The very first MTV T-shirt.

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“You’ll never look at music the same way again.”

Everything’s always hard at a start-up. Even T-shirts. Believe it or not, even at MTV.

The first time doing everything is torture, and in an organization, it’s organizational torment. No matter who’s in charge of what, everyone wants a say in everything. After all, we want to put our best foot forward to the world, don’t we? So, even a T-shirt (maybe, especially a T-shirt) becomes a matter of earth shattering importance.

I don’t think we’d even launched the channel —we’re probably talking July, 1981— when we realized we needed a T for some trade show or other. And honestly, we didn’t know how MTV worked yet. The vibe hadn’t really started, and we hadn’t finished much of any of the actual on-air work yet. The VJ’s were rehearsing and a set had been built (definitely not the vibe), and we had a logo (barely), but we didn’t really know how the logo worked yet. We knew about the changing colors and all, but nothing else. Our network IDs would explain it to us, but they were still being produced, and our promos were still a mess. The graphic identity was unformed and we wouldn’t understand our own work for over a year.

I’m not sure who designed the shirt, maybe Manhattan Design, the visionaries behind the logo. Alan Goodman, my key creative partner, had written the copy (“You’ll never look at music the same way again.”) for our first pitch tape that spring, and in lieu of anything else (“I Want My MTV” was still a year away) it was our key shout out.

This shirt only lasted for a couple of minutes before the “real” t-shirt came into being. (Don’t ask me why the new one was better, but it lasted for a year or more.)

What’s in a T-shirt? Not much, but, really, everything. We all love this thing.

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