I Want My MTV (62 page)

Ken had some bad habits that he had to give up. And he did. He stopped doing drugs, he gave up drinking, he lived a straight life. But he'd had some surgery involving his spine, and then he had two cornea transplants, because the first one didn't take. He joked about how the wheels were starting to come off. But I talked to him almost every day, and it didn't seem like he was in bad health. The last time I called him, he said he had a horrible headache and was really in pain. The next day, November 14, 2009, I got a call that he'd died. It was determined he'd had a heart attack. We had a great memorial for him, with everyone who ever knew him, it seemed; Ray Romano, Adam Sandler, and Larry David were there.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
Everything is snarky now, everything is pop culture–based now. But pre–
Remote Control
, it wasn't cool to know all the spin-off shows from
Happy Days
. That meant you were strange.

DOUG HERZOG:
Michael Dugan and Joe Davola are two lifelong friends of mine. We had the time of our lives making
Remote Control
.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Remote Control
stabilized our ratings. And it was a turning point. The idea of a game show on MTV would have been anathema five years earlier. When we had shows, we got better ratings.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
There were still a lot of music videos on the channel. It wasn't the MTV you know today. But the naysayers either left or shut up.

 

 

 

DISCO NEVER DIED—IT HID, MUTATED, AND RETURNED.
The era of hair metal was also a gala period for dance music, which fulfilled MTV's need—dating back to Michael Jackson—for vivid, fast-stepping videos. By the summer of 1987, dance music had earned its own daily show,
Club MTV
, guided by a pervy director who shot dancers, male and female, like they were strippers. The show thrived not only due to its displays of gyrating flesh, but also as a measure of what was topping the charts. Paula Abdul became the breakout star of 1989, despite a flimsy singing voice, because she was an expert dancer (and was also willing to duet with a cartoon feline who “rapped,” MC Scat Kat). And in 1990,
Forbes
reported, the highest-paid act in music was New Kids on the Block thanks to sales of lunch boxes and dolls and a Saturday-morning cartoon.

No act was more silly than Milli Vanilli, a name that has become synonymous with fraud. The music was created by Frank Farian, a German producer in his mid-forties who'd had success across Europe with the disco group Boney M. His first U.S. success came with “Girl You Know It's True,” which was sung by generic American session singers living in Germany. The success of “Girl” and subsequent Milli Vanilli singles surprised Farian, who unexpectedly needed the nonexistent “group” to perform in clubs and on TV. He assigned the job—possibly under duress—to Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, whose dancing had made them minor celebrities in Munich. The fraud deepened as the album sold 7 million copies in the U.S., “and then,” Farian said, “it was too late.” After he admitted the Milli Vanilli hoax in November 1990, he predicted, “in five or ten years, Rob will see it wasn't so bad. Then he'll be thankful.” It didn't work out that way. Less than eight years later, Rob—who, since Milli Vanilli was exposed, had made multiple suicide attempts, gone to prison, and been estranged from Fab—died of a drug overdose in a hotel room. His death was ruled accidental, though Fab has his doubts about the official cause of death.

 

JULIE BROWN:
A lot of great dance music was popping up: Janet Jackson's
Rhythm Nation
, Cameo, Taylor Dayne, Jody Watley. MTV took the dance-music niche and created
Club MTV.
It was a hip-hop, rocking, dance, nonstop, energizing show. It became a phenomenon, didn't it?

 

TOM HUNTER:
Club MTV
was
American Bandstand
with dance music and hot girls. It got great ratings, but just as important, it showed people we weren't merely a hair band channel. I was hell-bent for leather to try to defeat that notion.

 

JULIE BROWN:
We shot
Club MTV
two days a month and did between fifteen and nineteen shows in a weekend. I went out with the crew to choose dancers for the show. I chose beautiful girls and great-looking guys. The boys had their shirts off, the girls had their skirts short and tight, and they danced on top of podiums, so the cameramen could shoot up to the dancers, and make it hot, but not disgusting. I always wore two pairs of underwear, just in case the camera took a slight detour in the wrong direction.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Julie would come out of her dressing room in those outrageous outfits and say, “Can you see my cunt through this thing?”

