MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  JOE ELLIOTT: We shot for three days for the "Foolin'" video, and the whole third day never got used. I remember thinking at the time how annoying it was. They kept me back. They let everyone else go, for a day off at the beach. I had my day off at the beach...riding a fucking horse! I'd never been on a horse in my life. Saddle sore, my ass was hurting, and they didn't use one bit of it...probably because I looked like a complete dork. If you want to look graceful on a horse, it helps if you've been riding for ten years. So they put me on this horse on sand, had me riding around on a beach in New Jersey I think it was, and it never got used. There's a shot somewhere during the beginning of the guitar solo, I believe, where I'm running sideways down this corridor, and pyro is going off. It singed all the hair off my arm! I came out of that video shoot literally, physically, and mentally scarred. The smell of burning hair just doesn't go away, no matter how much you shower off. I had no hair. It was all gone, because I was wearing a sleeveless shirt. I'm surprised my arms didn't actually go up. The opening shot of me laying on my back distorts your face, so there's not much about the "Foolin'" video that I thought was too clever. There's one shot where we [jumped] into a hole, and they ran it backwards, which makes you look completely ridiculous. Again, the nice touches for the director to go, "Oh well, I got this machine. It's 'the wicky-wacky-backwards-machine!' Press this button, and it will go backwards." Great...but it didn't really put us in a great light. I think out of the three videos that we did with David, it's by far the worst.

  CARMINE APPICE: I remember seeing Def Leppard at the Whiskey, when they were young. And then when they started being played all over MTV...it was like, enough already! [Laughs] They had a tendency to just play it over and over, until you were done.

  PAUL DEAN: I have nothing but the highest regard for those guys as people and as musicians. We've toured with them, we hung with them, we've done a lot of shows together. To be honest, I don't remember any of their videos. I just remember their albums being incredible. I don't know if their videos were anything special, but it didn't matter, because their songs were great. I still go to Hysteria. I love that album. I don't listen to a whole lot of '80s music, but I still go there and Pyromania.

  JOE ELLIOTT: My first-ever tantrum! [On the set of the second version of the "Bringin' on the Heartbreak" video] We were shooting it at the Jacob's Biscuit Factory in Dublin. It was February, and it was six below freezing. It was the coldest I can remember in a long time. We were shooting through the night, so it got down to about ten below when 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. kicked in. We were on this lake, and it was windy, and the wind and torn shirts...Steve and Phil had to climb these ladders up these gas tankers to play their guitar bits. They weren't wearing those clothes for fashion. Steve was wearing this big, old fur coat because he was freezing his head off. I'm surprised he wasn't glued to the outer wall of the tank. And then there's these ridiculous shots of Sav and Rick wearing these monks robes and hockey masks, rowing the boat while I'm "crucified" to this cross! David had this thing about tying young boys up at the time. I was tied to a pyramid in "Foolin.'" I was just wearing this torn t-shirt, and I had to keep going off. We had a car parked on the side of the lake, with the engine running and the heaters on full. And I used to dive into the backseat into this, like, oven of a car, just to thaw out. It's ridiculous, it's over-the-top, but the band was over-the-top at the time. We were a bombastic bunch, just out of our teens. So we just went along with it. I had a lot more fun doing "Me and My Wine." We directed it ourselves. Mallet shot it. We came in and said, "This is what we're going to do. There's an English comedy show called The Young Ones, where they all lived in one house. This is how it's going to be, like kind of an extension of that, the Monkees and the Beatles." We wanted to get that feel across, of like a gang. You wake up in the morning, the alarm clock goes off, you hit it with a hammer, the Virgin Mary goes off the thing. That actually got the video banned in Ireland. If you look at it carefully, there were so many in-jokes done. There's a rubber glove stuck on top of a washing-up bottle, flipping the bird. You don't really notice it until somebody points it out to you. I slapped Phil on the stairs. He didn't know I was going to do it, so his expression was genuine. And pulling the shower curtain across to reveal Phil doing his "ballet pose" was kind of pre-worked out, but on a very loose "Let's have a drink and do this" basis. I think that video cost $5,000. We all got to do things...I used to sing into a vacuum cleaner as a child, because they look like microphone stands. I had to do it in the video! It was a lot of fun that video. It really was.

