the whole album, and I was really interested to talk to these guys. And so I'd be like, oh, so Relax, and blah, blah, blah, and Brian De Palma movie, and yada, yada. And Pauly would be like, and then he'd lean over to Paul and go, yes. I'd ask another question, and he'd be like, no. And five minutes in, I was like, look, guys, I love this band. America, could give a shit who you are. I want to change that. You want to talk to me? Let's talk. If you don't, then let's cut it off right here. And Holly was like, yeah, okay, we'll cut it off. I said, fine. Wow. They left. Two days later, Pauly shows up at my dressing room to apologize. So that's the other side of the coin. Yep. So you mentioned you and the original VJs being like family now, but how close are you currently with them? And was it weird getting together to write your book or nostalgic? How did that feel? When I say that we're friends, we're in touch all the time. I mean, Alan and I both work at Sirius. I do mornings on the 80s channel. I don't know if you guys have Sirius or not. I do mornings on the 80s. He does afternoons. I do afternoons on Classic Rewind. He does mornings. And we're friends. We speak. He lives in St. Louis, but we talk all the time. You know, we do a couple of 80s events a year. There's always some sort of stuff that's happening, you know, looking back on MTV. So we talk about that stuff. And Martha too. Martha lives outside of New York. And I'm in touch. I go and visit her. Nina, I don't see as much. Nina lives in Maine, in the middle of nowhere, like in the woods. And she's got like a truck and five dogs and nine cats and 14 birds and all this other stuff. And that's her. She was always a bit reclusive. But we, you know, we're in touch. We speak regularly. And because there's stuff that happens, you know, there's people who are talking to us now about an 80s tour of some sort, you know, sort of a tribute to the 80s tour that they want us to be involved in. There's always something that's coming up. So we're in touch. And the book, you know, we've been trying forever to get it made into a series or to a movie or something like that. And that, you know, we've been down that path a bunch of times, and we all wind up meeting the producer or the writer or whoever it is to try and make these projects happen. So we're in touch pretty regularly. And as far as getting the book done, David Edwards is the guy that wrote the book with us. And he basically interviewed us for hours and hours and hours and hours and kind of edited that stuff together and sort of put it in packages that made sense and made chapters out of them and that kind of thing. And even made it sound as though we were sort of talking to each other, although we were never. Actually, Martha and I did one interview together for the book, but everybody was interviewed individually for the book. So the cool thing for us about that was that once we were done, and the book was finished, and it finally came out, each of us in our own way had moments of like, when we read the book, like, Oh, my, really, Martha, you felt that that happened? I had no idea. We'd all had these revelations about experiences that the others were having that we had no idea about. So it was kind of fun for us to read our own book. Nice. That's cool. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on what MTV is today? And how have you seen the industry landscape change in the past 20 years or so? Well, do you watch MTV? No, sir. There you go. I mean, you are who should be watching MTV. And, you know, it's just not that I mean, they took music out of the title years ago, and it bears no resemblance to where I worked. There's no one who I worked with who is still there. It's a completely different as well as should be. I mean, it's people who are your age, probably, and who are doing the production and stuff like that. But it's, you know, it was the concept was, like I said, it was a radio station on television. And even though that was what we thought would work, people don't watch television like that people watch television, they want to know what's on at five o'clock. And when we started to do programming like that, one of the first things that we did was a thing called dial MTV, which was a phone and both top 10 based on phone calls. And that happened at the same time every day. And we saw the numbers go up for that. We started airing this crazy British comedy called The Young Ones, which was just about these four lunatic British kids. And that was on Sunday nights at eight o'clock, and the numbers were higher for that, you know, we were subject to ratings, you know, we were on cable television, so we were subject to ratings. So the more that they realized radio and television is just not a thing, the more that they kind of moved in a direction of specific blocks of programming and developing shows and even moving away from just straight up music shows. You know, we did game shows, you have MTV to thank for reality television, the first reality television show, we realized, holy shit, we can produce a television show for $25,000. We're in and cheap programming and MTV just went out the window after that. So I mean, I have a daughter who's 31 now. And when she was double digits and mid teens and stuff, I didn't want to watch that stuff. I mean, I didn't prevent her from watching it. That's not the kind of parent I was. But it's like 16 and pregnant. Is that really the kind of shit that I want you to be thinking about? I mean, it's a shame. And we all that the four of us that were left, it's not MTV to us anymore. And it's sort of sad, you know, like you see your high school fall into disarray, you know, this sad for us to see what it has become. And they made the conscious