Noël in 1979; Micky Dolenz in the late ’70s. (photos: YouTube, Getty Images)

The internet has many downsides, but if there was ever an example of its power being harnessed for good, it’s the recent unarchiving of “Dancing Is Dangerous” — a never-seen green-screen video by little-known Sparks protégé Noël, directed in 1979 by none other than the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz. It could, in fact, be argued that this is why the World Wide Web exists.

“It’s pretty weird, huh? A pretty weird video, if I’m being honest,” chuckles Dolenz, who up until very recently had forgotten he’d even shot the dystopian disco clip nearly half a century ago.

Scrappy dance-floor darling Noël’s Is There More To Life Than Dancing? — written and produced by Sparks’ Ron and Russell Mael, not long after they’d worked on their own disco record No. 1 in Heaven with Giorgio Moroder — recently received a 45th-anniversary reissue treatment on the Maels’ Lil Beethoven label, which sent the brothers on a quest to find the long-lost clip. According to a recent interview with the elusive and reclusive Noël for Synth History, the video for her debut single was shelved because Richard Branson — the head of Noël’s label at the time, Virgin Records — didn’t think it had enough “disco-dancing pizazz.” (Contradicting himself, Branson also allegedly believed that “disco was passé” and had already moved on to punk rock.)

But when watching Dolenz’s direction for “Dancing Is Dangerous” now, it’s obvious that the video was — like so many things Monkees-related — simply too weird and ahead of its time. Had it been released just two years later, when MTV debuted, it might have found an audience alongside other early, creative but low-budget videos by the Buggles, Devo, Missing Persons, and Oingo Boingo.

“In ‘79, not everybody was doing music videos yet. It was still kind of a new thing. And record companies were, frankly, a bit hesitant,” says Dolenz, who after the Monkees split in the early ‘70s became a television director in the U.K. and was looking to expand his career to commercials and videos. “There wasn’t really the distribution, the outlet, the platforms. There wasn’t really much going on at all with video, but some people were doing it.” And Dolenz, who points out that the Monkees’ “romps” in their eponymous ‘60s sitcom were really some the first music videos ever made, was eager to give it a go.

“I did like the song; it was kind of cool,” Dolenz, an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer, recalls of the new-wavey Noël tape he received from Virgin. “I came up with a visualization, and I guess they liked my idea, because they went with me.” While he admits that he doesn’t “remember a whole lot about the shoot” (please note, Dolenz’s recent autobiographical photo book is titled I’m Told I Had A Good Time), Noël’s memories of Dolenz’s high-camp high concept, as relayed to Synth History, are a lot sharper, involving an “entire storyboard,” a coffin, and an overactive fog machine.

Unfortunately, as Noël recalls, she had the flu and a 103 fever the day of the shoot in Los Angeles and she begged to reschedule, but because Dolenz was catching a flight out of town that evening, that wasn’t possible. She says she attempted to follow the “so excited” Dolenz’s direction, which entailed emerging from a casket “looking all mysterious and witchy,” but when the set’s copious dry-ice fog had the ailing, feverish singer wheezing and gasping for air by the third take, Dolenz disappointedly told her, “’Well, fine, then, we’ll just shoot some close-ups of your eyes and lips and a few standing and kneeling shots and call it a day.’ … He was very sweet and understanding, but I sensed how disappointed he was not to be able to film his vision for the video.”

Dolenz’s recollections of his vision for “Dancing Is Dangerous” are more technical, as he was eager to test out some camera techniques he’d learned from famous television directors Art Fisher and Jack Good on the set of the Monkees’ absolutely bonkers NBC special 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. (“That’s a weird one too,” Dolenz laughs, promising to talk more about that also-ahead-of-its-time spectacle later.)

“In those days, very few people were doing chroma key, which is what called it back then. Now it’s called green screen, but back then actually it was blue, not green! Not many people were even attempting it, but I had seen it in action,” explains Dolenz. Fisher was actually the first TV director to use chroma key technology, and British director “Jack Good was very experimental, like I tended to be — maybe sometimes a little too experimental, I don’t mind telling you! But you win some, you lose some. The English were a bit ahead of us terms of experimental and edgy stuff, because they didn’t have the same kind of economic restraints that we [American directors] do. But anyway, I knew this was possible because [Fisher and Good] had done it, and my people, my crew, they got it. They knew what it was. But in 1979, it was still experimental to some degree. We were all kind of taking a shot here, because a lot of the people in the crew had never done it before.”

