I Want My MTV (70 page)

 

ADAM CURRY:
I loved
Headbangers Ball
so much, and I was destroyed when Riki Rachtman took my job. He did his audition with Axl Rose. I was gone within a second.

I thought Riki was a douche bag, because I didn't think he could do the job. He wasn't a TV guy. I bumped into him years later at LAX. I was running a publicly listed company which I started. I had seven hundred employees; he was managing a porn star. I kinda felt good about that.

 

RIKI RACHTMAN:
Put it this way, if you said “Riki Rachtman,” you thought
Guns N' Roses
. If you said “Adam Curry,” you thought
Bon Jovi
. You wouldn't picture Adam waking up in a gutter, but you knew I did. You wouldn't picture Adam getting arrested, but I did. I was living the rock n' roll lifestyle without ever picking up an instrument. I opened a club called the Cathouse in September 1986, a mile or two from the Sunset Strip in LA. I hate saying it, because I'm patting myself on the back, but it was the most important rock club of that era. Everyone played there: Guns N' Roses, Faster Pussycat, Black Crowes, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. I didn't see
Headbangers Ball
, because the chances of me being home on a Saturday night were nil. On Saturday, we got hammered.

I was with Guns N' Roses when they got their record deal, all the way up to recording
Appetite for Destruction
, when all of a sudden they became the biggest rock band in the world. We'd see Adam Curry, and it didn't make sense for him to be on
Headbangers Ball
. So Axl said, “Do you want to be a VJ on MTV? I'll make a call.” I walked into my audition with Axl. Would I have gotten the VJ job without him? I doubt it. I had no TV experience—I had drinking experience, that's all I had. I started hosting in January 1990—I wore a Motorhead shirt and a studded leather jacket with a blue circle for the Germs, because I wanted to hold on to my punk roots. I still don't feel comfortable saying the word, but that show made me kind of famous.

I never had any say in what we played, and there were many videos I hated that did not belong on
Headbangers Ball
: Bon Jovi, Winger, Warrant, Slaughter, Firehouse, all the pretty, long-haired boys. I mean, we were even playing their ballads.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
Riki was a bandwagon guy. Once you weren't in vogue anymore, he was the first to say, “Oh, I hated that band.” That guy's got no backbone.

 

JANI LANE:
I had a good relationship with Riki, until grunge came along, and there was a huge backlash against hair metal. It wasn't cool for his image to be palling around with us.

 

DAVE MUSTAINE:
I had a good time as a correspondent for
Headbangers Ball
. But there was a sad sack hosting the show, this sap named Riki Rachtman. For some distorted reason, this guy liked for me to pick on him. And I didn't know him well, so I couldn't pick on him with any real fondness. I felt uncomfortable when I would do it, because I didn't dislike him. I just wasn't one of his friends, like a lot of guys who would come on the show.

Off the air, he seemed genuine. But on the air, he took on a kind of self-deprecating, slapstick approach, and I didn't dig it. Towards the end, they took pity on us and let us do the show without Riki, since he had become a caricature of himself.

RIKI RACHTMAN:
Dave had fun picking on me and putting me down, and I don't mind being the butt of a joke. But the feud wasn't real—I mean, he invited me to his wedding, we went skydiving together. Except for one time when he said onstage, “Why doesn't Riki Rachtman just kill himself and put us out of the misery?” He did apologize, and then we were good friends.

 

LARS ULRICH:
I've always liked Riki Rachtman. He was one of the kings of the LA nightclub scene, so there was a tremendous amount of respect. He was one of us. I mean, he made it easy to poke fun at him, but it was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink type of thing.

 

CURT MARVIS:
Metallica famously wasn't interested in making videos, but Q Prime, their managers, asked if we could help Lars and James edit footage for a long-form home video called
Cliff'Em All
. So they were constantly in our offices. Lars and James would buy a case of this shitty beer called Meister Bräu, for $4. And they would go through a case of beer in—I'm not kidding—an
hour
. Then they'd go across the street and buy another case. I never saw them eat.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
Metallica were anti-everything. That whole positive social mood of the '80s? Fuck that. It was embodied in their attitude toward videos: We're not going to make videos; that's for fuckin' posers.

 

LARS ULRICH:
We had a lot of contrary energy. And we were fueled by a lot of booze and spunk. We'd had conversations about videos for “Fade to Black,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Master of Puppets.” We were trying to keep the band mysterious, and we felt there was an underlying purity to the whole thing that would be compromised by making a video.

But we were on tour in Paris, in a dressing room with our managers Cliff and Peter, and they started talking about the song “One,” and about the movie
Johnny Got His Gun
, based on a book by Dalton Trumbo. And we thought
that
might be an idea worth embracing in a video. We'd use the movie footage, and then intercut band performance—but without really showing our faces. If you watch that video, there are a lot of shoulders and arms. We were proud to have struck the right balance between our own feelings about video and the commercial demands. We didn't think of it as a particularly accessible video.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
I'd been a Metallica fan since
Ride the Lightning
, I thought they were fucking awesome. I kept begging Robin Sloane to let me do a video for them. The opportunity came with “One,” but I couldn't figure out how to combine the footage from
Johnny Got His Gun
with performance footage. I choked.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
At the “One” video, James Hetfield had a sticker on his guitar that read, F-U-K BON JOVI. I said, “You have to cover that up, or MTV will not play this.” He looked at me, like, “Who the fuck are you? Give me some beer.” He refused to cover it. So I told the director, Bill Pope, to shoot in a way that no one can see the sticker.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
We gave MTV a seven-minute video. It was totally outside what they would normally play, so we asked for just one play, at night, but promoted. Like, “Metallica's never made a video before, it's seven minutes long, and we're going to show it at a certain time.” We had only $25,000 invested in it. They played it once, at night, and the next afternoon, it was their second-most-requested video.

