VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave
Page 15
Alan:
And men would come by with leeches and stretch her out on a rack.
Martha:
Now they would do physical therapy. Back then, they didn’t do that. But that’s why I can’t wear heels—I don’t have good enough balance. My life would probably be different if I could have. I look back, and clearly I was not embracing any kind of sex appeal. I’ll never know for sure whether it’s because of my physical condition or because I was sabotaging myself.
21
She’s Precocious and She Knows Just What It Takes to Make a Pro Blush
Martha Quinn, America’s Sweetheart
Martha:
After Tony, I got serious very quickly—with a guy who’d worked with Tony. I wanted so badly to be in that secure, mature relationship I’d always dreamed of, the kind Al and Jan had. I moved in with this guy, but then it didn’t feel right: I’d gone too far, too fast. I wanted to go back to my old apartment. I called the management at One Astor Place, where I had been living before, and got another apartment in the same building. I felt so bad, I paid rent on that empty apartment for seven months before I found the nerve to tell my boyfriend I wanted to move out.
When I moved back to Astor Place, I didn’t have any furniture, so I bought a table from Conran’s. It was a picnic table with a striped umbrella, and I kept the umbrella up—I felt very New York magazine.
Mark:
I never saw Martha’s apartment. It was weird—none of us went to each other’s apartments.
Martha:
I never had visitors because my apartment was such a mess. Always. My next-door neighbor, who became my friend, once came over to ask if she could borrow a cup of sugar or something. I said, “Yes, I’ll bring it over”—but I wouldn’t let her inside.
Alan:
A few months after MTV launched, Julian Goldberg, our executive producer, told me and Martha that the two of us were going to be the most popular VJs at MTV. That wasn’t something I expected, or banked on.
Martha:
He probably said that to everyone.
Alan:
We had no ratings or Nielsen coverage back then, but somebody was keeping track of popularity. They were doing it through fan mail, they were doing it by polling their record-company buddies. I don’t know what the metrics were, but we were definitely being judged.
Mark:
Martha was perky, she was plucky. She had that smile and those teeth, and she was cute in a nonthreatening way. Pretty soon, she was America’s Sweetheart.
Martha:
Originally, I was on in the mornings and then they bumped me to the afternoons. I got J. J.’s shift and that’s when Nina got overnights.
Alan:
I was on the graveyard shift and I went to mornings. That was the first time we realized they were paying attention.
Martha:
The afternoon drive-time shift was prestigious because everybody was coming from radio, when the biggest audiences come during the daily commutes. Those times didn’t really make sense on TV, because nobody was watching us in their car. What made it a plum shift was that I was on after school got out.
When I took over J. J.’s shift, I felt terrible. I didn’t want to be in a position where I was making J. J. look bad or feel bad. Also, most of my other friends were still going to NYU or working in entry-level positions; I didn’t know how to talk about this amazing job. I went to Thanksgiving at my grandparents’ house in Troy, and when all my cousins asked about MTV, I kept downplaying it. My mom pulled me aside and said, “You’ve got to stop doing this. Everyone’s excited about you working at MTV and you’re making them feel stupid for asking.”
Alan:
It can seem pretentious to accept compliments from fans—self-deprecation and humility feel noble, but really, they’re cumbersome. Fans just want you to own your status. I think the rest of us have no problem saying that Martha was the darling of the channel.
Mark:
She was definitely the fair-haired child with management.
Martha:
Early on, Billy Joel was dropping by the MTV studios, and Les Garland thought it would be good for the channel to manufacture gossip: He asked me to go out with Billy Joel on some public dates. I was like, “Uhhh, but I have a boyfriend.” Everyone at the channel told me I should do it anyway. I was saying, “Um, really? I don’t think so.”
Part of me thought this would be the first offer in a long series of staged romances with rock stars. As it turned out, that was the only time it ever came up. In hindsight, I should have said, “Hell yeah!” and told my boyfriend, “This is business—I’m going out with Billy Joel tonight!”
Five entertaining things about Billy Joel’s “Pressure” video, which seemed spooky and portentous in 1982 and is pants-wettingly funny now:
1. Billy writhes around in his leather jacket, attempting to simulate electroshock.
2. A car splashes water on Billy’s shoes—replayed repeatedly in slo-mo, as if it’s a presidential assassination.
3. Billy gets pulled into a white shag rug that appears to be made of quicksand.
4. A little kid gets sucked into a TV set, Poltergeist style—accompanied, for some reason, by a wide array of vegetables.
5. Billy appears on a game show, introduced by this on-screen text: “William Joel / Age: 29 / Occupation: Computer Software / Intersts [sic]: fast bikes, cooking, water sports, satellite.” His actual age at the time of the video: 33.
Martha:
I had a crush on Mark. One year for his birthday, I made him a tape where I sang a whole song to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” It had lines like “But if you only knew the times I hid my eyes for fear you’d see my crush on you-ooo.”
