I Want My MTV (54 page)

 

STEVEN TYLER:
I'd been living at the Gorham Hotel, on twenty dollars a week that my manager gave me, splitting a twenty-dollar bag of heroin with my girlfriend. When we crawled out of the ashes, we barely got a record contract. I said to John Kalodner, “Wouldn't it be nice if I knew somebody I could write lyrics with?” He said, “I know some people.” So yes. We used other writers to help us get out of the hole, and I did a lot of lame things. Like “Magic Touch,” for
Permanent Vacation
: “You've got the magic touch, don't you know, I've got a feeling, and I can't let go.” I'm so embarrassed. I did that.

 

JOHN KALODNER:
Tyler put me in a wedding dress in the “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” video as a sort of
Fuck you
. Marty Callner directed “Dude.” It was an instant hit. He was the force behind all those Aerosmith videos: “Dude,” “Angel,” “Rag Doll.”

 

NIGEL DICK:
I met Marty Callner at some video conference. Somebody said, “Marty, do you know Nigel Dick?” He shook my hand and said, very condescendingly, “So,
you're
the poor man's Marty Callner.”

 

RUDOLF SCHENKER:
Marty Callner was open for any crazy ideas. So I said, “Marty, why don't we put two girls' asses into the bass drum?” And that's what we did on the “Rhythm of Love” video. There are two butts in the bass drum. Marty was more fun than fun.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
The hair metal bands loved MTV and they had a huge number of fans. But their videos promoted the objectification of women. There were years here when it was hard to be a woman. I had a conversation with Jeff Ayeroff about the Sam Kinison video for “Wild Thing.” He said, “I understand that you have to play it. But did you have to make it a hit?”

MARTY CALLNER:
Sam Kinison's “Wild Thing” was the nastiest video I ever made. That was the misogynistic, evil side of rock n' roll. I loved it.

 

JOHN CANNELLI, MTV executive:
Many of the standards and practices conversations revolved around the portrayal of women in videos. “Wild Thing” was a tough one. We didn't want to play it, but we were in our hard rock period.

 

SAM KAISER:
MTV had a lot of hits with Great White. They had one video, though, “Save Your Love,” that we weren't quite sure of, so we put it into medium rotation. Capitol was busting us because they wanted heavy. Around this time, I was in LA for the Super Bowl. When I walked into my room at the Four Seasons Hotel, it was filled, from floor to ceiling, with inflated condoms. And every one of the condoms was embossed with the Great White logo and the words “Save Your Love.” This was a big suite, mind you. We're talking thousands of condoms. I respected the balls and the creativity it took to break into my hotel room. A week later we put the video in heavy rotation.

 

RIC MENELLO:
Danzig's “Mother” was about silent movies and horror movies—Fritz Lang,
Nosferatu.
Hot girls, shot in black and white.

We had a chicken sacrifice at the end. We didn't kill a real chicken. It looks like Glenn Danzig is ripping it apart, but he lets go and I did an Eisenstein, a hidden edit. MTV was like, “This is Satanic. You killed a chicken.” They went through that video with a fine-tooth comb.

So I made the changes they asked for. But I sent them the wrong cut. For a whole weekend, the original version was on the air. Rick Rubin got one hundred people to call MTV, “Yo, I want to see that video where they sacrifice the chicken.” On Monday I got a call from MTV—“Get the edited version to us by five o'clock or we will never show this video again.” So it showed in a butchered form. It was one of the few videos Beavis and Butt-head liked.

 

RICK RUBIN:
“Mother,” wasn't that the one with the chicken in it? That was a good one. We definitely wanted it to look like we killed the chicken, as you would in a horror movie. It worked a little too well—it didn't get much play.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
I was the director and the DP on Ozzy's “Miracle Man.” The song was about the hypocrisy of organized religion—this was around the time of the Jimmy Swaggart scandal—and Sharon wanted to do something different, so we set the video in a deconsecrated church, with Ozzy as the preacher, and dozens of pigs as the parishioners. I'd just bought new $300 Nike Airs. And the first guitar riff Zakk Wylde played was so loud, every pig in there shat. They freaked out. My brand-new shoes were covered in pig shit.

