I Want My MTV (71 page)

 

TAMRA DAVIS:
Tone-Lōc's “Wild Thing” was my first rap video. Matt Dike, who co-owned the Delicious Vinyl label with Mike Ross, was my best friend, and he wanted to rip off the Robert Palmer video “Addicted to Love.”

 

MIKE ROSS, record executive:
“Wild Thing” is a comedy about trying to get a chick into bed. Matt came up with the idea, and Tamra was willing to make a video really cheap. We'd never shot a video before. The idea was to put Tone in a suit, the way Robert Palmer's in a suit, with the hot zombie chicks all around him. But he wouldn't do it. I mean, he was a real gangster—a Rollin' 60 Crip from Los Angeles. So he put on a Delicious Vinyl shirt, and it was the right move. All of a sudden, when the lights were on, Tone was funny and charismatic—a natural. We didn't know he could turn it on like that.

 

TAMRA DAVIS:
We had no idea that Tone-Lōc was, like, a superstar. He had charisma. We hired some girls we knew from clubs—Cat, who's a very famous English model; Annabella, a beautiful French model; Jade, who was Matt's girlfriend; and Lisa Ann Cabasa, who's Hawaiian and Puerto Rican. Matt and I were in a club and we saw Lisa Ann dancing, and she had the best ass we'd ever seen. She dated Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys for a while, and then she was with [surfer] Kelly Slater for five years.

 

MIKE ROSS:
Jade's playing bass, Annabella's playing guitar, Kat's on keyboards, and Lisa Ann's on tambourine. Tone's DJ, M-Walk, wouldn't do the close-up shot of the DJ scratching a record, because he thought we were clowning him. This other guy we were working with said, “I'll do it.” So two different guys play Tone-Lōc's DJ in “Wild Thing.” The budget was around $450, which probably went into catering and weed. Everything else was free. No one got paid.

 

TAMRA DAVIS:
I used three rolls of 16mm film and two rolls of Super 8, so my budget was $200. In those days, videos were ruled by money. I shot it myself on a handheld Bolex camera, and I did a double exposure that was right out of film school.

We got a call from MTV, and thought for sure we were in trouble. Nobody had seen black and white people mixing together like that, especially black men. Matt said, “There's no way MTV is going to show a black guy pumping up against a white girl.” But it was the most played video of the year, hands down. Every kid knew that video.

 

MIKE ROSS:
It didn't look like anything else on MTV. We'd seen six rap videos on MTV, and four of them were by Run-DMC. To us, MTV was hair metal and Haircut 100 videos. So that wasn't our focus. But all of a sudden, here's a small label on the West Coast that out of nowhere has a video in heavy rotation. We were a couple of white guys in a dingy studio on Santa Monica Blvd. who'd gone global in the blink of an eye.

 

YOUNG MC:
We knew there was some importance to my “Bust a Move” video, because Tone-Lōc had such success with “Wild Thing.” The idea was to have me in the foreground, narrating the song, like Rod Serling from
The Twilight Zone
, and in the background to show the characters as I was speaking about them. It was one of the most literal videos ever shot. “Bust a Move” was a juggernaut. It was on the charts for forty weeks, which was pretty much unprecedented.

MIKE ROSS:
“Bust a Move” isn't as good as “Wild Thing.” It was almost a year later. You can never recapture that initial energy. Young was a little awkward in front of the camera, so we created a lot of action around him. And there was some drama on the set—Lisa Ann, who was dating Adam Yauch, was the star of that video, but she was crying hysterically. Yauch was on the phone with her, and they weren't getting along—I think he wasn't happy that she was in our video, or he wanted her to be in his video.

After “Wild Thing,” MTV wanted to start spiking hip-hop videos. And we gave them black artists they could play. Our videos weren't super-safe, like “Parents Just Don't Understand,” but it's not anything they were gonna take shit for playing, like N.W.A.

 

TAMRA DAVIS:
This was before I directed
Billy Madison
and
CB4
, but I was already trying to work on comedy. Yes, the girls are in short skirts and I'm filming up their dresses, but they're having a good time. The shot of the girl in the hot pants is straight out of
Starsky & Hutch
.

