I Want My MTV (55 page)

JEFF STEIN:
I'm sure Jani felt he was a great songwriter. If I were him, I'd rather watch “Cherry Pie” than “Heaven,” which is an anthem for eunuchs. Come on! Strap your balls on, Jani! And if you don't like the video, give me your platinum record!

 

BOBBIE BROWN:
Jani has a love/hate relationship with the song. Yes, it's the one song that's keeping his name alive, and people remember him for. But in his mind, as a writer or an artist, it's not his best work. It's a song he wrote in the bathroom, in five minutes.

 

ADAM LEVINE, Maroon 5:
“Cherry Pie” was metaphor-free. It left nothing to the imagination. There's a scene where a piece of cherry pie falls into her lap, and you're like,
Really?
Even at twelve years old, I thought,
Wow, how tacky
.

 

BRET MICHAELS:
Our “Flesh and Blood” video didn't pan out. CC wanted his girlfriend—Tammy was her name—to be in the video. I said, “CC, the video is basically softcore porn. We're playing Adam and Eve and we're going to be half-naked and sucking face. Isn't that gonna be weird for you?” He goes, “Don't worry about it—she's a model, she wants to do it. She's a professional.” So we shot the video, and let me put it this way, it didn't go over well with CC But hey, if I saw a buddy doing that with my girlfriend, I wouldn't be happy either. It probably led to our fistfight at the VMAs. One of many.

 

SEBASTIAN BACH:
We made a conscious decision to not objectify women in Skid Row videos. It didn't feel good, it wasn't a good thing to do, and every single video had chicks in it. Not that we don't like chicks, but it was overplayed at that point. We wanted our videos to follow the lyrical content of the song, intercut with beautiful, slow-motion hair twirling. And I think we achieved our goal.

Dude, when they talk about “hair metal,” whose hair do you think they're talking about? I've still got it. I'm looking at it right now. And it's so flaxen!

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
For Skid Row's “18 and Life,” about a kid who runs away from an abusive family and ends up getting drunk and shooting his best friend, I knew we were going to have problems with the guns. There was a scene where the kid spray-paints a drippy bullet hole in the middle of his forehead—like a third eye—and MTV made me remove that. You couldn't predict what they would or wouldn't allow.

 

DOC McGHEE:
“18 and Life” was a big video. I mean, you had a kid, Sebastian Bach, who if you put a set of tits on him, he could run for Miss Texas. One of the best-looking guys on the planet at that time.

 

SEBASTIAN BACH:
I was upstairs with my girlfriend Maria, fucking her on the floor in the video studio. She was riding me and they knocked on the door: “Sebastian, it's your scene.” She dismounted me, I pulled up my pants. Maybe that had something to do with the video's success, too, having just got fucked. My hair is tousled.

Then I saw Nine Inch Nails' “Head Like a Hole” and thought it looked amazing, so we hired the same company to shoot “Monkey Business.” Michael Schmidt made the tight leather pants I wore. It's all about the cock, baby. It's framed perfectly in that video.

When Rick Krim liked your band, he got your videos on MTV. Here I am today, standing in my huge house with platinum records all over the wall, and I owe that to two things: Rick Krim and my cheekbones. Though my lips had a lot to do with it, too. So I'd like to thank my cheekbones, my lips, my hair, and Rick Krim. And my crotch.

 

 

 

 

MTV's CENTRAL RELATIONSHIP WAS WITH ROCK
stars—making them famous, interviewing them, playing their videos, keeping them happy. But they also delved into the weird corners of music, where videos were still made on minuscule budgets, often with startling or innovative results.

The Cutting Edge
was a beloved showcase for freakiness, made by I.R.S. Records and licensed to MTV, which kept it hidden on the last Sunday of every month, playing videos from upstarts like R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Minutmen late in the night, giving weirdos a good reason for showing up to work tired on Monday mornings. “For those of us out in the sticks, it was a lifeline,” musician and newspaper editor Kate Messer wrote years later, “an encyclopedia to certain strata of ‘underground' culture.”

