I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  JOE ELLIOTT, Def Leppard: We did our first three videos—“Bringin’ on the Heartbreak,” “High ’n’ Dry,” and “Let It Go”—with the same speed you’d go out for a meal. I wouldn’t even really call them videos. They were filmed during a sound check. We put the kids from our fan club right in front and angled the camera so it looked like a full house. We wanted to get something on film, so we could get it onto The Old Grey Whistle Test, a British music program. We’d grown up watching that show and we thought it would be cool if we gave them a promo film and they played it—which they never did.

  MIKE RENO: We were going, “Videos? What are videos?” I remember saying, “Huh? We finally have a day off and we’re going to be dancing around the streets in makeup?” I also remember seeing the budget and being like, “We’re spending $25,000 to do this?” If you look at the beginning of “Turn Me Loose,” I’m holding a cigarette and the camera pans over my shoulder. The director said, “Your hand is trembling.” It was nerve-wracking for me. For some people it came very easily, and for some it didn’t come at all.

  JONATHAN CAIN, Journey: Steve Perry was very anti-video. He’d always say, “We’re performers, we’re entertainers, but we’re not actors.” And we were not a very photogenic band. So we stayed on the sidelines at first. When Frontiers came out in 1983, our manager, Herbie Herbert, was tight with the NFL Films guys, so he hired their crew, and they put together the footage you see in the “Faithfully” video. The live stuff looks great. But the shot of Steve shaving off his mustache was a bit much. I mean, did people even have to know he had a mustache? I didn’t get that.

  JOHN DIAZ: In the late ’70s, I became a producer and assistant director on TV commercials. Videos turned my life around. My idea was to bring in young commercial directors I’d been working with. One was Tom Buckholtz, who did the infamous Journey video “Separate Ways,” shot on a wharf in New Orleans. That was the first air-guitar video. In fact, it had air guitar, air keyboards, and air drums. It had air everything. Our concepts were so inane. At the end, you see a girl in bed wearing headphones who “dreamed” the whole video while listening to the song.

  JONATHAN CAIN: I’m at a loss to explain that video. Good Lord, I will never live down those air keyboards. No matter what else I’ve done in my career, sooner or later people find a way to ask me about the “Separate Ways” video. And Perry, I don’t know what he was thinking, but he cut his hair right before the video. Bad idea. His hair was rocking before the shoot.

  RUDOLF SCHENKER: When I saw Journey videos, something was wrong.

  DEBBIE NEWMAN: The deal was, none of the band members could bring girlfriends or wives to the shoot in New Orleans. But Steve Perry had started dating Sherrie Swafford, and he brought her. There was a ton of tension. The band hated Sherrie.

  JONATHAN CAIN: Sherrie was jealous and possessive. And when she found out there was gonna be a girl in the video—oh my god. There was a big kicking and screaming session. Sherrie was giving Steve a very bad time about that girl: “She’s a whore, she’s a bitch, I don’t want her in the video.”

  DEBBIE NEWMAN: The video was terrible. I mean, truly terrible. MTV played it constantly.

  ADAM DUBIN, director: Here’s a band at their commercial peak, and some idiot decided to film them on a wharf, and—here’s the worst part—instead of giving them instruments, let them mime playing imaginary instruments. The director should be shot. And the manager should be shot for allowing his band to be put in this position. But this is my point, there really wasn’t a music-video aesthetic yet.

  JONATHAN CAIN: Beavis and Butt-head made total fun of “Separate Ways.” Which was an outrage to me because, you know, we helped make MTV. I called our manager and said, “Isn’t there anything we can do to stop this?”

  KEVIN CRONIN: You were either on MTV and hip, or you weren’t on MTV and you didn’t even fucking exist. When you were their darling, it was great. When you weren’t their darling, you were fucked. We developed a love/hate relationship with them.

  BRYAN ADAMS, artist: I didn’t really think videos mattered. MTV was a cable channel with minor viewership. Shooting videos? I didn’t care. I should have.

