I Want My MTV (25 page)

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
Mötley Crüe shot “Looks That Kill” on the A&M soundstage. I was the stage manager. During the shoot they came up to me and said, “Dude, can you get us some Jack Daniel's and keep it in your office?” I go, “Yeah, sure, no problem, man.” Unbeknownst to me, they weren't allowed to drink at the time. So I bought a bottle of Jack for them, and between takes they'd stroll into my office with all their makeup on, do a big hit, and go back to the set. A couple years later, I did my first video with them, “Smokin' in the Boys Room.” When we met, first thing I said was “Hey, remember me?” And they laughed: “I
do
remember.” We had an immediate affinity.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
I went to Mötley Crüe's manager, Doc McGhee, and said, “I think this dude Wayne is totally happening. Let's give him a shot.” So we made “Smokin' in the Boys Room” and Wayne became a huge superstar director.

 

TOMMY LEE, Mötley Crüe:
Whatever we were doing, Wayne Isham was doing. If we were partying, he was partying. If we were doing drugs, he was doing drugs. He'd wake up at 8 A.M., hungover, and direct the video. He was like the fifth Beatle.

 

VALERIE FARIS, director:
Wayne could party as hard as any of the bands. They felt so comfortable with him because he was one of them.

 

DOC McGHEE:
Wayne is Mr. MTV. He did most of my stuff, because he was crazier than the bands. Wayne was low IQ, high RPM. He had no dimmer switch.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
I was never really was a big Jack drinker until I met Mötley. I went to an arena in Houston to shoot “Home Sweet Home.” Which is a great live video, in all honesty. I'm setting up the cameras, and I'm told that the band wants to see me in their dressing room. I walk in, and they shout, “You're late!” Even though I wasn't. I go, “What are you talking about?” They're like, “That's it. Double bubble!” I go, “What the fuck does ‘double bubble' mean?” Turns out, “double bubble” meant I had to hold the bottle of Jack Daniel's by its handle, and drink until two bubbles go up. I explained that I had to shoot their video in a few minutes, and “double bubble” wasn't such a good idea. But they kept saying “double bubble, double bubble.” So I double bubbled.

I look back now and can't believe we rocked so hard and still got so much work done. I'd grab a camera, they'd grab their guitars, we'd see the sun rise and think,
How the fuck did we just do that?
We drank, we did coke. I have no qualms about saying that.

 

CURT MARVIS, producer:
Wayne and I named our company The Company. We'd make up T-shirts where we'd print the words “The Company” in the logo style of a brand near and dear to Wayne: the Stolichnaya vodka label, the Harley logo, the Corona logo. But the most famous one had the words “Where's Wayne?” on the back. Because the most enduring phrase about him on any set was “Where's Wayne? Has anybody seen Wayne?” Wayne would be off doing shots with the band at a bar across the street, or finding a “clean shitter” somewhere.

 

NIKKI SIXX:
Wayne knew the band, he hung out with the band, he partied with the band, he was friends with the band, so he was able to get inside our heads and take it over the top. We were traveling around the country in tour buses, the show's going up and the show's going down, and we wanted to capture it in “Home Sweet Home.” We wanted to capture what it's like to be on tour. None of that was staged. It was just this honest moment.

 

DOC McGHEE:
“Home Sweet Home” showed Tommy playing the piano. It gave Mötley a little more credibility.

 

TOMMY LEE:
MTV played “Home Sweet Home” so many times, I honestly started to get sick of seeing it.

 

DOC McGHEE:
I'd just starting to manage Bon Jovi when we did the video for “Runaway.” There's a chubby girl who's a runaway, but she has laser eyes, and the band is playing in a warehouse that's burning. In the '80s, every video had to look like
Escape from New York
. Something had to be on fire, and you had to be in an alley that was wet, or else you couldn't shoot a video. Then “In and Out of Love” was done like a scripted movie, where the band is on the boardwalk, girls chase after them, and they hold newspapers in front of their faces to hide. Terrible.

