fourteen

VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR

You want to record “Jessie’s Girl”?

—RICK SPRINGFIELD

ONE DAY IN THE SPRING OF 1980 KEVIN BEAMISH, AN UP-AND-coming sound engineer and record producer, received a phone call from Kevin Cronin, the lead singer of REO Speedwagon. Beamish and REO were in the early stages of gathering tracks for possible inclusion on a new album. It would also be REO’s tenth for Epic Records without ever having seen one of their single releases make the top half of the Billboard singles charts.

“Can you come over?” Cronin asked, sounding amped up.

“Yeah, man, what’s up?” Beamish replied, wondering if he should be worried.

“Just come over. I’ve got something to show you.”

Virtual rock gods throughout the Midwest during the seventies (they were originally from Illinois), the now Los Angeles–based REO Speedwagon was still barely known on either coast outside of a smattering of hardcore fans. Able to sell out basketball arenas with ease in cities such as St. Louis and Des Moines, they were lucky to draw a thousand or two to their shows in places like Boston and Seattle.

Sales-wise, the best REO had ever done at the cash register had come with their 1978 album, You Can Tune a Piano, But You Can’t Tuna Fish, recorded at Sound City and executive produced by John Boylan (who was by then the West Coast head of A&R at Epic after his mammoth success with the band Boston). You Can Tune a Piano had been REO’s first LP to crack the Top Forty, peaking at number twenty-nine (and eventually going double platinum) while spinning off a couple of heavy-rotation FM AOR favorites too, with the rockers “Time for Me to Fly” and “Roll with the Changes.” With the success the band seemed poised for a breakthrough.

But REO Speedwagon’s next album, the highly anticipated Nine Lives, took an inexplicable step backward, barely going gold. Radio mostly reacted with a big fat yawn. And by then, in 1979, Epic had finally used up the last of its patience too. After eight years of support, the execs wanted hit singles for a change. REO had already been on the label longer than anyone except for the legendary British guitarist Jeff Beck. And he had outsold and outcharted them on his last two albums without even having any vocals.

It was time for REO Speedwagon—named after a brand of flatbed truck popular during the first half of the twentieth century—to earn their keep or find a new recording home. Cronin and the other four were put on notice: the new album would be their last chance. The reality of it made everyone in the band nervous, especially Kevin Cronin. He was the front man and the one most likely to come up with some radio-friendly hits. Which is why he had wanted to see Kevin Beamish, who was coproducing, right away.

After Beamish arrived at Cronin’s suburban Los Angeles–area home in the upscale San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Encino, he found Cronin at the piano.

“Remember when you talked to me about all the songs you said we didn’t have time to write because we’re on the road all the time?” Cronin asked as he began to play.

“Sure, yeah,” Beamish replied, remembering it well. That’s why he had lobbied Epic to do the recently released “best of” compilation (A Decade of Rock and Roll 1970 to 1980)—it bought the band time. REO needed some easy current income to forgo their normally heavy touring schedule and instead focus strictly on writing. If the new album was to achieve any kind of meaningful success, it was going to need an infusion of some seriously strong material.

“You should have seen by the look in my eyes, baby,” the high-tenor Cronin began to croon as his hands danced over the keys. “There was somethin’ missin’.”

It was the rough version of a song Cronin had been working on called “Keep on Loving You.” Beamish sat transfixed, especially when Cronin hit the chorus.

“And I’m gonna keep on loving you, ’cause it’s the only thing I want to do.”

When the performance ended, all an overwhelmed Beamish could utter was “Phew.” He knew then and there in Kevin Cronin’s living room that he had just heard a smash. What’s more, he couldn’t wait to tell the rest of the band about it, especially Gary Richrath, the group’s founder and longtime leader. After phoning Richrath to share his enthusiasm, he got even more good news: Richrath had a song he thought might be a hit too, something called “Take It on the Run,” which Richrath then proceeded to play and sing over the line.

With two potential gems and various other promising possibilities in hand, Beamish then booked several weeks of rehearsal time for REO at S.I.R. (Studio Instrument Rentals) in North Hollywood on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and they all set about fashioning an album’s worth of cohesive material. But when it came to “Keep on Loving You,” Richrath—a country-born-and-raised man’s man and a kick-ass, Les Paul–playing guitar hero by trade—would have none of it.

“I’m not playing this pussy-mother-fucking song anymore!” a red-hot Richrath bellowed as he unhooked his guitar and tossed it across the room one afternoon. “We’re a boy’s band, and it’s a damned love song. I’m not playing it, and we’re not putting it on this record.”

