MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  -- The Cars --

  MARTHA DAVIS: The Cars were a blast. A very distinctive and classic sound of the '80s, for sure. Also, really interesting videos. And they had a good sense of humor, which I think is a really great thing about how they came off in the videos.

  GREG HAWKES: We asked [Gerald Casale to direct two videos from Panorama], because we loved the Devo videos. He was easy to work with. He's a funny guy. He had a partner, Chuck Statler, who co-directed the films with him, who was more "the camera guy." For "Touch and Go," we went out to this amusement park in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. It's called Whalom Park, which is no longer there, sadly. I remember that was a hot day. Elliot had to do his guitar solo while riding on this teacup saucer ride, so he was spinning around, and it was hot. He got somewhat nauseous from the experience. And "Panorama" was fun. We shot it in Boston. The idea was to make it like a little spy/James Bond/spoof kind of thing. It was sort of a little series of almost chase scenes. We got to go up in the helicopter for that one, for the shot of Ric at the end, when he's pushed out of a helicopter.

  GERALD CASALE: [Devo's manager] Elliot Roberts had acquired the Cars, and they were a band that was kind of "anti-video." They were a band where Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr were incredible songwriters, and then they hooked up with Roy Thomas Baker, and they knew how to make a hit record sound. But they weren’t performers. I mean, if you watched the Cars, it was the old "watching paint dry" — they just stood there and played, and it was incredibly boring. And they were really leery of this "video thing" that started happening. But Elliot said, "Hey, Jerry and Devo have done all these videos - they know all about it. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money, use him!" And so we got off tour in Europe, and I stopped in Boston, and we spent a week in Boston doing "Touch and Go" and "Panorama." And of course, those were two of the least commercial Cars songs ever written! So it was very difficult on this tiny budget to even come up with something to do for those songs, that people would watch.

  GREG HAWKES: The "Shake It Up" video we did in Los Angeles. It was directed by Seth Justman's brother, Paul Justman. I'm not a big fan of the "Shake It Up" video, to tell you the truth. The thing I mainly remember was doing the indoor shots, where it was a pseudo-garage, just because I remember with all the smoke how uncomfortable it was and how everybody was coughing and gagging afterwards. Paul did ["Since You're Gone"] as well. I remember doing it in Los Angeles, and it was probably within a month or two of doing the "Shake It Up" video. I remember there are little animated shoes in that one. That to me was the high-point of the video. [Laughs]

  DEBORA IYALL: We were starstruck with the Cars a little bit, because they definitely had some real success, financially, so they all had leather jackets and stuff like that. I don't think I saw it in any objective way at all. I was just a fan of Ric's artist side and artistic intentions. And to that end, one of the reasons why we wanted to work with him [Ocasek produced Romeo Void's Never Say Never EP] was because he had worked with Suicide. So we knew he isn't just "The guy from the Cars." He's a music fan, too.

