MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  -- Eddie Money --

  EDDIE MONEY: We made two videos. I think it was $77,000 — the "Shakin'" video with Apollonia and the cars bouncing up and down. That was the first thing Apollonia ever did in show business, before Purple Rain. She had a boyfriend that was a karate expert, and the guy was always ready to break my arms in half. He was a very jealous man. I never would have hit on her, because I had an old lady at the time. You know how it is. Some people think you're hitting on the ladies even when you're not. You get in all kinds of fucking trouble. It happens to me year after year after year. The storyline is Apollonia gets out on the streets and starts the cars, and we were racing the cars. It was actually the first video where the cars are bouncing up and down. And one thing I remember specifically was that Apollonia might have been a very pretty girl, but she sure couldn't dance. "Think I'm in Love" was great, because the whole thing was me as Dracula, and my ex-wife was in the video — a very pretty girl. It turns out the whole thing twists around, where she's biting my neck instead of me biting her. It was a cute video. We shot it in a castle.

  -- Joe Jackson --

  STEVE BARRON: Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" — he was an artist who was not all together comfortable with the world of videos. He felt often that they just didn't represent the music in his head. It was always difficult. What do you do with the artist? Do you have them try to act? Do you just have them play and detached? And what I was trying to do with that was really have him as being the narrator and moving through the scenes and do a little kind of Cinderella story. It's a chambermaid in a posh hotel, who, for a moment, gets lost in one of the rich patron's closets. "Wardrobe of possibility" — what it would be like to be glamorous and successful. So she goes into a little fantasy with him narrating. I remember we shot it at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. At the time, computers were fairly new. And in [the hotel's] computer, they hadn't quite figured out how to deal with a film crew that would pay them $3,000 to use the hotel. I remember I went back to the hotel about a year and a half later, and they said, "Oh...you've got a $3,000 credit here at the hotel!"

  -- The Motels --

  MARTHA DAVIS: "Only the Lonely" was shot in downtown L.A. We were very "renegade" in those days. Cast and crew would huddle together down in some abandoned building. We wanted to give the bar the look of the bar in The Shining, kind of eerie and weird. So it was lit from underneath. The old man who was the bartender in that...the way we cast videos in those days was the PAs would run around and look for people on the streets that might want to be in a video. And this old man had literally just gotten off the bus — from I believe Oklahoma — and he gets approached by these young kids, "Do you want to be in a video?" And he's like. "Uh...OK." He was hilarious. He was having little drinks back there. Actually, he was hitting on me most of the night. "Take the L" was Russell Mulcahy. That one was a lot more intense in terms of costume changes and different set-ups. It was also shot downtown. It was a great crew. Just fun. It was a blast. [The album cover coming to life] was all Russell's vision. In fact, David Fincher kind of did [it] again with the billboard coming to life in "Shame." "Suddenly Last Summer" was one of the ones that I had storyboarded and had all the concepts for. That one was not as much fun, in the sense that I was being produced by Val Garay that time, and he decided that he wanted to direct the video as well. He wasn't really a video director, but there were some hilarious things about that, though. He said, "We need to have you have a co-star that's a real hot guy," so they get Bobby Carradine...whose next role was Revenge of the Nerds. [Laughs] That video was a lot of work, because I had to run up and down sand dunes a lot, and if you've ever done that, it's not really easy on ya. I don't feel that what I was seeing in my mind got captured in that, so that was frustrating, for various reasons.

  -- Bryan Adams --

  JOE ELLIOTT: My memories of Bryan Adams was just this gum-chewing punk, and I don't mean "punk" in the English sense. I mean the American '50s sense. Kind of the greased-back hair, leather jacket, tight blue jeans turned up at the bottom sort of thing...and a low-slung Telecaster. It wasn't bombastic like a band. It wasn't ever going to be like Poison. But for that reason, it was going to have a bit more longevity, I think. The Poison/Mötley Crüe/Guns n' Roses videos were bombastic. They were like watching a Vietnam film. They were "napalm" in comparison to Bryan Adam's "hand grenade," if you will. Bryan Adams was like a league up from Eddie Money. He was walking the same path as John Mellencamp and Tom Petty. He was a singer/songwriter. It had balls, but it wasn't metal. It was Americana. It was like a division down from Springsteen.

