One morning, I was running around, getting ready to go to the studio, and he was sitting on the sofa. I got a pitcher of water and poured the water in the tree’s pot, and Danny said, “Nina, what are you doing?”
“It’s dry in here—I’m watering the tree.”
He said, “It’s a fake tree.” He was right—and I had been watering it for two months.
Mark:
I went roller-skating with Carol at a rink near the West Side Highway. I was terrified of roller skates—I broke my arm skating twice when I was a kid, in two separate summers. Heard it snap both times. But Carol was into it, and at that time, everybody was skating and listening to the R&B station WBLS. That’s the scene that Mark Knopfler was singing about in Dire Straits’ “Skateaway.”
What I really loved was watching people skate in the park. People would set up orange cones and giant boom boxes.
Nina:
I didn’t enjoy the cacophony of boom boxes and roller skaters that descended on Central Park in nice weather. That didn’t just stress me out, it angered me—way too much noise.
I was in Central Park almost every weekend, no matter what the weather was. It is, to this day, my favorite place in the city. At the time, they hadn’t cleaned it up, so there were some really funky areas: The duck pond was just a swampy mess with discarded food wrappers. But there was still nature all around and I marveled at how woodland creatures could survive in the middle of a giant hectic metropolis. In the spring, the hundreds of flowering trees made the park a mystical fairyland. As I journeyed through it, I would let my mind wander. Time travel is very easy in New York: I envisioned what the land looked like in the 1800s, before the park was built, and think back even further to the geological events that created the landscape of Manhattan.
Alan:
It was great to see Sweeney Todd on Broadway and not sweat the ticket price. Jan and I went to lots of theater: Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway. Mark was intrigued, and eventually caught the bug. I could see he was getting interested in acting too: very ironic for Mr. Rocker.
Mark:
I liked going to the theater, but I didn’t want to drop a ton of money on it. Carol and I would spend the price of theater tickets on dinner, though. When MTV started happening, a whole new side of New York opened up. I routinely got great tables at great restaurants.
Alan:
Bob Giraldi, who directed the video for Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” opened an upscale Italian restaurant called Positano. I loved going there. Robert De Niro’s joint on Columbus Avenue was also a fave. Or any bar on Bleecker Street.
Mark:
At Positano, they knew Carol and me. We had a particular wine that we loved—that was the only place we could find it. When we were seated, they’d just put a bottle of it on our table.
Nina:
I pretty much lived on the stuffed grape leaves from the deli around the corner. I usually went out to dinner—New York kitchens aren’t that large, and it could feel claustrophobic being in the apartment all the time. I just wished I could find decent Mexican food.
Martha:
Every morning was the same for me: egg sandwich on a kaiser roll, a regular coffee in an Acropolis to-go cup, and the New York Post. I’d bring it all back up from the corner deli to my apartment, and would sit by my radio, listening to Howard Stern. I tried to time my mornings so I could run down to the car during a commercial break, and then ask the driver to turn Howard on for the ride to the studio.
Mark:
I loved the Cadillac Bar. Girls walked around the bar with two bandoliers across their chest. One of the belts had shot glasses, and the other one had rolled-up napkins. On their hips, in holsters, they had one bottle of tequila and one of 7Up. If you wanted a drink, they would slam down a foaming shot of tequila for you.
Nina:
My first year in New York, it was the Los Angeles Dodgers against the New York Yankees in the World Series. Our whole crew at MTV was from various areas of New York: the city, Long Island, maybe a couple of people from Jersey. So I had to be quiet about rooting for the Dodgers. I went to a couple of the games at Yankee Stadium—an early perk—and when the Dodgers won the Series, I won the office pool. I was not popular that day.
Mark:
Michael Pelech, one of the cameramen, discovered a strip club we called Shecky’s Lap Emporium. Across the street from America, this cavernous restaurant I used to go to all the time, there was a little steel door. We went through the door, took an elevator up, and walked down a long dark hall to the box office, which was inside a glass booth. I slid my money through the little opening. The guy in the booth said, “MTV!” Not really the place I wanted to be recognized. Inside, it was not a typical lap dance place. In this small, dark room, music was playing, girls were taking their tops off, there was absolutely no “hands off” policy! It was a quintessential New York experience.
Nina:
There used to be a place called Claremont Stables in Central Park. I would go riding there, and I fell in love with a white horse named Mirage. He was on the small side, maybe fourteen-and-a-half-hands (slightly under five feet), but he had just enough of an attitude to make him feisty and a good ride. One time I was going to see him and I forgot to bring carrots, so I stopped into a deli and grabbed strawberry cookies. After I gave him the treat, his warm breath on my face smelled like strawberries. Riding him through the park was transporting—on a misty day, I would feel like I was on a vast estate, somewhere in the countryside of England.
