I Want My MTV (47 page)

 

ANN WILSON:
It hurt our feelings, and we felt jealous. The guys didn't have pressure to be sex kittens.

 

SINEAD O'CONNOR:
There was a great band called Heart—I used to love this band—and they had a singer who was quite overweight, who in videos they shot only from the neck up. Prince's sister, Tyka Nelson, made a great fucking record called “Marc Anthony's Tune.” She was an enormously fat woman, and her label insisted she become skinny if she was going to get on MTV. So a) there were no black people on MTV, and b) there were no fat people.

 

MICK KLEBER:
Ann Wilson's weight was a big issue. People had this perception of what she looked like from the “Magic Man” era, when she was slender. And now that she wasn't, each video presented a challenge. There were a lot of different tactics that were used, with technology and lighting. You didn't have to be a genius to figure out that we were sort of hiding her in different ways.

On one shoot, David Mallet blasted a huge amount of backlight and had reflective panels sewn into the sides of her dress, so the light would blow off and create sort of an artificial waist. In other clips, they stretched the video in post-production to make her appear slimmer. As for me, I'd been in the Marines before working for Capitol, so I said, “Why don't we just get her in shape?” Her management were insulted that I would suggest that, even though they were keeping her in full-length coats and shooting her from the neck up. They would rather spend $100,000 extra in video production costs to hide her weight instead of putting $35,000 into fitness.

 

ANN WILSON:
The videos were stretched at the request of management. I never liked it. I've always felt that the effort to disguise a flaw is worse than the flaw. And I had to answer questions about it; if you didn't look like a porn star, everyone was like, “What's wrong?” People said horrible things about me.

DOMINIC SENA:
I was doing a video for Anita Baker, and we made sure she picked out the wardrobe she wanted to wear. A few days later, we were shooting some other footage while she got ready, and they came to me and said, “She doesn't like her wardrobe.” I said, “She liked it a few days ago
when she picked it out!
”

“Well, she doesn't like it now and she doesn't want to shoot.” My stylist frantically made some calls—it was Sunday, no less—and got designer shops to open. She came back with racks and racks of the hippest, coolest clothes, gathered in a few hours. Anita went through all
that
stuff, and didn't find anything she wanted to wear. It turned out that she felt fat and didn't want to go in front of the camera. So I never shot a single frame of her.

 

ANN CARLI:
We signed Samantha Fox—she was one of the biggest Page Three Girls in England. Page Three Girls pose topless in the
Sun.
She was fairly young, and extremely buxom. RCA wanted to do pinup calendars and take a real skanky approach. I wanted her to be more of a girl next door, so that was a big fight. Ultimately, I was right—guys liked her videos and girls bought her records.

Samantha was a great girl. But she would drink early in the day. She wanted champagne right from the beginning of the day. I made sure her drinks got watered down. At one video shoot, she was constipated. She was bloated and wearing a midriff costume. I had to get a doctor. This is kind of a disgusting story. I don't want to know what the doctor did, but the problem was solved.

 

JEANNE MATTIUSSI:
Barbra Streisand tortured me on a daily basis. She used to call at the crack of dawn. She was intent that she belonged on MTV. The directive to get her “Somewhere” video played came from the top, from Walter Yetnikoff and Al Teller. Walter used to call me the “dago broad on the West Coast.” That's the only sign I had that he knew who I was. And Al threatened me if I didn't get the video on MTV.

 

RONALD “BUZZ” BRINDLE:
The song was not an MTV song. It was a Barbra Streisand song. Dom Fiorvante was one level above Garland and I was sitting in Dom's office when he was on the phone with Walter Yetnikoff. All I could hear was f-words. I guess Barbra was emphatic in terms of her desire to get a video on MTV.

DAVID MALLET:
Everybody around her was terrified of Diana Ross. I didn't know that, so when she asked me, “What are we going to do for the video?” I said, “I'm going to dress you in a wig and make you look like an idiot, like you did on a '60s TV show.” There was a terrible silence in the room. And she said, “Oh, I like that. I'll do that.” There's a scene in “Chain Reaction” where she crawls on the ground, that's always a good thing to do when you're desperate. She had a huge hit, and it was regarded as a seminal video.

