I Want My MTV (53 page)

 

PAULA ABDUL:
Tawny started doing cartwheels on top of the Jaguars. With rock videos, you can do whatever you want. It doesn't even have to make sense.

 

TAWNY KITAEN:
I got on top of the cars and started doing cartwheels and splits. I'd been a ballerina and a gymnast until I was fifteen. I was very limber.

 

LADY GAGA:
I don't know a person in the universe who didn't melt when Tawny got on the top of that car. That was one of the greatest moments in video history. I mean, I wish I could steal that moment every day. If I was Paula Abdul, I would do that choreography by myself all the time.

 

SAM KAISER:
When we got the video for “Here I Go Again,” I told Marty, “It's a little too aggressive. There's too much breast in one scene, and too much butt in another.” He argued, but I said, “Marty, just take care of it.” When the new version came back, I called and thanked him. He said, “Oh, there's still something edgy in there. But you have to find it.” I brought it to Michelle Vonfeld in standards and practices, and it passed muster with her. One day, we're sitting in a programming meeting, and the channel was playing in the background, and Rick Krim goes, “Oh my god, I just saw Tawny Kitaen's tit.” We called the studio in Smithtown, Long Island, to pull that clip. And sure enough, in one frame, Marty had left Tawny's tit completely exposed. I called Marty right away, and he goes, “You found it!”

 

TAWNY KITAEN:
There's nothing slutty about anything I wore. But the public's perception is that I dressed like a slut. Apparently, you can put me in a brown paper bag and I will still be sexier than some chick with nothing on. When I looked lustfully into the camera, it wasn't in an
I want to fuck the whole world
, “Cherry Pie” way. I was looking at my husband. I wanted to fuck my husband, and that translated to anyone watching.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
I got lots of criticism for the Whitesnake videos. There was a class at Santa Monica College about my videos. Taught by a lesbian. Isn't that funny? MTV pretended to give me guff. They said “Oh no, Marty, you can't do that.” Yet they wanted me to go as far as I could.

 

JO BERGMAN:
With all the girls in the metal videos, you had to be careful about nipples. I was on constant nipple watch.

 

TOM HUNTER:
Dial MTV
was our highest-rated video show, yet it was the same ten videos in the same order at the same time every day. I had to change how we tabulated positions, because some videos would just live forever. People would vote for them again and again. Whitesnake's “Here We Go Again” was one of those.

 

JOHN KALODNER:
Tawny was a beautiful, smart, flamboyant, controlling woman. At the beginning, she was great for them. But for the long-term career of Whitesnake, she was terrible. The rest of Whitesnake grew to hate her. She tortured the other wives and girlfriends. Coverdale's career was ruined because he was pussy-whipped by Tawny.

 

TAWNY KITAEN:
David and I were the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of rock n' roll. John Kalodner used to call me Yoko Ono. I was arguing about which single to release. I was picking the photographer for album covers. At concerts, people would hold up signs saying, “We Want Tawny.” I was more famous than the band.

I was truly, truly in love with David. We became filthy rich. I was spending $75,000 a month. I think I was compensating for growing up in poverty, and David didn't know how to stop me. It's like David had married a teenager. So we broke up. I got the house in Beverly Hills, he got the house in Tahoe. I never saw him again. I have never burned a bridge with anybody, but David won't speak to me. I have only great memories of him. But in my case, absolute power corrupted absolutely. I do give myself credit, though, for the fact that “Here I Go Again” has over 11 million views on YouTube.

 

SOPHIE MULLER:
We didn't have MTV in England. I yearned to watch it. When I came to America, it was on 24/7 in my hotel room, and you had to sit through ghastly videos like Whitesnake, just to watch something you wanted to see. The lighting was horrible, the art direction was crass, and it was offensive to see a woman sprawled on a car with a short skirt and big hair.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
In making Great White's “Rock Me,” I wilted to pressure from the label. “Got to have a girl in the video, mate. Look at Tawny Kitaen on top of the Jaguar.” For the moment, that became the ideal of rock videos. “Rock Me” is a safe, cliché-ridden video.