 

MIKE ROSS:
Cindy Leer is wearing the stop-go shorts, like a little version of Marilyn Monroe. She was in the Ramones video “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and was a local LA phenomenon.

 

YOUNG MC:
Flea is wearing pants that look like they're adorned with a child's toys. I wasn't there, but the story was that he bobbed his head so much that he threw up. He was really going at it.

 

MIKE ROSS:
Flea's standing on top of a truck, going berserk and violently rocking his bass. I don't know if he was hungover or what, but he blew chow in between takes. This was before the Chili Peppers had really busted out. That's the beauty of Flea—he's all or nothing.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
When it came time to make a video for
Paul's Boutique
, we got to pick a director. I liked a couple of videos from They Might Be Giants, so I said, “Let's find that guy,” and that's how we got Adam Bernstein to direct “Hey Ladies.” We threw in every stupid '70s reference we could think of. Mike's dressed as John Travolta. I give Bella Abzug a high five.

We were living in a house on Mulholland Drive that we'd rented from a Hollywood filmmaker couple, Alex and Marilyn Grasshoff. The Grasshoffs had a huge walk-in closet that was locked, so we picked the lock, and inside were all Marilyn Grasshoff's clothes from the '70s. I mean, it was a gold mine: fur coats, fur hats, crazy leather pants. So we were wearing her clothes in the video.

 

SHOCK G, Digital Underground:
The shoot for “Doowutchyalike” was a true and real party first, a video shoot second. We rented out a hotel in downtown Oakland—the entire hotel—and threw a wild three-day party, Friday though Sunday. To give you an idea of how much fun it was, it wound up costing twice the approved budget to finish. Every time we ran out of dough, the video rep who was on the scene would call the label and say, “This is gonna be bananas! You gotta send more money and let us finish!”

“Doowutchyalike” was voted number forty on MTV's Top 100 video countdown of 1989. Then “The Humpty Dance” was a hit with MTV, but damn near every other sentence was bleeped out, anything with a sexual reference. We were baffled, because there's not a single cuss word in the entire song. Meanwhile, songs that boasted mad violence and murder were left uncensored—which makes perfect sense when you think about it. It's not robbers and killers that make the world unsafe, it's all those dang 69 rear ticklers. The even-more-backwards thing was, the bleeps made it seem more offensive. “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom” became “I once got busy in a muthafuckin' bathroom” after your mind filled in the blanks.

 

RUPERT WAINWRIGHT, director:
When I started, I didn't really like rap. I was like,
God, this is annoying
. There weren't many black directors around. And almost exclusively doing black videos. For two or three years, people thought Rupert Wainwright was some black dude, until I got better known. At first, my friends would go, “You're doing a rap video? Oh, I'm sorry.” They thought I was a nerd because I wasn't directing Whitesnake videos. Six months later, all the white boys on the West Coast suddenly became black.

We got a call to do a band I hadn't heard of, N.W.A. I listened to “Straight Outta Compton,” and it had a good beat. For the video, I came up with the idea of a revolution in Compton, panic in the streets, stuff like that. Then I listened to the song a little harder. And I realized, this could actually cause a riot. So I flipped the idea on its head, and we shot a police sweep, which made N.W.A look like the victims of police brutality.

We were shooting in the LA River, a concrete culvert about a hundred meters wide and twenty meters high, where four inches of water travels through. Three hundred people were watching from the overpasses and bridges. It was a hot day, and I said to Eazy-E, “Do you want to change what you're wearing? You must be kind of hot. Do you want to take the jacket off?” And he pulled down the top part of his jacket, revealing a bulletproof vest. I wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest. So I realized, I needed to dress appropriately when around Eazy.

Here's what would typically happen with N.W.A: We would meet at Jerry's Famous Deli for, like, three hours while I went through the video concepts. I'd get a sense of consensus and then there'd be a quiet voice from the corner: “No, man, it's wack.” I'm sorry, I didn't hear you. “It's wack.” And everyone else would turn and go, “Yeah, man, it's wack.”
But five minutes ago you all loved it
.