  GREG HAWKES: ["You Might Think"] is my favorite. I think it's the best one we did. I remember meeting with Jeff Stein, the director, who showed us a demo reel of the Charlex guys. Charlex was this company in New York, which was run by two guys, Charlie and Alex, thus the name, "Charlex." So Jeff's idea was to do a somewhat animated video, in the style that these guys at Charlex sort of developed. They used this thing, I guess it was the "video paintbox." It gave it that cartoon-y look, and we shot everything on video. We went down to the Charlex Studio in New York and pretty much shot everything in front of the blue screen. Then they would put in all the backgrounds. And since it was shot on video, as soon as we would finish shooting a scene, they would have a crew that would start putting in the background and things. So we could see it being put together while we were there, shooting other scenes. I liked working with those guys a lot. Now, the only bad thing is it seems like the Charlex guys and Jeff Stein had a falling out after that and never worked together again. I think it was somewhat over who deserved the most credit over that video. At least from my viewpoint, Jeff was the guy who had the idea of doing it and bringing Charlex in and was sort of the "big idea guy." But then Alex Weil was really the hands-on director and came up with a lot of the ideas for the various individual scenes. And we did end up working with Jeff Stein again on his own. He did the video for "Tonight She Comes," which I also liked. Andy Warhol was, you'd probably call him the "executive director" [for "Hello Again"], where the actual director was this guy named Don Monroe, who worked for Andy Warhol. At the time, they had a New York show, called Andy Warhol's TV. It might have been a public access show. I think it at least started out as a New York public access show, and this guy, Don Monroe, was one of the directors for that show. So he was really the de facto director on the "Hello Again" video. That was fun. We shot that in New York. We did it at some club in Greenwich Village. Andy Warhol seemed like a somewhat shy, quiet guy. Seemed very pleasant. There was that guy, John Sex, with the snake, that does stick out a little bit. [Laughs] And the girls with the Jell-O or something. The "Magic" video, again, I wasn't crazy about it. It's the one where Ric is walking on water, and there's a lot of odd characters hanging around the pool. We shot it in Los Angeles in an afternoon. To me, it's just fluff. Timothy Hutton directed ["Drive"]. In fact, that's where Ric met Paulina [Porizkova] and started, y'know, that. [Laughs] [Hutton] brought a sense of seriousness about it. I remember I was in the background, shooting pool or something in a scene, and he would talk to us each about, "OK, move your arm, and do the shot like this. You've got to be thinking this." It was pretty serious. I thought it was shot really well. The camera work was beautifully done. He had a good cameraman, and he worked with the cameraman a lot. He knew the technical stuff, as well as the acting stuff. [Ric hitting it off with Paulina] was the start of a certain amount of turmoil. [Laughs] I mean, with Ric personally, first of all, he was married at the time, so there was that "complication." That's just where they met, and it developed from there. I remember shooting ["Tonight She Comes"] in a big airplane hangar or something in Los Angeles. It wasn't as innovative as the "You Might Think" one, but I liked the look of it.

  MIKE RENO: What I remember the most about the Cars was their sound. They had come up with a mixture of rock and synthesized music that was very interesting for me. They had sounds that I had never heard before, so they must have really dug in and created new sounds. They were definitely innovators, of synthesized sounds and cool rock grooves. The drums sounded amazing. And they looked cool. They had one guy that was kind of the geeky guy, and one guy who was really handsome, and one guy that was really scary. The whole thing was very interesting to me. But I loved their songs. Their songwriting is what really got me, and the sound of the songs. It really had nothing to do with video for me. Watching a video wasn't as special for me as it was for a lot of people. I liked the sounds and the songs. The Cars were right on target.

  Def Leppard (and Mutt Lange)

  MIKE RENO: As far as I'm concerned, Def Leppard had one of the best sounds going. I know now they used the same producer [on their biggest albums, High n' Dry, Pyromania, and Hysteria]. But back then, I didn't put two and two together. I just thought, "How could they do that?" They had this great sounding set of drums, huge vocals, and great songs that just seemed to be masterpieces. And they were running around with flag shirts and flag shorts. They were very British. Really cool looking guitars. It was a magic time. Those guys were awesome. And the greatest thing about it is today they're my friends. But Def Leppard just made me open my eyes. I couldn't believe a band could sound that good. They had these harmonies, and they reminded me of the sea, a wall of harmonies. I said, "I've got to start trying to do that." And I realized it's hard to reproduce that stuff live. So we didn't use it much, because I didn't want to have people say, "They sure sound good on record...but they suck live." So I always cut stuff in the studio that I knew I could recreate. But I di
dn't know how Def Leppard were going to do that, and then I realized that all five of them were singing all these harmonies. They had some great songs, too, some classic songs. I'd have to put them up in the top five for classic songs, along with Foreigner and the Cars. Foreigner was hugely great, too. Lou Gramm — his voice was so great. And the guitar riffs by Mick Jones and the production. And it turns out that the same producer that produced the Cars and Def Leppard also produced Foreigner. So we ended up trying to get close to this guy. We wanted to work with Mutt Lange. So we ended up having a short but sweet experience with Mutt Lange [Lange wrote Loverboy's 1985 hit single, "Lovin' Every Minute of It"].