decision, we're going to be a lifestyle channel. That was the decision that they made, you know, after, you know, a decade or so, and it's still around. And the fact that it's still around, especially today, considering where you get your music from, you know, you have 14 different places, and there's more music today than you could ever possibly consume. And yeah, here is MTV, and they still do, you know, they talk about music a bit, but it's not necessary anymore. You know, people always are asking me, wow, man, you know, you guys, you should all go MTV should come back and we still be great. We could watch the videos. Like who the f**k needs it? Now you got YouTube, you can watch whatever you want over and over again, anytime you want. There's no need for what we were doing back then. So it's a shame what's happened, but you know. So for our final question, kind of giving you a chance to plug and also out of our own interest, you have a new podcast yourself that you've mentioned. Walk us through how that started and what it's been like so far. Well, I don't want to sound like an old guy, but I don't get podcasts. I just don't. Having said that, yeah, I'm doing a podcast. What I'm doing now is what I have been doing with my co-host, a guy named Alan Light, who's a journalist. He writes for the New York Times, Best Liar, and has published a bunch of books, including an amazing Prince book called Let's Go Crazy. He spent a year with Prince. So he and I did a talk show on Sirius for six years on a channel called Volume, which was a talk channel about music like sports talk or radio talk. And it was live. So we did three hours live, five days a week, phones, guests, that kind of thing. So that's what this is. It's called Sound Up with Mark Goodman and Alan Light. Sound Up Pod is where you can get us, at Sound Up Pod on socials and sounduppod.com, I think is our website. And it's, you know, we do the same thing. You know, we just, when the Rock Hall nominations were announced, we had Luke Graham and Peter Frankenacher were both on the list to be inducted. And the first show that we did this week, we had the director of this new documentary that's coming out called Hate to Love Nickelback. And it's hysterical. I mean, it's a great doc. And it starts from the premise. We know everybody hates this band. And yet 50 million albums, five Grammys, you know, like all these awards, Junos, millions of dollars on tour. And yet everybody hates Nickelback. What the hell is that? So we had the director on. And that was our first show. We do two shows a week. So we had the director on on Monday, talked about that idea and what it's like for them. They know, too, that everybody hates them. Yeah. But they're really good natured about it. And it was great. And so that was sort of a jumping off point for us to talk with our listeners about do you have a band that you have to defend to others that you go, I love that people like, oh, really? Really? And most everybody has those. Do you guys? I would say, yeah, we actually covered one of their albums recently. It's I don't even know if you would have heard of it. I know you know him, though. It's Sahara Snow. It's a Rick Springfield project. I can't believe you just did that. I was so weird, man. I was just doing the countdown show for a week from now on 80s. And there's a Rick Springfield track, not from that album, but it's the one he stops working for 11 years. And that's the one album he puts out. And I was talking about that album. I haven't talked about that album in 20 years. I can't believe that he brought that up. He's a personal musical hero of mine. We talked to Bob Marlette, who was on that album. So is Rick Springfield the guy who you have to defend loving? I wouldn't think so. But I'll tell you, my band is Coldplay. That's a little tough not to say Coldplay is mine. Right? I love them, but people hate them. I don't know why. I don't know when it happened. I think maybe some time around when it passed or something. I don't know. We all have those bands. You know, our producer has been a major KISS fan for his whole life. And KISS is, you know, for me, I'm older than he is. KISS was a joke. You know, when I started at Radio in 1976, you know, they had just put out Destroyer, the biggest album. It was like, come on, really? I've never worked at a rock station that ever played KISS. But Tom Morello, you know, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello is in the nominating committee in that room for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the way that works is each guy in the room gets to do a pitch for two artists that they would like to see on the nomination list. Well, he pitched KISS because KISS was the band that made him pick up a guitar. So Tom Morello likes KISS, I'm going to reconsider. So that's just one of the things that we do on our podcast. And it's all about, you know, whatever currently is happening. We do news, we talk about new music releases, we have a Spotify playlist, and we can't play music on the podcast. And not really making any money. Yeah, it's a labor of love, for sure. Well, I can only have so much love. Yeah. But I get it. I mean, it's for you guys, it's a different situation. It's probably fun for you. And if you get to talk to some people that you enjoy talking to, then great. I mean, for me, you know, it's time that I could be, you know, smoking pot and watching TV. So it's a little bit different. But I do I love working with this guy with Alan Light. He's super, super smart. He's a Yale graduate, you know, an incredible journalist. So I feel like I learn something every day with this guy. So it's, you know, labor of love for a while. I got invited to, there's a guy named Ken Seisler, who