by Craig Marks
I was twenty-one years old, strictly an actress. I did close to fifty commercials before that, starting at age six, and I was picked for the TV series Family over Helen Hunt. I’d also been the original Joanie on Happy Days. But The Brady Bunch had just gone off the air, and after I shot the pilot, they said, “We’re sorry, she looks too much like Cindy Brady.”
JEFF STEIN: Wish Foley definitely suffered for art. We built a giant teacup out of an aboveground pool. The doughnut was a giant inner tube. I asked for the water in the teacup to be warm, and it wasn’t. She was in cold water on an air-conditioned stage for quite some time, and never said anything. When she came out, she had hypothermia.
WISH FOLEY: It was 7 A.M., after twenty-four hours of shooting, and the water was ice cold. If you look closely, you can see me shivering. They bundled me up and shoved me into an emergency-wash shower.
JEFF STEIN: There’s a scene with a pig in a baby carriage, wearing a bonnet, which means we had to hire a pig wrangler. The guy brings out his piglet, and maybe there was pork roast in the catering truck that day, but the pig took off. Maybe he thought he was lunch. Ever try to catch a pig in a sound studio?
TOM PETTY: For the last shot, where we cut a piece of Wish’s body and eat, we had a giant cake made in the shape of her body, and Wish slipped her head from underneath. That must have been uncomfortable as hell. There was only one cake, so we had one take to get it right. When MTV saw that shot, they said one of my looks down at Wish was too menacing, like I was enjoying it too much. I thought that’s what the character would do. He was pretty scary. They asked us to pull that shot. We used a different one where I looked a little less menacing.
WISH FOLEY: I was under the cake for four and a half hours, with my head flipped all the way back. When people said that the cutting of the cake promoted cruelty to women, I had to laugh that people took it so damn seriously.
JEFF STEIN: or laughs, I asked them to fill the cake with strawberry jam, so when they started hacking it up, jam was squirting all over the place. There was a big stink about the cake cutting. I was cited by a parents-teachers organization for promoting cannibalism.
SCOTT K ALVERT, director: Jeff Stein had a great sense of humor. He was the first director who took it to a different level. “Don’t Come Around Here No More”? That was brilliant.
TOM PETTY: I thought the problem with Jeff was that he was a little bit off the rails. But he did great by us. I was knocked out when I saw the final cut; I played it thirty times in a row. “Don’t Come Around Here” kicked the barn doors off for us. We hit the moon with that one.
LIZ HELLER: Everyone stayed up all night finishing the video to get it ready for an MTV world premiere, which was scheduled for the next day. We were going to send it directly to MTV’s studios via satellite, and because of the time crunch, MTV’s standards and practices wouldn’t get to see the final edit. At the end of the video, Alice turns into a cake, and Tom Petty and his band cut up the cake. It was a crazy, drugged-out image, and for those days, it was pretty extreme. Standards and practices was completely panicked.
MICHELLE VONFELD, MTV executive: I was executive assistant to David Horowitz, who oversaw the cable and recorded music divisions of Warner Communications, and when David became CEO of MTV Networks, he asked me to go with him. He saw that no one person was overseeing the network’s standards and practices. I became the one-person standards and practices department.
JEFF STEIN: “Don’t Come Around Here No More” is the video that led to the formation of the PMRC. Tipper Gore’s daughter saw the video, and the cake-cutting freaked her out.
Around that time, a parent-teacher organization picked the five most offensive music videos, and two of them were mine: “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and the Jacksons’ “Torture.” That was probably my career highlight in music videos.
LES GARLAND: We had the PMRC up our ass.
DEE SNIDER: Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was on the “Filthy 15,” the PMRC’s list of songs they felt were most objectionable. They rated “We’re Not Gonna Take It” V for Violence. When I testified before Congress, I said, “These lyrics are no more violent than the Declaration of Independence.”
MARTY CALLNER: Tipper Gore and the PMRC called “We’re Not Gonna Take It” the most violent video of all time. Which is pretty funny, because there was no blood in it, no anything.