 

PETER BARON:
Whitney Houston was the first breakthrough for Arista Records at MTV. We didn't spend a whole lot of money on Whitney's videos; she didn't have the charisma and personality of a Madonna or Prince. She was a churchgoing, gospel-singing teenager who rarely left the house. And she had two old Jewish managers—one named Gene Harvey and the other, I'm not making this up, named Seymour Flics. They were two
alter kockers
who didn't know anything about videos. Clive Davis was barely involved. He didn't even have a TV in his office for the first five years of MTV.

I went to to England to supervise “How Will I Know.” The day before the shoot, my phone rings, and it's Don Ienner, who was a VP at Arista. He says, “Peter, we need a favor with Whitney. I'm going to have Tommy Mottola call you.” I said, “Fine.”
Ring, ring
. “Peter, how you doing, I hear great things about you.” I was like,
Oh, that's a setup
. “One of my dearest friends is in England, and I was wondering if there's a way you could hook up”—he used the phrase
hook up
—“an introduction between him and Whitney. He's in the UK working on a movie called
The Mission
.” I said, “Well, who is it?” He said, “It's Robert De Niro.”

Two seconds later,
ring, ring
. “Hey, Pete, it's Bob De Niro. What are you guys doing tonight?” When I told Whitney, she dropped a fork out of her hand. And said, “No fucking way,” or something along those lines. “He's really been coming after me. He keeps sending me flowers and calling my dad.” So I had to blow off Robert De Niro. He said, “Maybe tomorrow night?” I go, “Yeah, maybe.” And he called me the next day and about three or four more times, before he understood that it wasn't going to happen.

 

CLIVE DAVIS, record executive:
Whitney was so young and fresh and beautiful in “How Will I Know.” That video took her album to a different level. We'd established a good base at R&B radio with the first few singles, but “How Will I Know” established Whitney as a star.

BRIAN GRANT:
Women always looked good in my vids. That reputation followed me around. Some directors just didn't put a lot of effort into it. Russell never got women, because he never spent any time making them look good. Also, I always operated the camera myself, because I felt it was crucial to make them feel safe and comfortable. There's a close-up in Whitney's “How Will I Know” video where she looks absolutely stunning. You become a still photographer for a short period of time, and it's just you and the artist. It becomes very personal.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
I saw situations where one shot would make a star, like with Susanna Hoffs and “Walk Like an Egyptian.” That thing she did with her eyes made her a star.

 

SUSANNA HOFFS, the Bangles:
We used Gary Weis because we'd been huge fans of the Rutles movie he codirected. It was a two-day shoot in New York. You really felt like you had arrived when you had a two-day shoot. Part one was a live performance in some warehouse filled with contest winners from a radio station. The DP was using a long lens way back in the crowd. There was a close-up on me toward the end of the video, when I sing my section, but because the camera was so far away from me, I had no idea how close up it really was. Back then, when we performed live, I'd pick a friendly face in the middle of the crowd and then someone to my left and someone to my right, and I would sing to them, using them as focal points. That's what I was doing in that part of the video. I wasn't aware it was such a tight shot. People always ask me, “Were you trying to do something with your eyes there? Was that a thing?”

 

TONY WARD:
If you're a model and you're working in music videos, you're an extra—just cheap talent, a nobody. They moved you around like cattle and sometimes worked you twenty-four hours straight. It was quite murderous.

 

MAK GILCHRIST, model:
When you do music videos, you usually get pages and pages of production notes, detailing what emotions and feelings you should be conveying. With Robert Palmer's “Addicted to Love,” there was a paragraph on a single sheet that said, “Look like showroom mannequins. Easy on the personality, girls, we're selling sex here.”

 

JULIA BOLINO, model:
When I did “Addicted to Love,” I'd never heard of Robert Palmer. I was eighteen—I'd been modeling for two years—and I was more into Blondie and people like that.

