by Craig Marks
NIKKI SIXX: Wayne knew the band, he hung out with the band, he partied with the band, he was friends with the band, so he was able to get inside our heads and take it over the top. We were traveling around the country in tour buses, the show’s going up and the show’s going down, and we wanted to capture it in “Home Sweet Home.” We wanted to capture what it’s like to be on tour. None of that was staged. It was just this honest moment.
DOC McGHEE: “Home Sweet Home” showed Tommy playing the piano. It gave Mötley a little more credibility.
TOMMY LEE: MTV played “Home Sweet Home” so many times, I honestly started to get sick of seeing it.
DOC McGHEE: I’d just starting to manage Bon Jovi when we did the video for “Runaway.” There’s a chubby girl who’s a runaway, but she has laser eyes, and the band is playing in a warehouse that’s burning. In the ’80s, every video had to look like Escape from New York. Something had to be on fire, and you had to be in an alley that was wet, or else you couldn’t shoot a video. Then “In and Out of Love” was done like a scripted movie, where the band is on the boardwalk, girls chase after them, and they hold newspapers in front of their faces to hide. Terrible.
LEN EPAND: For “Runaway,” we used a commercial director named Michael Cuesta, who had no music-video experience. After that, we shifted to Masfin Kahan, who did a few Bon Jovi videos. I wasn’t there, but I was told that he offered an illegal substance to one of the police officers assigned to the shoot for security. He was taken away before the shoot was done.
DOC McGHEE: I was there when he got arrested. Some cop saw him doing blow in the middle of the Jersey boardwalk, and they arrested him. It wasn’t a hard case for the police to solve. We just kept shooting the video.
Chapter 13
“THAT RACISM BULLSHIT”
MTV’S AOR FORMAT COMES UNDER FIRE
IN 1983, TIME AND ROLLING STONE RAN COVER STORIES on MTV, almost simultaneously. MTV was finally being noticed by the mainstream press, and the mainstream press was unimpressed. Both articles took disapproving tones. Time sniffed that “the majority of clips now in circulation are labored ephemera with heavily imitative associations,” unfavorably compared Duran Duran (“an affable, uninspired British band currently aglow with success”) to Beethoven, and concluded, “the pervading silliness is worrisome.”
Steven Levy, writing in Rolling Stone, unfavorably compared “superficial, easy-to-swallow” acts such as Adam Ant to Bob Dylan. To bolster his accusation that “heavy-metal pounding” videos were dangerously violent, he quoted Dr. Thomas Radecki, chairman of the right-wing National Coalition on TV Violence, who a year later testified to Congress on behalf of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) and served on their board of directors. (Radecki also routinely claimed that Dungeons & Dragons was “causing young men to kill themselves and others.” His reign at NCTV lasted until 1992, when his medical license was revoked for “engaging in immoral conduct” with a patient.) MTV, Levy wrote, “makes the musical energy and optimism of the Sixties seem a thousand light-years ago.” He called the network “the ultimate junk culture triumph,” and concluded, “Unlike the activist ’60s rock coalition, the MTV coalition is essentially passive. Their function is to sit still, watch the commercials and buy the products, not change the world.” In other words, the pervading silliness was worrisome.
Criticism of MTV was not unique throughout the decade. Feminists, including Naomi Wolf, deplored the depiction of women in videos. Conservatives like Allan Bloom saw peril in the loose morality of videos, which contained “nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful, or even decent”—and in which, he claimed dubiously, “Hitler’s image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause.” Ted Turner called MTV’s programming violent, degrading to women, and “Satanic.” Criticism was even more pointed within the music industry—at a 1983 convention, Chris Strackwitz, founder of a small label that released blues and Cajun records, asked MTV programmer Buzz Brindle, during a panel discussion, “How can you justify showing twenty-four hours of garbage?” Even video directors sometimes expressed disdain, including John Scarlett-Davies, who in 1984 memorably dismissed the work of his colleagues as “masturbation fantasies for middle America. They just sit there with their cans of beer, tossing off while all these scantily-clad girls do this and that with men with their big electric guitars like prick extensions.”
One accusation proved stickier than others: MTV showed few black artists. Buzz Brindle told a reporter, “We’ll air black artists who play rock,” which ignored the fact that MTV aired videos by plenty of white artists who didn’t play rock. Bob Pittman and Les Garland defended their policy (which caused grumbling even within the company’s offices) by saying that black artists weren’t excluded because they were black, but because they didn’t play rock n’ roll, which was MTV’s format. Both had been trained at AOR radio, where music was narrowcast to a small population that liked rock, and only rock. MTV, Andrew Goodwin later wrote acutely, “denied racism, on the grounds that it merely followed the rules of the rock business (which were, nonetheless, the consequence of a long history of racism).” And Jordan Rost, the vice president of research for MTV, believes that Pittman, in creating the format that excluded most black artists, misunderstood and misapplied the network’s research. This rejection of black pop did harm to MTV—the network needed to constantly evolve, and its dependence on new wave and heavy metal limited that ability—and it took remarkable circumstances for them to finally give a black singer the kind of attention that had been reserved for Men at Work and Twisted Sister.
