by Dave Holmes
I believe I had a reputation as a little bit of a pill back then, and I absolutely deserved it. I would write e-mails complaining about spelling errors in the lyric crawl on Say What? Karaoke. I would physically correct grammar issues on cue cards. I have never complained about the size of my dressing room, but you will not confuse “your” with “you’re” while I have anything to say about it. (Even if it’s on a teleprompter and nobody will see it but me, I’ll know.) So when another even higher-up executive swung through backstage and I simply pointed at the “Shower Rangers” entry on the show’s breakdown with an incredulous look on my face, that production executive did not engage. He simply gave a thumbs up. This was going to happen.
Dude, This Sucks opened with all of the acts parading through the crowd and into a holding area stage left. As the show progressed, Kevin was to call them one by one, and each would try their best to impress a judging panel of early 2001’s hottest young celebrities (I can’t remember who, but imagine people like Jesse Metcalfe from Passions, Samm Levine from Freaks and Geeks, and model Jaime King; again, very soon you will understand why nobody has rushed forward to attach their name to this show). Cody and Other Cody were front and center in the stage-left holding area, ready to do their bit for forest safety with a special secret that only they and we knew about.
Like, really ready. Like, ass-full-of-water ready.
It was then that a much higher-up executive popped in. I was relieved; surely a clearer head would finally prevail.
I said, “Hey, are you aware that two guys are going to shoot water out of their asses and put out a fire on stage in just a few moments in front of a live audience?”
He said: “Are you serious?”
I said. “I am serious. In fact, it is the very first act in the show.”
“Wow.”
“I know.”
“Well, that can’t happen.”
“I know.”
“That’s our closer.” And then the boss took the show breakdown from my hand and sprinted to the control room to move the Shower Rangers from the top of the show to the very bottom.
Hosting a show like Dude, This Sucks is a difficult thing. You want to keep the energy up. You are wearing an earpiece and producers are shouting direction directly into your head while you’re shouting copy off a teleprompter and calculating scores in your head. There is a live audience that is staring right at you in silence during the inevitable and interminable production delays. If you are on a mountaintop in California in February, it is cold. It is a challenge even if you’ve done it a hundred times before. Kevin Farley had done it zero times before. And though he did a hell of a job, he still blew a few lines and missed a few cues, the way one does the first time one does a thing like this. And though our production people were the best in the business, this was the first time any of us were doing this show. We all made mistakes. We all caused slowdowns.
The result was that Cody and Other Cody were being held stage left, with asses full of hot-tub water, for the duration of a thirty-minute show that stretched into an hour, and then two.
And then three, and then more.
My final responsibility as announcer was to welcome the audience back to Dude, This Sucks at the beginning of act three, the last segment of which would be the Shower Rangers, whose performance I was now morbidly curious to watch. I stumbled a little on the intro. We had to do it again. Kevin flubbed a line or two. After what seemed like a long time to even those of us with nothing inside our asses, we reached the grand finale. Kevin called their name. The cameras cut. The marshmallow-roasters hit the center of the proscenium, and PAs brought the tiny pile of fake wood and Sterno out to the lip of the stage and tried to light it. And then tried again. And then tried again. Cody and Other Cody were so close to being allowed to release the water in their asses, yet still so far.
At last: ignition. The cameras rolled. “Fire Water Burn” played. The Shower Rangers, faces flush with a unique blend of pride, stage fright, and whatever emotion you’re feeling when you’re about to go number two in front of a live audience, approached the campers. The Shower Rangers pointed at the NO OPEN FLAMES sign and wagged their fingers no. And then the Shower Rangers tore away their pants and crouched. The fire was extinguished. The crowd rejoiced. The judges let the whole moment play out. Holy shit.
And this is where the genius of the MTV production staff comes in: the whole thing was camera-staged in such a way that the heads of the campfire people obscured the actual assholes. So you could see what was happening, but you couldn’t really see what was happening. It was theater of the mind. And it worked. A victory for the Shower Rangers.
This is when I decided to leave. I said goodbye, I got into my rental car, and I drove all the way back to Los Angeles, very quickly, without stopping. You would have, too.
