I Want My MTV (42 page)

 

BOB GIRALDI:
I had a meeting with Stevie Nicks where we sat on her bed. I've never seen a woman that stoned in my life. She was so wasted, we couldn't even communicate.

 

DOMINIC SENA:
I did Fleetwood Mac's “As Long As You Follow.” Christine McVie had the lead vocals, and I was focused on her, then drifted over to capture Stevie Nicks sitting on the arm of a couch, and there was no Stevie there. She had fallen off the couch and onto the floor. I said “Jesus Christ, would somebody please pick Stevie up and put her back onto the sofa?”

 

JEFF STEIN:
My crew and I had a thirty-six-hour day once. It was for the Vinnie Vincent Invasion. I can't remember the name of the video—would
you
?

 

BETH BRODAY:
There was never enough money or time to fully execute the ambitious visions of directors and artists, and we would end up shooting twenty-four-, twenty-five-, twenty-six-hour days. I would have to keep my crews happy and awake by providing them certain substances beyond coffee.

 

DAVE GROHL:
My father-in-law used to help bands make videos in the '70s and early '80s, back when they'd just pay you in cocaine. “The band's gonna be here, you have them for one hour, just set something up quick.” They'd get a bunch of VHS tape and cocaine, and you got yourself a video.

 

MICK KLEBER:
I certainly saw a lot of eight balls being consumed on set, especially when a video would run long.
Bump up and go.
I heard a lot of records in those days where we'd go, “That's the cocaine mix.” All brittle treble, no bottom end.

 

PAUL FLATTERY:
Toto were known as David Paich and the New Crusty Nostrils. But then again, everyone was doing coke. Lawyers. The record company execs. Everyone.

 

STEVE LUKATHER:
Everybody was gacked to the tits for a decade. There was piles of coke everywhere. Some of us dabbled, some of us became drug addicts. It started out fun, and then people got hurt. We had to fire our singer because he disappeared into drugs. That whole period was just a nightmare, let's face it.

 

SHARON ORECK:
One of the guys in Toto kept sending a PA out to get coke. And while he was snorting, he told me he'd been saved by the Lord from hard drugs. I said, “Well, what's that going in your nose?” And he's like, “That's just cocaine.” In the early '80s, there was still this bizarre impression that heroin was a drug, but cocaine was like a cigarette. Pretty much every person in the music-video industry was doing cocaine, except me. And I wasn't doing cocaine only because I'd finished with it in the '70s. It was beyond pervasive. Everyone was high. I never heard the term “rehab” until 1985 or so. And then, all of a sudden, I started hearing it a lot.

 

BOB GIRALDI:
I smoked a lot of dope. We were always high. We were never straight.

 

LOL CREME:
The crew was as stoned as the rest of us. Early on, a lot of them were paid in drugs, since there were no real budgets yet. They'd go overtime and they got paid a little bit more coke or grass. The crew were delighted to do these shoots, and they did great favors to us, because they were so bored with doing advertising or movies. This was the spirit of rock n' roll, as far as they were concerned.

 

DARYL HALL:
I'm sure the cameramen were doing blow. That's pretty much the'80s. The artists were high, but not as high as the crew.

 

JERRY CASALE:
Nobody thought coke was bad for you. We thought it was great. Executives at Warner Bros. used to break it out at meetings.

 

ROBERT LOMBARD:
Cocaine in those days was just something to get laid with. If you give cocaine to girls, they're gonna pull their clothes off.

 

JOHN DIAZ:
Coke was all over the place. The excuses were the long hours and the hard work, but I don't know if the drugs were the result of that or the cause. The coke didn't make anyone more aware or help them get things done more quickly. It just made them want more coke.

 

ROBERT SMITH:
Drugs and alcohol were the fuel for many of our videos.