Dolenz says he and his “Dancing Is Dangerous” cinematographer also started “fooling around with a video technique that at the time was called frame-dragging, or lagging. It had to do with the way that you tuned the video cameras, the way that you tuned them for the intensity of the light coming in. This was on video, not film, and video was still pretty new in ‘79 to some degree, so it was all a bit of a crapshoot. We shot the video and the lag, and a lot of people looked at it and said, ‘Uh oh, the camera fucked up!’ And I said, ‘No, no, that was the point! That’s what it’s supposed to look like!” (Four years later, Dolenz would utilize this technique in a sci-fi series for Britain’s ITV called Luna, which starred a then-largely unknown teen actress named Patsy Kensit.)

Meanwhile, the flu-stricken Noël — a former fashion model whose punky persona first captured the Maels’ attention when they witnessed her perform with the Mick Smiley Band at the Troubadour — soldiered through the shoot and made it work, looking like a proto-Lady Gaga with her clown makeup, peroxided hairography, and rotation of fabulously slinky disco outfits. The result was a fever dream, literally and figuratively. While Noël styled herself, she tells Synth History that Dolenz “suggest[ed] which way he wanted me to look with my eyes, how to purse my lips or walk, kneel, and throw my hair back, since he had to scrap his concept for the video.” (Ironically, according to Noël, Dolenz ended up missing his flight that night anyway.)

The whole project seemed doomed from the start, but after interest in the mysterious Noël (whose true identity has never been revealed) grew after the release of Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers documentary, the Maels reached out to her in October 2023. They retrieved the original Umatic master she still had in her possession, and had the “Dancing Is Dangerous” video digitized with the help of Whammy Analog in Silver Lake and the UCLA Film & TV Archive. And the rest was Synth History.

But, as mentioned earlier, the Monkees were always at the audiovisual forefront, and historically, “Dancing Is Dangerous” can be traced back to their above-mentioned television special, 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. This was another seemingly doomed project — it aired opposite the 1969 Oscars ceremony, because Dolenz recalls NBC “didn’t have much confidence in it,” and the network’s plans to follow up with two additional Monkees specials were eventually cancelled. But decades later, 33 1/3 has found its own cult audience via the internet.

“NBC came to us and said, ‘We want to do a special,’ and we were all for it because at the end of the second [The Monkees] season, frankly, everybody was getting a bit bored. It was all just very samey. I think the general consensus was we didn’t want to do another season of just exactly the same thing. We wanted to do something different from just a long episode of The Monkees.” The band commenced work on 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee just three days after the premiere of their equally bizarre cult film Head, and the two tandem productions effectively if temporarily detonated the careers of the reluctant TV teen idols (while simultaneously ushering in the New Hollywood era). “I personally liked the idea of deconstruction. … It was, absolutely, the deconstruction of the Monkees,” Dolenz explains.

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was also an early experiment in using video, not film. “It was all videotaped, which was kind of — well, not kind of — it was totally new at the time,” says Dolenz. “The idea originally was to do it at NBC, which was set up for live television and all the big variety shows. But a week before we were supposed to tape at NBC in Burbank, all the TV musicians went on strike. I remember there being talk about just scrapping it, but then the producers and NBC and whoever said, ‘Let’s do it remote — a remote video broadcast!’ Now, that alone had hardly ever been done, except maybe on the 6 o’clock news. A staged thing with music and blue screen and all the bells and whistles and live performances had certainly never done on videotape.”

Relocating the taping at the last minute to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where productions were typically done on the fly through remote video trucks (“massive 13-wheelers,” as Dolenz recalls), 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee took advantage of the unexpected situation by using various video techniques and effects that were mostly new and unproven at the time. The result was a psychedelic TV trip through something called the Electro-Thought Machine, with a Wizard (played by Brian Auger) and his gorilla sidekick plotting to take over the planet by brainwashing the Monkees. Or… something like that.

“I don’t even remember the original script or anything, except that I know we were all scrambling to get this thing done and having to make up shots and having to make up the dialogue and having to constantly try to salvage what I think could have been a really spectacular, groundbreaking special,” says Dolenz. “It still turned out pretty interesting, but you have to watch it and understand it in the context of the time, and that it was experimental videotape, certainly cutting-edge. And, we got through it.”

33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee was quite a romp, so to speak. Among the surreal highlights were a classic ‘50s medley starring Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard seated at stacked-to-the-rafters grand pianos, and an epic finale featuring Dolenz and his bandmates Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, along with Buddy Miles, engaging in an almost Sonic Youth-like noise-rock jam in a cluttered Hollywood prop-house. And all this “deconstruction” climaxed with footage of an A-bomb blast of Southern California.

That warehouse jam was the Monkees’ final performance as a quartet (Tork quit the band immediately after the 33 1/3  taping)… until 1986, of course, when a Monkees marathon took over MTV and sparked a spectacularly successful reunion. And so, the world had finally, fully caught up with the Monkees. Dolenz even recalls that MTV darling Cyndi Lauper “came up to me once out of the blue at some event and said, ‘I’ve just got to tell you, I was a big Monkees fan, because you guys made it OK to be different.’”