  PHIL COLLEN: The biggest rock album before Pyromania came out was Asia or something like that. John Mellencamp and stuff like that, but no rock bands. Before [MTV], you had the mystique of Zeppelin and the Stones, which was cool. They managed to keep their mystique. With a lot of bands, it was like, "These guys really aren't doing it." But we did the opposite. We were young guys, and we embraced it. Just in the typical cycles that they go through anyway, so I think something would have happened. And MTV just came at one of those starting points, as a result of things getting a bit staid.

  MARK WEISS: I thought it was a slicker version of Led Zeppelin. Definitely more poppy, but that's what fit the mold. I guess you could say Bon Jovi followed that, but Bon Jovi took it to a whole new level, whereas Def Leppard are still playing old Def Leppard songs, while Bon Jovi do songs that I don't even know.

  ANN WILSON: They were probably the first of the big hair band videos, right? They kind of laid down a formula for what was going to be, for years afterward. Just the really good-looking, made-up guys with huge hair, trying to get girls. So I think they were probably influential in starting the whole hair band movement on MTV.

  FRANK STALLONE: I think they're excellent. Joe Elliott is a great singer. What I like about the group is they're still buds. They still hang out. They've been together over 30-something years. They've got a good mindset on it. I like the camaraderie.

  PHIL COLLEN: You can say the Police, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, all these really young artists had very definite images. We didn't really consider that we had an image, but I think looking back, we actually did. The Police were kind of from the British punk scene...obviously not really, because they're some of the best pop songs I've ever heard in my life, Sting being just an amazing writer and the band having this great chemistry. Their look was one thing, and then you had Prince's thing, and Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Duran Duran. And we were completely different. It wasn't a sweaty, greasy, leather metal, which again, is what we actually came from in England. There were a lot of bands, like Motörhead, and that's all they did. Now, looking back, we actually had a little niche that we found, that reflected what we were doing musically, and we were unaware of it. There was something that was a bit more clean-cut than your average Motörhead fan...but it wasn't as glossy as Duran Duran. Which was perfect, because the music wasn't that. We were a rock band that took showers.

  BRUCE KULICK: Certainly, when you look at a Def Leppard record, they were put together by Mutt Lange, who's such a brilliant producer and so meticulous and well-crafted. Well, now that sets the bar really high, and you better make your stuff very high quality, or you don't stand a chance.

  ERIC BLOOM: There's Mutt Lange's fingerprints all over what those guys do, from the background vocals to the production to songwriting to everything.

  JOE ELLIOTT: Working with Mutt...I don't know. Have you got three weeks? Where do you start? When we first started working with Mutt in 1981, it was a year later than we wanted to. We wanted him for the first album. A lot of people misinterpret our relationship with Mutt as being us going, "Oh, we want that AC/DC thing." Yeah, we did, but we were into Mutt Lange's productions a long time before everybody knew who he was. I'd bought singles by Supercharge. The Records had a single called "Teenarama" that Mutt did that was just a phenomenal song. He did City Boy, who had hit singles in Britain. He worked with XTC, and all the hit singles the Boomtown Rats had in Britain were Mutt Lange productions. "I Don'
t Like Mondays" was the first one he didn't do. There had been about ten songs that I'd bought that were all Mutt productions. He just made their records stand out a little bit more than the average record. He was like the "Chinn and Chapman" of the late '70s, if you like. So when we actually did get a chance to work with him, which was by virtue of our manager, Peter Mensch, looking after AC/DC. He bribed Mutt to watch the opening act, which was us. And he said, "Yeah...not perfect, but I can work with this." And that was how we wound up getting him.

