by Greg Prato
MARK WEISS: I think I did [take photos that day]. JJ was "Geraldo" discovering Al Capone's safe, uncovering it. But instead of Geraldo having nothing in there, JJ had the prize of uncovering rock royalty for the first time. I know they did the whole hype-up, and then they did the unveiling. It was a good lead-up, but it was kind of anti-climactic.
JOE ELLIOTT: They obviously saw MTV or the medium of video was a great opportunity to do this en masse, rather than just do it at a press conference in New York, hoping it would sneak into all the broadsheets. It was a smart thing to do, actually. As it was in '96 to put it all back on again.
WARREN DeMARTINI: It was pretty shocking to see what those guys really looked like. You're just so used to the make-up. It really did conceal their real faces. It was just a total, unforgettable TV moment.
RIK EMMETT: The Paul Stanleys, the Gene Simmons's, and these kind of folks, they are just performers. And at some point, you have to say, "OK, forget all the artifice, the imagery, and all the histrionics of show business. Now I'll just show my talent. I'll show my ability. I'll write a song, and I'll present the song as best I can." It gets down to that elemental kind of thing. And I do think television and big rock shows, they tend to take you away from that. But that core value, that never goes away. No matter what happens in the music business, it will always boil down to when you distill it to its pure essence. It's still going to be a songwriter who has written a song that is being performed by a good musician. Period. A lot of the bands that I've always respected are bands that always understood that.
NINA BLACKWOOD: I thought it was great. In fact, that was the period I liked them the best. Because it was real, and I thought Bruce Kulick was a great guitar player. I just liked that approach. When they put it back on, it was like, "Oh come on." It's like "the band that just keeps going."
ERIC BLOOM: Looking back, it didn't hurt. It certainly made a buzz. But then they put the make-up back on and retired ten times. In retrospect, they never made a mistake. I love the original version, with Ace and Peter, and the Bruce Kulick era was great. Early on, Kiss opened for us [on New Year's Eve, 1973]. When I saw them that first night, they were an opening act jammed onto our show. It was us, we were the headliner, Iggy and the Stooges was the special guest, and Teenage Lust was the opening act. And Kiss was under the opening act, as a favor to somebody. They came out, did their thing, and it was like a holy shit moment. They've stood the test of time.
CARMINE APPICE: I don't remember if I saw that or not, but I knew those guys. I knew them without the make-up, so it wasn't that big a deal to me. I used to hang out with Paul Stanley. In L.A., we would sort of be a team. We'd go see Angel in Long Beach and sit in the audience. I'd be mobbed, and nobody would know who Paul was. We'd go to Midas Mufflers to fix my Jaguar, and nobody would know who Paul was. A guy there asked, "Hey...are you guys in a band?"
RUDY SARZO: It was a ballsy move, something that they felt they needed to make. What was really interesting about that, everybody in the industry thought, "Well, that's it. They cannot go back to wearing the make-up again." Which actually was not it. The make-up is kind of like that Superman/Clark Kent alter ego thing. Now, they can do both, with the make-up or without the make-up.
MIKE RENO: I thought it was not a very good move, just because they had created this illusion. I personally would have rather kept it that way. The illusion was created. It's kind of like finding out the magic you just watched was actually just a trick. I liked the illusion. I wouldn't have done an "unmasked" situation, but that's just me. I just thought it was a very cool illusion. But it was almost as big as watching the Super Bowl when they came on TV. It was big. That's why they did it. It was probably a "Gene Simmons idea."
FEE WAYBILL: No, I didn't watch it. I remember it. I remember the whole incident. But I'm not a Kiss fan, not a fan of Gene Simmons. Possibly the greediest man on the face of the Earth.
GEDDY LEE: No, I didn't see that. I already knew what they looked like. [Laughs] I didn't really think about it, and frankly, I haven't thought about. I don't think it was such a big deal.
LITA FORD: I think it was too late. I think people just didn't really care. They just loved their music, and that was it. Wanting to see what they looked like without the make-up, I think that wore off. And when they did take their make-up off, people were like, "Eh...they should have done that a few years ago."
PHIL COLLEN: I thought, "Oh man...don't do that!" That's what everyone really wanted, for them to be the characters that are Kiss. But it's cool. That's what you do in a band, you constantly change...or you should. You try different things. It would be really boring if you've done the same thing over and over again. You have to mix it up a little bit.
BRUCE KULICK: It was pretty interesting. I mean, I knew what the guys looked like, so it wasn't like, "Ooo!" But it was more like, "How are they going to handle it? How are they going to present this?" And I thought it was really cool. The only odd thing to me was I was always going to keep my eye on the position that I wanted...which was Vinnie Vincent. He didn't look like he belonged.
PETE ANGELUS: I might have thought, "This is interesting, because they have created such a substantial brand." And now, this is almost like when the curtain comes down on The Wizard of Oz. Now you're seeing the guy behind all the smoke and mirrors.
ANN WILSON: I think everyone had the same kind of response to that. [Laughs] I think it was, "Put the make-up back on." Not because of them personally, but just because they were so much more interesting with the make-up on. They had come out with that as their "cartoon." Their whole thing was that. So for them to suddenly not be that, there were tons and tons of other bands that were just like them. That set them apart.
