MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  MARTHA DAVIS: I love Devo. That's one of my favorites of all time. They were just absolutely brilliant. As soon as you say "Devo," the video for "Whip It" pops into mind. It's just classic and brilliant. I cannot come up with enough accolades for them. They were brilliant musically, so funny, and so tongue-in-cheek. It was that sort of "serious funny," where they did it very seriously. I remember when I went to see them live, Mark Mothersbaugh was marching around with a pouty face on, and then just dives into the audience. You're just like, "What the hell is going on?!" And we hear Mark Mothersbaugh every day, at least 30 or 40 times a day, if you have your television on. He's become so successful as a commercial guy. And he's still absolutely lovely, a wonderful guy.

  GEDDY LEE: They were funny. I loved them. "Whip It" I think is really good. Ironically, we ended up working with Jerry Casale many years later. He directed a couple of videos for us. He went on to become a very good video director. Their visual point of view and their humor — their tongues were planted firmly in cheek.

  GERALD CASALE: The way ["Whip It"] happened was Warners had never focused on that song, and frankly, neither had we. We weren't sitting down going, "Let's write a hit." We just wrote songs we liked and only put the songs on the record we liked. The record company said, "'Girl U Want' — that's your hit!" And, of course, it went nowhere. So they had us make a video for "Girl U Want," and then somebody at the label said, "'Freedom of Choice!'" So we made these two videos. They released "Freedom of Choice" when "Girl U Want" tanked, and "Freedom of Choice" went nowhere. We were on tour for like three months, and while we're out there, "Whip It" starts being played by Kal Rudman, who was a major programmer/radio mogul in the Southeast. Back when people could start things regionally, he did, and it grew out of there and went up to New York City, and the "Rudman Report" had it on fire, so all these other stations started picking it up. So in the middle of our tour, they had to keep changing venues, canceling shows and putting them in other places, because suddenly, we were playing to twice as many people...and sometimes even more than that. And when we got back off that leg of the tour, they go, "You've got to make a video for 'Whip It.'" We were rather burned out and really on a schedule, and Chuck Statler, the cinematographer that had been my college friend that we shot everything with, was busy. He was working with Elvis Costello. So I planned the whole video with my friend, John Zabrucky, who is a prop designer and an artist. We planned the whole thing out, and Mark and I storyboarded it, and we cast it and built a set out of a rehearsal space we had in a warehouse outside of Beverly Hills. Chuck flew in with just a four-man crew, and we started shooting at something like 7:00 in the morning, and we ended at like 1:00 in the morning. We shot the whole thing in like 16 hours. And then the editor, Dale Cooper, followed the storyboard, we tweaked it a bit, and it went out. It was one of the quickest videos we ever made. Other than "Beautiful World," it's the most favorite Devo video I ever directed.

  DEBORA IYALL: "Whip It" was kind of weird. [Laughs] I'm basically a feminist, and him whipping the girl's clothes off is a violation. It made me a little uncomfortable. Now, I'm like, "Well, I'll never really get all they were trying to do with that one and the crazy West." And I also thought, "Well, I'm just not seeing what they're alluding to, with this Western theme and the exploitation of the West against the native woman." I probably over-think things a little bit.

  GERALD CASALE: ["Beautiful World"] is like our pièce de résistance, because even when Mark and I were writing the song, and I wrote the final line, "For you, but not for me," we already had in mind using archival footage to slowly go from really funny to really dark. The kind of way Bonnie and Clyde had. And we loved that. We thought, "If we use archival footage, we can really make the point, because this archival footage will carry so much iconic and cultural impact. We could never shoot enough stuff to communicate that. So we'll just shoot us in a way that we can integrate us with archival footage.” And I spent a long time with Chuck's help, going to all these stock footage places and archival footage places, before the big boys bought up all the mom-and-pop places. Before it got congealed into big bucks, where it was monetized, when people realized how much they could make from stock footage. Literally, some places would sell us bags of film. So we'd find these little canisters of 400 or 500 feet of this and that and nothing more than a description of what it was. We spent weeks and weeks watching this stuff. And then we went to New York, to some of the more expensive film libraries, where it's really cataloged specifically, and you're paying by the minute and paying for viewing, when we needed the really powerful stuff, like racial protests in the South in the '60s. And the editing was the most fun in the world. You took all this great stuff we found and started building a story, like a collage, with the existing moments that you could afford. The whole thing in the end cost $25,000. It was the most labor-intensive video I ever made in my life...but I loved every minute of it. And I even like the kind of lo-fi quality of the whole thing, because there's a certain crude power in that. It holds up. You watch it now, and you're like, "Jesus!" It's just as unnerving as it was in 1981.

