I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  TOM FRESTON: Madonna once said that we grew up together. We sort of did. It was the two M’s, Madonna and MTV. She created what a modern artist could be, and how you could reinvent yourself, or reinterpret yourself, with music videos.

  MARK GOODMAN: I interviewed Madonna a couple of times. Once when we were in Miami, talking backstage, I said, “I don’t know if you remember, I’m Mark Goodman. I interviewed you at MTV before you were ‘Madonna.’” And she looked at me and said, “Mark, I was always Madonna.”

  Chapter 16

  “YOU GOT CHAR-AS-MA”

  PRINCE, BRUCE, BILLY IDOL, AND THE GODS OF 1984

  THE FIRST PHASE OF MTV—NAIVE, EXPERIMENTAL, low-key, low-budget—had come to an end. Skeptical record executives, watching Michael Jackson and Madonna, now had inarguable proof that an expensive video could be a wise investment.

  For the record business, this was the first good news in years. Between 1975 and 1978, record sales had grown from $2.4 billion a year to $4.1 billion, a 71 percent increase in three years. By 1981, when MTV launched, sales had recessed to $3.9 billion. Ten years later, annual sales were at $7.8 billion. Rarely has an industry benefitted so well from an innovation it rejected.

  The average budget had been $30,000 to $40,000, but videos now became more sleek and elaborate—and so grueling that three different people went temporarily blind. As more cities were wired for cable, and more cable operators began to carry MTV, the network also benefitted from a fluke of timing: 1984 was a fantastic time for pop and rock music. Prince, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, and Van Halen all became superstars that year. Even Bruce Springsteen, the spiritual leader of rock’s anti-video movement, relented, though his first big video was one he didn’t like.

  BOB PITTMAN: Until Michael Jackson and Madonna, we didn’t have an act who was truly a video artist. We, without shame, flogged Michael Jackson videos, because we wanted other artists to see how you should do a video. We wanted to advance the art form. If you look at videos prior to “Thriller” and after “Thriller,” there was a marked change. Every artist wanted to do that kind of video. Three guys standing on a stage began to look pretty lame.

  PAUL FLATTERY: Before MTV, bands used to break out regionally. And then MTV became the national radio station, with pictures. It became the tail that wagged the dog.

  ABBEY KONOWITCH: I feel like a really old guy when I say this, but back then, the industry could make a hit. Clive Davis at Arista, Donnie Ienner at Columbia, David Geffen—if they decided something should be a hit, it was a hit. And if MTV decided a song was going to be a hit, it became a hit. Today, the consumer makes that decision. There is no gatekeeper with that kind of power.

  JOHN SYKES: 1984 was our tipping point. It was an incredible year for music: Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Van Halen. All of a sudden, we began to feel the wind at our backs. Artists were selling tens of millions of records, in no small part due to video. And finally, finally, after three years, people understood what we’d been pitching them.

  GALE SPARROW: John Sykes and I went to an international video conference in St. Tropez. Every record-label person that dealt with video was there. Elton John’s manager, John Reid, had a boat, so he’d have unbelievable cocktail parties there. The guy who put together the conference went to jail because he owed so much money to the hotel we stayed at. Everything was comped: our rooms, all our food and alcohol. We drank St. Tropez dry. They ran out of Cristal champagne. On the last night, Harvey Leeds decided there was no way we could drive from St. Tropez to Cannes and make our flights, so he hired three helicopters to take us. We were living like millionaires.

  TIM NEWMAN: This St. Tropez event was a great deal of fun with a lot of really bad behavior. You felt like you belonged to this interesting, crazy little club.

  LIZ HELLER, record executive: We stayed at an incredibly grand hotel, Les Mas De Chastelas. John has always been healthy and fit, really into exercise, and one night I said, “So what are we gonna do tonight?’ And John very seriously said, “Well, it’s a health night. I’ve got to be in bed by 5 A.M.”