 

SIOBHAN FAHEY, Bananarama:
The “Cruel Summer” video was just an excuse to get us to the fabled city of New York for the first time. It was August, over one hundred degrees. Our HQ was a tavern under the Brooklyn Bridge, which had a ladies' toilet with a chipped mirror where we had to do our makeup. When we repaired to the tavern for lunch, we met a bunch of dockworkers. They were intrigued by us and started chatting, and they all had these little vials of coke. I'd never done coke—I was aware of its existence, but I didn't know anybody who could afford it. We were exhausted and they gave us very generous bumps. That was our lunch. When you watch that video, we look really tired and miserable in the scenes we shot before lunch, and then the after-lunch shots are all euphoric and manic.

 

BOY GEORGE:
There was one video when Jon Moss and I had this
massive
fight, and as he was about to go on set, I dropped a vase of flowers on him. By that point, we were pretty messed up on drugs. That affected everything, not just the videos—that affected life, full stop.

 

BRYAN ADAMS:
Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, that comes with the territory. I mean, it's a lot of guys in film and music, getting together and partying. What do you expect?

LES GARLAND:
John Belushi was a dear friend, and when he died of an overdose, I said, “That's it. I'm done with coke.” My buddy Glenn Frey, of the Eagles, nicknamed it “the enemy.”

 

TOM PETTY:
There was a lot of coke on the sets of music videos. I found that coke made all the waiting around even more painful. I didn't do it much. But the crews, they were cocaine-powered. Nowadays, I can't bear to look at one of my music videos. I can't stand 'em. I feel like I can taste the cocaine, smell the arc lamps.

 

NANCY WILSON:
Jeff Stein was a really fun director to work with. He probably was not on cocaine, unlike everybody else at the time. Including us.

 

ANN WILSON:
Of course, including us. Otherwise we never would have done some of these videos. In the '80s, we drank a lot of champagne, we did a lot of blow, and made a bunch of videos.

 

 

 

IF MTV DIDN'T WANT TO PLAY RICK JAMES, JUST IMAGINE
how much they didn't want to play Kool Moe Dee or Roxanne Shante.

The black artists MTV embraced were mostly nonthreatening figures, like Lionel Richie and (no matter how much he
tried
to look tough) Michael Jackson. Not for the first time, MTV was accused of racism for ignoring hip-hop. To be fair, from the time it emerged in New York City, rap was dismissed as a passing fad by record labels, radio stations, newspapers, and magazines as well. But with MTV, there was an added chicken-and-egg dilemma: MTV rejected videos by rap pioneers like Kool Moe Dee and Roxanne Shante because they didn't look very good, and labels wouldn't invest more money to make rap videos look good because MTV wasn't playing them. Recognizing this obstacle, Public Enemy refused to even make a video for their first album.

The cycle was broken by Run-DMC, who were first in many things, including the first rappers to get significant MTV support, and then by the Beastie Boys, whose Def Jam label—founded by Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons—overcame MTV's fear of rap by making striking and original videos that couldn't be ignored. On the contrary, they were often the best videos on MTV.

 

DMC, Run-DMC:
When we did “Rock Box,” everybody at Profile Records was like, “Yo! The video's on MTV! That's the first rap video on MTV!” They were so excited. We was like, “What the hell is MTV?” We wanted our videos on
New York Hot Tracks
and
Video Music Box
.

LIONEL MARTIN, director; TV host:
Ralph McDaniels and I DJed at parties. We were hip-hop kids. I grew up in Queens, New York. Russell Simmons lived down the street from me. Ralph worked for a TV station, WNYC, which is like a public-access station. In 1984, he came up with the idea to do
Video Music Box
. I mean, we didn't see rap videos anywhere else. I don't think we did it because of MTV. It was to fill our thirst. Our show came on at 11 P.M., but it became so popular that we got an afternoon slot. Kids would come home right after school and watch
Video Music Box
.

 

VERNON REID:
They were real pioneers. I saw my first hip-hop videos on
Video Music Box
, because no one else was playing them.

 

YOUNG MC, artist:
Video Music Box
was my MTV, to an extent. I lived in Queens, and my neighborhood didn't have cable. It was mostly two-family homes, and it took a long time for that area to get wired.

