MV3 had only been on the air for two weeks when Glen Brunman from Epic records, whose music I played on KROQ, approached Peter Facer with a music video he was trying to get on the show. Peter called me in to the meeting to watch the clip.
“Before we play it,” said Glen, “I have to tell you it’s a black artist.”
That didn’t bother us one bit; we were playing Prince (“I Wanna Be Your Lover” and “Controversy”), George Clinton (“Atomic Dog”), The Gap Band (“You Dropped a Bomb on Me”) and Musical Youth (“Pass the Dutchie”) and the kids loved them all.
Glen continued, “To be upfront with you we’ve taken this video to MTV several times and they refuse to play it because it’s ‘too black.’ The president of the record label, Walter Yetnikoff, is furious and has made this a priority for us. It would mean a lot to me personally if you could get this one on.”
Glen switched his gaze and looked straight at me. “I know you’ve worked with this guy before and like his music and I promise you it’s going to be a big track. It just needs exposure.”
Peter smiled, “No problem. If it’s good we’ll play it. I don’t care what color he is as long as the video’s great. Do you want to show it to us?”
Glen nodded and hit play on the three-quarter-inch tape machine.
Peter and I sat back and watched in awe as Michael Jackson danced down the street, illuminating paving stones with his feet while singing about Billie Jean.
When it finished Peter took a breath and asked Glen, “Can we see it again?”
Glen looked disappointed, “So you’re not sure?”
“No way,” said Peter. “The video’s brilliant. I just want to see it again for myself!”
Glen rewound the tape and as Michael’s masterpiece played a second time Steve Poole walked in and saw the images on the TV screen. He stopped and watched, like Peter and I, transfixed.
As it faded out I explained to Steve, “It’s new. Michael Jackson. MTV won’t play it because he’s black.”
Steve wrinkled his brow, “That’s why they are fucking losers.” He turned to Glen, “How soon can we play it?”
Glen pointed to the tape machine, “The video’s yours. Whenever you want.”
Steve thought out loud for a moment, “The crew’s gone home. But I can run camera myself and we can put together an intro on the fly.” He spoke directly to Peter, “You and me, we’ll edit it into tomorrow’s show, okay?”
Peter nodded.
Steve had one final question for Glen, “Has anyone else played it?”
“No, it’s been turned down everywhere. ET ran their credits over twenty seconds of it but that’s all. It’s your exclusive if you want it.”
“Damn right we do. Tell your boss that we’re going to world premiere ‘Billie Jean’ tomorrow on MV3 and fuck MTV.”
Steve Poole might have had drug issues but there wasn’t a racist bone in his body.
MV3’s premiere of “Billie Jean” had huge implications for the music world. As the song took off and exploded on the charts, MTV realized the magnitude of the mistake they had made.
They went back to Walter Yentikoff, the president of CBS records, and pleaded with him to have the next Michael Jackson video before MV3 or anyone else. In return they would create a new category, the MTV World Premiere Video, which sounded suspiciously similar to how we had introduced “Billie Jean” as the MV3 World Premiere Video.
CBS agreed and on March 31, 1983, MTV debuted their very first World Premiere Video. And what video was it? Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” because now, faced with scorn and ridicule, MTV had decided that Michael wasn’t “too black” after all.
Six months later a package arrived at my door. Inside was a framed and mounted Thriller album signed by Michael. It also included a note that said, “Richard, thanks for everything you did.” I hung it on my wall that day and it has been with me ever since, a reminder of one of the most talented artists in the history of recorded music.
MV3 was a sensation in every market it was airing in. The press jumped on the bandwagon in February with articles headlined “MV3 Rocks TV,” “A Syndicated New Wave Dance Party Takes Hold” and “MV3 Dance Bandstand Rocks to New Wave Beat,” but even with massive ratings in thirty-one cities and critical acclaim the “1-800” ads remained and the big corporate sponsors stayed away.
During the first week of February when the salary checks for our fourth week of shows were due, Steve called Karen, David and me into his office.
“We’ve got a slight problem with the bank. I’m sure you all know about thirty-day billing cycles?” He looked at us as if we should have a complete grasp of advertising sales and spread sheets, “Well, we are right in the middle of that cycle so in about twelve days we’ll be flush with money from our sponsors but until then if you could give me a little time before issuing your paychecks . . . ?” His voice trailed off.
As the MV3 left Steve’s office all three of us now knew that something bad was going down in Burbank.
By the beginning of March we started to notice things were going missing from the set, big things like the camera crane. No longer could the show do sweeping moves in and out of the blue screen and over the dancers’ heads. Now we just had three cameras on stationary tripods, or “sticks” as the operators called them. Though no one talked about it we all knew what had happened to the crane; it had been repossessed.
Despite our problems the show remained a huge promotional vehicle for not only the record companies but also the movie studios. In the second week of March, Warner Brothers Pictures contacted us to arrange an interview to promote a new movie they had coming out called The Outsiders. Steve Poole joked that it was the perfect fit for us because that’s what we often felt like, so he confirmed that the stars of the film could come in.
