I Want My MTV (3 page)

Network television followed; the hit series
Miami Vice
launched in 1984, according to legend, after NBC's Brandon Tartikoff wrote the phrase “MTV cops” on a piece of paper. Michael Mann,
Vice
's executive producer, dismisses this as “a nice anecdote without much basis in history, as far as I know.” But Mann imbued the show with a video sensibility: “I watched MTV a lot in those days. And
Miami Vice
was a radical departure from everything else on the air. The conventional way of using music in Hollywood was to apply the music to picture, more or less. But MTV influenced editing—now, we were cutting picture to music. And the content of videos on MTV was often what you would today call ‘fractals.' They didn't have the beginning, middle, and end of a story. MTV forced feature filmmaking to evolve: you didn't need to bring an audience through so much clunky, conventional exposition of the story. That kind of stuff was obsolete.”

Also, John Sayles says, “MTV had a huge influence on independent films.” Sayles, who had been directing independent films since 1980, explains that music videos gave novice technicians access to state-of-the-art equipment; previously, someone would “start as a camera loader and fifteen years later might touch a Panavision. Twenty-three-year-old technicians had horror stories about working on videos, and then they'd say, ‘But you should have seen the camera they gave me!'”

 

THIS BOOK INCORPORATES INTERVIEWS WITH MORE THAN
four hundred people who were significant, even if only briefly, in MTV's Golden Era. It's been thirty years since the network signed on with a few videos and a flurry of technical mishaps. Memories change over the years and agendas can conflict, so two people might recall an incident in different ways—when this occurs, we've let each side have his or her say. MTV lent assistance to us; however, this is not an MTV book. No one from the network had any say in its content or read the book prior to publication. We thank them, collectively, for their faith that we'd tell the story with candor, affection, and, where appropriate, criticism.

Throughout our research, the people we interviewed almost unanimously looked back at this period with joy and happiness, even if they now regret some of the clothes they wore, and we hope their enthusiasm—and ours—is obvious on the page. This is the story of how an asinine idea changed the culture of America, and then the world, for better or worse.

—Rob Tannenbaum

 

 

 

 

 

 

BILLY GIBBONS, ZZ Top:
One night I got a phone call from Frank Beard, our drummer. He said, “Hey, there's a good concert on TV. Check it out.” So a couple of hours went by while I watched TV, and I called him back and said, “How long does this concert last?” He said, “I don't know.” Twelve hours later, we were still glued to the TV. Finally somebody said, “No, it's this twenty-four-hour music channel.” I said, “
Whaaaat?
” MTV appeared suddenly—unheralded, unannounced, un-anything.

 

STEVIE NICKS, Fleetwood Mac:
I was living in the Pacific Palisades and I would sit on the end of my bed, watching video after video, just stupefied.

 

DAVE NAVARRO, Jane's Addiction:
I was fourteen when MTV came on the air. My record collection at the time consisted mainly of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and here I was being exposed to a cross section of hard rock, new wave, and pop music. I still listen to Musical Youth every day. Okay, maybe not.

 

DAVE GROHL, Nirvana; Foo Fighters:
It seemed like a transmission from some magical place. Me and all my friends were dirty little rocker kids in suburban Virginia, so we spent a lot of our time at the record store or staring at album covers. With music videos, there was a deeper dimension to everything. On Friday nights, you'd go to a friend's house to get fucked up before going out to a party, and you'd have MTV on.

“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC, artist:
I was living in a $300-a-month apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed and a tiny TV, but man, I wanted my MTV. It was a luxury for me to get cable TV. I would watch all day long. At the time, MTV felt like a local, low-budget station. The VJs would make glaring errors, or forget to turn off their mics. I mean, it was horribly produced and great. I felt like,
This is television for me
.

 

JANET JACKSON, artist:
I loved watching it. How exciting back then, being a teenager and having something so creative, so fresh, so new. It was about waiting for your favorite video, and not really knowing what hour it would hit, so you'd have to watch all day long.

