I Want My MTV (23 page)

 

LARS ULRICH:
I remember all these strange dudes from England with funny haircuts. But then you'd see a Saxon video. That was what kept me glued to the TV.

 

STEVE ISAACS, MTV VJ:
I didn't see MTV until I was fourteen. At that point, they were putting a lot of boobies in the videos. That was the one good thing about shitty metal. For a teenage boy, MTV really yanked you through puberty.

 

DAVID MALLET:
AC/DC's “You Shook Me All Night Long” is one of the funniest videos ever. I based the singer, Brian Johnson, on Andy Capp, a hugely popular cartoon character who was an English institution and never did any work. He was always in the pub. Brian follows a trail of underwear up the stairs in a little house, and it all opens out into a huge set with girls in rubber, riding stationary bicycles and mechanical bulls.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
Culture Club's “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” video had a scene with a jury in blackface. At the same time, we had a video from some godawful rock band, and the video was totally degrading to women. I was in a marketing meeting, and somebody said, “I'll play two videos. One is really offensive and the other is really good.” The one they thought was offensive was Culture Club. As a woman, I was thinking,
You have got to be kidding me
.

 

RIKI RACHTMAN, MTV host:
The first video I saw on MTV was Mötley Crüe's “Live Wire.” They were wearing red leather and Nikki Sixx set his legs on fire.

 

NIKKI SIXX, Mötley Crüe:
We shot “Live Wire” and two other songs just down and dirty, to give away to fans, inspired by shows like
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
and
Midnight Special
. When MTV came along, we did “Looks That Kill,” and MTV also played “Live Wire.”

What I liked and respected was, MTV played all kinds of music, which is what FM radio used to be when I was growing up. You'd wait to see videos by bands you were into, but you sat through other bands and you'd go, “Hmm, that Duran Duran band's not bad.” MTV broke down those barriers, to the point where I actually bought a Thompson Twins album.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
The first video shoot I ever went on was Mötley Crüe's “Looks That Kill.” Bob Krasnow, who ran Elektra, decided I should go to LA and oversee production of the video. I walked onto the set, went up to Mötley's guitarist, Mick Mars, and said, “Hello, I'm Robin Sloane from Elektra.” And he goes, “Fuck you, who cares?”
Okay, then
.

 

STEVE SCHNUR:
I kept telling Les Garland that MTV should be playing Mötley Crüe's “Looks That Kill.” “This is where we should be, Les. It's got to be about rock n' roll.”

 

SEBASTIAN BACH:
“Looks That Kill” was all blue and silver, and it looked striking. That was my favorite video back then. I love the outfits: platform boots and makeup.

 

NIKKI SIXX:
The '70s were about fashion and music; it was a merging. Fashion designers hung out with rock stars. We said, “Let's top it. Let's go even farther.” At times it was ludicrous, but wonderful. To be honest, I can't remember the concept for “Looks That Kill.” If you strip it down, it's only about being over the top.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
When we were kids growing up in Sheffield, there were only two types of clothing shops—men's and women's. And you were never going to find stage wear in a men's shop. So nearly everything we wore, from the waist up, was female. Blouses and T-shirts with loud patterns, designed for big ladies.

 

PHIL COLLEN, Def Leppard:
Girls liked us. We were like Duran Duran, if they played hard rock. We were the same age as Duran, from the same era. We were a rock band, but we didn't want to look like other bands who had greasy hair and greasy jeans. Our girlfriends let us borrow their clothes.

 

DAVID MALLET:
Def Leppard's “Photograph” looked different from anything at the time. Different colors, mood, visuals, editing, photography. It's hard to believe now, because it looks like every heavy metal video ever made. But nothing had ever looked like that before.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
When we did “Photograph,” we went mental. Phil wore a polka-dot top. Steve wore all white. The day before the shoot, I had £25 in my pocket, and I went down Kings Road in London to get some clothes. I found a pair of black pleather trousers that were too short by about four inches, so I bought them, and some leg warmers, which I'd seen in the TV show
Fame
. When I was done buying the pants and the effeminate leggings, I had £8 left. I walked past a punk rock shop and they had a red-white-and-blue Union Jack shirt in the window for £7.99. It was all I could afford, and it was loud. After that video, the shirt became so iconic that we sold almost 100,000 of them on tour that summer. We couldn't
wait
to the make videos. The morning we shot “Photograph” is when I frosted my hair for the first time. When “Photograph” came out, I was a blond bombshell.

