I Want My MTV (56 page)

 

KEVIN KERSLAKE, director:
It was a point of honor among bands on
120 Minutes
to
not
show up in regular rotation on MTV. They wanted to be the bad kids on the block, who showed up for those two hours on Sunday night and ran riot. At that point, indie rock was thriving. You had great underground labels like SST and Rough Trade, and they'd give you complete freedom. I wanted to do something totally new. I'd shoot on Super 8, and play with the color palette to make it more psychedelic. The punk rock ethos really drove the visual content, even if you weren't working with punk bands. My first music video—“Shadow of a Doubt,” for Sonic Youth—used horrible quality, super-grainy performance footage. It was fantastic.

 

PETER HOOK, New Order:
We weren't at all interested in self-promotion, so traditional music videos didn't make sense to us. Often, we didn't even appear in our own videos. To my knowledge, we were the first band to do that. We thought of video as its own art form. We didn't use them to push our faces down people's throats. We met Michael Shamberg when he filmed us playing in New York, and we gave him more or less complete artistic freedom to do the videos. Michael's a big producer now—he did
Pulp Fiction
and
Garden State
—and he introduced us to interesting directors: Robert Longo, Kathryn Bigelow, Philippe Decouflé, Robert Frank, William Wegman, and Jonathan Demme. Jonathan directed “Perfect Kiss,” which was a live performance video. I think he captured the awkwardness and the edginess of the group. It was quite an artistic statement.

 

MATT MAHURIN:
I had no film experience; I didn't even have MTV. I'd never held a film camera before. I knew nothing about the process. Sharon Oreck taught me how to be a filmmaker. Her office was in an old refurbished motel, and we had production meetings in one of the bedrooms. “Okay, Matt, this is what we call a production meeting. And now we're going to put you in a car, and this is what we call a location scout.”

I was already a painter and a photographer, and I had a distinct look to my work. Jeff Ayeroff, the head of creative at Warner Bros., and a brilliant guy, said, “Do you want to direct a video?” There were a lot of people starting to do slick things, like David Fincher—cinematic, controlled, very art-directed, pristine. I wanted something edgier, darker, moodier. I could add emotional weight to something. I used lighting, film grain, shadows, to make things ethereal and dreamy. I wanted everything I did to have some truth to it. I had no desire to fake anything or deceive anybody, or turn artists into computer-generated sex symbols. I didn't like blowing stuff up; I didn't like to build sets.

 

VALERIE FARIS:
Matt Mahurin brought a new angle to music videos. Before that, they were fairly conventional in terms of photography and lighting. He took it into a more sophisticated visual world, and brought a new visual language.

 

JONATHAN DAYTON:
Matt would take a single Arcan light and shine it on an artist, and it would become ghoulish or blown out. He let things burn and get very orange and hot. It wasn't a perfect image—he let them degrade.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
I was hired to do U2's “With or Without You.” I'd seen Matt's work, and he was very Man Ray–influenced, and I'd stolen a lot from Man Ray, so Matt seemed like a good fit to assist. He was working with Sam Bayer, who also ended up being a great music-video director. So they shot Super 8 footage, which I edited and transferred to 35mm and projected onto the semitransparent scrims. That was one of those shoots where everything was right. But the weak link was the transfer from film to video, because in those days the telecines weren't great, and it was being transferred onto standard-def videotape. I wish one day they'd remaster all the great videos to HD, because the image on the 35mm film in “With or Without You” is spectacular. We were shooting through three or four layers of gauze with different projections on them, it was beautiful. But now, especially when you see it on YouTube, you can't even tell.

 

SAMUEL BAYER:
Matt Mahurin was my teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I was a painter and I needed money, so when I got out of school in 1987, he let me work on some music-video sets as a PA. God bless Matt, I was a really bad PA.

 

MATT MAHURIN:
Bono asked if I wanted to work on U2's “With or Without You.” Meiert Avis had a big production going with 35mm and dollies and a Luma crane and track laid out. He shot the band performing, and then I shot a bunch of b-roll or second unit stuff that was atmospheric. He'd shoot a band member, send him to me, and I'd have ten minutes. I didn't have any crew helping me, so I took a light and strapped it to the end of a broomstick and dug it into my hip, and I was pivoting this light around.