  ROGER POWELL: They're hopefully in Dr. Demento's list as well. And that's what I liked — the band to do something bizarre or creative at least, with the visual medium, rather than just film a concert. There's certainly nothing wrong with filming concerts, but it's like, "You just finished making this cool, wacky record. Why not do something visually thematic? I always admired those guys as being pioneers. They took the legacy of Frank Zappa into the video age.

  GERALD CASALE: "Peek-A-Boo!" was part of a trilogy, where we had this great idea, which now, you can see Nine Inch Nails or U2 do, and a few other bands with money. We said, "We're going to create a video that approximates what people are going to see us do live. So when they see the video on television, that's what they're going to see when they come to see us live. And they'll know from watching the video what can happen." So we created backdrops in sync with the music, using really crude computer graphics at the time, mixed with live action and animation. And with the express intent of rear-projecting them on a screen, which at that time, the best we could do was 25 feet wide by 17 feet high. And then develop the lighting system and a matte black floor, so that light wouldn't bounce, so we could be lit standing about ten feet in front of the screen and be the same color temperature/exposure rate as the screen. So we're not brighter than the screen, we're not darker than the screen — we're matched. And then we would project that, and that would be connected to a 6-track, 35-millimeter film dubber, with the sound mag [having] the click track we had cut to and some effects, and we would play to that click track — bass, drums, guitar. We'd be totally in sync with these films. So the first 25 minutes of the show, that's what it was. The people went nuts, and we loved it. Back-up singers would come on screen at the scale where they looked the same size as us, and Mark would turn around with a prop laser gun and blow up these computer girls that were dancing in a line, like a duck shoot. People went nuts...and critics attacked viciously. Even though the next part of the show was more traditional, early Are We Not Men? songs in yellow suits. Especially guys like Robert Hilburn. I still remember how mean he was. We played two sold-out nights at the Universal Amphitheatre, and the people never sat down once. And he writes, "Hey Devo, if I wanted to see video-games, I'd go to an arcade. Rock n' roll or stay home." It was nasty. We were definitely "the let-no-good-deed-go-unpunished guys." Y'know, like the pioneers who got scalped. Now, it's like you're almost expected to do something like that. Stealth video curtains and Quicktime films and laptops allow anybody with any money to do that so much more easy than we did it, and less labor. And so much more refined, high-tech, and high resolution. But we were trying to do something that hadn't been done.

  JELLO BIAFRA: I was mainly into Devo before Warner Brothers got a hold of them. And Klaus Flouride, our bass player, was really into them throughout. But a lot of the hardcore kids and pioneer bands of the early '80s just hated them. Almost irrationally, wh
ere if you really wanted to put something down — this was an Orange County slang term — you called it "Club Devo." Maybe it was because it was the first new wave-related band that was really unusual that the people they hated in school got into. I have no idea. Or, Devo was the first band that they got into, before they discovered hardcore, and became like Mary Poppins to them. When you're seven years old, you love Mary Poppins. When you're eight years old, you hate Mary Poppins. And then when you get older, you start liking it again. Because now, I've noticed a lot of people who came up a little after I did — like the guys in the Melvins — they love Devo. Devo has definitely been redeemed in a lot of people's eyes since then. I did see some of their early films they made — even before they put out records — and I thought they were pretty cool and pretty demented. Their whole original theory, if you remember, Devo stands for "de-evolution," and a subhuman species called "Jocko Homo." And boy, was that species in evidence at some of the later big hardcore shows in southern California. I renamed them "The Flintstone Children," because they all seemed to be like Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm and know about four words of the English language — "Uh-huh," "Uh-uh," "Gimme," and "Fuck you." Now, they're in Congress...and look what's happening to our country!

