I Want My MTV (59 page)

When they fired me, it was usually about the hair. “Cut your hair.”
No.
“Well, then we don't want you anymore.”
Okay, fuck you
. I had big, poofy hair. With short hair, I look like a penis. And the hair made me famous.

 

KEN CLARK:
The person behind Adam's hairstyle was his wife Patricia. She was a famous Dutch singer and television star. Patricia would wake up early and set his hair in hot rollers. She did his makeup, his wardrobe, his hair. And Adam's hair just kept getting bigger and bigger.

 

ALISON STEWART:
On the back of Steve Leeds's door, there was a nude poster of Adam Curry's wife. Adam knew it was there—he may have given it to Steve.

 

STEVE LEEDS:
Adam's wife, Patricia Paay, was a big celebrity in Holland. She was a singer, and she posed for
Playboy
. The poster was a blowup of her centerfold. Adam and his wife insisted I hang it there. He was proud of her and often brought celebrities to my office to show it off. The whole scenario made me very uncomfortable, and many times I asked Adam if I could remove it. I hung it on the back of my door, so most folks would never see it.

 

ADAM CURRY:
The VJs worked all year, doing the interviews, and on the big night, the VMAs, we wouldn't even get tickets to sit in the crowd. Kurt Loder was doing the backstage interviews. Like, “Fuck you, you motherfucker.” It was very annoying.

 

TOM HUNTER:
Judy McGrath said, “Let's face it, viewers don't care about the VJs.” So we stopped showing the VJs before commercial breaks. Judy, who'd been promoted to creative director, also took the VJs out of the studio and put them in all crazy locations. The VJs hated these new initiatives, of course. Julie Brown stormed out of a VJ meeting. I said, “We'll have a better meeting without her.” Some people didn't want change.

 

CAROLYNE HELDMAN:
Julie Brown thought of me as this odd bird who didn't care about fashion, or any of the things she cared about. She realized we had nothing in common, so she didn't pay me much mind.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Carolyne was a hippie. She didn't shave her pits, she didn't shave her legs, she had bad eyesight, and wore nerdy glasses. She liked frumpy, flowered dresses, and MTV wasn't having it. There was an ongoing battle to get her to shave her legs, to wear contacts, to look sexier.

CAROLYNE HELDMAN:
I did an interview with Robert Plant once. I'm a huge Led Zeppelin fan; I still consider them to be the greatest rock band of all time. We were seated right next to each other on little bar stools, and the lighting was very stark. It was very intimate—our legs kept touching—and he flirted shamelessly with me. I held it together—I did a good interview with him—but I was smitten, just smitten with the man. After the interview, Robert said, “My manager and I are going to a comedy show tonight, would you like to join us?” And I said, “Oh sure, I'll go,” as calmly as I could. So I got myself together and went to the comedy club, and there he was, as advertised, sitting at a table. I took a deep breath, walked over to his table, and said, “Hello Robert, how are you?” And he's like, “I'm sorry, dear, who are you?” That was a huge blow to my ego. But it was also a valuable lesson: These guys are pros. They know exactly what they're doing. They know just how to charm the hell out of a naive young journalist.

 

BETH McCARTHY:
MTV loved that Carolyne was earthy and different, then all of a sudden, some executive saw her and said, “Why is she on the air?” She appeared on the air in shorts once, and they saw that she didn't shave her legs. They freaked out.

 

CAROLYNE HELDMAN:
I wore shorts on the air once, and I got into big trouble. They sent me a memo afterwards: “You will never wear shorts again, you violated the terms of your contract.”

 

STEVE LEEDS:
They were like, “Steve, you've got to get rid of her.” I have a master's degree from the Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse, and I had to have a conversation with Carolyne Heldman about shaving her legs.

 

ADAM CURRY:
Carolyne got fired because her legs were too fat. That was kind of fucked up. She was hired as the girl-next-door type, and she insisted on wearing shorts. Steve Leeds said, “Please wear long pants.” She refused. And they fired her for her thunder thighs.

