I Want My MTV (64 page)

 

KEVIN SEAL:
They set up huge klieg lights around the pool, so it looked like it was sunny, and kids pranced around in their bathing suits every time a floor manager cued them. We'd cut away to some video and they'd stand there, shivering. It was a bacchanal. The Daytona Police converted a Safeway parking lot into a temporary jail, with chain-link fences. Scores of kids in zip cuffs stood around, shouting at their friends. There were reports in the paper about kids who plunged off a hotel balcony and hit the deck. I dreaded it.

There was the sense of young lives being wasted, which was sort of a pall that hung over my time at MTV, generally. Not only with the audience, but perhaps in my own life as well.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
Mister Mister played Spring Break, and their record company sent them a package via FedEx, which was mistakenly delivered to the room of an MTV executive, who saw it on his bed and ripped it open, thinking it was for him. He found . . . well, something meant to keep the band awake and happy for several days.

 

VANILLA ICE, artist:
My Spring Break show must have been the most-skipped school day in history. Some principal actually showed up at the concert and busted a bunch of kids.

 

TREACH:
I met my ex-wife, Pepa, at Spring Break. I was a Salt-n-Pepa fan; I had pictures of them on my wall. I loved Pepa before she even knew me. I saw her at the airport, and she had a gang of bags and I helped her carry them. I was the biggest star out of everybody, so she was looking at me like, “Oh, the biggest star out here is concerned about me.” We ended up going bungee jumping in a park in Miami. She dared me. I couldn't back out.

 

PEPA, Salt-n-Pepa:
I had my son with me, and after our show, I was gonna leave. Treach was like, “Stay and watch my show tomorrow.” I was like, “Stay? Just like that? Okay.” And then he leaned in and gave me a little peck.

TREACH:
We stayed in the same hotel, but nothing popped off down there. I wanted to, but she was like,
Nah.
She wasn't fast with it. We had one kiss, when I was taking her to her room. A couple of weeks after Spring Break, Pepa and I got together. We were together for ten years. MTV was a matchmaker, for sure.

 

GERARDO, artist:
I had a foot fetish, so my road manager, Nick Light, would stand the girls against a wall and see who had cute feet, or who had them polished all nice, and the girls that had those and other qualifications came to my room. Nick was a great road manager, because he would start the party somewhere else, and he'd get rid of anybody under eighteen. By the end of the night, he always knew the right girl for me, and only then would he bring her to my room. My wife knows all about this. This isn't going to be getting me in trouble. And she has very beautiful feet.

 

ALLEN NEWMAN:
We'd had a lot of success with Spring Break, so we did a live Mardi Gras broadcast. And I was given very specific instructions from Doug Herzog: Avoid showing any breasts. Because the big expression at Mardi Gras was “Show us your tits.”

We were shooting a segment at the corner of Bourbon and Royal in New Orleans, and I've got my eyes peeled to make sure there are no naked women in the background. The phone rings, and it's Herzog, yelling at me: “What are you doing? How could you let this happen?” I look at the feed—there are no tits. Except there was some guy standing behind Mark Goodman and Alan Hunter, holding an eight-foot black dildo.

 

PAULY SHORE:
I was sitting at my mom's house in 1988, watching Spring Break and going, “I've got to be there, because I want to get laid.” I was like any other kid thinking the same thing, just wanting vagina.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
Pauly flew himself down to Spring Break, and hung around, and annoyed everybody. We didn't know who he was.

 

LENNY KRAVITZ:
I showed up to Spring Break in a loincloth. I'd grown a beard and was living in the Bahamas like a fucking jungle man. I just did not care at all. I got on a private plane and came in a loincloth, man. I sat there and got interviewed and people were like, “What is wrong with this guy?” Pauly Shore was there. Every time I see him, he talks about that loincloth.

PAULY SHORE:
I was desperate to be on MTV. Next Spring Break, MTV gave me an opportunity, and I did a couple little tosses to a video, but people didn't know who I was. Me and Christian Slater sat in his hotel room, going, “This sucks,” because we weren't famous and Corey Feldman was getting all the girls. But that didn't last long.

