I Want My MTV
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - “IT’S THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD”
Chapter 2 - “I DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO PLUG IN A LIGHT”
Chapter 3 - “WE WERE JUST IDIOTS IN HOTEL ROOMS”
Chapter 4 - “WHAT’S A VJ?”
Chapter 5 - “A TOTAL, UNMITIGATED DISASTER”
Chapter 6 - “GIRLS SLIDING ON POLES”
Chapter 7 - “A HAIL MARY PASS”
Chapter 8 - “MIDGETS, MODELS, AND TRANNIES”
Chapter 9 - “POUTING AND SHOULDER PADS”
Chapter 10 - “SHUT THAT DOOR!”
Chapter 11 - “THEY FIGURED OUT A WHOLE NEW PERSONA”
Chapter 12 - “GIRLS BELONG IN CAGES”
Chapter 13 - “THAT RACISM BULLSHIT”
Chapter 14 - “I’M NOT LIKE OTHER BOYS”
Chapter 15 - “THE TWO M’S”
Chapter 16 - “YOU GOT CHAR-AS-MA”
Chapter 17 - “HE’S GOT A METAL PLATE IN HIS HEAD”
Chapter 18 - “WANNABE CECIL B. DEMILLES”
Chapter 19 - “WHY DON’T I JUST TAKE $50,000 AND LIGHT IT ON FIRE?”
Chapter 20 - “DON’T BE A WANKER ALL YOUR LIFE”
Chapter 21 - “A WHOPPING, STEAMING TURD”
Chapter 22 - “A WEDDING DRESS WITH NOTHING UNDERNEATH IT”
Chapter 23 - “NO CABLE NETWORK IS WORTH $500 MILLION”
Chapter 24 - “GACKED TO THE TITS”
Chapter 25 - “THEY DISS THE BEATLES”
Chapter 26 - “WE PUT FINCHER ON THE MAP”
Chapter 27 - “THERE I AM, WITH MY RACK”
Chapter 28 - “THE LEGION OF DECENCY”
Chapter 29 - “HICKORY DICKORY DOCK, THIS BITCH WAS . . .”
Chapter 30 - “I’D LIKE TO THANK MY CHEEKBONES”
Chapter 31 - “THE ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS”
Chapter 32 - “MARTHA WAS HEARTBROKEN”
Chapter 33 - “A TRUE TELEVISION NETWORK”
Chapter 34 - “THAT’S WHAT HYPE CAN DO TO YOU”
Chapter 35 - “THE FIRST TIME I SMELLED FREEBASE”
Chapter 36 - “I BROUGHT SNOWBALLS TO THE DESERT”
Chapter 37 - “PEOPLE IN THE HOOD RUSHED TO GET CABLE”
Chapter 38 - “WE’VE ALWAYS LOVED GUNS N’ ROSES”
Chapter 39 - “THOSE HAREM PANTS CAME OUT OF NOWHERE”
Chapter 40 - “EGO-FUCKING-MANIACS”
Chapter 41 - “I WANT TO HAVE A NICKNAME”
Chapter 42 - “RHYTHM NATION”
Chapter 43 - “YOUR MANAGER’S AN ASSHOLE”
Chapter 44 - “KERMIT UNPLUGGED”
Chapter 45 - “SILLY, SUPERFICIAL, AND WONDERFUL”
Chapter 46 - “TIRED OF CHEAP SEX SONGS”
Chapter 47 - “A MONKEY COULD DO IT”
Chapter 48 - “A PEP RALLY GONE WRONG”
Chapter 49 - “YOU’RE NO BETTER THAN A RABBIT!”
Chapter 50 - “GETTING OUT OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS”
Chapter 51 - “LET’S GET CRAZY TONIGHT”
Chapter 52 - “FAT CITY”
Chapter 53 - “YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW I MISS IT”
Acknowledgements
Cast of Characters
Index
DUTTON
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, October 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum All rights reserved
PREGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Marks, Craig.
I want my MTV : the uncensored story of the music video revolution /
by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN : 978-1-101-52641-5
1. MTV Networks—History. 2. Rock videos—United States. I. Tannenbaum, Rob.
II. Title.
PN1992.8.M87M33 2011
791.45’611—dc23 2011032517
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To my mom and dad, who loved me unconditionally and always had cable.
And to Porter, for whom I promise to do the same. (C.M.)
To Gabriela, who links the family that’s recently gone
to the family that’s soon to arrive. (R.T.)
So the book covers the years 1981 to 1992 . . .
WALTER YETNIKOFF, record executive: Okay. I don’t remember any of that.
Introduction
“RIDICULE IS NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF”
HARDLY ANYONE THOUGHT IT WOULD SUCCEED.
