by Craig Marks
BOY GEORGE: I had just got off a flight from New York and I was tired. I’d done a show the night before, and I looked like I’d been beaten up. Cameras were shoved in your face from the minute you got there, but because it was for charity, you didn’t complain. Everybody was really, really friendly—I think Simon Le Bon came up and gave me a hug. In front of the press, of course.
BOB GELDOF, artist: The ’80s were characterized by greed, in effect. But you must understand, I missed that. To me, the ’80s were characterized by overwhelming generosity and kindness. Prior to Live Aid, people had been participating in this phenomenon for months. “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was sold in butcher shops all during Christmas. They weren’t selling turkeys or partridges. For whatever reason, this song—not a particularly good song—tapped into a groundswell of compassion. We never said we’d eliminate world hunger, but we could draw attention to a monstrous human crime, a moral and intellectual absurdity. It worked.
JON LANDAU: “We Are the World” had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen’s career, especially internationally. I couldn’t be there the night the thing was filmed. But I was in California a little while afterwards and went to see Ken Kragen, who had organized the thing. Ken says, “Let me show you this.” And when Bruce’s bit comes up at the end, juxtaposed with Stevie Wonder, I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited. That video arguably had as much impact as any of Bruce’s own videos, and it was completely unplanned. And that also became the Bruce that Joe Piscopo and everybody loved to parody.
CHIP RACHLIN, MTV executive: I called a concert promoter I knew, Harvey Goldsmith, who had aligned with Sir Bob. He said, “We’re trying to feed the starving in Africa. What do you bring to the party?” I said, “Well, I do have a twenty-four-hour music channel playing most of the artists on that song. Why don’t we start there?” So I talked to Garland and explained that if we made some sort of commitment to give them inventory on the air, we could get the exclusive on the video. And that led to us broadcasting the Live Aid concert. I did that deal. About six weeks before the broadcast, Gale Sparrow and I left to form a new company.
CURT SMITH: We’d been touring for a year, really hard work. We had five days off and planned a holiday in Hawaii. Then Bob Geldof announced that we were playing Live Aid. He never asked us. Geldof thought he was so powerful that if he announced it, we’d have to say yes, or we’d look like bad people. I was pissed off. Whether we played or not wasn’t going to make a difference to the amount of money raised. So we went on holiday, because that was the only break we had.
BOB GELDOF: I didn’t lie or blackmail very much. I had to announce the gig, and I realized that talking on the phone to a band was one thing, but unless their names were in the paper, they weren’t going to commit. Once it was in the paper, they couldn’t back out. Bryan Ferry rang me up and said, “Listen, I haven’t agreed to do this.” And I said, “Well, it’s cool, Bryan, if you want to pull out, that’s fine.” Of course, really, he couldn’t.
DARYL HALL: It was an unforgettable experience backstage: “Hey, Jimmy Page.” “Look, Madonna.” Jack Nicholson was passing joints around.
ALAN HUNTER: I wish Jack had tapped on my shoulder.
MARTHA QUINN: I said to Jack Nicholson, “I’m Martha Quinn from MTV.” And he goes, “I know who you are.” That’s when I realized I was a celebrity.
DAVID ROBINSON: The Cars had a lot of technical trouble. It was way too hot. We seldom played in the daytime, so that was disconcerting. The electronic drums weren’t working when we started “Drive,” and I had to yell, “Shut off all the electronic drums.” There was a rush to get bands onstage and off. I just remember being nervous and hot, and not really liking it too much.
JUDY McGRATH: I was standing in mud up to my knees for what felt like twelve hours, feeding the producers copy and trying to make sure we had our facts straight. I was exhilarated beyond belief.
MARTHA QUINN: Everybody lambasted the VJs for our Live Aid coverage, because the production truck cut to us while Paul McCartney was singing “Let It Be.” How do we know what they’re doing in the truck? That’s not my fault.
ALAN HUNTER: Kurt Loder called us airheads in Rolling Stone. That was a little mean, but he was not far off.