  TOMMY MOTTOLA: Sykes got friendly with John Mellencamp, so we put together a big promotion. We were trying to get in everybody’s good favor at MTV, so we’d get as much heavy rotation as possible.

  JOHN SYKES: I met John Mellencamp performing in New York. I think he was John Cougar at the time. We were playing “Jack and Diane” over and over again. And he was a smart guy. He said, “Okay, I’m gonna do business with you guys.” I asked if he wanted to do a promotion for us where we’d give away a pink house. I said, “We’ll buy it in your hometown, and we’ll have a big party if you’ll play in the living room.” He said, “I’ll do that.”

  MARCY BRAFMAN: We went to the Russian Tea Room, and there was a certain amount of vodka being drunk. Bob Pittman said, “You know what we should do? We should buy a house somewhere and blow it up.” We’re like, “Yeah! Let’s do that.” And we did, pretty much. We got college kids to spray-paint it pink, and then Mellencamp drove his motorcycle through the house and out the door.

  JOHN SYKES: The response turned out to be huge. We bought the house, a little shack, I think we paid $20,000 for it, after which I get a letter from John, asking, “Did you see Rolling Stone this week? The house you bought is across the street from a toxic waste dump. You gotta get another house.” So I got on the plane and went to Indiana to find another house. I pulled up in the car, and a woman came out with cookies to give to me, because she really wanted to sell her house, this poor single mom with her kid. I didn’t even get out of the car. I said, “We’ll take it.” And that first house stayed on the books for MTV through, like, 1992. They couldn’t sell it, because it was across the street from a toxic waste dump. They finally wrote it off.

  JON LANDAU: John Sykes wanted us to do an MTV contest. I said, “You know, we’re not really the contest types,” but they came up with the idea of being a Bruce roadie for a day. It was an enormous success in terms of the number of people who entered, and some nice kid won a signed guitar, and they filmed a little reel of him pretending to do different tasks. That promotion probably had the impact of a couple of videos.

  MILES COPELAND: As MTV became the primary outlet for pop music, everybody started putting as much effort into videos as they did into recording a song. Other acts came along, doing more adventurous videos, so you had to keep up. You could no longer just have a guy standing there strumming his guitar.

  BOB GIRALDI: “Love Is a Battlefield” was about a runaway. I give Pat Benatar credit, because she was not a dancer, at all. But she almost pulled it off.

  PAT BENATAR: The choreographer on “Love Is a Battlefield” was Michael Peters, who worked with Michael Jackson. And I have two left feet. That five, six, seven, eight style of dancing? Are you fucking nuts? I can’t do that.

  So there I was, like, “Oh good Christ, what have I gotten myself into?” I hated it so much. I was crying, and Michael Peters is like, “Come on!” I’m happy I did it, but I can’t say there was one moment when it was pleasant. When I do the song live now, I go back by the drums and do the “Battlefield” dance for like eight seconds, and the crowd goes nuts.

  SINEAD O’CONNOR, artist: I thought “Love Is a Battlefield” was quite good, with the threatening gang of dancing women coming toward the camera. I also liked all of Cyndi Lauper’s stuff. She was unconventional in terms of how she looked, so it was encouraging to those of us who were young women at the time.

  CYNDI LAUPER, artist: I wanted “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to be an anthem for women around the world—and I mean all women—and a sustaining message that we are powerful human beings. I made sure that when a woman saw the video, she would see herself represented, whether she was thin or heavy, glamorous or not, and whatever race she was. It was about representing as many different women as I could. And I cast my mother, to be honest, because I just wanted to hang out with her. And you know what? She was a natural.

  AL TELLER: MTV
compounded the possibility of overexposure. I think Cyndi Lauper got caught in the MTV trap. Her image became frozen because of MTV. Which is unfortunate, because she’s a very talented artist. She should have had a stronger career. If Madonna hadn’t been a marketing genius and reinvented herself from album to album, she would have been toast many years ago.