MICHELLE VONFELD: We actually met with the PMRC early on, because some of the things they accused us of playing were either videos we didn’t play or videos we played in an edited form. Tipper Gore was at the meeting. I think she was surprised to learn that we had standards at all.
SAM KAISER, MTV executive: We secretly called Michelle Vonfeld “The Legion of Decency.”
MICHELE VONFELD: Each video they wanted to air, I watched frame by frame. I often heard the criticism that our policies were inconsistent. But we felt we were being consistent with a product that was inconsistent. No two videos were the same.
Here’s an example: To the best of my recollection, the Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” video ran unedited—even though the word “faggot” is used—because of the context in which the word appeared. It wasn’t a slur against gays; it was part of the artistic makeup of the song. But the following week, if I’d been brought a video where somebody’s being called “a dirty little fag” in a mean, disrespectful way, it was not going to air. If somebody wants to interpret that as inconsistent, well, then, yes.
GEORGE BRADT: We played “Money for Nothing,” with its prominent use of “faggot,” about a billion times. That still pisses me off.
MICK KLEBER: MTV’s standards and practices were totally malleable. If you were David Lee Roth or Madonna or Michael Jackson, you could grab your crotch all day long. If you were a baby act like Poison, MTV would make you take that out. And we’d say, “Wait a minute, look at Van Halen. They’re doing that.” And their answer was really bald-faced: “When Poison get to be as big as Van Halen, then we’ll see.”
CHRIS ISAAK: There was a list of things MTV said no to. It was a big list, like Hollywood had the Hays Code rules starting in the ’30s. “You can’t have a gun in the video. You can’t have somebody smoking in the video. You can’t show part of a woman’s body. You can’t show only her legs.” But believe me, you can find a video with every one of these things in it. They made exceptions, if you were connected right. They were politically correct with the people they felt they could push around. And the people on top of the heap did whatever they wanted.
JEFF STEIN: MTV’s standards and practices were the same for everyone, except Madonna.
ROB KAHANE: We always said, there was the Madonna rule, and then everybody else’s rule.
TOM PETTY: Standards and practices always found something I hadn’t even noticed. In the video for “Yer So Bad,” they swore there was a girl sniffing cocaine in one scene. To this day, I still can’t see that.
MICHELE VONFELD: We had four constituents we were trying to please: the cable community, the advertising community, the creative community, and the consumer. We devised a two- or three-page document, our standards document. It wasn’t a list of words you couldn’t say on television. It was more our philosophy. It talked about not glorifying violence, it discussed sexual matters, issues of taste, things that could be hurtful to other people.
DAVE KENDALL, host, 120 Minutes: There was a sense that MTV was naughty and decadent, because it was giving people cheap thrills and instant gratification. The network played on the idea of excess and debauchery. We had promos like, “Too much is never enough.” But that’s kind of a myth. I don’t think MTV, in that sense, was anything new. The allure was always very sexualized. People think of MTV as a new cultural phenomenon, when all it did was merge archaic desires: the sex drive, the desire to be better than one’s peers. MTV’s newness was not so much cultural as technological. There was suddenly a new platform, cable television.
JEFF STEIN: I did a Quiet Riot video, “The Wild and the Young,�
�� as an allegory about the PMRC. We shot in Pasadena, California, at an old power station. I had two old dames who were friends of mine, a lesbian couple, playing fascist brain police. I got Wink Martindale, the game-show host, to be Big Brother. Together, they were like the anti–rock n’ roll gestapo.
PATTI GALLUZZI, MTV executive: When I was hired as director of music programming, I was in charge of picking the videos we played, and getting them approved by standards became my job, too. In the beginning, it was hell. It could take ages. Michelle Vonfeld had a lot of power. Often she just didn’t understand something, so she wouldn’t clear it, and we would waste days going back and forth with the record company, requesting lyrics. Eventually I wised up and went, “Okay, nobody can submit a video to MTV without sending us the lyrics.”
