I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  Putting a Jew and an Arab in the video was just about breaking taboos. Yes, the Muslim in the video is drinking a beer. They pull into a petrol station and the Arab makes the Jewish gentleman pay for the gas. These days, with all the sensitivity towards religion, you wouldn’t get to make that video.

  MICK JONES: We were showing how people can get along—by drinking beer and going to Burger King. The idea of the video was about oil, really. We were in America, so we went to the oil fields in Texas. That was the subtext of it. I wanted to wear red long johns, but Don wouldn’t let me. That’s why I put a mosquito mask on my face, ’cause I was in a bad mood.

  TODD RUNDGREN: At first, there was a more eclectic variety of videos on the air, because bands weren’t yet making videos specifically for MTV. After MTV was recognized as being a great promotion vehicle, things got more formulaic: smoke bombs, scantily clad women, that sort of thing. There’s nothing wrong with smoke bombs and scantily clad women the first couple of times, you know? Then you start to think, Nobody has any ideas here, really.

  BRUCE ALLEN, manager: Loverboy wanted their videos to be sexier. It’s all about sex. That’s why I loved those videos like Duran Duran—what is it, “Hot Girls on Film”?

  PAUL FLATTERY: We shot the Bryan Adams video for “Cuts Like a Knife” in the empty pool at Hollywood Athletic Club. Simon Fields was very proud of auditioning the girls. He’d have to see their breasts.

  RAQUEL PENA, model: My modeling agency sent me to the audition, and there were hundreds of gorgeous girls there. I was shocked that I got chosen. Steve Barron wanted someone with really long legs, and I wore a black bathing suit that he liked. I wore the same suit in the video. That’s how low-budget it was! I was twenty, but I looked like I was thirteen.

  BRYAN ADAMS: The abandoned pool and a girl: that was the entire concept. A lot of people wanted to know about the girl—she became a bit of a cult figure. She ended up dating one of the guys at the record company, of course.

  STEVE BARRON: I got some stink from Rolling Stone for the “Cuts Like a Knife” video. The song has a sexy vibe to it, so we made a sexy video, and we cast a very pretty girl in a swimsuit. And they wrote a big article about how videos like “Cuts Like a Knife” were bad for music because they were pushing sex.

  DON LETTS: The record labels used to say, “We want this video to fit seamlessly with the video that’s before it and the one after it.” I’d think, What the fuck are you talking about? I want my video to leap out of the screen.

  OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: The premise of the “Physical” video was to distract from the fact that the song was so sexual. I was freaked out about it: I had a good-girl image and the song was naughty. I called my manager and said, “We have to pull the record.” But it was too late. The video plays against the lyrics by making physical mean exercise, not sex.

  BRIAN GRANT: Olivia was coming off a massive flop with Xanadu, a dreadful film. I made fun of the lyrics by setting the video in a gym: She tries in vain to train some fat guys, then goes away, and when she comes back, they’ve turned into good-looking gay boys.

  OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN: Brian Grant threw in a twist at the end—instead of me walking off with a guy, the guys walk off with each other. Some people edited off the end when they showed the video. I always had gay friends. And as the choreographer, Kenny Ortega—we’d done Xanadu together—was gay, it seemed fine.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” was super, super, super gay. There was no holding back. We shot in Nice, in the south of France. My costume designer was in charge of body-painting all the boys. Elton brought his suitcase of glasses and a thousand different colors of suits, and every scene he’d change his outfit and we’d use the painted boys in the shot. We had leather boys, and mimes, and kissing clowns. Bruno Tonioli, who’s a judge of Dancing with the Stars, was one of our dancers. I think he played one of the traffic policemen dressed in leg warmers and a leotard.

  Billy Joel’s “Allentown” has homoerotic imagery, as well. There were shirtless construction workers. And there is bare assery. We had to pay the boys $500 each to show their asses. I think it was the first time bare ass had been shown in a video. Don’t forget, that was 1982. There’s been quite a cultural change since then. That was many years before I did the pilot for Queer as Folk, where the first day of the shoot I had a guy’s tongue up another guy’s ass.

  BILLY JOEL: In The Hangover Part II they did a very profane and hilarious spoof of “Allentown.” There was renewed interest in the video on YouTube, so I watched it the other day for the first time in a while. Now, Russell was a brilliant director. But I didn’t realize until I watched it again how gay that video was. It’s really gay! There’s a shower scene with all these good-looking, muscular young steel workers who are completely bare assed. And then they’re all oiled up and twisting valves and knobs. I’d missed this completely when I was doing the video. I just thought it was like The Deer Hunter. You know, guys go off to war, they come back, they’re all messed up, and there’re steelworkers who don’t have jobs—okay, I get that. But did they have to be taking a shower with their bare asses hanging out? Maybe there’s something artsy-fartsy about that, I don’t know.

  LOL CREME: We had a concept for Elton John’s “Kiss the Bride” which was big, and big budget. He was all for it, but his manager John Reid got the budget and said, “Forget it.” He’d recently gotten the bill for Elton’s previous videos, done with Russell Mulcahy, and they spent God knows what in the south of France—most of it, I was told, on dinners, champagne, and coke.

