Memoir of a High-Flying Maverick

Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, by Tom Freston (Gallery Books, 320 pp., $29)

Tom Freston attributes his long-running success as a media entrepreneur who helped shape modern popular culture in America and throughout the world largely to luck. His captivating new book suggests otherwise. 

Part memoir, travelogue, history of rock n’ roll, and insider look at the media business, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu is a rollicking, often hilarious romp through Freston’s 25-year career as a creative force in the music industry and modern media. Witty and warm, the book accurately reflects the man I met over 30 years ago and have admired since—insatiably curious, creative, decent, and kind.

To be sure, there are villains in his account—chief among them Sumner Redstone, the late, unlamented chairman of Viacom, a “sedentary Scrooge,” as Freston calls him. But this is not a bitter tell-all written to settle scores. It’s an account of how he built a multibillion-dollar company that reinvented TV and the fun he had doing it.

On page 1, Freston is fired by Redstone after only eight months as Viacom’s chief executive officer. It’s a crushing blow, and a compelling opening. “I had not seen it coming,” he writes. He should have, he later admits. Redstone, who had sacked two of his predecessors, enjoyed terminating his designated successors on holidays. The ax fell for Freston in a two-minute meeting on Labor Day weekend, 2006. “Deeply embarrassed” and feeling “defeated,” Freston had spent 26 years building MTV, the “sun in Viacom’s solar system.” As Viacom’s CEO, he had run not only MTV but also Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and VH-1. He added Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster to the company’s portfolio. His abrupt dismissal was tempered only by the farewell he received as he left his office at 1515 Broadway for the last time. A thousand people who had worked for him spontaneously gathered in the lobby to give him a hero’s send off, with a thunderous ovation. Their support softened his shame and rekindled his irrepressible optimism. “There would be new adventures ahead,” he writes.

The book chronicles Freston’s “Leave it to Beaver” upbringing in the Connecticut community of Rowayton, 40 miles east of New York City on Long Island Sound.  The son of a stay-at-home mom and a World War II veteran-turned-public relations executive at a paper firm who suffered from what would later be called PTSD, Freston was not an exceptional student. Only the threat of being drafted and sent to Vietnam prompted him to attend business school. Much to his surprise, he loved his classes, especially one taught by Peter Drucker, whom he credits with having reinforced his entrepreneurial spirit.

He had always worked. Whether it was making a small fortune at age 14 mowing his neighbors’ lawns or booking gigs for friends in rock bands in college or bartending in New York—“a trade that can serve you well in a rambling life”—young Freston was always in search of opportunity. While working as a bellboy at a wealthy summer resort at Lake George in the Adirondacks, he discovered not only “grass”—“It looked like oregano”—and psychedelics, but also that “life could be a lot more interesting off the main track, forging a less conformist path.” These early experiences reinforced his determination to “straddle a dual existence” between the bustling creative life of nightclubs and music and the business life for which his M.B.A. had credentialed him. He was determined to live life on his terms.

There were missteps, of course, like an early job as a junior ad executive at Benton & Bowles, then one of the nation’s top ten ad agencies. Promoted quickly, he was given a shot at ad stardom by working on the firm’s Charmin account. “Did I, Tom Freston,” he mused, “look like a toilet paper man?” Having saved $5,000, Freston quit his job to join a friend for a year of wandering through North Africa, India, Asia, and the Sahara Desert. That decision marked the beginning of his life-long passion for travel to exotic and often challenging places and of his addiction to the professional risk-taking that would shape his life. It was also on this trip that he first visited Afghanistan, the doomed country that looms large in Freston’s memoir.

He is a gifted travel writer. He was fortunate to have journeyed to the world’s Timbuktus before they were overrun by mass tourism. While living in India and Afghanistan in the 1970s, he started a clothing company, Hindu Kush, which sent tunics, shawls, and cotton drawstring pants to New York. “Luck had landed me on the far side of the world in the early days of globalization,” he writes. Though undercapitalized, the business was a success. Much of it was ruined, though, in 1978, when Communism came to Afghanistan. Freston was stunned. Hadn’t Communism “gone out of style”? What the Afghan Communists didn’t destroy, the U.S. government did. Alarmed by the flood of low-cost clothing from Asia, President Jimmy Carter restricted clothing imports, especially from India. “After years of surviving strikes, blackouts, heat waves, rodent infestations, malaria, dysentery, dust storms, cobras, riots, drug raids, bribery demanders, cheaters and thieves,” he writes, “Hindu Kush was going to be wiped out by President Carter.”

He needed a new job. Along came a new cable-programming startup run by John Lack, devoted to rock and roll and using music videos. A music fanatic, Freston was all in, for $35,000 a year. He credits prominent industry figures such as Bob Pittman as critical to MTV’s success but also praises lesser-known colleagues whom he says have not received the credit they deserve. Music lovers will be fascinated by his description of the dogged effort and creative marketing that enabled MTV to break through. Some of it came from the musicians themselves. Mick Jagger and David Bowie recorded “I want my MTV” promos that “set us on our way to victory.” In 1985, “Money for Nothing,” the Dire Straits hit, “opened up new continents for us,” he writes. “In rock and roll, it takes a long time and a lot of work to become an overnight sensation.”

Writing in a self-effacing style, Freston downplays the credit he deserves for having recruited, assembled, and managed strong-willed, talented colleagues, many of whom remain his close friends—John Sykes, Bill Flanagan, Judy McGrath, Juli Davidson, Gerry Laybourne, and Carole Robinson. “A key reason for our success was women,” he writes. “At the time, the television industry was still a men’s club,” he observes. “Over half my senior team was female.” He also acknowledges some of MTV’s shortcomings, including the network’s early neglect of black artists. And he struggled on occasion with his own “grudges.”

Freston was obviously an inspiring mentor. Consider Saad Mohseni, an Afghan music lover whom he championed and who became one of his country’s most important producers of news and entertainment. While others have folded under Taliban threats and pressure, Mohseni continues trying to bring music, news, and debate to his fellow Afghans.

MTV proved a stunning financial success. Once the smallest part of Viacom, with $75 million in annual sales, MTV under Freston became the company’s fastest-growing and largest division, with $8 billion in sales. It also became a source of news for a generation that had resisted it. In an effort to boost young voter turnout in the 1992 presidential election, MTV helped launch “Rock the Vote.” Its 23-year-old reporter, Tabitha Soren, interviewed the Republican and Democratic nominees—President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The 1992 election yielded the highest turnout ever for young people, Freston asserts—up 20 percent from 1988, an increase that has never been topped.

Freewheeling, even as a top media executive, Freston describes a five-hour lunch with Fidel Castro, in which Castro said that his favorite TV show was The Sopranos. He travels with Bono throughout Africa to raise money and lobby for debt relief. He takes a van ride in Rwanda with Mike Huckabee, whom he finds to be not only a “decent man, but surprisingly, a Kinks fan.” Freston says he eventually rejected his sixties aversion to politicians, faulting himself for “writing off a lot of good people for years.” But his book says little about his political views other than his disdain for Donald Trump and his enduring fury over America’s betrayal of the more than 100,000 Afghans whom we deserted after the Taliban reclaimed the country in 2021. Freston remains deeply committed to their rescue and to the Afghan cause. 

Unplugged says little about Freston’s own family and personal life. But to younger readers, he offers this advice: “You, too, can invent your own life. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

Photo by Toni Anne Barson/WireImage