 

STEVE LEEDS:
I was always on the lookout for new VJs. A production guy handed me a tape of Daisy Fuentes, a smoking-hot weather girl from the Spanish station in Newark. She became the host of a countdown show on Telemundo, called
MTV Internacional
, and I put her on MTV sporadically in the middle of the night. One afternoon, Judy McGrath walked into my office and said, “Who is this bimbo you have on in the middle of the night? Get her off. She's not connecting with the music.” I said, “We're working on that.” And eventually Daisy became a regular VJ on MTV. She filled the hot-babe slot.

Any time a VJ was giving me attitude, I would pull in this NYU college kid to fill in. I'd say, “Adam, you want to make $300? Can you be here this afternoon at four?” That was Adam Sandler. He was doing comedy around town, and he was a fill-in VJ. We also hired Dweezil Zappa, who was a smart-ass. One time, he came out of a hair band video where the hero gets hung, and said, “Kids, don't try that at home. Unless you're a Young Republican. Then it's okay.” I told him, “You can't do that.” Dweezil said, “Stop telling me what I can't do. Tom Freston said I can do whatever I want. And I'm not redoing it.” So it went on the air. Judy McGrath said, “Steve, what the fuck? I'm getting angry phone calls.” I said, “I asked him to redo it, and he refused.” Well, that was the end of Dweezil.

We did a big search at colleges for VJs, all over the country. Kevin Seal's roommates at the University of Washington decided to audition, and Kevin went along as a goof. His audition was amazing. He had no intention of actually becoming a VJ.

 

KEVIN SEAL, MTV VJ:
The University of Washington women's crew team was racing the Russian national crew team, and I was looking forward to attending that, but it was raining terribly that morning, so instead I went with my friends to the MTV tryout. I don't know what skills I brought to the job, besides frantic gesticulation, near-inchoate ravings, and a palpable distaste for Duran Duran. People assumed I was high all the time, probably because I was all squinty and raving. I think I may have represented the segment of viewers who were high, which was not inconsiderable.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Kevin was an engineering major, a total nerd. There was nothing rock n' roll about him. The story goes, he was tripping on mushrooms when he tried out.

 

KEVIN SEAL:
People assumed that somebody behaving the way I did must be on drugs. But it's just a neurological disorder of some kind. Though I was a fan of 'shrooms, so it was not implausible. Not long after I got the job, I did half a hit of acid while we were taping in Philadelphia for Fourth of July weekend. That was the one time I was tripping on the air. I remember feeling it come on at Betsy Ross's house. I thought I could discover something, but it was just like, “This is Betsy Ross's house.
Rross. Rrrosss.
”

 

ALISON STEWART:
Kevin Seal was sort of the accidental VJ. Once in a while, he'd spend the night in his dressing room. He seemed uncomfortable with the attention, like he thought it was a joke and he was in on the joke. Kind of like how Jimmy Kimmel is in on the joke of hosting a late night talk show.

 

KENNEDY:
My favorite VJ was Kevin Seal. I loved his irreverence and wit, and his willingness to look silly. I've never heard a bad word uttered about the guy.

 

KEVIN SEAL:
I was uncomfortable when people would see me on the street and hoot, “MTV, dude!” Since I was not, myself, MTV, I'd shrink from it. I was a fan of David Letterman. Also, as in the Eastern Bloc countries, there was a sense that there are certain things you're not allowed to say, so you would allude to them obliquely. In that tiny way, Vaclav Havel and I were both struggling within the system.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
Like Kurt Loder, Kevin was brainy, but in a biting, sarcastic way. A little disdainful, like a David Letterman for the younger generation. In the late '80s, irony was suddenly the cool worldview. You had
Spy
magazine, you had Paul Rudnick, you had smart people writing snarky things. Now everybody's snarky; even socialites are snarky. It's tiresome, but at the time, it was fresh.

