I Want My MTV (34 page)

 

LISA COLEMAN:
Here's a good piece of trivia: Pat Smear from Nirvana and Foo Fighters was an extra in “Raspberry Beret.” I met him years later and he said, “I'm such a huge fan, I was in the video.” Look closely and you can spot him, in the front.

 

DAVE GROHL:
That's when Pat had dreadlocks all the way down to his butt. He gets to the auditions at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles, and everyone has to do a synchronized dance. Pat can't dance. So they sent him home. He starts walking down the hallway and hears, “Hey you!” He turns around and there's this big bodyguard standing next to Prince. And Prince whispers in the bodyguard's ear. The bodyguard says, “You can stay. He likes your hair.”

HOWARD WOFFINDEN:
A few of us traipsed to Prince's house in LA about 11 A.M. to meet with him about a video. Someone lets us in and we're sitting in the living room, waiting. Eventually Prince comes in, dressed in silk pajamas, with a blue stiletto on his right foot and a yellow stiletto on his left foot. He sits down and we launch into our spiel. He listens politely for a minute and says, “Uh, hang on.” He disappears for another thirty-five minutes or so. Again, he wanders out, and now he's got the blue stiletto on his
left
foot and the yellow stiletto on his
right
foot. He sits down and says, “Now, what were you saying?”

 

SHARON ORECK:
There was a story told at Limelight about an early Prince video. Supposedly, there was a shot where Prince wanted doves released into the air, but the production manager decided not to work with an animal trainer because it was too expensive, so he bought some doves from a local pet store. When it came time to throw the doves into the air, he literally
threw
them from the stage, and they were immediately sucked into a giant fan, chopped up, and then sprayed around the room and all over the band. That was one of the first rock video legends.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
The Van Halen approach to videos was, like, this is the party, you're in our living room, come on in and join the party.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
I'm not sure I ever understood why it was necessary for Van Halen to fly across the stage while drinking beers in “Panama.”

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
They said, “Mike, why don't you go first?” They strapped me in a harness under my clothes, and it was totally—how would you say?—I mean, it almost castrated me, the way it was wrapped around my legs and groin. My nuts were, like, in a vise. These straps were coming right around my ball sac. As soon as I did it, then you got Al swinging and drinking a beer, and Eddie swinging while Al and Dave yank on him.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
The harness didn't fit Mike very well. I wasn't doing any testicular inspections, but I do remember him gripping his groin and complaining.

 

RANDY SKINNER:
The director who started out on “Hot for Teacher” ended up not finishing it. Things weren't going the way the band wanted, and Pete was a little bossy, so he took over.

PETE ANGELUS:
I had an idea to have young kids portray the four band members. Once the kids spent a little time with the band, they started to assume different personalities. It was weird. Like, the little Alex became very argumentative and difficult to find on the set. The little Edward was shy, and of course the little Dave started running his mouth. I also had an idea of seeing the band members thirty years later, based on their personalities. Alex, that was a no-brainer: He was a gynecologist.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
The kid who played me looked pretty similar to me. The kids who played Eddie and Dave, they wore wigs. I think Alex had his guy drinking a Schlitz Malt before the end of the shoot. When the teacher jumps on the desk and whips off her dress, the little kids were hooting and hollering. We said, “Just go for it, guys. You're going to enjoy this.”

 

DONNA RUPERT, model:
I was first runner-up in the Miss Canada 1981 pageant, then I moved down to LA and signed with the Wilhelmina modeling agency. I lived in a motel on Sunset Strip for a month, until I could find an apartment. It was a sleazy business, but I was too naive to know how sleazy it was. I did forty or fifty national commercials, from Camay to Toyota to Tab, and the agency almost didn't let me do the Van Halen video. They said, “It's not a good image for a model to do a rock video.”

