I Want My MTV (50 page)

 

ROBERTA CRUGER:
It was my job to seat everyone at the VMAs. That became very complicated. I had to keep Van Halen separated from David Lee Roth, after they broke up. They had to be in different sections, but one couldn't have a better seat than the other.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
David Lee Roth was nominated for a lot of awards in 1985 and lost every single one. I met James Brown that night, who said, “Man, you got fucked.” To me, that was better than any award. Joe Davola handed me a Moonman statue and said, “The crew and I feel horribly about what happened.” So I have a Moonman for the most losses ever.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
They made cases of these things. I ripped off a Moonman, walked out with it, and gave it to Pete the next day. I was like, “Dude, you got robbed.”

SUSAN SILVERMAN:
“California Girls” and “Just a Gigolo” were nominated for Video of the Year, and lost to “Boys of Summer.” After the show, David Lee Roth and I went to a party, and he got wasted. You know how someone sort of pins you against a wall at a party and you can't escape? Well, Dave was in my face for forty-five minutes about how he really should have won Video of the Year.

 

RUSSELL MULCAHY:
Duran presented me with the Video Vanguard award at the VMAs, and while I was walking onstage, the ass of my suit pants ripped open. And so I'm standing there giving my speech, and I'm completely fucked because all I could think about was the breeze going up my ass, and hoping my jacket was long enough so that it wasn't caught on camera.

 

WISH FOLEY:
I went to the VMAs the year “Don't Come Around Here No More” lost to “Boys of Summer.” I got hit on by Jon Anderson, the singer of Yes—he was short—and by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which I loved.

 

DEBBIE GIBSON:
I was supposed to perform on the VMAs one year, but here's one of the perils of being a teen star: My wisdom teeth acted up, I got an abscess, and I couldn't sing. My face was all puffy and swollen. That was my hottest year, too. After that, no invites. Oh well.

 

ARSENIO HALL, TV host:
Sam Kinison was a friend of mine, and one night at the Comedy Store in LA, he told me he was gonna host the 1988 MTV Awards. Then I got a call asking if I was interested. I said, “I was told that Sam Kinison is hosting.” And they said, “
Are you interested?
” And I said, “Yeah, but before you pull the trigger, me and Sam should talk.” And they never gave me that opportunity. Sam called me and just said, “Fuck you, bastard,” and he hung up.

Eddie Murphy and I were friends, but friends can be competitive. At that time, he had the prettiest woman, the most money, and the nicest house. But MTV only called him once to host. I hosted four years in a row. Every year I'd say to Eddie, “Yeah, MTV called me again, they want me to host that shit one more time. How many times did you host it?” “Once.” “Well, maybe it didn't work out that good.” That was the only thing I ever had on Eddie.

My first year, I spent some time hanging out with Cher. A little kid came over and said, “Could I have a picture of you all?” And the picture ended up on the front page of the
Globe
, with the headline CHER'S NEW BOY TOY. It would have been cooler if it had paid off and I got the punani from Cher. I could tell my grandchildren, “See that lady with the feathers on her head? Daddy rocked that.”

At the time of my second VMAs, I was going out with Paula Abdul. John Landis had hired her to choreograph the African dances in
Coming to America
. I teased Landis about that: “So, apparently, all the African choreographers were busy?” He said, “Are you complaining?” I told John, “If she comes here, she's mine.” And that's when we hooked up. She was the biggest thing in pop music. It felt like life was perfect. Paula's taking
all
the trophies home, I'm
in
the “Straight Up” video, that's my girl, and I'm the host.
Can life be any better?

 

PAULA ABDUL:
Me and my sister have a habit of peeing in our pants when we laugh too hard. If you touch us on the side of our ribs, we will pee. It's not a fun thing. When I was hanging around Arsenio and Eddie Murphy, I had to have a change of clothes with me all the time. Arsenio always made me laugh.