 

MICK KLEBER:
Compared to many managers, Alan Niven was very hands-on at video shoots, scrutinizing each shot and offering intelligent input. I conceived the notion of staging Great White on platforms surrounded by water patrolled by sharks, intercut with a sexy “shark goddess” who would strip to her torso of fish scales and fire a phallic spear. This proved to be too expensive for our budget. I proposed to Propaganda that I would recommend Nigel Dick to Great White as director for the “Rock Me” video on the condition that Propaganda absorb the difference between the actual production costs and the allotted budget. They agreed to make an investment in the development of Dick's career, so the video was made based on the original idea. Dick shot footage of small sharks in a tank, but they were unconvincing and rejected. Fortunately, the model cast as the shark girl provided plenty of high-quality cutaway eye candy.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
The original video we did for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” might be the worst video of all time. The idea was that we're inside a house that's being demolished, and we're trying to play the song while the building falls down around us. MTV said, “We can't play this. It's crap.” When we released our videos on a VHS compilation, we called that one a “rare UK version.” It
was
rare, because it rarely got any airplay.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
Def Leppard's
Hysteria
cost a fortune to make, about $7 million, and it didn't sell all that well. “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was the fourth single. We made a concept video that didn't work, and we had to scrap it. The song was a stiff at radio. The label said, “Look, it's over.” As a last-ditch attempt, we decided to shoot a live version of “Sugar” in Denver. Wayne Isham found twelve of the best-looking girls in town, we stuck them in the audience, and went at it. And boom, the video just went nuts.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
That's when
Hysteria
went mad.

 

CLIFF BURNSTEIN:
Wayne was a rock star. Watching him shoot a live concert was worth the price of admission. He'd be in the truck, directing, yelling out the camera moves, and he would have obscene nicknames for every camera op. He'd be in a frenzied state for an hour and half. He'd yell to the cameraman, “Get right beside that fucking whore!” He was better than the show.

 

JOE ELLIOTT:
Wayne was a bottle rocket, an absolute lunatic. He was on caffeine overload twenty-four hours a day. Nothing was big enough, fast enough, wide enough, or tall enough. He was always saying, “We need more of that.”

 

CURT MARVIS:
Ron Jeremy showed up to many of our video shoots. He was friends with a lot of the metal guys. You always knew things were going to get bad when Ron showed up with a couple of porn stars.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
I'd never been a strip club guy. But hanging out with Mötley, I became a strip club guy. And they wanted to shoot “Girls, Girls, Girls” in a strip club. So I went to every strip club in LA and scouted locations. This is one reason I love my wife. I could tell her that I was going out to location scout at strip clubs, and she trusted me.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
During “Girls Girls Girls,” I had to go all these strip clubs with the band. Vince's girlfriend came up to me and warned me: “You stay away from my man.”
No problem
.

 

STEVE SCHNUR:
Mötley loved making videos. They loved showing off. I'm not saying they were the first, and they certainly weren't the last, but nobody knew how to play to the camera better than Mötley Crüe. I never had a problem getting their videos played on MTV.

 

TOMMY LEE:
All of us rode motorcycles except for Mick. He was only into guitars. So in the video, you can see us on our bikes, riding around, and Mick was sitting on a motorcycle strapped to a trailer, pretending to ride. It looks so cheesy and obvious. I laugh every time I see that video.

 

CURT MARVIS:
Mick didn't know how to ride a motorcycle, so we put his bike on a rig and towed it. We struggled for hours with the camera angles. When we finally got one that worked out, we had to figure out how to keep Mick's wig from blowing off.

 

WAYNE ISHAM:
Pole dancing was new, so we found a girl who knew how to pole dance. At a certain point though, we realized the strippers couldn't really dance, so we had to hire professional dancers who could actually move in time to the song. If you look at “Girls Girls Girls” now, it seems pretty innocent compared to the stripper videos of today.

