I Want My MTV (12 page)

 

DALE PON:
Gstaad is one of these places for rich people that you don't imagine you'll ever get to. We shot Bowie in the early morning, and he hired a truck with rental ski equipment of every size, and outfitted everyone in my crew. He opened the back door of a truck and said to one of my producers, “Susan, what shoe size are you?” And he's pulling boots off the truck for her. They skied off with David to a big lunch, which he'd arranged. I'm afraid of speed, afraid of height, afraid of death, so I walked down the mountain.

 

RANDY PHILLIPS:
To the record companies, the managers, and the artists, Les was the face of MTV. He sold MTV to a very skeptical industry. Most of the artists who participated in the early “I Want My MTV” campaign? Les got them to do it. Most of them didn't even know what they were talking about when they did those spots. That should give you a sense of Les's ability to bullshit.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
We fought with Jack Schneider to get $10 or $15 million for advertising. Schneider had made his fortune through advertising, but ironically, he didn't believe it worked. He said we could have $2 million. Dale Pon researched which markets presented the greatest opportunities for us. And he said we had to flood each market with the ad. He figured we'd create a fucking jihad. It meant we'd run through our budget in four to six weeks. Given what our finances were in May of '82, we probably
were
in a go-for-broke strategy.

The spots had stars like Pete Townshend saying, “America, demand your MTV,” and “Call your cable operator and say, ‘I want my MTV.'” John and Jack thought this was the greatest thing in the world. They hated these cable operators.

 

JOHN LACK:
We were in the Warners boardroom at 75 Rockefeller Plaza: me, Jack Schneider, Bob Pittman, Bob McGroarty, the lawyers. And Pittman says, “I suggest we go right to the consumer.” McGroarty stands up. “What are you, out of your mind? We're gonna go around the cable operators? We can't do that!”

 

DALE PON:
I think I'm quoting Bob Pittman: He said it was “a Hail Mary pass.” He said, “Whatever we think of this campaign, it's our last chance.”

 

GEORGE LOIS, advertising executive:
The plan was, we were going to shove the idea down the throats of cable operators.

 

TOM FRESTON:
We knew our audience had a lot of time on their hands and actually would call their cable company.

 

TOMMY MOTTOLA:
“I Want My MTV” was the best promotion in the history of the music business. They were able to get every single act to stand in a stupid commercial and say that line. The campaign gave MTV integrity and credibility with the audience; their favorite band or icon was endorsing this brand and telling them
this
was the thing they should watch.

 

DALE PON:
The “I Want My MTV” campaign is an immature, rude, impudent campaign.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
“I Want My MTV” was one of the most iconic campaigns of all time.

 

NICK RHODES:
Their corporate identity—the logo, the “I Want My MTV” campaign—was genius.

 

MARTHA QUINN:
Friends would ask what I was doing. I'd say, “Oh, I'm working at this MTV thing.”
What?
“Well, I'm a VJ.”
What?
It wasn't until the “I Want My MTV” commercials that I could say, “You know where Pete Townshend says, ‘I want my MTV'?
That's
where I work.”

 

JOHN LACK:
So we launch a campaign in Denver where TCI is headquartered, and where they own the cable system. Within an hour of the first ad, the phone is ringing. Within the first day, they're getting more phone calls than they get in a month. By the second day, they've gotten five thousand phone calls. Newspapers pick up on the story. Within a week, Malone is on the phone with Steve Ross: “I give, call off the dogs.” That's how we got TCI.

DALE PON:
The cable operators said, “Stop hurting us. Stop. Please stop. I'll sign if you stop.”

 

BOB PITTMAN:
We'd go into a city and run the campaign, and people would flood the cable company with phone calls. They'd cave and put us on. Then we'd go to another city and say, “We're gonna run that campaign. Look at what happened in the last city.” By the time we'd done it three or four times, we didn't have to run the campaign much, because the threat of running the ad was enough.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
The cable operators all got mad, and they all signed up MTV. The cascade began. And once the cascade began, it never stopped.

 

 

 

RECORD LABELS ARE ABUNDANTLY STAFFED WITH
people who oversee every stage of an album, from recording through publicity, marketing, and promotion. Like nervous parents, labels rarely let musicians out of their sight. But when it came to video, artists were mostly unsupervised. There were no record-label departments to oversee videos, and no one in the executive ranks who had any expertise in filmmaking. Budgets were low, and videos were not yet recognized as important. The job was often delegated to female staffers, who rarely saw opportunities in other departments, and many of them became heavyweights in the music-video industry.

The lack of oversight meant creativity could run rampant, within the limits of a budget. Video directors had a level of freedom film directors could only envy, and video sets were unregulated havens for misbehavior. Unlike films and network TV, where every production carefully hewed to union or guild regulations about pay, schedules, and work conditions, music videos fell into more of a sweatshop model. Hours were cruel and pay was meager, but directors, producers, and technicians could quickly get opportunities that would have taken years of apprenticeship in film or TV. Director Jeff Stein summarized the trial-and-error nature of video with a joke he says was often told on his sets: “How do they make music videos in Poland? The same way we do.”

Music videos drew a specific type of characters, brave and hardy men and women bent on exploration and merriment, people whose personalities—and appetites, especially for drugs—often rivaled those of the bands whose videos they made. In short, pirates, lunatics, outcasts, misfits, iconoclasts, and barbarians.

 

ROBERT LOMBARD, producer:
At first, Van Halen were very anti-MTV. They were getting pressure from the network to produce clips, but they didn't want to. They felt they were better than that. Van Halen's record label commissioned Bruce Gowers to shoot a concert, but the band wouldn't cooperate, so there was no augmented lighting onstage. I had my own independent production company, and they dumped the footage on me. It was hard to cut things together, but I worked with an editor to make a video for “Unchained,” and the band loved it.

