I Want My MTV (68 page)

 

PATTI GALLUZZI:
One time Michelle said there were derogatory terms about homosexuals in a video. I was like, “What are you talking about?” She said, “He's constantly calling this guy a
homey
.” Which I thought was pretty funny. Michelle was a little square. A rapper would call somebody a “Herb.” She'd go, “That's obviously a reference to marijuana.” And we'd go, “No, Michelle, if you're a ‘Herb,' you're a nerd.” MTV's system for standards was poorly equipped for understanding rap, and most rap videos had a much higher amount of logos, product mentions, drugs, alcohol, guns, overt sexuality, and objectification of the female form than your average Bon Jovi video did.

 

ED LOVER:
They took the power of programming away from us. We were told what videos to play and on what date. They knew the power the show had. We always argued with Patti Galluzzi about clearing videos. She'd say, “You can't play that, it's on hold.” It meant a video wasn't cleared to be played yet. It took a while to get “Fight the Power” off hold. We never played “Straight Outta Compton” on
Yo!
I love Patti, but we used to
argue.
Because
Yo!
had to be at the forefront of what was happening in hip-hop. That was frustrating as fuck, yo. And it absolutely hurt the show.

 

PATTI GALLUZZI:
We argued pretty much every week. Never in my years at MTV did I fight with anybody as much as I fought with those guys. Their goal was, “Let's play ten brand-new videos.” And my goal was to play three or four new videos, and also some videos that were recognizable. The Box would get rap videos at the same time we did and put them on the air the next day, while we were still arguing. The one time I really pissed off Judy McGrath, I wrote a scathing memo saying, “We need to stop holding up videos just because we don't understand some of the words.” Judy was like, “I'm the one who put this show on the air, so why am I suddenly the racist here?”

 

ED LOVER:
People talk about what Russell Simmons did with hip-hop and the level he took it to. Nobody says this: Ted Demme is the one dude who is absolutely responsible for hip-hop being a multimillion-dollar genre of music, because
Yo! MTV Raps
took it international. I've been to Holland, to Japan, and in all these places they said they learned to speak English by watching
Yo! MTV Raps
. Hip-hop has blown up all over this globe because of Ted Demme, and that's the God's honest truth.

 

SALT, Salt-n-Pepa:
Ted had a crush on me. I was going out with Herbie, our producer, at the time. Ted must have liked black girls, I know that. He used to look me up and down. I was a little hood back then, so maybe he liked that.

 

DENIS LEARY:
Teddy is the only guy who could get gangster rappers on television and make them laugh. The first time I met him, I was shooting something connected to
Yo!
and he was the cue-card holder. I said, “What the hell are those?” And he said, “Those are your lines,
sir!
” I said, “I don't need those.” And he went, “These are gone,
sir!
” and he threw them in the air. I went, “Who the fuck is this guy?” He made me laugh about ninety times, so he stuck in my head.

 

PETER DOUGHERTY:
You know that Beastie Boys line from
Paul's Boutique
, “Sneaky pouch time bomb”? “Sneaky pouch” was coke. They got that phrase from Teddy. He just had a taste to party too much. I was at Ted's wake and his funeral, and it was all about partying and partying. In front of Ted's family and his kids, Denis Leary had people doing shots at the funeral. I was just appalled. Partying is what killed Ted.

 

ED LOVER:
Ted was jovial, smart, fun, caring, considerate, and loyal. When he died of a heart attack, in 2002, it ripped out a big part of me. At his funeral, Michael J. Fox was sitting next to me, Bernie Mac, Eddie Murphy, Natalie Portman, Denis Leary, Johnny Depp—all of these people Ted had worked with when he went on to be a movie director.

 

ALEX COLETTI:
Ted was the biggest personality. He lit up a room. Ted was just a thousand-watt bulb every day.

 

EVERLAST:
Our manager, Amanda Scheer, wound up becoming his wife five or six years later. Ted was one of our first champions at MTV—that's how they met. He was a funny cat, a life-of-the-party kind of guy, laughing and talking a lot of shit. He was a big, jolly dude.

