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In our prior conversation with Fred Seibert, we discussed his role as a young producer and engineer capturing Cecil Taylor and other artists. Despite working with heavyweights like Rudy Van Gelder and Tony May, Seibert ultimately chose not to make music his career. Instead, his focus became, primarily, television. At the beginning of the 1980s, he co-founded MTV. He also served as the channel’s first creative director – the one who made it an icon of American culture with its notorious logo and the motto “I Want My MTV.” It’s somewhat easy to see the connections between MTV and Seibert’s recording career; keep in mind this was a time when the channel actually cared about music instead of obsessing over reality TV. But his love of music and lessons from his time with WKCR and Oblivion Records also subtly guided one of his next major projects, developing Nick at Nite. He later went into animation, first serving as the President of Hanna-Barbera Animation and then going out on his own. Even in this realm, his work with Rudy Van Gelder and his love of the Beatles serves as a surprising guide.

PostGenre: So, you were sharing how you met Frank Olinsky, who designed both the artwork for “Spring of Two Blue J’s” and the MTV logo…

Fred Seibert: Right. When I was four years old, my parents moved into our suburban neighborhood. Once we got there, a five-year-old boy was standing on the dirt hill in our backyard. That was Frank Olinsky. 

Growing up, Frank introduced me to many bands. He’s the reason I know about the Who, Jeff Beck, and Frank Zappa’s The Mothers of Invention. And he’s a music fanatic to this day. He seems just as excited about going to an Alison Krauss concert – he even did the artwork for her album covers for a while – as he was when he saw Cream years ago. 

Frank is the son of two artists and he was already exhibiting talent as a child. It wasn’t a surprise he became a professional artist. I was able to help him get his artwork on the album for “Spring of Two Blue J’s” and a bunch of posters promoting Cecil’s concerts. He also did one of my album covers for Oblivion Records and it was fantastic. So, we were always connected. 

PG: When you were selecting the logo for MTV, was Frank your immediate choice?

FS: When MTV was being formed, I was dating a graphic design major at [The] Cooper Union [for the Advancement of Science and Art]. Between her and the work of Milton Glaser- who designed the ‘I Love New York’ logo – I became very interested in graphic design. 

Since I was very interested in logos, I went to my boss at MTV and asked who would be designing the logo for the new channel and he had told me to work on getting one together. I initially wanted to hire Milton Glaser but figured he charged a lot of money, and as a startup, we didn’t have much funding. I also realized that even if we could afford Glaser, he would get credit for anything we did and I wanted a little credit for the logo. 

At the time Frank was starting a studio with two partners named Manhattan Design. It was a small operation in a room behind a Tai Chi studio on Sixth Avenue. But I knew Frank was a brilliant designer and illustrator. He is one of the biggest music lovers I know and a longtime friend. I figured I owed Frank an opportunity to see if Manhattan Design would be a good fit for making the logo. So, I called him up, we grabbed a cup of coffee, and I asked him if he would be interested in doing the logo, which he was. Manhattan Design did 500 different logos for us and we ultimately found one that fit.

PG: One of the more striking things about the MTV logo was how it did not look so polished and, well, corporate. Did you encounter resistance from anyone on that aspect of the logo?

FS: Although all of my bosses signed off on the logo, I ran into a real problem when it came to the sales department. The sales department was always backward thinking. The head of sales was not excited by the logo and marched into his boss’s office. His boss asked me if I thought it would last as long as a logo as the CBS Eye because, at that time, the Eye was the most famous media logo of all time. When he asked me, I started laughing because I figured we’d be lucky if MTV was going to even be in business in five years.  I figured there was no way that a rock and roll channel could last a long time. 

So the boss above the head of sales marched me into his own boss’ office. The head boss looked at me and asked who did the logo. I told him truthfully it was done by three guys behind the Tai Chi Studio on Sixth Avenue. [Laughing]. He asked me why I didn’t go find someone good and I told him they were great. And, the way things worked out, they didn’t charge me anything. If I had gone to Milton Glaser, he would have charged me $10,000 just to walk in the door. So, the boss said he would give me $40,000 to go to four “good people.”