Now Dolenz is the only surviving Monkee, sadly, but he shows no signs of slowing down, embarking on his Songs and Stories concert tour this summer. Is it possible that the Noël might join him onstage at one of the gigs for some sort of surprise noise-rock/disco jam? That’s highly unlikely… but if that does happen, someone had better videotape it.

Matt Pinfield after his accident in December 2018. (Photo: Consequence of Sound)

On Dec. 3, MTV 120 Minutes VJ Matt Pinfield was crossing the street near his Hollywood home when he was struck by a car going 40 miles an hour. Though he tried to jump out of the way, he ended up sustaining grievous injuries. First, he broke his leg in two places (“The bone came out of the flesh down there;  it looked like a pretzel,” he recalls), then he split his head open all the way to the skull after hitting the windshield headfirst and whacking his head a second time on the pavement.

“[Doctors] told me I was so blessed and lucky to be alive, because most people would not have survived it,” Pinfield tells Yahoo Entertainment and SiriusXM’s Volume West.

Pinfield spent a week in the intensive care unit at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, and he’s  currently undergoing physical therapy and using a walker. But that hasn’t stopped him from pursuing his passion for seeing live music. This week, while attending the iHeartRadio ALTer Ego 2019 festival at the Forum (whose staff Pinfield praises for helping him get to the ADA section with a wheelchair and taking good care of him), his old friends the Killers gave him a shoutout while introducing “All These Things That I’ve Done.” It was a feel-good moment, for sure, but few fans in the crowd knew the deep connection Pinfield has with the Hot Fuss classic. Not only did Pinfield title his memoir All These Things That I’ve Done: My Insane, Improbable Rock Life, but the Killers actually wrote the song about Pinfield.

Years ago, before the Killers were famous (frontman Brandon Flowers was still holding down a day job as a Las Vegas bellboy), Pinfield, who was a vice president of A&R at Columbia Records at the time, tried to sign the promising young band. He was also working with the U.S. Army as part of a program that mentored wounded and/or PTSD-stricken musician soldiers returning from Iraq — and after visiting those veterans in Colorado City, Colo., he swung through Las Vegas, where he and the Killers quickly bonded.

“I watched them rehearse in their drummer Ronnie Vannucci’s garage — they were playing in his parents’ garage!” Pinfield says, laughing. “I took them out to dinner, and later on, I was going, ‘Hey, anybody want to give me a ride back to my hotel?’” Flowers subsequently offered to drive Pinfield, and the two cruised the Strip singing along to the Beatles’ Help!. They ultimately wound up hitting the bar at the Las Vegas Hilton on a low-key Tuesday night, just “talking about life.”

“I started to tell him the story about mentoring soldiers, and I was getting ready to go through a divorce. I was going through a bit of a rough time,” Pinfield says. “So, he went home that night, and their old manager, Braden Merrick, calls me on the phone, and goes, ‘Hey Matt, Brandon wrote a song about you. He went home last night and wrote this song.’ It was ‘All These Things That I’ve Done,’ and the line ‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’ is about the mentoring thing.”

So, it was a full-circle moment this week for Pinfield that — after helping injured people and bonding with Flowers so many years ago — the Killers helped him celebrate his own physical recovery. “It was beautiful. It was such a beautiful moment. I told Brandon backstage that I was just so moved by that and I thought it was absolutely amazing,” Pinfield says. “It was so cool when he dedicated the song to me at the Forum the other night. I saw him right before, and then they had me showing them pictures of my wounds.”

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Backstage with Ronnie Vanucci and Brandon Flowers from The Killers at the LA Forum. It was a beautiful moment tonight when Brandon dedicated “All These Things That I’ve Done” to me from the stage.

A post shared by Matthew Pinfield (@matthewpinfield) on Jan 20, 2019 at 12:35am PST

Speaking of wounds, Pinfield’s forehead scar is healing nicely — “An inch lower, and I could have lost an eye; I was very, very blessed,” he says — and Pinfield gives all the credit to his head surgeon, who apparently is a 120 Minutes buff. “They brought me to the Trauma Center at Cedars-Sinai … I heard someone say to [the surgeon], ‘Do you want to just staple him?’ And he goes, ‘No, no. This guy’s a VIP. I watched him on TV as a kid,’” Pinfield says, chuckling. “He was a fan! So, he sewed it up slowly, which accounts for the fact that it’s a pretty good-looking scar.”

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It was 7 weeks ago to the minute that I was hit by that speeding car and almost lost my life. So grateful to still be with you sharing my love for music and passion for new and older artists alike. Like Bo Diddley once said to me “I ain’t done yet! “

A post shared by Matthew Pinfield (@matthewpinfield) on Jan 21, 2019 at 7:49pm PST

Full audio of this conversation is available on demand via the SiriusXM app, on Volume channel 106.