 

LEN EPAND:
For “Runaway,” we used a commercial director named Michael Cuesta, who had no music-video experience. After that, we shifted to Masfin Kahan, who did a few Bon Jovi videos. I wasn't there, but I was told that he offered an illegal substance to one of the police officers assigned to the shoot for security. He was taken away before the shoot was done.

 

DOC McGHEE:
I was there when he got arrested. Some cop saw him doing blow in the middle of the Jersey boardwalk, and they arrested him. It wasn't a hard case for the police to solve. We just kept shooting the video.

 

 

 

 

 

IN 1983,
TIME
AND
ROLLING STONE
RAN COVER STORIES
on MTV, almost simultaneously. MTV was finally being noticed by the mainstream press, and the mainstream press was unimpressed. Both articles took disapproving tones.
Time
sniffed that “the majority of clips now in circulation are labored ephemera with heavily imitative associations,” unfavorably compared Duran Duran (“an affable, uninspired British band currently aglow with success”) to Beethoven, and concluded, “the pervading silliness is worrisome.”

Steven Levy, writing in
Rolling Stone
, unfavorably compared “superficial, easy-to-swallow” acts such as Adam Ant to Bob Dylan. To bolster his accusation that “heavy-metal pounding” videos were dangerously violent, he quoted Dr. Thomas Radecki, chairman of the right-wing National Coalition on TV Violence, who a year later testified to Congress on behalf of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) and served on their board of directors. (Radecki also routinely claimed that Dungeons & Dragons was “causing young men to kill themselves and others.” His reign at NCTV lasted until 1992, when his medical license was revoked for “engaging in immoral conduct” with a patient.) MTV, Levy wrote, “makes the musical energy and optimism of the Sixties seem a thousand light-years ago.” He called the network “the ultimate junk culture triumph,” and concluded, “Unlike the activist '60s rock coalition, the MTV coalition is essentially passive. Their function is to sit still, watch the commercials and buy the products, not change the world.” In other words, the pervading silliness was worrisome.

Criticism of MTV was not unique throughout the decade. Feminists, including Naomi Wolf, deplored the depiction of women in videos. Conservatives like Allan Bloom saw peril in the loose morality of videos, which contained “nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful, or even decent”—and in which, he claimed dubiously, “Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause.” Ted Turner called MTV's programming violent, degrading to women, and “Satanic.” Criticism was even more pointed within the music industry—at a 1983 convention, Chris Strackwitz, founder of a small label that released blues and Cajun records, asked MTV programmer Buzz Brindle, during a panel discussion, “How can you justify showing twenty-four hours of garbage?” Even video directors sometimes expressed disdain, including John Scarlett-Davies, who in 1984 memorably dismissed the work of his colleagues as “masturbation fantasies for middle America. They just sit there with their cans of beer, tossing off while all these scantily-clad girls do this and that with men with their big electric guitars like prick extensions.”

One accusation proved stickier than others: MTV showed few black artists. Buzz Brindle told a reporter, “We'll air black artists who play rock,” which ignored the fact that MTV aired videos by plenty of white artists who didn't play rock. Bob Pittman and Les Garland defended their policy (which caused grumbling even within the company's offices) by saying that black artists weren't excluded because they were black, but because they didn't play rock n' roll, which was MTV's format. Both had been trained at AOR radio, where music was narrowcast to a small population that liked rock, and only rock. MTV, Andrew Goodwin later wrote acutely, “denied racism, on the grounds that it merely followed the rules of the rock business (which were, nonetheless, the consequence of a long history of racism).” And Jordan Rost, the vice president of research for MTV, believes that Pittman, in creating the format that excluded most black artists, misunderstood and misapplied the network's research. This rejection of black pop did harm to MTV—the network needed to constantly evolve, and its dependence on new wave and heavy metal limited that ability—and it took remarkable circumstances for them to finally give a black singer the kind of attention that had been reserved for Men at Work and Twisted Sister.