Then Eazy would get up, throw the bill at me, and say, “You pick it up, white boy.” I probably would have picked it up anyway, but I didn't need it thrown in my face. And Dr. Dre was always the one who'd come along and say, “I'm really sorry, he's just a bit tense right now.” Dre had the best manners and was always kind of apologizing for Eazy.

Nobody in N.W.A fucking coughed or farted without Eazy's permission. It was weird. Dre was the musical genius of the group. Ice Cube was a great rapper. But the group was totally in Eazy's control. He'd make a decision and bang, that was it. There was no dispute.

 

TAMRA DAVIS:
“Wild Thing” and “Bust a Move” led to working with Eazy-E. I met him in the office of the president of Capitol Records. He was like, “I wanted to show you how important I am. I kicked that motherfucker out of his office so I could impress you.” And I was like, “It's working.” That was my first meeting with him.

N.W.A, those guys all wanted to act. They all wanted to be De Niro, or Rudy Ray Moore. They loved it, because it's all an act anyway. I mean, they really had to live the life of being gangsters, and part of it is intimidation and acting and pushing it. So they loved building the myth.

 

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
Every hip-hop group in the business asked Mike Tyson to be in their videos, and they'd set up shooting days, prepare everything, and he'd never show up. For “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson,” we were allowed to do a video at his training camp in Ohio, and he showed up.

ANN CARLI:
That was a horrible experience, I'll tell you right now. Mike Tyson was very big at the time. Russell Simmons knew Don King and he was able to get this video together. We couldn't believe our luck. It was an expensive video for us, especially in hip-hop, probably $100,000, maybe even $150,000. As soon as we got to Tyson's training camp in Ohio, Mike gets Jeff and Will in his car—a gold Mercedes with actual diamonds—and he takes off, driving very fast. We're on a schedule and we don't know where they've gone.

 

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
Mike said, “Hey, I want to show you guys my house.” And he grabbed me and Will and put us in his car and we drove for an hour, looking for his house. He couldn't find his house. He pulled over—this was in the country, in rural Ohio—and asked somebody, “I'm Mike Tyson. Do you know where I live?” And the guy was just like, “Yeah, you live right up this road.”

It was funny, because on the one hand he was doing us a huge favor by being in our video. But on the other we needed to get back. We were trying to tastefully say, “Mike, this is cool, you know, but we really need to get started.”

 

ANN CARLI:
Don King was saying, “Don't worry.” Will told me afterwards he said, “Mike, let's go back,” and Mike was saying, “Fuck them, they have to wait for you.” Will was like, “Well, but it's my money I'm wasting.”

 

JOHN DIAZ:
Tyson was a train wreck. He accosted every girl on the set. He grabbed them in the most lascivious way you could imagine. He was menacing. I had to send all the women away. Also, Mike would hit anybody that got into the ring. He hit me. He punched Scott Kalvert in the arm so much, Scott lost all feeling for three or four days. He hit the cameraman. The cameraman wanted to brain him with one of his cameras.

 

SCOTT KALVERT:
Tyson cracked me in the ribs, thinking it was funny. He almost killed me. I was a big boxing fan, so it was pretty cool.

 

ANN CARLI:
There were times when Tyson seemed lucid, and other times he was abusive. I was on the pay phone when everybody broke for lunch and Tyson stayed back. When I hung up the phone, he pushed me up against a wall and lifted me off my feet. I don't know where I got the nerve, but I said, “If you don't put me down right now, I'm going to have to hurt you.” He started laughing, and when he dropped me, I ran into the lunchroom.

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
That was Mike back in the day. He wasn't a model gentleman.

 

ANN CARLI:
Tyson had already said to me, “I want to fuck you.” He had a massive knot of bills secured by rubber bands, with condoms on the outside. In front of everybody, he held it up and said, “I'm going to use this on you.” Russell Simmons told him, “She's a big executive at the record company, chill.”

 

DJ JAZZY JEFF:
Don King was cool. He kept trying to get Russell Simmons to sell him Def Jam.

 

ANN CARLI:
At one point, Will said to me, “I'm sorry this is happening, and if it was up to me, I'd beat the crap out of him for what he's doing to you. But I also know you want to get this video done as much as I do.”