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Nowadays, celebrities going makeup-free for the camera lens is an everyday Instagram occurrence. But 35 years ago, when greasepainted rock gods KISS bared their faces on live television, it was a shocker. On Sept. 18, 1983, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and relatively new band members Vinnie Vincent and the late Eric Carr took it all off for a Sunday evening MTV press conference — and against all odds, the makeunder actually revitalized their flagging career.

Up until that fateful night, the ‘80s had not been kind to KISS. Within the decade’s first two years, original members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss had left the group. A previous attempt to change with the times, with the ambitious but laughably misguided 1981 concept album Music From “The Elder,” was a commercial disaster. Ten years after their formation, KISS had fallen out of favor — replaced by MTV darlings who wore makeup in an entirely different way, like Boy George and Duran Duran. Perhaps that is why MTV execs stuck KISS’s press conference in the graveyard timeslot of 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, or why the event transpired with such a surprising lack of on-camera fanfare.

Looking back at the footage now, this “really big moment” in KISStory, as host J.J. Jackson somewhat unconvincingly worded it, seems anticlimactic, even downright awkward. There were no splashy graphics, no screaming in-studio audience, no background music. As glamour shots of the band members’ previously painted faces dissolved into closeups of their new looks — their clawfooted dragon-boots, leather linebacker shoulders, and superhero visages now replaced by standard-issue Sunset Strip attire — the set was eerily silent, save for the faint hum of the studio’s electricity and Jackson’s calm, resonant voiceover. (“There’s no question MTV chose J.J. to be at the helm, as he was MTV’s anchor of rock ’n’ roll knowledge,” Jackson’s co-worker, fellow original VJ Martha Quinn, tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I adore the moment he tosses out ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,’ a reference to the Traffic album.”)

So, there was ex-”Ankh Warrior” Vincent, glazed-eyed in a red blazer that seems pulled from Loverboy’s closet; pretty-faced former “Fox” Carr, rocking some earth-toned “Hungry Like the Wolf” safari-wear; Stanley, the onetime “Starchild,” in lavender leather trousers and a popped-collar teal vest that could’ve come from the Summer 1983 Members Only capsule collection; and, finally, a less demonic “Demon,” Simmons, sporting poodle hair and an uncomfortable stare. (The usually overconfident God of Thunder later confessed in his autobiography that he was “scared stiff” during the reveal.) The brief presentation was low-key, even by primitive early-MTV standards, and was especially off-brand for a gang of “fire-breathing, blood-spitting monsters” famous for flying on wires and detonating piles of pyro at their over-the-top stadium shows.

Quinn has amusing memories of the scene. “I remember jamming into the packed MTV control room to watch the unmasking,” she tells Yahoo Entertainment. “Everybody on the staff grew up for the most part in the ’70s, and KISS was in our rock ’n’ roll DNA. It’s hard to remember now, but the reveal of what the guys in KISS looked like under their makeup was historic. It’s funny, the production was so bare bones. You can really see the low-budget early MTV — in many ways, the MTV that today is so missed.”

At the time, Simmons insisted to Jackson and MTV’s late-night viewers that “KISS [was] still KISS” and that the band felt “very, very comfortable” with their new image. “We’ve always contended from the beginning that the makeup was just sort of a stage manifestation of who we are … the makeup was just an extension of our personalities,” he said on the air. “[We still have] the same sort of energy and drive and commitment to doing everything, short of killing ourselves, to give people the best show in the world.” Stanley coolly concurred: “Nothing really changes, because we only know one way to perform. The makeup never had anything to do with the bombs or doing splits or whatever we’re doing onstage. It comes from us. Taking the makeup off doesn’t change how we feel.” (Vincent — who would leave the band a year later — and Carr said pretty much nothing.)

However, speaking to the fanzine Porkchops & Applesauce in 1995 to promote the all-star tribute album Kiss My Ass: Classic Kiss Regrooved, Simmons admitted, “Everybody hated it. It was exciting to finally see us, but people were disappointed. They didn’t want the paint to come off. But you know what? Tough. It had to happen. You want your heroes to stay the same forever, but then the consequence of that is you get bored with them.”

Despite any initial backlash, KISS’s unmasking proved to be a shrewd career move, at least in the short term. Of course, the image update did nothing to earn the respect of music critics. (“Readers of early-’80s rock magazines may recall many bizarre interviews with Paul and Gene where they were asked if it would be difficult for them to record music without the greasepaint, thereby suggesting that many reporters somehow assumed KISS wore makeup in the studio,” writer Chuck Klosterman amusingly noted in Grantland.) But KISS fit right in with the commercial metal that would soon come to dominate Headbanger’s Ball-era MTV, and their first two no-makeup albums, Lick It Up and Animalize, went platinum (something their previous three albums had failed to do).