  CYNDI LAUPER: Funny, my manager, she now says that maybe my image became so big that my talent got hidden. I can see that now, but we put our energy into making videos because I got more love from MTV at first than I did from radio.

  GEORGE MICHAEL, artist: I think I picked up on how the business worked really quickly. The way people in record companies respond when they see someone who genuinely knows what he’s doing is unbelievable; they never say no. It starts with what to do for videos, then it becomes what singles should be released.

  JAZZ SUMMERS, manager: Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is a bit camp. Two young boys dancing around in shorts. I thought it was tacky, and I said so. I tried to talk them out of it, but my management partner, Simon Napier-Bell, was more camp than a row of tents. He thought it was lovely. And MTV really got behind it.

  JON ROSEMAN: “Careless Whisper” was a fucking disaster. We shot it in Miami. After the first day of shooting, George told me he didn’t like his hair.

  ANDY MORAHAN: Wham! went to Miami to shoot “Careless Whisper,” and they didn’t like what they shot, so their manager, Jazz Summers, called me. Jazz had managed my college band, Havana Let’s Go—Tim Pope was supposed to do our first video but we couldn’t afford him, and since I’d studied film at college, I made it instead. Jazz said, “I need a favor. We screwed up the video, and I’d like you to reshoot it.” By then I’d developed a small reputation as a director. “Careless Whisper” is basically George Michael performing in an empty theater, the Lyceum in London. It’s probably best known for how much George’s hair resembles Princess Diana’s.

  JAZZ SUMMERS: MTV was pounding Wham! videos. It was like Wham! TV. George and Andrew Ridgeley were dancing on the carpets of 22 million homes, fifteen times a day. In cities where MTV was big, we were selling loads of records. I sat down with Simon Napier-Bell. I’d stopped drinking and he was still drinking, so he got drunk. He said, “Wham! should be playing stadiums.” Then he got even more drunk, and said, “Fuck it, let’s do something interesting. Let’s go to China.” I thought it was a great idea. We could get national and international press by being the first pop band in China.

  So we went to China and made a film, and took footage from that to make the “Freedom” video: George and Andrew walking around the Great Wall of China, a bit of concert footage, and it starts with a minute and a half of the Chinese countryside, and zillions of people walking over a bridge and riding their bikes. MTV were chomping at the bit for it. They said, “We want an exclusive on it. But we don’t want to air the bit on the front of the video.” I said, “In that case, you can’t have an exclusive.” And I went back to England.

  MTV needed this video. So John Sykes and Les Garland flew to London with David Hilton, their top negotiator. Hilton set up the Fox network years later. We went to an Italian restaurant, and he said, “We’d like to play the video six times a day.” I wanted nine times a day, and I wanted it in peak-viewing time. He said, “I’m not sure we can do that.” I said, “You can do whatever you want. You can show it once an hour if you want. In fact, that’s what I want; I want you to show it once an hour every day for the first ten days, with the introduction on the front, and after that, you can take it off.” And he said, “Deal!” David Hilton has been one of my best friends ever since.

  Everybody said I was crazy when we did the stadium tour, but we picked cities where MTV was on. We had 60,000 people in LA, 40,000 people in Miami. We didn’t play Chicago, because MTV wasn’t strong enough there. Ticket sales in a city were directly proportional to the strength of MTV in that market.

  DEBBIE GIBSON: Being a gay-boy magnet even at fourteen, I was in love with George Michael. I’d come home from school and turn on MTV—and there was “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” There were a lot of people dressed in white, dancing. I thought all thirty people were members of Wham! George Michael had a million-watt smile and a tan. There was a Wham! camp and a Duran Duran camp, and I was in the Wham! camp. For me, Duran Duran were sort of dark compared to Wham! They probably had more songs in minor keys.

  BRIAN GRANT: I made Duran’s “New Moon on Monday” because Russell Mulcahy wasn’t available. I wasn’t the first choice. We attempted to make a little movie, and I’m not sure we succeeded. We shot in Noyers, a village northeast of Paris, and the former Miss France was in the video. The band was instrumental in casting her, I recollect.

