Jackson “were the coolest people I’d ever met in my life. Quinn, the youngest VJ and therefore the most relatable to MTV’s teen audience, soon became the network’s most popular crew member and America’s shag-haired sweetheart - which, she says, surprised her, because she thought her fellow VJs Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Nina Blackwood, and J.J. All the kids in America wanted their MTV, and eventually, they got their wish. Then the cable companies would phone up MTV and say, ‘You’ve got to pull those commercials!’ So … we bought more.”Įventually, the marketing blitz worked. They had people like Pete Townshend and Billy Idol telling viewers to call their cable companies - and cable companies were getting inundated with calls. My favorite story about that is, remember those famous MTV commercials that said call your local cable operator and demand, ‘I want my MTV’? Well, the reason that campaign started was cable companies did not want to add us. The advertisers didn’t want to advertise with us the record companies, by and large, didn’t want to provide videos the cable companies didn’t want to carry us.

“The world was just not going along with us,” she recalls. Quinn, a very recent New York University graduate, even kept her day job at the NYU dorms for a while, just in case her MTV employment was short-lived. While Quinn says she “thought that we were onto something from the very beginning,” it took some time for the rest of America to catch up with Fort Lee. “Anyway, as we watched the launch that night, we were all sobbing. Mark Goodman, I believe, took a limo, because he did not want to ride with these ‘little people,’ because he was the WPLJ disc jockey at that time, which was a big New York rock station,” Quinn said, chuckling. You couldn’t even get it in Manhattan then. When MTV started, we didn’t have a big budget at all - no budget for limousines or anything like that - so they rented a literal yellow school bus that drove the crew and VJs out to this little bar in New Jersey, because there weren’t many places that carried MTV.

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