AMY FINNERTY, MTV executive:
I loved Ted. I was a bridesmaid at his wedding in 1994. Ted got into a scuffle outside the party, and somehow I got in the middle of it and got punched in the face. Who knows who he was fighting with? Everybody was drunk.

 

TONY DiSANTO, MTV producer:
I worked with Ted on a live afternoon show,
Han-gin' with MTV
. For me, being a good producer was about preparation, so nothing can go wrong. Ted wanted surprises. It was the antithesis of everything I'd learned. He was in the control room and I was out on the floor, and he was always in my earpiece saying, “Shake up the audience! Get them fired up!”

 

JAC BENSON:
Because I made no money, Ted would give me cash out of his own pocket on Friday, to make sure I had some for the weekend. Everyone loved Ted Demme. I don't know anyone that would tell you a different story.

 

FAB 5 FREDDY:
It was a fresh, buoyant, diverse time for this music. That period is now referred to as the golden era of rap. It wasn't about me. I know I was cool and all that, but I was just a vehicle to lead you into this shit.

 

BILL ADLER:
Rap integrated MTV, to the benefit of rap and MTV. If MTV had continued to play Genesis for ten years, they might not have seen their tenth anniversary.

 

 

 

THERE WAS PLENTY OF IMITATION IN THE 1980s; WHAT
was Whitesnake but a hugely successful Led Zeppelin tribute act? But many of the decade's biggest stars were unique, sounded like no one else when they appeared, and were not predicted to be Next Big Things: Madonna, Prince, Beastie Boys, U2, Metallica, Dire Straits, Tracy Chapman—even Kenny G, who was unique in a bad way.

No one was a bigger underdog than Guns N' Roses, five scuzzballs from LA whose caustic notion of hard rock had little to do with Poison or Bon Jovi. As with rap, MTV was afraid of the band. The network relented only under pressure from David Geffen, one of the titans of the record business, and ironically, Guns eventually became so prominent on MTV—in his memoir, guitarist Slash called MTV “a channel that helped us out, but that we didn't care for”—that the network hired a new VJ mostly because he came recommended by the band.

 

JOHN CANNELLI:
I was taking a ride through Central Park on my ten-speed, and I put the Guns N' Roses cassette on my Walkman. When I heard “Welcome to the Jungle,” I almost fell off my bike.

 

SAM KAISER:
I had two right arms in the department. One was Rick Krim and the other was John Cannelli. John maybe had the best eyes and ears in the place. He was soft-spoken and dry, but he had a knack for picking stuff. When John spoke up, you listened. He brought us a video by Guns N' Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle,” and I fell out of my chair.

TABITHA SOREN:
The news department was a less important area in the scheme of the channel. MTV was just discovering Guns N' Roses, and they traded exclusive access to some A-list video for an interview with the band at CBGB. Nobody wanted to do it, so they sent me, with a crew. I was nineteen, and Axl said, “Are you even old enough to be in here?” It was so exciting. Then I went home to my dorm room and went to sleep.

 

NIGEL DICK:
I was strictly known as a pop guy. But I was a huge fan of Led Zeppelin, Rory Gallagher, Bad Company, and Free, so getting to direct a Great White video was a breakthrough for me. And I was on my second Great White video when Alan Niven, their manager, said, “I've got this new band called Guns N' Roses. They're hugely difficult, they don't want to work with anybody, nobody wants to work with them. Would you do their video?” I turned him down. A week later, Alan said, “Look, I can't find anybody to do it. You
have
to do me a favor.” So I thought,
What the heck, I'll make some extra money
. I shot the second Great White video on, say, a Thursday and Friday, and shot “Welcome to the Jungle” on Saturday and Sunday. I honestly preferred Great White's music.

 

STEVEN ADLER, Guns N' Roses:
At the time,
nobody
wanted to have anything to do with us. They were afraid one of us was gonna die, or kill somebody. Even recording
Appetite for Destruction
, we had ten different producers who said, “No way, I already heard about those guys.” And then, of course, they all regretted it.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
The budget that Geffen afforded for “Jungle” was insufficient for us to realize the storyboard we wanted, so we piggybacked it onto a Great White shoot, so we could have a four-day rental in equipment and staff.

