Book Description

This story is an intriguing memoir by one of the guys who eventually founded MTV and let me tell you for certain, it is quite a fabulous story! Author Gary Van Haas is still alive at 70 years old now and he tells a remarkable and hair-raising tale of his early days as a child living in Miami Beach with his mother and in Bethesda, Maryland with his dad and how the changes of 1968 eventually sent him with his young new wife and child to Venice Beach, California where the Flower Power Peace Movement was in full swing. From there starts off working as a Stuntman in the movie business and from there he beings booking rock bands on Sunset Blvd at the Whiskey, Troubadour and Bitter End West... All top-rated clubs at the time. In the next stage in Gary’s development he decides to use the new SONY Beta-Max video tape machines to tape his acts used later to promote the band’s records in Tower Records on the West Coast and in Goody’s in New York. The market research results are phenomenal and Record Companies such as Warner Bros, Electra, Atlantic and many more hire Gary to do more in-store music video market research. Later Gary is invited to all the record industry conventions worldwide where eventually in London he is greeted by the president of SONY who set up their new big screen video projection machine to show the record industry the power of Gary’s new music videos. The story follows with Gary buying a house a million dollar in the lush hills of Marin County in the Sausalito, California living next to his friends Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, and music promoter Bill Graham. The story continues as Gary meets and marries the Underwood Typewriter heiress and later where he divorces and falls upon the ‘love of his life’ in jet-set Mykonos, Greece where slowly he decides to leave the U.S. and move to Athens, Greece permanently as a whole new world opens up to him. From there they travel all over Greece and Europe and most of the globe visiting and staying such exotic places as Cyprus, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and much of the Far East.