I Want My MTV (82 page)

And then there was Pauly Shore, an intensely and deliberately annoying LA comic who had more interest in girls' breasts (“melons”) than in videos—and who in 1992, with
Encino Man
, became the first VJ to star in a hit movie. It's MTV's version of a rags-to-riches tale.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
Nobody at MTV wanted anything to do with Pauly Shore. We were doing a show called
The Half-Hour Comedy Hour
, and having some success with it, so we decided to do a full comedy concert. We booked five comedians we liked, doing fifteen minutes apiece, and let Pauly be the warm-up act.

 

PAULY SHORE:
They said, “We want you to host it, but your shit's not going to air.” So I went out and killed. It was my time. My shot at Spring Break was a year or two too early.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
He was the best act of the night. Everybody who worked on the show said, “We'd better take the Pauly thing seriously.” Next thing we knew, we were in business with the Weez.

 

PAULY SHORE:
I did thirty-second vignettes called
Totally MTV
, shot on film. I was doing a gig at a comedy club in West Palm Beach, Florida, sharing a condo with a comedian named Jonathan Katz, the bald guy. All of a sudden,
Totally MTV
came on, and I screamed: “Oh my god, I'm gonna get laid! I'm on TV!” The next day, Jonathan switched condos.

The buzz started at MTV: Who was this guy with his own vocabulary?
Weasel
and
buddy
and
grindage.
When I'd say, “Hey, check out my buff wood that you created,” MTV didn't know it meant, “Hey girls, look at my dick that you just got hard.” It was a subliminal language to the kids.

They offered me a three-month trial run for my own show,
Totally Pauly
, in June 1990. MTV was so East Coast: Ken Ober, Kevin Seal, Adam—what's his name, with the hair? Adam Curry. I represented freedom, wildness, California dreaming. I was twenty-one, I acted retarded, and I looked retarded. I had long hair, I was wearing tie-dye shirts, jean shorts, and scarves from my mom's closet, talking to the sluts on Sunset Blvd.

 

KAREN DUFFY, MTV VJ:
I had a post-grad degree as a recreational therapist, working with severely and profoundly disabled people. I loved my job at the Village Nursing Home on Twelfth and Hudson, working with an Alzheimer's population who had a two-second attention span. And that translated beautifully to the MTV audience.

I kept getting big commercial gigs without any experience. I was the Calvin Klein girl, I did commercials for Cover Girl, Skippy Peanut Butter, Vidal Sassoon, Revlon. I was twenty-nine and still working at the nursing home. Being a VJ looked like fun. So I made a cheeseball videotape and sent it to MTV the Thursday before Memorial Day. By Tuesday, they asked me to audition.

I was with Click Models and they told me, “Don't take this job.” My modeling agent said I'd be taking a pay cut. Everybody said it'd be the worst thing I could do for my career.

I didn't know a lot about music, and that made me work harder. I went to the Museum of Broadcasting and watched old Frank Sinatra variety shows. I noticed that Frank always dolled up, and seemed to not take himself seriously. Even at the height of grunge, I was always in stockings and high heels and a dress. I was hosting the evening shift and kind of wanted it to feel like that.

MTV was the greatest job of my life, because it was money undiluted by labor. It was pure fun. Being a VJ? A monkey could do it.

 

STEVE ISAACS:
When I got to MTV, the two big acts were Guns N' Roses and fucking Vanilla Ice. I was twenty-one, and at that point, MTV still played music. The first round of VJs had to think on their feet and know about music. Starting with round two—Adam Curry, Julie Brown—MTV didn't give a crap about that. It was just
Get some kids, put them on the air, see how it works out.
I was a musician, doing an open-mic night in LA, and I hope they hired me because I had a bit more music knowledge. I was part of what everybody referred to as phase three: me, Karen Duffy, and later, Kennedy.

 

KENNEDY:
I got negative mail as soon as I got on the air. It was a little shocking—angry letters from girls in Macon, Georgia, threatening to hurt me if I kept flirting with Steve Isaacs. There was also a postcard from someone who accused me of being a fat liberal Jew, and I remember saying, “I'm not liberal!” Why was I voted Most Annoying VJ after only a few months? I still don't know. I think a lot of women on TV at the time were not as acerbic and outspoken.