 

JOE JACKSON:
And another thing: MTV was racist.

 

LES GARLAND:
The worst thing was that “racism” bullshit. There were artists of color on MTV: Joan Armatrading, Eddy Grant, the Bus Boys, even Prince. But there were hardly any videos being made by black artists. Record companies weren't funding them.
They
never got charged with racism.

Rick James singled me out in an interview, and it pissed me off. I have nothing bad to say about Rick James. The mistake he made was calling me a racist and not knowing me. “Super Freak” was a booty video in a swimming pool. We couldn't play that shit.

 

CAROLYN BAKER:
It wasn't MTV that turned down “Super Freak.” It was me.
I
turned it down. You know why? Because there were half-naked women in it, and it was a piece of crap. As a black woman, I did not want that representing my people as the first black video on MTV.

 

LES GARLAND:
I ran across Rick James one night in a club. I went up to him and said, “My name is Les Garland. Does that mean anything to you? You called me a fucking racist. You don't even know me.” He said, “Dude, I'm sorry.” He apologized, I accepted it, and we became friendly. You remember the Eddie Murphy video “Party All the Time”? Rick wrote that song. And I'm one of the two white guys in the video.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
The music department was the driver of the programming, but people in the halls were starting to rise up and say, “I get the format you want to follow, but this is incredible music and these are unbelievable artists.” The staff was ready for revolt.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Bob wanted a rock n' roll format. But there was a lot of pressure building up, because all of sudden people wanted to be on MTV. Because of his Mississippi background, Bob was thought by some people in the business to be racist. But it did bother me that we had to have this format. There were a lot of people at the network saying, “We should broaden this out.”

 

JORDAN ROST:
The original research study for MTV showed that playing a few, specific urban artists would turn off a lot of the core audience. I remember thinking, “Oh, Bob is remembering that first study.” But he translated the research in a way that wasn't ever studied, and he created a rule from it that was erroneous, as opposed to saying, “Let's do another study in six months, with different artists.” It shows how quickly you can create a mold, even if it's a faulty one.

CAROLYN BAKER:
I said, “We've got to play James Brown.” And Bob said, “The research says our audience thinks rock n' roll started with the Beatles.” I came through the civil rights movement. I was a member of SNCC. I believe in opening doors. The party line at MTV was that we weren't playing black music because of the “research.” But the research was based on ignorance. I told Bob that to his face. We were young, we were cutting edge. We didn't have to be on the cutting edge of racism.

 

GEORGE BRADT, MTV staff:
It's worth remembering who had cable at that time: white suburbanites, mostly. MTV was playing it safe with the audience. My first job there was call-out research, four to nine every weekday, for minimum wage. We were given phone books from areas with a lot of MTV coverage, and randomly called people. Once we found regular viewers, we'd call back every few weeks and ask about videos. I don't remember many, if any, recognizably black or Latino voices on the phone. That research drove a lot of the music decisions, and let's just say it wasn't exactly a sophisticated research operation.

The people at the top had all come from radio stations. They were old-school, white radio guys with an AOR mind-set, probably because in the world of '80s radio, AOR was cool. MTV was slow to realize that they didn't have to think of themselves as “the rock channel”—they were the
only
channel.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
I did an interview with David Bowie, and he asked me why there were so few black faces on MTV. I was in an odd position, because I couldn't diss the company. So when Bowie started in with me, I tried to explain the rock format idea. And Bowie was not having it. I was fumpfering around for something to say, and the interview felt like an eternity.

The fact was, J.J. and I had been talking about this. He pointed out to me that he was initially down with the rock format, but once MTV started to play Spandau Ballet and ABC—basically, white R&B acts—he felt there was no reason not to play black R&B acts. He was like, “What the fuck is up with that?” He told me he talked to management about it. I don't for a minute believe Pittman was a bigot—we were a rock station, the programming made absolute sense to me.