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. And to this day, the four of us are such good friends. 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. 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.

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