Mark:
How did I let America’s Sweetheart slip through my fingers? The answer is that at the beginning, Martha seemed like a kid to me. I had nothing to say to her; she was like a little girl. So I had no interest. Later on, I think she got hotter. About a year in, maybe a year and a half, she started to dress cute, in short skirts. She started taking birth-control pills and her boobs got bigger. The entire crew noticed that! I went back and forth on Martha.
Martha:
Paul Stanley of Kiss, and his manager, Howard Marks, called me in for a meeting: They wanted to manage me. They said they’d put me in really cool outfits. I couldn’t imagine what that meant—leather miniskirts? In hindsight, maybe that wouldn’t have been so terrible. But in the folly-of-youth department, I thought it was an odd offer, and I declined.
Sometime later, I went on a date with Paul. We went to Bowlmor, a bowling alley on University Place in Greenwich Village. Paul brought his own shoes, his own ball in a personalized bag, the whole works. I thought, “Whoa—this is kind of intense. He’s really into bowling.” First frame, I rolled a strike. Paul did not. Then he got down on the floor and started analyzing the pitch of the lane. He wasn’t happy. He went up to the manager and says, “There’s something wrong with this lane. We need a different lane.” I couldn’t handle it. That was the only time we went out.
22
They Told Him Don’t You Ever Come ’Round Here
The Irresistible Rise of Michael Jackson
Mark:
Before Let’s Dance came out, David Bowie did a press junket in a hotel room. It was one of those deals where interviewers file in one at a time. I had interviewed him before, on the radio, but I’m sure he didn’t remember me.
I said, “I have some tough questions for you, David—I hope you’re ready.”
And he said, “Ha, great, because at the end I’d like to ask you some punishing questions as well.”
That comment just blew by me.
At the end of the interview, he started asking me why there was such a dearth of black music on MTV.
I said, not trying to toe the corporate line but honestly, “Listen, if this was a radio station, we’d be a rock station. It wouldn’t make sense for us to play stuff that isn’t in
our format.”
The conversation got around to Bowie saying, “Don’t you think there are black kids in the audience who would like to see some of these videos?”
I said, “Well, I guess so, but this is what we do, and we have to think about the audience that has cable.” A lot of times we were finding that cable’s heaviest subscribers were in rural areas where they couldn’t get any television reception at all, out in Oklahoma or whatever—not usually your biggest fans of urban music.
Bowie was hammering me, and I was trying to defend the network—but it was an awkward position, and I was looking around for some help. Gale Sparrow in the talent department was there, as was John Sykes, one of our big executives, but nobody was stepping forward. Ultimately, they cut that part of the interview out. I think they did air it years later, which is okay with me.
What irritated me was that I felt like a pawn. I had no say over what MTV played—I wasn’t an executive. And Bowie knew what the situation was. He knew John Sykes, and he knew a lot of the other principals. He was just using me to bring this issue into the forefront. I felt like an idiot, and I felt used, and I felt insignificant to David Bowie—which I probably was, anyway.
It wasn’t my finest moment. As I thought about it afterward, I worried that I looked stupid to Bowie, and to the people around me. And I wondered if there actually was an issue. J. J. and I talked about it. He was a rocker, but what he said to me—which I hadn’t really thought about—was that we were playing white people who were basically doing black music. Even Bowie, to some extent. Why wouldn’t we play black artists doing music in the same style?
Nina:
I did not believe that MTV was a racist channel at all. We played videos by Joan Armatrading, Jon Butcher, Garland Jefferies, and Phil Lynott with Thin Lizzy—but they were all in the rock genre.
Mark:
I didn’t see the conflict so much as black performers saying, “Hey, that white band is doing the same kind of music as us, why shouldn’t you play us?” I thought the point of view was more, “These bands are making all this money, we want some.” I certainly know that’s what the record labels were saying: There was a whole column of artists that we weren’t touching, and they wanted us to play them because MTV was a very effective form of promotion. It radically affected record sales.
I grew up listening to black music and hanging with black people and going on black dance shows. But my naïve perspective was about making our format the best that it could be. I went home and listened to Prince, but for better or worse, I wasn’t in a headspace of thinking, “Well, we should be playing black music too.”
Martha:
I was in the music director’s office when Michael Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean” came in. I said, “Wow, this is amazing.”
He chuckled and said, “Yeah, but we can’t play this.”
People said we didn’t play the video because Michael Jackson was black—I just don’t believe that. It was because we were rockers and it was pop.
Mark:
Bob Pittman’s from Mississippi, but I don’t believe he’s a racist. I just don’t. Les Garland and John Sykes and the other executives who came in over the years, I don’t believe they’re racist either. I think they were the victims of old-school thinking. They were believers in AOR radio: That stands for “Album-Oriented Rock,” which was what the industry called the rock format.
