I Want My MTV (14 page)

 

HUEY LEWIS, artist:
On “Do You Believe in Love,” we did whatever the record label told us. They hired a stylist, and we were made up to the max, and I sang to a girl who was asleep in a bed with my band. When I saw it, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever seen. And everybody loved it! We were producing our own records, so I said, “Let's do our own videos, too. We can think of far sillier shit than this.”

 

PATTY SMYTH:
We had a hard time getting radio to add “Goodbye to You.” At that point, if a station was playing one chick record, like Pat Benatar or the Pretenders, they wouldn't play another. But MTV liked our video, and the song became a huge hit because of MTV. The first time I saw it on MTV I was really surprised, because the label had added cheesy, swirly psychedelic special effects to it. That's so classic record company. “Oh, let's put some schmutz on it to make it look professional.” My videos got more and more ridiculous, because the record company got more and more involved.

 

JOHNNY BARBIS, manager:
Elton John felt that he didn't photograph well. He didn't like the way he looked. So getting him to make videos was not easy.

 

DON LETTS:
Chrissie Hynde was not pro-video. She's old-school. She had a few moments when people were staring at her in the street. I said, “Darling if you don't want to be stared at, you shouldn't be making a video.”

 

TOM PETTY:
I didn't much like making videos—the hours were insane—but I liked the outcome. My band hated making videos. They didn't want to go anywhere near them. I didn't blame them. But I didn't have a choice. I had to be in them.

 

ROBERT SMITH:
My overriding impression of making videos is that they're incredibly tedious and incredibly hard work.

 

CHUCK D:
I hated doing videos. Anything over four hours, to me, is like,
I want to get the fuck out of here.
I don't like to be photographed and I don't like to be in front of a camera. So my biggest recollection is doing the same thing over and over and over again, which I've never gotten used to.

MARTIN FRY, ABC:
Every video was a one-day shoot. And that one day would last forty-eight hours.

 

ANN CARLI, record executive:
We had a fire on the set one time. The lights ignited a bunch of trash, but we didn't want the fire department there, because they would have shut us down. We probably had too many people in the building, we probably shouldn't have been working so late. But at the time, it was unregulated. We'd do an eighteen-hour day with seventy-two setups.

 

ANN WILSON:
It would be ten hours of waiting around in makeup and hair, then ten minutes in front of the camera and five more hours of waiting around. At the end of the two days, when the sun was coming up in the morning, they'd say, “Time for your close-ups!”

 

MARTIN FRY:
The food on set was good. And you got air miles.

 

TERRI NUNN, Berlin:
We shot videos for “The Metro” and “Sex” in a two-day period, back to back, forty-eight hours straight. What I remember from the shoot is crying. There's a sequence in “The Metro” where I'm walking on subway tracks—it was a stage set—and I'm kind of stumbling through it. I was exhausted and pissed off, like, “When are we gonna fucking finish this video? I wanna go to bed and die.” I was sobbing, and the director was like “Great! Yeah! Okay, film her now!” It was good for the video.

 

MICK KLEBER:
If you were a music-video executive, you'd want to show up on set around midnight, an hour or two before the thing's supposed to be over, because that's when the shit is really hitting the fan. You're coming face-to-face with the reality that you're not going to be able to get all your shots in the time you've allotted, and you're either gonna have to spend more money or make some creative adjustments.

 

DAVID ROBINSON, the Cars:
I just tried to get through them with my dignity intact.

 

BRYAN ADAMS:
I tried to whinge my way though it.

 

BILLY JOEL:
I hated making videos. See, I became a musician because I knew I wasn't cut out to be a movie star. I'm a piano player, not an actor. I'm not photogenic. Back in the '70s, people who knew my music didn't even know what I looked like until they'd see an album cover. Then they'd meet me and say, “Oh, you're short.” Everybody I talked to hated doing videos. Elton hated them. Springsteen didn't like making them. He held out for a while, but the music business became completely geared toward them.