Our goal wasn’t to “censor” videos—we wanted to play videos in a way that preserved as much of the artist’s integrity as possible while not warping the minds of America’s youth. We were desperately trying to avoid glorifying guns. If it was a superstar, like Madonna, obviously we wanted to premiere the video, so we’d be on the phone with the label or the manager, trying to clear it up quickly. Everybody would be desperate to get a Madonna video on the air, and people didn’t care so much about a Nice & Smooth video.
And obviously, we wanted to be sure to play the videos of musicians we wanted to book at the VMAs.
Chapter 29
“HICKORY DICKORY DOCK, THIS BITCH WAS . . .”
BACKSTAGE AT THE VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS
WHAT PEOPLE REMEMBERED FROM THE FIRST VMA broadcast wasn’t Herbie Hancock’s five victories for a mind-twisting video, it was the sight of Madonna humping the stage in a wedding dress. That set the tone for every VMA to follow—the point wasn’t to be honored for excellence in your field, but to cause a commotion, even if it meant showing off your lumpy buttocks, as Howard Stern did in 1992. The show reinforced MTV’s reputation as a place for edgy behavior, even when presenters insulted the network—as comedian Eddie Murphy did on the second VMAs, shortly after Beverly Hills Cop made him a Hollywood superstar: “They came to me about six months ago and said, ‘Eddie, host the MTV awards,’” Murphy declared, on a live broadcast. “And I’m an actor, so my first reaction was, ‘Fuck MTV.’” The crowd loved it. So did MTV.
LES GARLAND: Eddie Murphy and I became good buddies, and I got him to host the second VMAs in 1985. He was the biggest star in the world at that point. The night before the show, rehearsal is set for 9 P.M. We had a great rehearsal. And I gave him careful instructions about what he could and couldn’t say on TV. The show was being simulcast on Metromedia, which is Fox before it became Fox. I said, “Listen, you have to control the four-letter words, you can’t say shit, like you do on pay TV, okay? Promise me?” And he goes, “Don’t worry, Garland.”
So next night, he comes out—“Ladies and gentlemen, EDDIE MURPHY!”—and right after he says hello to everybody, he goes off script.
GEORGE BRADT: He walks out and goes, “A year ago, I would have said, ‘Fuck MTV.’ But now I got a video, so I kiss their ass.” This was when you could still swear on cable.
LES GARLAND: He takes a left and just keeps going. Starts talking about how loose the women are in rock n’ roll. “I’m not gonna say I got a disease, but all I know is there was flames coming out of my dick.” This is live. There’s no seven-second delay. Pittman comes running across Radio City Music Hall: “Garland, stop him!” And I’m like, “What do you want me to do? Go onstage?” I’m taking the heat, of course, because I put Eddie on the show. And stations are pulling the plug on us left and right. But this is the anarchy of MTV, this is what it was all about. Eddie finishes the monologue, we go to commercials, he comes offstage, and I grab him and go, “I can’t believe you did that. I told you, you can’t say that stuff.” He goes, “No, you told me I couldn’t say shit.”
BRIAN DIAMOND, MTV staff: Once the cat was out of the bag, the show spiraled from there. It was the year after Live Aid, and we gave a special award to Bob Geldof. They introduce him, he gets a standing ovation, and the first words out of Geldof’s mouth were “I find it amazing in these times you can say fuck on national television.” Glenn Frey also said fuck. We weren’t on a tape delay—nobody did that back then. Needless to say, there were several bottles of champagne sent to cable operators in the next day or two.
ROBERTA CRUGER: It was my job to seat everyone at the VMAs. That became very complicated. I had to keep Van Halen separated from David Lee Roth, after they broke up. They had to be in different sections, but one couldn’t have a better seat than the other.
PETE ANGELUS: David Lee Roth was nominated for a lot of awards in 1985 and lost every single one. I met James Brown that night, who said, “Man, you got fucked.” To me, that was better than any award. Joe Davola handed me a Moonman statue and said, “The crew and I feel horribly about what happened.” So I have a Moonman for the most losses ever.
