I Want My MTV (43 page)

ANN CARLI:
We told MTV, “This is incredibly racist, that you're not playing rap.” As Russell Simmons used to say, “It's not limited to African-American youth, it's teenage music.” Boy, did he get proved right.

 

KOOL MOE DEE, artist:
Ann Carli and Russell Simmons deserve credit for believing hip-hop artists should be treated like mainstream artists. We were aware that there was one video budget for an R&B or hip-hop act and another budget for a pop act. We had to fight to even
have
a video budget in our contract. The record label would tell us we could do one video, and if our single sold 250,000 copies, we could potentially get a second video. Labels didn't believe in spending money on hip-hop videos.

 

LIONEL MARTIN:
After hosting
Video Music Box
, I got an opportunity to direct my first music video, by Roxanne Shante—“Roxanne's Revenge.” The budget was $400.

 

DMC:
Jam Master Jay, our DJ, had been sampling “Walk This Way” for years. We didn't even call it “Walk This Way.” We didn't know who Aerosmith was. We just knew that in Jay's crate there was an album cover that said
Toys in the Attic
, and it had a picture of a toy chest and a teddy bear. We'd say, “Get
Toys in the Attic
and play number four.”

When we were making
Raising Hell
, we wanted to put something old-school on the album, and Jay was like, “Yo, let's do
Toys in the Attic
,” because that beat is real B-boy. If it had been up to us, our version of “Walk This Way” would have just been the beat, a couple of the guitars, and me and Run bragging about how great we are. But Rick Rubin came into the studio and was like, “What are you listening to?” We said, “This is
Toys in the Attic
.” He was like, “No, the name of the record is ‘Walk This Way' and the name of the band is Aerosmith.” Then he said, “It would be really great if you guys remade this song with Aerosmith. Not just sample it. Actually do the record over.”

Jay, being a visionary, goes, “Whoa, great idea.” Me and Run turned to Jay like, “What the fuck you talking about?” Rick took the record off the turntable and handed it to me and Run. He said, “Go learn this song.” We was like, “Nah, that's bullshit.” We took the record home to the basement, dropped the needle, and we hear Steven Tyler sing “backstroke lover always hidin' 'neath the covers . . .” We got on the phone with Russell Simmons: “Yo, this is hillbilly gibberish”—we couldn't even
understand
what this guy was saying. We definitely didn't know it was about a dude having sex. We just knew we completely hated it.

Russell was screaming at us, “Y'all stupid motherfuckers, you gotta do this record!” And we hung up the phone on him. For six hours we sat in our basement in Hollis, Queens, letting the phone ring, me and Run looking at each other, like, “
You
pick it up.” “No,
you
pick it up.” We
know
it's Russell and Rick, and we ain't doing this record. So finally I pick up the phone, and it's Jay. Russell's in the background, screaming, and Jay tells Russell, “Shut up, man. You know they stupid little kids, you keep screaming at 'em, they ain't
never
gonna do this.”

Jay says, “Yo, don't bug out, Rick went and got Aerosmith, they're here in the studio, Steven's doing his vocals and he's busting your ass.” Jay was using psychology. But me and Run, we're crying, “Jay, this song's gonna ruin us! We already done ‘Rock Box' and ‘King of Rock.' We're taking this rock-rap shit too fucking far.” So Jay said, “Do it like a Run-DMC record. Switch off. Run, you take a word, then D, you take a word.” We went back to the studio and tried it like Jay wanted. And it worked. That record changed our lives. It changed theirs, too. Aerosmith were going through a rough patch in their career when we did “Walk This Way.” That video got them motherfuckers a new $40 million record deal. They should have given us 10 percent of that.

 

RICK RUBIN:
I don't think it was hard for me to get Aerosmith to record the song, or to make the video. They were going through a down period. They'd reformed, put out one album, and it flopped. The record and the video had a huge effect on both groups. It opened the door to Run-DMC's full suburban crossover, and it reminded people how great Aerosmith was.

 

DMC:
The video was amazing. We shot it at an old theater in Union City, New Jersey. My favorite part is when Steven takes a mike stand and busts a hole in the wall. That was prophetic. It showed our worlds coming together. And that's what happened when MTV played the video. It went into all sorts of living rooms, and as soon as people saw it, they were addicted to rap.