David Mallet was hilarious. He called everybody “dear boy.” He was very posh, very theatrical. When we turned up to shoot “Photograph” at Battersea Power Station, he'd built that whole set. There was gridding on the floor with lights underneath. It was fantastic. The girls in the cages have become a little dated, but at the time, it hadn't been done so much, so it worked fine.

 

DAVID MALLET:
Why did I put the girls in a cage? Girls belong in cages, come on.

 

JANI LANE, Warrant:
I was a junior in high school, and when I saw “Photograph,” I was like,
Oh my god
.

 

DAVID MALLET:
With David Bowie, we'd been thinking about surrealism. With Def Leppard, we were thinking about comic books. A huge influence on me was Bob Kane, who drew the early
Batman
comics. On “Rock of Ages,” I was satirizing sword-and-sorcery movies and comic books.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
“Rock of Ages” was a laugh. I wield this giant prop sword through fiery hallways and then the sword magically turns into a guitar. It's very
Spinal Tap
. When I sang “All-right,” which sounded a bit like “Owl-right,” Mallet put an owl in the video at that moment.

 

PETER MENSCH, manager:
Def Leppard put me in “Rock of Ages.” I'm the hooded figure playing chess, and I lip-sync the words “
Gunter glieben glauchen globen
.” That video was set in a quarry or something, where female bodybuilders were knocking buildings down. It made no sense at all.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
“Foolin'” was a three-day shoot somewhere on Long Island. David had me running down a tunnel with explosions going off, and my arms caught fire. All the hair burned off and I stank like burning flesh for a week. The smell was fucking rotten. And there's a fantastic scene when I'm chained to a pyramid and I break out of the shackles. I sit up and look at the camera and sing, “Is anybody out there?” And if you look at the video—which I suggest you do, because it's quite funny—you can see that underneath my white trousers I have on tighty whities. I wasn't wearing them on the first take. Mallet watched that scene back through the lens and said, “Dear boy, I can see your wedding tackle. You need to put some underpants on. They'll never show this on the telly if we don't clean it up a bit.”

I spent the entire third day riding a horse on a beach. I'd never been on a horse in my life. My ass was fucking killing me by the time we finished. Turned out, not a second of that footage got used in the video.

 

PERRI LISTER:
I was in “Foolin'.” I had a mask on my face and was playing a harp. And they set fire to me. I saw my life flash before me: “Girl Burns to Death in Rock Video; Nobody Helped Her.”

 

TAWNY KITAEN, actress:
My first love was Robbin Crosby, the guitarist from Ratt. We met in high school. He had a dream of being a rock star, and I had a dream of being an actress. I eventually broke up with Robb, and started dating Pete Angelus, Van Halen's lighting director. It was so goddamn fun. Eddie Van Halen was with Valerie Bertinelli. I remember walking arm in arm with Pete after a concert, behind Eddie and Valerie, and saying to myself, “One day, I am going to be an actress and I am going to be married to the lead singer.”

David Lee Roth and Pete and I became the Three Musketeers. We would travel everywhere together, and then we'd come home and Dave would sleep on our couch. I was with Pete for three years. But we broke up when I got my first movie. I started dating Tommy Lee, before he met Heather Locklear. That was really weird, because Nikki Sixx was Robb's roommate, and he wasn't thrilled that I was dating Tommy.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
I met Tawny Kitaen when she was seventeen, maybe eighteen, at a Van Halen concert in San Diego. She was very attractive, outgoing, and we started dating. I invited her up to LA, and we were living together. I photographed her and sent her to the Elite modeling agency, so that was her entree into the entertainment business. That was before she started dating O.J. Simpson and before she married David Coverdale.

