I Want My MTV (30 page)

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
MTV jumped on “Borderline,” and that was it. Away we go.

 

CINDY CRAWFORD, model; host,
House of Style:
Madonna was the first person on MTV whose style we tried to emulate. I was a freshman at Northwestern University and my roommate from New Jersey was a huge Madonna fan. The way she mixed things—lace and skirts, gloves and boots—I didn't know what to make of it, but there were elements I could relate to.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
She works with a lot of different stylists and costume designers, but nobody really dresses Madonna except Madonna. The whole trashed-out lingerie street-look—where your dark roots and bra strap are always showing, and there's holes in your stockings—that was all her.

 

DEBBIE GIBSON, artist:
Madonna paved the way for all of us, and may we never forget it. “Lucky Star” was my favorite video, because it was all about her and the performance. Those early Madonna videos were about her energy, and what she was wearing, and how she was dancing. When I was fourteen, I won two tickets on WPLJ radio to see her in concert, and my cousin and my sister were upset that they couldn't go, because I had to take my mom. And so in a very cocky manner, I said, “Well then, I'll win two more.” And I did. The four of us dressed like Madonna and went to the concert.

JEFF AYEROFF:
I made “Lucky Star” for $14,000 with a friend who was a pot grower from Bolinas, California. We'd released “Everybody,” “Burning Up,” “Holiday,” and “Borderline” as singles. And Madonna didn't want to release

“Lucky Star.” Around the same time, she was getting sued and needed money. I said, “Let me release ‘Lucky Star,' and I guarantee you'll sell enough records to pay that off.” “Lucky Star” broke the first album wide open.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
Jeff Ayeroff gave his friend Arthur Pierson a video to direct, and I ended up as the director of photography on that clip, “Lucky Star.” And Madonna was so pissy. We start to do a shot and I realized I was using the wrong lens. I said, “Sorry, I have to change lenses.” And she was
angry
. Didn't want to wait. I said, “Dude, I can't just
shit
a lens.” Everybody was freaking out. Maybe I could have said it in a different way.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
For “Like a Virgin,” Jeff Ayeroff said, “We want to do something outrageous.” I said, “Let's do it in Venice!” The idea of Madonna singing in a gondola was the most outrageous thing I could think of. And Madonna dug it, because she has the whole thing with the Catholic Church and her Italian heritage. It turned into a huge party. One night, we were waiting to take a ferry back to where we were staying. Everyone had been drinking, and somebody bet the photographer Larry Williams that he couldn't put his fist in his mouth. He did get it all the way in his mouth, but then it got stuck and he couldn't get it out. He won the bet, though.

Madonna stayed at the Hotel Cipriani, partly because she was avoiding Simon Fields, who still wanted to sleep with her—so did everybody else, for that matter—and partly because there was a pool there, and she swam every morning as part of her exercise routine. The rest of us stayed at a sleazebag hotel on Lido, a little island just outside Venice. There were 3 million mosquitoes and the mattresses were stuffed with rocks. Shooting in Venice was definitely excessive. We shot during the day, ate in little cafes, and partied with Madonna at the Cipriani at night.

 

JEFF AYEROFF:
By that point, Madonna was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. So we went to Venice, like a bunch of fucking whack jobs. I don't know what we spent—$150,000? $175,000?—but it was way more than we'd ever spent on a video. Simon Fields was having an affair with Madonna, Mary Lambert was having an affair with somebody else. What did I do on the shoot? I sat on the back of the barge and yelled “
Duck
,” so Madonna didn't smack her head on the bridges.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
There's this famous yearly Carnival in Venice where everyone wears elaborate masks. I loved that idea, of things not being what they seem. Madonna's love interest in the video wore a lion mask, and that gave me the idea to get a real lion. I wanted to have the guy in the lion mask turn into an actual lion. Nobody else liked the lion. Madonna went along with it.