 

 

 

MTV'S SHOWS ALL HAD CONNECTIONS TO MUSIC,
even if it was only
Remote Control
's questions about song lyrics and appearances by “Weird Al” and LL Cool J. In 1988, the network began a slow breakup with music by debuting
The Big Picture
, a show about movies; the
Half Hour Comedy Hour
, which introduced the wicked wit of future VMA host Chris Rock; and
Way USA
, an annoying travelogue show which—well, it's enough to know that it ended after two episodes, twice what it deserved.

These changes upset and confused some employees, so in October 1988, Lee Masters, MTV's general manager, wrote an internal memo to explain the “aggressive and risky moves” of MTV's “new programming strategy.” Videos, he explained, “aren't the novelty they once were” and were available on other networks. Soon, MTV would have a nightly talk show, and a daily soap opera “with an MTV spin.” (Neither program evolved as quickly as Masters predicted.) And he answered the question MTV staffers were asking one another: “Is MTV moving away from music? Absolutely not.” MTV would have non-music shows, he wrote, “but music must always be the base” of the network.

And Top 40 songs were increasingly the base of MTV's music, thanks to new VP of programming Abbey Konowitch. A few years earlier, when he worked at Arista Records, Konowitch was “really bothered about sitting with my eleven-year-old son and seeing a girl in a garter belt” on MTV, he'd told a
Christian Science Monitor
reporter. Once he joined MTV, garter belts were in heavy rotation, driving up ratings and profits. More than any MTV executive since Les Garland, Konowitch had a big ego and a bawdy reputation. And he didn't hide his music philosophy: “I like hit songs,” he declared. “We want to get behind those that will be
big stars
.”

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
When John Sykes left to work with Mike Ovitz at CAA in 1986, I thought,
That's going to be my next job
. But no one from MTV approached me. They hired Sam Kaiser, who was friends with someone there. I was a little bummed about that. Now, I had a great job at Arista Records. I was senior VP of artist development and video, which was essentially the head of marketing. I was part of the inner circle of a very successful company. But Sam Kaiser didn't last long, he was there for about thirty minutes, and suddenly that job was available again. And still, they didn't call me! I couldn't believe it!

So I talked to a friend who knew people at MTV, and asked him why no one had called me. He came back to me and said, “No one's called you because they don't want to piss off Clive Davis, and they don't think you would take the job.” I said, “Tell them I'd take it.” They called the next day, and soon thereafter Lee Masters offered me the job.

When I got to MTV in July of 1988, ratings were down. MTV's first half-life was over. They were looking for a way to regain their mojo, and they'd started to develop long-form programming. MTV was morphing. By 1988, any thirty-minute program got a better rating than the highest-rated half hour of videos. Even in 1988, videos were already old news. I brought snowballs to the desert. I had a fresh view in a place that had become stale, because no one knew what the fuck to do.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
Abbey's first day, he had the music way too loud. I'm like, “Who the fuck is this guy?” And he started calling me Axl, because Guns N' Roses was happening and my name is Alex. I thought, “Oh, I'm gonna hate this dude.” To this day he still calls me Axl.

 

MC HAMMER:
Anything MTV needed me to do, I would do it. I never told Abbey
no.
If I was in the middle of a tour and MTV was doing Spring Break, but Abbey said, “Hammer, baby, this is important to us,” I'd say, “Okay, I'll do this, but when my next video comes out, I'm gonna need you to turn it up.” It was a partnership.

 

TOMMY LEE:
Mötley Crüe was always trying to push the boundaries of what MTV would play. “Okay, we'll pan up the girl's chest and show her boob, but cut away
right
before the nipple. How's that?” Then Abbey Konowitch would call and say it didn't pass standards and practices. It's hard to imagine Abbey as an enforcer of moral values, but it's true.

 

ADAM CURRY:
There was continuous wheeling and dealing, collusion between MTV programming and the record industry. It was very clear: If you give us a certain video premiere, we'll throw this other piece-of-shit band you have into the Buzz Bin. Buzz Bin was a big joke. It was so obvious that Konowitch was a shill. He was very open about it: “Shut up, we're playing this video.” He was doing all the deals.

