I Want My MTV (88 page)

 

MICHAEL NESMITH:
There was a golden age of music video—an innocence and a flowering—and then a rolloff in the late '80s or early '90s.

 

TIM NEWMAN:
In the beginning, it was laissez-faire and ad hoc. Each label had a head of video production, but in many cases they didn't do anything, didn't show up to the set. It was pure freedom and fun. In the late '80s, there were more people in the business who frankly didn't know what they were doing. As time went on, managers more and more thought they were experts.

 

JEFF STEIN:
The scariest phrase I ever heard doing music videos was the record company executive saying, “I have an idea for the video.” And the second scariest phrase was the band's manager saying, “I have an idea for the video.”

 

ANTON CORBIJN:
When budgets increase, more people get paranoid about money being misspent and they want to have a say in the video. And you know, art is not created by committee. If that happens, it's a problem.

 

TOM BAILEY:
The music business was held hostage by videos. Media barons and lawyers took over the record companies, because it was about the way you spent money, to focus your bombardments of the audience. So whilst I have MTV to thank for opening America to the Thompson Twins, it also killed us off, in a way. Video was a fantastic servant, but not a very good master.

 

ADAM DUBIN:
In music videos, there are three distinct forces—the unholy triumvirate, I call it. The artist and their management each have an idea of what the video should be. The record company has another vision, but they also have the money. You needed two of the three camps aligned for your concept, but the other camp usually fought back. And sometimes management and the record company would line up together and force a concept down the artist's throat: “Either you do this, or there will be no video.”

If you shoot the video and get into the edit room, all three forces battle it out. It becomes a place for old scores to be settled. Or band members squabble among themselves over screen time.

 

JEFF STEIN:
As MTV became a phenomenon, and record companies and managers became more involved and put their fingerprints all over videos, it became big business. It became overcommercialized and homogenized. And eventually in 1992, it became euthanized.

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
The balance at MTV was moving away from music and that's when I left, in '92. The things we did, whether it was Guns N' Roses or a hundred others, we couldn't do it anymore. There weren't enough video hours, and more important, there wasn't the commitment that music was important to the channel.

KEVIN SEAL:
Around 1991, it fizzled out for me. Somebody asked if I really wanted to do this job, and I made a noncommital shrug. They eased me out. The idea that somebody new should be on all the time sounded reasonable. For example, I was amazed Kurt Loder could be on year after year, because he was not any more into it than I was. As long as they were still paying, he could go out and drink after work. One night we went to a dive bar near Penn Station and ordered every zany cocktail we'd never had. “Brandy Alexander? That sounds like a stripper's name!”

 

KENNEDY:
I had the pleasure of sitting down with all five original VJs at the Hotel Nikko in LA the night before the 1993 VMAs. J.J. Jackson was a sweet teddy bear. Alan seemed a little confounded by the direction of the network. Even back then, people were complaining there wasn't enough music on MTV.

 

ADAM CURRY:
I quit on the air in the summer of 1993. I was doing the
Top 20 Countdown
, Beck was number one with “Loser,” and I said, “Beck is number one. That's it, I really think the Internet is the place to be, I had a great seven years, I'll see you on the Internet.” I walked out and never went back.

 

TRACEY JORDAN:
What I call the pimp-rap videos had started. Rappers were throwing gang signs up, there was gunplay, and women were more like body parts and props.

 

RICK RUBIN:
The budgets got bigger over time, but the concepts never got better.

 

SIMON LE BON:
The simple ideas, which are always cheap, got used up. If you haven't got a great idea, one thing you can do to make it look good is throw money at it. That became the ethic.

 

SCOTT IAN, Anthrax:
Here's what was fucked up: In 1993, Anthrax was about to shoot a video, when Mark Pellington came up with a treatment for a different song. But he wasn't available until the fall. So we waited, which was a huge mistake. During our summer tour, we had no single out. It was a stupid decision. Our record company talked to us into waiting because Mark was
the
hot guy at the time. Videos ruled the business.

 

JOHN SAYLES:
I know somebody who worked on a Taylor Dayne video, and it was reshot three times because they didn't like the way her hair looked.

ANN WILSON:
As it went along, videos really stopped trying to interact with the music. The video had a story of its own, and the music was a subtext. It became about how the stylists wanted to make you look. It got less fun for us because of that.

 

AL TELLER:
Every artist and manager felt it was their right to make a top-notch video. Meanwhile, MTV tightened up their playlists and started to air fewer and fewer videos. Plus, they started branching off into non-music programming. So you had two conflicting curves: a rapidly climbing curve of expenses for a video, and a rapidly declining curve of the number of videos being exposed. It became impossible.

 

MICK KLEBER:
Most of the early videos were made for $20,000 or less. Duran Duran's “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” in Sri Lanka were a package deal at $35,000. By the end of my run in 1993, Capitol had produced music videos with budgets eclipsing $1 million, and annual video expenditures for the label were nearly $15 million.

 

EDDIE ROSENBLATT:
Videos were singularly the biggest cost in a marketing budget. Once you spent $100,000 or $300,000 or $500,000, if MTV didn't play the video, it was a waste of money. And even though you had different arrangements with artists relative to recoupment, if they didn't sell any albums, there was nothing to recoup.

 

MARTHA DAVIS:
Record companies were so fat that they did what everything does in the law of physics: they blew up. And they started making stupid choices. Part of it was drug-induced. Because there was so much money, the price of making a video was going up like crazy.