 

TOMMY LEE:
I went home with one of the girls in the video, the dancer with the dark hair. We shot the video, then we had an afterparty, then one thing led to another, and she went home with me. I was like,
Dude, I can't believe I'm having sex with this girl, she's so fucking hot!

 

DOC McGHEE:
Tommy
never
went home without one or two of the dancers. That's every strip club we ever went into! I'm surprised Tommy or Nikki can remember making the video, but that's okay. They may have heard about it from somebody else.

 

ROBIN SLOANE:
Les Garland and I went through “Girls Girls Girls” frame by frame, to see if there was any exposed breast. I couldn't believe that was my job.

 

STEVE SCHNUR:
One time, Mötley Crüe played Providence, Rhode Island. I was in the limo with them, leaving the gig, going back to the Biltmore Hotel, and there were tons of girls outside, screaming “Take me up to the room” and taking their shirts off. And Nikki Sixx said to this sea of girls, “Who wants to come up and fuck me?”
Bedlam
.
Mayhem
. And he goes, “You got to go through Schnur.” I looked at him as if the messiah had arrived.

Nikki was the sane one in the band, believe it or not.

 

RICK KRIM:
Mötley was in town once and we went out to a dive bar called Alca-trazz, on Eighth Street and Avenue A. I met a couple of people from work there, plus Heather Locklear and Tommy Lee. I still got off on that; hanging out with them made me feel cool. Heather was a little wary about going to this place, and I said, “It's really mellow, no one will hassle you.” We walked in and the first guy she sees looks at her and goes, “Heather Locklear! I used to jerk off to you all the time when you were on
Dynasty
.”

 

BRET MICHAELS:
Wayne Isham was supposed to do “Talk Dirty to Me.” And this is no diss to Wayne, but he had bigger fish to fry. He was getting $300,000 budgets to do videos, and we had $8,400. So instead, he sent his DP and camera guy to do it. Luckily, they were so energetic and young that they helped to make it a mega fucking hit. We all got hammered, we handed out some beer to the audience, everyone had fun. We shot it in half a day. My motto has always been “If you can't do it right, do it anyway.”

 

MICK KLEBER:
I was Poison's video guy at Capitol Records for a long time. We had issues where Bret would have some drinks on set, which is a no-no for a diabetic, and he'd get violently ill.

 

BRET MICHAELS:
Watch “Talk Dirty to Me” and you'll see our drummer Rikki fall off the back of his drum stool. That wasn't a stunt. He liked to jump up when he played, and we didn't have enough money to get a big drum riser, so he had his drums on a small riser. When he stepped back, he fucking bit it. We had to shut down for a half hour while we made sure he didn't have a concussion.

Bobby Dall, our bass player, had a firm grip on how our record deal was structured, and we were very good at making sure we got a bang for our buck when it came to videos. Instead of spending a million dollars on a video, we'd shoot one for $150,000, work a little harder, and still be competitive with the big-budget videos out there.

 

CURT MARVIS:
If one hard rock group made a video with ten explosions, the next group had to have twenty explosions. If one had a lighting rig with five hundred lights, the next wanted a thousand.

 

MARTY CALLNER:
I was in great favor at the Geffen company, because I had made Whitesnake. Geffen had been in trouble and now they were rolling. I saw the Aerosmith video with Run-DMC. I called Geffen and said I'd love to do a video with Aerosmith. Starting with “Dude (Looks Like a Lady),” we went on to do something like ten videos together. They put themselves in my hands.

Steven Tyler is a great performer, and he has a rubber face. He can do comedy. Joe Perry is a sexy guitar player. And, you know, the LI Three are the LI Three. The Least Interesting Three. But those two together had a powerful dynamic.

 

JOHN KALODNER:
The first album I made with Aerosmith was
Done with Mirrors
. It stunk. David Geffen wanted to drop them. So for the next album,
Permanent Vacation
, we were gonna do it my way. Steven Tyler still hates me for it. He tells people I ruined his career by making him sing “I Don't Want to Miss a Thing,” which Diane Warren wrote.