I Want My MTV (49 page)

The girl who played Alice was named Wish. Stan Lynch, our drummer, dated her for years. And our bassist, Howie Epstein, had a kid with one of the other girls from the video. Videos were a great place to meet really hot women.

 

WISH FOLEY, actress:
When I went to the audition, there were fifteen or twenty girls coming in at the same time. They were models, in skimpy leather outfits with short skirts. Boobs everywhere. It was kind of gross, they would stand in front of a mirror and do their “come hither” look. And here I am, dressed up like Alice in Wonderland.

I was twenty-one years old, strictly an actress. I did close to fifty commercials before that, starting at age six, and I was picked for the TV series
Family
over Helen Hunt. I'd also been the original Joanie on
Happy Days
. But
The Brady Bunch
had just gone off the air, and after I shot the pilot, they said, “We're sorry, she looks too much like Cindy Brady.”

 

JEFF STEIN:
Wish Foley definitely suffered for art. We built a giant teacup out of an aboveground pool. The doughnut was a giant inner tube. I asked for the water in the teacup to be warm, and it wasn't. She was in cold water on an air-conditioned stage for quite some time, and never said anything. When she came out, she had hypothermia.

 

WISH FOLEY:
It was 7 A.M., after twenty-four hours of shooting, and the water was ice cold. If you look closely, you can see me shivering. They bundled me up and shoved me into an emergency-wash shower.

 

JEFF STEIN:
There's a scene with a pig in a baby carriage, wearing a bonnet, which means we had to hire a pig wrangler. The guy brings out his piglet, and maybe there was pork roast in the catering truck that day, but the pig took off. Maybe he thought he was lunch. Ever try to catch a pig in a sound studio?

 

TOM PETTY:
For the last shot, where we cut a piece of Wish's body and eat, we had a giant cake made in the shape of her body, and Wish slipped her head from underneath. That must have been uncomfortable as hell. There was only one cake, so we had one take to get it right. When MTV saw that shot, they said one of my looks down at Wish was too menacing, like I was enjoying it too much. I thought that's what the character would do. He was pretty scary. They asked us to pull that shot. We used a different one where I looked a little less menacing.

 

WISH FOLEY:
I was under the cake for four and a half hours, with my head flipped all the way back. When people said that the cutting of the cake promoted cruelty to women, I had to laugh that people took it so damn seriously.

 

JEFF STEIN:
or laughs, I asked them to fill the cake with strawberry jam, so when they started hacking it up, jam was squirting all over the place. There was a big stink about the cake cutting. I was cited by a parents-teachers organization for promoting cannibalism.

 

SCOTT K ALVERT, director:
Jeff Stein had a great sense of humor. He was the first director who took it to a different level. “Don't Come Around Here No More”? That was brilliant.

 

TOM PETTY:
I thought the problem with Jeff was that he was a little bit off the rails. But he did great by us. I was
knocked out
when I saw the final cut; I played it thirty times in a row. “Don't Come Around Here” kicked the barn doors off for us. We hit the moon with that one.

LIZ HELLER:
Everyone stayed up all night finishing the video to get it ready for an MTV world premiere, which was scheduled for the next day. We were going to send it directly to MTV's studios via satellite, and because of the time crunch, MTV's standards and practices wouldn't get to see the final edit. At the end of the video, Alice turns into a cake, and Tom Petty and his band cut up the cake. It was a crazy, drugged-out image, and for those days, it was pretty extreme. Standards and practices was completely panicked.

 

MICHELLE VONFELD, MTV executive:
I was executive assistant to David Horowitz, who oversaw the cable and recorded music divisions of Warner Communications, and when David became CEO of MTV Networks, he asked me to go with him. He saw that no one person was overseeing the network's standards and practices. I became the one-person standards and practices department.

 

JEFF STEIN:
“Don't Come Around Here No More” is the video that led to the formation of the PMRC. Tipper Gore's daughter saw the video, and the cake-cutting freaked her out.