 

JON LANDAU, manager:
When Bruce Springsteen put out
Nebraska
in '82, he wasn't interested in making videos. He hadn't yet decided what MTV had to do with him creatively. Then and now, Bruce is interested in three things: writing songs, making records, and doing concerts. Everything else is secondary. The idea that you had to make a video every time you put out a record wasn't very appealing. So Arnold Levine, the director of creative services at Columbia Records, assembled a video for “Atlantic City” that Bruce doesn't appear in. Bruce loved what Arnold had done. Les Garland and John Sykes were big Bruce fans, and MTV played “Atlantic City.” But Bruce had no ambition to become a video artist.

 

RUSSELL MULCAHY:
Rod Stewart didn't like making videos. We shot “Tonight I'm Yours” at the pool at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in LA. We booked twenty rooms that overlooked the pool, and we had lovely girls in bikinis having pillow fights on the balconies. There's some fairly obvious '80s imagery: a nun in a rowboat, that sort of thing. Well, Rod partied the night before, and he didn't want to come out of his trailer. I went to have a chat with him, and he had sunglasses on. I said, “Rod, come on. I'm gonna film the video anyway. Do you want to be in it?” And he went, “Oh fuck, all right.”

 

BRIAN GRANT:
I was in LA, and Russell asked if I would operate one of the cameras. It was probably the most debauched evening I've experienced in my life. There were forty or fifty very beautiful women there, some in bikinis, and a helicopter overhead. There was plenty of substance abuse going on all around. In every room, I believe. The police shut down the filming, but they didn't shut down the rest of the night's activities.

 

RANDY SKINNER:
Rod used to act out his lyrics in his videos. For instance, he would do a choo-choo train move when he'd sing a lyric about a train. He was very literal. I'd always howl when I saw that.

CAROL ROSENSTEIN, producer:
I became Bruce Gowers's line producer, and Warner Bros. hired us to do four Rod Stewart videos. We were meeting Rod and his manager, Billy Gaff, at the finest restaurant in LA, Le St. Germain. After a while, the maître d' says, “Mr. Gaff called, and he and Mr. Stewart are running a bit late. But he said to have a drink and order an appetizer.” A while later, the maître d' comes around again and says, “Mr. Gaff says Mr. Stewart's going to be a little while longer, go ahead and have your dinner.” We finish dinner, no Rod.

Next day, the meeting is rescheduled at another super-expensive restaurant. Again, same thing happens. We eat, no Rod. We wait another couple of days. Finally we get the call: “Come to Rod's house at 10 A.M. on Saturday.”

We were in the kitchen, waiting for him. Amazing kitchen, by the way. Rod comes in wearing nothing but a loosely tied silk robe. Bruce says, “Rod, we have some ideas for the locations of the videos.” Rod says, “Eh, let's just do the whole thing here. It's a nice house.” And we did. When we were setting up, we had to store some lights in the master bathroom. There was a large apothecary jar of talcum powder. That's what I thought it was, until I saw somebody reach into it who hadn't taken a bath. Rod was fun to work with, though. And we always ate very well.

 

PAUL FLATTERY:
Jon Roseman Productions was the biggest music-video company in America. I was a producer; Russell Mulcahy, David Mallet, and Bruce Gowers were our directors. And then Roseman fucked it all up. He shared an apartment with a coke dealer who was sent to prison. And he gave interviews where he slammed the record companies and the artists. “I ripped off the Rolling Stones!” “The Atlanta Rhythm Section are a bunch of big, fat Southerners!” “Rod Stewart was doing coke.” And the labels said, “Look, we like you guys, but we can't use your company anymore.” Roseman completely screwed me. So in 1982 Bruce Gowers, Simon Fields, and I formed our company.

We had John Cougar as a client and we shot a concert with him at the Marquis from which came two live videos, one for “Factory” and one for “I Need a Lover.” John was swearing like crazy onstage—“I need a fucking lover, that won't drive me fucking crazy”—and this was in the days of painstaking two-inch editing, so our entire budget was blown editing out the curses. John was a pain to deal with. Always has been. We did all of his videos and he was always a pain in the ass.