JOE JACKSON: And another thing: MTV was racist.
LES GARLAND: The worst thing was that “racism” bullshit. There were artists of color on MTV: Joan Armatrading, Eddy Grant, the Bus Boys, even Prince. But there were hardly any videos being made by black artists. Record companies weren’t funding them. They never got charged with racism.
Rick James singled me out in an interview, and it pissed me off. I have nothing bad to say about Rick James. The mistake he made was calling me a racist and not knowing me. “Super Freak” was a booty video in a swimming pool. We couldn’t play that shit.
CAROLYN BAKER: It wasn’t MTV that turned down “Super Freak.” It was me. I turned it down. You know why? Because there were half-naked women in it, and it was a piece of crap. As a black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first black video on MTV.
LES GARLAND: I ran across Rick James one night in a club. I went up to him and said, “My name is Les Garland. Does that mean anything to you? You called me a fucking racist. You don’t even know me.” He said, “Dude, I’m sorry.” He apologized, I accepted it, and we became friendly. You remember the Eddie Murphy video “Party All the Time”? Rick wrote that song. And I’m one of the two white guys in the video.
JUDY McGRATH: The music department was the driver of the programming, but people in the halls were starting to rise up and say, “I get the format you want to follow, but this is incredible music and these are unbelievable artists.” The staff was ready for revolt.
TOM FRESTON: Bob wanted a rock n’ roll format. But there was a lot of pressure building up, because all of sudden people wanted to be on MTV. Because of his Mississippi background, Bob was thought by some people in the business to be racist. But it did bother me that we had to have this format. There were a lot of people at the network saying, “We should broaden this out.”
JORDAN ROST: The original research study for MTV showed that playing a few, specific urban artists would turn off a lot of the core audience. I remember thinking, “Oh, Bob is remembering that first study.” But he translated the research in a way that wasn’t ever studied, and he created a rule from it that was erroneous, as opposed to saying, “Let’s do another study in six months, with different artists.” It shows how quickly you can create a mold, even if it’s a faulty one.
CAROLYN BAKER: I said, “We’ve got to play James Brown.” And Bob said, “The research s
ays our audience thinks rock n’ roll started with the Beatles.” I came through the civil rights movement. I was a member of SNCC. I believe in opening doors. The party line at MTV was that we weren’t playing black music because of the “research.” But the research was based on ignorance. I told Bob that to his face. We were young, we were cutting edge. We didn’t have to be on the cutting edge of racism.
GEORGE BRADT, MTV staff: It’s worth remembering who had cable at that time: white suburbanites, mostly. MTV was playing it safe with the audience. My first job there was call-out research, four to nine every weekday, for minimum wage. We were given phone books from areas with a lot of MTV coverage, and randomly called people. Once we found regular viewers, we’d call back every few weeks and ask about videos. I don’t remember many, if any, recognizably black or Latino voices on the phone. That research drove a lot of the music decisions, and let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a sophisticated research operation.
The people at the top had all come from radio stations. They were old-school, white radio guys with an AOR mind-set, probably because in the world of ’80s radio, AOR was cool. MTV was slow to realize that they didn’t have to think of themselves as “the rock channel”—they were the only channel.
MARK GOODMAN: I did an interview with David Bowie, and he asked me why there were so few black faces on MTV. I was in an odd position, because I couldn’t diss the company. So when Bowie started in with me, I tried to explain the rock format idea. And Bowie was not having it. I was fumpfering around for something to say, and the interview felt like an eternity.
The fact was, J.J. and I had been talking about this. He pointed out to me that he was initially down with the rock format, but once MTV started to play Spandau Ballet and ABC—basically, white R&B acts—he felt there was no reason not to play black R&B acts. He was like, “What the fuck is up with that?” He told me he talked to management about it. I don’t for a minute believe Pittman was a bigot—we were a rock station, the programming made absolute sense to me.
JEFF AYEROFF: I was one of the first people to point out that MTV didn’t play videos by black artists. But the people running MTV weren’t racist. Part of the problem was the quality of videos. If you look at the Michael Jackson videos before “Billie Jean,” even those were just him backlit by lasers.
RALPH TRESVANT, New Edition: We didn’t have any budget to make our first video, “Candy Girl,” so we had to go home and get our own clothes. Those are our school clothes we’re wearing. We shot “Popcorn Love” and “She Gives Me a Bang” the same day in London, while we were on a promotional tour. We shot “Cool It Now” and “Mr. Telephone Man” on the same day, too.
BOBBY BROWN, New Edition: The first time I saw a music video wasn’t on MTV, it was on BET. When I saw New Edition’s video on BET, I was thirteen, and I felt like a star. Everybody saw it in Boston, so we was the shit in the hood. People were impressed we were on TV. Didn’t matter why. We could have robbed a bank . . .