  RUDY SARZO: The way I look at Def Leppard comes from the point that I knew them personally. Def Leppard was the opening act for Ozzy in 1981. And at the time, they had a guitar player named Pete Willis, who was having an alcohol problem. The sound of the band...they had great songs. They were a great band, very young, very energetic. They really kicked us in the ass every night. It was a great bill, great people. But a little bit rough. They weren't as polished as they should have been. It wasn't until Phil Collen came into the group that he brought in that very balanced sense of presence, not only musically, but also as an individual. I mean, I'm not saying he was a saint. We all hung out and had a good time, but he was very professional, and he raised the bar of the group overall. And by the time that Pyromania came out, it was a whole different band. It's amazing how one individual can make such a contribution, that just becomes the paradigm shift in what the group is known for. By then, that album, great songs. Those are all gems, every single song. And the videos really sold the band, which to me, that is the ultimate outcome of making a music video — to promote what the group is really all about. Those videos were perfect. They sold the band.

  PHIL COLLEN: The thing we always wanted to do in Def Leppard is just be a hybrid of a lot of other things. In England, you don't really do the "cover band thing." When you start up, you start writing songs before you can even play an instrument, in most cases. So America's the complete opposite. We were creating our own thing, and I think it was going to combine a lot of different rock bands — Thin Lizzy, T. Rex and the glam thing, along with the punk stuff, and Zeppelin. It was a total combination. We tried to do it with the music, and when we met Mutt Lange, he's great at creating "the hybrid." Obviously, what he did with Shania Twain — bringing country to a much larger audience. It crossed over into pop, and Taylor Swift is the next example of that. There's very little country. It's more pop than it is country, but it obviously has its roots in it. And that's what we were, a rock band, but we didn't want to be like a lot of the American bands. Which we thought were great — Journey, Foreigner, and stuff like that. We still wanted to have that hard-edged thing that AC/DC had, but we still wanted to have the harmonies, a bit like Queen. So again, it's just an absolute hybrid. Nobody had really done what we'd done until the Pyromania album came out. It was still kind of hard-edged. It had harmonies, but they weren't sung sweetly like, say, some of the American bands.

  HERMAN RAREBELL: They make very commercial, pop-oriented, heavy, melodic rock. And with that formula, you can't fail on American radio. Very commercial, simple melodies, which go directly in your brain. Very catchy lyrics.

  ALAN HUNTER: Def Leppard was easy for me to embrace. They weren't just heavy rock n' roll. I didn't love the heavier stuff. I mean, look, I got into Mötley Crüe...but they were so lightweight, it just didn't get me going. It was fun to see a band like that, that had been kicking around for a while, that finally, across the ocean, found great success on MTV. And it was really only because of MTV. No one would have heard about them on radio. I don't think they were being played on radio at all at the time. So that was the other "weirdo phenomenon," that MTV was the first portal for so many bands, and they didn't even bother with radio. I thought Def Leppard was a classy heavier band. It was easy for me to talk about them, because I valued good production and good musicianship. Thank God I wasn't hawking music in the '90s, y'know? Nirvana and REM...I'm not a "grunge rocker" at all.