  STEVE BARRON: "Cuts Like a Knife" got some real stick. It was like '83, and there was a girl who was probably naked, and it was like, "Is this what videos are going to be in the future? Is it going to be all about sex?" Of course, you look at videos now — especially R&B videos — it's absolutely not hidden in the slightest, in a way that we were starting to do then. I remember it was the same year as "Billie Jean," because the girl in the bed in "Billie Jean" who disappears and is on the poster, is the girl from "Cuts Like a Knife." There's a little trivia connection.

  -- Stray Cats --

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: The Stray Cats were very cool, because that was sort of the first rockabilly stuff going on. And that was a lot of fashion. There weren't a lot of bands using stand-up bass back then. That really made an impact and broadened the musical personalities.

  -- Eurythmics --

  LITA FORD: I'm a huge Annie Lennox fan. I think she's awesome. I remember she used to change her hair a lot. She keeps herself covered. She's not a sex symbol. There was nothing there that your parents wouldn't want the kids to watch — any cleavage hanging out, butt cheeks hanging out, or anything like that with Annie. She had nothing to do or show off but her voice, and that was enough for her.

  -- Billy Idol --

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: Billy Idol — those were videos capturing the energy of the song. They made him a personality, which I guess you could say that pretty much for everybody. But he came across as a larger-than-life personality in the videos.

  -- Huey Lewis and the News --

  EDDIE MONEY: Huey Lewis came out with some pretty good videos. Huey Lewis was very poppy to me. He's a good buddy of mine. I've known him for years. He was definitely out there doing all those videos, and for some reason, his music really fit television. It was very "up." It wasn't moody, and there weren't a lot of interludes in it. If you look at my video, "I Wanna Go Back," it's harder to film a ballad than it is to film a fast song. It just is that way. I don't know. I was pretty out there back then. I didn't know what the fuck I was watching. [Laughs]

  --Julian Lennon--

  JULIAN LENNON: [For the "Too Late for Goodbyes" video] Martin Lewis, a mad English producer, decided to hook me up with Sam Peckinpah, whom I'd knew of, through his movies, but never figured how it was going to work between us. Anyway, I'd seen this guy dancing very uniquely on PBS and decided, "Maybe I need a few original moves, for either video and/or stage." So found out who this guy was — Moses Pendleton from Momix [dance troupe] — and decided to go and "train" with him at his dance studio in Connecticut. I went to meet Sam in Montauk, Long Island, with a terrible hangover via seaplane from New York. We met, and he was an amazing character, who loved to play tricks on people. So much so, that he almost had Martin Lewis in tears, thinking we'd had an argument, and it was never going to work out, after all the expenses laid out by Charisma/Atlantic Records, run by, at that time, Tony Stratton Smith/Ahmet Ertegun. We arrived at Bear Track Studios, and I had no idea how we were going to do this and what we were going to do. All I knew was that it was going to be a kind of "live performance"-looking piece. Sam had no idea who or what Moses was doing or why he was even there. I didn't either, really, as I wasn't dancing as such. Nonetheless, Moses bizarrely ended up looking like dad's ghost in a doorway in the background, which was never ever part of the plan, but c'est la vie. I was young and very shy, so [I] didn't voice my concerns. Er...not entirely clear
on [the "Valotte" clip], whether we filmed it at the same time as "Too Late for Goodbyes" and in the same studio. But again, I was told it was going to be a chilled performance piece, which is what it turned out to be. Shame I was so nervous. I couldn't play the piano and sing at the same time, with a whole film crew around me and Sam there, observing from the dark corners of the room, shouting, "CUT!" Again, I kind of knew the basic storyboard [for the "Stick Around" video], but it didn't really hit me as to what we were really doing, until we actually went through the process. It was a crazy/hazy video shoot, which was constantly moving and changing, and I was instructed to follow through with the ideas of the director, which I did. It was fun. Met lots of new friends through the process. It was a fun video, looking back...but what was with the hair-do?!

