MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  JOHN MURPHY: It was a little surreal — no audience, just stagehands, the director, and a few folks from Elektra. It was the first time we ever lip-synched, so that was a learning experience, seemed odd to be hitting strings but you weren't actually controlling the sound. We figured out quick that the trick is to actually sing along, don't just mouth the words. I don't remember there being any video monitors for us to see how we were coming across, so it was pretty much on the fly. Just as we were feeling a little more comfortable with the atmosphere, it was over. The last song was "Tomorrow Night," and they brought in these smoke pots from a church and filled the place up with smoke. They used a lot of red lights, so it kinda looked like Shoes headlining in hell. I just remember the end of the day feeling sweaty, tired, and our eyes burning from the smoke.

  JEFF MURPHY: Despite our pleas to the label to film more videos, they refused, citing the expense and dismissing it's importance as, "a flash in the pan." So we independently filmed our own video, to the song "In Her Shadow" from the upcoming LP Boomerang, and submitted it to MTV in early 1982, which MTV aired. Elektra became upset and forced them to yank it off the air, because it didn't come through proper Elektra channels. They reprimanded us that it violated our agreement. Later that year, MTV sent a film crew into the studio with us for an interview for their "music news" segment, but Elektra never funded another video for us.

  -- Jefferson Starship --

  MICKEY THOMAS: ["Find Your Way Back"] may have been the first one that we shot. Grace didn't officially rejoin the band until the next album, Winds of Change, but she did drop by and record a duet with me, on "Stranger" for that album. So that was kind of her big debut for Grace's re-entry into the band, the "Stranger" video. I think we shot the "Find Your Way Back" and "Stranger" videos at the same session, probably back-to-back. One on one day, the other the next day. We were just kind of feeling our way around, stumbling around with it. "Well, what are we going to do? We're just going to stand here, pretending to be on stage, and run through the song half a dozen times, from various camera angles." And that was pretty much it. It was a little stiff, a little awkward. It was also new. ["Layin' It on the Line"] was one of the most fun video shoots ever. It was a large shoot, and there were a lot of people involved in it. We used this old turn-of-the-century fire station, down in San Francisco, this real cavernous hall. And that's where we staged our "mock political convention," which was loosely the concept for that — "Mick and Slick" running for president. But then we tried to pepper the whole video with as many odd characters as we could possibly find. We tried to run the full gamut. Bill Graham, Willie Brown, and Pat Paulsen are in it, and underground groups at the time, like the Sisters of Mercy and the Residents. And then Grace and I got to do a couple of different personas in it. We got to do our "rock" on stage, and then we got to dress up as political figures, as well. ["We Built This City"] is a pretty cool video, but I don't like me in that video. I felt like I was very stiff and wooden. That was one of the deals where, "Now, a stylist is going to come in and tell everybody, 'You're going to wear this for this scene, and then we have to fix your hair like this for this scene.'" We succumbed to that for a couple of videos there, and those are the ones that I don't feel that great about. I just feel like I look kind of silly in that one, as far as my physical appearance. And that was the time where the video scene was being dominated by a lot of bands, specifically English bands. That was the first time where I felt I was trying to dance, awkwardly, in a video. [Laughs] I'm not a "Thompson Twin." That doesn't work for me. But I gave it a go, and then later on, you think, "God, I look stupid there," or "I wish I had not let myself be under the influence of so-called 'creative hands' on that video." I shaved off my mustache right before that video for "We Built This City." That was something that I had been thinking of doing for a long time, anyway. The facial hair was becoming very passe. But at the same time, I had a mustache for so long that it was kind of a scary thing to shave it off. It takes you a while to get used to looking at your upper lip. But it was a much better look for the '80s, I think. The video that I may be most proud of overall is "Sara." By then, we had enough experience making videos to get a little more creative control over the project. And we really were able to spend a lot of time on that one. I got to spend a lot of time in advance with the director and talk about, "What do we want to accomplish with this video?" It was our most expensive video, I think. That's the one where we got to be really crazy, like we were actually making a "mini-movie." So we got to spend a lot of money foolishly, like you do in the movies. [Laughs] In my mind, it was sort of a combination of Wizard of Oz meets The Grapes of Wrath — Midwest, just that whole look I wanted to have to it, black and white, Dust Bowl days-looking. We did silly stuff like we found a house and said, "This looks like the perfect house...but we really need a windmill." So they went to another house and found a windmill that looked right and moved the windmill over to the house for the shoot. We got a little self-indulgent on that one. And then you get to the point of where you're making this sort of mini-movie-type video. It's hours and hours of footage you shoot over and over, and then it gets down to the reality of it, that, "Wait a minute. We're making a four-minute song here...how do we get all this information in?" So the storyline kind of evolves and makes sense...up until about three minutes and 30 seconds of the song. And then the last 30 seconds of the song, we're trying to get all the footage in that we weren't able to use yet. [Laughs] It becomes like a mad dash to the finish line. But, overall, I like that one the best.