 

LOU STELLATO:
We would shoot fifteen shows in two days, at the Palladium in New York, and then they would run the hell out of those fifteen shows. One of the dancers was Camille Donatacci, who ended up being Mrs. Kelsey Grammer.

 

CAMILLE GRAMMER:
When I tried out for
Club MTV
, I was nineteen years old, going to college, and working as a dental assistant. I was on
Club MTV
from the first episode to the very end. The pay was $35 a day. That barely covered parking and lunch. We basically did it for free. We would get to the Palladium at nine o'clock in the morning and we would dance until nine o'clock at night. MTV would always say to us, “This is great exposure for you.”

BETH McCARTHY:
I was in Tampa with Ted Demme and Colin Quinn for one of our Super Bowl shoots. They thought it would be hilarious to take me to a strip club. I'm like, “I'm not going.” So they took me through what I thought was the back door of a club, and it ended up being a strip club called the Dollhouse. All of a sudden I hear, “Hi, Beth!” And there's one of the strippers waving at me. She was an ex–
Club MTV
dancer. The guys fell down laughing.

 

MIKE ARMSTRONG:
There was a horrific incident when they were taking the
Club MTV
dancers by bus to Daytona for Spring Break. As they approached a tollbooth near Baltimore, someone was trying to lower the shade, and the bus driver got distracted and plowed into cars at sixty miles per hour. People were killed. It was on the news. At the end of the day, a friend of mine who was on the bus approached two
Club MTV
dancers and he overheard one say to the other, “After all we've been through today, your hair looks great.” I've been telling that story for twenty-three years now.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
Not only did I segment produce on
Club MTV
, I performed on
Club MTV
. There was a group of people from MTV—me, the producer Bruce Gilmer, and Troi from the mailroom, who later became Star from the radio show
Star and Buc Wild
—who played various instruments. When artists would come and lip-sync on
Club MTV
, and they couldn't afford a band to pretend to play behind them, we'd back them up. My brother played percussion. We backed up Roxette, Robbie Nevil, Rick Astley. I mimed a great guitar solo in Astley's “It Would Take a Strong, Strong Man.”

 

LOU STELLATO:
I was very involved in
Club MTV
. I was Julie's floor producer. I wrote the scripts for Julie. Yes, there were scripts for
Club MTV
.

 

BETH McCARTHY:
I still see one of the dancers from
Club MTV
, Laura B, because she's now Tina Fey's stand-in on
30 Rock
.

 

CAMILLE GRAMMER:
At the end of the first year of
Club MTV
, I had a breast augmentation. I came back for season two and everybody was like, “Huh! Wow!” I don't know if I got more camera time, but I definitely got a lot of fan mail.

 

BETH McCARTHY:
Camille was a pretty girl who started doing stuff to herself that made her not as pretty. I had a problem with her because I didn't like the way she treated my friend Milt. Milt was a director at MTV. Camille was friends with Milt, and when she didn't have a boyfriend, she would date him a little bit. Except that he took it to mean they were totally together.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
I knew Camille very well. She used to date Milt Lage. Milt and I went to London to do the Oasis
Unplugged
in 1996, and we had adjoining hotel rooms. We turned on a baseball game, and there was a shot of Camille and Kelsey Grammer at the game. That's when he found out they were dating.

 

LOU STELLATO:
Milt Lage invented the
Club MTV
upskirt shot.

 

CAMILLE GRAMMER:
The cameramen knew what they were doing. The girls wore miniskirts, and then we realized it would be a good idea for us to wear bike shorts underneath, for those upskirt camera angles.

