MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  -- Peter Gabriel/Genesis/Phil Collins --

  MICKEY THOMAS: Peter Gabriel, overall, is probably my favorite artist, period. If you just put it all together — stage performances, albums, videos, lyric content, just coolness — Peter Gabriel is right there. His videos, early on, were some of the most interesting, experimental videos at the time. He was really right on the cutting edge of that. "Shock the Monkey" is a great video. It was very striking. It had images that I think we had not seen yet at that time in video. That de-evolution of man, getting back to your primal roots, that kind of thing. And, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with rock n' roll. It can be very primitive. But yet at the same time, using some of the most exploratory and cutting-edge video techniques at the time. I remember when that record came out, Security, I was already into Gabriel, but the rest of Jefferson Starship weren't really hip to Gabriel yet. I brought that album into the studio — we may have been working on Nuclear Furniture — and sat the whole band down in the studio and played that whole album, blasting on the big speakers, and "conditioned" the band. But Peter Gabriel was the kind of artist that could change your life, the way you look at the world. And "Shock the Monkey" is a prime example of that.

  GEDDY LEE: That was a perfect combo, because Peter Gabriel was such an interesting artist as a young frontman for Genesis, and he brought such an unusual and fresh visual style to Genesis in the early days, and then when he went out on his own, because he is such a creative person. I think he really took the bull by the horns and made it his own and was tremendously successful because his music was so interesting and so high quality, and he had such a vibrant imagination. He was able to bring those two things together and really take the media seriously. It was obviously the concept of these types of animations that he did — stop-motion animation with clay and other props [for "Sledgehammer"]. Everybody wanted to use that guy, but of course, that concept became pretty much identified with Peter Gabriel. He did other things besides that. He was always very theatrical. The original Genesis, of course, was in that whole prog rock/theater/English kind of deal. I always loved his records because he's very meticulous about the production, the songwriting was great, and I think he just nailed it when he would produce the videos, because they would be so entertaining. You knew when a new one was coming out that you didn't know what to expect, but it was really going to be spectacular.

  JON ANDERSON: Peter I do love very much. I follow him very carefully. I think he's always been very inventive and always will be. "I wish I'd have done that video!" y'know? "I wish I had wrote that song!" Him and Sting — it's like, "Oh my God, I wish I had done that."

  MICHAEL SADLER: Nothing comes close. He and Freddie Mercury, for me, as entertainers and creative...just artists in general that no one will ever replace. No one can touch Peter. It's just ridiculous his creative mind, the way it works. It astounds me.

  ROGER POWELL: [Phil Collins] took the tactic of reinforcing the music, and they had the budgets to do good stuff. He's certainly a dynamic person. I think he's an incredible songwriter and performer. He did one with Philip Bailey ["Easy Lover"]. That was good, too. I heard it in the supermarket the other day. [Laughs] That's where all this stuff ends up!

  GEDDY LEE: Those videos were more about how successful those songs were, rather than the strength of the videos. "In the Air Tonight," which is the song that broke Phil Collins as a solo artist, was such a strong song. I think the song broke the video, not the other way around.

  MICHAEL SADLER: Great sense of humor. Again, not taking yourself too seriously. Especially with a band like Genesis, because it's so musical, the video has a chance to say, "Don't take us too seriously," and put a funny image in front of it, and it takes the edge off of, "Well, I like Genesis...but they get a little too musical at times." I think the videos were a chance to take it a little more tongue-in-cheek and just relax with it.

  JON ANDERSON: Phil carried the business of pop music for four years, constantly, churning out this incredible amount of hits for his solo album through to whatever. But he just had this incredible run through the '80s, where that's all you heard, [and] that's all you saw.