JOE DAVOLA: They made cases of these things. I ripped off a Moonman, walked out with it, and gave it to Pete the next day. I was like, “Dude, you got robbed.”
SUSAN SILVERMAN: “California Girls” and “Just a Gigolo” were nominated for Video of the Year, and lost to “Boys of Summer.” After the show, David Lee Roth and I went to a party, and he got wasted. You know how someone sort of pins you against a wall at a party and you can’t escape? Well, Dave was in my face for forty-five minutes about how he really should have won Video of the Year.
RUSSELL MULCAHY: Duran presented me with the Video Vanguard award at the VMAs, and while I was walking onstage, the ass of my suit pants ripped open. And so I’m standing there giving my speech, and I’m completely fucked because all I could think about was the breeze going up my ass, and hoping my jacket was long enough so that it wasn’t caught on camera.
WISH FOLEY: I went to the VMAs the year “Don’t Come Around Here No More” lost to “Boys of Summer.” I got hit on by Jon Anderson, the singer of Yes—he was short—and by “Weird Al” Yankovic, which I loved.
DEBBIE GIBSON: I was supposed to perform on the VMAs one year, but here’s one of the perils of being a teen star: My wisdom teeth acted up, I got an abscess, and I couldn’t sing. My face was all puffy and swollen. That was my hottest year, too. After that, no invites. Oh well.
ARSENIO HALL, TV host: Sam Kinison was a friend of mine, and one night at the Comedy Store in LA, he told me he was gonna host the 1988 MTV Awards. Then I got a call asking if I was interested. I said, “I was told that Sam Kinison is hosting.” And they said, “Are you interested?” And I said, “Yeah, but before you pull the trigger, me and Sam should talk.” And they never gave me that opportunity. Sam called me and just said, “Fuck you, bastard,” and he hung up.
Eddie Murphy and I were friends, but friends can be competitive. At that time, he had the prettiest woman, the most money, and the nicest house. But MTV only called him once to host. I hosted four years in a row. Every year I’d say to Eddie, “Yeah, MTV called me again, they want me to host that shit one more time. How many times did you host it?” “Once.” “Well, maybe it didn’t work out that good.” That was the only thing I ever had on Eddie.
My first year, I spent some time hanging out with Cher. A little kid came over and said, “Could I have a picture of you all?” And the picture ended up on the front page of the Globe, with the headline CHER’S NEW BOY TOY. It would have been cooler if it had paid off and I got the punani from Cher. I could tell my grandchildren, “See that lady with the feathers on her head? Daddy rocked that.”
At the time of my second VMAs, I was going out with Paula Abdul. John Landis had hired her to choreograph the African dances in Coming to America. I teased Landis about that: “So, apparently, all the African choreographers were busy?” He said, “Are you complaining?” I told John, “If she comes here, she’s mine.” And that’s when we hooked up. She was the biggest thing in pop music. It felt like life was perfect. Paula’s taking all the trophies home, I’m in the “Straight Up” video
, that’s my girl, and I’m the host. Can life be any better?
PAULA ABDUL: Me and my sister have a habit of peeing in our pants when we laugh too hard. If you touch us on the side of our ribs, we will pee. It’s not a fun thing. When I was hanging around Arsenio and Eddie Murphy, I had to have a change of clothes with me all the time. Arsenio always made me laugh.
JOEL GALLEN, MTV producer: I was supervising producer of the 1989 VMAs, which was the last year of MTV’s contract to have Dick Clark Productions oversee the show. There was talk about Jerry Seinfeld hosting the show, but everybody was like, “He’s not big enough yet.” So we brought back Arsenio. After that year, I came in as executive producer and said, “We can’t allow lip-syncing anymore. Let’s emphasize live performance.” Of course, that’s all changed now. It’s one big lip-sync.
JUDY McGRATH: Bobby Brown had a moment on the VMAs that year. It’s on YouTube. If you freeze the video, you can see that he dropped a vial of something while he was performing. It could be any number of things, I suppose. But it probably wasn’t Splenda.