 

BETH McCARTHY:
I was a PA on the New Year's Eve show when the Beastie Boys'
Licensed to Ill
had just come out. Mark Goodman almost got into a fist fight with them because they were rude to his wife.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
“Fight for Your Right (to Party)” started as a joke. The goal was “Let's write a stupid frat song.
That
'll be funny.” Then people liked it. So Rick said we had to make a video.

 

RIC MENELLO, director:
I was a desk clerk at the NYU dorm from midnight to 8 A.M. I knew a lot about movies. Rick Rubin used to come by. Russell Simmons used to come to the dorm. The Beastie Boys would come by, especially Adam Horovitz, because his dad was a play wright and a screenwriter. You pop by Menello at the front desk, bullshit a little, then split. One day, Rubin said, “I think you should direct the next Beastie Boys video.” That was “Fight for Your Right (to Party).” I was like, “No.” 'Cause directing is sacred to me. I knew I would feel bad if I fucked it up.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
I used to cut school and hang out at Rick Rubin's dorm room, and Menello would be there at four in the morning, working the desk. We said to Rick, “
That
guy's gonna direct the video? Okay, if you say so.”

 

RICK RUBIN:
Menello knew more about film than anybody. Why did I think he could direct a video? I thought
anybody
could. Because it was more about the idea than about technical ability. Concept was king.

 

RIC MENELLO:
Rubin said, “You're going to do it.” (“I'm not doing it.”) “You're going to do it!” (“All right, I'll do it.”) We were two loudmouths and we had knock-down, drag-out yelling sessions. I decided to use Adam Dubin, Rick's roommate, as a codirector, so if it went bad, I would blame him.

ADAM DUBIN:
“Fight for Your Right (to Party)” caught fire on radio, and MTV said, “We're holding a spot in heavy rotation. If we don't have a video two weeks from now, we're moving on.” It was an ultimatum. What Rubin specifically did not want was any of the slew of video directors who, on any other day, were directing Coca-Cola commercials. So Rubin called Menello. Now, Menello is a great character. He's ten years older than me, and he knows more about film than anybody you know. He's like an idiot savant of film, and he would preside behind the desk of Weinstein dorm. He would tell you about Orson Welles for four hours, and imitate him as he's doing it.

I'd graduated NYU film school in May of '86, and I'd produced and directed my own student films, so Menello brought me in. He hit on the look and the feel of the video by saying, “It's going to be like the party scene in
Breakfast at Tiffany's
,” which is really just a long series of gags. In fact, we stole some of the gags from director Blake Edwards, particularly having a guy with an eye patch. We'd known the Beastie Boys for years, and they were knuckleheads. We said, “Who are these guys? They're the guys who come to the party and drink all your beer, steal your girls, wreck the place, and then leave.” We gave that image to them.

We had $20,000 for a two-day shoot, which is insane. It was just a wing and a prayer.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
We shot at our friend Sunny Bak's loft, a block away from the movie theater on Nineteenth and Broadway. The premise was Rick Rubin's: a party that turns into a food fight. Just about everyone in the video was a friend of ours. My two best friends to this day—Cey Adams, who did a bunch of artwork for us, and Nadia Dajani, who I met in elementary school—were pie throwers in the video. The nerds at the beginning were our old friends Ricky Powell and David Sparks. My favorite thing about that video is that we made it with our friends, and I'm still friends with many of those people.

 

TABITHA SOREN, MTV reporter:
I'm in that video, with dyed blond hair. I'm still close friends with Rick Rubin, and they needed extras for the video. I worked hard at not getting any pie goo on me, because there was no money for the budget, so they went to the back of a supermarket, and from the garbage, they grabbed whipped cream that had expired and was rancid. The smell in that room, when everybody was done throwing pies, was like rotten eggs. You wanted to throw up.

 

RICK RUBIN:
If you put a lot of whipped cream in a hot room for a few hours, it ends up smelling horribly bad.