 

TONY DiSANTO:
Steve Isaacs was the guy who turned me on to Rage Against the Machine. The first time I heard Pearl Jam was from Steve Isaacs. He was part of that new generation.

STEVE ISAACS:
I got in trouble with Michael Jackson one time. He went on Oprah, and she asked why his skin had become white. “Why are you white now, Michael Jackson?” He said he had vitiligo, and that was why he was getting brighter. I mentioned it on the air and said he was on his way to becoming fluorescent. It's not even a funny line. But let's be honest, the guy became white.

Apparently, he was watching. I got called into one of the boss's offices and they said, “Michael's pissed off, and to make up for it, we have to do a Michael Jackson weekend.”

I was shocked at how much new artists would bend over backwards to get on the channel. And then there was a tipping point where artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Guns N' Roses could tell MTV to do anything. It was strange to see artists hold that kind of power over MTV.

 

KENNEDY:
More than one artist complained about me, or refused to let me interview them. I had a pretty good head on my shoulders, so when someone said they liked me, I assumed they wanted something from me, like Duff's phone number.

 

KAREN DUFFY:
MTV really kept us on our toes. People were getting sacked left and right. I was on a six-week contract, and MTV would renew it for another six weeks. The network fed you with an eyedropper full of love. My friend Steve Isaacs was making $22,000 a year. He'd negotiated his own contract.

I was covering the Grammys at Radio City Music Hall, and afterwards there was a party at the Rainbow Room, where Howard Stern was doing a live broadcast, and he started talking about me. The next day my agents called and said, “What the hell happened? MTV just offered you a big contract.” That was a turning point. I owe it all to Howard Stern.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
Karen Duffy is beautiful and spunky, and she knows everybody. Literally, everywhere you go, she knows everybody. She's like the mayor.

 

KAREN DUFFY:
I used the privilege of MTV to go to a lot of
Saturday Night Live
shows. I was dating Chris Farley and I was
crazy
about him. One time we were going to the Museum of Natural History to watch a shark movie. I was starstruck that I was on a date with him. It's snowing like crazy, we were cutting through Central Park, and Chris kept falling. He kicked my feet from underneath me, and I did a face plant in the snow. We get up, we laugh. We get to the museum and everyone's looking at me. I'm thinking it's because I'm on a date with Chris. Then I looked in the mirror in the bathroom and all my makeup had run down my face, like Alice Cooper. I'm like, “Dude, why didn't you tell me?” And he's like, “I wanted you to look ugly so nobody else would go out with you.”

He jilted me for the most beautiful girl in the world, Laura Bagley. But every night I went out with Chris, he had women throw themselves at him. I don't know any man that could scoop the poozle like Chris Farley.

 

KENNEDY:
I was really disappointed by the way a few women at MTV responded to me. Karyn Bryant already had a reputation as being difficult, and she provided a great roadmap of what not to do. She was gone within a few months, so maybe she had reasons to be insecure. But being super-bitchy to someone who's never been on TV? That was lame, and there's no excuse for it.

 

PAULY SHORE:
I'd been on MTV for about a month, and Sam Kinison asked me to open for him in Virginia Beach. I got to the venue and there were screaming teenage girls. About a year after I started at MTV, Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney offered me a three-movie deal.

 

TONY DiSANTO:
I was Pauly's intern. When he sees me, he still says, “Get me a cappuccino, Fat Boy.” That was his term of endearment for me. I once brought a script to his hotel room at Spring Break in Daytona. I knocked and nobody answered, so I opened the door and it was like a video—Pauly sitting in bed with twenty bikini-clad, big-haired '80s girls. He said, “So, give me my script.”