  -- Asia --

  GEOFF DOWNES: ["Heat of the Moment"] was Godley and Creme, who started to become quite significant players in the game, as far as MTV was concerned. They were doing a lot of video clips. But you've got to bear in mind that when that stuff was being shot, it was being shot by video camera, so it had a certain kind of "look" about it. It wasn't film or anything like that, that had kind of a rough edge to it. People were starting to get very creative with videos then, starting to use a lot of graphics and a lot of things that would make it more interesting for the viewer. Something other than just footage of a band playing. All of a sudden, they were injecting all sorts of effects. I think ["Only Time Will Tell"] was done the following day. I think we did the first two promo videos on two consecutive days in London. I remember seeing the girl — I think she was about 15 — and she was dancing, and I thought, "Wow, this is really bizarre." But when I saw the final article, I thought, "I see where these guys are coming from. They're trying to create something unusual and different." We went with the director Brian Grant, and ["Don't Cry"] was a video that was very much based on Raiders of the Lost Ark. In many ways, we felt embarrassed about it, because we were kind of drawn into doing things that we didn't do naturally. With a band like Asia, we were known as musicians, and all of a sudden, we're in a kind of spoof film. In some respects, that didn't really work for us.

  -- Yes --

  JON ANDERSON: We knew the guys who did the filming [for "Owner of a Lonely Heart"], so we got on very well with them. We really hadn't performed as a band [after Yes reunited in 1983]. We made the record as individuals, but we'd never been on stage together. So we were like, "Hi Trevor, nice to meet you, give you a hug. OK, we're filming." I think we did the first "movie" with a different keyboard player, and then he had to be edited out, because he wasn't in the band anymore. We were just juggling it around. But the video came out, and I thought it was a pretty good video. I wasn't sort of "blown away," but the record was so good anyway. And then we did another one, "Leave It," which is a totally surreal sort of video, which I loved. By then, we were number one around the world, so we were immensely famous for ten minutes. That was it. It was, "Oh, we're going to be upside down...that's cool! Let's do 17 versions. Oh great, that's amazing!" So there are actually 17 different versions of the video, which is perfect. Anything more abstract really reaches me, because it's something that I'll remember, where sometimes you do a video, and you think, "Oh, that looks OK," and ten minutes later, you don't care. But something that's abstract, you can look at it now and think, "That's a damn good video," because it is different.

  -- ZZ Top --

  NINA BLACKWOOD: That transition was fairly brilliant on their part. They had the trilogy of "Gimme All Your Lovin,'" "Sharp Dressed Man," and "Legs." And then incorporating the logo with the keychain and the Eliminator car. And they are just so odd-looking to begin with! Then you have Paula Abdul, who choreographed them. Granted, they didn't have a lot of moves, but the moves and gestures that she had them do really worked. It completely blew them over the top. They were this little boogie band from Texas. They had a great following, but then that broke them wide open. Even in their shows...they're like dirty old men! They have girls prancing around, but it was brilliant for them. I'm not really — except for Santa Claus — into long beards. And I always thought it was funny — the one guy that doesn't have a long beard, his last name is Beard!

  -- John Cougar Mellencamp --

  DAVE MARSH: "Jack and Diane" was at the drive-in or something, and "Pink Houses" had that great footage of the old black guy sitting on a stoop. Because of what MTV was in terms of race terms, that black guy sitting on the stoop was an insurrection. It's the kind of thing that John in his "perpetual rebel thing" really does right. You said he was Bruce's competition...I think there were four. I was thinking about this the other
day, because Bob Seger's birthday was last week. There was really Bruce, Bob, Tom [Petty], and John. People try to call it "heartland rock" or whatever they called it at that point. What it really meant was "Not punk, not new wave, not British — American." And those guys, of them all, Bruce made OK videos, I don't remember Bob hardly making any videos, Tom made videos that were really fun, and John has always been a pretty serious songwriter. He was probably at his most popular, and he was writing the most serious songs he ever wrote in a lot of ways. And the most effective. "Jack and Diane" not so much, but "Pink Houses"...you could remake "Pink Houses" right now, that lyric, and do a more up-to-date arrangement of it, and it would sound like it was written yesterday. And all of those guys have some songs like that. Y'know, I had two teenaged daughters at this point...I saw a lot of MTV. [Laughs]

  MARK WEISS: The thing that sticks out on that is, a few months after it happened [an MTV contest in which a winner received a free house, painted pink with the help of Mr. Cougar], it ended up being on some sort of nuclear waste [site] or something. I don't know if it was rumor or what, but it was on a dump-site, and they ended up selling it. But at the time, it was fun. They "painted the mother pink," as he would say. They got overalls, had a big painting party, and then jammed in the room. It was pretty cool.