I remember the year when the record industry grossed more than the film industry, or something crazy. It was like fat city. Secretaries were going to lunch in limos. We fall for the bubble thing, every time. We fall for it.

 

NICK RHODES:
The record labels were such thieves—the budgets we were spending on videos, they were spending on wine at lunch.

 

JOHN BEUG:
I'd started working in the music business in '72 for a guy named Lou Adler. We made a couple of movies:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and Cheech and Chong's
Up in Smoke
. Then I went to work for movie studios. Having worked in motion pictures, it annoyed the crap out of me that the money being spent on videos often didn't wind up on screen. They were wasting it. Directors wanted a steady camera
and
a stage crane, even though they only used one or the other. I used to marvel that we made
Up in Smoke
for $1 million, and here we were spending $1 million on a music video.

 

ANN WILSON:
A whole day would be spent auditioning the effect on a snare drum. Talk about wasteful activity.

 

NANCY WILSON:
It was a huge, spectacular, corporate explosion. And it was exciting to be part of it, at first. But videos, like the production of music in that time, became bombastic and costly. How many dancers were employed? How many makeup artists and stylists?
How
big did the hair get?
How
much did it cost?

 

 

 

SAMMY HAGAR:
I was fucking shocked.
These bastards don't play videos anymore. How dare they call themselves MTV?

 

MICHAEL NESMITH:
MTV switched to reality programming and became more of a social network, which may have been prescient.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
MTV doesn't really want to acknowledge their age. I hosted a twentieth anniversary special with the original five VJs and the ratings were not good. At all. The kids don't really want to watch people who are old. So the twenty-fifth anniversary passed without a peep.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
If I had stayed at MTV, I'm not sure I'd have
ever
switched it to mostly shows. I understand that if the advertiser says, “I'll give you more money for it,” you do it. But I'm one of those old-fashioned guys that goes, “If I have something the consumer likes, my job is to convince the advertiser to advertise in
this
, not to change my programming to what the advertiser wants.”

 

JUDY McGRATH:
The people who were there when MTV started were disappointed when we stopped being the home of music videos. I'm
still
sad about it. But things had to evolve.

 

NICK RHODES:
At some point the
M
in MTV changed from
Music
to
Money
.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
The rampant abuse of music-video directors in the past thirty years has been appalling. We have no ownership over our work. We have no protection from having it re-edited or repackaged. Directors are paid a flat fee, which is pathetic to begin with. And now MTV is a giant corporation, thanks to music videos. You're not even allowed to talk about this shit. It's career-busting if you try.

 

JAC BENSON:
I understand the economics of television. But you fell in love with a channel that promoted itself as giving you that thing you wanted and couldn't find anywhere else, that represented you, and then that channel changed. It's sad and disappointing.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
Sitting in front of a TV certainly looks passive. But watching MTV made me want to grow up and be a creative person. It made me want to write, it made me want to get onstage. MTV was instrumental in me not being a banker, and not being a banker has made all the difference in my life.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
Once a year or so, I meet somebody that tells me that they were living in Iowa or Ohio, fifteen years old, when MTV came on. And it changed the direction of their life. Whereas they thought they were gonna be a lawyer, they ended up moving to New York and becoming an art director. There must be thousands of people working in the arts—graphic design, Madison Avenue, film, photography—because of the influence of MTV. And all the hairdressers, of course.

 

HUEY LEWIS:
For a long time, the '80s were dismissed. But the '80s gave us twenty-four-hour-a-day music television, and the drum machine. Both changed music forever.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
You know the old expression “You can't shine shit”? Video did. It shined shit.

 

ANDY SUMMERS:
My real thought about music videos is that you shouldn't have music videos. But one didn't really express these thoughts too much at the time, being huge beneficiaries of the medium.

 

BOY GEORGE:
Videos were like postcards, going to every corner of the world. People living in small towns in the middle of nowhere were able to have access to what artists were doing. That's the positive aspect of MTV. The negative of that is that it turned music into a product, like a can of beans, and that's why we're in the situation we're in now. Everything is cross-collateralized: movies and pop, fashion and pop, advertising and pop. Back in the '70s, pop music was its own untouchable empire. You would never have seen David Bowie advertising anything. Pop stars were kind of nebulous and saintly. Whereas nowadays, anyone can be like a pop star, and video played a part in that.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
MTV was great for music and great for the country. The Beatles changed everything, and nothing else changed again until MTV. Everybody watched it to get their style, to know what was hip and cool. It was a lifestyle channel.

 

ANNE-MARIE MACKAY:
Music videos were a new form of storytelling, with their own visual literacy. Young people understood them. They could say, “These are the new myths.” They were tribal about it. Music videos changed the way people absorbed information. They changed entertainment forever. When MTV changed its format and started airing reality shows, I hated it with a passion and I still hate it. They made the music-video industry, and they killed the music-video industry.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
It's just kind of a network now, you know? They outsource all their shows to external production companies, instead of using their own sets and producers.

 

BILLY GIBBONS:
It's not unusual for people to ask me, “When will MTV go back to playing music?” And I say, “You'll have to go to Europe.”

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
MTV and radio were gurus for what was cool, what mattered in pop culture. Today it's all tiny little factions. MTV was the last national radio station. There is no mass media anymore.