Two days later I found myself on the set interviewing C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise about their film and we laughed together about movies and music.
I had a shocking wakeup call at the end of that month when The Psychedelic Furs were our live guests on the show. They had rehearsed and sound checked and were ready to go. The lead singer, Richard Butler, was dressed in a long, heavy coat which gave him a dark, mysterious air and looked great on camera. The problem was no one was rolling tape and Richard was starting to sweat.
It got hot quickly on the MV3 set. With more than a hundred excited dancers pressed up against the stage, the band in full gear and the incandescent Klieg lights blazing down like artificial suns on everyone assembled there, the air conditioning just couldn’t cope. And the clock kept ticking.
After more than an hour the band was understandably at their breaking point. Something had to be done. The floor manager chose me as the one to do it.
“Go up to Steve’s booth. Break the door down if you have to. Tell him we have to roll tape or we lose the band and today’s shoot.”
Steve did not like to be disturbed in his office on a tape day but the lot had fallen on me so I shouldered it and went upstairs to confront our director and executive producer.
I knocked gingerly on the door. No answer. I knocked again and again.
“Come on, Steve, I know you’re in there. It’s Richard. Let me in, please.”
“It’s open. Come on in,” said a voice from inside.
I opened the door and stepped into the control room.
“Shut the door,” demanded Steve.
I closed it quickly behind me. I had expected to find Steve at the switching board looking through the large glass window which gave him an unrestricted view of the set and stage; instead he was at the other side of the room hunched behind his desk, and there on the desk top was a mound of white powder with a revolver lying next to it.
“What do you need, Daddy?” he asked.
“We need you to roll tape. The band’s going to leave if you don’t.”
“No, they’ll wait. They want to be on television. Everyone
wants to be on television. Just like you do, right?” he said.
“Steve, seriously, we have to roll tape.”
“Look, Daddy, let’s make a deal,” he said. “I’ll roll tape if you do a line with me. Then I’m done here and we can get going.”
“Steve, I can’t. I’ve got to introduce the band when they start.”
“You can do that in your sleep,” he seemed to be getting angry. “Just do one line. It’ll make you better on camera,” he held up a rolled up twenty to me, “Just do it.”
“If I do a line you’ll roll tape?”
“Are you deaf? That’s what I said,” he thrust the twenty at me again. “Come on, do it!”
We needed to get this performance taped with The Psychedelic Furs and I was not about to get into a shouting match with someone who was obviously stoned out of his head and had a loaded gun just inches from his grasp.
“Okay,” I said. I stepped forward and watched as Steve sliced out a line for me.
“It’s good stuff,” he said proudly. I bent down and snorted the powder into my nose. It felt sharp and slightly acidic. I had a slight rush, my eyes felt bigger for a moment and I had the urge to grind my back teeth, but that was it. I’d never done drugs before and I was expecting to feel like I was floating or see rainbows and hear a chorus of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” but instead I had less of a rush than I got when catching a wave or finishing a competitive swim.
“That’s better, Daddy. Here let’s do another.”
I stepped back from the desk.
“Steve, come on, you promised,” I was frustrated and I certainly wasn’t going to do another line.
“You are no fun are you, Daddy?” Steve shook his head at me. “Tell them to roll tape without me. Peter can fix any shots we don’t get in post.”
Steve raised his head from the desk and glared at me, “And if you don’t have the balls to do another line then get out and shut the door behind you.”
As I hurried back down to the stage to give them the “roll tape” order I knew that MV3 would soon be crashing down around our heads.
Just a few days later Steve called a meeting with the hosts and told us that the “overwhelming research” he was getting indicated that the viewing audience didn’t like the dancers, that they were getting in the way of the videos. So there would be no more dancers on the set as of that day.
This was the exact opposite of the real-life feedback that I heard every night in the clubs. People loved the dancers. They looked forward to checking out their hairstyles and hip street clothes, and when the ska boys and girls would hit the MV3 dance floor and skank to videos from The Specials or Madness it was like a party happening on your TV.
But if the dancers were gone, the catering and craft table bill would be cut as would several jobs including the dance coordinator. It made sad sense to us. Now Karen, David and I would be the only ones on the set adlibbing our intros to the clips on the show. The videos would play on even as MV3 began to sink.
As April rolled around we were down to just one camera on the set. It was an older broadcast camera that Steve owned and had dug out of storage; the rest had been grabbed by angry rental companies and returned to their stock. The stage was now a lonely place with Steve running the camera and David, Karen and me moving from corner to corner desperately trying to make each shot look different.
It became Peter’s job to take the tapes and edit our “stand ups” with the latest videos and then mix in older clips from the show of the early live performances and even ones with the dancers filmed during our first few weeks on the air. It saved Steve a fortune in shooting new footage but it meant that MV3 became a chaotic mish-mash of old and new, but somehow, despite itself, the show still continued to pull huge ratings.