PG: But in your mind, you already hired good people.

FS: Exactly! His attitude greatly angered me and led me to pull the first corporate weasel move of my career. I went to four well-known people and purposely sandbagged the assignment, giving them all bad directions. With the faulty directions, they came back with things that were, at best, OK. I brought those back to the big boss who asked to look at the Manhattan Design version and decided to go with Manhattan Design’s after all. He wanted to make some typeface changes to the portion under the big M that said “Music Television.” So, I went back to Manhattan Design and asked them to set 10 different typefaces. The boss ended up picking Helvetica. Which, whatever…

PG: And then there is also the fact that the MTV logo wasn’t a static image. The letters were the same but with the colors and designs consistently changing. Did you encounter any complaints about the fact the logo wasn’t static?

FS: People were very confused by the logo changing its appearance. Those who complained the most about that were the network’s lawyers. They initially said we couldn’t trademark the logo because it was constantly changing. But we were able to take care of that problem once I pointed out that we could just trademark the outline of the letters. 

In a way, I feel like the changing logo ties back to my interest in jazz. In both cases, I learned that you could be the same by always being different. A jazz solo is the quintessential version of that thought. The solo belongs in the moment when it is played but is unlikely to repeat itself. Having grown up in pop music and having studied classical music, as a kid I was very taken with the idea that the individual could reframe something. And that was one of the most interesting things to me about the changing aesthetics of the MTV logo. Any time a designer worked work with it, they could do things to make it their own. Before that, logos were immutable. The artist was more or less stuck with what someone came up with before. Each artist wants to put their own stamp on their work and, unlike all other logos, the MTV one allowed them to do so while maintaining the corporate brand.

PG: Going back a bit, how did you go from recording Cecil Taylor and other jazz and blues musicians for Oblivion to being one of the co-founders of MTV?

FS: As with everything in my career, I got into MTV almost by accident. I turned it down originally. 

I was going broke being a record producer. I originally wanted to produce the Beatles and ended up producing Hank Jones instead. Don’t get me wrong, Hank was an incredible artist, but there was no money there. Many records I even did for free on my own out of a love of the music.

And, when I did get paid, I would make $250 a record. There weren’t nearly enough records coming through for me to make a living off of it. To make some money, I took a job at a country music radio station in its promotions department. My boss at the station, Dale Pon, was both a genius and a lunatic. I learned so much from him that I use even now. Actually, when I was ultimately at MTV, Dale was who I hired to create the famous “I Want My MTV” slogan. But, back at the station, one day Dale quit and went across the street to a competitor. I did not like his replacement at all and learned nothing from him. Though I was making money at the station, I was very unhappy. I mostly kept the job just to pay my rent. 

One day I got a phone call from Bob Pittman, the program director at the station Dale went to after he quit my station. Bob told me he had left the station to go work in cable TV and had heard I wanted to join him in television. I didn’t. I agreed to talk to him about it, but I watched television, I didn’t make it! [Laughing] I was only 27 at the time and Bob was only 25. We got together for a drink and from our conversations, it was clear how much smarter Bob was than my boss at the time. One of the things my mentor taught me is that the job doesn’t matter; what matters most is the boss. And because Bob was so smart, even though I didn’t initially plan to take his offer seriously, it started to become attractive.

That night, I had a recording session with [trumpeter] Bill Hardman. In retrospect, it was one of the worst sessions I ever worked on. Bill was a heavy drinker and that made it difficult.

But, I also wasn’t paying a lot of attention because I kept thinking about Bob’s offer. I spent all six hours of the session, not listening to one thing. I ended up calling Alan Goodman, who I had worked with back at WKCR, and ultimately was my creative partner at MTV. I asked Alan to come to the studio and help me make a decision about Bob’s offer. Alan and I put together a pros and cons list and the pros ended up being twice as long as the cons. But the last thing on the con list was that I wouldn’t work for music again. Even so, looking at the two lists made me decide to quit the radio station and to go to cable TV.