Upon hearing of the plan to launch a TV channel that would show music videos around the clock, businessmen of wealth and experience—worldly men who ran record companies and partied with rock stars, and visionary men who made fortunes by anticipating the explosion of cable TV—scoffed and snickered. Who would watch this channel? Even if it proved popular, who would advertise there? Why would GM or Anheuser-Busch want to reach this channel’s audience, consisting mostly of fourteen- to twenty-four-year-olds? Where’s the money in that?
Prior to the launch of this channel on August 1, 1981, only a few dozen people believed it would succeed, and all of them worked at the channel. The start-up staff was a coterie of misfits, inexperienced and determined, and included two one-eyed executives who were later hailed as visionaries. Which is not to say that everyone who worked at the channel believed it would succeed. “It sounded like an asinine idea,” Bob Pittman (one of the one-eyed executives) admitted five years after the launch, when the channel was the centerpiece of a $525 million bidding war. It’s easy to imagine this as the theme of one of the network’s early advertising campaigns, which were usually brash and self-mocking: “MT
V: It sounds like an asinine idea.”
There are two kinds of successful consumer products: some fill an existing need by making people’s lives easier (toilet paper, or the dishwasher), and others create a need that didn’t previously exist (sanitary wipes, or coffee). It’s easy to predict success for the first type of product, but harder for the second. In 1981, there was no need for music videos. MTV was an outlet for something that barely existed; the network had about a hundred of them in inventory, mostly by marginal or unpopular British and Australian bands. Not only that, MTV planned to get more videos by asking someone else, record labels, to make and pay for them, then hand them over for free. That’s not a business model, that’s chutzpah.
But from asinine beginnings, MTV became the sun around which popular culture rotated. The MTV aesthetic during its Golden Age of 1981 to 1992—quick cuts, celebrations of youth, shock value, impermanence, beauty—influenced not only music, but network and cable TV, radio, advertising, film, art, fashion, race, teen sexuality, even politics. The channel was plotted to captivate an audience whose interests had been ignored: John Lack, who started MTV, called teenagers “the demographic group least interested in TV,” because TV wasn’t interested in teens. Children had cartoons; adults had the evening news and most of the shows that followed it. Teens were an untapped audience, an invisible power. MTV gave them what they wanted, and got them not only interested in, but obsessed by MTV, making it their clubhouse.
Like MGM in the 1930s, or CBS from the mid-’50s to the mid-’70s, MTV became the preeminent arbiter of celebrity. Constant airplay of Michael Jackson videos helped make Thriller the best-selling album of all time. When MTV Europe launched in 1987 as the start of a global expansion that now reaches from Brazil to Pakistan, the network’s influence expanded beyond the U.S. Yo! MTV Raps, which debuted a year later, gave hip-hop its first international forum and accelerated the music’s popularity around the world. The channel’s first foray into long-form programming, the faux-game show Remote Control, introduced dorm-dwelling smart-alecks to novice comedian Adam Sandler. When House of Style arrived the next year, it transformed Cindy Crawford from a model to a mogul. Cannily, MTV never tied success to the fate of any one or two stars. (“MTV works in dog years,” Downtown Julie Brown wisecracked, after her VJ tenure ended.) Unlike traditional networks, which spend millions to retain popular shows and actors whose popularity is bound to dwindle, MTV sees talent as disposable and replaceable; the network is the star, not the performer. Martha Quinn got five years. Tawny Kitaen got a year and a half. A-ha got three months.
MTV gave work to young directors, producers, and executives who became power brokers in film and TV, most notably David Fincher, who received Academy Award nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Social Network, and Michael Bay, who received no Academy Award nominations, but who made shit blow up real good in Armageddon and the Transformers series. Videos created ample work for Playboy playmates and for choreographers, dancers, mimes, animal trainers, pyrotechnicians, hairdressers, aesthe-ticians, dry-ice vendors, coke dealers, and midgets. (Midgets were a staple of music videos. Midget freelance work surely peaked in the ’80s.) MTV did a lot for record labels, helping to revive a slumping industry, but it was the bands who benefitted most. The channel gave a platform to new acts, asking only that they be beautiful or outrageous. MTV could make stars out of Brits in eyeliner, rappers in genie pants, permed Jersey boys, even choreographers with weak singing voices. Within weeks, acts went from journeymen or unknowns to stars whose faces were familiar across the country. Their lives were transformed, sometimes ruined. The story of music videos is also the story of overnight celebrity and the experiences created by celebrity: the indulgence and decadence, the backstage sexual exploits, the drugs that were as ever-present as makeup kits and hair weaves. This is true not only for the artists but for the network executives themselves, most spirited among them former radio program director Les Garland, who partied on yachts with Rod Stewart, cameoed in videos with Eddie Murphy, and charmed centerfolds, actresses, stewardesses, and starlets, often on the same night. A history of MTV is also a history of excess that has since vanished from the music business due to dwindling sales. As Simon Le Bon, the Marlon Brando of music videos, mutters darkly, “Nobody’s got any money to make videos now.” From today’s frugal perspective, the stories of the video industry’s invention, expansion, and domination read like the last days of the Roman Empire, if Nero had been really into dry ice and pyro.