In the mid-‘80s, they scored respectable rock hits with “Heaven’s on Fire,” “Tears Are Falling,” and “Crazy Crazy Nights,” and they featured prominently in the 1988 metal documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II (which also starred Poison, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and Faster Pussycat). Ironically, in the early ’70s, KISS had crafted their image as a response to the glam-rock scene (“The very first pictures we took when we first got together, we looked like drag queens,” Simmons joked to Porkchops & Applesauce), and now they had assimilated into the 1980s glam-metal revival by taking the makeup off.

“At the time, I felt like it was the guys in KISS, very astute businessmen, wanting to keep step with the times, with the bands they were seeing on MTV — like Van Halen, Def Leppard, and Ratt,” Quinn tells Yahoo Entertainment. “These bands were all embracing the big rock sound that KISS specialized in, all while looking like glam-but-gritty rockers. Maybe Paul and Gene wanted to shed the Starchild and Demon to show they could play that game too. Or maybe they just wanted to be recognized by their fans more often!”

By 1989, KISS were even back in the Billboard top 10 singles chart with the power ballad “Forever,” their biggest hit since 1976’s “Beth.” Of course, the fact that “Forever” was co-written by schmaltz king Michael Bolton probably didn’t restore KISS’s ’70s rock cred — but by that point, they’d at least won over plenty of new fans. “I plead completely guilty that at some point [in the ’80s], we did completely sell out, to the guys that held the checks in front of our faces,” Simmons told Porkchops & Applesauce. “I mean, once you become disgustingly well-off, it’s difficult! We started making real pop records, with synthesizers and girl singers and all that s***. … I don’t think KISS will ever regain whatever credibility we once had, but that’s OK.”

KISS soldiered on for 13 years sans makeup, and in 1991, the year of grunge, they were still big enough to have their cover of Argent’s “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” serve as the theme song for fictional history-alternating band Wyld Stallyns in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. But by the irony-obsessed mid-’90s, ’70s nostalgia and kitsch were all the rage with Generation X — as evidenced by the above-mentioned Kiss My Ass, featuring covers of makeup-era KISS material by everyone from Garth Brooks and classical Japanese musician Yoshiki to alt-rock darlings Toad the Wet Sprocket, Dinosaur Jr., and the Lemonheads. And so, around this time, there was increasing public demand for KISS to return to their old facepainted ways. However, Simmons seemed surprisingly resistant to this “sellout” idea.

“To this day, a lot of original fans say we should do the makeup again, but then they say, ‘Remember, don’t sell out!’ But the truth is, if we did that again, we would be selling out. We’d just be going to the bank and putting out more s***loads of cash into our bank accounts,” Simmons told Porkchops & Applesauce. “There are bankers lined up now who say, ‘Do it and we’ll pay for the whole tour.’ I don’t negate the idea of doing it. But only if [we] feel like it.”

As it turns out, it didn’t take very long for Simmons and Stanley to “feel like it.” After the classic lineup of Simmons, Stanley, Frehley, and Criss reunited in August 1995 (without cosmetics) for a warmly received MTV Unplugged episode, they decided to kiss and make up, so to speak, and embark on their first tour together since 1979. And once again, KISS turned to live television to break the news — with all four original members making a bizarre surprise appearance, in full costume, alongside Tupac Shakur at the 1996 Grammy Awards. (“You know how the Grammys used to be, all straight-looking folks with suits. Everybody looking tired. No surprises. We tired of that! We need something different, something new! We need to shock the people. So, let’s shock the people!” Tupac proclaimed in his upbeat Grammy introduction.)

KISS’s full-facepaint reunion tour kicked off in June 1996, less than a year after Simmons’s assertion that reapplying the makeup would be a “sellout” move. And it was a sellout — in the sense that the band’s subsequent reunion tour sold out all over the country, grossing $143.7 million and becoming the most successful KISS tour to date.

Stanley, speaking to Loudersound in 2016 about KISS’s initial decision — actually initially proposed by Stanley — to go makeup-free, explained: “[The old look] had really run its course. It was no longer the original images. We had a fox and we had an Egyptian guy [Vincent, sometimes also known as “Egyptian Warrior” or “The Wiz”]. Maybe next we’d have ‘Turtle Boy.’ It was becoming farcical. We needed to take a stand. If we were good enough and viable enough as a band, we would survive. And if not, we would meet the extinction we deserved.”

Simmons expressed a similar sentiment to Porkchops & Applesauce. “We had to take [the makeup] off. It had run its course. New members were coming into the band, and then new characters were happening. It just wasn’t convincing to us anymore. We had always adhered to the philosophy that if Peter and Ace ever left, then KISS, at least in that form, would cease to be,” he said. “And I think instinctively, we did that. Without killing ourselves, without taking the Cobain way out, we simply killed off that version of KISS and decided to do a different version.”