  GREG HAWKES: John Cougar...not a fan. All I remember of his videos is him, like, singing on a farm.

  -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers --

  DAVE MARSH: Tom Petty's videos I remember, because I had stopped smoking pot 15 years earlier, and they made me hallucinate — because he was so stoned! Those were the ultimate stoner videos. And I think it really helped Tom, because being stoned in public and being able to laugh at yourself a little bit, if the music's good, that's always pretty good PR. He really pulled that off in those videos.

  -- Bob Dylan --

  GEORGE LOIS: I did a music video for Bob Dylan, "Jokerman." Kurt Loder says it's still the best music video ever made. The way that happened is I had convinced Bob Dylan in '75 that Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was innocent and that the Jersey cops framed him. I went to prison to meet Rubin. So I convinced him to join forces with me and Muhammad Ali, because Muhammad Ali was the head of the committee I started, of famous people who were speaking out and trying to tell the world how Rubin was brutally jailed and had been in jail for like 16 years or however long it was. And Bob wrote a song, "Hurricane," and did a concert in prison. And then a couple of days later, he did a terrific concert at Madison Square Garden. So I had that experience with Bob, and Bill Graham came to me when I was doing MTV, and he had been having arguments with Bob Dylan about music videos at the time. Bob was very much against them, and Bill said, "The only way I can get him to do one is to tell him that you'll do it. Will you?" I said, "Of course I'll do it!" So they sent me his album [Infidels], and I chose "Jokerman" out of it, because every line was visual. I saw five or six thousand years of the history of art, in every Goddamned line he said. And also, I devised him intercutting singing the song. I devised this running graphic visual album of some of the greatest works of art in the history of the world. And the coup de grâce, I put the lyrics on the screen, as they're going with each visual. One of the reasons why is I think it's always difficult listening to lyrics on TV or the radio. I can listen to a song, turn to my wife, and say, "What the fuck was that line?!" So I put the lyrics on, which really nails the son of a bitch. In fact, when Bob came with Bill Graham to see what I wanted to do, I had a roomful of visuals with the type on them, so it was like a storyboard pinned to the walls in a big room. I explained the lyrics and visuals with it. I went through the whole thing. And I remember Bob said, "You know, a lot of these things I had in mind when I wrote the lines!" He got excited about it. "I wrote that line, and somehow, that line really is what I said."

  -- Rolling Stones --

  JOHN OATES: I thought [the Stones' videos] were nothing. [Laughs] They were exactly like ours — nothing. They were just a bunch of guys clowning around in front of cameras. There wasn't really any thought put into it, just, "Hey, we've got to do a video, let's do a video, let's get it out there...and here's our new single."

  FRANK STALLONE: I don't think the Stones ever had really good videos. Their videos are pretty cheesy.

  -- George Thorogood --

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: We were in England, touring with the Rolling Stones. The English office of EMI were there, and they wanted to do "Bad to the Bone" as a video. I wanted to do it as a card game. I wanted to pattern it after the movie, The Cincinnati Kid, with Steve McQueen. And the same time, I'm thinking that there was a director in L.A. that was thinking of doing a video and doing a take-off of Paul Newman's The Hustler. We were ready to rip off two classic movies! [Laughs] We got our heads together, and they said, "Do you know any people you'd like to have in this video?" Originally, they thought about BB King to play the part Bo Diddley played, and I said, "BB King might be a bit too dignified for this...we need somebody that's a heavy rocker." So we settled on Bo Diddley, which was fantastic. Bo had a lot of natural acting skills. He was up for the challenge. The funny thing about that was I went in there and tried to rip off every pose James Coburn did in every movie he ever did. [Laughs] And little things we did that we took from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Ocean's Eleven. And I thought, "This is great. This will launch my movie career. I'll be able to get in movies from this." Well, what happened was we did it with the pool player who taught Paul Newman how to shoot for The Hustler — Willie Mosconi, the greatest pool player in the world. And he got a part in a movie, The Baltimore Bullet, with James Coburn, and Bo Diddley got a part in Trading Places, with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy...and I didn't get anything! I'm still waiting for a part. Mr. Mosconi was like a gangster. We called him "Mr. Big." We wanted to have credits — Mr. Big, Bo Diddley was "Bad Bo," and I was "The Kid." We made it kind of like an old-time western but pool shooting instead. That was like a mini-movie. And they had footage of us playing in it, at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City.