 

NIGEL DICK:
The video for “Welcome to the Jungle” was Alan Niven's idea. He told me, “Axl will step off a bus, then he'll be sitting in a chair watching TV, and there will be all this horrible footage on the TV.” The hardest part of a Guns N' Roses video was waiting for Axl to show up. He was always late. He had to be in the right vibe, and you couldn't get too pushy. You were always worried he'd have a tantrum and leave. After we did the close-up of him on a stage, he hid in the dressing room for two hours. He couldn't handle the shiny boards and the lights and the bounce cards. Suddenly, instead of a bunch of hot girls at his feet when he's singing, there were a bunch of aged film people with light meters. It freaked him out.

 

DOUG GOLDSTEIN, manager:
Nigel was quiet and soft-spoken. If Axl was running two and a half hours late, Nigel was like, “Well, he'll get here when he gets here.”

 

ALAN NIVEN:
Everything of worth in a video is stolen from somewhere, so I stole from some cool movies. Axl's character is a corollary to Jon Voight in
Midnight Cowboy
, who comes to a city that's a cauldron of false dreams. That plays beautifully into the scene from
The Man Who Fell to Earth
where David Bowie is in a motel out in the desert with a pile of TVs, trying to absorb information about the planet he's landed on. Then there's the scene from
A Clockwork Orange
, when they're made to watch all these insane images on TV.

 

STEVEN ADLER:
Believe it or not, we couldn't find any girls to be in the video. It was one night out of forever when no girls were around. So I called my roommate—her name was Julie, I couldn't tell you her last name—and she's the girl laying in bed with me while Axl watches the TVs. There was an X-rated part where I was making out with the girl, rubbing and licking her neck, her boobs were out and everything. When we went to Japan, I saw the video and they didn't cut out that scene. It was so great!

 

TOM HUNTER:
When they submitted “Welcome to the Jungle,” we accepted it for
Headbangers Ball
, which was typically what we'd do with a video that extreme. Axl was twitching in an electric chair!

 

DOUG GOLDSTEIN:
MTV wasn't interested. Their response was “We'll play it two times overnight and see how it goes.”

 

ALAN NIVEN:
MTV didn't give a damn. Didn't care.

 

NIGEL DICK:
Initially, they wanted to play it only once or twice after midnight. Then we had to re-edit it, because there was a brief moment when a red soda machine appeared, and MTV said it could have been perceived as a Coca-Cola sign.

 

JOHN CANNELLI:
There was controversy over how much to play “Welcome to the Jungle.” Our GM, Lee Masters, thought we were playing too much hard rock. Lee and Tom Hunter, the guys with radio backgrounds, were afraid of the video. Tom got some pressure from Geffen, so we put it on the overnights, and all of a sudden we started getting requests. Then we played it in the afternoon, and from there it went through the roof. And I became GNR's guy at the network. We did one of Axl's first MTV interviews at my apartment in Chelsea.

 

EDDIE ROSENBLATT:
We had sold a couple hundred thousand albums and they still wouldn't play the video. I sent my weekly sales report on the album to Lee Masters, and I got on the phone and made him read it with me.

 

DOUG GOLDSTEIN:
The interesting thing nobody knows is that we'd been touring for a year and three months and had sold 150,000 units. Eddie Rosenblatt took Alan Niven to lunch and said, “Great first album, it's time to record another one.” But Alan begged for the money to make the “Sweet Child O' Mine” video.

 

ALAN NIVEN:
I looked at Eddie with total disbelief and said, “What do you think might happen if we got MTV's support?”

 

DOUG GOLDSTEIN:
Axl was frustrated that “Jungle” wasn't getting played. He and Cannelli were great friends, so he couldn't understand why they wouldn't play it. He knew that, in order to be one of the biggest bands in the world, they'd have to be played on MTV. Axl loved Cannelli. He didn't care John was gay, that didn't bother him at all.