  FRED SCHNEIDER, the B-52s: We wanted to do videos. Our manager, Gary Kurfirst, said, “What do you want to do videos for? You don’t make any money from them. Look at David Byrne, he puts out videos, he doesn’t make any money from them.” Gary didn’t get the point. I guess you wouldn’t say he was a visionary in that respect.

  JANE WIEDLIN: When Miles Copeland, the president of our record label, said we were gonna shoot a music video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” we were like, “Music video? That’s stupid. You suck.” We were totally bratty about it. The money he used for the video was, like, left over from the Police’s video budget. It was pennies. They got a guy to follow us around Hollywood. We wanted an old-school convertible, so we rented it from Rent-A-Wreck for $10 or $15.

  This was the plot: “Get in a car and drive around. Belinda, you sing. Everyone else look cute.” When we needed a grand finale, our big idea was to jump in the fountain at the intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. I remember thinking, The cops are gonna come any minute, this is gonna be so cool.

  MICHAEL STIPE, R.E.M.: Miles Copeland said, “I want you to make music videos, and I want you to lip-sync.” And I said, “No, I’m not going to do it.” He said “Okay,” and that was the end of the meeting. I was this twenty-three-year-old little shit with acne and a bad haircut, and he allowed us the latitude. But it was a reaction against what other people were doing. It felt like a sellout to lip-sync. Jim Herbert, who was my art professor, drove with us to a place in Georgia where a guy named Mr. Miller made whirligigs and had thousands of them on a hill And Jim filmed us. The first videos we did really were, for lack of a better term, anti-video.

  SHARON ORECK, producer: Prince’s “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” videos were just smoke, then Prince’s face, then smoke, then Prince’s butt, and then smoke. Prince was interesting, and I liked the songs, but the videos were profoundly bad. They were, like, porn bad. His videos were so filled with smoke that everyone on the set would get diarrhea, because mineral oil was so thick in the air.

  DON LETTS, director: The Gap Band were a handful. They turned up on the set of “Party Train” in a white limo. They stumbled out of the limo, then one of the dudes bit the makeup woman on the ass. I got them to walk fifteen feet twice, did a tracking shot, and then got them the hell out of there.

  SIMON FIELDS: The Gap Band wanted to be wheeled onto the sand by white guys. Not in the video, but on the set.

  PHIL COLLINS, artist: For “In the Air Tonight,” I had a distinct idea of what I wanted the video to be. The best bit is where the album cover sings. But the part where I’m walking down the corridor? That was meant to look scary, like something from The Blair Witch Project, where you can only see what’s directly in front of you, as though you were wearing a miner’s helmet. And it didn’t turn out that way at all. Unless you’re lucky, you end up looking back on these things with a bit of dread.

  STEVE LUKATHER: We hated the “Hydra” video so bad. This was the image the world saw on TV? I might as well have hung myself in a closet with an orange ball gag in my mouth and a dildo up my ass. We were going, “How will we live this down?” So our fuck-you answer for our third album was to film ourselves playing live at A&M Studios. And then MTV didn’t want to play that. I’d like to underline how much I hated making videos.

  DAVE HOLMES: I loved how acts who were huge before MTV tried to adapt and couldn’t. Like “Abracadabra” by Steve Miller, which was a huge song. Oh, stop it. You’re making a fool of yourself. He just seemed too old. He was probably in his late thirties.

  ADAM DUBIN: “Start Me Up” is a great song, but it’s like somebody locked down a video camera and said to the Rolling Stones, “Okay, get out there. We’ve got an hour.” That’s a ridiculous video. It’s almost like they couldn’t be bothered.

 
BILLY JOEL, artist: The Rolling Stones may be the best band that ever was, but their videos were absolutely horrendous. It’s as if Mick said, “I refuse to spend money on this.”