Alan:
I shopped a lot at Macy’s—that was how our apartment started to become more adult. We got rid of the thrift-store furniture, went to Macy’s, and in one fell swoop, got bookshelves, couches, an entertainment complex, and a new TV. Every now and then, Jan and I would have a Thursday night with nothing going on, and we’d cherish an evening on the couch with popcorn, in front of NBC’s lineup: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, Hill Street Blues. They hadn’t started calling it “Must See TV” yet. Vegging out is at its best when you’re squeezing it into your busy life.
Nina:
When I moved to New York, I thought I would do MTV and also have a harp gig—the way Woody Allen plays clarinet once a week. When I got settled in, I had my harp flown to the Teletronics studio, because the case was too big to fit in my apartment. I played it on the air—“Here Comes the Sun,” one of my favorites. I stored the case in the MTV props department and took the harp home—it wouldn’t fit in a cab, so Teletronics moved it for me with their van. It turned out there wasn’t time to look for a New York City harp gig, let alone do it. MTV was 24/7, so the harp unfortunately got the back burner.
I played harp at a few weddings over the years—once for an MTV producer, and once for our director of marketing. And Tommy Shaw, the guitarist from Styx, asked me to perform at his wedding. That was a nerve-racking gig, just because there were so many professional musicians there.
Alan:
Jan started performing at the cabaret on the third floor of the Magic Pan restaurant at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue. I went to her show every two weeks or so; sometimes I’d end up there at the end of the night after another evening activity. I loved watching my wife perform: She had the belting power of Ethel Merman or Liza Minnelli, and the comic timing of Lucille Ball. She was a real contender on the musical theater scene.
One night, I was feeling particularly happy with life at MTV and even more serene in the darkened warmth of a candlelit nightclub table, watching Jan sing her heart out on “I Can Let Go Now,” a Michael McDonald song that I had helped her pick out. That song made me cry whenever I listened to it, no matter what the environment. But in that setting, on that night, I was a weepy mess. A few glasses of wine and an enraptured audience fueled my sentimental heart. Everything seemed to be in its place: my job, my love, my life.
Afterward, we went with the cabaret cast members to some late-night joint: theatrical types in full over-the-top extroverted display. Around t
hree-thirty, we headed home in a taxi (which I could now afford). My dreams were coming true, and I was happy to share them with Jan.
14
Throw Your Arms around the World at Christmastime
Christmas Songs and New Year’s Eve Shows
Mark:
One Christmas, MTV gave us all clipboards. I wasn’t expecting a cash bonus, but once I got the clipboard, I was like, “What the fuck is this?” We were all looking at each other, thinking, “Why did they even bother?” And that was when I started thinking, “Wait a second, we should be getting something. Something better.” Another year, they gave us all frozen turkeys.
Martha:
Every year, we taped a Christmas video, where we got a rock star to come into the studio and perform a Christmas song, with the VJs and the staff in the background. If I had to go back to one single day at MTV, it would be the day we taped our first Christmas video, Billy Squier’s “Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You.”
Mark:
The worst of the lot.
Martha:
Really? I think it was the best. It captured everybody’s enthusiasm and innocence and love of rock ’n’ roll. Everyone still had stars in their eyes and fire in their hearts about MTV. It was a mash-up of Teletronics studio employees and MTV staffers—we were a team.
Mark:
We were one big happy family. Sort of.
Martha:
I wouldn’t have cared if they said we had to do ten more shots, or fifty more shots, because I could’ve sat there all day. Everybody that I totally loved was right there, plus a rock star.
Alan:
“Reggae Christmas,” the Christmas song we did a few years later with Bryan Adams, was kind of dorky. But it was always a big party for everybody to come down from the office and be part of the Christmas video. The concept for “Reggae Christmas” was that Pee-wee Herman fell asleep and dreamed the whole song, and I woke him up at the end. Whenever there was a pseudo-acting thing, they gave it to Al the actor—even though I was crappy too.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse was huge in 1984—we all watched it every Saturday morning. It didn’t matter how late we were out on Friday, we woke up to watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the morning. Working with Pee-wee was like working with a wrestler: When we were staging the shoot, he was Paul Reubens. But when the camera came on, he did his Pee-wee thing.
Martha:
The first New Year’s Eve Rock ’n’ Roll Ball was in 1981, with Bow Wow Wow, Karla DeVito, and David Johansen.
Mark:
This was before Johansen had turned himself into Buster Poindexter. His next album was a live record, and for the cover he used a picture of his band onstage at the New Year’s party. He covered up the MTV logo with the album title; the songs on the album were basically his set from that night.
Martha:
We taped in the ballroom at the Hotel Diplomat. We weren’t on cable in Manhattan yet, but the party was still a big deal. My brother Chris snuck in with Bow Wow Wow’s road crew, wearing the satin MTV jacket I’d given him.
