I Want My MTV (4 page)

 

JERRY BRUCKHEIMER, movie producer:
The Graduate
was the first time I saw contemporary music integrated into a story. The Simon & Garfunkel songs gave you an emotional lift. It told the audience how to feel about those scenes and those characters.

 

MICK JONES, the Clash:
When the Rolling Stones got busted for drugs, they did a promo film for “We Love You,” where Keith Richards is the judge and Mick Jagger is Oscar Wilde, and on trial. Really fantastic.

 

JO BERGMAN, record executive:
My first experience with music videos was when I was working for the Rolling Stones in London in 1968, and we shot “Jumpin' Jack Flash” and “Child of the Moon” in the freezing English countryside, with the band dressed as itinerants. They're funny little films.

 

NIGEL DICK, director:
I was at Bath University in 1975, and every Thursday night at 6:30 we'd gather in a common area to watch
Top of the Pops
. The program after it was
Monty Python's Flying Circus
, so it was a big event. There'd be five hundred people watching one television.
Top of the Pops
came on, and number one on the countdown was “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. This video comes on and we're all like,
What the fuck is that?
It was astonishing.

 

BRUCE GOWERS, director:
When I was a cameraman, I worked on at least three Beatles videos—I can't remember the songs, but “Paperback Writer” was one. In 1975, two crooked wheeler-dealer brothers from Queen's management company asked me to do a film for “Bohemian Rhapsody.” We started at 7 P.M. and were in the pub before it closed at 11 P.M. That famous multiplying effect during the “thunderbolts and lightning” part, where you see many Freddie Mercurys and Brian Mays? That was corny. I stuck a prism onto the camera lens. It was held on with gaffer's tape.

 

JOHN TAYLOR, Duran Duran:
“Bohemian Rhapsody” could not have held the number one spot for as many weeks as it did if
Top of the Pops
hadn't kept running their film. But nobody called it a “video.” Later, there was one for the Boomtown Rats' “I Don't Like Mondays” and for Ultravox's “Vienna” as well—most of the long-running number one songs in the late '70s had some form of filmic presentation, because bands didn't want to keep showing up to play the song on
Top of the Pops
. That was the motivation within the UK market.

 

ROBERT SMITH, the Cure:
“Bohemian Rhapsody” was number one every fucking week. I fucking hated it.

 

BRIAN GRANT, director:
Nobody had seen anything like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I was working on
The Muppet Show
as a cameraman, and at that point I determined I wanted to direct videos.

 

JULIEN TEMPLE, director:
The first video I directed was the Sex Pistols's “God Save the Queen.” The Sex Pistols were banned from television in England, so we used to take a projector around and show the video before other bands played, so kids could actually see them.

 

DEBBIE HARRY, Blondie:
We started making music videos in 1976, maybe a little earlier. A lot of times we couldn't go to England to promote a single, and they used a lot of video on TV there. We had a big following in Australia as well, and traveling to Australia every time you released a song was out of the question. Our videos were stunning, and so ahead of their time. They have an innocent flavor to them. My nipples are showing in “Heart of Glass.” Maybe that's why people liked the video so much.

 

MEAT LOAF, artist:
For
Bat Out of Hell
[in 1977], I talked the label into giving me $30,000 to shoot three live performance clips, and I got them played as trailers before midnight showings of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
That is still the number one selling album in the history of Holland, and I never played there. It's all because of the “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” video.

 

KEVIN GODLEY, director:
Lol Creme and I made our first video in 1979 for the Godley & Creme song “An Englishman in New York.” It was post–“Bohemian Rhapsody,” which was a watermark. The record label agreed to let us make a little film on the condition that we work with a guy who had done it before. This may sound boastful, but it became obvious to us that we could do better on our own. We used video cameras and hired TV people to do the lighting. It was very low rent.

 

PERRI LISTER, choreographer:
In 1978, in London, I joined a dance group called Hot Gossip. We were like a punk rock dance group. We did a TV pilot for a comedian named Kenny Everett, and when it was shown, Mary Whitehouse, who was the Tipper Gore of England, stood up in the House of Parliament and said we were lewd and should be banned immediately. Which, of course, meant instant fame. Everybody tuned in the next week.
The Kenny Everett Video Show
was a bit like
In Living Color
, and we were like the Fly Girls. We danced to Blondie, Devo, the hits of the day. David Mallet was the director, and he started directing music videos. He did a bunch of early David Bowie videos: “Ashes to Ashes,” “DJ,” “Fashion.” When he began directing music videos full-time, he often used me as his choreographer. And then I started to appear in them as well.

 

DAVID MALLET:
Bowie was at the forefront of anything new and exciting. He was a fan of surrealist cinema and he wanted to mix it into rock n' roll. The video for “Fashion” has a lot of Buñuel in it, a lot of surrealism, which David brought to the party.

 

ALAN HUNTER, MTV VJ:
I'd been in New York for less than a year, attending drama school, and I was one of the six dancers in the “Fashion” video. I wore a mime striped shirt with suspenders, and I got paid $50 a day for three days.

 

DAVID MALLET:
The “Boys Keep Swinging” video is an incredibly straight and normal performance by David Bowie right up to about fifty seconds, when it goes insane with him in drag. He smears lipstick across his face; that's traditional Berlin drag-club stuff. The BBC watched the first twenty seconds and said, “Jolly good, nice to see him doing proper for once.” They put it on the air at teatime on a Saturday. And there was a hell of a row. They called it obscene and perverse.