At the audition, there were five of us standing there for what seemed like forever, turning around in our bikinis, in a room with Van Halen and the director. I thought,
Kill me. I can't believe I have to do this.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
The thing I'll never forget about that day is, I got up early, and my wife got up along with me, and my oldest daughter, Elisha, was conceived that morning.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
We had a great time casting the women. I'd love to tell you there was some talent or skill that went along with it, but there wasn't. We spent a day looking at women in bikinis. A few years later, I read in
Fortune
about some billionaire who had accomplished many things, and he said the only thing he hadn't done was to be the casting director in a Van Halen video.

 

DONNA RUPERT:
This is something I don't think anybody knows: There are two girls, two blond teachers, in the video. I was the one wearing a tiara and dancing with David Lee Roth. There's a second girl, who drops to her knees on the desk, wearing a white wife-beater, and does the stripper dancing—that wasn't me. But it transitions quickly to me again, so you think it's me through the whole thing.

I think I made $2,500 for the video.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
In the final scene, all the kids come out of school and jump in Dave's hot rod. And Dave never could drive a car that well. Sometimes I feared for my life because he just could not drive. They got in the hot rod with him, and he took off and almost crashed the thing. It was like, “Oh my God! Dave is going to kill these kids!”

 

PETE ANGELUS:
At the time, there was a lot of choreographed dancing on MTV. It was kind of appalling that everybody had dancers. We felt it would be humorous to have Van Halen do their own dancing. The worse it got, the better. Alex was having a lot of difficulties. I said, “Let's do another take,” with the intention of seeing how bad it could actually get.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
One of the dancers in “Beat It,” the white guy, he choreographed the little dance moves we did. Alex Van Halen, he's the drummer, he's gotta keep the beat, he's the guy with perfect rhythm—but if you watch the video, he's a half beat behind everybody else. I remember him asking me to help him with his dance steps minutes before we did it.

 

DONNA RUPERT:
Phil Donohue showed “Hot for Teacher” as an example of what your kids shouldn't see.

 

RANDY SKINNER:
I remember watching various scenes get filmed for “Hot for Teacher” and thinking,
Oh my god, this is never going to get on MTV
.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
There was a big to-do in the press from women's groups about how the teachers were disrespectfully represented. I didn't see it that way. It was a fantasy that every boy goes through in school.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
I saw “Hot for Teacher” when I was in college. The dorm had a TV in the lounge area, and most often, it was set to MTV. So I saw “Hot for Teacher” with a group of people, and we loved it. There was an excitement about music videos, a buildup to seeing them, and then discussions afterwards about what it meant. I was already in film school, but “Hot for Teacher” made me want to direct music videos.

PETE ANGELUS:
Dave didn't change his mind-set for his solo videos. He was the biggest proponent of more, more, more. Bigger. More exciting. He enjoyed the over-the-top characters. In “Just a Gigolo,” he's the Dave-TV talk show host. I like the idea of “Gigolo” quite a bit, of Dave hosting a television program and bouncing his way into different TV studios and interrupting video shoots. He was thrilled by creating a different character, an obese producer, in “Goin' Crazy.” Later on, in “Eat 'Em and Smile,” we had him in a prosthetic fat suit. What made “California Girls” enjoyable was the idea of Dave being a tour guide, through ridiculous scenarios involving women. I think the women made it popular. But I hope the sense of humor contributed. Dave looked like he was having fun—and he
was
having fun. He liked being around the set, he always came into the edit bay with me. He'd be sitting there with his sunglasses on, usually doing something to anesthetize himself, going, “That's doesn't look bright enough to me.”
Really? Maybe you wanna take off those fucking sunglasses and give it a look.

 

HUEY LEWIS:
Dave's videos were off the charts, just brilliant. I still use that line from “Just a Gigolo”: “You got char-
as-
ma.”

 

PETE ANGELUS:
After I delivered “Just a Gigolo” for Dave's solo project, Warner Bros. said, “Do you think it's a good idea, really, to be electrocuting Billy Idol or punching Boy George in the face?” I said, “I think it's great.” And that was the end of the conversation. It was the biggest budget I'd done with Dave, but I don't think it exceeded $300,000. I think we got a phone call from Cyndi Lauper, that she enjoyed it quite a bit. But I didn't hear from Billy Idol, “Congratulations for electrocuting me.”