PG: Bob’s offer was to start a music channel?

FS: No. It was to work for the promotions department of The Movie Channel.

But in June of 1980, a month after I went to work there, a page and a half memo went out that said that in August of 1981 The Movie Channel would start a music channel and that Bob would be leaving to go work on the new project. Now, I had just started at The Movie Channel primarily because Bob was going to be my boss, and here he was leaving already. So, I decided I would start trying to convince Bob to hire me for the music channel as well. He agreed to it, but only if I also kept my job in the promotions department of The Movie Channel. I had to do both jobs while making $27,000 a year. 

But I also made him agree to one condition. You see, whenever I would try to do something creative for The Movie Channel, he would shoot it down because HBO didn’t do it. With a music channel, we had no competitors. We had no precedent. If Bob didn’t like something I was doing for this new music channel, that was fine. But he couldn’t shoot it down based on what someone else did. Bob agreed to those terms and more or less gave me free rein to do what I thought was best for the channel. That freedom was incredibly important because we had to completely reinvent how we talked about ourselves. With MTV we didn’t even have scheduled programming blocks like traditional television. 

PG: At some point, MTV decided to be music television in name only. It started dropping music videos entirely in favor of reality TV. Do you know why that happened?

FS: I know exactly why that happened. I didn’t like the change at the time, but I understood the rationale. Of course, by the early 2000s with the rise of YouTube, I lost my reason to be upset over it. 

Television ratings are made up of several factors. One is how long the average audience stays on the channel. That metric is important because MTV is ad-supported and the ads came on only once every 11 to 12 minutes. The problem with a music video channel was that the videos were about three minutes long. Once a song ended, you gave the viewer an opportunity to change the channel. Or get up and go to the bathroom. Or go get a drink. MTV’s music programming gave you the chance to be distracted every three minutes.  

Also, because MTV was effectively, a top 40 format, you would have bands that some people would like followed by others that they may not but that someone else liked. You would have Duran Duran, followed by the Rolling Stones, and then Pat Benatar. If you loved Duran Duran, you may not love Pat Benatar or even the Stones. And so, you are given a great opportunity to change the channel right after Duran Duran’s video. And that was bad for ratings.

PG: But it seems the shift to reality tv did not ramp up until the early 2000s. It is surprising it took that long if there was a significant structural problem with MTV.

FS: Even early on, we started to notice there was a problem. In the beginning, the novelty of the station kept viewers glued to the TV. But after only about 18 months, that novelty was already starting to wear off. Our average viewing time went from over an hour to maybe 15 minutes. By the late 80s, one of the network executives decided to run what we call long-form programming. The idea is that instead of a bunch of disjointed videos, you found a way to provide some sort of narrative that would keep people on the channel longer.

Additionally, several people that worked on MTV came out of television and didn’t like the channel’s format because they were used to TV shows. My first production manager would come into my office and tell me that we needed to run tv shows because he didn’t like the music video format. That angered me at the time because I was very into the idea that MTV had invented a new format for television. Many people came to work there because they wanted to work in television. While they might have been music fans, their first passion was television. 

And from that, there was a comedy show that brought Adam Sandler to the world. And a second show called Club MTV that was essentially an American Bandstand without kids dancing. Both shows increased the constant thread time-span viewing metric. And it became a model for the channel. 

PG: Was Total Request Live (TRL) a long-form programming effort to keep a focus on music?

FS: Yes, TRL came from that sort of structure. The same with Yo! MTV Raps. We had a lot of music videos that were now being reorganized into shows. And these shows had higher average view time ratings. 

In the year 2000, for the first time, MTV hired a head programmer from outside the channel. Everyone else had been homegrown or came out of the radio business. But now they had someone who was primarily a television executive. The success of The Real World was his opening. And while he did like music, he thought the channel could redefine MTV to move away from music as long as the new programming kept the essence of MTV.

