I Want My MTV (52 page)

 

ALAN NIVEN:
With Jon, you had a reasonably talented individual who was extremely good-looking and very much liked by the camera lens. His sidekick, Richie Sambora, most people would agree, has a better voice. But Jon had star quality. I'm not sure how well that band would have done before MTV. One track off their first album worked, “Runaway.” Their second album was not good. Had it not been for Jon's good looks, I'm not sure Bon Jovi would have been allowed to make a third album. Wayne Isham was at least as important to that band as Jon Bon Jovi.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
Doc McGhee called me about meeting with Bon Jovi. It was Jon's birthday, and I met him at a bar, and he was not into me doing their videos at all. He looked at me, like, “Who the
fuck
is this crazy guy?” I wasn't the serious auteur he was hoping for.

Jon had his own ideas for “You Give Love a Bad Name.” He wanted chicks in low-cut tops mud wrestling. That wasn't what I was about. I know it sounds funny, coming from the guy who directed Mötley Crüe's “Girls Girls Girls,” but there's a world of difference between the burlesque in “Girls Girls Girls” and mud wrestling.

TOMMY LEE:
When Wayne started doing Bon Jovi videos, we gave him all kinds of shit. “How can you
do
that, man?”

 

NIKKI SIXX:
My problem with Bon Jovi was that Doc McGee had started managing them, and without a doubt, they were poaching on our success. When we would see Bon Jovi do a knockoff of what we did, we didn't like it. Go think of your own shtick! It's just disrespectful, and it's all about the money at that point.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
I shot “You Give Love a Bad Name” at the Olympic Auditorium in LA. It had been closed down forever, so we opened it again and hung the lights, built the stage, brought in the fans, and created our own mock arena. I painted the Bon Jovi logo on the stage floor. I told the band they couldn't check out the stage until I had the lights working and everything ready to go. I made them wait outside, then I opened the big doors. They came in and were blown away. Because this was
their
show.
Their
rig.
Their
stage with
their
name written on it.

Right before that video came out, Bon Jovi were on the road opening for .38 Special. After a few weeks on MTV, they were headlining.

 

RICHIE SAMBORA, Bon Jovi:
Our success had a lot to do with timing. I guess there was a hole—there was a need by the people for a Bon Jovi. Just a good-time entertainment band, you know? A bridge between Phil Collins and Whitesnake.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
We went back to the Olympic Auditorium and re-created the stage for “Livin' on a Prayer.” Jon wanted to fly over the crowd. So Joe Branam—he's the best stage rigger on earth—came up with a kooky harness, where you pull really hard on a rig and it flies out and swings back. Jon loved it. After those Bon Jovi videos came out, everybody wanted
that
video. Everyone wanted that live energy. Def Leppard wanted it. Whitney Houston wanted it. The Rolling Stones wanted it.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
With all due respect to Bon Jovi, they copied a lot of things Van Halen had already done. I've seen this before, my friend. I know your hair is more poofed up, but still it's the same thing. Don't kid yourself; it's not a genius concept.

 

LARS ULRICH:
Maybe my favorite video of the '80s was “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Wayne Isham brilliantly captured the other side of rock n' roll, the pictures of Jon Bon Jovi staring out the plane window. Wayne was by far the number one guy in rock videos.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
Wayne Isham is one of the best live directors there is. That video, about the tribulations of being on the road, seemed very real. Lars was friends with Wayne and he asked me, “How long you think it took them to shoot that?” I guessed two weeks. Lars said, “No. Seven months.”

 

TOMMY LEE:
Every video started to look like “Home Sweet Home.” “Wanted Dead or Alive” looks just like “Home Sweet Home.” Except ours is on a bus and Bon Jovi's is on a plane.

 

DOC McGHEE:
They're the same video, pretty much. Listen, everybody steals from everybody.

 

RICHARD MARX:
My video “Right Here Waiting” is very similar to “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Except I was wearing more eyeliner than Jon Bon Jovi. The makeup person said, “You don't understand, you're not gonna see it on camera.” Sure enough, I saw the dailies and went, “Motherfucker!” I look like a drag queen.

