MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  FRANK STALLONE: But you know, I'm not the only one. There are some guys that had some big records but bad videos. I mean, look at Billy Ocean's shit videos! They weren't good either!

  ORAN "JUICE" JONES: I remember that video for "Party All the Time." It was a hoot to see Eddie Murphy singing. [Laughs] That was priceless. He was singing like he meant it, too, Jack! It was cool, because let me tell you something, artistic expression is supposed to be given. It's supposed to take place. You can't judge art. You can either appreciate it, or you don't. A lot of cats had comments and opinions about Eddie Murphy when he was doing that, and we knew Rick James. He used to come by, and we'd smoke blunts. He was a cool cat...a little strange, but overall, a cool cat. But Eddie Murphy, he was a comedian, and he was singing. You had to appreciate his fearlessness. That was courageous. He jumped out of his comfort zone and did something that was so far to the left, you couldn't even see it. It was around the corner!

  PETE ANGELUS: I just saw that recently, as a matter of fact. I just thought, "Jesus Christ, man...somebody pull him aside and say, "Please...stop!" To me, it was how serious he was taking himself, and Rick James dancing in the background like he was creating some Vivaldi piece or something. I just thought, "Wow, they are very, very seriously into this concept of partying all the time." And it's not that serious of a concept when you come right down to it. I felt the translation of the lyric, the expressions on their faces, and the camaraderie of "partying all the time" was just fantastic.

  FRANK STALLONE: Oh please. It's just Eddie. "OK, gee I'm famous, let me do a really bad song. And I'll get Rick James to produce it." It's just dreadful. It's like Don Johnson from Miami Vice. Jesus, come on. David Soul, "Don't Give Up on Us," but he was a singer. I mean, they'll do it. Telly Savalas did an album, but he talked. William Shatner does records. John Tesh, Jim Nabors...I want to kill myself. ["Party All the Time"] was just a dreadful video. You have real artists out there that want to get a chance to do something...in other words, if he wasn't a movie actor, you would have never seen that. It was not like he would have gotten a music deal from "Party All the Time." But there's some videos that are horrible, like Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance." Now, I would have liked to have come in there with a daisy cutter and mowed everyone down. It was just all these cretins. The dwarf looked like he took a dump in his pants. It's just a creepy video. It's like, "Where the fuck did these guys come from?" They're Canadians or something like that. You had this dwarf that looked like he had a load in his diaper or something, chasing him down the hill. I hated that. Like "99 Luftballons." Come on, man. You got all these German guys sitting there on "a battlefield"...it's just a soccer field with flash pans. It's supposed to be Verdun or something, like you see the Eastern Front or something. But she had her shot...she blew it.

  JON ANDERSON: A lot of musicians and artists would make the wrong video, and they'd be one-hit wonders. Very sad.

  PETE ANGELUS: I also remember — which I wasn't very fond of — David Bowie and Mick Jagger's "Dancing in the Streets" video, with the two of them dancing around each other. And with all due respect to both of them, because they're great artists...I couldn't help but say to myself, "What the fuck is wrong with you? I mean, seriously, you're one step away from wearing a Speedo...I don't know where you're going with this." I understand that both of those artists want to incorporate some level of femininity into who they are, but it is a bit of a stretch. But that was the beauty of MTV. To me, as great as some of the videos were from a lot of artists, there were also these fantastically horrendous videos that were trainwrecks, that you just couldn't stop watching, going, "Seriously...the manager, the director, a friend of the band, a wife, nobody came on the set and said, "What the fuck are you doing?!" Nobody thought of that? I just think it's fantastic, that a band would be led around by some director, who really wasn't connected to them in any way, other than he had been hired to come up with some bullshit idea, and that the band was following their lead. To me, that was as interesting as the great videos. I don't think what I think of other artists’ videos is important. I thought some were very creative and innovative, others I didn't pay much attention to, and some I considered fantastically horrendous. When I created and directed videos, I didn't view myself or my work as being in competition with, or compared to, other videos. Basically, I simply figured if the concept made me laugh or smile, it might have the same affect on some other people. I wasn't attempting to create "art" for a rock n' roll audience. I was just trying to grab the viewer's attention, burn a visual into their minds, and put a dirty little grin onto their faces.

  PHIL COLLEN: The great thing about these videos is they would get you to do this really geeky stuff. But we were so young and green, we'd go, "Oh...OK!" When we'd done the "Animal" video in Holland, we'd hooked up with a circus. They said to me, "We'd like the knife thrower to throw stuff. If you're playing guitar, just stand still, and he can throw knives." And I'm like, "Uh...no. I don't think so." So they talked Joe into it. And if you see the video, you see him stand up against this pole and wincing as this guy dressed as an Indian chief is throwing knives at him. It was all excess, and it was kind of virgin territory. It was "Spin̈al Tap to the extreme" in a lot of cases.

  JOE ELLIOTT: But what you have to understand is you can't plan your life around "What people might think in ten years." You've got to do it for what people are going to think tomorrow — and suffer the consequences. Some of us are lucky to get through that...and some of us aren't.