 

STEVE BACKER:
When Living Colour came around, it was a head-scratcher. “Cult of Personality” seems like an obvious hit now, but let's face it, four black guys doing rock n' roll wasn't your everyday thing. The reaction from MTV wasn't so much resistance as confusion: “What do we do with it?”

 

VERNON REID:
When I saw the playback of “Cult of Personality,” I was like,
America isn't ready for this
. There's footage of SS troops, shots of Mussolini. It's very confrontational.

 

STEVE BACKER:
The fact is, I got Living Colour on MTV by threatening to withhold a new Michael Jackson video. I called Frank DiLeo, who'd worked at Epic and was managing Michael. The “Smooth Criminal” video was about to come out, and we had to decide who'd get the world premiere. I told Frank, “I'm having trouble getting Living Colour on MTV. Can I tell them they're not going to get Michael unless they deal with Living Colour?” Frank was our former head of promotion. He understood. He said, “Do what you gotta do. I'll back you up.”

So I went to see Abbey, whom I didn't know well. I was ridiculously nervous. I had Living Colour in one hand and Michael Jackson in the other. Abbey said, “Backer, this is not how we do business.” And I said, “It's exactly how you do business.” They put “Cult of Personality” into rotation.

 

COREY GLOVER, Living Colour:
We owe most of our career to Michael Jackson.

 

GEOFF TATE, Queensrÿche:
We put out an album called
Operation: Mindcrime
, and it sold exactly what all our other records had sold, about 250,000. We'd been on tour for nine months, and then we began the process of making a new record. A month later, our managers called and said, “This guy at MTV, Abbey Konowitch, really likes the band. He's interested in playing a video from you.” We made a nice video with Marc Reshovsky for “Eyes of a Stranger,” and it went to MTV. Within a couple of weeks our sales were up to 500,000.

 

JANET KLEINBAUM:
MTV wielded a lot of power, and Abbey enjoyed that position very much. He had a reputation as a crazy man. There was partying, long dinners, lots of drinking, girls, foul language—that was the norm. I didn't have to participate; I think I had to play along, I had to not be offended and have a good sense of humor and show them I could keep up. Any promotion for a metal band would involve scantily clad women and lots of alcohol. And that sometimes breeds egotistical behavior.

The men had a very different style of promoting than the women did, and they had advantages over us. The guys would go off golfing for a weekend. Those things didn't happen often with the women. Who were we gonna take out? There weren't any women in powerful positions at MTV. The women who worked there were managers, directors, and assistants.

 

PATTI GALLUZZI:
Abbey would say sleazy, inappropriate things all the time. He'd be about to leave my office after a meeting and say, “Just show me your tits one time. Come on, just once.” And I'd be like, “Oh, get out of here.” It wasn't the culture of MTV to talk like that, but it was the culture of the music business, and I was used to it. I'd had [Geffen Records executive] Marko Babineau pinch my ass at a convention when he didn't know me from Adam.

I have two points to make about Abbey's behavior. The first is, he never made me feel uncomfortable. He would also say similar things to Tom Hunter. We'd be in a boring meeting, and he would mouth to Tom, “Blow me.” And Hunter and I would both crack up.

On the other hand, this was before Anita Hill. Honestly, the Anita Hill hearing made a lot of us go, “I've had that happen to me millions of times.” So my second point is, in retrospect, because I was complicit with his behavior, I might have been enabling him to also say those things to assistants and secretaries. I feel bad thinking that maybe he was saying these things to people who weren't in a position to say, “Oh, Abbey, fuck off.”

 

LINDA CORRADINA, MTV executive:
Boys are stupid, what can I say? A lot of the guys were known for hitting on girls, especially younger girls. There were men—married men—who didn't have boundaries, absolutely. But girls can make their own reality. You put up with it, or you don't. If you're intimidated by it, you should report it. I can't say it ever bothered me.