 

 

 

KURT JEFFERIS, MTV viewer:
How many people can say they smoked a fatty with David Lee Roth, man? It was a high point, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for a kid from a little town in Pennsylvania to win a national contest.

 

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
We ran a contest, “Lost Weekend with Van Halen.” I wrote the copy for the promo spot. There was a trashed hotel room, girls, David Lee Roth, and the pitch was that if you win, you won't remember the weekend. In fact, there's a chance you might not survive.

David Lee Roth, God bless him, loved it. He wanted to push it as far as possible. I hired two gorgeous models for the promo, and I'm pretty sure he slept with both of them.

The promo was a big hit. For the first time, we got over a million postcard entries. So when it came time to do the Lost Weekend event, it was a no-brainer that we were going to film what transpired.

 

KURT JEFFERIS:
I was allowed to take one person as my guest. My best friend Tom said, “Are you gonna take me?” But I was thinking about taking my girlfriend. Tom said, “C'mon, you're gonna take your girlfriend to something like that?”

 

JOHN SYKES:
In the promo for the “Lost Weekend with Van Halen” contest, David Lee Roth said, “You won't know where you are, you won't know what's gonna happen, and when you come back, you're not gonna have any memory of it.” It was a takeoff on the old movie
The Lost Weekend
, with Ray Milland, about an alcoholic. And then the guy who won—we didn't know this—turned out to have a metal plate in his head.

 

KURT JEFFERIS:
Thirty days after I started college, I had a bad head-trauma accident. I fell down a staircase, from the seventh floor to the sixth floor. I was in the hospital for three months, with a blood clot on my brain. If that had never happened, I don't think I would have ever won the contest, because I was home recovering and had lots of time to mail postcards to MTV.

 

JOHN SYKES:
We fly to Detroit with Van Halen and the contest winner, and they're putting him through the ringer. Dave—not us, Dave—locked the kid in a room with an exotic dancer. They set him up with drinks. They brought him onstage and presented him with a big sheet cake, then they slammed it into his face and doused him with champagne.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
I probably remember more of what happened than the guy who won the contest. Because boy, I'll tell you, he jumped in, full-on. I guarantee, he had a great time. I think he almost ended up in the hospital, from drinking too much. He got laid. He drank. He did everything. He hung out with the band, but I think he got into more trouble hanging out with our crew.

 

KURT JEFFERIS:
They gave me a “Lost Weekend” T-shirt and a hat. I met Valerie Bertinelli when I was backstage smoking a joint and drinking Jack Daniel's. They brought me onstage and smashed a cake in my face, then about a dozen people poured champagne on me, including two midgets. After the show, we went backstage and they brought in a girl for me. She was a stripper in a short black leather skirt. David Lee Roth said, “Kurt needs to meet Tammy.” They put on some music so she could dance and take her clothes off for me. David told her to take me into the shower. And I had Tammy in the shower.

 

RICHARD SCHENKMAN:
I'd brought Don Lenzer—an award-winning documentary cameraman—to shoot the event with a real documentary crew. After the show, they sent the kid to the inner sanctum of their dressing room, to take a shower with a groupie. Obviously I didn't film that. I wasn't allowed in, but I understand they rubbed egg salad all over her. I could hear him howling from where I was sitting.

JOHN SYKES:
And later, the kid goes back to his hotel and loses it. I was in Detroit that night, taping a Pretenders concert, and Richard Schenkman called because the kid was freaking out. His friend said, “He's got a metal plate in his head. He shouldn't be drinking.” At the hotel, it was just insane. The band's having a huge party, they're saying, “Get the kid out of here.” We had to lock him in a room, and one of our producers stayed with him. Van Halen
poisoned
everybody that night. It turned out to be one of our greatest promotions ever.