Killing the radio star

GO sits down to chat with MTV creator Les Garland. Plus, read extended coverage you'll only find online.

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Les Garland has spent 30 years chasing “it”, from Los Angeles and rock radio to New York and the launching of MTV. “The Next Big Thing” has him in Florida now, but the Springfield native keeps a home on Table Rock Lake for when he needs to get away. It started as a vacation spot and a way to stay close to family; now Garland says he spends about 40 percent of his days in Missouri. He took such a vacation last week, spending five days in his home town to attend and speak at the Missouri State university Public Affairs Conference April 17–20.

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t working.

“I’m looking for a band,” Garland says, turning his interview into a question-and-answer session of his own. Who’s big these days? Are there good venues for major acts in Springfield? The questions about his hometown roll on for almost fifteen minutes. He says he wants to promote Springfield’s next “it” music act, but what Garland is really after is “The Next Big Thing”—whatever it may be.
Right now that’s The Tube, Garland’s digital-cable, all-music TV network. This Big Idea is to jump on the digital broadcast signals of local TV stations around the country, all of which have room for two or three more networks than they include. It means the network falls in unusual places on the digital signal—channel 17.3 in Columbia, for example, which is the closest carrier to Springfield—but digital tuners pick it up anyway.

The Tube is a fine-tuned take on what Garland has been selling in one form or another since disco died: music on television. In 1981 he left his job as vice president of the West Coast branch of Atlantic Records to help launch MTV (Music Television, a phrase the network hasn’t used since the Rubik’s cube fell out of style). Back then, cable television was a budding medium with a lot of new programming. Garland says it was a matter of good timing, and his wasn’t the only network that had it. “Shortly after MTV, we got a good laugh out of The Weather Channel,” he says. He stuck with MTV until 1988, when second-generation management started putting shows without music on the network (not MTV!). By then, Garland had produced the first MTV Video Music Awards broadcasts and manned the controls of the Live Aid hunger relief concert in 1985, which Garland calls “that decade’s Woodstock.”

Having been to the top of the cable-TV heap once already, Garland took a new approach with his new venture, The Box. Music videos were still the name of the game, but the content was decided by the viewers, using the remote control as a cable box. Garland says he believes the network was helped in popularity by the rise of rap music in the late ’80s and early ’90s. When Garland sold The Box in 1997, it was to a familiar business partner—MTV, which then turned The Box into M2.

The Tube is his latest national venture—“That’s the chaos that keeps me young,” he says—but he says he has taken a greater interest in local events in the last couple of years. In fact, Garland says he’s working on negotiating deals to bring more and bigger national music acts into more and bigger venues in Springfield, though he couldn’t give details on either just yet. All he could divulge was that, if all goes according to plan, local music fans can expect to see the results before the end of the year. Oh, and he’s still looking for that local band to promote, so if anyone has ideas, let him know. They just might be Les Garland’s Next Big Thing.

Check out our entended, online only coverage on the next page.