  PMRC and Censorship

  DAVE MARSH: This is the period of "the great music censorship panic." MTV was funny. They instigated some of the criticism with some of the stuff you were talking about, about sexuality. It was an open-invitation that way. I don't remember a lot of violent videos. Am I wrong about that? I don't think they got a lot of violence criticism; they got a lot of sexual criticism. That's probably proportionately what you would expect.

  JOE ELLIOTT: I wasn't aware of that at the time [the 1985 Senate hearing which sought to label "offensive" records, lead by the PMRC, Parents Music Resource Center]. We were in Holland from '84 to '87, so whatever was going on in the States was coming at us at a very slow rate, over the phone. MTV Europe didn't launch until August 1, 1987. We were there at the party, because it was in Amsterdam. Elton John sang "Happy Birthday" to me on a barge. It was amazing. But all this stuff, we were hearing it second-hand. I wasn't even aware that they had a problem with the Pyromania album cover. If they did, they are sadder than I thought they are. In fairness, I had a problem with it on 9/11. The second that happened, I went, "We should maybe withdraw the sleeve from further pressings." And after six weeks, people went, "No," because everybody realizes it's just coincidence. But as for pre-9/11, somebody going, "Well...this building's on fire." It's like, "So?" It's hardly Appetite for Destruction, where there's this like raped chick with a robot next to her or whatever it is [the initial pressing of Appetite was originally to have a controversial Robert Williams painting as its cover]. People do take the "comic book element" of rock a little too far. And Tipper Gore [PMRC co-founder] is the prime example — fucking moron. God bless Dee Snider [who spoke at the Senate hearing]. Irrelevant of what I think of his records, he was an absolute genius, standing up for the entire music business, going, "You guys are just pathetic." And he was very eloquent in his speech. I thought Dee Snider did everybody a big favor.

  DAVE MARSH: I don't remember how much they interacted with MTV. Specifically, I led the charge from the other side, and I'm the one who broke the story in the Voice that, in fact, this group of housewives in the D.C. suburbs — every single fucking one of them — turned out to be to related to either a senator, a congressman, or in one case, a cabinet member. That was one thing. I did a bunch of stories about their connections to right wing preachers and stuff. I was the one who stood up at the press conference. They kept trying to get these warning labels on the records, which worked out exactly the way that I predicted it would work out. Metal and hip-hop
acts are the only people that have had labels on their records. Ever. So they come up with this press conference in D.C. They're all about, "This is going to be a voluntary label thing." But if you really listen to it, what they were saying was, "The record companies were going to do it voluntarily." So in the question period, I stood up and said, "You keep saying these stickers are voluntary, but there aren't any artists up there. Can you tell us which artists volunteered?" You never heard such hemming and hawing in your life. It was hilarious! To me, it was like the most obvious journalistic question, and nobody else was going to ask it, because everybody else had been snowed by the idea. And I said, "Well, wait a minute, I guess I have a different understanding of 'voluntary,' because does this mean you can 'volunteer' for me?" [Laughs] Actually, Dee was even better than Frank Zappa [who also spoke at the hearing], and Frank was at his best. The big lie that came out of the PMRC Senate hearing was during the presidential campaign [in 2000], Al Gore said, "I was hardly involved in this, and really on the day, I didn't say much." He was the only senator who never left the room. And it's on video. C-SPAN ran the whole thing.

  HERMAN RAREBELL: Lovedrive got banned. As you remember, there was chewing gum put over one of the breasts of the woman sitting in the back of the car. That cover got banned, but at the same time, it was voted by Playboy as "The Best Cover of the Year." And because of this, a lot of kids bought that cover, because it was banned. Love at First Sting also offended a lot of emancipated women and women for women's rights, who felt that it revealed too much. So, therefore, they wanted to ban this one, too.

  LITA FORD: I think there's ways to make things happen, and I personally don't think what I was singing was very rude. So I think it was uncalled for. It's not like I was cussing and swearing up a storm. The worst thing I said was "I want to taste your sweet thing. I'm hungry for your sting." [Note: The actual lyrics to the song "Hungry" are..."I want to taste your sweet thing, I'm hungry for the sting of your sex"]. I mean, it's dumb stuff. Why would anybody censor that? It's dumb. I guess they're trying to keep everything clean. The songs now, they're really overboard.

  DAVE MARSH: It was hip-hop and metal right away, and hip-hop more universally. Because they were the most defenseless. You realize that these record companies — I don't know if they still have them — at the time, they set up lyric-screening committees. Actual censorship boards within, which they denied for years. Until finally, somebody leaked a memo or something — probably to Rock & Rap Confidential — where they're actually talking about, "This record got through," and "This record we have to change the following." It promised no censorship, which is hallucinatory, right?

