I Want My MTV (51 page)

 

SINEAD O'CONNOR:
It was funny, when we won the award for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Madonna was raging about it, because she had her “Vogue” video nominated also, and we
fucked
her. She and Sandra Bernhard had been really nasty about me in magazine interviews, based on how I looked. As if being blond and having big tits and a big ass was more important. Which it is, if you're Madonna, because your records aren't great, so all you have to sell is tits and ass. So yeah, I was very pleased to beat the shit out of her that night.

 

TABITHA SOREN:
Whenever I covered the VMAs, they said, “It's a party, Tabitha. Don't ask the rock stars anything serious. It's supposed to be light.” I always thought,
What a waste of time.

 

ARSENIO HALL:
One year I was in the host dressing room, and next to me was Madonna; next to her was Janet Jackson. Madonna's door was cracked open and I heard her talk about Janet, not in a positive way, and one of Janet's people heard it, too. It was always a soap opera.

 

CINDY CRAWFORD:
I loved doing the VMAs, because everyone was there. One time, Todd Oldham loaned me a dress to wear, and I was sewn into it. Only later did we figure out that there was no way for me to pee. It was 5 P.M. until 12:30 A.M., when I could get the dress off. That was a long night.

 

VAN TOFFLER, MTV executive:
I was the guy who got Pee-wee Herman to open the 1991 VMAs. I spoke to his manager for months. When he said yes, I danced on Doug Herzog's desk.

 

JOE GALLEN:
Pee-wee Herman had been arrested a few months before the VMAs, for masturbating in a movie theater. This became the object of jokes on every late-night talk show. Dana Friedman, who nows runs Fox Television production, was his publicist, and I started conversations with her about Pee-wee appearing on the show. After the arrest, he had basically gone into hiding. The first line we pitched him was “Heard any good jokes lately?” We pitched a few other ideas back and forth, but we never could beat that one. His appearance was a big secret. I had to put him in a special dressing room in the basement. We had to make sure it was forty-five degrees in there, because otherwise his makeup would start coming off.

 

ARSENIO HALL:
Pee-wee Herman upstaged my monologue. They told me Pee-wee was gonna open the show, and I'm like,
You know what? No monologue can beat that.

 

BILLY IDOL:
I was trying to figure out how I could make presenting an award a bit of fun, not just open an envelope and announce the winner. The pants I was wearing had a large zipper. So I realized I could stick the envelope inside my trousers, zip up, then pull it out of my crotch and read it. When I thrust my hand into my trousers, you could hear a gasp from the audience. I can imagine the director going, “For Christ's sake, don't show his balls! If he gets his dick out, cut to anything else.” I love Jane's Addiction, so I was proud to give them an award.

 

DAVE NAVARRO:
Billy Idol announced our song as “Been Caught Wanking,” because that was on the heels of Pee-wee Herman getting caught masturbating in a movie theater. I accepted the award. This was my first time on live television. I'm saying “Thank you very much,” but in my head the dialogue was “Get the fuck out of here, because there's drugs at home.” I was a big junkie. I went onstage, took the award, got in the car, and left. Within fifteen minutes of leaving the podium, I was in my cousin's house, shooting dope.

The next morning, I went to score drugs and the dealer recognized me. He's like, “Hey, man, I saw you on TV last night.” And he gave me a few extra bags of heroin. At that moment, I realized the power of MTV.

 

BRET MICHAELS:
CC DeVille was completely hammered the night of the VMAs. At rehearsals, he'd yell, “Fuck this, I'm going solo!”

Our original plan had been to play “Something to Believe In,” but it was too long, so we agreed on “Unskinny Bop.” That's what we rehearsed. By showtime, CC was annihilated. And I'd had a couple of drinks. I'm not innocent here either. So we ran onstage and launched into “Unskinny Bop.” We didn't realize the show was in a commercial break. We're up there playing, and MTV is screaming at us to stop. By then we'd already played the song! We didn't know what to do. All of a sudden CC goes, “What the fuck, let's go into ‘Talk Dirty to Me.'” He starts playing it, we follow along, and the whole MTV crew is waving for us to stop. But at this point we're already in. And then CC's guitar cord came unplugged. He didn't even know it. I walked over to him and said, “CC, your fucking guitar cord is out of your guitar, no one can hear you.” He's like, “Oh shit!” And he reaches over and plugs it back in. You can watch it on YouTube, it's hilarious.