When she moved to LA, I think she was dating Robbin Crosby from Ratt. I discovered she was dating a lot of people, but I was on the road, so what could you do?

ROBERT LOMBARD:
I became part of the inner circle of Van Halen. I had carte blanche at their offices on Sunset. I ended up living across the street from Dave. We would go out and chase girls. And do drugs. And drink Jack. I had my own bodyguard. When Dave walked in a club it was—and I don't like to use religious terms—it was like God parting the waters. One night we went to the Troubadour to look for girls and there were no open tables, and they told people they had to leave so we could sit down. Girls would come to our table, lift their skirts up, pull their panties down, and throw 'em at David. Or undo their tops. No one had the charisma David Lee Roth had. He had midgets all over the place who hung out to drink. At that time, I drove a 924 Porsche with a hatchback, and the midgets used to sit in the trunk.

 

MARK GOODMAN:
I interviewed David Lee Roth at the U.S. Festival in 1983. He was drunk and coked up, laughing at every joke he made. Dave was the greatest interview.

 

ROBERT LOMBARD:
Once Van Halen got into the MTV mode, they got
into
it. Dave was glued to that TV. He threw something through his TV set one night because they'd dropped in rotation on MTV. He cut an artery and ended up in Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Blood's spurting out of him and he goes, “I'm David Lee Roth. I could buy this place.” The nurse told him, “Just sit down and shut up.” They were obsessed. It was like a new drug.

 

MARSHALL BERLE, manager:
Those videos Pete Angelus and Dave Roth created were the best I've ever seen.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
When I was in high school in Connecticut, I had a teacher who allowed me to make Super 8 films rather than take tests. That was 1973. I moved to the West Coast to go to UCLA film school, but my parking tickets started to exceed the cost of tuition. So I ended up on the Sunset Strip, and I interviewed with a gentleman named Mario who owned the Roxy and the Rainbow and the Whiskey A-Go-Go. He gave me a job at the Roxy, probably in 1975. Van Halen asked me to travel with them—I'd designed their merchandise and worked on their album packages and logos, then I designed their productions and their lighting—and when MTV reared its ugly head, I thought well, okay, the full circle has come back to me, so I'll direct the videos.

ROBERT LOMBARD:
“Jump” is where the drama really started. During the production of “Jump,” we had a high-end DP. Pete Angelus operated one of the cameras, but we never used any of his footage, because he didn't know how to operate a 16mm camera to save his life. Dave wanted the performance video intercut with him doing crazy shit, like driving his chopped Merc hot rod and hanging out with midgets and girls in maids' outfits. So we shot hours of footage.

 

PETE ANGELUS:
Rather that doing something bigger than life, which is how Van Halen was perceived, we wanted something very personal. Let's see if we can get Edward to smile. Of course, we also had to appease Dave, who wanted to throw his karate tricks into the equation.

 

MICHAEL ANTHONY:
There was getting to be a little bit of tension between us three and Dave.

 

ROBERT LOMBARD:
I told the band, “I'm gonna shoot in sections.” Alex would show up, we'd do some drum segments, then bass, then guitar, then David. I didn't shoot them together until the end of the day. I was trying to keep peace, because I felt tension amongst them. David thought he was bigger than the rest of them.

I was in post-production with a rough cut of the video. I knew that if they kept it as a straight-on performance video, they would have a number one single. So I took the rough cut to Eddie's house up in Coldwater Canyon and played it for him and his brother Alex. I said, “Guys, I'm taking a stand here. If you put in this crazy footage”—which later surfaced in “Panama,” after I was gone—“the video isn't gonna have the impact it should have.” Eddie and Alex said, “We agree with you, one hundred percent. We're not gonna release this video unless it's done this way.”

Two days later, I got fired. Noel Monk, their manager, said, “You don't do that—you don't go behind Dave's back. Here's your check, never want to see you again.” That video won the award for best performance video at the first VMAs. And I still don't have my award.