  -- Loverboy --

  PAUL DEAN: We had just signed with Columbia, and we were all on holidays. We had been working hard, and we had a week off. We were all down in Mexico — Mike, Matt, and me, with our girls. I think we got a call from our manager saying, "We're shooting a video for 'Turn Me Loose' at a club in New York City, the Ritz." So that was our first foray into that. The director thought the song was a parody. He didn't take the lyrics serious. We wrote the lyrics serious — it was a put-down to this girl. It's all fiction...that's why they call it "creative writing," y'know? So anyway, the director, his take was, "This should be a comedy." Who are we to argue? We were a fledgling thing. It played out OK. It was pretty funny. The name of the director I can't remember, but he was a staff guy working for Columbia. We were just thrilled to be asked, because we knew the marketing value of MTV. Basically, it was a live performance with a bunch of cut-outs of silent movies, of the girl getting revenge on the guy. That's what the director's idea was. But they also had another cut-away of Mike sitting at a table and a girl smoking, and I remember seeing his hand shake, because he was so nervous. I don't think they got it on film...

  MIKE RENO: ["Working for the Weekend"] is pretty much the same story. We would play the song over and over again, and we'd bounce around like we normally did. Here's what I thought was kind of interesting. The director would say, "OK, we're going to shoot another song. Now go get changed." "What do you mean?" "You have to put on a whole new outfit, and we're going to change the lighting a little bit." But it was the same stage! So basically, we just had to get some other clothes, fix your hair, take a break, and then jump back on stage and do the same thing over and over again. I really felt like I was being abused a bit, but that's the nature of the beast. ["Hot Girls in Love"] was one of the goofier moments in our lives. It was an L.A./Hollywood set. It was a soundstage. We set up in different positions and played different things. I remember I said, "What are you shooting through that glass?" And he said, "Come here, and I'll show you what it looks like." So I went over, and I looked through the camera, and what they had done is about five feet in front of the camera, on glass, they had painted wooden barrels. If you just walked by and looked at the glass, you'd see a glass half-painted with wooden barrels. But the camera would shine through that glass, and film through that glass, and would end just where the stage floor was. So it looked like we were dancing on these wooden barrels, while we were performing this song. A lot of the video was that
shot, us playing. And then they'd break away and have people jumping on and off barrels. Matty, our drummer, was playing with gas pumps instead of drumsticks. This was all just goofy fun. It was almost to me like a Monkees video. We were the Monkees for a day. [Laughs]

  PAUL DEAN: MTV ran a contest for "Queen of the Broken Hearts" [the winner would appear in the video]. We were in the Mojave Desert, and [the winner] might have been there with her kid...but she was just plowed. By the time it was for her to go on, she was just gone. I think maybe she got 20 frames, like a second. It was like, BAM! "Oh, there she is. There's the big winner!" But at least it's bragging rights, I guess. That was a really cool video to do. I wasn't really agreeing to the Road Warrior look, but in the end, I was out-voted. So I went with it.