 

SIMON FIELDS:
The lion started to get crazy around Madonna. No one else. And then we found out that you can't have a lion around a woman when she's on her period.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
You can't be in Madonna's presence, ever, without feeling the raw sexuality and sensuality she exudes. And that's something I encouraged in all the videos we did. When you're near her, and she turns that charm on you, it's like somebody switching on a spotlight. The camera sees it.

 

SHARON ORECK:
I was on the “Material Girl” set when Madonna first met Sean Penn. They were so perfect for each other—she was an extraordinary beauty and a rebel princess, and he was a young god of cinema and also clearly the James Dean, rebel type. The PA on the video, Meegan Lee Ochs, had been Sean's assistant. She was Phil Ochs's daughter, and Sean met her when he was trying to make a film about Phil. So she said to either Mary Lambert or me, “My ex boss really wants to meet Madonna.” The crew knew he was coming and everyone was super excited and giddy. We were shooting the musical sequence where she's in the pink halter dress. So he met her when she was in her Marilyn Monroe finery. We all knew they were going to fall in love and get married.

Madonna's breasts are super perky, so they tend to pop out when she dances. In the “Material Girl” video, she's wearing a pink outfit, and I guess it didn't have a bra, so whenever she'd go upside down, or lay back with her arms in the air, one or two of her boobs would come out.

 

FREDDY DeMANN:
People often misunderstand the “Material Girl” video. The idea was that Madonna was a Marilyn Monroe–type actress playing the role of a gold digger—a “material girl”—in a musical, but off-camera she was a good person. She chooses the poor guy in the shitty car instead of the rich guy. But everyone assumed Madonna was identifying with the material girl, not the good girl. The title stuck to her, and that bothered her. She never liked that handle.

 

MARY LAMBERT:
Madonna's always had a dual personality. A lot of her early videos—“Borderline,” “Material Girl,” “La Isla Bonita,” perhaps “Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer”—are largely about her straddling two different worlds.

 

DANIEL KLEINMAN:
After I shot Madonna in concert on the “Like a Virgin” tour, she came to look at the footage while I was editing, and to tell me what I'd done wrong. She was going out with Sean Penn, and she used to take cuts home and show him, and she'd come back with notes from Sean Penn. The editor and I would tear our hair out.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ, Beastie Boys:
The first time we went to LA as a band was when we opened for Madonna. That was the greatest. Kids were literally in tears when we were playing. It was one of the most punk rock things we've ever done. And Madonna is the best. After the first night, her manager, Freddy DeMann, said, “These guys suck.” “No, seriously, they suck. They need to go home.” And Madonna was like, “These guys are staying.” She put her foot down. We didn't realize until later that the audience's hatred for us worked in her favor. When she got onstage, they couldn't have been happier to see her.

 

TOM FRESTON:
Madonna once said that we grew up together. We sort of did. It was the two M's, Madonna and MTV. She created what a modern artist could be, and how you could reinvent yourself, or reinterpret yourself, with music videos.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
I interviewed Madonna a couple of times. Once when we were in Miami, talking backstage, I said, “I don't know if you remember, I'm Mark Goodman. I interviewed you at MTV before you were ‘Madonna.'” And she looked at me and said, “Mark, I was
always
Madonna.”

 

 

 

THE FIRST PHASE OF MTV—NAIVE, EXPERIMENTAL,
low-key, low-budget—had come to an end. Skeptical record executives, watching Michael Jackson and Madonna, now had inarguable proof that an expensive video could be a wise investment.

For the record business, this was the first good news in years. Between 1975 and 1978, record sales had grown from $2.4 billion a year to $4.1 billion, a 71 percent increase in three years. By 1981, when MTV launched, sales had recessed to $3.9 billion. Ten years later, annual sales were at $7.8 billion. Rarely has an industry benefitted so well from an innovation it rejected.