JOHN TAYLOR: Duran broke up in ’84 and there was a rift. Andy Taylor and I were touring with Power Station in America, and Simon and Nick were working on the Arcadia album. We met in Philadelphia and did several days of rehearsal, and it was not a friendly or happy situation. The only time we were able to get in the same space together was when we did the photo for the program. Live Aid was the last time the band played together for a few years.
RICK SPRINGFIELD: Eric Clapton asked to meet me that day. I was a big fan. But I was stressed out and I blew him off, which is kind of embarrassing. He probably thought, Oh, what a dick.
TOM BAILEY: That show was mayhem. We were announced, the curtain went up, and as I walked towards the mic stand, I realized my guitar cable wasn’t long enough to get there. It was a shambles.
On the bus back to the hotel, I sat next to a corpse who turned out to be David Crosby. He looked white as a sheet and he was unconscious. It was a bit like the final scene in Midnight Cowboy.
There was a big party afterwards, but I went back to the hotel with Nile Rodgers and we played Scrabble. Nile was very good at Scrabble.
HOWARD JONES: U2 established themselves as a global band that day. And Queen established themselves as probably the best band of all time.
JOE DAVOLA: I told the people I worked with, “I wanna get onstage at some point today.” They were like, “You’re full of shit.” When they were singing “We Are the World,” the finale, security had fallen apart. I found Doug Herzog and said, “Follow me.” I ran up to the microphone, got between two guys in Duran Duran, and started singing. That was the MTV attitude: You might as well go for it. No guts, no glory.
Chapter 21
“A WHOPPING, STEAMING TURD”
THE WORST VIDEO EVER MADE
BILLY SQUIER, artist: I came up with “Rock Me Tonite” on holiday in Greece, swimming off Santorini. I came out of the water and said to my girlfriend, “I’ve got a hit for the next record.”
MICK KLEBER: “Rock Me Tonite” is often ranked as one of the worst music videos of all time.
RUDOLF SCHENKER: I liked Billy Squier very much, but then I saw him doing this video in a very terrible way. I couldn’t take the music serious anymore.
STEVE LUKATHER: Billy Squier was a cool guy. I worked on one of his records. But that video killed his career.
PHIL COLLEN: The first big tour Def Leppard did in the States was in ’83, as the opening act for Billy Squier. A year later, Squier learned the hard way that rock singers shouldn’t skip through their bedroom, ripping their shirts off. That’s in the first chapter of the rock handbook. You should know that straight off the bat.
BILLY SQUIER: I had an idea for the video, based on the ritual of going to a concert. If we admit it, when we’re getting ready to go out, we’re checking our clothes and our hair. So I wanted to show me doing that in my apartment, then cut back and forth with kids getting ready to go to a Billy Squier concert and sneaking out of the house. In the last chorus, they get to where they’re going, I get to where I’m going, we’re all in it together.
The first person we went to is Bob Giraldi, the biggest video director in the world. I sent him the song, he loved it, we had a meeting, everything was good. Three weeks later, he called my office and said, “I’m out.” He decided it wasn’t something he’d want his kids to see. I was like, “Huh?”
BOB GIRALDI: Having seen the video, he was right: I should have been the director.
MICK KLEBER: Giraldi said he was routinely turning down projects that were underfunded. He was interested, if we could enlarge the budget. Compared to other labels, Capitol budgets were conservative. Bob understood and politely bowed out.
BILLY SQUIER: So we regrouped and went to David Mallet. I told h
im the idea and he came back a few weeks later with storyboards. The first thing he showed me was a scene of me riding into a diner on a white horse. I was like, “Get rid of him.” That was the end of that.
MICK KLEBER: Capitol had worked with David on clips for David Bowie, Iron Maiden, Queen, and a Tina Turner video, “Let’s Stay Together,” which demonstrated her comeback potential. But David wasn’t sold on “Rock Me Tonite” as a song. He may have submitted a treatment out of professional courtesy.