 

RIC MENELLO:
We wrecked the place. We threw pies, we kicked in the door to the bathroom. The idea of the video was infantile rebellion. Some people, like frat boys, didn't see the satire of it. It's not so much satire as a kind of blanket, cartoonish rejection of anything adult. It was stupid, but stupidity did not preclude intelligence around the edges. The style was rigorous and exact. It was influenced by Jerry Lewis, the Three Stooges, and silent movies. I played off the song—when the lyric goes, “Your mom busted in,” then I busted in as the janitor. I wanted to be crude. I wanted to raise a fist against videos being very slick.

 

RICK RUBIN:
It was rooted in Hal Roach's slapstick comedies, especially his
Our Gang
films of the '20s and '30s. Years later, those three Beastie Boys characters are iconic. People know who those three guys are; they know those characters like they would know cartoon characters.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
Adam Yauch grabs a guitar and smashes it, which is a gag we stole from
Animal House
. And it ends in a Three Stooges pie fight, where it suddenly ropes in everybody. Rick Rubin got a pie in the face, and the first one hit him in the chest, so Ad-Rock ran through and tried to stuff another pie in his face. That's the footage we used.

 

RIC MENELLO:
When I saw the rough cut, I cried. I thought it was the worst thing I had ever seen. To make myself feel better I turned on PBS and
Gigi
was on, by Vincent Minnelli. So I cried again. “He did
Gigi,
I did
this
.” I showed the video to Rubin and the Beastie Boys. They were like, “This is really good! It's kind of like a porno film.”

MTV interviewed me about the video, and I told complete and utter lies. I said it was shot in France.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
The minute MTV ran that video, my parents knew who the Beastie Boys were. They were like, “Wow, my son did the most popular video on MTV right now.”

RIC MENELLO:
The video was a mammoth hit. It was the most requested video on MTV. I quit the desk job.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
People loved that video.
Instantly
. Which was super-weird, because as much as I was dying to be a celebrity—I'd turn up anywhere I could be recognized—the video wasn't a planned, big-budget, marketing-team thing. We just made a video with our friends, and people were drawn to it. Then we had our
become-what–you-hate
moment. We were making fun of a fratboy mentality, and suddenly we were the thing we were making fun of.

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
I directed three Beastie Boys videos—“Hold It Now, Hit It” and then two live ones, “Rhyming and Stealing” and “She's Crafty,” when they had a girl dancing in a cage. Rick Rubin made me get a shot of a girl lifting her top up in “She's Crafty.” In the dressing room, I gave out mayonnaise and honey. Ad-Rock was taking whole six-packs and throwing them against the wall. DJ Hurricane was pouring honey on this girl in the dressing room. A couple of the Beastie Boys had serious girlfriends, who got very mad at me.

 

CHUCK D:
We totally rejected the idea of making a video for our first album, because there was no clear-cut place where our video would be seen on a regular basis. We made an album for $17,000, so a video would cost more than our album—and half of the cost would be recouped against us anyway. People like Fab 5 Freddy and Forest Whitaker came to us with ideas. But why would we spend our own money that we ain't got?

 

RICK RUBIN:
I didn't care that Public Enemy didn't want to make a video, not at all. Even though there weren't that many videos in those days, there were too many bad videos already. I didn't like the idea of a video as a marketing tool. I liked it as its own artistic piece.

I never believed in doing a video for the sake of doing a video, or promoting our new single. The idea had to be first. The reason we didn't do a video from the first LL Cool J album was, there never was a great concept. Jean-Paul Goude, the fashion photographer who did the Grace Jones video, had a unique enough visual style to separate LL from everyone else who made rap videos, all the guys with the gold chains. I thought,
If we can get him, then we should do a video
. But he never responded.

ADAM DUBIN:
For “No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn,” the record company wanted a video in the style of “Fight for Your Right (to Party).” Nobody wanted to mess with the formula.
Licensed to Ill
was tearing up the charts. There were eight guys from the record company at the video, because suddenly, the Beastie Boys mattered. Menello and I wrote all the gags, again, which we mostly took from Bugs Bunny cartoons. We had $70,000 this time, so we shot on 35mm instead of 16mm and got a better crew. We did a prologue, where Menello was the club owner and he's like, “Where are your instruments?” And then they come back as the band, wearing heavy-metal gear. Simone Reyes, the receptionist at Def Jam, was in the video—she's the girl holding a can opener. Simone was pretty, so a lot of people flirted with her, and I think she dated Yauch at one point.