The average budget had been $30,000 to $40,000, but videos now became more sleek and elaborate—and so grueling that
three different people
went temporarily blind. As more cities were wired for cable, and more cable operators began to carry MTV, the network also benefitted from a fluke of timing: 1984 was a fantastic time for pop and rock music. Prince, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, and Van Halen all became superstars that year. Even Bruce Springsteen, the spiritual leader of rock's anti-video movement, relented, though his first big video was one he didn't like.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
Until Michael Jackson and Madonna, we didn't have an act who was truly a video artist. We, without shame, flogged Michael Jackson videos, because we wanted other artists to see how you
should
do a video. We wanted to advance the art form. If you look at videos prior to “Thriller” and after “Thriller,” there was a marked change. Every artist wanted to do
that
kind of video. Three guys standing on a stage began to look pretty lame.

PAUL FLATTERY:
Before MTV, bands used to break out regionally. And then MTV became the national radio station, with pictures. It became the tail that wagged the dog.

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
I feel like a really old guy when I say this, but back then, the industry could make a hit. Clive Davis at Arista, Donnie Ienner at Columbia, David Geffen—if they decided something should be a hit, it was a hit. And if MTV decided a song was going to be a hit, it became a hit. Today, the consumer makes that decision. There is no gatekeeper with that kind of power.

 

JOHN SYKES:
1984 was our tipping point. It was an incredible year for music: Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Van Halen. All of a sudden, we began to feel the wind at our backs. Artists were selling tens of millions of records, in no small part due to video. And finally,
finally
, after three years, people understood what we'd been pitching them.

 

GALE SPARROW:
John Sykes and I went to an international video conference in St. Tropez. Every record-label person that dealt with video was there. Elton John's manager, John Reid, had a boat, so he'd have unbelievable cocktail parties there. The guy who put together the conference went to jail because he owed so much money to the hotel we stayed at. Everything was comped: our rooms, all our food and alcohol. We drank St. Tropez dry. They ran out of Cristal champagne. On the last night, Harvey Leeds decided there was no way we could drive from St. Tropez to Cannes and make our flights, so he hired three helicopters to take us. We were living like millionaires.

 

TIM NEWMAN:
This St. Tropez event was a great deal of fun with a lot of really bad behavior. You felt like you belonged to this interesting, crazy little club.

 

LIZ HELLER, record executive:
We stayed at an incredibly grand hotel, Les Mas De Chastelas. John has always been healthy and fit, really into exercise, and one night I said, “So what are we gonna do tonight?' And John very seriously said, “Well, it's a health night. I've got to be in bed by 5 A.M.”

 

TOMMY MOTTOLA:
Sykes got friendly with John Mellencamp, so we put together a big promotion. We were trying to get in everybody's good favor at MTV, so we'd get as much heavy rotation as possible.

JOHN SYKES:
I met John Mellencamp performing in New York. I think he was John Cougar at the time. We were playing “Jack and Diane” over and over again. And he was a smart guy. He said, “Okay, I'm gonna do business with you guys.” I asked if he wanted to do a promotion for us where we'd give away a pink house. I said, “We'll buy it in your hometown, and we'll have a big party if you'll play in the living room.” He said, “I'll do that.”

 

MARCY BRAFMAN:
We went to the Russian Tea Room, and there was a certain amount of vodka being drunk. Bob Pittman said, “You know what we should do? We should buy a house somewhere and blow it up.” We're like, “Yeah! Let's do that.” And we did, pretty much. We got college kids to spray-paint it pink, and then Mellencamp drove his motorcycle through the house and out the door.

 

JOHN SYKES:
The response turned out to be huge. We bought the house, a little shack, I think we paid $20,000 for it, after which I get a letter from John, asking, “Did you see
Rolling Stone
this week? The house you bought is across the street from a toxic waste dump. You gotta get another house.” So I got on the plane and went to Indiana to find another house. I pulled up in the car, and a woman came out with cookies to give to me, because she really wanted to sell her house, this poor single mom with her kid. I didn't even get out of the car. I said, “We'll take it.” And that first house stayed on the books for MTV through, like, 1992. They couldn't sell it, because it was across the street from a toxic waste dump. They finally wrote it off.