Their next single was the Roy Orbison tune “Pretty Woman,” and they asked me to oversee the video. “And you'd better not steal money from us”—they were always saying that. The band chose characters they were going to play: David Lee Roth played Napoleon, Eddie Van Halen played a cowboy, Alex Van Halen played Tarzan, Michael Anthony played a samurai warrior. We had two midgets in the video and a transvestite. At the audition, we put eighty trannies on tape. The band wanted to see some pussy, and I'd have to bring in models so they could look at girls in bikinis. The casting session was midgets, models, and trannies. And we'd drink Jack Daniel's all day—Drambuie for Eddie—and have a little toot here and there. There are line items in a video budget for catering and craft services—that's where you hid the money you used to buy drugs. I would always be able to bury at least a quarter ounce of cocaine in there and then dummy up a catering receipt.

 

SAMUEL BAYER, director:
I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and I loved MTV. In “Pretty Woman,” David Lee Roth dressed up as Napoleon and Eddie Van Halen was a cowboy. It looked like they'd shot it in two hours, in someone's backyard in Pasadena. It was brilliant.

 

ROBERT LOMBARD:
The location was near Valencia, a long drive from LA, so to make sure they were on time, we had a limo pick each one of them up. They had a big trailer, like for a major film star, where we hung out and got high. The shoot took twenty-four hours and everybody was laughing their asses off, especially when the midgets tied the tranny to a stake.

At the end of the video, the girl whips off her wig and she's a man. And the midgets are running their hands up her legs and under her dress. You've got midgets violating a tranny. I thought it was hysterical, but MTV didn't. The video was banned and I thought,
My music-video career is totally over.

 

PETE ANGELUS, director:
Some bizarre things happened during that video. Two cameramen quit. Why? Maybe because it seemed like we were disorganized. But they might have quit because they were severely hallucinating from the mushrooms that the little people brought to the set and handed out.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY, Van Halen:
MTV played “Pretty Woman” once or twice and that was it, because of the ending with the transvestite and the midgets and the hunchback. We were going,
Let's be outrageous as we can.
I was wearing about 120 pounds of armor, and walking around in that was not fun. But you know, a couple of beers and everything was okay.

The two midgets—or little people—one is named Jimmy Briscoe. He used to come to Arizona and stay with me and my wife. He went on the road with the band, as “head of security,” and he's been in quite a few movies. As it got later in the day and into the evening, everybody'd had a few beers, and the other little guy was copping a bit of a buzz and hitting on the female star. When he found out it was a guy, he didn't care; he was still hitting on him.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
I stood on the set, going, “Seriously, can anybody find the little people? Where are they?” After twenty minutes of searching for them, I thought,
I'll walk around and see if I can turn up anything
. I got to the transvestite's dressing room and I opened the door. This is what I saw; I don't want to be held accountable, it's just what I
saw
. The little guy was wearing a black cape. He was holding the transvestite's penis, which seemed kind of erect, and he was pretending it was a microphone. And he was singing “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones while doing a Mick Jagger impersonation. I thought,
This is not going well.
Then I closed the door and let him finish whatever the hell they were doing.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
From the beginning, the lunatics were running the asylum. It was a new industry; there were no boundaries. It was like the Wild, Wild West.

 

JEFF STEIN, director:
I'm sure you've heard this from many people; it was like the Wild West. And I'm sure you've heard this even more: it was like the inmates were running the asylum.

MICK KLEBER:
In the early days, one week you'd be a food stylist, the next you were a producer of music videos. It was the Wild West. Everyone was inventing it as they went along.

 

MIKE RENO, Loverboy:
Nobody knew what the hell was going on, to be honest.

 

TIM NEWMAN, director:
It was completely freewheeling. Nobody knew anything. There wasn't much in the way of rules.

 

STEVE BARRON:
Nobody knew what music videos were going to become, or even what they were. There wasn't any history to go by. There was no one saying, “This is what a music video looks like.”

 

LOL CREME:
There were no authorities at the record companies, no authority anywhere, that could say you were doing it wrong. Video directors were the new rock stars. Everyone was crazy, no one was in charge.

 

JULIEN TEMPLE:
The record companies had no real control over the videos. They were very film ignorant, so as long as you could agree on an idea with the band, you were free to do what you wanted. It was very exciting to have an idea as you fell asleep and then two weeks later see it all around the world on TV.

 

JOHN DIAZ, producer:
None of the labels wanted to have anything to do with videos. And since they had a lot of women in less glamorous, lower-paying jobs, they put these women in charge of videos. Debbie Newman and Debbie Samuelson at CBS, Liz Heller at MCA . . . We called them all “The Debbies,” as an homage to Debbie Newman, since she was the first. Debbie was hard-driving; we always said she was a woman with balls.

 

DEBBIE NEWMAN:
In 1979, the head of marketing for international at CBS Records needed footage of Journey to send overseas, because it was cheaper than sending the band. I was booking bands to appear on shows like
Midnight Special
and
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
, and she asked if I could find somebody to shoot a video. There weren't any established music-video production companies in America yet, but I found two Englishmen, Paul Flattery and Bruce Gowers, to shoot some live clips. That was the beginning of my music-video career.

JEANNE MATTIUSSI, record executive:
Debbie Newman hired me at Columbia Records, and that's when I got thrown into video production. I was the West Coast girl and Debbie Samuelson was the East Coast girl. A lot of us who did video promotion back then were fairly attractive, so we used to work that angle.