However, when Frehley and Criss eventually left KISS again in the early 2000s, Simmons and Stanley — instead of re-removing their makeup or coming up with new characters — opted to have replacements (and current members) Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer respectively take on Frehley’s “Space Ace” and Criss’s “Catman” personas. That decision was perhaps even more polarizing than the group’s infamous MTV press conference. (“You’ve got a lot of push-back from some of the diehards. And that’s understandable. Hey, you know, if you lived in the ’70s and KISS was your favorite band, and that’s what you grew up with, and suddenly there’s another guy wearing that makeup, I can understand how some people, it might not have appealed to them as much,” Thayer told Rolling Stone in 2014.) But the controversial move, much like the makeup removal stunt of ’83, didn’t seem to derail KISS, who are now planning a massive (and possibly final) tour in 2019.

So, it looks like the makeup is here to stay. In fact, Stanley — who along with Simmons holds the ownership and licensing rights to the four original makeup designs — even recently suggested that KISS could theoretically continue indefinitely, without any original band members. It’s a proposal that longtime KISS manager Doc McGhee has supported, insisting that a new lineup could still rock stadiums and arenas “as long as these kids walk out there and they have that makeup and they have that attitude and they have a great f***ing visual show. … That’s what KISS is. KISS is a way of life.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“Whenever I hear the Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star,‘ I get goosebumps. I practically want to cry, every time. Every. Single. Time.”

So says Martha Quinn, one of the iconic five original MTV VJs, as the history-making cable channel that launched her career (not to mention the careers of hundreds of pop artists) celebrates its 37th birthday.

On Aug. 1, 1981, Quinn — who was just 22 years old at the time, and had only been working at MTV for two weeks — and her new co-workers piled into a rented bus to go watch the station’s midnight debut at a watering hole called the Loft in Fort Lee, N.J. The now-iconic “moon landing” theme music blasted for the very first time, the Buggles’ one-hit wonder hit the small screen … and the music business and pop culture in general were forever changed.

“I remember waiting for a school bus. 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. You couldn’t even get it in Manhattan then. [Original VJ] 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. “Anyway, as we watched the launch that night, we were all sobbing. It was the most emotional night. It was like having a baby being born.”

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. 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.

“The world was just not going along with us,” she recalls. “Everyone was against 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. 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. So MTV bought airtime, commercials. They had people like Pete Townshend and Billy Idol telling viewers to call their cable companies — and cable companies were getting inundated with calls. Then the cable companies would phone up MTV and say, ‘You’ve got to pull those commercials!’ So … we bought more.”

Eventually, the marketing blitz worked. All the kids in America wanted their MTV, and eventually, they got their wish. 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. Jackson “were the coolest people I’d ever met in my life. You know how in movies like American Graffiti, there’s always that little kid that wants to get in with the gang? That was totally me. I loved those VJs so much. And to this day, the four of us are such good friends [Jackson passed away in 2004]. We are family.”

Quinn soon gave notice at NYU, and ended up working her “dream job” during MTV’s entire first decade — making history with Live Aid, the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards, and countless A-list interviews. In a full-circle career move, she has reunited with her old MTV boss Bob Pittman, who hired her in 1981 after a chance encounter at New York’s WNBC radio station; Pittman, now the chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, recently recruited Quinn for the iHeart80s radio station. But she admits to Yahoo Entertainment, “People say to me, ‘Will you ever have a job as cool as being an original MTV VJ?’ And the answer is obviously no. When am I ever going to have the chance to be a part of something groundbreaking and revolutionary like that? And you can’t be a part of it on purpose. We didn’t know that it was going to be revolutionary at the time.”

Two years ago, when MTV hit the big 3-5, Viacom banked on the current ’90s nostalgia craze by rebranding its VH1 Classic channel as MTV Classic, a 24-hour network that airs a binge-worthy loop of Daria, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Total Request Live reruns. But here, Quinn reminisces about some of her personal favorite true “MTV classic” moments, from the network’s earliest days.

A very Billy Squier Christmas

“Number one, my top, very favorite MTV moment is ‘Christmas Is the Time to Say “I Love You,’” says Quinn, referring to the holiday singalong that she and her fellow staffers taped with stadium rocker Billy Squier in 1981. “If I had to go back in time and revisit one day, like if I could get into the DeLorean and go back to one moment, it probably be this. What you see in that video, it was recorded within months of our launch, and we were all so starry-eyed, such believers. We were rebels with a cause. Everyone you see in that video, they’re the technicians, the secretaries, the executives, the production assistants. We were all one big happy family, fighting for MTV. We believed so strongly in the power of rock ‘n’ roll. And you can really see it there.”