  MICK KLEBER: Bonnie Raitt was one of the artists from the ’70s who was nervous about making music videos. Bob Seger wasn’t a huge fan of the idea of a music video. They were self-conscious about their still photos. You can imagine how uncomfortable they were with a video.

  MEAT LOAF: MTV was never very kind to me. They never played any of my videos.

  PAUL FLATTERY: The truth is, video did kill the radio star. It was like when the talkies happened and actors lost their careers if they didn’t have a good voice. Bob Seger was a great singer, but he felt he was overweight, so he always had to be shot in black-and-white, and at certain angles. There were a lot of people trying to cover up.

  MARTHA DAVIS, the Motels: It’s a lot harder for a woman to not think about her appearance, because we’ve been programmed that way for so long. Women didn’t have the confidence to be dorks in their videos. It’s easier for a guy to be a goofball, because that’s what guys do. Especially if you’re Huey Lewis.

  HUEY LEWIS, artist: On “Do You Believe in Love,” we did whatever the record label told us. They hired a stylist, and we were made up to the max, and I sang to a girl who was asleep in a bed with my band. When I saw it, I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. And everybody loved it! We were producing our own records, so I said, “Let’s do our own videos, too. We can think of far sillier shit than this.”

  PATTY SMYTH: We had a hard time getting radio to add “Goodbye to You.” At that point, if a station was playing one chick record, like Pat Benatar or the Pretenders, they wouldn’t play another. But MTV liked our video, and the song became a huge hit because of MTV. The first time I saw it on MTV I was really surprised, because the label had added cheesy, swirly psychedelic special effects to it. That’s so classic record company. “Oh, let’s put some schmutz on it to make it look professional.” My videos got more and more ridiculous, because the record company got more and more involved.

  JOHNNY BARBIS, manager: Elton John felt that he didn’t photograph well. He didn’t like the way he looked. So getting him to make videos was not easy.

  DON LETTS: Chrissie Hynde was not pro-video. She’s old-school. She had a few moments when people were staring at her in the street. I said, “Darling if you don’t want to be stared at, you shouldn’t be making a video.”

  TOM PETTY: I didn’t much like making videos—the hours were insane—but I liked the outcome. My band hated making videos. They didn’t want to go anywhere near them. I didn’t blame them. But I didn’t have a choice. I had to be in them.

  ROBERT SMITH: My overriding impression of making videos is that they’re incredibly tedious and incredibly hard work.

  CHUCK D: I hated doing videos. Anything over four hours, to me, is like, I want to get the fuck out of here. I don’t like to be photographed and I don’t like to be in front of a camera. So my biggest recollection is doing the same thing over and over and over again, which I’ve never gotten used to.

  MARTIN FRY, ABC: Every video was a one-day shoot. And that one day would last forty-eight hours.

  ANN CARLI, record executive: We had a fire on the set one time. The lights ignited a bunch of trash, but we didn’t want the fire department there, because they would have shut us down. We probably had too many people in the building, we probably shouldn’t have been working so late. But at the time, it was unregulated. We’d do an eighteen-hour day with seventy-two setups.

  ANN WILSON: It would be ten hours of waiting around in makeup and hair, then ten minutes in front of the camera and five more hours of waiting around. At the end of the two days, when the sun was coming up in the morning, they’d say, “Time for your close-ups!”

  MARTIN FRY: The food on set was good. And you got air miles.

  TERRI NUNN, Berlin: We shot videos for “The Metro” and “Sex” in a two-day period, back to back, forty-eight hours straight. What I remember from the shoot is crying. There’s a sequence in “The Metro” where I’m walking on subway tracks—it was a stage set—and I’m kind of stumbling through it. I was exhausted and pissed off, like, “When are we gonna fucking finish this video? I wanna go to bed and die.” I was sobbing, and the director was like “Great! Yeah! Okay, film her now!” It was good for the video.