We became great friends, and I ended up producing his show. Pauly was the first VJ who had nothing to do with music. He wasn't a former radio DJ or a music expert. He was a comedian and a personality. His material wasn't even all that great. It was more about his delivery and attitude. The music became secondary when he was on. When he did VJ segments, he didn't even say the name of the next video. I think Pauly was the network's first attempt at developing a youth culture–driven personality, as opposed to a music-driven one.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
Pauly Shore came out on the road with Warrant, in our tour bus. He was with Savannah, the porn star, when we played Vegas. He was smarter than a lot of people understood at the time. He had no shortage of pussy, trust me.

PAULY SHORE:
There was a lot of girls. There was Debbie Laufer, who was a
Penthouse
Pet in 1988. I was dating a
Playboy
Playmate, Cady Cantrell. There was a model named Jill Fink, who married Patrick Dempsey. And then obviously Savannah.

There were groupies, all the time. That was kind of my thing. I used to have a road manager, Nick Light—his brother is Rob Light, one of the head guys at CAA—and he made it clear to them: If they came on the bus, they had to hook up with me. If they said, “Oh, I just want to meet him,” he wouldn't let them on the bus. In the back of my bus, which I called “The Wood Den,” I had a basket of buttons that said GRINDAGE, and another basket that had condoms. I'd have sex with them with a condom, and they'd leave with a button. So it was win-win.

 

 

 

MTV HAD BECOME SICKENINGLY DECADENT, AND
Nirvana came along as a corrective to the show-business follies of Paula Abdul and Pauly Shore, an enema to the idiocy of corporate rock—that's the conventional plot synopsis of grunge. Here's how one Nirvana biographer summarized the popularity of
Nevermind
, the band's 1991 album, which (oh, the symbolism!) knocked Michael Jackson out of number one on the U.S. album chart and has sold more than 30 million copies: “People were choosing substance over image.” Juxtapositions and morality tales are convenient, but the truth is more complicated—Nirvana was as deliberate about their image as any other band of the MTV era, and far smarter about it, too.

Punk rock is usually said to be about refusal, saying
no
to mainstream culture and values. But Nirvana was not uncooperative with the mainstream. Rather than deciding to not make videos—as their contemporaries Pearl Jam quickly did, after MTV would not air the original version of “Jeremy”—Nirvana made great videos, meticulously overseen by Kurt Cobain. No matter how much they might have despised MTV, they made themselves part of it: videos,
Headbangers Ball
, the VMAs,
Unplugged
, interviews, a lengthy seven-song live set at MTV's studios in January 1992, a day off before taping
Saturday Night Live
.

Sure, Nirvana's roaring music and disorienting videos made other bands look conventional, and “Smells Like Teen Spirt” had as much effect as any video since “Thriller.” But MTV was too big and stable to be changed by any one band. A new roster of rock bands came on the air—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, and soon Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, and dozens more–but even as Nirvana's “Come as You Are” gained in heavy rotation, MTV was also playing pre-grunge holdovers, including Def Leppard, Genesis, Vince Neil, Mr. Big, Slaughter, and Richard Marx. Nirvana didn't kill video stars—they joined them.

 

AMY FINNERTY:
I met Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic at a World Party concert at the old Roseland in New York. I said to Kurt, “Aren't you in that band Nirvana?” He was like, “Wow. You know who we are?” I said, “I work at MTV.” At which point he and Krist couldn't make fun of me fast enough.

Everyone in the MTV programming department was at a listening party for the new Guns N' Roses album, and Mark Kates at Geffen slipped me an advance copy of
Nevermind.
From then on, I was determined to get this band all over MTV.

 

SAMUEL BAYER:
I'd spent every dime I had to put together a spec reel. I knew Robin Sloane at Geffen Records, and I took her to lunch—I couldn't even afford to order anything—and told her I was desperate for a job. I think she took pity on me.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
Kurt Cobain was the only artist I've ever known who had brilliant, fully realized ideas he could express in one sentence. With “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Kurt said, “My idea for the video is a pep rally gone wrong.” Kurt got some ideas for directors from watching MTV and taking notice of directors' names. He liked Matt Mahurin, and I knew Matt's assistant, Sam Bayer, and had seen his reel. He hadn't made a video yet, but he'd been doing a lot of shooting on his own. Kurt looked at Sam's reel and loved it, so I hired Sam. But there were a lot of problems between Sam and Kurt.