PG: And what was that?

FS: He thought that what defines MTV is that it tells the world, essentially, “Screw you. We’re going our own way.” And he was right. 

PG: You also developed Nick at Nite. How did that come about?

FS: After I’d been at MTV for three years, I felt like it was time to move on to another project. So, one day I just quit and set up my own company. The next day, my MTV boss called me and offered to hire me back as a consultant. I agreed and, at some point while consulting for MTV, my boss became the head of both MTV and Nickelodeon. 

At that point, in 1984, Nickelodeon was ad-free and struggling. It had only one show with good ratings. My boss decided that if things could not get turned around quickly, Nickelodeon would likely need to be shut down. He asked me if I had any ideas to save the channel. Truthfully, I had none. I still didn’t know much about television. Or kids. I was a young single guy and didn’t even like kids. But I agreed to a one-year deal to try to fix the channel. Somehow, over six months, my partner and I were able to bring the ratings up drastically. 

Nick used to turn off each night at eight o’clock Eastern Time. In those days, a transponder was fairly hard to come by; there were only 24 of them in the country. To make some revenue, from 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM each night, Nick leased their transponder to something called The Arts Channel. But The Arts Channel later decided to get its own transponder, leaving Nick scrambling to find something to air on the evenings.

Gerry Laybourne, who led Nickelodeon and was really the soul of the place, came to me and asked for ideas on what to do with Nick’s nighttime programming. My partner and I previously pitched a show to ABC for eleven o’clock in the morning which would be the first oldies television show. Monday through Friday for a half-hour, we would show episodes of Father Knows Best. Then the next week we’d show episodes of The Donna Reed Show. And then switch it to a new show for week three, and so on. ABC seemed to love the idea at first but ultimately turned it down because they felt like no one would watch black and white TV shows. 

PG: Did older television shows always speak to you?

FS: I think it comes from my love of music. I was a huge fan of Rhino Records. Its founder, Richard Foos, also became one of my closest friends. One of the things Rhino has done best is re-issuing older recordings. And I generally loved oldies on the radio. I am sure that interest in older music stretched out to older television as well. 

PG: How did you get Nickelodeon to not only go along with the idea after ABC rejected it but expand it to a full evening of programming?

FS: Well, when I was presenting the idea to Gerry, she said there was a problem. They had just bought 240 episodes of The Donna Reed Show. With such a large purchase, the episodes couldn’t be rotated as we planned. And that’s where we came up with Nick at Nite. 

PG: You mentioned that older music may have partially influenced the development of Nick at Nite. Do you feel like your background with music influenced your time at Nick at Nite in any other way?

FS: Working with WKCR provided some inspiration for programming at Nick at Nite. At some point in the 90s, the radio station called together a few of us alumni. Over the years the station was losing financial support and trying to find ways to jumpstart things. Each year they did a programming block on Beethoven’s birthday where it would be nothing but Beethoven compositions. Our group, including the late Phil Schaap, started brainstorming and decided to have a similar marathon on John Coltrane’s birthday with a four-day marathon of Trane’s music. It made a lot of money for the station and spurred a series of marathons at WKCR.

A few years later, Nick at Nite was going through a rating slump and we were looking for new approaches to programming. We were still running primarily black and white shows and it seemed people weren’t as excited about seeing them as they once were. I started thinking about the John Coltrane marathon, the Ornette [Coleman] marathon, and all these different marathons at WKCR. We always raised more money during those marathons than at any other time so I thought they may also help with Nick at Nite’s ratings. 

PG: Is that where Nick at Nite’s Block Party Summer came from?

FS: I didn’t do Block Party Summer, but that was an extension of my idea.

We started by putting four episodes of The Donna Reed Show back to back. Sure enough, it doubled our ratings. And, over time, those blocks of the same show became common on Nick at Nite. One of my favorites was that we were able to buy the black and white episodes of Bewitched, which I didn’t even realize existed. Once we bought them, we didn’t know what to do with them. We ended up running them all – black and white and color – in the order that they were originally aired. It did phenomenally. And, now, many people in cable depend on those types of marathons when they need to boost their ratings at the end of the ratings period.