As we entered May, the MV3—David, Karen and myself—had still not been paid since the end of January. We were working long hours, under crazy conditions with drugs and guns in plain sight and doing it all for free. It wasn’t so bad for me because my club gigs were so lucrative and the TV exposure was certainly helping the morning show ratings on the radio, but for Karen and David times were getting very tough. Steve’s promise was that at the end of the month things would change for the better.
The second US Festival was happening May 28–May 30 and Steve had scraped up enough money to secure a camera crew to go with us to the mega-concert in San Bernardino to shoot the performances and backstage interviews. He was convinced that with that footage he could finally get major sponsors to come onboard and pay off all of the bills—and our salaries in full. We had nothing to lose so we stuck with his plan; after all, it was the only one we had.
I reached out to Steve Wozniak and obtained all the clearances we needed and we were ready to reclaim MV3 and make it a financial success.
My all-area working pass, US Festival, 1983
Our shoot at the US Festival went without a hitch and we interviewed virtually all the major artists on the bill for MV3 including The Clash, Van Halen, Men at Work, Berlin, Missing Persons, Stray Cats and INXS. It looked and sounded sensational on camera and on the show. But sadly it was all in vain.
With David Lee Roth backstage at the US Festival
Despite the superstar footage Steve was unable to land any national sponsors. At that point David Maples was understandably done and just walked off the set when he heard the news. Steve responded that he was in talks with CBS to do a prime-time video show, a network version of MV3, and if Karen and I would just stick with him we would be the hosts.
Our Burbank sound stage that just months before had been seething with life and energy and had been the focal point for everything hip and cool with the youth of America was now desolate and all but abandoned.
Steve Poole would shoot our intros directly onto a bulky old one-inch tape machine that he owned. Peter would then race with the tape to an edit bay in Hollywood and cut together the next show with whatever available video clips he could find. We had no help, we had no hope, we only had each other. I suppose what happened next was inevitable.
It had been a depressing day shooting our thrown-together intros without David and then being constantly interrupted by Steve disappearing to his office “for a few minutes.” When we finally wrapped Karen asked if I could give her a ride back to her apartment which was only a couple of miles from mine. I said it was no problem and the two of us took off in my car.
We talked for a few minutes about how sad the situation with our show had become and then we forced ourselves to change the subject and I asked how Karen’s acting career was going outside of MV3.
As I drove and listened to the stories of her auditions I felt this formerly aloof co-host who had now become my comrade in arms, open up to me and I started to pick up on that unspoken chemistry that often passes through two people prior to their first sexual encounter together.
A few minutes later I exited the 101 at the Woodman off-ramp that Karen and I both used. North would take us to Karen’s place, south and we would be at my condo. I deliberately took the middle of the three lanes, and pulled up to the stop sign.
I looked over at Karen and said, very simply, “Left or right?”
They were three little words but there was no room for doubt in their meaning. Karen glanced in the direction of her apartment for a moment and then put her hand on my leg.
“Left,” she replied.
I said nothing, just smiled and swung the wheel toward my apartment.
That night we began our illicit affair. Karen was fun and beautiful and we both needed each other to get through the shit-storm that MV3 had become.
I continued to do everything I could to keep MV3 going. Every intro I did on camera I tried to make fun and interesting. If I heard a new song I’d ask Peter to see if he could get the video for it so we could play it on the show. I set up wardrobe trades with several clothing stores in LA for Karen and myself, including at The Factory on Ventura Blvd.
So in that spirit when KROQ returned
to Hawaii in June of 1983 I arranged to have Karen and Peter fly over to the islands with me to shoot a week of intros for MV3. Steve Poole said he would have a camera crew waiting for us in Oahu but at the last minute broke the bad news that he had been unable to book one—something we knew really meant that he had no money to hire them. Instead I picked up a home VHS camera that Peter could operate and hopefully the quality would be good enough to use on the show. I loaded up my carry-on with the camera and a bunch of blank and pre-recorded VHS tapes and we boarded one of two DC10 aircraft that KROQ was using to fly our listeners to Hawaii.
The first plane was entirely filled with KROQ fans, almost 350 of them. Karen, Peter and I were on the second DC10 which carried another 150 loyal listeners, making 500 in all. The rest of that private charter, the other 200 seats, had been sold to another group heading to the island paradise.
I was exhausted having been up since four that morning to host my morning show and was dozing in my seat when a stewardess came up to me and woke me gently. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said, “but some of the passengers asked if we could show a tape of your TV show on the monitors instead of the movie.”
I nodded through my sleepy haze. “Yeah, there’s a bunch of tapes in my bag in the bin overhead. Just grab one that isn’t sealed. It’ll either be a show or a video album.” I was way too tired to get up and shuffle through them myself. Within seconds I was back asleep.
I’m not quite sure how long my slumber lasted. I estimate based on the tape that it was about twenty minutes but however long it was this time I was not woken up gently. Instead the stewardess along with two male stewards were leaning over me and shaking my seat violently. I was immediately awake.
“What’s going on?” They looked so serious that I was concerned that we were going to crash.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 27