 

KIP WINGER, Winger:
The first video treatment we got for “Seventeen,” the guy wanted to put us in a theater and have a goat swinging upside down. We were like,
What are you talking about? We're a rock band, get a hot chick and put us onstage
. It was the era of big rock music. I wanted to make it. When I met Reb Beach, I said, “I'm going to sing at the top of my register, and you play guitar as fast as you can.” Yeah, we had poofy hair. That was the formula.

Rick Krim was a huge Dixie Dregs fan, and our drummer had been in the Dregs. Tom Hunter, the president of MTV, was from Denver, and I'm from Denver. Those two things helped them put our first video on the air. And then Abbey Konowitch was really into “Seventeen.” His quote was “This is the video Van Halen should've made.”

 

RICK KRIM:
Yes, I championed Winger, and I still champion Winger. They were my discovery. They were brilliant musicians who wrote really good songs. Kip was the pretty boy with chest hair who posed for
Playgirl
and danced ballet moves in a video, so they got unfairly maligned. They became the poster boys for fake metal.

 

KIP WINGER:
I starved myself for a week before the first video, trying to be skinny for the camera. MTV changed my life overnight. It's rock n' roll, there are a ton of perks, especially women. I mean, it was a two or three a day when we were on tour. And we did 250 shows a year, so you do the math.

 

RICK KRIM:
I was with Kip in LA the night he met Rachel Hunter. He'd seen her in
Sports Illustrated
, she'd seen him on MTV, and they connected. One time I went to his house and she was there in her underwear. That was pretty cool.

 

KIP WINGER:
On “Seventeen” and “Headed for a Heartbreak,” MTV played us every fifteen minutes. Then we did “Hungry” and thought,
Enough chicks, let's try to give it a little meaning
. I had an idea for a mini-movie: a guy is in love with his girlfriend, they get married, and they're driving in the hills, his brakes fail, and he drives off the cliff and she dies. So we spend $200,000 on the video, but the car didn't really go off the cliffs. We had to push it over. This is total
Spinal Tap
. And here we are dressed in what I consider to be our worst clothing choice—I'm in a velvet coat with studs on it and denim chaps—jumping up and down on police cars. It was ridiculous. Guns N' Roses stole a couple of our video ideas and that was one of them. When they drove a car off the cliff, it was way cooler, because they had more money.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
Warrant filmed its first video, “Down Boys,” on December 16, 1988. I remember because I got pulled over the night before with Jerry Dixon, our bass player. A female sheriff pulled me over, and we had a six-pack on the floor. She asked if I had any outstanding tickets, and I had a warrant out for my arrest, for bad registration tags. She said, “Are you guys in a band?” I said, “We are. Believe it or not, the band's name is Warrant.” She let me go.

 

JANI LANE:
We were told by the label how to dress, how to have our hair done, the whole nine yards. For “Heaven,” we wore white leather outfits. Looked like a bunch of Elvis impersonators. We were pegged as a fluff band.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
We'd seen the Poison video for “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” where they had tour footage, and we wanted to copy it for “Heaven.” Because the formula worked. In our genre, once there was a winning formula with one band, the others would follow. There weren't any hair metal bands winning Video Vanguard awards, that's the best way to put it.

 

JANI LANE:
Donnie Ienner, the president of Columbia Records, called and said, “Jani, give me something like ‘Love in an Elevator.' Sex sells.” I wrote “Cherry Pie” in two or three hours.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
The Tom Petty “Don't Come Around Here No More” video was brilliant, which locked us into hiring Jeff Stein for “Cherry Pie.”

 

JANI LANE:
There was so much pressure to sell sex. Pressure from MTV, from the label, and from the consumer. I was trying to fight that. I have three sisters and a mom.

