I Want My MTV (63 page)

I think we grossed $250 million. Out of that, we got pretty much nothing.

 

STEVE LEEDS:
The track they were lip-syncing to skipped. They freaked out, threw their mics down—BOOM!—and ran offstage to their tour bus. Julie Brown said, “Holy shit, what are we going to do? We've got to fix this.” I went back to their bus with Julie and she convinced them to go back onstage. Two dates later, the same thing happened.

 

PAULA ABDUL:
I headlined the
Club MTV
tour with Milli Vanilli—they played right before me. “Girl You Know It's True” came on in the dressing room, and all of a sudden we heard, “Girl you know it's—girl you know it's—girl you know it's . . .” Everyone jerked to a halt, like, “Oh my god.
Oh
my god.” Of course, we knew they used backing tracks, but lots of acts, myself included, sang along to backing tracks during parts of their shows. And we'd heard whispers that maybe they didn't sing all the vocal parts on their album. But we didn't know they weren't singing
at all
.

The next thing you know, they're getting booed, and they run offstage and lock themselves in their trailer. Downtown Julie Brown had to bang on their door for them to come out and get back onstage. To their credit, they went back out. But word spread pretty fast after that. I felt bad for them. I mean, how do you recover from that?

 

KIM MARLOWE:
If you've seen the clip, Rob ran off the stage. Fab did not, until he finally went, “Fuck, he ain't coming back, I've gotta go get him.”

JULIE BROWN:
I was backstage in my trailer, in the bathroom to be honest with you, and someone knocked and said, “You've got to get onstage, the track is stuck.” It kept repeating “Girl you know it's—girl you know it's—girl you know it's . . .” Quite a few artists at the time were lip-syncing, and the boys were caught with their pants down. But who's to blame, really? Is it the record company? Is it the producers? Before that moment, they did a great job of selling it.

It was difficult to calm them down—especially Rob, God rest his soul. He worked so hard at pretending to be a superstar, and it hit him harder than it should have, and yeah, he lost his life. That's what hype can do to you.

I didn't know they were lip-syncing and I didn't care. There were all these songs that were done by pseudo people: “It's Raining Men” by the Weather Girls, and Black Box.

 

BILLY JOEL:
Milli Vanilli were
crucified
for not singing in concert. But most people knew them only through their videos, and
everybody
lip-syncs in their videos. I guess Milli Vanilli died for our sins.

 

ARSENIO HALL:
When it all blew up, I did a joke in my monologue: I sang, “Girl, you know it's true / Ooh, ooh, ooh, you are through.”

 

KIM MARLOWE:
The VH1
Behind the Music
episode made it seem like that show was their downfall, but that's a fabrication. They went on to win the Grammy after that. Their downfall was Frank Farian announcing, “They didn't sing,” then leaving Rob and Fab bleeding in the streets. He's partly responsible for Rob's death, in my opinion.

Rob and Fab couldn't take it anymore and were tired of living a lie, feeling like shit, and making no money while everybody else got rich, then constantly wondering who was gonna tell on them. So they decided, “Let's go ahead and destroy it so we can get out of this thing that makes us want to kill ourselves.” They wouldn't continue on with the second Milli Vanilli record.

 

FAB MORVAN:
Rob is dead as a result of excess, acquired via the rock-star life. I'd known Rob Pilatus for years. We lived together, traveled together, shared the same hotel room at first. I know Rob's habits. The minute Rob got to a hotel room, he would destroy the room—open his bags and throw his things everywhere, all right? Rob was found in a room that was clean. No mess. That makes no sense. I'm not saying he was murdered. I'm just saying it's shady.

To this day, I'm the poster boy for lip-syncing. But we didn't invent it. And what I did back then is no different from what people are doing today. With the audio tools we have, Auto-Tune and Melodyne, you can take anybody off the street and make him sound like a beautiful bird. We can enhance someone's performance, enhance someone's looks, we can enhance
everything
, and create something that
appears
to be, but is
not
.