So I didn’t find out until a few days later what happened.
This is what I am told happened:
By the time of their debut, what was in the asses of the Shower Rangers was no longer water. Even the most skilled of rectal sharpshooters is no match for Mother Nature, and in retrospect, nobody really knew exactly how much experience Cody had in this department. (Other Cody, we should remember, was an absolute beginner.) Also, once something is up there for as long as whatever was up there was up there, it wants out. Give it an opening, and it will take that opening by force. So while it is true that the Shower Rangers hit the fire, they also hit other things that were farther away, things they never intended to hit.
Specifically, the Shower Rangers hit two teenage girls. Let’s call them Caitlin and Other Caitlin. Caitlin’s father was a bigwig and was therefore able to swing VIP audience passes for his daughter and her friend. A VIP audience pass gets you right there in the front row. Into what we may now call “The Splash Zone.”
So there Caitlin and Other Caitlin were, two teenage girls covered in strangers’ feces. I am told, and I believe, that they were not too psyched about it.
The production staff hurried out into the audience once they grasped what had happened, armed with towels and bleach and very hot water and a second goodwill deployment for Nick Lachey. And great attitudes: Ha! Wasn’t that crazy? Aren’t you two good sports? Look, a TRL T-shirt just for you! Here again, the MTV people are straight-up magical: I am told that once the girls had been cleaned up and apologized to and promised tickets to every single MTV event that would ever go down until the end of time, their frowns turned most of the way upside-down. Such is the power of the promise of an eventual audience with JC Chasez.
It seemed that the shitstorm had blown over, but soon enough, famous lawyers were retained. Tapes of the show remain the sole property of the California State Police. The Codys were taken from their homes and forced to undergo a battery of tests for a variety of illnesses, because if they were HIV-positive or had hepatitis, their act would be considered something like assault with a deadly weapon. (They tested negative.) The whole thing became a huge legal mess that towels, bleach, even Nick Lachey himself could not clean up, and while it did eventually get settled, dude, that must have sucked.
The show got picked up, was renamed Sink or Swim, ran for a season or two with me as host, and featured about 300 percent more Hula-Hooping, freestyling, and juggling. We left the butt stuff to Steve-O from that point forward, and you can’t say he didn’t run with it.
But it was clear that things were changing at the network. Music was becoming less important, shock more so. The producers were getting younger and younger. While for my first couple of years I found myself working alongside people who wanted to do their best and make exciting, unpredictable, memorable television, more and more I was meeting people whose highest artistic goal was to be friends with Melissa Joan Hart. The ground was shifting under my feet.
And like the Shower Rangers, I was starting to feel like I needed to go.
I’m really sorry about this chapter. Here is Nick Lachey, and the rest of 98 Degrees, to cheer you.
T
hat last chapter aside, I am determined not to write a showbiz tell-all, mostly because there’s not much to tell; if there were crazy cocaine sex parties when I was at MTV, I was not invited. But something has to get excerpted on Popsugar if we’re going to make this book work, so, you know, here.
Kid Rock
At Spring Break 1999, a just-barely-pre-fame Kid Rock DJ’d the festivities, and at the end of a particularly long shoot day, a few of my coworkers and I relaxed in the hotel Jacuzzi. Let the kids pound liquor Slurpees at Señor Frog’s, we thought, let’s be grown-ups and drink wine in the tub. We were having a perfectly nice conversation when who showed up but Kid Rock, shirtless and in cut-off jean shorts, holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He splashed himself into our midst. “Where the pussy at?” he bellowed. “Ha haaaaa I’m just serious.” One of the women in the tub said, “You’re in here with women. Don’t talk like that.” “Whooo! Ha haaaa, that’s cool, I’m just serious. Y’all mind if I smoke?” He pulled out a cigar and lit it before anyone could answer, which was really the only way he could have made himself less pleasant. Our conversation stopped, and one by one everyone left except me; I was not going to let him win this Mexican standoff. “All right, Holmes. Where the titty bars at? Let’s go get some pussaaaay!” I said, “Yeah, no, Kid, I’m gay.” “All right. All right,” he said, “Ha haaaa,” and took another long, sad pull off the bottle. “Whoo.” You guys, I wanted to live in this moment forever.