  GREG HAWKES: The bands he was working with at the time — the most famous would be Def Leppard — which was huge back then. In fact, it was really the AC/DC records that got Ric in particular interested in working with Mutt [on the Cars' Heartbeat City], because he liked the AC/DC records and just liked the way all the guitars and drums sounded. Then when we first started working with Mutt, he's like, "We've got to make this really modern-sounding record, and we're going to use a lot of keyboards." [Laughs]

  JOE ELLIOTT: The first album [On Through the Night] we did in three months. It seemed like, at the time, three years. We couldn't believe what he did differently to Tom Allom. We enjoyed making the first record and can't stand listening to it. Hated making High n' Dry, but I can listen to it, no problem. Didn't have much fun making Pyromania either, but it's a great record to hear. He made me a better singer. He pushed me harder than I would have pushed myself. The whole thing was like being in the Army. "Drop and give me 20!" You wouldn't do that, unless somebody was shouting at you. And that's what he does. He would say, "You could do it better than that," and you're thinking to yourself, "I don't think I can." And he'd talk you out of your own negativity. He's a great referee as well. But he's just fantastically tuned-in sonically. He's got "bat ears." He can tune out frequencies that other people leave on their records, and that's what made ours stand out. You listen to "Photograph" or "Rock of Ages" or any track off Pyromania played loud on a stereo in a car with all the windows up, and you're on the pavement, and the car's parked. You can hear our snare drum from 30/40 feet away! You can tell it's a Def Leppard record. That's what he was good at doing, giving you an identity.

  PHIL COLLEN: He's the best producer and most perfect musician I've ever met. He's just got a great amount of vision and being totally open-minded. Even with different genres of music, letting it all in, combining it, and taking the best of everything. I think certain people stick to their own genres, but with Mutt, it's just like a totally wide open radio signal. He just lets it all in. It's amazing. It was great working with someone that talented, as a songwriter, producer, and everything. It added a different take on stuff, which again, was very inspiring. We were trying to find our sound, and he directed us there. He said, "Let's have some hit singles here, and let's make it different. Let's make it special. Let's make it memorable, and let's make it classic." And that's really what we set out to do, and it worked.

  THOMAS DOLBY: I was asked to play on [Pyromania] by Mutt Lange. He was a producer that I had worked with previously on Foreigner 4. He was a friend, and he often used to tap me up for keyboard work on his projects. I was very happy that they broke that way. They blended hard rock with more of the pop sensibility. And they were nice, Northern English lads, and quite self-effacing. Mutt was 100% "hands on" that album. Mutt goes over everything in microscopic detail, and he's just got the most sensitive ears I've ever come across. He's such a perfectionist that, instead of playing guitar chords, you had to play each string individually. People thought he was completely crazy. It took him ten days to get a kick-drum sound. And this did drive people completely crazy, like Bryan Adams, for example. I think it had never taken him more than about three weeks to record an album, and it took Mutt that long to get a drum sound on the first album they did together [Waking Up the Neighbors]. So did the Cars. But the end result was something really special and magnificent. He is one of the world's great producers.

  GREG HAWKES: I really liked working with Mutt. He's really a talented guy. But, he's definitely like a micro-manager, and there's no detail so small that he wouldn't happily spend working two or three days on. [Laughs] With little keyboard parts, the detail work was...even to me — and I had always thought of myself as somewhat of a perfectionist — I was astonished by his sense of perfectionism. And I remember doing background vocals. We would go out there for days after days after days. My ears would be red and sore from wearing earphones. We'd be out there singing background parts, y'know, "Who's gonna drive you home." "Ah...not breathy enough, man." "Who's gonna drive you home." "Not breathy enough!" "Who's gonna drive you home." Until it's almost all air and barely a note coming out. "That's the vibe...but now it's out of tune. Do it again!" It seemed it took days to do the background vocals on that record. Much different [than working with the Cars' earlier producer, Roy Thomas Baker], just in as far as scope and how long it took to make. Before we did Heartbeat City, I think the longest any Cars record had taken had been a month and a half. And then with Mutt, I remember we did it in London. It seems like I went over in the spring and just had a spring jacket, and didn't get back until Christmas...and the record still wasn't done! [Laughs]