  MICK KLEBER: If you were a music-video executive, you’d want to show up on set around midnight, an hour or two before the thing’s supposed to be over, because that’s when the shit is really hitting the fan. You’re coming face-to-face with the reality that you’re not going to be able to get all your shots in the time you’ve allotted, and you’re either gonna have to spend more money or make some creative adjustments.

  DAVID ROBINSON, the Cars: I just tried to get through them with my dignity intact.

  BRYAN ADAMS: I tried to whinge my way though it.

  BILLY JOEL: I hated making videos. See, I became a musician because I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a movie star. I’m a piano player, not an actor. I’m not photogenic. Back in the ’70s, people who knew my music didn’t even know what I looked like until they’d see an album cover. Then they’d meet me and say, “Oh, you’re short.” Everybody I talked to hated doing videos. Elton hated them. Springsteen didn’t like making them. He held out for a while, but the music business became completely geared toward them.

  JON LANDAU, manager: When Bruce Springsteen put out Nebraska in ’82, he wasn’t interested in making videos. He hadn’t yet decided what MTV had to do with him creatively. Then and now, Bruce is interested in three things: writing songs, making records, and doing concerts. Everything else is secondary. The idea that you had to make a video every time you put out a record wasn’t very appealing. So Arnold Levine, the director of creative services at Columbia Records, assembled a video for “Atlantic City” that Bruce doesn’t appear in. Bruce loved what Arnold had done. Les Garland and John Sykes were big Bruce fans, and MTV played “Atlantic City.” But Bruce had no ambition to become a video artist.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: Rod Stewart didn’t like making videos. We shot “Tonight I’m Yours” at the pool at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in LA. We booked twenty rooms that overlooked the pool, and we had lovely girls in bikinis having pillow fights on the balconies. There’s some fairly obvious ’80s imagery: a nun in a rowboat, that sort of thing. Well, Rod partied the night before, and he didn’t want to come out of his trailer. I went to have a chat with him, and he had sunglasses on. I said, “Rod, come on. I’m gonna film the video anyway. Do you want to be in it?” And he went, “Oh fuck, all right.”

  BRIAN GRANT: I was in LA, and Russell asked if I would operate one of the cameras. It was probably the most debauched evening I’ve experienced in my life. There were forty or fifty very beautiful women there, some in bikinis, and a helicopter overhead. There was plenty of substance abuse going on all around. In every room, I believe. The police shut down the filming, but they didn’t shut down the rest of the night’s activities.

  RANDY SKINNER: Rod used to act out his lyrics in his videos. For instance, he would do a choo-choo train move when he’d sing a lyric about a train. He was very literal. I’d always howl when I saw that.

  CAROL ROSENSTEIN, producer: I became Bruce Gowers’s line producer, and Warner Bros. hired us to do four Rod Stewart videos. We were meeting Rod and his manager, Billy Gaff, at the finest restaurant in LA, Le St. Germain. After a while, the maître d’ says, “Mr. Gaff called, and he and Mr. Stewart are running a bit late. But he said to have a drink and order an appetizer.” A while later, the maître d’ comes around again and says, “Mr. Gaff says Mr. Stewart’s going to be a little while longer, go ahead and have your dinner.” We finish dinner, no Rod.

  Next day, the meeting is rescheduled at another super-expensive restaurant. Again, same thing happens. We eat, no Rod. We wait another couple of days. Finally we get the call: “Come to Rod’s house at 10 A.M. on Saturday.” />
  We were in the kitchen, waiting for him. Amazing kitchen, by the way. Rod comes in wearing nothing but a loosely tied silk robe. Bruce says, “Rod, we have some ideas for the locations of the videos.” Rod says, “Eh, let’s just do the whole thing here. It’s a nice house.” And we did. When we were setting up, we had to store some lights in the master bathroom. There was a large apothecary jar of talcum powder. That’s what I thought it was, until I saw somebody reach into it who hadn’t taken a bath. Rod was fun to work with, though. And we always ate very well.