Tara Reid and Her Friend
Also at Spring Break 1999, Tara Reid and Jerry O’Connell joined us to promote their new film Body Shots, which I never got around to seeing and neither did you, but any day spent around a shirtless Jerry O’Connell is a day well spent. This was the Spring Break at which Tara and Carson began their short, intense courtship by Motorola Two-Way Pager; they met on swings as reluctant judges on a morning shoot of a beach Say What? Karaoke, shouting morning-drunk affirmations at each other over a young Joseph Gordon Levitt, who sat in between.
Tara had come down with a friend from Los Angeles, a woman who we guessed was a few years older, not because of her face or body—she had the lineless face and emaciated form of the Los Angeles wannabe fameball; whether she was twenty-five or forty-five was unclear—but because of her eyes. She had the jaded, weary look of one of the dime-a-dance girls in the Pat Benatar “Love Is a Battlefield” video that the Candy Store Boys and I had scrutinized in our youth. We guessed she was around thirty, but, like, a hard thirty. We’d introduce ourselves like “Hi, my name’s Dave,” and she’d just look back at us expressionless, like “What do you want me to do about it?” Since we never got her name, among ourselves we called her Hard Thirty.
Tara and Hard Thirty wanted to be where the cameras were. They’d stumble out from the hotel, still drunk from the night before or getting drunk for the night ahead. They’d spot our camera setup, and they’d run toward us. What they would never do is learn that you can’t really run in high heels on sand, so they’d fall down over and over on the way to us, a Pig Pen cloud of dust and glitter. And then they’d reach us, sand in their mouths and cigarette butts in their hair, and send an intern to Fat Tuesdays to get them daiquiris. (And God help anyone who brought them the wrong flavor. On day three, Hard Thirty accepted a drink—a big one in a two-foot, hot-pink plastic goblet—took a sip, grimaced, and said: “No. Different,” before giving it back to the intern. “Different,” she repeated, in the low, lazy drawl of the day drunk—vocal fry before we had a name for it. Duffrunt. Which I guess meant: “Go get me a different one,” because an intern ran off to get her a new frozen cocktail. No please, no thank you, no Oh, wow, it’s 11:00 a.m. and maybe I shouldn’t be behaving this way, just Duuuuffruuuunt.) But when we would go out at night and kids would take pictures of us, Hard Thirty knew where the camera was, and she would pose: hip flexed, chest out, lips pursed just so. Hard Thirty knew what she was doing.
About a month later, a bunch of us were in the green room, and someone ran in with a copy of the New York Post: “You guys, look at Page Six!” He threw it down on the coffee table, and there she was, in her signature pose, on the step-and-repeat at some museum gala or another. Hard Thirty was a sixteen-year-old heiress and socialite named Paris Hilton.
Mark Wahlberg
I cannot claim to know Mark Wahlberg well, but he would come around the studio a lot, and if we passed each other in the halls, he would pull me aside for a private moment and say: “They payin’ you yet, bro?” I would assure him that they were payin’ me, and he would say: “Good. You got to make sure they payin’ you, bro.” I would say: “Yeah. Yeah, no, I will,” and we would go our separate ways, and then the process would repeat itself three months later when he had something else to promote. I have no idea where he got the idea that I was volunteering at MTV—that I carried myself like someone who absolutely would have worked for free probably had something to do with it—but his concern warmed my heart. Much later, three or four years after I’d left MTV and moved to Los Angeles, I ran into him at Saturday evening Mass, and at the sign of Peace, he leaned into me and whispered: “Yo, they payin’ you yet, bro?” It’s possible that this is just a thing he says to everyone.