  BILLY JOEL: Russell directed my first real video, “Pressure.” I put myself completely in his hands. I said, “What do you want me to do?” He said, “You’re gonna sink into a pool of foam and disappear.” “Okay.” “And then you’re gonna be in a chair raging at the sky.” “Okay.” “And then you’re gonna walk down this bridge.” “Okay.” It was his movie, his vision. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

  BRIAN GRANT: Russell was probably the most successful director of that era. Everyone wanted him to direct their videos.

  PAUL FLATTERY: Russell Mulcahy was so ahead of the curve. He invented the jump cut. He was the first to bring in glass shots, where you paint on a piece of glass and combine that with live footage to create a very elaborate appearance. He used it on Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy.” He was the first to use dance in a meaningful way. He was the first to bring in body paint.

  MARTY CALLNER, director: I was in bed one day, watching a pay cable station called the Z Channel, and a music video came on: “Bette Davis Eyes,” directed by Russell Mulcahy. It broke every rule of what is and isn’t allowed on television. It was the most creative thing I’d ever seen on TV.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: Steven Spielberg rang me up after he saw “Bette Davis Eyes.” I was in a van in London, editing a video at two in the morning. An assistant came in and said, “Oh, there was a Steven Spielberg rang you. I told him to call back.” I went, “What?!”

  DANIEL PEARL, director of photography: Russell was a visionary. The whole genre was kind of his baby. I’d describe his directorial style as “organized chaos”; I’d use that phrase to describe most of the early directors, actually. Some things were planned, but some were happy accidents. There was a great sense of freedom. It wasn’t anything like a studio film shoot. That’s one of the things that made music videos unique from other kinds of filmmaking. We had a policy not to break the rules, but to blow up the fucking rules. There’d be a rule, like, “Do not shoot a person in black-and-white with a red filter, because it’ll look all blown out.” Fuckin’ cool.

  BRIAN GRANT: There was a lot of experimentation, some good and some bad. As a director, it was like somebody else was paying for me to attend film school. For Stevie Nicks’s “Stand Back,” I dreamed up the idea of doing Gone with the Wind in three minutes. I wanted to direct feature films, and I thought this would help prove myself. When Stevie watched the video, she hugged
me and said, “I look fat.” And she redid the video with somebody else—a simple, boring, dance-routine video. Such is life.

  STEVIE NICKS: “Stand Back” was my first and last foray into writing a video. I decided it was going to be a Civil War scene. It was insane—it didn’t go with the song at all. It was so bad, it was almost good. I tried to act, which was horrific. We used a house in Beverly Hills that we accidentally set on fire. I almost got killed riding a horse; he went straight into a grove of trees and the crew in the car driving alongside screamed, “Jump!” So we watched it back and I said, “This can never come out. I don’t care if it cost $1 million.” Irving Azoff, my manager, said, “You’re an idiot.” We knew “Stand Back” was gonna be a big hit and we had to have a video, so we hired another director and I paid for two complete videos.

  SHARON ORECK: The general rule was that video costs were 50 percent recoup-able; so if a video cost $50,000, the band was in for $25,000, which would get deducted from their royalty payments.

  DARYL HALL: I didn’t pay attention to how much money was being spent, much to my shame and sorrow. I was too stupid to realize that all the stuff was charged to me anyway. People loved to spend my money. This is a good story: Somebody decided the “Maneater” video wouldn’t be complete unless we had an actual panther, a man-eating animal, in the video. It appeared for a second and a half in the video and probably cost $10,000. This South American black panther was wired to the floor so it wouldn’t attack everybody. Of course, it got loose in this gigantic studio in LA and went in the rafters, fifty feet up. Nobody could get it down. That’s when I left the building.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: I collaborated on the storyboard for Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with Jim Steinman, who wrote and produced the song. Jim is fabulously, fabulously crazy. We would banter ideas over a bottle of red wine. I’d say, “Let’s set it in a school and have ninjas in one scene,” and he’d say “Let’s have a choirboy with glowing eyeballs.” We shot it in an old abandoned insane asylum in London. We had one sequence, which was Steinman’s idea, where a shirtless young boy is holding a dove and he throws the dove at the camera in slow motion. Bonnie came around the corner and screamed, in her Welsh accent, “You’re nothing but a fucking pre-vert!” And she stormed off.

  There was nothing perverse intended. The imagery was meant to be sort of pure. Maybe slightly erotic and gothic and creepy, but pure. Anyway, the video went to number one, and a year later Bonnie’s people rang up and asked if I would direct her new video. And I told them to fuck off, because I was insulted about being called a fucking pervert. And I was a little mad because pervert wasn’t pronounced correctly.

  PATTY SMYTH: Columbia had a full-blown video department by the time Scandal made “The Warrior.” They all had to justify their jobs, and they were scrambling around to come up with what they thought were cool ideas. They found some French chick who did body-painting. And then they brought me to a haircutter who had some crazy vision for what I should look like, and she cut off all my hair. In retrospect, that chick must have hated me, because she made me look as bad as she possibly could. “The Warrior” was the biggest hit of my career, and no one recognized me in the video.