 

LEN EPAND:
Once Bon Jovi established a winning style on “Bad Name” and “Livin' on a Prayer,” we pulled their prior videos out of circulation. They were all deemed embarrassing, or at least not the right image. We notified all video outlets, including MTV, that they were no longer licensed for use. I doubt they ever appeared on broadcast again.

 

MICK KLEBER:
Marty Callner and Wayne Isham were better than anyone at shooting a crowd. The crowd is a huge part of the concert experience. Marty would get great shots of girls reverently looking up at their heroes onstage. And Wayne's Bon Jovi videos had the same.

 

DOC McGHEE:
The concept is simple: show people what you want them to believe you are. So I showed them crazy rock bands, with chicks everywhere, and people staring up at the stage in awe.

 

SAM KAISER:
MTV and Bon Jovi went to a resort called Hedonism II in Jamaica and broadcast from there [in April 1987]. It was called Hedonism Weekend. Bon Jovi's manager, Doc McGhee, invited me to come with him and the band to a little place called Miss Jenny's Teas and Cakes. I'm not going to say who in the band partook. It definitely wasn't Johnny. Johnny never got involved in the nonsense.

Miss Jenny's Teas and Cakes was a tumbledown shack with a chain-link fence over it. And Miss Jenny had a special set of teas and cakes, if you know what I mean. Doc walks up to the Jamaican woman behind the counter and says, “Give me a gallon of tea and that whole pan of cake.” She goes, “You crazy, mon.” And we were off and running. I have never laughed so hard in my life. I recall trying to go to bed at 3 A.M. and still hallucinating at 8. That next morning, I somehow got dressed and walked down to the breakfast area, and everyone is wearing sunglasses. Everyone is moving slowly. One guy is standing in front of the scrambled eggs, staring at the serving spoon. And it dawned on me,
Holy shit, the crew is tripping, too
. A couple of years ago I ran into Richie Sambora at the ASCAP awards, and he said, “You almost got me killed in Jamaica.”

 

DOC McGHEE:
We flew contest winners down to be in this resort with Bon Jovi. All the heads of MTV came. I'm pouring them psilocybin tea and serving pot brownies, and nobody's getting high. We drank all the tea and drove back to the resort, eating more brownies. When we pulled up, we were flying. They found one MTV executive at 5:30 A.M., sobbing on the lawn. I slept by the pool, because I couldn't move and it would've looked bad for the manager to be dragged to his room on a fucking golf cart.

 

MARSHALL BERLE:
The guys in Ratt were party animals. We shot “Dance” at the Whiskey in LA and Stephen Pearcy showed up late. We did one take, he said “I'm done,” and he was gone.

We shot “Slip of the Lip” in New Orleans and Shreveport. My head of security was an ex-policeman, and he's in the video, wearing a cowboy hat. He was more trouble than the band. The morning after we made the video, the manager of the hotel asks me to come to the fifth floor. He opens the door and there's my head of security, handcuffed to a bed, stark naked. He says, “I was partying with a couple of girls and they stole my wallet, my gun, my badge, all my clothes, and left me here.”

 

DANIEL KLEINMAN:
Ronnie Dio was a funny little guy. I made a video called “Rock n' Roll Children” for him. He had two huge minders with him. Because Ronnie was very short—about five-foot-four—they told us we weren't allowed to allude to his height. But there's a type of spotlight in America called a “midget.” It's a very small spotlight, and it has a different name in England. We were getting ready to do a take and the gaffer shouted, “All right, bring on the midget!” The minders thought we were referring to Dio. They went out of their minds.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Vinnie Vincent was briefly the guitarist for Kiss, and then formed the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. He came to the studio one day totally done up, with the makeup and the wig. And he ended up locking himself in the janitor's broom closet in the hallway. His management and record label people were outside the door desperately trying to coax him out, but he wouldn't come out of the broom closet.

 

NIGEL DICK:
Vinnie Vincent had an astonishingly great head of hair, but felt it necessary to wear a wig. I said, “Vinnie, what the fuck are you doing? What's wrong with your real hair? It's great.” I will totally confess that I did Vinnie Vincent Invasion videos solely for the money. Musically, they were bereft.