was a director at MTV, actually directed our segments. And he does a podcast with Gary Kroger, who was on Saturday Night Live for like five minutes, you know, he was part of the cast and one dreadful year, but they do a podcast together, the Gary and Kenny show. So I'm going to go on that and they tell me what's the name of this podcast? OBU FM. OBU is our school. So it's like a radio station kind of thing. Okay, but that's that's the name of the podcast OBU FM or is this for a radio station? It's just the name of the podcast OBU FM. It's in the vein like we listen to the music that our parents listened to and watched you introduce growing up. And our goal is to promote that music to our generation. We're 21. So that's pretty cool. I think. Thank you. Thanks. And it's pretty weird. It's probably not to you, I guess, because it's life. But for me, the concept of kids listening to the music that their parents listened to is a wild concept to me. It worked because my kid, she's a singer, and she's recording and putting stuff out on Spotify and touring and stuff. And she's a singer because I played her tons of music like she's seven years old and she was singing to the offspring, you know, they put a record out that I love. So she listens to the stuff that I listen to and got turned on that way. And I listen, I love my parents music. You know, I love Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, these incredible R&B singers. So that wasn't my music, but I got turned on to it because of that. So the concept of kids listening to their parents music blows my mind. I think it's really, it's a cool thing. And they take you to concerts and stuff. Have you been to concerts with your parents? Oh, yeah. Yes, sir. Yeah, biggest ones I've been able to see, biggest ones I'm most thankful that I've been able to see, I saw Van Halen with Eddie. I got to see Phil Collins and Genesis separately, both in the most recent Farewell Tours. Wow. I didn't get to see that tour. That was a great tour. Yeah. Just love that. I love that. Yes, sir. In A, right? Yes, sir. It is nice. The most recent one for me was Stevie Nicks just came. We're in Arkansas. She just came to Little Rock a couple weeks ago. So that was a pretty cool one to go to. I just saw her too a few weeks ago. Yeah. Great. She's amazing. And Mrs. Tom Petty. Could you tell? Right. Yeah. Yeah. She started off like before she even walks on stage, she plays Running Down a Dream. And she really misses him. It's interesting to have like all these super in-depth questions that you would ask these artists. If these like really big people that you could get them on, like Don Henley would be a dream interview, but there's no shot, you know, like anyone from Duran Duran, just things like that. That would be insane. But maybe someday. Cool. We won't keep you but do like a lightning round, like top five favorite videos of the 1980s. I'm going to start with the most obscure one, which is a song called Questionnaire by an artist named Chaz Jankle, J-A-N-K-E-L. His sister, Annabelle Jankle, was a big video director in the 80s and did a lot of work. I think she worked with Duran Duran and a bunch of others. So Questionnaire by Chaz Jankle. He wrote a song, actually, that Quincy Jones covered in the 80s. Peter Gabriel, almost anything, but Big Time. It was amazing to me. I'm a massive Van Halen fan. I was friendly for years with David Lee Roth. I went on tour with him for a while. So his California Girls. It's like a classic, for sure. And the Van Halen stuff, I'm her teacher. I'm not sure that would get made today. Right. Yeah, for sure. What's the one? I remember the one that they have these midgets. It's Pretty Woman. I mean, it's awkward. Yeah. That was a great one. You know, the Benefit ones also. Benefit, I mean, We Are The World and Do They Know It's Christmas. Those two in particular, Do They Know It's Christmas, was first. And it's, you know, it's a pretty okay song. It's fine. But when you look at the video and you see all those people in one room, and the same thing with We Are The World, it's amazing to see that. We Are The World is awesome. What an awesome song, really. Did you see the new doc on The Greatest Night In Pop? Yes, sir. Bruce said that, you know, at the end of it, he says, look, it's a tool. It did what it was supposed to do. It doesn't matter how good or bad the song is. But those videos, because without the videos, the song would have been so much less. Right. Videos are huge to me as well. How's that? Pretty good list? That's perfect. I like it. Well, is there anything else you'd like to plug while you're here? Mornings on the Big 80s on SiriusXM, afternoons on Classic Rewind, East Coast time, Classic Rewind, Channel 25. Awesome. Well, this has been an honor. I know that our parents are like thrilled that we're here. So, yeah, this has been a lot of fun and we really appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you very much. Send love to your parents. Thank you. Have a good day. You too, man. Thanks for talking. Talk to you later. So, yeah, that was the interview with Mark Goodman. I just want to thank him again for doing that. It was super special to both of us. I know my parents, Sam's parents too, had a lot of experiences hearing him, listening to the things he was playing and just seeing them on MTV. So that was cool for both of us. Yeah. Really interesting guest. It's not someone like, I mean, normally we go for like the artists themselves. And this is someone who is really just as important that has so much insight of like the scene. And like he was right there. Like we talked about Live Aid and, you know, premiering Thriller and Purple Rain and all these like iconic things. He's right there with the artists for all these really important moments of music history. Yeah, it is really cool because one, he kind of lays the blueprint down for people like us and what we're doing. Like there weren't really figures that were reviewing music, but also interviewing the artists and kind of just putting it out there. So that's kind of really cool. That was the first time that was happening on such like a big scale like that. Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, we talked with him about like MTV and what it is today. And like it kind of does think that we don't have MTV like it was for today. And like I would argue that if we did, I would want it to be the music of, you know, that classic generation. I don't think MTV would be as cool for me if it was just like, you know, like seven Drake videos every hour, you know? Yeah. But at the same time, I think it would be kind of interesting if we had that. It could be both, you know, could definitely be classic videos, but also, you know, showing like whether it's the biggest hits or even like whoever the, you know, VJ, whatever their favorite videos are, that would be a cool thing to have on such like a mainstream stage like that. But I mean, obviously now we have streaming, we have podcasters, YouTube, so many different ways people can find things. But it would be interesting to see how it would look like if MTV really stayed true to itself. Yeah. And I know like if you have like any sort of cable or, you know, whatever kind of streaming television, they have like shows like I Want My 80s and classic videos and stuff like that, where it's basically like kind of watching MTV. It's just like the videos, you don't really get the segues into them or interviews like you would. But you can also like, there's so much footage on YouTube, where it's like an hour straight of MTV, December 1983. And that's super cool to watch. Even like a lot of them have like the commercials. And then those are commercials that I actually don't mind seeing. But like just the history of all that is super, super cool. And yeah, I get to talk to them about some of our favorite artists. And back in the day, you know, what that looked like speaking to them, you know, really, really cool interview. I'm very glad that Mark was able to speak to us. And yeah, Mark, if you're listening, we want to thank you again for being on the show. Yeah, thank you very much. So we asked Mark, you know, about some of his favorite music videos. You know, he mentioned Peter Gabriel and Van Halen, some of the like USA for Africa, Band Aid stuff. In terms of music videos, obviously, it's a different thing today than it was back then. Obviously, that was like the formation of music videos pretty much was MTV and those glory days of that. Today, it's kind of like just something that you can do something that you just put on TikTok, I guess. But like, what are some of your favorite like classic videos? Like if you could think of those videos from the 80s, like even if you know, you're not crazy about the song itself, like the video, or maybe it's like just super cheesy and really fun to watch. Yeah, I didn't grow up for a while having my own access to the internet. So a lot of times, I would listen to music that my parents had, or even like CDs and stuff like that. So really, I didn't start watching music videos until probably more into my older middle school, high school years. One specifically, I think about that is one of the probably the most iconic is Every Breath You Take. Yeah, fleece kind of a very moody one. Yeah. Bunch of Prince videos. When Doves Cry, especially that video always sticks with me. My favorite Prince video is the one for Party Man from the Batman. Yeah, that one. That one's pretty funny. He's Batman and the Joker. It gets weird, but he kills it. It's all right. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, for me, like music videos are cool, because you can go for like the super flashy, like almost like a movie. And you can also go for just like a really tame kind of vibe thing. All in all, I mean, one of your favorite artists, obviously, they have some great videos. I know one on one. Yeah, the one that I always think of. I like that video a lot. Yeah, my favorite video from them is probably either Missed Opportunity from the Ouya album, or some things are Better Left Unsaid from Big Bam Boom, both of which are kind of album tracks, but they made videos for and they're pretty interesting to watch. Like Duran Duran, I think of them specifically, they changed the landscape with music videos, because they saw what other people were doing. Like, especially for the Rio album, they went and I guess did a week or a few weeks in Sri Lanka and shot like miniature movies. Oh, I didn't even know that. Yeah. So like Hungry Like the Wolf, I believe Save a Prayer, like all those videos were shot in Sri Lanka, same director and they're like miniature movies, if you go watch them. A View to a Kill, their Bond theme is a super cool video. It's also really interesting to watch in terms of insight of band dynamics at that time. But Genesis, some killer videos. I remember we talked about like Land of Confusion with Nick Collins, like a crazy one. Yeah, I know that for a lot of those videos, they just try to have fun. I think that's cool. I mean, even like bands like Guns N' Roses have some goofy videos that are fun to look back on. Yeah. In terms of like live performance videos, like Aerosmith has some awesome ones that I'm a huge fan of. It always makes me wish that MTV was around before the 80s. Because like, I would love to see how that would look for bands like, I don't know, like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles. What would a Hotel California