For years, everyone tried to crucify me and make me suffer for “not being authentic,” and I'm like, “You're making me laugh now.” There's so many people that came before me, and that came after me, and that will come after and after and after. Authenticity? No, it's about entertainment.

 

 

 

 

ADAM CURRY:
MTV needed to get alcohol companies to advertise on the network. It was a big deal. We needed beer; we were doing Skittles. A lot of Skittles. That's how Spring Break was born. It's not like someone said, “Hey, let's go film Spring Break.” It was like, “How do we get Budweiser on the network? Let's go to where Budweiser is.” And Budweiser was at Spring Break. That was a turning point for MTV ad sales—once we had the beer market, because that's where all the money was.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
I produced the first Spring Break in Florida. We were live eight to nine hours a day, so we had a Best Body contest, this contest, that contest. We were usually staying at a crap-hole hotel, going to work every day, and we'd go out every night. Once we traveled outside New York, we really saw the power of MTV. People went nuts.

 

BETH McCARTHY:
Beginning in 1986, I went to Spring Break for nine years straight. It was horrific. Everything was disgusting. We'd work all day and night, and then walk back to a disgusting sleazebag hotel at 1 A.M. It was hilarious, but
ugh
. Our executives would flash their MTV IDs and whore around with college girls.

 

JOE DAVOLA:
During commercial breaks, we'd throw T-shirts to the crowd and tell girls to take their tops off. Bars around the country had satellite TV, so they didn't get the commercials, just the live feed. And we started getting complaints about nudity on the channel.

ALAN HUNTER:
I was in the middle of one thousand beer-drinking frat boys at Daytona, talking to the Hawaiian Tropic girls while the guys chanted, “Hunter's got a woody.” I repeated it out loud on the air, then realized what they were saying. I don't think I had a woody. I think they did, and they were projecting.

 

NINA BLACKWOOD:
Spring Break was a miserable experience. People running around half-naked and drunk, and I couldn't get a decent meal. Everything was served on paper plates. I came back and said, “I'm never doing one of those again.” It was sponsored by some beer company, so there I was hawking beer for MTV, after all the stuff they wouldn't let me do. I remember slamming copy on the table and saying, “I'm not reading this. Give it to Martha, she'll read anything.” Because she would. She was such a darling.

 

JOHN CANNELLI:
I booked Sam Kinison to come to Spring Break. He was in his hotel with his girlfriends, Malika and Sabrina, running around the room, jumping on the couches, barking like a dog.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
One Spring Break there was an epic poker game in Sam's hotel room. Marjoe Gortner was there. He's a famous preacher who was in some bad'70s films, like
Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw
, with a naked Lynda Carter. By the end of the night, half the talent department was in the room. Gilbert Gottfried and Sandler were there. There were lots of drugs, and Gilbert, who probably has never done a drug in his life, kept walking up to people and making them sniff him: “Am I clean? Am I clean?”

 

STEVE BACKER:
I walked into Sam Kinison's room by accident during Spring Break and smelled the foulest shit I ever smelled in my life. That was the first and last time I smelled freebase. Spring Break was just ridiculous.

 

MARCY BRAFMAN:
MTV's Spring Break coverage really bothered me. I mean, wet T-shirt contests? Even with all the rock n' roll mayhem at the network, we'd never had a sexist outlook. Of course, a lot of that had to do with the fact that there'd been a lot of women running the network. MTV didn't objectify women back then.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
Daytona was a miserable place. It seemed like it poured rain the entire time we were there. We stayed at the most miserable hotel, the Pagoda, which the MTV staff referred to as the Abe Vigoda. Just the most disgusting place, with shag carpeting in the rooms, and filled with kids who were puking and partying. At the same time, there was lot of fun to be had. We would take over the town. Joe Davola became an instant local celebrity. We started doing a series of spots about him, called “Joe Davola, Hardworking Producer.”

 

JULIE BROWN:
Spring Break, oh my gosh. I wore the highest platform shoes and it still didn't help me tread through the vomit in Daytona. That was the wildest of MTV. We had the sexy girls, the guys, and you mix that together with booze, and trust me, you've got a party.