Having played “Keep on Loving You” over and over to get the arrangement into workable form, Richrath could simply take no more. He had tried blasting his guitar through his Marshall amplifier stack as loud as he could to drown out Cronin’s singing and playing, but the resolute Cronin refused to be minimized or intimidated—he knew he had a good song.

At the same time, however, an interesting phenomenon occurred during the in-studio showdown between the group’s two principal songwriters: the combination of Cronin’s vocal and piano work in conjunction with Richrath’s raw, distorted guitar sounds provided, to Cronin’s ears, an unexpectedly ideal counterbalance on “Keep on Loving You.” Richrath’s wrath managed to keep the tune grounded and relatable, providing a little bit of toughness to go with the sugar. Despite his hissy fit and all the petulant electric guitar pyrotechnics—or, more accurately, precisely because of them—Richrath had inadvertently helped create an arrangement that perfectly prevented the song from veering into the terminally vanilla land of Barry Manilow and Air Supply. That was something nobody in REO wanted, not even Cronin, the group’s resident romantic with the folkie soul.

To mollify the burly, stubborn Richrath, however, Beamish subsequently pointed out to the guitarist that the weird, high-pitched sounds heard on a board tape from one of their recent weekend shows where REO had played an early version of “Keep on Loving You” were, in fact, a hoard of women screaming their lungs out at the end of the song. Not a bunch of birds, as Richrath had erroneously thought upon first listening. The reason to even bother playing Cronin’s prized composition finally started to make sense to the self-appointed alpha male of the band: yes, REO was a boy’s band. But boys brought their girls to the shows. And girls were crazy about “Keep on Loving You.”

After feverishly cutting demos of the best of what they had during a two- to three-day period at Crystal Recording in Hollywood—coincidentally the first studio Beamish had worked in when getting in the business many years before, just like Fleetwood Mac’s Richard Dashut had done before him—REO then reconvened at Kendun in North Hollywood shortly thereafter to record the real deal. But after Beamish sat down with Cronin to listen to the playback of the new album (Cronin had also been playing it for several days in his car), the two came to the same surprising conclusion: for the most par, the quick and dirty demos of the songs recorded at Crystal actually sounded better than the newly created masters that had cost a whole lot more money. The energy, enthusiasm, and quality of the originals could not be duplicated, let alone surpassed.

So Beamish, along with Cronin, Richrath, and REO’s Alan Gratzer (drums)—the four coproducers—made the unusual decision to add overdubs to the nine demo songs where needed, cut a tenth song (“Out of Season”), mix it all down, master it, and then offer the finished stereo version of the album to Epic for approval. With the depth of songwriting and performances, they were sure it was their most commercially viable album yet.

But REO Speedwagon’s record label had other ideas.

After Beamish shipped a copy of the master tape to Frank Rand, Epic’s East Coast vice president of A&R—the guy who made the decisions for the New York–based company regarding which albums to release—Beamish waited. And waited.

When he finally called Rand more than a week later to see what was going on, Beamish was stunned at the executive’s reply.

“I’m rejecting your record,” Rand said flatly. “There aren’t any hits on there.”

After failing to talk Rand out of his decision, a shaken Beamish took the bad news back to Cronin and Richrath, who came unglued. They agreed that Rand didn’t know what he was talking about: Had the guy even listened to the album? They decided it was either going to be put out just as it was or the label could go ahead and drop them. REO would then shop it elsewhere, potential lawsuits be damned.

Shortly thereafter Beamish called Rand one more time on behalf of Cronin, Richrath, and the rest of the group.

“You all do what you want,” Beamish said to the Epic executive, “but I would suggest you go ahead and release it anyway. The band is standing by the record.”

He then added one final tip.

“By the way, service Top Forty radio with ‘Keep on Loving You.’”

“Oh no,” Rand replied, recoiling like he had been shot through the heart with a poison dart. “That track is awful. It’s way too sappy.”

But after Beamish convinced him that the label had nothing to lose because they didn’t believe in the album anyway, Rand did just that. He had his promotional team start working “Keep on Loving You” at stations around the country. Six weeks later Kevin Cronin’s battered little love song leapt to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and practically everywhere else in the universe. Furthermore, REO’s new album, with a memorably lascivious cover designed by John Kosh and named Hi Infidelity as a nod to the marital struggles of some of the band members, also rocketed to number one, becoming nothing less than the single-biggest-selling album of 1981.

But aside from the huge personal success enjoyed by REO Speedwagon with the release of their tenth album, the music industry ramifications in the wake of Hi Infidelity ran much deeper and wider. The power ballad was here to stay. And rock music in general was getting lighter and poppier seemingly by the day. Those who wanted to survive in the changing marketplace were either going to have to rebrand themselves accordingly or face the prospect of reduced popularity.