Around that time, a parent-teacher organization picked the five most offensive music videos, and two of them were mine: “Don't Come Around Here No More” and the Jacksons' “Torture.” That was probably my career highlight in music videos.

 

LES GARLAND:
We had the PMRC up our ass.

 

DEE SNIDER:
Twisted Sister's “We're Not Gonna Take It” was on the “Filthy 15,” the PMRC's list of songs they felt were most objectionable. They rated “We're Not Gonna Take It”
V
for Violence. When I testified before Congress, I said, “These lyrics are no more violent than the Declaration of Independence.”

 

MARTY CALLNER:
Tipper Gore and the PMRC called “We're Not Gonna Take It” the most violent video of all time. Which is pretty funny, because there was no blood in it, no
anything
.

 

MICHELLE VONFELD:
We actually met with the PMRC early on, because some of the things they accused us of playing were either videos we didn't play or videos we played in an edited form. Tipper Gore was at the meeting. I think she was surprised to learn that we had standards at all.

SAM KAISER, MTV executive:
We secretly called Michelle Vonfeld “The Legion of Decency.”

 

MICHELE VONFELD:
Each video they wanted to air, I watched frame by frame. I often heard the criticism that our policies were inconsistent. But we felt we were being consistent with a product that was inconsistent. No two videos were the same.

Here's an example: To the best of my recollection, the Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” video ran unedited—even though the word “faggot” is used—because of the context in which the word appeared. It wasn't a slur against gays; it was part of the artistic makeup of the song. But the following week, if I'd been brought a video where somebody's being called “a dirty little fag” in a mean, disrespectful way, it was not going to air. If somebody wants to interpret that as inconsistent, well, then,
yes
.

 

GEORGE BRADT:
We played “Money for Nothing,” with its prominent use of “faggot,” about a billion times. That still pisses me off.

 

MICK KLEBER:
MTV's standards and practices were totally malleable. If you were David Lee Roth or Madonna or Michael Jackson, you could grab your crotch all day long. If you were a baby act like Poison, MTV would make you take that out. And we'd say, “Wait a minute, look at Van Halen. They're doing that.” And their answer was really bald-faced: “When Poison get to be as big as Van Halen, then we'll see.”

 

CHRIS ISAAK:
There was a list of things MTV said
no
to. It was a big list, like Hollywood had the Hays Code rules starting in the '30s. “You can't have a gun in the video. You can't have somebody smoking in the video. You can't show part of a woman's body. You can't show
only
her legs.” But believe me, you can find a video with every one of these things in it. They made exceptions, if you were connected right. They were politically correct with the people they felt they could push around. And the people on top of the heap did whatever they wanted.

 

JEFF STEIN:
MTV's standards and practices were the same for everyone, except Madonna.

ROB KAHANE:
We always said, there was the Madonna rule, and then everybody else's rule.

 

TOM PETTY:
Standards and practices always found something I hadn't even noticed. In the video for “Yer So Bad,” they swore there was a girl sniffing cocaine in one scene. To this day, I still can't see that.

 

MICHELE VONFELD:
We had four constituents we were trying to please: the cable community, the advertising community, the creative community, and the consumer. We devised a two- or three-page document, our standards document. It wasn't a list of words you couldn't say on television. It was more our philosophy. It talked about not glorifying violence, it discussed sexual matters, issues of taste, things that could be hurtful to other people.

 

DAVE KENDALL, host,
120 Minutes
:
There was a sense that MTV was naughty and decadent, because it was giving people cheap thrills and instant gratification. The network played on the idea of excess and debauchery. We had promos like, “Too much is never enough.” But that's kind of a myth. I don't think MTV, in that sense, was anything new. The allure was always very sexualized. People think of MTV as a new cultural phenomenon, when all it did was merge archaic desires: the sex drive, the desire to be better than one's peers. MTV's newness was not so much cultural as technological. There was suddenly a new platform, cable television.

 

JEFF STEIN:
I did a Quiet Riot video, “The Wild and the Young,” as an allegory about the PMRC. We shot in Pasadena, California, at an old power station. I had two old dames who were friends of mine, a lesbian couple, playing fascist brain police. I got Wink Martindale, the game-show host, to be Big Brother. Together, they were like the anti–rock n' roll gestapo.