LISA COLEMAN, Prince and the Revolution: We were on tour when “Little Red Corvette” started doing well on radio, so we squeezed in a video. A director flew in, we set up our gear at the venue in Jacksonville, and Prince threw together some choreography.
ANN CARLI: When I came to Jive Records, only one video had been made in the U.S. office, and that was Whodini’s “Magic’s Wand.” It was awful. The guys in the group just ride up and down escalators—that was the video. Barry Weiss, who managed artist development at Jive, said to me, “I’m never going to make another video, because I almost got fired over that one.” I thought, Yeah, I can see why.
DON LETTS: Once MTV came onto the scene, a corporate mentality came into play: “We don’t want any radical ideas, nothing political.” For directors like me, who were smart enough, you learned to be subtle. I did a video for Musical Youth, “Pass the Dutchie,” five little black guys playing a reggae track. I placed them in front of the House of Parliament, which is a postcard shot of what England is supposed to be. Instead, I replaced it with my vision of London. It was a subtle way of acknowledging the importance of black culture in the UK.
People often say “Billie Jean” was the first black music video on MTV. “Pass the Dutchie” was first. Because they were little and spoke in funny British accents, Musical Youth were deemed as nonthreatening, and therefore non-black.
DENNIS SEATON, Musical Youth: Kelvin was the youngest, eleven years old, and I was the oldest, fifteen. In our first four videos, which Don Letts directed, the band was always skipping and jumping. You just see the innocence of youth. We didn’t see MTV until a year after “Pass the Dutchie,” when we recorded our second album in LA.
DON LETTS: I’m in New York, and I get a call from MTV. They want to interview me about making videos for the Clash. When I get to the studio, everyone looks at me like I’ve shit myself. After an embarrassing five minutes, a guy sits me down and says, “I don’t know how to tell you this, we can’t do the interview. We didn’t realize you were black.”
DONNA SUMMER, artist: When I began, people focused on my sexuality. I started my career with “Love to Love You Baby,” and when I used to do that song, pandemonium would break out. They would body-slam the stage. But I’d pulled away. I was always trying to have more dignity. I wanted people to focus on the music.
I don’t know if MTV knew what to do with me, because “She Works Hard for the Money” wasn’t your typical rock n’ roll video. It takes you to where people work hard, where lives are tough, maybe thankless. All these different characters who’ve had to struggle, the waitress and the nurse, are saying, “I’ve succeeded.” That’s why they dance at the end. As a black woman, that might not be the easiest thing for my record company to sell. I don’t say this as a racial slur. Because I was black, they just couldn’t understand me having that level of creativity. Even though I was forward-thinking, I didn’t get the opportunity to do something that, say, Madonna did. That’s just pure, institutionalized racism.
BILL ADLER, record executive: The first so-called “hip-hop” video MTV played was Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” which was great, but there are no human beings in it, except once in a while you see Herbie on a little TV screen. It’s a way of programming black music to white youth without any scary black people in it.
KEVIN GODLEY: The brief we were given for “Rockit” was to find a way to get Herbie onto MTV.
HERBIE HANCOCK, artist: Godley and Creme explained to me what was going on in the video. It was about our fear of machines taking over. In the video, robots have replaced humans. At the end of the video, when I come on the TV, it gets thrown out the window, because robots are afraid of humans. Or something like that.
DEBBIE NEWMAN: I sent a two-line description of the video: “Herbie Hancock appears on a television screen in a room full of robots. $35,000.” Nobody thought this would ever get played.
LOL CREME: Our concept was to put the robots in a domestic situation, like a family. I had to explain it to the video genius at CBS. She said, “Are you sure you can make robots interesting for three and a half minutes?” That was the kind of fabulous mind in charge of videos.
KEVIN GODLEY: They were hydraulically powered and unstable robots, and there were arms flying around, legs kicking, bits falling off. They were quite dangerous, like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There was one robot having a wank under the bedclothes, which you could not get away with now. It was strange and grotesque—that was something I hadn’t seen on MTV yet.
NICK RHODES: “Rockit” was a landmark.
GALE SPARROW: Godley and Creme came to the studio, supposedly for an interview. I set up all our studio interviews, and we had nothing scheduled. They said, “Oh, sorry . . . Well, as long as we’re here, we’d like to show you something.” They’d made this mistake on purpose, to play me the Herbie Hancock video. And I was blown away. I said to Les Garland, “We have a problem. Because this is the most fabulous video, and I think we’ve got to play it.” Word came back from CBS Re
cords that Godley and Creme told them they’d get Herbie Hancock on MTV, and if they didn’t, CBS didn’t have to pay them. And they did. We played the hell out of it.
HERBIE HANCOCK: I saw the final product in a screening room in London, and I’ll admit, I had no idea what I was looking at. We played it for Columbia Records in London, and they went insane. They were congratulating me, telling me how great this was. And I said, “It is?” MTV started the video in light rotation, and the response was so incredible that they sent it to heavy rotation. It just blew up.
I remember being on The Phil Donahue Show, and even he asked me why they didn’t have videos of black artists before me and Michael Jackson.