BILLY SQUIER: Now we’re in trouble—this thing has already been scheduled for an MTV world premiere. I’d had two huge records, huge tours, everything is set up. We’re running out of time.
MICK KLEBER: We talked to MTV about moving back the premiere date, but they were reluctant to change and couldn’t guarantee a world premiere at a later date. I passed this on to Billy’s manager, Tom Mohler.
ARNOLD STIEFEL: Bullshit, MTV’s already given them a date. Fuck MTV, they can wait. But Billy’s a sweet, gentle guy. I don’t think he had anyone fighting for him.
BILLY SQUIER: David Mallet had been using a choreographer named Kenny Ortega, who is considered a great choreographer. Kenny was a friend of my girlfriend, Fleur Thiemeyer, who was a costume designer. Kenny rang up and said, “I would really like to direct this video. I love Billy.”
TOM MOHLER: Stewart Young and I started comanaging Billy in 1980. We absolutely did not endorse Kenny Ortega and did not want it to happen. Stewart fought diligently to get rid of him.
BILLY SQUIER: The idea Kenny pitched was “I’ve seen you perform, and you have great moves onstage. Let’s go onto a soundstage, you take the guitar off, and do stuff you would do onstage.”
I wanted it to look like American Gigolo: grainy textures, somber colors. I was very clear about this. Kenny made a reference to the Tom Cruise scene in Risky Business, where he’s playing air guitar. I said, “Absolutely not. This is not a pop video.” We shot on a soundstage in LA, only a week or two weeks before the world premiere. There wasn’t much time left. I come to the set and see all these pastel colors, a comic-book city backdrop, smoke machines, a bed with satin sheets. This is not what we said we were going to do. And Kenny says, “No, trust me. When it goes onto film, it’ll look the way you want.” “So this is gonna look like American Gigolo?” “Yep.” I didn’t like the sheets, but I trusted the guy.
I mean look, Kenny is gay. And this is the way he saw me. He abused my trust, I really feel that. He did not do what he said he would do.
PETE ANGELUS: Let me stop you right there. What could the director have said? “You’re going to dance around like an idiot and don’t worry, we’ll cut around it?” There’s no finger-pointing in that regard, Mr. Squier. I don’t care if the director was lying dead on the floor, you shouldn’t have put on a fucking pink T-shirt and danced around like that.
MICK KLEBER: Kenny Ortega has since become famous as the director of the High School Musical series and the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It! At that point, he had directed a few videos—most notably the Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited”—but he had no experience with rock singers. Capitol frowned on artists meeting directly with video directors, but Billy was determined to control the process. By going around the label, he had thrown down the gauntlet. And although the concept seemed questionable to us, and we were somewhat alarmed about the idea of the video, Billy was completely sold on it.
ARNOLD STIEFEL: Duran Duran videos were pretty light in the loafers, for straight men. But did Billy not notice the pastel satin sheets? I mean, I don’t know that Barry Manilow ever did such a gay video. Billy was dancing like Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain. It’s more than swishy. He was jumping on beds and ripping off his shirt. He’s the world’s most horrible dancer. This is the great Kenny Ortega. How could he have allowed such a thing?
TOM MOHLER: I was at the shoot, and I asked Kenny only one thing: “Please make sure you film the entire song with the band.” I wanted coverage so we could cut away to the band. He said, “No problem,” and that never happened. He did not do that. I was tremendously disappointed. Stewart and I wanted footage of Billy with a guitar, and if we’d had that, we could have re-edited Kenny’s video.
I saw the video in my apartment in Beverly Hills. I was speechless. I asked the label if we could just not put out a video. And Jim Mazza, who was the president of Capitol, said, “We need optimal visual support.” I wish we’d had the balls to say to the label, “We’re not putting it out.”