  -- Robert Plant --

  JOE ELLIOTT: People don't seem to ever mention it, but I thought "Big Log" by Robert Plant was a phenomenal video. This was Robert Plant going out on his own. Now, he'd already done a solo record in '82 [Pictures at Eleven], and this must have been his second album by then [The Principle of Moments]. He was all over America in '83, just as much as a band like us or Quiet Riot. But I liked the Plant one, because it was him on his own. It was all about him. He didn't have the, "Oh, I've got to get shots of the drummer!" It doesn't matter who the drummer is on a Robert Plant record. You don't have to do that "balancing act" that you do with a band, where a guitarist goes, "I should be on when it's a solo" and all this bullshit. It should be about the video, and the director has a much easier job with a solo artist than he does with a band. Because if you take the David Bowie/Mallet ones, like "China Girl," all you've really got is Bowie up against a wall, the girl with the long finger nails, Bowie laying on the beach mimicking that shot from From Here to Eternity. But it's all about Bowie — Bowie, Bowie, Bowie. There's no shots of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Earl Slick, or whoever. It's all about Bowie. They're the ones that are probably a director's dream. With a band like us, it's probably a director's nightmare. But that's what I meant about the Plant one. It was a breath of fresh air.

  -- Heart --

  ANN WILSON: ["What About Love"] was the first one we did in England. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We were pretty naïve about it. It's this huge, big-budget video shoot that Capitol had planned. David Mallet was the director. They had all these sets. Nancy and Howard Leese had to go up this spiral staircase, and when they got up at the top, they set it on fire. It was burning from the bottom...and they were up there with their guitars! They had to rely on the fact that, just when the fire got to them, that the stagehands would put it out. They got the shot. And they had me dressed up as a welder, in this impossible outfit, with this tiny corseted waist and this big welder thing going on. All so
rts of strange twists and turns of plot, like I was in the back of a bus reading Gone with the Wind, with a big tear rolling down my cheek. [Laughs] And they put the first extensions on our heads that we ever had. Suddenly, one day we had hair down to our waist, where the day before it had been to our shoulders. And it was purple and blue. It was pretty fun. It was like playing "hyper-dress up." It was very scary hours. I think the shoot took a couple of days, and by about 24 hours in, I was starting to get really, really scared, just by how tired I was and how the pressure didn't stop. They were like, "Well, we're holding your close-ups until the end," so you're at your most tired, emotional, and strung-out. "And now...we shoot your close-ups!" That was the unfairness of a rock video shoot. I believe we did ["Never"] in L.A., and it was probably Marty Callner. The same type of thing — really huge budget. Lots of different scene set-ups, really outrageous, outlandish ones. I think on that one, they had Nancy jumping off a cliff with her guitar on. And, of course, it was Nancy, because she's the blonde, really pretty one, so they had her do all the physical stunts. I'll never forget, even though they had her in a safety harness under her clothes, I did not like what it looked like to see her jumping off a cliff. I burst into tears, and I had to run off the set, because it bothered me so much. They had to go, "OK, hold it. The other sister is out of control." But they got the shot. It was a stupid idea, and it hit the cutting room floor. But that's just to illustrate what it was like. Nothing was too outrageous; nothing was too trite or silly. They had to try it. ["These Dreams"] was a good one. Jeff Stein was the director, and we did that in L.A. That one I thought was pretty well done. It had a more creative look to it, a more gentle look to it. They created this set that was like another world. It was like a magical land somewhere far away, that was perfect in every way and colorful. And Nancy was wandering, strolling, singing. Of course, there were extensions down to our knees by then, and we could never get enough volume in our hair. The corsets were tighter than ever.