Johnny Depp
The 1999 Video Music Awards were held in the Metropolitan Opera House, which was a big deal, and my friend Tracy Grandstaff (the voice of Daria!) was the head writer. I’d never written for an awards show, and I thought it would be a good feather to stick in my cap, so I joined the writing staff. As the event drew closer, I kept getting pulled away to do events or live promos for the show, so I kept having to pass on the things I was assigned to write, such as podium banter for Gavin Rossdale and Susan Sarandon as they gave Best Female Video to Lauryn Hill, or for Buddy Hackett and the cast of The Blair Witch Project before they handed the Best Direction award to the Torrance Community Dance Group for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” But there was one assignment I refused to give up: Johnny Depp was introducing Nine Inch Nails, who hadn’t performed together in some significant amount of time that we were supposed to make a big deal about. It would be epic. Depp and Reznor: legends coming together, kind of. I was determined to make it great.
I spent time on this intro. Like, a lot of time. I incorporated song and album titles and lyrics (“They caught us all in their DOWNWARD SPIRAL and brought us CLOSER TO GOD,” etc. God almighty). I did a ten-, a twenty-, and a thirty-second version, just so Johnny would have options. Tracy looked over my work, thanked me, and we were off. I called my roommates, my immediate circle of friends, and my parents, and said: “I stayed up all night writing the words that Johnny Depp is going to say on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House when he introduces Nine Inch Nails. Please watch.” Sitting in the audience that night, I watched Johnny Depp come on stage, and I looked to the back of the house to see my words in the teleprompter—they went with the twenty-second version, okay, cool. And then I turned as Johnny Depp hit his mark, looked at all of the words he was supposed to read, gave a dismissive shake of his head, and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, Nine Inch Nails.”
My consolation was that literally everyone I had told to watch watched and still called to congratulate me on a job well done.
Puff Daddy and Dream
At some magazine party—I want to say the reception for the “Hot Summer Music” cover of Teen People—I ran into Puff Daddy, who knows everyone’s name and is always at work. “Dave Holmes,” he said, “come with me.” I like an adventure, so I went with him. He made the high-sign to a group of teenage girls in matching halter tops as we walked, and they fell in step as he led us into a stairwell. He closed the door behind us, snapped, and said: “Dream, sing.” The girls sang a bit of a new song I guessed was called “He Loves You Not,” a pretty decent song with some interesting harmonies, and then they all looked at me for a reaction. “That’s Dream,” Puffy said. “That’s my new shit.” “Great,” I said. “That was really good!” But what I was really thinking was How awesome would it be if the doo
r locked from the outside and we were stuck here together all night, like in a sitcom episode? Puffy’s new shit actually did pretty well: “He Loves U Not” and “This Is Me” both made the countdown, and then they vanished a year or so later. Everything Puffy touched briefly turned to gold that year.
Lance Bass and Dream
Lance Bass had his Y2K New Year’s Eve party at the Hammerstein Ballroom just a few blocks up from the studios, and I was to broadcast from there. The guest list was a real who’s who: Jamie Lynn Sigler, Chris Kirkpatrick, various members of third-string Lou Pearlman boy bands, and girl groups who identified themselves by name and name of group, like members of some kind of pop military—“Hi, Mandy, Innosense.”
Lance worked the room in a gold and black top, the spitting image of the Gordon Gartrelle shirt Theo Huxtable wanted, and billowing black satin pants that gathered at the waist and then again at the ankle, with massive slits along the sides revealing bare legs. It was the kind of outfit that made you say: I am looking at a future gay astronaut.
The décor was what you would expect from a guy who got famous in an Orlando boy band: potted palms and paper lanterns. And at each table, massive floral centerpieces sat atop giant round mirrors covered with fake Christmas snow. It was very festive. It was very Lance.
One of the live hits I was supposed to do from the party was me at a table chatting with Dream (who for such a fleeting pop band have evidently had a massive impact on my life), and a minute or so before we were to go live, the camera guy removed the floral centerpiece so that nobody at the table would be blocked by it. This left us sitting around a big round mirror topped with fake Christmas snow. I thought nothing of it until one of the Dream girls—Alison? Joanne? Li’l Sneakerz? Who even knew?—took her all-access laminate, and absentmindedly, just as a thing to do with your hands while you’re waiting to go on live TV, started pushing the fake Christmas snow around on the big round mirror. A pile here, a pile there, a big fat straight line right in the middle. The producer counted us in: 3…2…