CBS Records ultimately said, “You need to play ‘Billie Jean’ or we’re going to pull all of our artists from the channel.” And then they did.
MTV didn’t play “Billie Jean” until March 2, 1983, after the Thriller album and the “Billie Jean” single had already hit number one. The MTV executives have always insisted that they were blown away by “Billie Jean” and rushed it on the air. For example, Les Garland: “I was the first person at MTV to see it, and I’ll never forget putting it in my three-quarter-inch machine, hitting the start button, hearing the bass beat to ‘Billie Jean’ start up and going, ‘Holy shit . . . are you kidding me?’ I called everybody in and said, ‘You’ve got to see this. This is the best video of its time!’ Pittman was on the West Coast. I phoned him and said, ‘Bob, wait until you see “Billie Jean.” It’s going to blow your mind.’ We put it on midweek. It wasn’t even a Tuesday add.”
Mark:
I don’t believe that for one minute. At this point, I don’t even know why they would deny that happened. I remember when CBS pulled all their product—we had a production meeting where the word came down that we wouldn’t have all these artists anymore. I talked to people who were doing the logs of what videos we played, and they had to go through all of them to make sure there were no CBS artists in there. It didn’t last for a long time—it might have been less than a week—but it was more than one day, and it definitely happened.
When MTV caved and finally agreed to play Michael Jackson, CBS also forced us to play this Barbra Streisand video for “Emotion” that had Roger Daltrey and Mikhail Baryshnikov in it. It was the worst piece of shit ever, and the label basically said, “Yeah, you’re playing this too, bitches.”
Martha:
We were ecstatic when “Billie Jean” got added—art trumped format. What we didn’t see at the time was how it was the foot in the door to expanding the format. And then it became a constant exercise in expanding it a little more: How about a game show? How about a reality show?
Nina:
I think expanding was the right decision. How could you not play Michael Jackson? You cannot think of MTV now without thinking of it having Michael Jackson on it.
Martha:
It felt like we played that “Thriller” film every twenty minutes. But it was more impactful at home than it was in the studio. For us, it was just another segment. You’d say, “Wow, how about that Vincent Price rap,” and then move right into “Well, anyway, this Saturday, we have a Triumph concert.”
We had a lot of Michael Jackson coverage. When he got burned filming those Pepsi commercials, we got the news after hours, so the studio was closed—I went up to the MTV offices to film a news report. And when the commercial finally came out, we gave it a world premiere and played it over and over. I never met him—I wish I had. I used to daydream about the two of us on the cover of People: “MTV PIXIE MARTHA QUINN MARRIES MICHAEL JACKSON.”
23
I Might Like You Better If We Slept Together
Celebrity Flirtations and Liaisons
Nina:
Robert Plant came to MTV, and of course, J. J. did the interview. I had just finished my show, and I was getting my stuff before I left the studio. As I headed out the door, J. J. motioned me over—he wanted to introduce me. Plant looked me over, acting like English rock-star royalty, and said, “Well, hello.” He was leering at me, but I grew to like him.
Mark:
Nina and Martha got hit on a lot. They both went out with Roger Glover, the bassist for Deep Purple. On separate dates, he took each of them for a ride in his sports car. And they both deny anything happened.
Martha:
The two of us had no idea until many years later. Roger dipped into the well of Martha and Nina, apparently. Which sounds a lot worse than it was!
Nina:
I did Duran Duran’s first MTV interview. Their career was just starting—they weren’t huge yet. I wondered what they did to the boys in England, because all of them were extremely pretty, and with full lips. I went to see the band play at the Pier, and John Taylor asked me out. I had a personal rule against dating the people I was interviewing, but I would have broken it for him. He was my type, and tall. I’m sure nothing physical would have happened that night, because I just don’t on the first date. I didn’t go out with John, because my friend Ida kept saying I shouldn’t. I thought she was being protective of me, but later I found out she had a major crush on him.
Martha:
For a while, Paul Shaffer and I palled around quite a bit. He even took me to a temple service, but we couldn’t sit toget
her—I sat upstairs with the women. After the service, we were hanging out on the sidewalk, talking to Mick Jones from Foreigner. Paul and I used to say it was the greatest thing to be young, free, and in New York City.
Nina:
I went out with Paul and Martha one time—I wasn’t clear on whether they were an item, or if they were just friends. We went to the Hard Rock Café, because it was close to my house. Paul was a notorious drinker, and I could definitely drink too. I don’t think Martha put away as much. We were trying to have a conversation, but it was very loud. Paul told me, “You would be perfect in Vegas.” And at that time, I hated Vegas, so I got mad, and I told him, “That’s a big insult!” I wasn’t as mad as I sounded; I was screaming because he couldn’t hear me over the music. He explained that he meant it as a compliment, and that he loved Las Vegas. At the end of the night, he and Martha walked me home, just down the block. Paul was a little loaded. “Ohhhh, I really like you,” he said. And then he and Martha got in a cab.