 

PATTI GALLUZZI, MTV executive:
When I was hired as director of music programming, I was in charge of picking the videos we played, and getting them approved by standards became my job, too. In the beginning, it was hell. It could take ages. Michelle Vonfeld had a lot of power. Often she just didn't understand something, so she wouldn't clear it, and we would waste days going back and forth with the record company, requesting lyrics. Eventually I wised up and went, “Okay, nobody can submit a video to MTV without sending us the lyrics.”

Our goal wasn't to “censor” videos—we wanted to play videos in a way that preserved as much of the artist's integrity as possible while not warping the minds of America's youth. We were desperately trying to avoid glorifying guns. If it was a superstar, like Madonna, obviously we wanted to premiere the video, so we'd be on the phone with the label or the manager, trying to clear it up quickly. Everybody would be desperate to get a Madonna video on the air, and people didn't care so much about a Nice & Smooth video.

And obviously, we wanted to be sure to play the videos of musicians we wanted to book at the VMAs.

 

 

 

WHAT PEOPLE REMEMBERED FROM THE FIRST VMA
broadcast wasn't Herbie Hancock's five victories for a mind-twisting video, it was the sight of Madonna humping the stage in a wedding dress. That set the tone for every VMA to follow—the point wasn't to be honored for excellence in your field, but to cause a commotion, even if it meant showing off your lumpy buttocks, as Howard Stern did in 1992. The show reinforced MTV's reputation as a place for edgy behavior, even when presenters insulted the network—as comedian Eddie Murphy did on the second VMAs, shortly after
Beverly Hills Cop
made him a Hollywood superstar: “They came to me about six months ago and said, ‘Eddie, host the MTV awards,'” Murphy declared, on a live broadcast. “And I'm an actor, so my first reaction was, ‘Fuck MTV.'” The crowd loved it. So did MTV.

 

LES GARLAND:
Eddie Murphy and I became good buddies, and I got him to host the second VMAs in 1985. He was the biggest star in the world at that point. The night before the show, rehearsal is set for 9 P.M. We had a great rehearsal. And I gave him careful instructions about what he could and couldn't say on TV. The show was being simulcast on Metromedia, which is Fox before it became Fox. I said, “Listen, you have to control the four-letter words, you can't say
shit
, like you do on pay TV, okay? Promise me?” And he goes, “Don't worry, Garland.”

So next night, he comes out—“Ladies and gentlemen, EDDIE MURPHY!”—and right after he says hello to everybody, he goes off script.

GEORGE BRADT:
He walks out and goes, “A year ago, I would have said, ‘Fuck MTV.' But now I got a video, so I kiss their ass.” This was when you could still swear on cable.

 

LES GARLAND:
He takes a left and just keeps going. Starts talking about how loose the women are in rock n' roll. “I'm not gonna say I got a disease, but all I know is there was flames coming out of my dick.” This is live. There's no seven-second delay. Pittman comes running across Radio City Music Hall: “Garland, stop him!” And I'm like, “What do you want me to do? Go onstage?” I'm taking the heat, of course, because I put Eddie on the show. And stations are pulling the plug on us left and right. But this is the anarchy of MTV, this is what it was all about. Eddie finishes the monologue, we go to commercials, he comes offstage, and I grab him and go, “I can't believe you did that. I told you, you can't say that stuff.” He goes, “No, you told me I couldn't say
shit
.”

 

BRIAN DIAMOND, MTV staff:
Once the cat was out of the bag, the show spiraled from there. It was the year after Live Aid, and we gave a special award to Bob Geldof. They introduce him, he gets a standing ovation, and the first words out of Geldof's mouth were “I find it amazing in these times you can say
fuck
on national television.” Glenn Frey also said
fuck
. We weren't on a tape delay—nobody did that back then. Needless to say, there were several bottles of champagne sent to cable operators in the next day or two.