Three years later, Squier, one of MTV’s early darlings, would release his polarizingly pastel, new-wavy “Rock Me Tonite” video, which many people — including Squier — claim destroyed his career in less than four minutes and 49 seconds. But Quinn shrugs, “I don’t remember that video being poorly received at the time. If I were Billy Squier, I would launch the ‘Rock Me Tonite Tour.’ I would go out on tour with a giant huge bed on the stage, and I would come out in a pink tank top and dance my ass off. Because that was a super-fun video and a super-great song. I would just say, ‘Take this, haters!’ And it would be a smash.”

When Bob met Bono

“In 1984, I had the opportunity to interview Bob Dylan. He said he would do it if we sent a crew to Wembley Stadium in London, and he said, ‘I want [the interviewer] to be Martha Quinn.’ I don’t know how I wasn’t nervous. I was there sitting with him, doing his makeup, and I was completely calm! I would be way more nervous today,” says Quinn.

As surreal as it may have been for 25-year-old Quinn to help a rock legend like Dylan apply ’80s-appropriate guyliner, that wasn’t the wildest thing that happened that day. “After the interview, his assistant came up to me and said, ‘Bob wants to know if you want to fly with the band to Ireland for their show there tomorrow.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have my passport with me!’ So I had to run back to my hotel in a cab and then race to Heathrow. The plane was waiting on the tarmac. I went leaping onto the plane; my head was spinning,” Quinn recalls. “And I flew to Ireland with Bob Dylan and his band and saw his show at Slane Castle — where there was a young kid who was in a new band and working for a local music newspaper [Hot Press]. The kid went to interview Dylan. And that was the first time that Bono ever met Bob Dylan. I was backstage and I saw the whole thing happen.”

Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love with David Lee Roth

“In my area of New York, where I grew up in the late ’70s, you were either a fan of Black Sabbath, Van Halen, or Earth, Wind & Fire,” laughs Quinn. (Interesting side note: The clearly well-rounded Quinn landed her VJ gig with an audition that consisted of her talking about EW&F for four minutes. “And so when a chance to interview David Lee Roth came down the pike, I was so excited. All I could think about was everyone back home freaking out.”

Quinn, who also confesses to crushes on Rick Springfield, Corey Hart, and other heartthrobs of the day (“all of them, really!”), may have kept calm and carried on in the presence of Dylan. But she was a bundle of nerves when it came time for her sit-down chat with notorious charmer Diamond Dave. She tried her best not to let him see her sweat.

“We all know David Lee Roth is Mr. Jive Talker, and I was thinking, I’m going to pierce through to his soul, and he’s going to drop that façade and say, ‘Oh my God, Martha Quinn, where have you been all my life?’ And we would ride off into the sunset,” she giggles. “You can see in the footage that I’m not even laughing at any of his jokes. I was so intent on not being razzle-dazzled by him. Now I know that the best thing about David Lee Roth is his razzle-dazzling. So there was no sunset-riding for me and Dave.”

But later, at the first VMAs in 1984, Quinn finally got a “lovely moment” with the goofy Van Halen frontman. “I opened the show, and when I was leaving the stage, I tripped onstage. I remember there was an audible gasp from everyone at Radio City Music Hall, and I was mortified to the max,” she says. “I was so embarrassed. I could barely function. I couldn’t take it. And being young, with every single person I ran into that evening, I would say, ‘Oh my God, did you see what happened?’ — instead of just playing it cool.

“I said to David Lee Roth, who’d been sitting in the front row, ‘Oh no, did you see me trip and fall?’ And he said, ‘Ah, darlin’, welcome to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You know how many times I’ve done that? That’s what rock ‘n’ roll is all about!’ He just singlehandedly pieced me back together and made me feel OK. So I totally did have my real, genuine moment with David Lee Roth after all. He was so kind and so positive, so gentle. I’ve always been very grateful for that.”

Quinn, a self-described “rocker chick,” also reveals that her favorite music video of all time isn’t the above-mentioned network-launching Buggles classic, but “Jump” by Van Halen. “At the time, in the mid-’80s, storyline music videos were big, like A-Ha’s ‘Take on Me’ and Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys,’ or really produced videos like Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer.’ And what I loved about ‘Jump’ was you really got to just see the band. It was the pure joy of the rock ‘n’ roll experience.”

So, did Roth ever figure out that Quinn had a crush on him? “Oh, I can imagine it was pretty obvious,” she quips.

Under the cherry moon — in Sheridan, Wyo.

Another one of Quinn’s ’80s crushes was the late Prince, whom she only met briefly — when she was bizarrely dispatched to a Holiday Inn in Sheridan, Wyo., to report from the scene of an Under the Cherry Moon movie premiere for an audience of elated MTV contest winners. “There’s a video floating around somewhere of Prince where I’m interviewing a contest winner and he walks up, and it’s so obvious that I’m completely throwing myself at him,” she groans. “It’s too embarrassing. But you know, that’s when you do when you’re young.” (Quinn asked Prince, “So how do you feel?” His answer: “With my hands, Martha.” Now that’s some classic MTV.)