  NICK RHODES: “New Moon on Monday” is my least favorite of our videos.

  JOHN TAYLOR: Russell optioned the William Burroughs book Wild Boys, and he was in development with the film. The film fell through, which we benefitted from because Russell took all the crazy, fantastic ideas he’d developed for the film and jammed them into the video.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: Wild Boys is a hard novel to read. Very homoerotic. One day I was on vacation in Greece and I ran into Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes. Their yacht pulled up next to our rented yacht.

  SIMON LE BON: I had taken a sailing boat and Russell had brought his boyfriend on another boat.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: We started talking about Wild Boys and they asked to write a song for the film. They spent a lot of money on the video, around $1 million. Sting was next door filming The Bride, and he came over to the set and went, “Holy fuck.” It was a four-day shoot, and celebrities kept turning up to gawk at this extraordinary set, with a giant windmill that had poor Simon strapped to it. The windmill would spin around and Simon’s head would go underwater into this chilly tank. It did break down at one point, and people had to jump in and lift his head out.

  PERRI LISTER: “Wild Boys” was outrageous. That went on for two weeks at Shep-perton Studios. There were all kinds of freaks in that video. I think they had the tallest man in England, and a guy who was twenty-four but looked like he was two hundred. There must have been twenty-five dwarves as well. One of the girls had a terrible fear of dwarves, and every time they came near, she’d start gasping and palpitating. Russell had me topless, painted gray from head to toe, and my hair was painted white. At 6 A.M., they would stand there and spray-paint us. We’d all been up most of the night. There was one scene where a guy flew across the ceiling, and everyone heard this ghasly sound—KA CHUNK. I think he broke his collarbone.

  RUSSELL MULCAHY: There’s a scene where we put Billy Idol’s girlfriend Perri among all the dystopian, Mad Max–looking boys prancing along. I asked her, “Can we see a tit? One tit?” She said, “Darling, at this price, you’re gonna get two!”

  JEFF STEIN: I was dragged into making Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” Bill Aucoin, Billy’s manager, had been KISS’s manager. He was a marketing genius. Bill lived it up—you could lose brain cells by osmosis being with him. He was the most full-tilt character I knew, besides Keith Moon. Bill knew I had done the Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and he kept saying, “We’re getting lame concepts for the video.” I said, “If I were you, I’d do a live performance.” He said, “Great. Can you do it tomorrow?”

  It was the holiday season, so all the equipment houses were closed and we had nowhere to shoot it. Somehow we organized getting the Capitol Theater in New Jersey the next night. We bused kids out of New York to the theater. Of course, we had a lot of beer and wine on the buses, which nowadays you could not do. Everyone was well soused. I put the hot-looking girls with the big tits up front. We had a mosh pit—my cameraman had the footprint of a Doc Marten boot in his cheek for a week after that gig.

  Even though it was a triumph, it was a hair-raising experience. About an hour before the “Rebel Yell” world premiere, we got a phone call from MTV, telling us to remove a shot of a kid in the front row holding a Budweiser can. So we got the master tape
and had to find a shot to slug in, right? We need one more shot of hot-looking girls with big tits. We ran it over to MTV ten minutes before the world premiere, or there would have been 4:50 of black. That’s what it was like in those days.

  Billy went from playing to fifteen hundred people to playing the Oakland Coliseum in six weeks. That was the power of MTV.

  BILLY IDOL: That tour, we went from playing in clubs to playing in theaters to playing in arenas, over a ten-month period. Videos were gigantic in putting across, in images, what I was about. You almost didn’t have to say much, because the video espoused what you were about.

  JEFF STEIN: The look of “Rebel Yell”—that backlighting, the purple, the smoke—was totally mimicked in Purple Rain. My video influenced a lot of live videos that came down the pike.