In March 1986, MTV introduced
120 Minutes
, a two-hour weekly show airing on Sunday at 1 A.M.
120 Minutes
went through a number of hosts, largely because it was an unglamorous job that no one wanted to keep. Except, eventually, Dave Kendall.

 

VALERIE FARIS:
The Cutting Edge
was an hour-long show that aired once a month, on Sunday night. It was hosted by Peter Zaremba, the singer of the Fleshtones. Peter is a music lover and historian, so he lent some credibility to the show.

 

PETER ZAREMBA, host,
The Cutting Edge
:
It was MTV's alternative music show, the precursor to
120 Minutes
. As host, I got paid $1,000 a show, which was a lot of money for me. We'd air offbeat videos MTV wouldn't show. We played Madonna before MTV put her videos in rotation. And we'd film artists playing just for us—we'd go to a sound check, or invite R.E.M. to some interesting location, and they'd do acoustic versions of their songs. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' first national TV appearance was on
The Cutting Edge
. We had the Replacements, the Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, Alex Chilton, Jonathan Richman, and we also had Willie Dixon, Jimmy Cliff, and Tom Waits. Iggy Pop wanted to be filmed up in a tree. Morrissey insisted on no interviewer, because he didn't want to be sullied by talking to a host.

 

JONATHAN DAYTON, director:
It was bands that otherwise might not appear on MTV. This was the one place where you could see Henry Rollins reading his poetry. We filmed Morrissey in his bathroom at a hotel, and gave him a stack of envelopes, each with a single word inside. He would open the envelope and talk to a little camera. The word might be “beauty,” so he'd talk about beauty. There were no VJs or happy talk. It was very homemade. No one was making much money, so in exchange you were given a lot of freedom.

 

PETER ZAREMBA:
Two of the show's producers, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, went on to become big-deal directors. They did lots of music videos, and later they directed
Little Miss Sunshine
. They were very mellow. They put up with a lot of junk.

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
Everyone I knew would find a television set, have beers, and watch
The Cutting Edge
. It was like
The Island of Misfit Toys
. All the miscreants and the outcasts and the punks and the fat girls and the kids with bad skin and the queers could gather together around this universe. Pre-Internet, and before the instantaneous sharing of information and knowledge about music or about art, that was it. That was for the Lee Renaldos and the Kim Gordons and the Courtney Loves and the Michael Stipes.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
MTV helped create the trench coat–wearing, Cure-loving, zine-reading kid of the '80s. Echo and the Bunnymen came to St. Louis and there were all these kids dressed the same who knew every word, but the band wasn't getting played on the radio. Somehow, they'd all gotten the same message, and it was from watching MTV late at night.

DAVE KENDALL:
I was cleaning a woman's apartment the first time I saw MTV. She felt bad for me, a young kid having to clean apartments to pay the bills. So she said, “Hey, we've got MTV!” And I was like, “What's that?” I'd come to New York from London on a student exchange.

To be honest, I wanted to work for any company that would allow me to stay in the States legally. I was getting laid for the first time in my life; that's probably why I stayed. I would've worked for a burger stand if they could've gotten me a work permit. I was a music journalist, writing for
Melody Maker
in England, and Judy McGrath hired me to write
120 Minutes
. Then I started producing it as well. There was a parade of hosts: J.J. Jackson, then Mark Goodman, Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Kevin Seal—whoever was available. Hosting the show wasn't a plum assignment.

But
120 Minutes
was culturally important, because there was nowhere else to find this music in 1986, so I felt a sense of satisfaction. These were the days when VCRs were available, so people started to tape the shows and watch them later. MTV was always conceived to be both an art and a business. There was a desire to cater to a smaller audience that was not the lowest common denominator.

 

RICK KRIM:
The first times I met Bruce Springsteen and Bono, the conversations were about
120 Minutes
, because they both loved that show.