No one, however, expected what was about to happen next.

AT 12:01 A.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME ON AUGUST 1, 1981, just after the images of a rocket blasting off and then an astronaut walking on the moon flickered across the TV screens in the small number of homes actually able to receive it, the following words were heard: “Ladies and gentleman, rock and roll.”

And from that moment on, the music business would never be the same.

Spoken by John Lack, the chief operating officer of a new cable network called Music Television (MTV), the simple sentence served to launch a new broadcasting concept of providing twenty-four hours of nonstop pop and rock video programming. Starting slowly on just a handful of cable networks around the country, the New York City–based MTV wasn’t even initially available to viewers on its home turf in Manhattan. Although a seemingly obvious concept in retrospect, airing music videos twenty-four hours a day across the nation had never been done.

Yet a plentiful number of one-off music videos had been around for years. Many were created as stand-alone promotional pieces and/or to be aired in conjunction with an appearance by a band or solo artist on a TV show either in the United States or overseas. One of the more famous examples occurred in 1974 when the Rolling Stones, rather than touring in support of their latest album, instead chose to appear in a video featuring them jamming on their instruments (while, oddly, wearing sailor suits) to their recent hit song, “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (But I Like It)” as they hopped about inside a giant plastic tent as rising water and soap bubbles slowly submerged them.

Prior to its launch, MTV’s creator and programming chief, Robert Pittman, made the brilliant move of hiring five engaging, telegenic VJs (for “video jockey”) to become the resident talking heads. Within a year, as more cable systems around the country signed on, Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J. J. Jackson, and Martha Quinn would become huge stars. But the most pressing concern for the first day on the air, at least, dealt with which videos the new channel would play. The world, such as it was, would be watching.

Electing to lead off with a relatively obscure (yet ultimately more prophetic than anyone knew) video of a song called “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the London-based Buggles, which only made it to number forty for one week on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1979, it was actually the second video MTV played that would provide an indication of where music was truly headed.

AFTER WRAPPING THINGS UP WITH CARLOS SANTANA, KEITH Olsen had begun looking for his next big-name project. He also had it in the back of his mind that he might want to own a studio of his own. Though he had briefly been a partner in Sound City in the early days, Olsen held no particular interest in the business aspect of it. Studios were dicey propositions in terms of revenue flow. Someone had to continually beat the drums, so to speak, to keep customers coming in the door. But what did interest Olsen was the idea of having a place for his use only.

With so many high-profile projects now coming his way, it was getting harder and harder to reserve adequate studio time at Sound City. Though Olsen was the star attraction there, he nevertheless was also far from being the only producer, band, or singer wanting to use the facilities. Studios only make money when they are occupied, so Joe Gottfried and his partner naturally took business from anyone who was willing to pay for it. Which occasionally left Olsen on the outside looking in, at least regarding Studio A, where his beloved Neve 8078 mixing console sat. But studios also cost a lot to build, and they had to be situated in the right building with the right acoustics in the right neighborhood. Olsen didn’t have a lot of time to race all over town looking for the right location, nor did he want to spend a fortune out of his own pocket to create a sonic environment that would satisfy his exacting needs. Fortunately for him, a series of events would soon conspire to create the perfect answer to his dilemma.

BY 1980 PATRICIA MAE ANDRZEJEWSKI WAS LOOKING FOR A NEW record producer. Known to the public as Pat Benatar, the petite, Long Island–born singer with the knockout looks and operatic voice who could belt out a song like album rock’s answer to Big Mama Thornton had scored a huge debut hit in late 1979 with “Heartbreaker.” But after a platinum-selling album (In the Heat of the Night) that had been more or less produced by committee, Benatar wanted some consistency and more personalized attention for album number two. Given her breakout success, she felt she had earned it.

With Bob Buziak, Keith Olsen’s manager, once again working his magic behind the scenes at the highest of levels, Buziak managed to secure his client the gig. The next thing Olsen knew, he was sitting in a meeting with the brass at Chrysalis Records, Benatar’s label, brainstorming about song possibilities. Just as with Foreigner, Olsen’s job was to make a big act even bigger. But it would take strong material to do it. And Olsen had just the song in mind.

At around the same time he signed on to produce Pat Benatar’s next record, Olsen had received an inquiry from another record label that wanted him to produce a little-known Canadian singer-songwriter by the name of Eddie Schwartz. After Schwartz sent Olsen a demo of a bunch of his stuff, Olsen dutifully gave it all a listen. Although most of the tunes were decent but not really standouts, one of them practically leapt off the tape. It was a simple, relatable little story song (Olsen’s favorite kind) about somebody in a relationship putting on a brave front when they are about to get dumped by the person they love.

