46
MAY 2013
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HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
WHEN NINA BLACKWOOD
showed up
at her new job on Aug. 1, 1981, she felt
pre y relaxed about it. “All we knew,”
she says, “is that we were doing some
li le music thing on cable.”
In a book out this month, Blackwood and the three surviving members of MTV’s
original veejay team (J.J. Jackson died in 2004) recall the whirlwind of the “li le music
thing’s” inception.
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave
is part social
study, part trip down memory lane, collated by
Rolling Stone
veteran Gavin Edwards.
“
It’s an oral history,” says Blackwood, “a look at the early days of MTV through our eyes.”
It should come as no surprise that the veejays’ eyes were o en, let’s say, a li le
bleary. Young and relatively inexperienced (Blackwood was just in her 20s when
she joined the network), the quintet
was hurled headlong into a rock ’n’ roll
bacchanal that would have tested the
restraint of a nun, and their book
contains plenty of anecdotes involving
hair-raising excess.
Speaking of hair, Blackwood was no
slouch in that department. Her moppy
blond ’do, along with her adventurous
fashion sense, earned her the title of “video
vixen”—which may not have been entirely
fair. “I’m actually shy,” she says. “I’m a
wallflower, not the wild partying floozy I
was portrayed to be. It was always a li le
difficult for me when, in the ladies’ room,
someone would stick a piece of paper under
the door for an autograph.”
Now in her 50s, Blackwood lives in
Maine, where she hosts ’80s-themed radio
shows. It’s a lifestyle that be er suits her
temperament, she says. Not that she has
any regrets about her five years on MTV.
“
It was the biggest thing I’ve done,” she
says. “Living in New York, being the toast
of the town, having this cool job and being
flown all over the world—how do you
top that?”
MAY 7
I Miss MyMTV
The Rick Springfield era may be over,
Nina Blackwood says, but that doesn’t
mean the music has to die
It’s difficult to overstate the influence
MTV has had on popular culture—
everything from the way people dress
to how movies are shot was
transformed by the world’s first
music video channel. “It went
from being unknown to being
an adjective,” says Nina
Blackwood. “It amazes me that
something so important has
morphed into what it is today.”
Blackwood, it turns out, is
not a fan of MTV’s shift to reality
fare. “I’m not saying it should be
stuck in the ’80s, but it should
be on the cutting edge, not
aiming at the lowest common
denominator,” she says. “I don’t
think the 24-hour music video
channel would work these days,
but at least keep it credible.”
Bright
Lights,
Big Hair
A new book onMTV—penned
by four of the original veejays
—
offers an inside look at a
revolutionary television channel
MOVIES
Black Rock
,
a Maine-based horror story that doesn’t involve negotiating I-95 traffic in July
//
The Great Gatsby
,
a
Long Island–based drama that doesn’t involve negotiating L.I.E. traffic in July
BOOKS
Waits/Corbijn ’77–’11
,
a photographic
doorstop devoted to craggy growler TomWaits
//
Share: The Cookbook That Celebrates Our Common Humanity
,
whose
contributors include Nelson Mandela and Meryl Streep (really)
MUSIC
Primal Scream’s
More Light
,
on which Led Zeppelin
screamer-in-chief Robert Plant twangs his vocal cords
TV
Gloomy crime drama “The Killing” is resurrected by AMC
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THEMONTHAHEAD
RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGES (BLACKWOOD)