  MIKE RENO: First off, I wasn't really clear on that contest, because there was so much going on, it was just one little thing in a million things that were happening that month. But at that point, we were almost too busy to watch MTV anymore, because we were always traveling, doing shows, and promoting ourselves. But I remember a helicopter had flown us out to the desert — the Mojave Desert — by these catacombs. Very sandy of course, and hot. It was cold in the morning, then it got hot, then it got cool at night. We were basically supposed to be chased around by "she-women," clad in animal hides. We were the target, and they were watching us. We were out in the desert looking for them, and they were looking for us. It was just a big, huge, sexy, "manly guys and half-dressed women," running around the desert. In some mishmash, macho, Road Warrior — the whole thing was devised to be very Road Warrior, Mad Max-ish. We just played along with it.

  PAUL DEAN: David Fincher was the director [for "Lovin' Every Minute of It"]. He's gone on to do Seven, Alien 3, and so many amazing horror movies. I remember sitting with him, and he's telling me, "Y'know, this is OK for now...but I really want to do scary horror movies. I want to really get into intense stuff." I remember we didn't have a storyline at all, and we were sitting there — he, I, and the cinematographer guy — trying to think of an ending. It's a three-day shoot, and who knows how much hundreds of thousands of dollars this thing cost to shoot. It was pretty cool. Everyone had their own room and their own "set" of girls. That was a really fun thing to do.

  MIKE RENO: We took over a hotel, over by the Hollywood Bowl. The Holiday Inn there in Hollywood. I don't know if we took over the entire hotel, but I know we took over the whole eighth floor. It started off with filming in a small, little club, where we were playing as if we were a club band, and some guys are going, "These guys aren't even close to being Loverboy." And then it moved over to showing fantasies of everyone. We were all asked to come up with "a fantasy." If we could have a fantasy for a day, what would it be? And everyone in the band came up with a different scenario. There were rooms decorated in the Holiday Inn with that particular fantasy. So one guy's fantasy was piano and a candelabra and women in white sheets floating around with blonde hair...that would probably be our keyboard player's fantasy. Mine was like a circus fantasy — Cirque de Soleil almost, before its time. I had jugglers and little people, body builders with those whiplash mustaches. I think mine was a Fellini dream, like a Fellini movie. It was way out there. And Paul's was in this guitar manufacturing shop that was loaded with half-dressed babes. And there was a poker game with our bass player, Scott. His dream was poker. And Matt had one...I can't remember what his was. It was a little movie production really. Every scene had to be shot separately. And they'd move the cameras and shoot the end of the scene, even if it was only in the video for seven seconds. I kind of learned how people work out in Hollywood. It's "hurry up and wait." Set the lights, get the smoke, dress the people, fix their hair. It was insane. It probably cost a huge amount of money.

  -- The Tubes --

  FEE WAYBILL: "Talk to Ya Later" — we did a video of the entire The Completion Backward Principle album. We filmed the entire album and made a home video. We didn't do individual videos. We made a home video product, which we did at Shepperton Studios in England, with Russell Mulcahy, who went on to do a number of movies. He was just a video director then. And our choreographer, Kenny Ortega, has gone on to be a very famous director, with High School Musical and the Michael Jackson DVD [This Is It]. He pretty much put that whole thing together with Russell. And it was great. We had a fabulous time. We worked hard. It as actually right at the same time they were filming the first Alien at the studio. It was so cool to go to the Alien set and see the monsters and the spaceship. It was amazing. We did it right before we did a big tour, and we were there for about three weeks at the studio, working every day. Naturally, we had the facilities of a movie studio. We could make a lake, and we could do this, and we could do that. We had everything happening. I remember we did one video called "Sports Fans." Of course, they could never show that on MTV. It was about a jock who couldn't figure out what sport he wanted to do, so he's wearing all the equipment for all the sports at once. It opens with the sports guy walking into the locker room...only it's the women's locker room. The girls are supposed to be standing there naked in the shower, and we hired these women, and they said, "Oh no, we won't take our tops off." We went, "What?! What are you talking about?" So we covered them in whipped cream and foam, so it looked like they were soaping and lathering up, and you couldn't really tell they were wearing clothes underneath. I was so mad that we had hired them and that they wouldn't appear naked that I was supposed to come out in a jockstrap, and I took my clothes off, and came walking out into the dressing room naked. Full-frontal nudity! Russell loved it. Everybody loved it. Naturally, it was a little controversial, so we ended up having to do two versions. We had to do the censored version for the U.S.A., but then for Europe and most of the other countries, we did the naked version. "She's a Beauty" we did on the A&M lot, and nobody was too happy with it, because they wouldn't let us do what we wanted to. They wouldn't let us do the Freaks video, with all the geeks — the chicken woman, the bearded lady. So we had to come up with this sort of tame version. It was OK, but it wasn't great. We had a lot of people there. Rosanna Arquette was "the big sister," and Robert Arquette [who plays the young boy] was young, and it kind of scared him. At one point, he started crying! He was scared of the scary woman in the fish tank. We had a mermaid in a fish tank, and she was kind of evil-looking, and he thought she was drowning or something. He was just a kid. He got scared and started crying, and Rosanna had to come and calm him down.