  ALAN HUNTER: Devo were certainly groundbreaking. That was up there with "Fish Heads." They seemed to have a real good knowledge and handle on what they wanted to achieve from a video, and it wasn't what Michael Jackson wanted to achieve. Theirs was not about glamorization; theirs was de-evolution. They had a real vision for the video medium. Their whole bit was about the mystic and fun attitude that they created. For them, video was so integral to who they were. It wasn't like they were an artist having to do video for promotion. They always had a good sense of humor. I gravitated towards the bands that had some sort of self-deprecating sense of humor about the whole thing. I would not have expected that from Bono or Peter Gabriel. They didn't need to. They were bigger than the other ones, like Men Without Hats and Madness, some of the English new wave bands. They were "of the medium," not above it, necessarily.

  "Weird Al" Yankovic

  GEDDY LEE: I love "Weird Al"! Funny stuff. He was the first guy to go out and take the piss out of everyone else, on an MTV level. He did it well, and he was the only guy doing it, so he broke through. I saw him last year at a premiere. It was funny to see him.

  ROGER POWELL: I always loved anything that "Weird Al" did. I actually got to meet him once at an accordion seminar, somewhere out in Colorado. I always looked forward to anything that he did from a record point of view. And, of course, the videos were just hysterical. The humor thing, that definitely translates well from record to video.

  ART BARNES: Al's been a pal since before MTV. His videos are always brilliant. He's a really hard worker and a very nice guy. One of the good guys. I'm very happy for all his successes.

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: He made it OK to be funny, which was good for Blotto. It's one thing to take a song and come up with a clever parody of it. It's a whole other animal to try to create a whole film that does the same thing. You're not only parodying the song; you're parodying the video of the song. And stuff like "Fat," that's a work of art. That is classic stuff.

  STAN RIDGWAY: His career is something of an accident, a "happy accident." I don't think Al set out to be the "king of parodies." He just had an accordion, started to play it, and said, "Goddammit, I can't play any more of this polka music my parents taught me!" I think he deserves all that success, because nobody really had any idea to do anything like that. No one would have wanted to. He had very little competition at all.

  JELLO BIAFRA: "Weird Al" Yankovic? I know nothing about him, except for the name. A friend of mine who collects novelty records and lives in rural Illinois, the only live shows he's been to in years is me and "Weird Al" Yankovic. I don't know what that means...

  ALAN HUNTER: "Weird Al" was great. I never understood why "Weird Al" had such easy acceptance by all the artists. Once he had taken on Michael Jackson...and as I remember the story goes, Michael had no problem with it, for "Eat It" and "Fat." "Weird Al" was so gonzo. He provided the comic relief for MTV. MTV was all about creating an atmosphere and eclectic nature from going from serious "U2 bands," to Devo, to David Byrne, to then "Weird Al" Yankovic. I mean, the good, the bad, and the ugly was what MTV was all about in the '80s. And it was kind of what I revel in now on the radio show. I'll come out of a Debbie Gibson song or an REO Speedwagon song and go, "Well...I went to the bathroom on that one." It was the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it all seemed to work. But it worked in the context of 24-hour video, because you needed relief occasionally from the seriousness of things, the overly pretentious '80s. To have a good David Coverdale and Whitesnake bullshit video with Tawny Kitaen writhing around, to break the bubble of pretentiousness from Ultravox or Simple Minds. But it all seemed to work in the context of the rest. Pick them all out individually and watch them on YouTube, and it's like, "Oh my God, how did people get into this?!" But it was part of the fun, because when you're three or four beers down, watching that, it makes sense. [Laughs]