 

CONAN O'BRIEN, TV host:
I was a freshman in college and a friend of mine was staying at her grandfather's apartment in New York. She said, “Come over and hang out.” When I got there, she said, “I'm watching this new channel, MTV.” What a weird thing. What do you mean, they're showing music videos? What's a music video? Why would you show that? I can't stop watching! We watched for six hours. It's one of those things you can't describe to anyone who's younger than you, like the first year of
Saturday Night Live
. It was like a comet streaking across the sky.

 

DAVE MUSTAINE, Megadeth:
My mom moved out when I was fifteen, so I'd been living alone in my apartment for a few years. People would ditch school, come over, buy pot from me, and watch MTV. I'm telling you, man, I had the coolest house in the town.

 

LARS ULRICH, Metallica:
I lived with my parents, and we didn't have cable TV. We had three channels, and PBS. Dave Mustaine was a couple years older, and he had cable. And as I'm sitting here now, I can clearly see his apartment. In the right-hand corner, under the window, there was a wood-cabinet television and it was tuned to MTV 24/7.

 

LENNY KRAVITZ, artist:
The first time I saw MTV, I was on vacation with my parents in the Bahamas. They had MTV in the hotel we were staying at. It was beautiful outside, eighty degrees and sunny, and I spent the whole week in my hotel room, watching MTV, 24/7. My parents were like, “My god, what is wrong with you?” I did not want to come out. I just wanted to watch videos all day. Duran Duran, Prince, Hall & Oates, Bowie's “Ashes to Ashes,” Talking Heads, Bow Wow Wow, Haircut 100, Adam & the Ants. That's when MTV was MTV.

 

LADY GAGA, artist:
The '80s was such a magical time. We'd just come off Bowie's'70s glam rock, and disco was spiraling into this incredible synthetic music. Everything was so theatrical. Once the video was born, all these visuals found a new medium.

 

PATTY SMYTH, Scandal:
I remember watching MTV at my boyfriend's house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, in the summer of '81. A year later, I was on it.

 

PAT BENATAR, artist:
I was in a hotel in Oklahoma, just this little roadside motel, and it was one of only about eight places in the United States that actually had MTV on the day that it aired. We were all sitting on my bed—the whole band, my manager, everybody—with our mouths open. I'm telling you, within a week, we couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. It changed everything, in one week.

 

AL TELLER, record executive:
The timing of MTV was perfect. The music industry was in the doldrums and trying desperately to reinvent itself.

 

CHRIS ISAAK, artist:
I had a TV that was from, like, 1959, a portable with rabbit ears and tinfoil. I got two and a half channels, and MTV was not one. My buddy was a photographer for the San Francisco 49ers, and it was a big treat when I went to babysit his kid, because I could watch MTV. At first, it was almost underground or counterculture. I don't think people had gotten to the payola yet.

 

BRET MICHAELS, Poison:
I was eighteen or nineteen, working as a fry cook and maintenance man, and singing in a covers band. We got cable just so we could watch MTV. I'd go to parties, and girls would ask me, “Why are you watching the TV?” I'd say, “I'm waiting for Van Halen.” I'd sit there with a little smokage and wait for their video to come on.

 

MICHAEL IAN BLACK, comedian:
We did not have cable. Cable was for millionaires. I grew up in Hillsborough, New Jersey, a terrible place, but there was a local UHF station, U68, that hopped on the MTV bandwagon. If the weather was clear and the antenna was pointed just so, we could watch videos on U68. It was a ghetto MTV.

 

CHYNNA PHILLIPS, Wilson Phillips:
I saw MTV the first day it aired. I was in New Jersey, visiting my dad, and our friend had MTV. We all crowded around the TV, and “Video Killed the Radio Star” played. I was hooked.