Knowing a great composition when he heard one but not crazy about Schwartz’s vocals, Olsen gave him a call.

“Really, you want to sing this, Eddie?”

Featuring the lines, “You’re a real tough cookie with a long history / Breaking little hearts like the one in me,” the delivery just didn’t work for Olsen. In his view it was a song a girl should be singing, not a guy.

But Schwartz was insistent.

“Oh, yeah, yeah—that’s me,” he replied, unconvincingly.

“Well, you know, I’m working with this female singer, Pat Benatar, who’s already had a big hit, and I think this song would be perfect for her,” Olsen countered, the implication clear. If Schwartz gave Olsen the song, there might be some serious bread to be made—for everyone. Which turned out to be all Schwartz needed to hear.

“Okay,” he quickly said.

With Olsen’s prized song now in hand, it then took a little arm-twisting for Benatar to want to sing it. She and her bandleader (and boyfriend), Neil Giraldo, disagreed with Olsen’s assessment. Not only did they not like “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” at first, they also didn’t see it becoming a hit. Benatar’s artistic inclination was to go for more lyrically sophisticated material in the same vein as Bruce Springsteen, one of her idols. But Olsen, in his friendly, charismatic, ever-persuasive manner, was as insistent about Benatar singing the song as Eddie Schwartz originally had been about keeping it for himself.

Subsequently booking time at Davlen Studios in North Hollywood (Sound City was temporarily full), Olsen, Benatar, Giraldo, her band, and Chris Minto, Olsen’s talented engineer, began laying down the tracks for “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” With Benatar offering up a stinging, sneering, defiant vocal performance worthy of an Academy Award and with Giraldo supplying his customarily blistering guitar work, the song came out even better than Olsen had expected. He was sure it would be a smash.

With everyone then agreeing that they felt they could work well together, plans were made to reconvene at Sound City to cut the rest of what would be called Crimes of Passion. But while working on the album Olsen received another overture about working with yet another artist. This time the request came from Joe Gottfried, Sound City’s beloved co-owner. The genial though far-from-shrewd Gottfried had somehow gotten a record deal with RCA for a young singer-songwriter–guitar player he was grooming, and he wondered if Olsen would be willing to handle the production for a couple of songs to release as advance singles. The label wanted them as soon as possible. Which is the moment Olsen realized just where his new state-of-the-art recording facility was going to come from.

“Joe, I’ll tell you what. I’ll cut those two songs on your artist for points and a studio next door.”

Gottfried looked confused.

“You mean the old radiator shop that closed down?”

“Uh huh,” Olsen said. “I’ll put in the gear, and you do all the build-out.”

“Okay, you’ve got a deal,” Gottfried said as the two shook hands.

And while Olsen soon thereafter had his own gorgeous new recording studio called Goodnight LA (in partnership with investor and best friend, Gordon Perry), positioned immediately adjacent to Sound City no less, in the same horseshoe-shaped business complex, perhaps the bigger gain was snagging a percentage of the struggling musician Gottfried needed produced: Rick Springfield.

Born in Australia as Richard Springthorpe, the tall, dark, and exceedingly handsome (and by now thirty-year-old) Springfield dreamed of nothing more than being a successful musician. Having enjoyed a brief taste of the charts in 1972 when his song “Speak to the Sky” made it to number fourteen in the United States on the Billboard Top Forty, Springfield’s career soon evaporated when rumors circulated that Capitol Records, his label, had secretly bought up a bunch of his albums in order to boost the sales ranking.

Following an extended fallow period that left Springfield essentially broke and out of the spotlight for the rest of the seventies, his luck finally changed when Gottfried stepped in as his manager and benefactor. Treating Springfield like a son, Gottfried gave him free studio time to work on his craft and also a stipend of a $150 a week to help pay the bills (which Springfield augmented with the income from occasional small acting jobs). But musically Springfield felt that being produced by the great and powerful Keith Olsen was an incredible gift and maybe his only hope.

With a bunch of demo songs on a cassette that Springfield had meticulously written and recorded over the past year or more, he was more than ready for the big meeting scheduled up at Olsen’s house. Olsen wanted to listen to everything Springfield had so he could pick the two best of the bunch. As Olsen lent a critical ear to each song in turn, the one that really caught his attention was about a guy’s unexpected love for his pal’s girlfriend. Based loosely on an encounter with a woman Springfield noticed in a stained-glass-making class he took while waiting for the RCA deal to happen and originally titled “Randy’s Girl,” then “Gary’s Girl,” it was far from the best of what Springfield felt he had to offer.