Then we got hired to do two videos from his album
American Fool
: “Hurts So Good” and “Hand to Hold On To.” We shot them back to back. He said, “Look, there's a song on the album the label doesn't believe in. But I do. Can you do me a favor and save one roll of film, shoot me singing the song, I'll give you some old photos and stuff and then you cobble it together for me?” The song was “Jack and Diane.” So we stole some editing time in LA. We projected slides on the edit room wall, and we had the tape op wear white gloves to do the clapping. We didn't charge John a cent. It was his only number one song, and he never, ever called us again.

 

JULIEN TEMPLE:
I wrote the treatment for the Rolling Stones's “Undercover of the Night” as a way of
not
doing the video. I was a punk rocker, and the Stones were regarded as jet-set traitors to the cause. The song was about the death squads then operating in Central America, and I wrote an extreme treatment about being in the middle of an urban revolution, and dramatized the notion of Keith and Mick really not liking each other by having Keith kill Mick in the video. I never thought they would do it. Of course they loved it.

I went to Paris to meet with the band. We were having dinner at Le Cinq, and Keith was looking particularly unhappy. He was glowering with menace from the other side of the table and eventually said, “Come downstairs with me.” My producer and I went down to the men's room. Keith had a walking stick, and suddenly he pulled it apart. The next thing I know he's holding a swordstick to my throat. He said, “I want to be in this video more than I am.” So we wrote up his part a bit more. That was Keith's idea of collaboration.

 

STEVE BARRON:
Fleetwood Mac were, um, not easy to work with. They'd been through many relationship dynamics, shall we say, and those dynamics were strained at the time of “Hold Me.” Four of them—I can't recall which four—couldn't be together in the same room for long. They didn't want to be there. I think Christine McVie was about ten hours getting out of the makeup trailer. By which time it was dark. That wasn't a good video, that one.

 

SIMON FIELDS:
“Hold Me” was a fucking nightmare, a horrendous day in the desert. John McVie was drunk and tried to punch me. Stevie Nicks didn't want to walk on the sand with her platforms. Christine McVie was fed up with all of them. Mick thought she was being a bitch, he wouldn't talk to her. They were a fractious bunch.

STEVIE NICKS:
First of all, it was 110 degrees there in the desert, and I'm in flowing chiffon and platform boots with five inch heels, in a chaise lounge on a white sand dune, and I couldn't leave until they got that shot. It was so hot, and we weren't getting along. Lindsey Buckingham wasn't happy with me because I'd broken up with him six years before. I'd had an affair with Mick Fleetwood, which was a secret until Mick told Lindsey, and Lindsey was
horrified
. Then Mick fell in love with my best friend, who left her husband for Mick, so I lost Mick and my best friend in one fell swoop. And everybody hated Mick because of what he had done to me. So it was a bad situation. My advice is, don't ever go out with a rock star.

 

RUSSELL MULCAHY:
I was coupling up the members of Fleetwood Mac in “Gypsy,” and people were pulling me aside saying, “No, no. Those two were fucking and then they split up and now he's sleeping with her.” I got very confused, who was sleeping with whom.

 

STEVIE NICKS:
There's a scene in “Gypsy” where Lindsey and I are dancing. And we weren't getting along very well then. I didn't want to be anywhere near Lindsey; I certainly didn't want to be in his arms. If you watch the video, you'll see I wasn't happy. And he wasn't a very good dancer.

I wanted to stop doing coke at that point, so I'd been in Corona del Mar, California, in self-imposed rehab, for two weeks. But the “Gypsy” video was scheduled and there was no getting out of it. That video was three days, and by the time we got to the end of the first day of filming, I was exhausted. I said, “I need a little bit of coke.” Somebody got it for me, and I wrapped up the little bottle in a Kleenex and hid it behind the makeup mirror. Then I got called to the set, and when I came back, somebody had cleaned up the dressing room and thrown away the bottle. I said to the person who had gotten it for me, “You have to get in the garbage Dumpster and find that little bottle.” But the person refused.

I think we probably would have gone on to make many more great videos like “Gypsy,” had we not been so into drugs.