When we came offstage, I walked one way and CC walked the other, and he made a few comments to me that I won't repeat. I said, “Go fuck yourself.” He said, “Fuck you.” I'm not a guy to back down, so I'm like, “Wait a minute, if you want to talk, let's talk right now.” He shoved me, I shoved him, and
bing bang boom
, we were on the ground, kicking and punching each other. We fought on the side of the stage, in between Eddie Van Halen and Cindy Crawford. Then MTV bitched us out like crazy for the performance. They crucified us. It wasn't like we were trying to be malicious. It was an innocent mistake.

 

ARSENIO HALL:
I was standing in the wings and I saw Prince pass me with no ass in his pants. That shocked me, and I thought, “He has hair on his ass.” So I picked up a yellow pad and started to write no-ass-in-pants jokes. When a man from Minneapolis has no ass in his pants, the jokes kind of write themselves. A week later? A black-and-white suit with no ass in the pants was delivered to my office, from Prince and his tailor. I still have it.

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
The VMA awards for me are like weddings and funerals. It's such high-pitched emotion coming off of everyone in the room that I can barely breathe. And so I tend to just kind of black out.

With “Losing My Religion,” 1991 was our year at the VMAs. Dennis Hopper presented to us, and I kind of rushed him. I came out from the side, wide-eyed and yelling, and I scared the life out of him. He looked at me like,
Who the fuck are you?

 

TARSEM SINGH, director:
The evening of the VMAs, I went to the restaurant where I'd worked as a busboy two years earlier. And the cook said, “You've got to show people your heritage. Here, wear my turban.” So I walked into the MTV awards wearing a turban, which I'd never worn in my life. I went up to accept an award wearing the cook's turban from Bombay Palace.

People don't know how to treat you when you wear a turban. They think you're a holy man, not a foul-mouthed moron. Dennis Hopper bowed and said, “Namaste” to me. He's a hero of mine, and I was like,
If I open my mouth, he's going to call me a cunt
, so I bowed back.

 

CINDY CRAWFORD:
I was a Midwestern girl, thrown into this rock n' roll world. We were backstage at the VMAs looking for people to interview, and Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes was there, wearing cool suede pants with leaves embroidered on them. I asked him, “What kind of leaves are those?” He's like, “Cannabis.” Then it was like,
beat beat beat
. . . And I said, “That's pot, right?” I wasn't playing the ingenue, I really didn't know.

At the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in London, they said I was going to interview Def Leppard, and a whole group of guys was walking over. I asked, “Which one is he?” They're like, “It's a band, you idiot.” I wasn't Kurt Loder, and I didn't have to be.

 

ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI, MTV producer:
House of Style
always did shows from the VMAs. One year, Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers came up to Cindy at the end of the night like he was on fire. He picked up her underarm and said, “I want to lick you.” I pulled her arm down and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” It was invasive.

 

CINDY CRAWFORD:
My kids love the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anthony Kiedis and I both live in Malibu, and I see him a lot. I tell my kids, “He tried to lick my armpit once.” Those moments only happen at the VMAs.

 

 

 

MANY PEOPLE AT MTV HAD A LOVE/HATE RELA
tionship with metal; they hated the way women were depicted in the videos, but loved the ratings generated by the music's rabid fans. Metal, rock critic Deborah Frost wrote in September 1984, was “more popular than ever,” and she attributed the success to MTV, where approximately a third of all videos were by hard rock bands: “Suddenly, rock's most extreme fantasy genre looked bigger, brighter, more
fantastic
than ever before,” she wrote. “And MTV is in the fantasy business.”