“Really?” he asked, dumbfounded. “You want to record ‘Jessie’s Girl’?”

“It’s the best one you’ve got. A great story song,” Olsen replied.

Knowing Olsen’s reputation for picking hits, Springfield decided to go with it. He was in no position to argue anyway.

After Olsen then strategically asked Pat Benatar’s husband-to-be, Neil Giraldo, to play guitar and bass on the song (along with composing his own parts)—how could Pat get mad if time was taken away from her own album under those circumstances?—Olsen got “Jessie’s Girl” and another tune, written by Sammy Hagar (a future Olsen client too), called “I’ve Done Everything for You” in the can over one weekend at Sound City, then mixed them both the following Saturday. Three days, all in. From there Olsen immediately returned to work finishing up the Crimes of Passion LP for Benatar plus getting the construction under way on Goodnight LA, all the while giving “Jessie’s Girl” little further thought.

In the fall of 1980 “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” became a giant hit, as did Crimes of Passion. Pat Benatar was now an even bigger star. And Keith Olsen was rewarded with the opportunity to produce (along with Neil Giraldo this time around) her next album, Precious Time, which would also end up going multiplatinum in the summer of 1981. But it was neither the incessant radio airplay of “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” nor any of the other huge songs from either Crimes of Passion or Precious Time that would turn Benatar into a household name. That job fell to MTV.

On its first day on the air MTV had gone with “Video Killed the Radio Star” as its lead, which did little to revive the Buggles’ fading career. But the second video MTV aired during the wee hours of that morning—“You Better Run,” featuring a finger-snapping Pat Benatar in a black-and-white top suggestively telling a paramour to get lost if he knows what’s good for him—blew the lid off her career. It instantly established the photogenic, take-no-shit Benatar as one of MTV’s early darlings, her videos played over and over. The heretofore-untapped power of video as a promotional tool, compared to radio’s traditional reach, was mind-boggling. Benatar’s album sales shot up, as did those for most of the other acts MTV favored. Suddenly, making a video became the central component of any major artist’s promo plans.

MTV quickly metamorphosed into the province of those, like Benatar, who were attractive, willing to spend the time and money, and able to act (or at least lip sync in a reasonably entertaining fashion). Within a startlingly short period of time from its launch in August of 1981 MTV had made it so that what a music artist looked like mattered as much—maybe more—as what the music itself sounded like. Looks had always mattered in rock and roll, of course, from the Beatles’ celebrated mop-top haircuts in the early sixties to David Bowie’s ever-changing personas in the seventies. But now appearances were everything.

Anathema to rock-and-roll purists, video really did kill the radio star by the early eighties. Or at least many of them. With album-rock radio already reeling from the body blows it had absorbed over the years from the pernicious incursions of disco and new wave, MTV provided the ultimate smack-down. Pretty boy (and girl) musicians suddenly ruled for often little other reason than their appearances. All of which served to help Rick Springfield just when he needed it most.

His album, the ten-track Working Class Dog, released in late February of 1981 (and produced by Bill Drescher at Sound City on the other eight, non-Olsen songs), at first received scant notice. Nobody knew about it. RCA, leery of pushing Springfield’s brand of pop-rock at a time when power ballads, new wave, and the remnants of disco were still popular, sat on the LP without promoting it. Finally, after some nudging by Joe Gottfried and the by-now well-connected Keith Olsen, RCA hesitantly released “Jessie’s Girl” as a single at the end of March. They then gave Springfield the princely sum of $900 to go make a rudimentary video of him singing the song that could be used on various TV shows instead of spending a bundle on indie radio promoters.

After an agonizingly slow build over nineteen weeks spent in the Hot 100, during the first week of August—at the precise moment MTV hit the air—“Jessie’s Girl” became the number-one song in the country. With RCA then racing to hand over the cheaply made “Jessie’s Girl” video to MTV’s programmers, who were hungry for content, Springfield, like Benatar at the same time, became one of the new cable channel’s biggest stars. Further, REO Speedwagon, fresh off the unbridled success of Hi Infidelity, appeared in the ninth, seventeenth, and forty-seventh videos played on MTV’s first day, becoming another of the channel’s regular acts.

As for Keith Olsen, without even trying, he had unwittingly become part of the so-called video generation. Which would prove to be both good and bad for him and for the rest of the rapidly changing L.A. music industry as the eighties rolled forward.