MAK GILCHRIST:
I was twenty-one and had to be persuaded to do it. Music videos were something you did on the side from your modeling career. “Addicted to Love” was shot in a basement studio in London. I got paid a quarter of my normal day rate.

 

JULIA BOLINO:
When we got to the set, the director, Terence Donovan, told us each to pick an instrument. I happened to pick lead guitar. I'm glad I didn't pick drums. Poor Kathy Davies, she didn't get much screen time. Then we went into hair and makeup, which took quite a long time as you can imagine. The makeup was ladled on. I could barely talk because my lip gloss was so heavy.

 

MAK GILCHRIST:
I was really into funk, and I thought,
I get to be the funky bass player who slaps the bass
. As you can see, I insisted on slapping the bass, even though the song had no slapping bass whatsoever. In fact, I'm not even dancing to the tune that's playing. I am not in rhythm with anybody or anything.

If you're looking at the video, from right to left, Julie Pankhurst is the keyboard player. Patty Kelly, the guitarist, is next, standing on Robert's right. I'm the bassist, and Julia Bolino is on the far right. She's the one with what we called the autonomous breast, the girl whose boob is swinging to its own tune. And behind us is the drummer, Kathy Davies. Julie Pankhurst is the one whose legs get a close-up.

We girls were sitting together on lunch break, and Terence slammed a bottle of wine on the table and said, “Right, you lot, get your chops around that.” I got a little tipsy. In fact, I got rather drunk. After lunch, my ankles began to wobble in those heels. My ankle sort of clicked over and I lost my balance. The neck of my bass hit Robert in the back of the head, and his head hit the microphone. That would have been a hilarious outtake.

 

JOHN TAYLOR:
Robert Palmer wasn't comfortable doing videos. “Addicted to Love” exemplified how he felt about it—it's a video commenting on itself. He's making fun of it. He didn't really step outside of that. He did “I Didn't Mean to Turn You On” and “Simply Irresistible,” and they're both variations on “Addicted to Love.” He was a bit too old and self-conscious by the time videos became important.

 

JULIA BOLINO:
Robert Palmer was very polite, very professional. His wife was there, so perhaps he had no choice.

MAK GILCHRIST:
None of us felt we were being exploited in that video. That was a shock to me, when people said the video was demeaning to women. I thought the opposite; I thought we looked strong and quite scary.

 

JULIA BOLINO:
The dresses were by Azzedine Alaïa. We had no idea they were see-through. It was only when I saw the video played back that I was like,
Oh my God, you can see my boobs
. I've always had quite big boobs.

 

MAK GILCHRIST:
I kept it quiet that I was involved in the video. It did not appear on my résumé. When the video comes to the point where you see me licking my lips, I would go crimson and leave the room. I remember walking into bars, and if it was on TV, I'd turn around and walk back out. I was horrified. My best friend Gil would introduce me to his male friends and say, “This is the one from the Robert Palmer video.” And the guy would look at me in a way that made me want to wash my hands straightaway.

 

BRUCE ALLEN:
You had to have great-looking babes in your videos. And the biggest arguments, of course, were over who got to pick the girls.

 

JOEY ALLEN, Warrant:
Once you picked a director, you'd get a book of the two hundred hottest women in LA: models, video girls, actresses, Playmates,
Penthouse
Pets. We'd say, “Who in the band is single?” And that guy got to pick.

 

SIMON LE BON:
I had one on-set romance, and I'm sure Nick had at least one. Sheila, who turned into a cat in the “Hungry Like the Wolf” video, she became the girlfriend of our manager Michael Berrow for a year after that.

 

BRIAN SETZER:
I asked out the girl in the “Stray Cat Strut” video and she said
no
.

 

RICK SPRINGFIELD:
When I was shooting “Affair of the Heart,” I pulled an extra out of the crowd and took her in a back room. It was pretty quick. That went on all the time. I was a big extras person, to be honest. Extras were great.