MIKE PELECH: When Kiss decided to take their make-up off, I think Scott Fishman was directing, and he said, "Now we know why they put their make-up on in the first place." They were the four ugliest guys.
GERALD CASALE: I thought, "Jesus...put it back on."
1984 MTV Video Music Awards
LES GARLAND: The MTV Video Music Awards show kind of started off as another one of our jokes. We'd all gone through award season, and "My God, the Oscars, the Globes...wouldn't it be fun to do a spoof on awards shows?" We thought, "We'd get this funky place, we'll have some funky award, we'll give it to people, and just let people get up and rant and rave. Just make it complete anarchy." That was the idea, to spoof and make fun of the real awards shows. So we set a date in September [September 14, 1984]. And we were smart enough to know that we should probably go to the outside and get some people that have had some experience, which would make it even funnier. So Don Ohlmeyer, as you might remember from sports [Monday Night Football] — he is one of the guys that helped develop instant replay — we hired Ohlmeyer's organization. And they "got it." They understood the sensibility of what we wanted to do. I'll never forget Ohlmeyer making a really brilliant statement one night. He's like, "The one thing I learned about sports — it's not contrived. There's no script. The great sports events on television captured the sport. We need to capture the award show. Just let it happen, don't contrive it, don't fake it, let it happen, and we'll try and capture it." So it started out as a joke, which is why we got Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler [as hosts], two of the funniest people around. I remember Aykroyd was dressed as the moonman. How about the Moonman Award for openers? That was a joke. At the top of every hour for 24 hours a day [sings MTV's top-of-the-hour music], that rocket ship taking off and the astronaut planting the MTV flag, we were convinced that we probably poisoned the minds of a generation of young people that thought that we actually sent an MTV flag to the moon! So when it came time for the award, what would be a better award then a moonman? In fact, I'm looking at the first one ever made — right here, right now, I'm touching it. It sits in my office. It's beat up, but I'm sure it would draw a handsome dollar on eBay. Put that in the category of a stunt, but it was such a big hit, we did it every year.
BOB PITTMAN: The Video Music Awards came a
bout because Don Ohlmeyer had a big budget at RJR Nabisco, and he said, "I've got money if you do an awards show." I said, "I want to do an awards show, because I don't want somebody else to do 'The Academy Awards,' and MTV will just be one of many players — MTV, Friday Night Videos, everybody. We should be the umbrella over all video music, not part of music video in somebody else's umbrella." So we thought it was important to try do it. I couldn't figure out quite how to finance it and get it going. But Don stepped in with the money, and also creative help. Don had done big-time TV, knew how to do an award show, and knew how to organize it. The problem was we didn't have enough carriage, enough reach of America to make enough money on advertising. So I went to a guy named Dick Block, who ran the Metromedia TV stations, and worked out a deal to simulcast it on the Metromedia TV stations, which became the Fox stations later. And for the first few years, I think we simulcast it on broadcast TV, cable, and radio, so we could get enough reach for the advertisers to make enough money to pay for the show. It's obviously become an annuity now and a big moneymaker for them, but that was the early days.
ALAN HUNTER: I remember getting the meeting with our senior producer, Julian Goldberg. He sat us all down over lunch, and we were all very excited to hear we were going to have a Video Music Awards show...and that Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler were going to host it. We were always a little miffed. At some point, as the years went by, we just did our stuff, and we had this weird, sort of schizophrenic feeling of things that happened on the channel. On one hand, we just wanted to be left alone, do our gig, party, go out, and didn't want to work much more than what we thought we needed to. But when we didn't hear about stuff, and they had invented and constructed some new program, we were all very offended that we weren't in on that from the beginning. [Laughs] And before you know it, now, it's a Video Music Awards show, it's happening in Radio City Music Hall, and Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler are hosting it. And we were like, "Well...how long have you all been meeting on this shit?" Our biggest deal was, "We're not hosting it?" That was a really interesting turning point for us VJs. That was probably when we started to understand that all this stuff was...we were the faces of the channel, no doubt about it. Bob Pittman and the higher-ups' philosophy was that none of us hosts would get too big. They, in fact, kept us from doing movies and stuff. I remember I was going to be in this movie, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and they asked me to play a music host type. I was all excited about it. And Bob Pittman said, "No, you can't do it." And I asked him why — I begged him — and he said, "You don't want to do that Al. That New Line Cinema company isn't going anywhere, anyway. And this movie is not going to be the right vehicle for you." He was very patriarchal about it. And it was really because they just didn't want to pay us anymore. His philosophy was that "nothing should be bigger than the music." It was almost like I couldn't fault him for that. So the hosts should not be too big for their pants. And we weren't. We weren't as rich or famous as the artists, but all the artists knew who we were. We were as recognizable as they were, so there was this weird symbiosis that we had with the artists. But as far as the channel goes, it was like, "Nah, you've got a shelf life here." And when they said, "You're not hosting the Video Music Awards show. We're getting movie stars," we were stunned. I can remember the gigs that we had for the show was I had one little report from up in the balcony, and the same goes for Mark, Nina, Martha, and JJ. We had these little reports we did, one-offs. And the rest of the night, we sat out in the audience, like everybody else. It was kind of a wake-up call.
