I Want My MTV (13 page)

 

PAUL FLATTERY, producer:
At the genesis of the industry, almost everybody at the labels who was commissioning videos was female. The male executives palmed the job off onto the women—the assistants, the secretaries. And for us young Englishmen, that was not a bad thing. At all. We took them to dinner, we wined and dined them. It was part and parcel of the deal.

 

SUSAN SILVERMAN, record executive:
The record business was a man's world. But there was an open door for women who had chutzpah. Video was the one area we could take over. We went in and we fucking kicked ass.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
Most of the girls in the video business were beautiful, especially Siobhan Barron.

 

SIOBHAN BARRON:
I didn't get along with most of the men in the record industry. They were macho and leather-jacketed, and they didn't accept me. They were of the opinion that women in the industry should shut up and lie down. I was very beautiful—I used to be a model—and bands would tell their labels they wanted to work with Limelight. I used my beauty when I had to.

 

RANDY SKINNER, record executive:
The '80s were amazing for video departments, because the labels didn't have a clue what to do. They didn't really care. The last label I worked for was Virgin in 2006, and twenty people had to approve your treatments.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
Music videos were like the Internet ten years ago: Nobody at the labels understood them. CBS was so focused on radio promotion, they didn't care about videos—they assigned video production to product managers, who knew nothing about film or art direction. That was how videos got done there. Somebody said, “Here, you deal with this shit.”

 

AL TELLER:
Originally, we thought we could budget each video at $15,000 to $20,000. That lasted about twelve seconds.

MICK KLEBER:
Some of the early music videos were terrible. There wasn't a blueprint for how to make a cool one.

 

DARYL HALL, Hall & Oates:
I'm not a big fan of any video, especially my own. Visuals are distracting. When the eye and the ear compete, the eye always wins. It has something to do with the way the brain works. In a word, I hated the Hall & Oates videos. But we were realists. If you were popular—which we were, obviously—you couldn't not do videos. But I went kicking and screaming. In the early days, no one knew what to do. For the “Private Eyes” video, somebody said, “Why don't you wear '50s hats and trench coats, like private eyes?” That's what we did. It was so low-budget it was almost laughable.

 

PAT BENATAR:
The “Shadows of the Night” video is about the Nazis during the Holocaust. A woman who's working in a factory, making parachutes for the war, is daydreaming that she's flying a plane and fighting the Nazis. It's so kitschy, we just die laughing when we look at it now. The Nazis were played by my drummer, Myron Grombacher, and my bass player, Roger Capps, a total Aryan from Tennessee. Myron was like, “Why do
I
have to play the Nazi?”
Because your name is Grombacher. Figure it out!

 

TIM FARRISS, INXS:
In the early '80s, we made a crazy video at home in Australia for “The One Thing.” We fed Valium to a few cats and had them running around a table while we had a feast with sexy models and
Playboy
centerfolds, ripping apart a turkey. Next thing we knew, we had a Top 40 hit in America and were opening for Adam Ant, who we called Adam Pissant. We played Long Beach Arena and the crowd mobbed us and we were ushered offstage—which goes to show the power MTV had.

 

JOE ELLIOTT, Def Leppard:
We did our first three videos—“Bringin' on the Heartbreak,” “High 'n' Dry,” and “Let It Go”—with the same speed you'd go out for a meal. I wouldn't even really call them videos. They were filmed during a sound check. We put the kids from our fan club right in front and angled the camera so it looked like a full house. We wanted to get something on film, so we could get it onto
The Old Grey Whistle Test
, a British music program. We'd grown up watching that show and we thought it would be cool if we gave them a promo film and they played it—which they never did.

MIKE RENO:
We were going, “Videos? What are videos?” I remember saying, “Huh? We finally have a day off and we're going to be dancing around the streets in makeup?” I also remember seeing the budget and being like, “We're spending $25,000 to do
this
?” If you look at the beginning of “Turn Me Loose,” I'm holding a cigarette and the camera pans over my shoulder. The director said, “Your hand is trembling.” It was nerve-wracking for me. For some people it came very easily, and for some it didn't come at all.