“Prince’s death was different to me from Glenn Frey’s or David Bowie’s,” Quinn now says wistfully, “in that he was really of the MTV generation. Purple Rain was ours. He was not our older brother’s favorite artist. He was ours. That was a really direct hit to the MTV generation.” Musing about other early-MTV icons who have recently passed, like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, Quinn says, “It just sucks. It’s like, ‘No! Everybody stay here!’ I need to start sending crates of broccoli to all my ’80s artists. Everybody needs to stay healthy.”

Martha meets the Boss, acts like a boss

“When MTV first started, so many of the more established artists, like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, were saying, ‘No, we don’t need to make videos,’” remembers Quinn. Obviously, Dylan soon came around to the concept of MTV. And Springsteen did as well – possibly with some encouragement from Quinn herself.

“I am pretty sure that I am responsible for launching the second phase of Bruce’s career — the career that got launched with the Born in the U.S.A. album,” Quinn jokes. “Because I ran into Bruce in a restaurant when he was recording that album, and he said to me, ‘Hey, aren’t you the girl I see on MTV?’ And I said, thinking very quickly on my feet, ‘That’s more than I can say for you! When are you going to make some music videos?’ And sure enough, he made videos. So I really think Bruce should be thanking me!”

However, when it came time for Springsteen to shoot his career-rebooting “Dancing in the Dark” video, he famously hired then-unknown actress Courteney Cox to play the giddy fan that hops onstage with him for an “impromptu,” slightly dorky ’80s dance-off. Clearly, Quinn would have been perfect for that role. “That [casting] was kind of a knife in the back, if you want my opinion,” Quinn laughs. “I’m just sayin’!”

Paul McCartney spills the tea

One of the reasons that Quinn and her fellow VJs were so beloved by the channel’s early audience was it was obvious that they were true superfans, just like the avid viewers at home. And even after a decade on MTV, that hadn’t changed much for the now-seasoned Quinn.

“In 1991, I interviewed Paul McCartney at Capitol Records in Hollywood,” she recalls. “I’m a diehard Beatles fan, and it was the only time that I’ve brought an album to an interview to be signed. And the craziest thing happened. He was drinking tea during the interview, and afterwards, I looked down at his teacup and I saw there was still tea in there. So I picked up the cup … and I drank it. I was like, ‘I am going to drink Paul McCartney’s tea. I don’t even care if I get a bacterial infection! I am going to drink it.’

“And no one was looking … so I picked up the cup, saucer, and spoon, and I put them right in my purse. I still have them. They’re behind glass, in a cabinet, to this day. And I’ve never washed them.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Even more astounding? Both videos were the work of the same director: a true video vanguard, Steve Barron.

Had Barron never come up with the wild ideas to cast the Norwegian heartthrobs of A-ha as comic-book moto-racers or have cube-headed, computer-animated repairmen act out “Money for Nothing,” the British director’s place in the MTV annals would still have been secure. Long before 1986, his video for the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” helped usher in pop’s Second British Invasion; his groundbreaking clip for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” then broke the color barrier at MTV, as one of the first videos by a black artist to ever air on the largely rock-based network. But just as “Take on Me” turned A-ha into overnight sensations and “Money for Nothing” revived the career of old-school classic rockers Dire Straits, these two landmark videos also catapulted Barron’s career to new heights; he soon moved on to major feature films, directing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Coneheads. (His latest directorial project is Britain’s ITV dramatic series The Durrells.)

Related: Watch Every VMA Video of the Year Winner Ever

“It just happened to be a year that there were these two big challenges and two big opportunities to do something special,” Barron tells Yahoo Music. He never thought he’d be talking about these videos three decades later. “I knew we were on to something very good, as soon as we finished shooting and cut it together as the animation was coming in — but nothing could have prepared me for this getting so much attention over the years. You always wonder how long your work is going to stay around, how many generations might get to see it.”

In actuality, at one time it looked like no one, of any generation, would get to see “Take on Me” and “Money for Nothing.” Both videos almost didn’t get made at all — the former due to resistance at MTV and radio, the latter due to resistance from Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler himself.

Barron’s animated “Take on Me” was actually the second video for the song. In 1984, a different mix of the single came out — accompanied by a basic, performance-based music video shot against a plain blue backdrop, seen below — and it went nowhere (other than #3 on Norway’s pop chart). But Warner Bros. executive Jeff Ayeroff truly believed in A-ha. So Ayeroff went back to the drawing board — quite literally — and recruited Barron.