KEN CEIZLER: It was a tough pill for them to swallow. It was a tough pill for all of us to swallow.
BOB PITTMAN: We knew we needed star performers. It's the "Academy Awards." Who's our star who's going to be doing it? It shouldn't look like it's the everyday programming. It really had to look like a big event. We needed the biggest names we could get. And the reality was the guys were great at what they did, but that wasn't their specialty, and they weren't known beyond MTV. If we were going to do the Video Music Awards show and simulcast it on broadcast TV, we needed something that said, "We've arrived. We're big. The big people are here."
KEN R. CLARK: That was the first thing ever on the channel that wasn't really hosted by the VJs, because back then, even the news segments were done by the VJs. There were no Kurt Loders or John Norris's with MTV News at that point. The VJs did everything. And there was no concept of programs. At the time, the whole philosophy was "television without a beginning, middle, and an end." You could turn it on at any time and turn it off at any time. That was really the first program on MTV that wasn't hosted by the VJs. I don't recall a ton of tension about it at the time. Maybe some of them wondered what was going to go on down the road, but I think everybody realized how cool it was to have the people hosting it that were hosting it. They were creating a television extravaganza, and all the VJs were realistic enough.
NINA BLACKWOOD: It was fun, and Madonna doing her thing, that now, is so tame. But then, was so shocking, shockingly provocative at the time. But you know what's funny? I was watching, but I don't remember being shocked. I didn't go, "Oh, what is she doing?!" I'm not jaded. It's just like, it was a performance. I wasn't as shocked as the press seemed to be. So that sticks out. Those were always fun. You get to wear a designer outfit and get driven around in a limousine...in New York. Come on, that's cool!
GREG HAWKES: I thought [Michael Jackson's videos] were great. Is that what the Cars was up against? [The Cars' "You Might Think" won "Video of the Year" over Michael Jackson's "Thriller," Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," and The Police's "Every Breath You Take"]. Wow. I'm surprised we won over "Thriller." But see, that's because "Rockit" and "Thriller" kept winning the other awards, so I was sure that they were going to take the big one. I remember thinking we weren't going to get it, because we had been nominated in six or seven categories, and we kept losing all night. So I figured, "Well, that's just the trend, just the way it's going to go." So when we actually did win for "Video of the Year," I was like, "Whoa!" That was a surprise. I think Eddie Murphy was up on stage with us. Maybe he was just a presenter. And I think both Jeff Stein and the Charlex guys were there, too.
KEN R. CLARK: A lot of those events — particularly when you're doing live television — went by in a blur, because you were so focused on whatever your task was at hand. Mine was always making sure that the right VJ was in the right spot at the right time and knew what they were talking about. You don't really have a perception of the show itself, because you're not watching it. And so much of what's going on on stage, you never see, because you're running around in the rat's maze of Radio City Music Hall. The first events like that, it was cool, but it wasn't until the second or the third year that they started getting bigger and bigger. I remember a lot more about the New Year's Eve Balls rather than the VMA's. The New Year's Eve Balls were always a big deal for MTV. It was a genuine really cool party and a really cool concert. It was originally at the Manhattan Ballroom. Celebrities galore, and for a kid who grew up in Ohio and Michigan, you're turned loose in the middle of every rock star you ever admired. You're working for the coolest thing on cable television. We all realized that we were really lucky people. [Laughs]
LES GARLAND: I got Eddie Murphy to host the second award show. He came out, and as many times as I told him what he could and couldn't do, he just took off on a tirade, [about] partying and this rock n' roll scene. The punchline was he'd gotten "something," and he says, "I'm not going to say my penis was burning, but flames were coming out of that thing!" Or something like that that. Oh my God. Pittman is like, "Garland! You've got to stop him!" I'm like, "What do you want me to do? Go on stage?" He comes off, and I'm like, "Eddie...what are you doing?! I told you what you can do and what you can't. I can't believe you did this." He says, "You told me I couldn't say 'shit' or 'fuck'." I go, "I meant you couldn't say all of them!" [Laughs] We lost a bunch of TV stations. They were clipping it off right and left. I don't even
know if we had a delay back in those days. As bad as that might have been when it was happening, it turned out to be a great moment of anarchy, and it had a little rock n' roll edge with this crazy comedian of his time. Those are the stories that I hope are part of the legend of MTV.
ALAN HUNTER: You can certainly say that is what made MTV the platform for all sorts of different types of entertainment, when we had the Video Music Awards show. We were seen as the hub of all things movies and music.
VH1
BOB PITTMAN: A lot of changes and fighting with the cable industry, because we were originally going to give it to them for free, and then we wanted to charge them. And, of course, when that happened, John Malone, who ran a company called TCI, the biggest cable operator, and Joe Collins, who ran ATC Cable, went to Ted Turner, and got him to start the Cable Music Channel. And then we had to launch VH1 as our fighting brand against that and negotiate with the other guys.