PG: After Nick at Nite, you went to Hanna-Barbera Animation and are now out on your own doing animation. How did that happen?

FS: It started with another job I didn’t want. [laughing]. 

At some point, the heads of Nickelodeon came to my company and indicated that they were planning to create their own animated shows. Back then, there were only two cartoons on Nickelodeon, Danger Mouse and Belle and Sebastian, that were doing well in the ratings. Both were from England and, funnily enough, both provided names for musicians today.

The executives asked me if I would help put together new animation. I didn’t know anything about animation. But, I am good at thinking on my feet and told them that the reason most of their cartoons struggled is that they sucked. In the 1980s, most animation wasn’t very good. 

I also told them that the greatest cartoons ever made were from back in the 30s and 40s by Looney Tunes, MGM, and Disney. What worked for those studios was to make shorts, put them into the movie theaters, and see how people responded. If people liked what they saw, they would make more. If people stopped or didn’t like it, they stopped making them. And that’s how you ended up with only five Screwy Squirrels but hundreds of Tom and Jerry’s. The people at Nickelodeon didn’t buy the idea of making shorts, failing to see a difference between that and full pilots. 

About six months later, the head of marketing at Hanna-Barbera called and asked if I could help their team. I agreed to have lunch with him. All I wanted to talk about was Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones and all he wanted was to get me to promote his new shows, which sucked. I ended up quizzing him on the Hanna-Barbera library because, at the time, Nickelodeon was running Yogi Bear cartoons on a license and doing great with them. Through those conversations, I end up finding out that Hanna-Barbera was not doing well financially. 

I went to the bosses at Nickelodeon and told them that I thought, because of the internal problems at Hanna-Barbera, they could probably purchase the studio for a very discounted rate. They didn’t believe me but reached out to Hanna-Barbera and were ultimately able to buy their library of cartoons for $7.5 Million when it was worth closer to $15 Million. 

Since they got such a good deal on the purchase and I made it all happen, I asked the executives to give me a $100,000 bonus. They responded that they had already paid me as a consultant and would not pay me anything more. But I was hired to be a promotional consultant, not work on acquisitions. When they turned down my request, I started complaining to anyone who listened over the next year. 

One of the people I complained to about it was a friend of mine who was the president of Turner Broadcasting. A year later he called me and told me that Turner had just bought Hanna-Barbera and asked if I could come run the studio. At that point, Hanna-Barbera had not had a hit in decades. I told him I had never made cartoons and he told me that because of the rough condition the studio was in, I couldn’t possibly make things any worse. In a way, it was a win-win for me. If I had a hit, people would think I was a genius. If it failed, no one would blame me given the studio’s state. And, so, I moved to Los Angeles to take over Hanna-Barbera. The first day I walk into the studios and I’m the president of the company. It was wild but, even crazier, everything worked out.

PG: Do you see any connection between your work in animation and back to when you were recording music?

FS: It goes back to what I said about Rudy [Van Gelder]. It is all about finding the right people. I developed differently than anybody else in the cartoon business. I know some of my employees know more than I do about filmmaking. But, ultimately, I focus on only one thing; who is that person, and do they want to make successful cartoons? 

I started this entire path of my career because I was a Beatles fan. They came to America when I was 12 and I learned from them that you could do great art while being popular. Not everyone had to be Cecil Taylor where the art is great but it goes underappreciated. And not everyone had to be Badfinger. Instead, you could make genuinely great music and still be popular. I went into animation with those lessons from the Beatles and Rudy Van Gelder. While I knew nothing other than the basic rudiments of animation production, I knew how to hire well. And those lessons come directly from my time recording music.

Cecil Taylor – The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert will be available on Oblivion Records on February 15, 2022. More information can be found on the label’s blog. Additional details on Seibert can be found on his website.