Not all MTV content was fleeting. If an artist’s peak coincided with the Golden Age of music videos, there’s a good chance that artist is among the few remaining acts who can still sell out sheds, arenas, even stadiums, testament to MTV’s pop-cultural dominance in its first decade. Before Xbox and Facebook, the Disney Channel and text-messaging, kids did one thing, separately but simultaneously: They watched MTV. Now those kids are parents, and when they want to relive their youth, they plunk down $250 for a ticket to see Madonna, the Police, U2, Guns N’ Roses, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, Motley Crue, George Michael, Michael Jackson (until his death), or Janet Jackson. All were synonymous with MTV’s first decade, and all continued to pack enormodomes twenty and thirty years later. Oldsters, purists, clergymen, and boomers carped that MTV’s corrupt value system promoted style over substance, impermanence over immortality. MTV and its viewers knew this was a false choice. Videos made songs better, not worse. They enhanced the joy of being a music fan, rather than diminishing it. Unless you were Billy Squier. Then, you were fucked. (See Chapter 21: “A Whopping, Steaming Turd.”)
As the subject of an oral history, MTV is uniquely compelling; the network identity morphs but never peters out. There’s no dreary third act where the star gets old, Learns an Important Lesson, and ceases being relevant. Like Charlie Brown or Beavis and Butt-head, the passing of time does not age MTV. It is perpetually fourteen years old, about to start high school, excited, but not too smart. With vampiric persistence, the network perpetually finds new, young blood.
But for us, 1992 marks the end of MTV’s Golden Era, which was brought to a close by a series of unrelated factors. Video budgets rose steeply, leading to wasteful displays; digital editing arrived, making it a snap for directors to flit between shots and angles; all the good ideas had been done; record labels increasingly interfered in video decisions; many of the best directors moved on to film; Madonna made Body of Evidence. It’s also the year MTV debuted The Real World, a franchise show that sped a move away from videos, the network’s founding mission, and into reality shows about kids in crisis, whether an unplanned pregnancy or how to un-marry Spencer Pratt. The Real World was the culmination of the network’s initiative to create its own shows and was also the last time MTV could claim to be revolutionary. MTV created the video music industry, then abandoned it, leaving behind a trail of tears—disgruntled music-video fans have stamped the phrase “MTV sucks” and “Bring back music videos” all over the comments pages of YouTube.
MTV WAS CREATED BY WARNER AMEX SATELLITE ENTERtainment Company (WASEC), a joint venture between two companies with little in common: Warner Communications, a fast-growing media company committed to “identifying new markets and new technologies,” and American Express, the credit-card giant, founded in 1850 as a shipping company. Warner executives believed in a future when all homes would be wired, and they invested heavily in cable TV and Atari home computers. (“The computer’s emergence as a commonplace object in the home,” Warner’s 1981 annual report predicted, “will, in fact, change life all over again for the American consumer.” They were right, but they were also too early to profit from their foresight.) Warner Communications envisioned cable TV as a sales tool, to deliver goods and services directly into the home, and American Express rode along in the hope that soon customers would buy the company’s traveler’s checks and investment services via two-way, interactive cable TV.
MTV first appeared in suburban and rural areas, where the cost per
mile of digging and installing cable was far cheaper than in cities. As a result, it was seen first by teens who probably needed it the most—videos brought big-city ideas to the sticks, and terrified parents who had terrified their parents by listening to the Beatles. In small towns or big cities, MTV was like an early social network—when Stray Cats videos aired, showing the trio in rockabilly outfits, fans in the Midwest began coming to shows in cowboy shirts and pompadours. And Mike Score of A Flock of Seagulls, owner of early MTV’s most unprecedented hair, says video exposure brought like-minded fans together at clubs where outcasts discovered they were part of a tribe.
Even if it accomplished nothing else, MTV pissed off baby boomers, in part because it signified a transition from an era when the biggest rock stars were bands that transformed public consciousness, to one where technology filled that role. Today, that transformation is complete: Apple sold 275 million iPods in the first nine years they were on the market, which is higher than the number of records sold by Elton John, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, or U2 in their careers. But MTV was the first time technology became a rock star, because—unlike calculators, CD players, or home gaming systems—it was sold at a reasonable price.
Every new technology contains a philosophy. The Walkman told consumers they should never stray far from music, nor were they required to interact with strangers. The iPhone preached permanent access to all media, while also miniaturizing the idea of status. What was the philosophy of MTV? It was best expressed in an Adam Ant song that was an early favorite on MTV: “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.”
MTV was an invention, as many principals in the story emphasized to us. Music video was “the Wild, Wild West,” a lawless place where nerve and cunning hands were rewarded. “All the rules go away,” Bob Pittman told a reporter in 1981, and other people recall it as a time when “There were no rules.” One cinematographer proudly said, “We had a policy not just to break the rules, but to blow up the fucking rules.”