 

JONATHAN CAIN, Journey:
Steve Perry was very anti-video. He'd always say, “We're performers, we're entertainers, but we're not actors.” And we were
not
a very photogenic band. So we stayed on the sidelines at first. When
Frontiers
came out in 1983, our manager, Herbie Herbert, was tight with the NFL Films guys, so he hired their crew, and they put together the footage you see in the “Faithfully” video. The live stuff looks great. But the shot of Steve shaving off his mustache was a bit much. I mean, did people even have to know he had a mustache? I didn't get that.

 

JOHN DIAZ:
In the late '70s, I became a producer and assistant director on TV commercials. Videos turned my life around. My idea was to bring in young commercial directors I'd been working with. One was Tom Buckholtz, who did the infamous Journey video “Separate Ways,” shot on a wharf in New Orleans. That was the first air-guitar video. In fact, it had air guitar, air keyboards, and air drums. It had air everything. Our concepts were so inane. At the end, you see a girl in bed wearing headphones who “dreamed” the whole video while listening to the song.

 

JONATHAN CAIN:
I'm at a loss to explain that video. Good Lord, I will never live down those air keyboards. No matter what else I've done in my career, sooner or later people find a way to ask me about the “Separate Ways” video. And Perry, I don't know what he was thinking, but he cut his hair right before the video. Bad idea. His hair was rocking before the shoot.

 

RUDOLF SCHENKER:
When I saw Journey videos, something was wrong.

 

DEBBIE NEWMAN:
The deal was, none of the band members could bring girlfriends or wives to the shoot in New Orleans. But Steve Perry had started dating Sherrie Swafford, and he brought her. There was a ton of tension. The band hated Sherrie.

 

JONATHAN CAIN:
Sherrie was jealous and possessive. And when she found out there was gonna be a
girl
in the video—oh my god. There was a big kicking and screaming session. Sherrie was giving Steve a very bad time about that girl: “She's a whore, she's a bitch, I don't want her in the video.”

 

DEBBIE NEWMAN:
The video was terrible. I mean, truly terrible. MTV played it constantly.

 

ADAM DUBIN, director:
Here's a band at their commercial peak, and some idiot decided to film them on a wharf, and—here's the worst part—instead of giving them instruments, let them mime playing imaginary instruments. The director should be shot. And the manager should be shot for allowing his band to be put in this position. But this is my point, there really wasn't a music-video aesthetic yet.

 

JONATHAN CAIN:
Beavis and Butt-head made total fun of “Separate Ways.” Which was an outrage to me because, you know, we helped
make
MTV. I called our manager and said, “Isn't there anything we can do to stop this?”

 

KEVIN CRONIN:
You were either on MTV and hip, or you weren't on MTV and you didn't even fucking exist. When you were their darling, it was great. When you weren't their darling, you were fucked. We developed a love/hate relationship with them.

 

BRYAN ADAMS, artist:
I didn't really think videos mattered. MTV was a cable channel with minor viewership. Shooting videos? I didn't care. I should have.

 

FRED SCHNEIDER, the B-52s:
We wanted to do videos. Our manager, Gary Kurfirst, said, “What do you want to do videos for? You don't make any money from them. Look at David Byrne, he puts out videos, he doesn't make any money from them.” Gary didn't get the point. I guess you wouldn't say he was a visionary in that respect.

 

JANE WIEDLIN:
When Miles Copeland, the president of our record label, said we were gonna shoot a music video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” we were like, “Music video? That's stupid. You suck.” We were totally bratty about it. The money he used for the video was, like, left over from the Police's video budget. It was pennies. They got a guy to follow us around Hollywood. We wanted an old-school convertible, so we rented it from Rent-A-Wreck for $10 or $15.