MICK KLEBER: When the rough cut arrived at Capitol, the immediate consensus was that Billy’s performance was disturbingly effeminate. “Is this supposed to be funny?” “Is Billy okay with this? He looks totally gay.” “A pink shirt? What was he thinking?” “It wouldn’t be so bad except for all the skipping.” “Maybe we should call it ‘Cock Me Tonite.’” “Maybe we should kill it right now.” “But Billy’s already approved it.” “Fuck it. It’s only a video.”
ROBERTA CRUGER: It was a pretty bad video. In fact, it was a very bad video. At MTV, we all said, “Oh my god, what were they thinking?”
BILLY SQUIER: When I saw the video, my jaw dropped. It was diabolical. I looked at it and went, “What the fuck is this?” I remember a guy from the record company saying, “Don’t worry about it, the record’s a smash.” I wanted to believe it would be okay. My girlfriend said something like “This is gonna ruin you.” This is where I’ll take responsibility. I could have stopped it. I found out subsequently that Springsteen had shot a video and hated it, so he scrapped it.
The video misrepresents who I am as an artist. I was a good-looking, sexy guy. That certainly didn’t hurt in promoting my music. But in this video I’m kind of a pretty boy. And I’m preening around a room. People said, “He’s gay.” Or, “He’s on drugs.” It was traumatizing to me. I mean, I had nothing against gays. I have a lot of gay friends. But like it or not, it was much more of a sticky issue then. At that point, I told my manager, “Pull the video. Just get it off TV.” I was a mess.
The video had a deleterious effect on my career. The tour before, I was selling out arenas faster than Sinatra, and as soon as that video came out I was playing to half houses. I went from 15,000 and 20,000 people a night to 10,000 people. Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling, and I couldn’t stop it. How can a four-minute video do that? Okay, it sucked. So?
Kenny Ortega didn’t get hurt by this; I did. That’s ironic. Nobody said, “I’m not gonna hire him, look what he did to Billy Squier!” He just moved on. The only person who got hurt by it was me. If you want to get really dramatic, you could say the guy crippled me.
WARREN DeMARTINI: We were on the road with Billy when “Rock Me Tonite” wasn’t being received well. We were on the sidelines for that bombshell. I couldn’t figure out why Capitol Records didn’t pull the video and make another one.
MICK KLEBER: The budget for “Rock Me Tonite” was perhaps the most money Capitol had ever spent on a video. When you compare the production value to other clips, it was a rip-off. Creatively it was a clunker. And from an artist development standpoint, it was a tragedy. The enterprise was a whopping, steaming turd just about any way you look at it.
BILLY SQUIER: This was so traumatizing, it led to me firing Stewart Young and Tom Mohler in September 1984, after three and a half years together, and hiring Arnold Stiefel, who manages Rod Stewart.
TOM MOHLER: I heard from Billy’s road manager that we were no longer the managers. I think Billy blamed us, to a certain extent. We should’ve been stronger. That’s what managers do.
This was a dark time. I mean, we had it all. Billy was selling records, tickets, and merchandise. It was personally devastating as well. Billy and I were very close. He’d been the best man at my wedding in February that year.
ARNOLD STIEFEL: Fleur Thiemeyer did Rod Stewart’s stage clothes, so I sort of knew her. She said, “Billy’s in trouble.” We met him in Philadelphia, and I said, “This video is terrible for
you. It’s going to cause you horrible problems. You ought to get it pulled off the air immediately.” I thought maybe I could help, but it was too late. He finished the tour and then he became a recluse for a bit.
BILLY SQUIER: It really points to a seismic shift in music. You weren’t listening to music anymore, you were seeing it. I think MTV had a negative effect on music. Video directors were guys who made commercials and used videos as a kind of stepping-stone to movies. There are instances where it worked well. I mean, I’m sure Duran Duran was happy with it, you know?
I think videos changed how record companies acted. It’s a force, so you’re going to look for bands that are videogenic. I would never point a finger at MTV and say it’s the Evil Empire. It was a good idea. But then MTV became the biggest radio station in the country, and the most influential. It became this monster.