  -- a-ha --

  STEVE BARRON: I had worked with Jeff Ayeroff on a couple of things, and he said, "There is this new band. They're from Norway. We did a $15,000 video in London of just them playing in a blue studio-type thing, and nobody played it, and nobody played the song on the radio. We just can't sell them. They're really good looking guys, but there's no catch. There's no 'hook' to it." I always said to him, "If you give me enough time, we can do animation. Just give me three or four months instead of two weeks to deliver a video, and we can do some frame-by-frame animation." He came and said, "I've put the release on hold because it's not working. You've got enough budget to do something, and you can take as long as you like. It just needs a good concept." He showed me some animation by this guy, Michael Patterson, from film school, and said, "This is a style that could be good." And it was. I said, "We've got to motivate it somehow, and then that will make it stronger. Because if there's a reason for it to be live animation, we're going to have a stronger video." So I went away to think and came up with the idea of the comic book, sort of based on a comic book I had read when I was five or six years old about these sidecar racers, and goodies and baddies. And then I thought, "Well, the love interest is a girl reading a magazine, and then there's a hand," and then the image came to mind of this hand reaching out — this comic-drawn hand. And I thought, "That's a pivotal image. I can build the video around that image." I structured a little story around it, and we went and shot it. You had to shoot everything, including everything that's animated. We went off and shot for a few days with these guys, and then everyone waited for months while the animators got to work on all the animation, and we put it together digitally.

  -- Cyndi Lauper --

  LITA FORD: Cyndi wasn't a sex symbol, but she had such an awesome voice that she didn't need to be anything but just an awesome voice. And making the videos that she did in the beginning were wonderful. They were very simple, basic.

  DEBORA IYALL: I think I cried watching "Time After Time." Just the song, for one thing — the narrative of it — and the misty-eyed train waving goodbye. Something inside of me really identified with her and her little trailer and her having to leave home. It was like the story of "smalltown boy." That video was sort of the story of that, from the girl's side. And then "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" — I never understood the Lou Albano thing, so that was kind of like, "Whatever." I did like that she had actual friends of hers in the video. I remember reading that and thinking, "Good. Get some neighborhood girls in the videos."

  MARTHA DAVIS: I loved Cyndi. Cyndi and I were in Look magazine or Life magazine, one of those big "L" magazines. We ended up in the magazine at the same time as "women in rock." We ran into each other at some music awards show, and she's like [adopts New York accent], "Mawtha, oh my Gawd, we're women in rock togetha!" She was so sweet and hilarious. She's a gas.

  KEN R. CLARK: Cyndi Lauper was always a favorite to have in that studio. That woman is generally funny. We always knew we were going to laugh hard when Cyndi came in. She's a salty New Yorker. She takes her craft seriously, but she doesn't take herself seriously. And that was I think what made a big difference with a lot of celebrities, is whether they took themselves too seriously.

  ALAN HUNTER: Well, she was our first "fun girl," wasn't she? She was to the left or the right — I don't know which — of Madonna. Madonna took herself very seriously, and you could tell she was going to be a superstar. Cyndi came from almost a fresh, breezy approach. She was very accessible. And she was part of the trend for fashion, with her crazy little dresses and her bobble things. And her persona — there was no one like her. She was very asexual. You couldn't tell what she was about. [Laughs] That was a very alluring with a lot of the artists, certainly the male artists from overseas, against a rock n' roll Loverboy video or something. I liked Cyndi Lauper because I got along with her well. I interviewed her first, and I was part of the "rock and wrestling" thing [which Cyndi was a part of, too]. So she did "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," then she backed it up quite smartly with "Time After Time," the serious side of Cyndi. And it didn't come off disingenuous. It wasn't like, "I want to change my direction now. I'm not that frivolous girl." It really was a good mix. You felt that Cyndi was well-rounded. She had fun, but then she could do a nice ballad, and it seemed to work.