This was the plot: “Get in a car and drive around. Belinda, you sing. Everyone else look cute.” When we needed a grand finale, our big idea was to jump in the fountain at the intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. I remember thinking,
The cops are gonna come any minute, this is gonna be so cool.

 

MICHAEL STIPE, R.E.M.:
Miles Copeland said, “I want you to make music videos, and I want you to lip-sync.” And I said, “No, I'm not going to do it.” He said “Okay,” and that was the end of the meeting. I was this twenty-three-year-old little shit with acne and a bad haircut, and he allowed us the latitude. But it was a reaction against what other people were doing. It felt like a sellout to lip-sync. Jim Herbert, who was my art professor, drove with us to a place in Georgia where a guy named Mr. Miller made whirligigs and had thousands of them on a hill And Jim filmed us. The first videos we did really were, for lack of a better term, anti-video.

 

SHARON ORECK, producer:
Prince's “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” videos were just smoke, then Prince's face, then smoke, then Prince's butt, and then smoke. Prince was interesting, and I liked the songs, but the videos were profoundly bad. They were, like, porn bad. His videos were so filled with smoke that everyone on the set would get diarrhea, because mineral oil was so thick in the air.

 

DON LETTS, director:
The Gap Band were a handful. They turned up on the set of “Party Train” in a white limo. They stumbled out of the limo, then one of the dudes bit the makeup woman on the ass. I got them to walk fifteen feet twice, did a tracking shot, and then got them the hell out of there.

 

SIMON FIELDS:
The Gap Band wanted to be wheeled onto the sand by white guys. Not in the video, but on the set.

 

PHIL COLLINS, artist:
For “In the Air Tonight,” I had a distinct idea of what I wanted the video to be. The best bit is where the album cover sings. But the part where I'm walking down the corridor? That was meant to look scary, like something from
The Blair Witch Project
, where you can only see what's directly in front of you, as though you were wearing a miner's helmet. And it didn't turn out that way at all. Unless you're lucky, you end up looking back on these things with a bit of dread.

 

STEVE LUKATHER:
We hated the “Hydra” video so bad. This was the image the world saw on TV? I might as well have hung myself in a closet with an orange ball gag in my mouth and a dildo up my ass. We were going, “How will we live this down?” So our fuck-you answer for our third album was to film ourselves playing live at A&M Studios. And then MTV didn't want to play that. I'd like to underline how much I hated making videos.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
I loved how acts who were huge before MTV tried to adapt and couldn't. Like “Abracadabra” by Steve Miller, which was a huge song.
Oh, stop it. You're making a fool of yourself
. He just seemed too old. He was probably in his late thirties.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
“Start Me Up” is a great song, but it's like somebody locked down a video camera and said to the Rolling Stones, “Okay, get out there. We've got an hour.” That's a ridiculous video. It's almost like they couldn't be bothered.

 

BILLY JOEL, artist:
The Rolling Stones may be the best band that ever was, but their videos were absolutely horrendous. It's as if Mick said, “I refuse to spend money on this.”

 

MICK KLEBER:
Bonnie Raitt was one of the artists from the '70s who was nervous about making music videos. Bob Seger wasn't a huge fan of the idea of a music video. They were self-conscious about their
still
photos. You can imagine how uncomfortable they were with a video.

 

MEAT LOAF:
MTV was never very kind to me. They never played any of my videos.

 

PAUL FLATTERY:
The truth is, video did kill the radio star. It was like when the talkies happened and actors lost their careers if they didn't have a good voice. Bob Seger was a great singer, but he felt he was overweight, so he always had to be shot in black-and-white, and at certain angles. There were a lot of people trying to cover up.

 

MARTHA DAVIS, the Motels:
It's a lot harder for a woman to not think about her appearance, because we've been programmed that way for so long. Women didn't have the confidence to be dorks in their videos. It's easier for a guy to be a goofball, because that's what guys do. Especially if you're Huey Lewis.