 

STEVE SCHNUR:
Don Dokken had hair issues. His hair was long and stringy, with a big ball of sunshine on top.

 

MICK KLEBER:
When the pop-metal aesthetic took over and hair bands reigned, Capitol Records spent an insane amount of money on extensions and hair plugs. For Great White alone. But it paid off. “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was a huge moneymaker for Capitol.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
Jack Russell and Mark Kendall of Great White spent the money as a personal choice, for their own self-confidence. They went to the same guy as Don Dokken, who also suffered an early hair recession. Jack used to hide his stash under his weave, by the way, which took me a little time to figure out.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
Whitesnake were signed to Geffen Records, and they couldn't get arrested. David Coverdale was dead broke. He was living at the Mondrian Hotel, but he couldn't pay the bill. He couldn't drive his car because he couldn't afford insurance. He was making money singing seltzer commercials. We went to lunch and he had $5 and a condom in his wallet. He said, “I'm sorry, but I can't even afford to pick up my share of the lunch.” Now I'm feeling really sorry for this guy, and I know that this is his last shot, so I got really passionate about doing the video for “Still of the Night.”

 

JOHN KALODNER:
Making the Whitesnake album took more than a year, but we finally finished. For the first video, “Still of the Night,” Marty Callner was a real auteur: director, writer, creator. The band you see in that video wasn't a band. David had fired the rest of Whitesnake, so I assembled a great bunch of musicians for his new band. That video was the first time they met one another.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
We had $125,000, and we made a performance video for a six-minute song. As I'm editing the video, I start to realize it's a piece of shit because the guys in the band aren't communicating. And the reason they're not communicating is because they'd just met. It was like Milli Vanilli. I called their manager, Howard Kaufman, and said, “This is not gonna work.” Luckily, Coverdale had marched through my house the previous Saturday night with a girl named Tawny Kitaen, who at the time was having an affair with O.J. Simpson. She was drop-dead gorgeous. I asked if she wanted to be in a music video, and she said
yes
. So I told Kaufman I needed $35,000 more to shoot Tawny and re-edit the video, and he said, “Fuck Coverdale. I'm not giving him the money.” Geffen said the same thing. I had to personally lend Coverdale the money to finish the video.

 

TAWNY KITAEN:
I remember it as if it were yesterday. Like, I don't remember yesterday, but I remember
that
. David was in debt to Geffen to the tune of $2 million. He was pretending to be a rock star. One night, I went with David to Marty Callner's house. They were shooting “Still of the Night” the next day. The second I walked in, Marty went, “Fire the chick we hired—you're gonna do the video!” And I said, “I don't do videos. I'm a professional actress.” But Marty said, “No. You're the girl. You're the one who's going to make this video.”

 

SAM KAISER:
We introduced a spot on our playlist called “Hip Clip of the Week,” where a video would get played six or seven times a day for four weeks. I mean, we pounded the daylights out of it. John Cannelli came and played Whitesnake's “Still of the Night.” I'm like,
Oh man, this is spot-on
. It was brilliant and we made it “Hip Clip of the Week.” As soon as it got on air, Jeff Ayeroff at Warners called me: “I can't believe this! That's not hip!” I said, “Maybe not to you and me, but it is to Joe and Janie out in Iowa.”

EDDIE ROSENBLATT, record executive:
Even though it was a six-minute track, MTV must've played it fifty times a week.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
David Coverdale became a megastar. Tawny and David made three videos together, and ended up falling in love and getting married. That was never going to last. Tawny relished the exposure. She was cute, sexy, sassy, charming. It was the good Tawny Kitaen. She wasn't the girl on the rehab shows yet. She was young and rock n' roll and fun.

The cars that Tawny gyrates on at the beginning of “Here I Go Again” are my Jag and David's Jag. We didn't have enough money to rent cars. Paula Abdul choreographed that scene for me. I said, “Will you stage this dance on the Jaguars for me?” And she did.