 

ADAM HOROVITZ:
We did an amazing stunt for Spring Break in 1986. It was a contest where the Beastie Boys would kidnap the winner and bring him down to Daytona. We're like, “This sounds really stupid. What? We're gonna get free beer? This sounds really awesome!”

I'd just turned twenty. I didn't go to college, so I had no idea what frat life was like. I was like, “How do you people get the money to party like this?” It was just drink drink drink. It was totally nasty. But don't get me wrong: I loved it. There's nothing wrong with nasty. I'm a fan of nasty.

My favorite part was going to a party thrown by Ron Rice, who owned Hawaiian Tropic. We're like, “Party at a guy's house who owns a suntan lotion company? Let's go!” We walked into the house, and as we were checking out the scene, we saw a super-drunk guy in his midsixties, wearing a captain's hat, like a broken-down Charles Nelson Reilly. He turns to a security guard and shouts, “Security? Throw me out!” That's still a running joke. Any time I have a couple too many, I'll say to my friends, “Security? Throw me out!”

Each thing we saw at the party was weirder than the previous thing. Weirdest of all was when we opened one door and there was a huge room with rows and rows of bunk beds, like an army barracks. That was where the Hawaiian Tropic girls lived.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
The Red Hot Chili Peppers played on
Club MTV
at Spring Break. They had to lip-sync and they just weren't feeling it, so toward the end of the song, Chad Smith got up from his drum kit, and he and Flea dove into the crowd. Flea picked a girl up, smacked her on the ass, and maybe pulled part of her bathing suit down. The cameras cut away as soon as they stopped lip-syncing. The cops came and looked at all our tapes and the Chili Peppers were put in lockdown. That was a bad incident.

 

FLEA:
We were totally against lip-syncing, so when we were faced with a lip-sync situation, we never just stood there and pretended to play. I'd play bass with my shoe and then jump into the audience, something like that. So we're onstage in Daytona, and the song starts, “Knock Me Down.” And about halfway through, I leave the stage with the song still playing and leap into the crowd. The first thing I see is a girl in a bikini standing in front of me. She's jumping around, having a good time. Woo-hoo! So I grab her and pick her up over my shoulders. While I was spinning her around, Chad ran up behind her and spanked her on the butt. I didn't realize it. The girl and I both fell onto the sand, and she started yelling at me. I yelled back at her, “Well, fuck you, then.” About twenty minutes afterwards I hear this girl is really upset. I was like, “Can I apologize?” I still had no idea that Chad had spanked her.

The next day, the local newspaper runs a picture on the front page of this girl, cowering in fear with me standing over, with the headline FLEA ATTACKS GIRL. I've always been crazy on stage, but the last thing I would want to do is hurt someone's feelings. We go to the next town in Florida, and after our show, Chad and I walk offstage and bam!, a cop places us in handcuffs and takes us off to jail. And that's when I find out that Chad had spanked her. We were in jail overnight, but the case dragged on for months. We settled it, but the words
Flea
and
sexual assault
went out across the national press. What I did was wrong—I shouldn't have touched her. But to claim that it was any kind of sexual thing was completely wrong.

 

JULIE BROWN:
I swore on the air at Spring Break. I got punished for it, which people don't know; I was taken off
Club MTV
for a couple of days. I was wearing a green Lycra dress—very thin, of course—and we were live. One of the dancers, in his little swimsuit, started rubbing up behind me. I told him to fuck off, basically. I don't like people touching me.

 

CAMILLE GRAMMER:
Jean-Claude van Damme was at Spring Break and he was hitting on me. Julie pushed him away. One of his people jumped in and said, “Excuse me, but that's Jean-Claude van Damme.” Julie said, “I don't give a fuck who he is.”

 

JANET KLEINBAUM, record executive:
I went down for many Spring Breaks. Couldn't wait to get out of there. Hectic, crowded, freezing cold, filthy beaches. It always looked better on camera than it did in reality.