 

JOEL GALLEN, MTV producer:
I was supervising producer of the 1989 VMAs, which was the last year of MTV's contract to have Dick Clark Productions oversee the show. There was talk about Jerry Seinfeld hosting the show, but everybody was like, “He's not big enough yet.” So we brought back Arsenio. After that year, I came in as executive producer and said, “We can't allow lip-syncing anymore. Let's emphasize live performance.” Of course, that's all changed now. It's one big lip-sync.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
Bobby Brown had a moment on the VMAs that year. It's on YouTube. If you freeze the video, you can see that he dropped a vial of something while he was performing. It could be any number of things, I suppose. But it probably wasn't Splenda.

 

BOBBY BROWN:
That was my diamond bracelet falling off my wrist. I know everybody says it was a package of coke or some shit. They can say what they want. I know what happened. Anyway, why would I pick it up if it was coke? “Wait, wait, my shit fell?!” No.

 

TRACEY JORDAN, record executive:
Oh, I was there for that. I was with Bobby—I've known him since he was like thirteen years old. He was dancing around the stage and all of a sudden, something flew out of his pocket. Then he did this elaborate dance step to pick it up and put it back in his pocket. And I'm like, “What the hell was that?” I have my suspicions. It was probably something to, ahh, lift his spirits.

 

JOEL GALLEN:
Bobby Brown dropped his coke vial onstage. The show always runs a bit long, so they want us to take out ten minutes and clean things up for rebroadcast. When I started editing, I was like, “Wait a second—what's going on?” He was dancing a thousand miles an hour. There was a close-up of Bobby, who looks panicked, then you see a little thing in the foreground—which is definitely a coke vial—then it cuts back to Bobby looking around, like, “What should I do?” Bobby picks it up, puts it in his pocket, and keeps singing. If you look at the clip on YouTube, it's pretty hilarious.

 

TOM PETTY:
I played the VMAs with Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin from Guns N' Roses—we did “Free Fallin'” and “Heartbreak Hotel.” I thought it was kind of a shaky performance. We didn't get a lot of rehearsal time, because Cher was doing a big production number and there wasn't much time for us.

As we finished “Heartbreak Hotel” and walked offstage, Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe came running out of the wings and decked Izzy, hit him right in the face. Our sound guy, Jim Lenahan, was walking off the stage with us, and Lenahan was like, “I don't even know this Izzy kid, but he's with us,” so he decked Vince Neil. Izzy was getting a lot of black eyes those days. I think he already had a black eye before Vince hit him.

 

SEBASTIAN BACH:
I was on the side of the stage when Vince punched Izzy. Vince's gold bracelet flew off his wrist as he cracked Izzy. It was a big chunk of gold. Vince was huffing and puffing, and I was like, “Dude, I've got your bracelet.” He's like, “You can have it, man.” In the day, if somebody said something bad about your band, you were obliged to punch him. It was considered totally appropriate.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
Izzy and I were walking offstage when Vince came out of the darkness and whomped Izzy on the face, at which point I threw Vince to the floor and put my left hand around his throat. I cocked up my right arm to bury in his nose, and had a moment of lucidity where I looked at his rhinoplasty, said, “That's too expensive,” and let him up. Then Axl ran all over the building, trying to find Mötley and extend the dialogue further. It was very timely that Nikki had jumped into a limo and fled the scene.

TOM FRESTON:
When Neil Young's “This Note's for You” won Video of the Year at the 1989 VMAs, that was our audience saying, “Fuck you, MTV.” And we deserved it.

 

BOB MERLIS, record executive:
“This Note's for You” was a parody. Neil was at war with the way the commercial world had co-opted music and turned it into a vehicle for shilling products. The look of the bar in the video is a parody of the Michelob commercials Eric Clapton did. A Michael Jackson imitator's hair catches on fire, and a Whitney Houston impersonator puts out his hair fire, presumably with a can of Coke. It was the era of selling out, and Neil was an iconoclast.

 

JULIEN TEMPLE:
Beer companies and the like were beginning to take over music. A lot of beer ads were using rock musicians. It felt like the line between videos and commercials was blurring, and “This Note's for You” was a great opportunity to make a piece about that. MTV was making lots of money from those advertisers, so anything that made fun of them was going to be incendiary in MTV's eyes. We managed to get banned from MTV
and
win the Best Video of the Year award. That was the peak of my video-making career.