music video be like? Yeah, exactly. Even the Eagles, like obviously they had later music videos, but I don't know, it's definitely 80s, like timestamp when the music videos were like at their peak, I'd say. Yeah. And it's also like a way of visually obviously like visually communicating your song. And I know a lot of artists actually have issues with that. I didn't want to do that. I just wanted to put out their music and let it be that. And I think that's also a cool aspect to 70s music versus 80s music. Because 70s music is definitely almost like more mysterious. Yeah, like it's probably good that there aren't many, I mean, at least up until maybe the 90s Eagles music videos. Like that would be like weird to see like a yeah, like a Hotel California music video. Yeah, I don't know what that would look like, honestly. It would probably like that's such a like a mysterious song. It would ruin the illusion of all the all the things that that could be about. But yeah, I mean, that's an interesting talking point. I know, like, we've talked to Bill Gibson, Huey Lewis and the News have a lot of really fun videos. One of my favorite music videos, which is not very flashy. It's not very in your face. It's just really vibeys. Of course, I'll be over you, Toto. Yeah, speaking of vibey truth. Yeah, that's a good video. Yeah, that's a good video. There's so many videos. I mean, never gonna give you up. Yeah, that's iconic. I mean, just a meme. Obviously, you probably haven't seen it. But Rick Springfield has a song called Bop Till You Drop. I believe it's from around 84. It's from the Hard to Hold soundtrack. And this video, man, it's literally like a Dune movie. There's like monsters and aliens. He's like this, like, it's just so strange. But yeah, like people like either did the bare minimum for their music video, or they just went like fully all out. Yeah, crazy. Obviously, some super iconic videos. Michael Jackson. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah, it's interesting because obviously didn't have social media and internet. Now artists don't even really have to have music videos to have like their, you know, visual presence, or whatever you want to call that. This is all the stuff we can put on social media now. So that probably is also a big portion of why things have changed how they have. Yeah, well, it's also an interesting thing to think about, like how music videos, they obviously cost a lot of money, especially like those more in depth ones. And I guess, you know, some of those costs could fall on the artists, you know, maybe they're taken out of royalties, or just advancements from paychecks from albums and stuff like that, just like recording costs would be. And I would definitely say how that would be like frustrating for an artist, especially one that doesn't really want to make a video, like, oh, I have to do this for my song to do well. Yeah. Also, I have to basically be on the hook for paying for that a little bit. Yeah, probably do a lot of the label and what they were wanting. Yeah, I saw an interview with Sammy Hagar a while back, and he was saying how when they put out, I believe it was the 5150 album, his first album with Van Halen, how they didn't want to make videos, they just wanted to put the album out. And the record was doing so well that the label, I believe it was Warner Brothers, they were begging them to make videos. And they're like, No, we don't want to, we certainly don't want to pay for them. So Warner eventually like caved in, and they fully funded the videos for it was either it was either 5150 or the follow up. Oh, you might want to but I mean, yeah, like, I don't know. It's just a strange game. I don't think it's nearly that big of a deal anymore. I think a label would rather you spend more time making like reels and stuff. Yeah, viral TikTok. Yeah, definitely. It's just a whole different whole different ballgame. Every now and then I'll see like a cool music video on YouTube. But it's definitely few and far between. Yeah. But yeah, certainly an interesting conversation about music videos and MTV and definitely our interview with Mark. So this has been a really cool episode getting into three of the week. I'll go ahead and start. I'm going to go with the downtown lights by the Blue Nile from the hats album from 1988. And then I'm going to go with you've been in love that little bit too long by Phil Collins. Off of the but seriously, album, the deluxe edition is not on the original release from 1989. And then hey girl by Michael McDonald off the blink of an eye album from 1993. And I'm from my three of the week. I'm going to start with Kings by Steely Dan. It's from their huge 1971 album can't buy a thrill. And then next up living for the city by Stevie Wonder from 1973 of his inner vision album. And then lastly, this is a kind of big deep cut that I just randomly found is called ain't scared by the band, the tragic thrills from 2017 on their album on foreign street. They only have like 30,000 listeners or something on Spotify, but great song, great band. Check it out. Nice. Yeah. Wrapping up this episode, we want to thank our friends at block street records. Go check out block street on 17 North block Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas for all your vinyl needs. They've got a great selection. So go check out block street. Also, you can follow us on Instagram at obu.fm.pod. And also Luke and I are in a band called bad habits. So if you're interested in coming to see us or getting updates on that, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at litterboxbadhabits. So yeah, this has been a great episode. I'm Sam Bennett. And I'm Luke Garrison. Thanks. This episode of obu.fm is a quest on entertainment production.