 

LOU STELLATO:
For some reason, they booked the Dead Milkmen to perform on
Club MTV
. And the band didn't take their performance seriously. During the interview they handcuffed Julie, either to a mic stand or to one of the guys in the band. She tried to keep it together, but it got ugly. And when we faded, she ran back to her dressing room. They were cracking up in the truck as it was happening. She was on the stairwell at the Palladium, with snot running down her nose, saying, “I can't fucking believe it!”

 

JULIE BROWN:
The Dead Milkmen handcuffed me. I got a bit pissed about that.

 

DEBBIE GIBSON:
Everyone at my school watched
Club MTV
. I wanted to be on that show. But one thing I never liked; they made you lip-sync. I was more petrified of lip-syncing than singing live, because if you messed up live or your voice sounded edgy, so what? But if you're lip-syncing and you forgot a riff, then you looked like an idiot. Then you're Milli Vanilli. And I was already in a genre people didn't seriously.

 

FAB MORVAN, Milli Vanilli:
Milli Vanilli made dancing a focal point in our videos. We didn't have much budget, right? We didn't have access to those top directors in Germany, we didn't even have a stylist. I did all the choreography. Because when we did “Girl You Know It's True,” the first video, no one thought it would become so successful. You can see the difference in our third and fourth videos, “Girl I'm Gonna Miss You” and “Blame It On the Rain”; we were selling records, so those videos had a little more like a real story.

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
Steve Leeds and I were at the
Club MTV
tour date [July 21, 1989] when Milli Vanilli got busted for lip-syncing. I thought they were charismatic onstage; it was like a gymnastics show. Steve brought it to my attention that they weren't singing. They would lip-sync, and between verses they'd say something like, “Yeah man! All right!” They could barely speak English! It was hysterical!

 

BETH McCARTHY:
The first time Milli Vanilli came in to be interviewed, we were all thinking,
There's no way these two guys are singing those songs. They don't even speak English
.

 

CLIVE DAVIS:
Milli Vanilli was the brainchild of Frank Farian, a German record producer. He was probably the number one record man in Europe. When Arista licensed the record for U.S. release, I had never seen the group. I didn't even meet them until they'd sold 2 million records in America. Frank Farian furnished us with the videos. We had no idea Rob and Fab didn't sing on the record. We were as shocked as the public. It turned out they were paid union scale; they weren't even getting royalties. Farian took the position that this was done all the time in Europe.

 

FAB MORVAN:
My response to that is very simple: If a pin drops in the company, Clive Davis will know about it. That's all I have to say.

 

KIM MARLOWE, manager:
The singers Frank Farian used were very unattractive, older—one of them was fat, one was skinny. I don't mean to disrespect them, but they didn't have stage presence. They had decent voices, but you still have to be a great performer, you have to be able to rip up those stages and control an audience. You're either a star, or you're not a star. Rob and Fab
were
stars. They had a great look and a great image.

Frank Farian is a very talented producer, but he is an unbelievably despicable human being, period. Because he gets young talent, signs them to contracts, and then gives them a small amount of advance. Rob and Fab didn't sign a lip-syncing deal. He brought them back many months later and told them what they were gonna do. “And if you don't, you have to pay the money back.”

 

FAB MORVAN:
We were not hired, we were trapped. You sign a recording contract with a big producer, and you get your little advance money. “Cool, we're gonna get some food, some clothes, take care of the trademark—the hair.” Then he said, “You have to lip-sync. If you want to get out of the contract, pay us back all the money we paid you.” And at this point, what can we do? The only way we can repay the debt is to work, to do what they asked us to do.

So we do it, and then you get addicted to the lifestyle, to being a rock star. Who doesn't want to be a rock star? But in the end, when the party's gone and you're all alone, you face the reality: “Damn, I didn't sing on the records.” And that hurts. That's one of the reasons we ended up hanging out with the night. You know, sex, drugs, and alcohol gets down in the night. The night is your best friend, because you want to escape the pressure, and once you start selling more and more records, more is demanded from you. You have to make sure you hide this very heavy secret.