There's one background image of a white, ghostly figure jumping naked into a wave—that's me at my house in Long Island.

Bono really is like the savior of the world, but he's also like the devil. He's the king
and
the court jester. He's got that duality to him. You'd be drinking with the band at their local pub and he was a wild man. He could be comfortable with the Dalai Lama or George W. Bush; he could adapt. He could put on any mask; it was a very real mask, but he could turn on a dime to get what he wanted.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
Nothing with U2 happens by accident. They study. If you want to be the biggest rock band in the world, you'd better do your homework. Take advantage of what worked for other people. The rooftop video we did for “Where the Streets Have No Name” was the Beatles' idea first. They did it for their last concert.

You can't tell from the video, but we got proper permits to shoot on the rooftop of that liquor store. The police got the worst of it in the video. Contrary to what you see, they tried their best to help us. They just got frightened as more and more people streamed into downtown. Which is exactly what we wanted. Every beat of that video is exactly what was planned. The band played five or six songs, then we did three or four live takes of “Streets,” and then two or three playback takes. What you see is a mixture of playback and live and then shots from other songs altogether. There was a lot of editorial work, but it was the easiest job I ever did in terms of shooting. There were seven cameras, the band looked great, the location was great, and you just let it go. It was easy.

There was one moment during “Streets” where the police pulled a fuse out of the generator. We were in the middle of a take, and the cops pulled out the fuse to shut us down. Bono's up there singing, he's flapping his lips, but no sound's coming out. We'd planned this for months, though, and we had a backup generator on the roof. So we flipped the switch, and that was that.

 

PAUL McGUINNESS:
Jon Landau refers to Meiert Avis as “U2's gift to Bruce Springsteen.” Bruce obviously liked the films Meiert had made with U2, and he hired Meiert to make quite a number of videos.

 

JON LANDAU:
Meiert had directed some U2 videos Bruce Springsteen and I liked. We were looking for something fresh for “Brilliant Disguise,” and we met with him and we really liked him. Meiert had a great intuition about how to work with Bruce. And once Bruce finds somebody he can communicate with and feels comfortable with, he likes to stick with that person. He doesn't like to jump around. We loved the “Brilliant Disguise” video. Meiert used a great cinematographer, Carlo Di Palma. And it was Meiert's idea for the video to be one long take. We got a lot of respect for that video, especially considering that Bruce is not fundamentally a video artist. And so we continued on with Meiert. We did “Tunnel of Love,” “One Step Up,” and “Tougher Than the Rest” with him.

 

MEIERT AVIS:
Jon Landau asked if I'd meet Springsteen. That was an insane phone call to get. He was coming off the
Born in the U.S.A.
album and tour, which had turned him into the biggest artist in the world. And he had a new album,
Tunnel of Love
, that was the opposite of that. The first single was “Brilliant Disguise.” Bruce told me, “Whatever you do, I don't want a huge music video. I want something personal.”

He said, “If you can look someone in the eye and lie to them, that's the brilliant disguise.” So I felt the right way to do the video was to do as little as possible. Initially I wanted to have just a still close-up of his face. But after really listening to the song, I pictured the narrator downstairs while his woman is upstairs in bed, and it's, like, three in the morning and he gets up and has a revelation. I wanted him to be in a kitchen, so you felt that there was another life upstairs. The video became one long push-in that revealed the setting, and ended with an extreme close-up. It's a single take. There were no cuts, no lying, no subterfuge. Even though the song is all about subterfuge. We did the vocals live, which was a thing I'd come up with for the Waterboys, because their singer, Mike Scott, wouldn't lip-sync.

Getting the kitchen for “Brilliant Disguise” was a fucking nightmare. I'd scouted a bunch of stuff in New Jersey and eventually found a kitchen big enough to shoot in. It belonged to a banker who was away on business, and his wife gave us permission to shoot. Four o'clock in the afternoon, the day before the shoot, I get a call from the wife: “My husband has come back and he doesn't want a film crew in the house.” The trucks had already left New York with all the equipment. I was in a phone booth in pouring rain off the New Jersey Turnpike, begging the husband—literally on my knees—saying, “Today is my birthday and this is the most important job in the world. If I don't have somewhere to shoot tomorrow, my career's over, this is my dream come true . . .” And he hung up on me.