  JOE ELLIOTT: By the time we were wrapping up the recording of Pyromania, we'd gone in and shot ["Photograph"] for the lead-off single. This time, we were lucky to work with a director, as opposed to somebody who just filmed us and edited it together. We'd turned up at this soundstage someplace in Battersea, in London, and there was David Mallet. Now, I didn't know who David Mallet was really, but I knew that he worked with Queen. That was good enough for me. We walked into this pre-built stage. We had nothing to do with it. We can take absolutely no credit for it. But Mallet had put this thing together — mesh flooring with lights coming up through it and these cages with all these girls in it with torn stockings and ripped tops and stuff. [Laughs] Hilarious now, but back in the time, it was like, "Wow...this is cool!" I remember Steve Clark was sick as a dog the day that we shot the "Photograph" video, and I think it was Sav's birthday, the second of December, 1982. We were still mixing the album at the time, so we probably actually lip-synched it to a rough mix. The album wasn't done, but we knew that this was the first single that we wanted to put out. So we shot the video, and we also planned to shoot one for "Rock of Ages," so it was "in the bag" while we were all together in one place. That was going to be the second single, and we did that on Phil's birthday, which is the eighth of December. And it was David Mallet again, but a different soundstage. By the time we got to doing that one, we felt like we were troopers, and we knew what we were doing. For ["Photograph"], we just went in there blind, and if David said do something, we'd do it. I remember there's one bit where the "Marilyn character" stabs her heel through a Polaroid of me screaming. The first thing I had to do when I walked in at 8:00 in the morning — before I even had a chance to have a cup of coffee — David comes in, and he calls everybody "dear boy" or "darling." "Dear boy, I need you to scream into my Polaroid." So I did this kind of scream thing, and he's like, "OK, done." You got pulled along. You got directed, because we didn't know what we were doing. He just said, "Be yourselves. Leave it all to me." And we just went out there and threw all the shapes, because you don't have to sing, so you can concentrate on the visual rather than the performance.

  PHIL COLLEN: Do you know the Pink Floyd sleeve, Animals? It's the Battersea Power Station. That's actually where we'd done the videos, in there somewhere. David Mallet, who directed those two videos...I guess ["Photograph"] wasn't really about Marilyn Monroe. It kind of hinted at it. He took the whole thing, and then all of a sudden, the whole video was about Marilyn Monroe! A lot of them back then, it was someone else's vision of what the song was about, which was cool. It turned out great, actually. And they really had a look to them, those videos.

  WARREN DeMARTINI: Oh man, "Photograph" was right there when we got MTV in the first place. At that time, I was finishing high school. It was my senior year in San Diego. I think San Diego was one of the last cities to get MTV, so on that day when you get that new cable box...and back then, it was on a cord with this box that had all these keys on it. And towards the end of the box, it was "MTV," and it had its own little icon. It was killer! "Photograph" was just starting to get into some real rotation. I thought it was great — great recording, great production, great song. I felt it was a very well-done conceptual/performance video.

  JOE ELLIOTT: It was the ridiculousness of it, which is exactly what the video ["Rock of Ages"] needed to be. [Mallet] was like, "I want you to walk down this drawbridge holding this sword." It's like, "Oh, fuck off. Don't make me do that!" Of course, like an idiot, I submitted to his blinked eyes, looking at me like some long-lost dog. David Mallet's got a great way of manipulating people like that. I was young and dumb and went, "OK." I look at that now, and I think, "What the hell was I thinking?" But the things that make me laugh is the beginning bit, where there are these people — most of our road crew — laying in this dry ice, with these ridiculous gloves on with nails coming out of the back of them, clapping along to the song. It's hilarious! And t
here's a couple of shots where Phil was clapping along on the verse — because there's no guitars — and he's standing directly behind me, so I look like I've got these "clapping antlers" coming out of my head. Watch the video carefully. I'm wearing a bandana and a yellow shirt, with the immortal Neil Young phrase, "It's better to burn out than fade away," which we stole for the song. And the bandana, for one version of it, it's got the "V" at the front, and it started to spin slowly around, so the knot was at the front. By the time he'd edited it together, the bandana just keeps going front, back, front, back. I didn't notice for five years, probably pointed out by somebody else going, "Look at your bandana!"

  PHIL COLLEN: Pretty funny when you look back. The "robe thing" took about 30 seconds to film. You kind of forget about that. It's the stuff that you have to do a take over and over again. I remember Joe and that slab, where the sword turns into my guitar. I used to play this Ibanez Destroyer. It made that guitar really popular. I had everyone trying to copy it and wanting to play it — again, the power of the video. I think there was a seven-inch single, and it was the shape of the guitar as well, which was pretty cool. It just showed you how powerful images were and how it was getting portrayed in the video.