 

TOM FRESTON:
People thought we banned it because the video spoofed us. But that wasn't the reason. Our ad salespeople said, “If we have products in videos, advertisers aren't going to bother to buy time anymore. They'll just put their products in the videos.” And I went along with them. Neil Young made a big stink about it in the press. We looked like a bunch of pussies. We
were
a bunch of pussies. That's a fact. Not playing “This Note's for You” was the biggest mistake I made at MTV.

 

JOEL GALLEN:
In 1989, Andrew Dice Clay was the hottest comedian on the planet. He was racy and edgy, MTV was racy and edgy, so we wanted to roll the dice with him, so to speak, and give him a spot. He was fine in rehearsal. Night of the show, the stage manager said to him, “We're running long, you gotta trim your act a little bit.” And he didn't react kindly to that. He started saying things he shouldn't say. The Dice incident was fantastic for the VMAs. We wouldn't admit it at the time, but controversy is great. You want people to talk about the show. You want it to be a show where anything can happen, and there's spontaneity and danger.

LEE MASTERS:
I asked Doug Herzog, over and over, whether Dice would keep it clean, and Doug kept saying, “He's gonna keep it clean, he's gonna keep it clean.” And so Dice starts doing his act, and he's keeping it clean, but no one's laughing. I was five rows back and I could see it in his eyes: He was bombing and he knew it. And he launched into “Hickory dickory dock, this bitch was sucking my cock.” Or whatever it was. Freston went nuts, and John Reardon, who ran affiliate and ad sales, went nuts

 

ARSENIO HALL:
Dick Clark was producing the show, and he and I were standing in the wings. He had a headset on and I didn't, so I didn't know what Dice was saying. Then I saw Dick throw his headset on the podium. He suggested I pull Dice off the stage. I said, “That's not what I do. I do jokes.” I saw Dice last month, and told him I was given the assignment of pulling him off, and we laughed our asses off. I think Dice knew what he was doing. You remembered him the next day.

 

TOM FRESTON:
It was a scene. It was one of those moments you hoped for at the VMAs. Barry Kluger, who ran communications, said to the press, “We're banning him for life from MTV.” Which was crazy. Barry had one of those Al Haig moments.

 

LEE MASTERS:
The VMAs were high stress, so every year I'd go on vacation immediately after. That year, I was feeling pretty good. VMA ratings were the highest they'd been since the first one. I said to my wife, “For the last four years, every day I went to work I felt I could get fired. I don't feel that way anymore. I feel safe.” I went back to work on Monday, and I got fired. If you ask people, they'll say no, but John Reardon wanted to be president of MTV, and he used the Dice Clay thing as a catalyst to get Tom Freston to push me out.

Two days later, I got an offer to run what was then Movietime, which we turned into E!, which made my career. And a year after he fired me, Freston fired Reardon. To this day, Tom will say, “That was the worst business decision I ever made, when we let you leave.” And I say, “Tom, you didn't
let
me leave, you
told
me to leave!”

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
Don Henley was an edgy guy, but we got on. In 1990, I got Henley to come to the VMAs, when “End of the Innocence” was up for a few awards. But this was the year of MC Hammer. Hammer won everything. About halfway through the show, I got bored and went for a walk backstage. I went upstairs in the offices of the Universal Amphitheater, and there's Don Henley, Don's manager Irving Azoff, and his wife Shelli. They're watching a monitor.

This will be shocking for some people to hear, but I knew that in ten minutes, Henley was going to win the award for Best Male Video. And when that award was presented, he couldn't be up in this office. I said, “So how long you gonna stay up here, Don?” He goes, “For the rest of the night. Hammer's winning everything. It's embarrassing for me to sit in the audience and lose to Hammer.”

I said, “Don, it would be helpful to me if you were in your seat when the Best Male Video award comes up.” He goes, “No. I'm not going to. I don't want to be embarrassed.”

Then I said to Irving, “It would make me feel good if Don could be in his seat.” He goes, “Ab, he's not gonna do it!” I said, “Irving, can you please
tell
him to go sit in his seat.” All of a sudden, Don realized why I needed him in his seat. He fixed his shirt and tie, went downstairs, and accepted the award for “End of the Innocence.”