 

JULIANA ROBERTS, producer:
Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein are geniuses. They still fly coach. Cliff's suitcase is a plastic bag. And he's the smartest person I know.

 

LARS ULRICH:
The rise of “One” was amazing. We were in San Antonio in February of '89. It was a Monday and we had a day off. Monday was the day that MTV's countdown show—was it called
Dial MTV
?—would air that week's newly eligible videos. “One” had been played once or twice over the past weekend. And that day, “One” entered
Dial MTV
at number one. We were stunned. We knocked off Bon Jovi. It was like we landed on another planet.

I'll say it hand on heart: We became MTV whores.

 

STEVE SCHNUR:
When Metallica made their video for “One,” they had really never been on more than seven or eight radio stations across America, but they filled arenas. This was when MTV used to do the Top 10 countdown in the afternoon. I remember calling Abbey Konowitch and saying, “I'm going to deliver you Metallica's first video. And I'm telling you right now, as cocky as this might sound, it will be your number one most requested video before you even play it.” And Abbey was like, “What are you talking about?” To make it even more difficult, the video barely even had Metallica in it. He wouldn't add it at first, even though, as I predicted, it was MTV's most requested video. Metallica was too scary. MTV looked weak, just playing it in the overnight, at 2 A.M. And inevitably “One” became the number one video in the countdown.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
After seeing what the “One” video did for them, Metallica were just as interested in making videos as everybody else was.

 

LARS ULRICH:
When we started working with Bob Rock on
The Black Album
, and making records that sounded bigger, we wanted to widen our horizons and move on to more established directors. And Wayne Isham was by far the number one guy in rock videos. Some of these video directors are failed film guys, and they can be pretty full of themselves, pretty aloof, pretty contrived. Pretty full of shit, generally. But Wayne had this childlike excitement that just makes you want to go at it together.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
For “Enter Sandman,” we all sat around a hotel room talking about our worst nightmares. Cliff Burnstein had the nightmare of being naked in front of a roomful of people. Mine is always about falling. And the video just went from there.

 

LARS ULRICH:
Running on the edge of a building, I think that was my nightmare. I'm not comfortable with heights.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
I was on the set of that video. Videos serve a purpose. They're actually sales pieces for the band. You cover that up with as much art as you can, but still, it has to be serviceable. “Enter Sandman” was a new sound for Metallica—a shorter song, very catchy—and it's basically about nightmares, so it's not as intricate as some of James Hetfield's other lyrics. Wayne delivered a straight-ahead video, with people falling and trucks coming at you. It works.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
There were two stunt kids on the set. Troy Robinson was the kid who was in bed and then starts running to get out of the way of a truck. He was just incredible. His dad was Dar Robinson, one of the most famous stuntmen in history, who'd been killed on a set a few years earlier. When Troy's running out in front of the speeding truck, and he leaps out of the way just in time? His father's stunt friends were right there running with him.

 

LARS ULRICH:
Peter Mensch came up with the idea of documenting the making of
The Black Album
. We ended up making this film called
A Year-and-a-Half in the Life of Metallica
.

ADAM DUBIN:
I was told I had to convince them to do it. I felt like a lamb to slaughter. These guys were tough. They were the anti-MTV band. James Hetfield plopped down in a chair—he's tall, he's big, he's Viking Lord Hetfield—and it's almost like the way Lincoln's sitting in the Lincoln Memorial. I start to explain how important it is that they document what they're about to do. James just laughs, like a fuck-you laugh. He's glowering at me. I realized I was getting shoved out the door, so I said, “Look, let me get a camera and shoot. I'll show you the footage. If you don't like it, I'll go home.”

I started filming in November of 1990. The record was supposed to be done in February. With Metallica, nothing is by schedule and everything costs twice as much. So I wound up living in recording studios with those guys for ten months.

 

LARS ULRICH:
We were pretty obnoxious back then. A guy named Lonn Friend, who ran the metal magazine
RIP
, was chronicling the making of
The Black Album
for his zine, so he was hanging around us a lot.
RIP
was owned by Larry Flynt, and every time Lonn would come down to the studio he'd bring us tons of
RIP
s, tons of
Hustler
s, tons of
Barely Legal
s and
Over 45
s, and different fetish and gay magazines. We were a bunch of twenty-four-year-olds. So we'd rip out pictures and pin them to the walls of the studio. Some dude with a fourteen-inch cock would go up, and then some naked forty-five-year-old woman. And on an impulse, a picture of Kip Winger ended up on the studio dartboard. Adam Dubin was there shooting, and it ended up in the
Year-and-a-Half in the Life of Metallica
documentary and in the “Nothing Else Matters” video.

 

KIP WINGER:
My guitarist was like, “Hey, have you seen the new Metallica video? They're throwing darts at your poster.” And I thought,
Wow, that really sucks
.

 

LARS ULRICH:
I've heard over the years from a number of people that Kip Winger didn't think that was particularly funny. I didn't have an issue with him personally—but he represented the opposite of what we were. And we were very much an “us vs. them” band. To me, they represented image before music, looks before credibility. It certainly wasn't personal. It was never
Kip Winger's a fucking cunt
. It was more
Look at this guy's hair
.

 

 

 

SOON AFTER
YO!
DEBUTED, TV WENT BLACK: START
ing in early '89, comedian Arsenio Hall's talk show darkened the complexion of late night and regularly gave a spotlight to rappers;
In Living Color
introduced the idea of a black
Saturday Night Live
(complete with a token white cast member) and brought hip-hop dance and graphics to prime time; and Will Smith, whose charming disposition had helped ease rap onto MTV, became a bigger star via
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. Rap hadn't just entered the mainstream—it had taken over.