  Devo

  ART BARNES: The best. Barnes & Barnes worked with Devo and hung with them in those days. Mark Mothersbaugh did some "Booji Boy" appearances in Barnes & Barnes projects. Those guys are serious artists. They were/are the real deal. I love their early videos. Creepy and strong.

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: I loved Devo. They were "the Dadaists" of the whole movement...and managed to make flowerpots cool.

  KATHY VALENTINE: My all-time favorite videos were Devo. They captured the essence of the band — how smart they were, how funny, how twisted. It just came through. You would watch a Devo video, and you got it right away. You got who these people were.

  TONI BASIL: They were brilliant. Everybody copied them. They were the first of that style of video and music. They were absolutely groundbreaking. I knew them when they first came out here, because Iggy Pop and David Bowie had told me about them, and I think Iggy and I went to see them at the Starlight Lounge. They were doing videos on the wall while they were performing. Which again, was groundbreaking. Nobody was doing that. "Whip It" came later. They had some really great early videos. It's their cynical take on the world, which is pretty funny.

  STAN RIDGWAY: I thought Devo were brilliant, and what they brought to the "video party" was really original. When they first got to Los Angeles, they played the Whiskey A Go Go, and I remember seeing them for the first time there. They played some of their videos. They were really actually films. They weren't shot on video. Nothing was shot on video back then. You shot on film and then converted it to video. "Jocko Homo" and some of the other earlier things — it was very avant-garde, smart, and entertaining at the same time. It appealed to your intellect, but also, to a quality that wasn't pretentious. I thought that was really exciting.

  DEBORA IYALL: Oh, I love Devo. The first time I saw them in San Francisco, it was so exciting. This tiny, sweaty club, and they came with their outfits that all matched, and they showed a film during their show, of Booji Boy — that character in a playpen — and they had the Bruce Conner Mongoloid film. Their music was really catchy yet really edgy at the same time.

  JOHN DOE: The first introduction to Devo was through their films in L.A. They sent some copies of their films — the Booji Boy films and stuff like that — to play before punk rock shows, before they ever came out to L.A. to play. They had some MTV/pretty heavy rotation. "Whip It" was a little bit later, but the first stuff — "Jocko Homo" and "Satisfaction" — those were great. They were delivering on the promise of what video could do.

  GERALD CASALE: We did [the "Satisfaction" clip] in Akron, Ohio. We pulled some favors and shot the performance on the stage at the Akron Civic Auditorium, which, at that point, had fallen into disuse, like the rest of Akron, was kind of half-shuttered. And we shot at this old strip mall, the scenes in the car with General Boy. We shot that in West Akron. And then we shot the interior scenes at Mark Mothersbaugh's father's house, the g
uy that played General Boy. We shot the whole video in two days, on 16-millimeter film, and it cost $7,850. [Laughs] I remember when we got to "Whip It” in 1980, it cost us a whopping $15,000. We thought, "Oh my God...we're really going too far!"

  GREG HAWKES: The Cars...that was right in the middle of our big run. So we were part of the whatever you want to call it, "new wave bands." But it seems to me, I remember Devo being the band, which were really the pioneers, as far as video stuff. They were the first real "video band," and videos were part of their shows. They made such creative use of video and just the way they incorporated it into their shows. They did one tour with the treadmills and the video screen, and I thought that was great. It was beyond just being a rock concert. It was almost heading toward a Broadway show or something — not Broadway as such, but some sort of more theatrical element had been ignited.