  -- Saga --

  MICHAEL SADLER: The storyline [for "On the Loose"] was really handed to us. That was a matter of your director will be given the song to listen to and come up with [an idea]. Unless he's really far off base, generally, the artist or band will adhere to it. That was the case with that. He just considered it, "OK, 'On the Loose'...let's take that literally. Crime, breaking out of jail." So he took that angle. And really, at that stage, I think you walk into it really green, and go, "Sure! I'm sure it's going to be great!" I remember showing up on the set and putting on the prison grays. It was all shot in a little subdivision in an industrial area of Toronto. It was a little silly — as a lot of the videos were — but that was the genre. It was fun to do and fun to watch. I got to do a little action, like jumping off a fence and pretending that I'm breaking out of jail. It was my first introduction to acting. And I never looked back. I'm waiting for my big break. That's why I'm living in L.A. now. [Laughs] We shot a video for a song called "Amnesia," and it was about Jim Gilmour, the keyboard player, having a case of amnesia and not remembering who he was. The live part of it is us playing on a stage, and I'm having to cover his keyboard parts, because he forgot to show up for the gig, and he's wandering around the streets. One of the scenes, the director decided that he wanted to have a pink elephant — but a real one. And what ended up happening is they brought two live elephants to the set. The reason they brought two is the one that they wanted to use couldn't be separated from the other one. They were real good pals, and they would freak out if they were separated. So th
ey ended up bringing both of the elephants to the shoot. They actually painted the one bright pink. They stood there with big brushes, and there's this gigantic pink elephant. And it's just for this quick scene. Jim Gilmour is walking by, [and] the elephant is walking by the other way behind him. The problem was, at the end of the day, they had to take the elephants back to the zoo, and they couldn't get all the pink off! So one of the elephants ended up going back to the zoo more than slightly pink.

  -- Aldo Nova --

  ALDO NOVA: The video [for "Fantasy"], how that came about was my manager at the time — Sandy Pearlman, who managed Blue Öyster Cult — hired this B-horror-schlock-movie film director, Richard Casey. And he had come up with some sort of a thing, because I had a "soundtrack" in front of my song, which was a helicopter and all that stuff. He basically had me coming out of the helicopter, and the laser beam was my idea. It still stands up. It gets played a lot on YouTube. Plus, I had that weird leopard suit. I used to go out with a stripper back then, so the girl that made the costumes for strippers made my leopard suit. [Laughs] I had a lot of stick from the record company about it, because I was actively involved in the editing. I was not happy with the way the guy was editing the video. I went in there myself and said, "Choose this shot. Choose that shot." The record company would get on my case and say, "Who are you to edit a video? You're a musician." And I said, "I have no limitations. To me, it's all music. It's just what I want to see on it." "Fantasy" sort of invented that genre, that you tell a little story before it — a little "pre-quote" to the song — and then you go into the song. And then after that, you've got Lady Gaga doing that now with all her videos — like "Telephone," when she's in jail. They tell a little story, and then it goes into the video. Back then, there was nobody doing that.