So we decided to call the National Guard. I figured, this is New Jersey, and it's for “The Boss,” let's call the army. The National Guard happened to have an officer's house on an empty base in northern New Jersey that was built in the 1950s, and it had a perfect '50s kitchen. They let us use it, because it was for Bruce Springsteen.

Making that one-take video was absurdly expensive. You'd kill yourself if you knew the number. I feel embarrassed. It looks simple, but I had Woody Allen's cameraman, Carlo Di Palma. It's actually a complicated shot—it starts high and drops down and pushes in and remains in focus right up to the close-up. The live audio didn't make it easier, because there was a recording session going on as well. That video won an editing award, even though it's all one take. Can you imagine?

 

MATT MAHURIN:
I sent my portfolio to Elektra Records, and they said, “Your work is a little too dark. But we have this new artist, Tracy Chapman . . .” I said, “Just let me shoot her. If you don't like what I do, you can pay me $5 for the film.” She came to my apartment, and she was so shy. When I shot “Fast Car,” I wanted it as simple as possible. I put the camera on eight feet of dolly and went back and forth for several takes. I projected some photographs on the wall behind her, to add different textures. I had a minimal crew, and kept everybody out of her eye line.

Then a buddy and I went on a road trip for a couple of days with a 16mm camera and no storyboard or ideas. I did many videos like that, where I'd shoot the working man—cobblers, ironworkers, bicycle messengers. I loved the truth that was imbedded in their lives. I loved the juxtaposition of the music with these raw bits.

When they sent “Fast Car” to MTV, it was almost like, “We dare you to not play this video. This is not Michael Jackson, this is not Lionel Richie.” She was undeniable.

 

LENNY KRAVITZ:
The original “Let Love Rule” was done by Matt Mahurin, who made a lot of great videos. It's dark and beautiful, with the same feeling as “Fast Car.” But I was a hippie, and I felt “Let Love Rule” needed to be more colorful and open and outdoors, so I didn't use Matt's version. He wasn't happy with me about that. My then-wife, Lisa Bonet, directed the version of “Let Love Rule” everyone knows. She shot it in Woodstock and Central Park. No one wanted me to use Lisa. Everyone thought we were becoming John and Yoko. Or that she was Jeanine, the girlfriend in
Spinal Tap
, who said, “You don't do heavy metal in Dolby.” But I believed in her. And it became a classic.

 

SINEAD O'CONNOR:
I shaved my head after I signed a record contract. Two guys from the record company wanted me to wear miniskirts. They described their mistresses to me, and said I should look like that. I didn't want to be pushed as some kind of pretty girl, so my way of answering was to shave my head. I didn't want to be governed by a load of middle-aged blokes.

It was a time when you hadn't really come across angry women. I wasn't standing there with blond hair, saying, “Oh baby, do me.” The way I looked caused a lot of opinions. Madonna did an interview at the time, saying, “Sinead O'Connor has about as much sex appeal as Venetian blinds.” I was an unusual character in all kinds of ways, and I suppose from the boring desks of MTV, I must have looked interesting. I didn't conform visually, and that's part of the reason MTV were attracted to me.

I often look quite serious, when in fact I'm not that serious of a person. But there was a fucking camera in my face, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. On videos, my job was just to fucking turn up and let everyone do whatever they wanted to me. The phallic-looking flowers in “I Want Your (Hands on Me),” that's the director, John Maybury. John was obviously obsessed with penises.

 

MICHAEL STIPE:
Our contribution to MTV—and I'll use a term that was not really around in the 1980s—was very queer. And purposefully so. If you saw a beautiful woman wearing not much in “The One I Love” video, then you were also going to see a man wearing not much. There are a lot of shirtless men in R.E.M. videos. I shot and edited “Finest Worksong” and basically called all my hot, male friends and said, “Okay, everyone take your shirt off and get sweaty.” I shot from a particular angle that was taken from Russian Constructivist art, where everyone looks like a god or goddess.