 

BRIAN GRANT:
A guy from MCA Records gave me £2,000 to make a video for M's song “Pop Muzik.” It got shown on
The Kenny Everett Video Show
, which was directed by David Mallet, who later became my partner. “Pop Muzik” went to number one, and the phone didn't stop ringing.

 

ROBIN SLOANE, record executive:
In 1978, I got a job as a secretary in the publicity department at Epic Records. I was bored doing administrative work, so I said to my boss, “Can I try and do something with the promotional videos we're getting from England?” No one paid attention to that stuff. I'd get them placed in local news programs if artists were touring, or on HBO between movies, or on late-night video shows popping up in different cities. The higher-ups left me alone.

 

WAYNE ISHAM, director:
When I got out of the army after the Vietnam War, I used my GI bill to go to college, and I saw the David Bowie “Ashes to Ashes” video on a midnight show called
Night Flight
[USA Network, 1981–1996]. I said, “That's exactly what I want to do.” I got a Hollywood phone book and ripped out the pages that listed production companies. I went from one to the other, saying, “I'll do whatever it takes to get into the production business,” and eventually I got a job as stage manager at the A&M soundstage. I'd literally clean the stage by hand. I didn't know how to plug in a light. But that was the best education I could've had. When Russell Mulcahy showed up, I was the only guy who knew who he was, because I'd seen his video for XTC's “Making Plans for Nigel” on
Night Flight
. All these crazy English directors filmed there—Russell, Godley & Creme, Steve Barron.

 

STEVE BARRON, director:
My mother, Zelda, was a continuity girl in film—they call it “script supervisor” in America—and my father was a sound mixer. They worked on films like
Blow-Up
and
Performance.
I was never much good at school and I left when I was fifteen. This was 1976, and music in London was getting really interesting. I worked as a camera assistant on movies, and eventually that led to the first video I directed, the Jam's “Strange Town.”

SIMON FIELDS, producer:
Steve Barron and I had our first meeting at Warren Beatty's house; Steve's mother, who worked for Beatty, had just finished work on
Reds
, and she was staying at his place. I had more meetings with Steve and his sister, Siobhan, who was very smart, very wild. She ended up as my fiancée later on. She and Steve started a production company in London called Limelight, and we decided to join forces.

 

SIOBHAN BARRON, producer:
When we started Limelight, we were working out of Steve's house. We were living on Scotch eggs to try and make ends meet. When the phone rang, which was once in a blue moon, Steve would always make me type on the typewriter, so we sounded busy.

 

BETH BRODAY, producer:
I was a producer on a syndicated video-clip show in LA called
Deja View
. Ricci Martin, Dean Martin's son, was the on-camera talent. Response to the rudimentary clips we played was
unbelievable.
Station managers would get calls from viewers saying, “This is fantastic. We've never seen anything like this.” This was before MTV, but I knew it was going to explode.

 

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH, Devo:
Groups made videos in the 1940s. The Beatles made “Hello Goodbye” after they weren't willing to tour anymore, and the Monkees movie
Head
was like a music video. Music videos weren't invented in the early 1980s.

 

STEWART COPELAND, the Police:
The first videos were for bands like the Monkees, where somebody with a video camera shot them walking through a park, doing stupid shit. “Hey, one of you guys climb a tree.” The band jerks around and someone hoses them down with a camera and cuts it in time with the music.

 

MICHAEL NESMITH, the Monkees:
I recorded a song called “Rio” in 1977, and Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, asked me to make a promo for the song—I think he called it a “clip.” I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me. As we edited these images, an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn't make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn't understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.

That wasn't what Island Records had in mind, at all. They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing. These lavish images were more than the medium could really stand. But “Rio” became a mild hit in Europe. I decided to try three or four more of these. And I started to see other music videos popping up.

 

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH:
By the time MTV showed up, it was something Devo had been anticipating for half a decade. In 1974, Jerry Casale, his brother Bob, and I were writing songs for Devo when our friend Chuck Statler came over with a copy of
Popular Science
magazine. On the cover, it had a picture of a young couple holding what looked like a vinyl record, except it was silver and reflective. And it said, “Laser discs. Everyone will have them by Christmas.” Chuck had taken filmmaking classes, and then directed commercials. We wanted to make films that used our songs, so they could eventually be on laser discs. We were art students from Kent State who were influenced by Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Laser discs looked like the obvious bridge between the conceptual world of art museums and the real world of record stores.

 

JERRY CASALE:
It was a burgeoning, do-it-yourself thing. The Devo videos I directed were hideous and funny. We saw the world as grotesque, and put ourselves right in with it. I grew up loving the New York underground films of the Kuchar Brothers and Kenneth Anger. I hired friends and we'd get extras for $25 a day. The video for “Satisfaction” cost a whopping $5,000. By the time we spent $16,000 on “Whip It,” it was like,
Uh-oh, these video budgets are getting out of hand.

 

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH:
“Whip It” was shot in our rehearsal room. The faux log cabin was made out of the cheapest paneling we could find at Home Depot. We cast a band member's girlfriend, and when I was at the mall, I saw a girl who was really pretty and really cross-eyed, so I asked if she'd be in a video. It was very casual. My dad's in about a half dozen Devo videos. Our management and our agents didn't understand us, and our record company certainly didn't.

STEVE LUKATHER, Toto:
We did some lip-synced videos for our first album, in 1978, including “Hold the Line.” I had
Mork and Mindy
fucking suspenders on. For our second album,
Hydra
, we decided to try concept videos. This was before MTV. Bruce Gowers shot four videos for us in one day. They're so bad, they're hilarious. The sets looked like the inside of a sewer. Even when we were doing it, we were laughing. We figured, “No one's ever gonna show this.”