Alan:
It was really cool to arrive for the show and see a line around the block. Over the years, it became the hottest ticket in town, but even on year one, I was sitting in a preproduction meeting at 5 P.M., when John Belushi came walking through the ballroom, getting a tour from one of our executives. Belushi stopped and leaned against a pole, to keep himself upright, and he just kept sliding down the pole.
Mark:
Belushi was hammered and obnoxious and falling over. I know, who’d have thunk it? But we were amazed he had turned up at our party!
Alan:
The notion that we were going to broadcast live was incredibly exciting and a little bit scary. All of the producers and people around us were neophytes, just like us. For a number of years, doing live events was sort of hell, because they didn’t know how to handle it either.
Mark:
There was a technical glitch during the show—I think an artist took way too long to get on the stage—and then Alan was killing time on the air, bullshitting. Forty-five seconds is an eternity to fill on the air when you’re not prepared. And this wasn’t a minute, or two minutes—it was like five minutes.
Alan:
I was improvising at this little podium, getting a lot of hand gestures telling me to keep on yapping. There was actually a stack of blue cards in case we got into trouble like that, with little tidbits and facts, but nobody gave me the cards. Jan was standing next to me, watching me. Finally, having completely run out of things to say, I pulled Jan on camera and asked, “So, what kind of music do you like to listen to?”
“Oh, James Taylor.”
Not Def Leppard, not Billy Idol—James Taylor. He wasn’t a big part of our musical catalog, but I had totally put Jan on the spot. I didn’t introduce her as my wife—I didn’t want to be parading my family on camera. It was an extremely lame segment, and it didn’t look like real TV, to be honest. It felt like a bunch of kids playing around.
Mark:
Alan was just rambling, talking about God knows what, stuff that didn’t even relate to music. Live TV can be very scary.
Alan:
As time went on, the New Year’s show became the best party on the planet. It was also an exercise in staying straight for four hours while everybody else was going to the bathroom and doing massive amounts of cocaine. It was weird to be at the center of the action and not be allowed to participate.
Nina:
Those shows were my favorite part of the whole year. I was doing what I loved, I had cool clothes that somebody provided, there was live music, and we were celebrating with the entire country. How do you top that?
Alan:
Every year, it got bigger. I’d go down to the ballroom where the show was going to be and find huge, lavish sets that people had been working on for months. We knew intellectually that MTV was getting big, but as VJs, we didn’t really feel it. We had no handlers, no assistants, no wardrobe or makeup people—we were just doing our shows. But then we saw that other parts of MTV were spending lots of money.
Mark:
One year, Billy Idol was playing, and he was completely out of his mind. He could barely speak—I have no idea how he got up onstage and sang.
Alan:
Year three, we were at Roseland. Howie Mandel was wandering around the audience as the roving reporter. We had, for the first time, a miniature camera, which we called the lipstick camera. And Howie was shoving it up women’s dresses, saying, “Whoa, look at that!”
Nina and I were doing a segment together, and once again, we had to stretch. We started the most banal conversation and before I knew it, Nina was talking about her cats. I don’t want to blame this on Nina—I was equally at fault. I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the cat conversation and segue into anything else. “Cats? How many cats do you have, Nina?” I felt like I was in an alternate universe. Nina was horrified herself, but she loved cats, and that was what came to mind.
Nina:
We were dying on camera. Where were the producers with the cards with all the information? They left us out there with egg on our face. They weren’t inept, they were just inexperienced. And if Alan or I had been more seasoned, we would have broken the wall and yelled, “Give us some cards over here.”
Alan:
It was ten scary, excruciating minutes. Finally, mercifully, we went to commercial.
From the script for the 1984 New Year’s Eve Rock ’n’ Roll Ball (featuring performances by David Lee Roth, Joan Jett, and General Public):
MARK GOODMAN: “It’s New Year’s Eve and I haven’t seen this much hysteria since someone tied Pee-wee Herman’s ‘big shoe’ laces together. Pee-wee?”
PEE-WEE HERMAN: (Ad-lib & toss to J. J.)
J. J. JACKSON: “I just found (Guest) out here in the crowd.” (Q to come.) “Coming up, another $10,000 giveaway . . . and in a few minutes, 1985 in the Midwest.”
Alan:
Th
e last couple of years, I inched back a time zone with my coke intake. We’d get to midnight in the Mountain time zone, the little coke vial would be burning a hole in my pocket, and I’d steal off to the bathroom. Mark and J. J. were adept at handling the bump to get through the show—pros that they were.
At two o’clock, our show was over. The rest of the world had been partying all night long; we’d jump into our limousines and join them. One year, I spotted Richard Belzer standing outside one of these clubs, looking around. I gave him a ride, and he was happy as a pig: “The VJ world’s pretty good,” he told me. I felt weird—you’re Richard Belzer, and I’m just a VJ, but I’ve got the limo and you don’t.
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave Page 11