  JELLO BIAFRA: One of the few silver linings of being Tipper Gore's pigeon in the attempts to beat up on and censor music was when I was charged with obscenity because of Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist album — I got to spend some time with Frank Zappa on a few occasions. And, at one point, he came to me with an idea, where he said he was going to go to MTV and ask them to give him the "dead time" of the wee hours of the morning, when nobody was really watching them, and see if they would let him do whatever he wanted. To make it a much more free-form, creative, wide-open medium, that it should have been in the first place. And he told me he wanted me to be his "Andy Rooney." I barely knew who Andy Rooney was. But I realized what he wanted was occasional bits of editorial commentary. I thought, "Well, if it's something like that, sure, I'll go on TV." All kinds of ideas popped into my head. I made a whole file of ideas on the subject. But then, Frank's idea never happened.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: I understand where they were coming from, but I thought it was really stupid. They obviously did not win the battle or the war, because rap makes anything that the PMRC was even considering awful look like nothing. I didn't give it a lot of weight, I just thought, "Oh God, here we go again." It's the history of rock n' roll. There's always some entity saying, "It's the work of the devil" or Elvis Presley and his hips swiveling. And it's weird, because I ended up being a very strong supporter of Al Gore. I go, "It's weird that he's married to Tipper." Of course, now they're getting divorced. "Oh, maybe he saw the light!" Because she was coming from such a different place than what I felt Al Gore always stood for.

  LITA FORD: The only thing back then that bothered me was the censoring. Now, everything seems to be so open about sexuality. You couldn't just sit down, write a song, and say what you feel. You had to pretty much write it around what you think they might play and what they might not play. At least now, we have a bit more freedom.

  Losing the Plot

  GERALD CASALE: We quickly realized what MTV was really all about, and it didn't surprise us where it went after that. What would seem brilliant to a naïve artist, like a new art form — where artists could have audio/visual/multimedia self-expression — quickly turned into a commercial assembly line where all the videos looked alike. And then slowly, for advertising dollars, they had to keep playing videos less and less and create horrible programming...until they played no videos. And, of course, the whole experience was like Animal Farm, where the rules kept changing on the side of the barn. It's like, "But why didn't Madonna have to the do that?" "Because she can, sport!" It was extremely frustrating, exasperating, and sad. We went from being the cool art darlings to somebody shoved into the cut-out bin, because the world was safe for Bon Jovi now. It was a typical experience of an artist travailing corporate business agendas.

  ALAN HUNTER: I'd say that two to three years into it, what happened was that MTV — the three letters — began to be used in articles of all kinds and used as a generic term. They started using it as a "Kleenex term." "That commercial is very MTV-esque," "That movie is MTV-like." They were referring to the edit style, fast-paced video montages, and the short attention spans. When that started happening, we said, "Ugh. MTV is about to become 'big business.'" And there was certainly a corporate-down thing that started happening.

  BOB GIRALDI: In our business — the media and advertising business — when you become successful is when it's no longer fun. Because then you have a lot of requirements, a lot of things to live up to. Now all of a sudden, people say, "You have to do this. You have to do that. You can't do this. You have to do this." Why? Because it's been proven that, if you do that, it will be successful. In those early days, it wasn't like that. It was everybody collaborating, trying, and experimenting, and "Let's see what happens." The same with MTV — was all about "Let's see what happens."

  DAVE MARSH: There's this whole ideology that came out of the "greed is good" period — which is very much the "birth of MTV" period — that confuses "big" with "good." It confuses "size" with "excellence." It's, "Steven Speilberg is the best director because his movies grossed the most." "Michael Jackson is the greatest artist in history because his records sold the most." And MTV was very much a purveyor, both in terms of movies and music and lots of other things, of that idea. Sometimes explicitly, but more often, just implicitly. And I think that that's a risky game for any media enterprise to play, because you may have been number one for a long time, and you may be number one for a while into the future, but eventually, you ain't going to be number one. And if what you're pedaling is that everything under number one is worthless in descending or ascending degrees, that ain't no way to create a culture with lasting value, is it? And I do think that is part of their periodic identity crisis that they have. "OK, let's not do videos. Let's do reality shows...let's do videos for a while...let's do game shows." But that's part of their identity crisis. "How do we stay big?" It's such an anachronism.

  ERIC BLOOM: Some people's perspectives was, "These guys really suck...but they have a great video." Like somebody would put too much money in a video, which could be an amazing video, and the band takes off from it, people go see them live, and they're not very good. But all of the above happened. You could have a shitty video, but be a great band.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD: It got to a point where, before you'd even make a record, people would say, "Well, what's the video going
to be?" And that soured me a little bit. I was saying, "Nah. Let's make the music, and if there's a good video there, we'll make one. If not, then we'll pass." Then it became a promotional vehicle for launching records, as opposed to breaking it on radio and television.

  DAVE WAKELING: I sat behind two teenagers one day, and they were talking about "that song," and they were like, "Oh, what about this?" "Yep, seen it." "What about this one?" "Yep, seen it." They were ticking the songs off by which ones they'd seen the videos of. For my favorite songs of the '60s — like "Downtown" or "Walk Away Renée" — I had my own "videos." Every time I hear that song, my own little show-reel gets dusted off and taken out, and I replay my own "videos." Some of this a little racier than you could ever be allowed on MTV. So the downside could be that video was either particularly bad or particularly eye-catching, and especially if it was both, you'd never be able to hear a song you liked again, without seeing that midget on the motorcycle with the champagne. That was it. You wouldn't be able to see nothing else.