 

DMC:
Making “Rock Box” was weird. We weren't into it—it was just something we were told to do. And the director had the idea to have some little boy chasing after Run-DMC, to show that we had appeal to the younger generation. A little white boy, too.

“Rock Box” was the first rap-rock record. It took Eddie Martinez's rock guitar to get us on MTV. Our producer, Larry Smith, came up with the idea. People forget about Larry Smith, but Larry Smith owned hip-hop and rap. He produced our first two albums, and he produced Whodini. The rock-rap sound was Larry Smith's vision, not Rick Rubin's. Rick changed history, but Larry was there first. Actually, me and Run was against the guitar. We did two versions of “Rock Box” because we didn't want the guitar version playing in the hood. But when DJ Red Alert played it on his radio show, black people loved the guitar version more than the hip-hop version.

 

EVERLAST, artist:
The first video that blew my mind was Run-DMC's “Rock Box.” It was like when some kids heard punk rock for the first time.

 

BILL ADLER:
DMC came up with the concept of “King of Rock.” It's not “King of Rap,” you know? Alien as it seemed to the average white person, our guys always thought of it as rock. You
rock
the mic. You
rock
the bells. In the video, Run-DMC bum-rush a Museum of Rock n' Roll, and they're blocked at the doorway by a guy from David Letterman's show, Larry “Bud” Melman, playing a smirking security guard: “You guys don't belong in here.” They push past him and shoulder their way into the museum. They diss Michael Jackson. They diss the Beatles. It's all bullshit to them. There's an exhibit in the museum with a video monitor. They look at a clip of Little Richard.
No
. Jerry Lee Lewis.
No.
Then they see their own first video, which was “Rock Box.”

Twenty-five years later, they were inducted into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, which didn't even exist at the time. So not only did they imagine something that didn't exist, they imagined themselves as part of it!

 

DMC:
We loved the fact that we walked into the Museum of Rock and got to pull the plug on a TV showing Jerry Lee Lewis, and step on Michael Jackson's glove. We were sick of journalists asking, “Do you think hip-hop is a fad?” “Where do you think you'll be in five years?” We felt disrespected. You're goddamn right we wanted to cuss out the Beatles. We got a lot of grief for that video. They wanted to hang us for dissing Michael, because Michael was god. But let me tell you something—we met Michael a couple of times, and he thought it was the coolest shit ever. He said to us, “Run-DMC, I think you guys are the greatest. I love the way you stepped on my glove.”

 

GEORGE BRADT:
Thriller
had already happened, but in general, the reaction to black artists at MTV was still
That's just not our format
.

 

ANN CARLI:
The only rap videos they would play were by Run-DMC. MTV were comfortable playing Run-DMC because they weren't threatening; they dressed like cartoon characters, in the hats and the jackets. They came out with a song, “King of Rock,” to try and get themselves on MTV. A lot of their videos had a cartoon quality, and that was an easier fit for MTV.

 

RICK RUBIN:
I was friends with people who worked at MTV, including Peter Dougherty, and it was a constant fight and struggle to get rap music on the station. I was lobbying them to play our stuff.

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
This goes back to MTV's history of racism—almost everybody who worked there, from Gale Sparrow to the VJs, came from FM rock radio. I don't think they knew how segregated things were. The only soul music we played was Hall & Oates.

JOE DAVOLA:
We still weren't playing black music. I wanted to put Cameo on the New Year's show—I loved that song “Word Up.” My bosses were like, “There's no fucking way you're doing it.”

 

CHUCK D:
Around that time,
Night Tracks
was on TBS, late on Friday nights, and they debuted rap videos. MTV had to pay notice to that buzz. How could they not? The motherfuckers were based in New York, the birthplace of rap. Either they were totally blind to the fact, or they were racist. And if they were blind to the fact, then they were racist anyway, because they chose not to acknowledge what was happening.