Martha, Martha, Martha! 35 Years Later, Original VJ Quinn Remembers MTV’s Early Days

On Aug. 1, 1981, Quinn – who was only 18 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, New Jersey. 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.