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: "I Love Rocky Road" was shot on an abandoned airstrip in Agua Dulce, California. I remember we had a lot of technical problems on that shoot. For whatever reason, a lot of the film got ruined, so we couldn't use some of the best takes. Also, it was shot in one long 22-hour day, so everybody was completely burnt by the end. And there was a group of accordion-playing kids that we were going to shoot for a scene but for some reason never got around to it. I still feel bad about that. "Ricky" was my first real music video. I think we spent a total of about $3,000 on it. It was shot — on video, not film — at somebody's house in the San Fernando Valley. It starred me and Tress MacNeille, the multitalented voiceover actress, who played the part of Lucille Ball. I played myself, as well as Desi Arnaz, after I shaved my mustache and put on the appropriate wig. The shoot wasn't very well-organized. I was supposed to be shaking maracas in one critical shot, but nobody had thought to bring any…so I found some bowling pins and shook those, because if you were really drunk, they might look kinda like maracas. "Eat It" was my first "big-budget" video, although still extremely modest by today's standards. We shot for two days on a soundstage. Michael Jackson's original locations didn't exist anymore, so we had to recreate everything from scratch. Michael's choreographer, Vince Patterson, reprised his role as a gang leader for my video. This was before I was directing my own videos, so my manager, Jay Levey, was calling the shots. I remember things got a little stressful on the set. For one set-up, when it was determined that the top of a street sign wasn't in the frame, instead of waiting for the DP to adjust the lens, someone bent the pole down so that the sign would fit. "Like a Surgeon" was filmed in an abandoned hospital, where apparently a lot of other hospital-themed TV shows and features were also shot. My main memory of this shoot was that we had an actual live lion roaming the halls, which was a reference to the lion in Madonna's video. At this point, we lost a lot of extras, who decided that they weren't getting paid nearly enough to deal with this.

  GERALD CASALE: Well, that's exactly what we did not want to be. It's kind of like Dr. Demento. As soon as you wink and nod at the audience, like, "This is all a joke," you become a clown, and you're letting everybody off the hook. You're not making them think anymore. It's like, "Oh, this is going to be a funny parody." It's in the name — "'Weird Al' Yankovic." As soon as you say "weird," "Demento," "goofy," or "crazy," you've just pulled the plug on anything real that can happen.

  FEE WAYBILL: Not a big fan of "Weird Al." It's just kind of too hokey. It's strictly comedy, strictly novelty band. Not really a player.

  GREG HAWKES: Some are funnier than others. Sometimes, it's a parody of a song that I don't even like in the first place, so it's hard to get excited about the parody in that case.

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: I don't remember exactly how [special “AL-TV” segments on MTV] came about, but after the success of "Eat It," MTV agreed to occasionally give me fou
r-hour blocks of programming to basically do anything in the world I wanted to. Can you even imagine them doing something like that now? That's how MTV was back then. It was seat-of-your-pants stuff…exciting, dangerous, very cool. MTV almost seemed like a weird local UHF TV station, but of course, it was a national phenomenon. Anyway, on AL-TV, I played a bunch of my favorite videos, I made disgusting sandwiches, I introduced "my best friend in the whole world," Harvey the Wonder Hamster, who would do horrifying stunts. I would provide running commentaries for music videos. I would do fake interviews with celebrities using clips taken out of context. It was a lot of fun. The conceit was that I was using my pirate satellite broadcasting transmitter to take over the airwaves. So during that time, MTV wasn't even mentioned. All the promos and IDs just said "AL-TV." Again, can you believe they let me get away with that? I still manage to do AL-TV every few years, usually with the release of a new album. But these days, it's on VH1.

  CARMINE APPICE: I lent a bass drum to "Weird Al," to do some of the hits that he did on their first album, that Rick Derringer produced ["Weird Al" Yankovic]. I was doing the DNA project with Rick at the time, and Rick was producing "Weird Al." "Weird Al" had a lot of great videos; in fact, his videos were killer. When Rick started producing him, he was playing accordion, and they did that "Ricky" song. Little by little, you kept seeing these videos he kept coming up with — "Eat It," "Fat." I thought he found a great niche. And it's amazing — he still goes out and plays for 3,000 people. When I met him, I said, "So what do I call you for a first name? 'Al' or 'Weird?'" He's always been a cool guy. And then he went into movies [UHF]. I said, "Wow, it's amazing how you go from goofing with an accordion to being a rock star."