 

MARK GHUNEIM, record executive:
120 Minutes
was the Pitchfork of its time.

 

DAVE GROHL:
On
120 Minutes
, you'd see a video that was made with a Pixelvi-sion camera and Super 8 and bad lighting. I found it endearing. Like,
This band made their own video? That's pretty fucking cool
. Like in R.E.M.'s “Driver 8,” where they have images projected on their faces and they're shaking the car to make it look like they're driving. I'd much rather see a school play than a Broadway musical.

 

DAVE KENDALL:
I started hosting
120 Minutes
because I wrote myself into the script. I did record reviews on the show, then Kevin Seal went away and someone suggested I fill in. And I did it for three and a half years. I had a fairly grating persona. I mean, I annoy myself. So I took great pleasure in annoying my public, by being brash and sarcastic. Being on television was not a natural thing for me.

KEN R. CLARK:
We used to kid Dave, usually behind his back, about his hair. He wore a really bad rug. People used to joke about the dead cat on top of his head. John Lydon from Public Image came in the studio and his focus was completely fixated on the top of Dave's head. Dave asked a question, and John said, “Dave, I have to ask—are you wearing a wig?” The entire studio exploded in laughter.

 

DAVE KENDALL:
I used to wear a hair weave, the so-called dead cat on my head. I'd come from the New Romantic era, so why wear a subtle hair weave when you can have something totally ridiculous? John Lydon turned to me at the end of a segment and said, “Is that a wig?” And of course, that didn't air.

Alternative music grew, and
120 Minutes
assumed a higher profile, in terms of advertisers and sponsors. There was more press attention, more label attention.
120 Minutes
was attractive to people who had a sense of being different, but they also had a sense of violation when a video crossed over into regular rotation. They felt something had been taken from them, part of their identity had been co-opted. They felt a sense of loss and anger, because the uncool people started to like Depeche Mode or the Cure.

 

ROBERT SMITH:
MTV played our videos because they set other videos into relief. We were their pet alternative UK band for a while. I was pleased that they did play us. But I also knew that if MTV stopped playing us, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

 

PAUL WESTERBERG, the Replacements:
When MTV came on, I would defiantly avert my eyes. I found it scary and weird. I thought they were the enemy—the antithesis of what the Replacements were, a living, breathing entity you had to see live to understand. We certainly made some awful videos, like the rest of the sheep. “I'll Be You,” that was one of the good ones. At one point, I was drinking gin out of a dog's dish.

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
Our disdain towards MTV videos culminated in “Fall on Me,” which I shot at a rock quarry in Indiana. There's not a single edit in it. I took a piece of film, turned it backwards, flipped it upside down, and put the words of the song on top of it in red lettering. I was following Andy Warhol's idea of the camera being a passive observer. And MTV played the living shit out of it, which was profoundly shocking. The video for “It's the End of the World as We Know It” was also radical. And MTV played that. We were in a position of power for a long time; we could make weird videos, and MTV would feel somewhat obligated to play them. We got immense joy from that. It became a way to bring our brand of fringe art into people's homes and living rooms. MTV was an amazing tool to be able to do that.

By 1987 I had started my first film company, with Jim McKay, and we were experimenting with music videos and public service announcements and short experimental film. I was spending a lot of time with visual-art people. Robert Longo was one of the premier painters coming out of New York. We wanted to upset the visual language of videos, and that's what we got with “The One I Love.” He was referencing Renaissance paintings, rather than Madonna. I saw the video he did for New Order's “Bizarre Love Triangle”—he interrupts it about two-thirds of the way through with a scene out of a movie, where a woman stands up at a table and says, “I refuse to believe in reincarnation, because I will not come back as a bug or an insect,” and a guy goes, “Well you're a real up person,” and then it slam-cuts back into the song. I don't think anyone had ever interrupted a song, cut to something, and then cut back to the song.