 

BOBBIE BROWN, model:
Jani and Tommy Lee were on tour together—I guess Warrant was opening for Mötley Crüe—and they were watching an episode of
Star Search
on TV. When I came on, they were both, like, “Hey, she's cute.” Or maybe they were like, “She's fucking hot.” Then Jani called my agent.

JEFF STEIN:
I wanted to cast Josie Bissett, who ended up on
Melrose Place
, but I was overruled by Jani, who may have been right for a change. Bobbie was perfect for that role. What did I tell her? “Do more of
that.
Shake it up until it hurts.” She followed instructions carefully.

 

BOBBIE BROWN:
The director told me it was gonna be sexy, but he didn't say, “We're gonna take a fire hose and blow your face off.” Let me tell you, that hose had some power behind it. You can see me turn my head really quick, because it was physically uncomfortable. I ended up fighting a little with the director,'cause he was kind of a dick. He wanted me to get in a tub full of cream. I refused to do that, by the way.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
Jani was turning on the charm. Bobbie was dating Matthew Nelson at the time, and he came to the shoot.

 

JANI LANE:
I had a horrible time. The rest of the guys shot for eight hours and went home. I was there for twenty-four hours straight, in the middle of summer in Hollywood, and the stage was about 125 degrees. I think I took eight showers that day. I'll give Bobbie Brown credit, she was there with me the whole time.

 

BOBBIE BROWN:
During the video, Jani was being flirtatious, making it very obvious that he liked me. Was there an immediate attraction? Not for me. Jani sent me flowers and kept calling. He went on Howard Stern and said, “I'm gonna marry Bobbie Brown one day.” I was like,
Oh my god
. He went as far as going out with my roommate and showing up at my house. He was constantly pursuing me, and I go, “Hey, I have your number. If I want to use it, I will.” After we got married, he said, “I was devastated when you said that.”

But then I broke up with Matthew, because he was jealous over the success of “Cherry Pie.” I called Joey Allen's wife and told her, mostly to piss off Matthew and rub it in his face, and within five minutes, Jani called me.

 

JANI LANE:
I had broken up with my girlfriend, who moved on to Richie Sambora. I called Bobbie, because I heard she wasn't happy with her boyfriend, and said, “I was wondering if you wanted to go to Disneyland.” She said, “I have your number, if I want to call you, I'll call you.” Then she broke up with her boyfriend and wanted to come out and see a show. We hit it off for a while, not very long. She got pregnant, we got married.

BOBBIE BROWN:
The video made me a weird icon in people's minds. I didn't take advantage of my opportunities the way I should have. I was supposed to be in
Casino
with Robert De Niro—I was going to play Sharon Stone's part—and have an interview with Steven Spielberg for
Hook
. I was somewhat of a fuckup—I got a huge ego, and I was fucked up on drugs. I'd walked into a club and the owner would shake my hand and give me drugs, for free. I never had to pay for it. Even my agent, if I had to lose weight, would give me drugs. I try not to dwell on it, but it really sucks. I have a lot of regret.

 

JEFF STEIN:
I thought “Cherry Pie” was the perfect music video. The concept meshed with the song. This is going to sound full of shit, but I wanted to do a parody of sexism in music videos. And instead, I was accused of creating a sexist video. So I don't know, if you parody something and people think it's real, have you done a good parody or have you failed?

The band knew exactly what they were. They did every hair band pose. That's one reason the video was perfect. There were bright colors, very bold, in your face. It was like pop art without the art.

 

JOHN CANNELLI:
We had an internal controversy over the video. Judy McGrath was offended by a woman being hosed down.

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
There was a time when the liberal feminists on MTV's staff were unhappy with the music programming. We were playing “Cherry Pie,” that kind of thing. It was awkward, because our job was to play the hits of the day.

 

JOEY ALLEN:
Spraying down a girl with a fire hose? It's rock n' roll, give me a break. It was just shock value. “Let's put this hot chick in here and sell as many records as we can.”
Rolling Stone
called it the most tasteless video of the year. It also sold over a million records for us, real fast.

 

JANI LANE:
From that point on, I was the “Cherry Pie” guy.