 

KEVIN SEAL:
I'd take record albums and wing 'em down the hallways, see if I could get them to lodge in the ceiling tiles. Steve Leeds would patiently pull me aside to say, “How would you feel if you were Don Dokken, you came through this hallway, and you saw a broken album cover stuck in the ceiling, like trash?” I got the sense that money in the music business was corrupting, and the music was cynically devised. I'm thinking of Winger, immediately. I wrote long letters to fans who would chat to me about smirking at one video or another, and I'd write, “Forget about recorded music. These bands are just a product that's promoted to get your money. What you need to do is buy an accordion. Go stand on the street corner with your friends and do some clogging.” I don't think I was smirking, actually. I looked at some old tapes recently, and I appeared as though I was having a seizure, like I was about to leave language behind. I was fidgety. Almost everything else except the pay, I could have done without.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
Kevin Seal was so much fun. One day he came to work with a box of caffeine pills and decided we should do an experiment. So we ate handfuls of pills and drank black coffee. I called him at 3 A.M.: “I'm still awake!” He's like, “Isn't it great?!”

 

KEVIN SEAL:
Interviewing John Lydon was a high point. I loved the Sex Pistols, and he blew his nose on the stage floor. It's not often your heroes live up to your picture of them. And another time Exene, the singer in X, called me “a little shit.” She had appeared in a movie I intended to see, but it was gone from the theater before I had time. I mentioned that, probably in an insulting way, though I meant to commiserate with her, and she said, “Well, he is a real little shit isn't he?” I loved X, so I was flummoxed. Steve Leeds pulled me aside, showed me the clip, and suggested that was the kind of thing we didn't want to have happen, whereas I thought,
No, that's the kind of thing I would like if I was watching.
It was good TV. But he had a different agenda.

 

ADAM CURRY:
Kevin Seal would get on a tangent, and even though he knew it would never air, he'd go on for three minutes, and we'd be peeing our pants. He was a Bill Murray–like genius, but he didn't like what he was doing. He didn't understand show business.

 

KEVIN SEAL:
For a while, Carolyne Heldman and I did the news at the
MTV News
desk. I did one show with no pants on. I'd seen TV anchors sitting at a desk, and assumed,
You'd do that with no pants, if you could
. And so I did. At the end, at that moment when in regular news shows they roll the credits and the two anchors pretend to talk to each other, Carolyne leaned over and said, “I can see your penis through your fly.”

 

KEN R. CLARK:
Kevin came to New York with nothing but a duffel bag, and he probably left the same away. I don't think he ever owned an alarm clock. I had to dispatch an intern to his apartment to wake him every morning, or he wouldn't show up. He never did research, he never prepped. But the reason he was so funny was that he just didn't care. He didn't want a career in television or music.

KEVIN SEAL:
For a lot of people there, it was a career. You do it because it's your job, and maybe you'll get a raise or a bonus. But the people who thought MTV was the coolest thing in the world, I didn't drink that Kool-Aid. And then I didn't have a career either.

 

ALAN HUNTER:
All the original VJs got pigeonholed. What were we going to do after MTV? A lot of times, we competed for the same jobs. One time, I showed up for a game-show pilot, and the script said MARK GOODMAN. “Oh, sorry, we gave you the wrong script.”

Two years after I left MTV, I was cohosting a show called
Malibu Beach Party
with a sixteen-year-old Alyssa Milano, and we were doing most of the show in a hot tub. I thought,
This is either the great thing ever, or I've sunk really far
.

 

 

 

HERE'S THE UPSIDE OF BUILDING A BUSINESS
around a product you get for free: The profit margins are huge. And here's the downside: You don't control your own inventory. Years earlier, music stars had released two or even three albums a year, but now, because of videos, and the expansion of the record and concert industry, and the greater ease of international touring, the biggest acts routinely went three or four years between albums. In a year like 1984, full of great music, MTV's ratings were way up. But in other years, the network's core artists were inactive, and ratings went down.

Even in the first two years, MTV's schedule had other programs besides videos—Saturday-night concerts with the Police and Journey, the Sunday night shows
Liner Notes
,
Fast Forward
, and
MTV Extra!,
as well as movies like
Phantom of the Paradise
and
Reefer Madness
. After that came
The Cutting Edge
and
120 Minutes
,
Headbangers Ball
, and episodes of
The Monkees
or the British comedy
The Young Ones
.