  When I saw the video, I was crestfallen. I had no idea it would look like an off-Broadway version of Cats. I begged the label, “Please don’t release that.” I was so upset and embarrassed. But it turned out to be a Top 10 video. That Halloween, everybody dressed as the Warrior. People came to my shows dressed as the Warrior. And when I came to the “bang bang” part of the song, everyone in the crowd would shoot off their finger-guns, just like in the video. I prefer to think “The Warrior” was a hit because it was a great song. Because that video . . . oh my god.

  DENNIS DeYOUNG: I’m still not sure what the “Mr. Roboto” video is about.

  I wrote Kilroy Was Here like a screenplay: it’s the story of a baby-boom kid who sees Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, then sees the Beatles and decides to form a band. The story revolved around censorship, the Big Brother idea of banning rock n’ roll. The other guys in Styx were afraid of the idea. We’d sold out Madison Square Garden four tours in a row, so I was thinking, What’s next? I decided we should make a short film.

  The people who worked on the film were spectacular talents. I screened reels from a bunch of directors, and really liked Brian Gibson, who’d done an English film, Breaking Glass. Brian brought Steven Goldblatt, who became a major cinematographer. They cobbled together three videos from the film footage. Stan Winston designed the masks in “Mr. Roboto,” and he’s regarded as a Hollywood legend. Michael Winslow, the guy who makes all the amazing sounds with his mouth in the Police Academy movies, played Hendrix in the long-form video. And you know who the goddamn choreographer was for the robot dancing in “Mr. Roboto”? Kenny Ortega, the same guy who ruined Billy Squier’s career a year later.

  I probably shouldn’t have forced the idea on the band. Relations in Styx got really crappy after that, and Tommy Shaw quit at the end of the Kilroy tour.

  STEVE LUKATHER: After “Rosanna” and “Africa,” we did a horrible disco line-dancing video for “Waiting for Your Love,” which MTV didn’t play. MTV had turned against us. We were good enough for them when they launched, and then it was like, “Fuck you.” So for the next album, Isolation, we decided not to even appear in our own videos. And one of them got nominated for a VMA, for Best Director! I have to say, I hated MTV.

  Chapter 9

  “POUTING AND SHOULDER PADS”

  EFFEMINATE BRITISH BANDS SPREAD WEIRD HAIRCUTS ACROSS THE U.S.

  FOR A HUGE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE IN THE 1980s, radio was the only delivery system for music. And radio had not evolved much—with few exceptions, American stations ignored punk rock, and hadn’t changed their playlists in years. AOR (album-oriented rock) radio was based on tradition and legacy, and a belief that young audiences wanted to hear familiar music—Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird”—drawn from an unchanging canon. Rock was in danger of becoming as ossified as ballet, with its repeated repertoire of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, and classical music, with its endless performances of Beethoven’s fifth and seventh symphonies.

  If there had been videos for Bad Company and Deep Purple, MTV probably would have played them—during the early days, they were still committed to an AOR playlist. But to fill time, they played new wave bands, mostly from England, who dressed in outrageous finery and adored the camera. “Video to us is like stereo was to Pink Floyd,” Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes said in 1984. “It was new, it was just happening. And we saw we could do a lot with it.”

  When Duran Duran or Eurythmics videos aired in the same hour as Journey or REO Speedwagon, it was the Brits who seemed brighter, bolder, and more captivating. The lipsticked, cross-dressing audacity of these bands did not go unnoticed by an older generation. Bob Dylan, also in 1984, said, “I mean, now you can wear anything. You see a guy wearing a dress onstage now, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, right.’ You expect it.”

  LIMAHL, Kajagoogoo: In the UK, we’d come out of a period of depression in the late 1970s. We’d had electricity strikes by the miners and it was a real anarchic atmosphere. There was a movement of punk and skinheads and violence. Punk was pain and spitting and swearing, and I didn’t like it. When we arrived at new wave and the great synthesizer explosion, everybody wanted to forget the previous five years. New wave was optimism, color, escapism, and running a million miles an hour from reality.

  MARTIN FRY: It’s hard to explain to a younger audience, just how fucked up it was in 1982. You could get beaten up for wearing mascara, if you walked into a bar full of old guys playing dominoes, but that was part of the appeal. It was like saying “Fuck you.” Long may that spirit exist.

  ABC used to antagonize bands who wore leather jackets and leather pants. They’d say, “What the hell are you doing?” There was a war between bands who thought there was authenticity in wearing denim, and newfangle
d bands like Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and Culture Club. We were all children of Roxy Music anyway.

  JOHN TAYLOR: In the first year or two, videos primarily were coming out of Europe, with a very sophisticated milieu. And they were dropping like bombs on the suburbs of Ohio and Texas, places that were so conservative. For people that were a little different—maybe they didn’t yet know they were gay, or didn’t know they were into art—the kinds of things that were on MTV were like life changers. All this stuff like Culture Club was the result of an underground, progressive, liberal, London art-school sensibility.

  TOM BAILEY, Thompson Twins: A golden age of pop music had started in England. It began with the Human League and ended with Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Brits were using lots of electronics and synthesizers, and people in the American music scene were very suspicious of us.