  MIKE RENO: We told our manager, Bruce Allen — who manages Michael Bublé and Bryan Adams — "We have to get a hold of this Mutt Lange guy, because he's producing every band that we love." He said, "How the hell am I doing to do that?" The best he could do was he got a hold of somebody that got a hold of Mutt. Mutt Lange was just about ready to do I think Def Leppard's new album [Hysteria], so he was unavailable for two years. But he said, "I have a song for you." So he proceeded to play us the song ["Lovin' Every Minute of It"] on the telephone. We proceeded to take out a little recorder and record the song from the telephone. You've got to imagine, this is before cell phones, so there was no other way. We were actually in the studio cutting a record, so we needed to get this done. We tried to figure out what all the parts were just from listening to the song. We could kind of figure it out, even though you couldn't really hear the bass. So we started recording, and he offered to send us his engineer, Mike Shipley, who, if you look at all the album covers that we loved, he was the guy who mixed all these records, like the Cars, Foreigner, and Def Leppard. We ended up going to a studio in Quebec, outside of Montreal, where a lot of groups recorded, including Rush, called Le Studio. We had Mike Shipley with us, and he proceeded to strap on triggers to the drums. This is before it got all the way it is today, and the trigger would trigger off a sound. And that was the sound we wanted, that cool, big snare drum sound, and the bass drum was the same. And that took about three days to do. So we were sitting there, ready to record, and all they were doing was taping stuff onto drums. We slowly started looking at each other, like, "What the fuck is this?" Because we're a band that get together and create something as a band of guys together in a room, y'know? And it's the fourth day, and all we hear is, "Boom, crack, boom, crack." Five days later, our drummer sits down to play them, but he likes to play with a little finesse. He might want to do a roll. And you can't do a roll with this pad thing, this trigger. You do a roll, and it just goes [makes noisy sound]. So he wasn't allowed to play like he normally plays. After about the tenth day of us trying to do this, we just pulled the plug on the whole thing and said, "Thanks very much." We brought all our gear and set up at Little Mountain, where we usually record, and proceeded to cut the song without him. That's the closest we got to working with Mutt Lange.

  PHIL COLLEN: A lot of people just don't understand what he's trying to go for. He's trying to get things special. It's not really perfection. He's just trying to get something out. If it was that easy to get special stuff out, we'd all be doing it all the time. Most of the time, it's trial and error, and you pick up things on the way. That's the whole fascinating thing with that. You stumble on something, and with Mutt, he's got this great track record, and he's very open to stuff. He really pushed it, but managed to keep the integrity of a rock band. But I think that was a big difference, crossing over into the p
op thing. It was more "Duran Duran" than "Metallica."

  Van Halen

  ALAN HUNTER: It was all about David Lee Roth, wasn't it? I mean, that's where you could do a concert video, and it worked just fine, to see David Lee Roth flopping around in his spandex. David Lee Roth was into mugging the camera. He worked the camera like an audience. But that was just sheer, raw musical power there.

  RUDY SARZO: People think of Van Halen as "an '80s band." No, they were actually a '70s band. For all intents and purposes, this was a band that already succeeded and made their mark in the '70s. You had a frontman that was so charismatic, that this guy was made for video. Forget about it. I mean, if he took his performance to a certain level in arenas, once you put the camera on David Lee Roth, that was a whole different animal right there. That made him the seminal frontman of the '80s. Nobody even comes close. And it's not that he's got an incredible voice. No. He is an entertainer. And that's what you have to be when you make a video. You're entertaining. And there's nobody better than David Lee Roth. He's in a class all by himself. Van Halen's videos were always fun. You can't help but smile when you watch those videos, because everybody else is smiling! They're having fun, which is what making music is all about. Let's face it — this is rock n' roll. We're trying to escape here, entertain, and brighten up our day. I mean, if you want to get depressed, turn on the news. [Laughs]