 

DAVE HOLMES, MTV VJ:
I grew up in St. Louis, and when I was ten, somebody told me there was gonna be a thing called MTV and it was just gonna show music videos. First of all, I didn't believe them. And second, I thought,
If that's true, it's the greatest thing in the world
.

 

B-REAL, Cypress Hill:
I think it was the greatest invention ever.

 

RICHARD MARX, artist:
I spent a ton of time watching MTV. I'd set my VHS machine to extended-play mode, to get six hours on a cassette. I videotaped midnight to 6 A.M., because they'd play videos overnight that they wouldn't play during the day. I was studying it.

 

SEBASTIAN BACH, Skid Row:
I'm from Canada, where there was no MTV. Every summer, my dad would send me and my sister to California to be with my grandma. I went to my cousin's basement, put on the TV, and saw the Scorpions on fuckin' television. I was a huge heavy metal fan, and I couldn't believe my cousin had the Scorpions on his TV set! I didn't leave the basement all summer. His parents said, “Are you okay? Do you do this at home?” I'm like, “I've never seen music videos, so you've got to leave me alone.”

 

CHUCK D, Public Enemy:
These days, everybody has a hi-def camcorder in their pocket. It's accepted with shrugging shoulders. “Okay, so what? A video.” But back then, it was a main event.

 

RUDOLF SCHENKER, Scorpions:
We came on an American tour in 1982 and I exactly remember every night coming from the concert into the hotel. I went in the room, switched immediately MTV on. It was so fantastic.

 

NANCY WILSON, Heart:
Everybody wanted their MTV so bad. I remember
craving
it like crazy.

ANN WILSON, Heart:
It was like the difference between silent films and talkies. All of a sudden, records could be seen. You could just put it on and party around the TV.

 

JANE WIEDLIN, Go-Go's:
It was the go-to place to find new music, and you could find out right away what you need to know about a band, like if you liked their style or if they were cute.

 

STEVIE NICKS:
When “Video Killed the Radio Star” came out, we took it with a grain of salt. We thought,
Well, video's not gonna kill the radio star.
It did. The song was prophetic.

 

 

 

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN MUSIC AND PICTURE, WHICH
went a long way back, took a different perspective in the '70s. Low-budget video novices were influenced by experimental filmmakers: Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, and Bruce Conner, who spliced together existing film footage like a cinema DJ, and was hired by Devo, pre-MTV, to create a video for their song “Mongoloid.” The
New York Times
film critic Manohla Dargis, writing an obituary for Conner in 2008, noted the wide influence of his “shocking juxtapositions and propulsive, rhythmically sophisticated montage,” and concluded, “MTV should have paid him royalties.” Later on, music videos would reflect the influences of
Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shining, West Side Story,
film noir, Russ Meyer's breast-laden film farces, and Saturday-morning cartoons. But here at the beginning, they were bold and wild.

DAVID MALLET, director:
Music video was a medium that was not regarded at all. It was like lavatory paper. In England, they were referred to as “fillers.” That was an insult.

 

JERRY CASALE, Devo:
Videos were a curiosity at best. The record company thought we were stupid for using promotion money to do low-budget videos. “What's
that
for?”

 

DAVID MALLET:
The first time anybody put film to music satisfactorily, in my opinion, was David Lean in
Brief Encounter
[1945]. The second time I noticed it was
Death in Venice
[1971], which was Luchino Vicsconti. The third and most effective time was “Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf, which is at the beginning of
Easy Rider
[1969]. That was the first time images and music went together to illustrate the music, rather than to illustrate the mood.

 

MICHAEL MANN, filmdirector:
The different ways music can collide with dramatic action, complement it, or prepare or surprise us is not new. You can go back to
Alexander Nevsky—
Sergei Eisenstein was writing storyboards on the same long roll of paper Sergei Prokofiev was using to write the score. They were doing this in 1938, and “talkies” were only nine years old. Watch the battle-on-the-ice scene; the planning, the synchronization of music and picture, the premeditated architecture of their collision is as specific as in the best MTV videos.