Seven months later, Bob Pittman suddenly announced that MTV was deemphasizing metal. “We want to play music that's on the cutting edge,” he said, dismissing heavy metal as “a quick, crass, easy buck for record companies.” Ironically, metal outlasted Pittman at MTV. Once he left, a new set of programmers gorged on hair metal bands whose male singers were nearly as pretty as the girls in their videos. In this era of MTV, you might see Great White, White Lion, and Whitesnake consecutively. And having outlasted criticism from the PMRC, hard rock bands grew more brazen than ever, creating a pantheon of video absurdity, usually involving explosions and cleavage.

With the survival skills of a cockroach, metal kept on. As for Pittman, by 1988 he and radio consultant Lee Abrams had started Radio Lisa, a twenty-four-hour heavy metal radio network with a “party atmosphere.” Metal, Pittman now declared, “has real appeal and deserves its own format.” Crass was in.

 

DEE SNIDER:
Marty Callner told me MTV had decided to cut back on metal videos. They didn't need us anymore. I said to Marty, “What the fuck? Metal has a loyal audience.” I told him to tell MTV to give me a show: Metal fans will tune in, just like they do for midnight metal shows on radio stations.

 

STEVE CASEY:
In '85, I came up with the idea for a metal show, with Dee Snider hosting. We had done a focus group in Atlanta, where there was a local UHF music-video program playing metal, and teen males were nuts about it. It seemed like a no-brainer. And
Heavy Metal Mania
did huge ratings.

 

DEE SNIDER:
Heavy Metal Mania
got huge ratings, as I knew it would. At first I did it for free. But the workload started getting heavy, so I was like, “All right, time for me to get paid.” To which the response was the same they gave everybody: “Oh, this is great promotion for you.” I'm like, “I'm the most recognized face in heavy metal. Everybody knows who I am. My career is starting to flounder because I'm over-fucking-exposed. I want some money!” “Well, we really can't do that.” “Well, then I really can't do the show anymore.” So I left.

 

LEE MASTERS:
Metal was always divisive at the network. Young men watched MTV the most, so if we played more hair metal, we'd get higher ratings. But that ran counter to the cool, cutting-edge image we were presenting. Judy McGrath and the on-air promotion people were creating fabulous promos, talking about how hip and edgy we were, and then we'd play White Lion.

 

SAM KAISER:
When I got to MTV from Atlantic Records, the channel was playing 100 to 110 current videos and was all over the place. I wanted to trim the playlist and focus more on the mainstream American kid who leaned towards rock. Because rock was on fire, with Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi. I came in right during the hair metal surge.

 

DOC McGHEE:
I mean, MTV was playing so much Mötley and Bon Jovi, I'd have to tell them, “You're overexposing my artists. If you don't take them off the air, I'm not going to give you another video.” I was fighting to get less airplay, not more.

 

STEVE CASEY:
I also started
Dial MTV
, which set records for ratings. Countdown shows were huge. Mötley Crüe's “Home Sweet Home” went to number one and we couldn't get rid of it. We had to change the rules or it would have never come off. It would probably still be number one today.

ALAN NIVEN:
What a cockamamie idea. How fast do you think bands and labels tried to jack that? You could hire people to phone in and request your band's video. You could pay your way onto
Dial MTV
, totally. My ex-roommate Don Dokken said, “You gotta get on this.” I didn't want to pay people all across the country to be phoning MTV to get our clip played. There was no integrity to that at all. I mean, if you don't trust your own programming judgment, go sell shoes somewhere.

 

CURT MARVIS:
Other metal bands saw Mötley Crüe's “Home Sweet Home” and said, “I want a video just like that.” Doc McGhee was managing Mötley and Bon Jovi, and Jon was dead-set against using Wayne Isham. The last thing he wanted was to use the Mötley Crüe director. But Doc said, “You've gotta use these guys.”

 

DOC McGHEE:
Jon said, “Why can't we have our own guy?” And I go, “Because you've done bad videos. Sorry, we're not standing on the boardwalk like the Beatles. We're a fucking rock band.” I wanted their videos to be like Mötley Crüe, but fun. Let's see Johnny's million-dollar smile. That's what sold Johnny.