Opinion

Behind the music television

I Want My MTV

The Uncensored Story of

the Music Video Revolution

by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum

Dutton

Director Pete Angelus was looking for his midgets.

The set of Van Halen’s “Pretty Woman” video was a bacchanal filled with Jack Daniel’s, cocaine, midgets, transvestites, hunchbacks and hot video vixens in bikinis.

But at one point, the midgets went missing.

After 20 minutes of searching, Angelus found them when he opened the door to a transvestite’s dressing room.

One little guy was “wearing a black cape,” said Angelus. “He was holding the transvestite’s [private area] and pretending it was a microphone. He was singing ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones while doing a Mick Jagger impression. I thought, this is not going well.”

This story, and hundreds more along similar lines, makes this new oral history of MTV a rollicking one. Veteran music journalists Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum show that the golden age of MTV — from its formation in 1981 until the end of 1992 — was just as wild and debauched as you would hope.

The early days of MTV were very stripped-down rock ’n’ roll. With record companies highly skeptical about the network’s potential and less than 300 videos in existence, early videos were the musical equivalent of C-level Roger Corman films, with unproven talent, minuscule budgets, and a dearth of ideas — but fans couldn’t get enough.

For INXS’s “The One Thing,” the band “fed Valium to a few cats and had them running around a table, while we had a feast with sexy models and Playboy centerfolds, ripping apart a turkey,” according to band member Tim Farriss. “Next thing we knew, we had a Top 40 hit.”

For Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” Joel said the director told him to “look at the picture in your locker as if you’re in love with this woman and then dance around with a wrench in your hand,” to which the piano man replied, “Are you f – – – ing kidding me?” And yet that — and the appearance of Christie Brinkley — made the song a hit.

Even Weird Al Yankovic has a tale of ineptitude from his $3,000 “Ricky” video, in which he was supposed to shake maracas, but no one remembered to bring them. “We had a bowling pin,” he said. “I thought, maybe if I shake it fast enough, it’ll look like a maraca. Apparently, it was good enough for MTV.”

Sometimes this ineptitude almost led to disaster, especially when animals were involved. Stevie Nicks almost died on the set of “Stand Back” when a horse she was riding headed straight for the trees, and the decision to use a real live panther while filming Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” almost fatally backfired when the panther got loose on set.

While using doves in one of Prince’s videos, the production manager threw the doves into the air, and they headed straight for a giant fan, which chopped them up and sprayed them all over Prince’s band.

And when Duran Duran rode elephants for “Save a Prayer,” they didn’t count on the elephants getting frisky. Band member Roger Taylor risked serious harm when the elephant he rode mounted — and had sex with — another elephant, as Taylor hung on for dear life.

But with music video fast becoming a sensation, the sex was hardly reserved for elephants.

Rick Springfield recalls how he “pulled an extra out of the crowd and took her in a back room” while filming “Affair of the Heart.” “That went on all the time,” said Springfield. “I was a big extras person, to be honest. Extras were great.”

Video’s success fed many an already massive star ego.

When Keith Richards found himself unhappy with his screen time in the Rolling Stones’ “Undercover of the Night,” he pulled apart his walking stick and suddenly thrust a sword against director Julien Temple’s throat, telling him, “I want to be in this video more than I am.”

And with sex and egos came booze and drugs galore, with video crews often paid in cocaine.

During the filming of Fleetwood Mac’s “As Long as You Follow,” Nicks was sitting on the arm of a couch and eventually fell to the floor, leading the director to yell, “Would somebody please pick Stevie up and put her back on the sofa?”

At the 1989 VMAs, Bobby Brown had a vial of cocaine fall from his pocket as he danced, leaving him to immediately conjure up an elaborate step to retrieve it, put it back in his pocket, and then just keep on dancing.

During a promotion at the Hedonism resort in Jamaica, Bon Jovi manager Doc McGhee fed psilocybin tea and pot brownies to contest winners, crew and band members and MTV executives. The next morning, they found one MTV executive “sobbing on the lawn.”

The book also features tales about the era’s kings of drug abuse, Guns N’ Roses, including the time the band’s manager had to buy off a series of witnesses — giving one man $2,000 for getting blood on his “custom shirt” — when a naked, bleeding and heroin-addled Slash shoved a maid at an Arizona hotel.

While most of MTV’s executives and VJs were choirboys and girls by comparison, the network did have one rock star of its own, as the exploits of MTV executive Les Garland became the stuff of legend.

In the book, Garland tells of the time he, Rod Stewart and Stewart’s manager took four “lovely ladies” to the River Cafe in Brooklyn, where a game of Truth or Dare resulted in Garland, on a dare from Stewart, ordering a tequila shot from the bar while pantless and exposed.

And several MTV employees confirmed that Garland — who only failed to get Madonna into bed after confessing to her that if they did sleep together, he’d tell everyone — was once found receiving oral sex in the office from Missing Persons vocalist Dale Bozzio.

As MTV’s influence rose, diva behavior spread to new VJs like Adam Curry, who forced one MTV executive to keep a naked poster of Curry’s wife, who was a singing star in Holland, in the office.

But Curry paled beside the notorious Downtown Julie Brown, who terrorized all in her wake.

Alison Stewart, then a VJ assistant at MTV, recalled how Brown — who refused to read scripts or do reshoots — asked Stewart to accompany her to a personal appearance in Westchester, then forced her to wait in the car until three in the morning.

Brown herself reinforced her reputation by telling the authors, “If I’m in Ralph’s supermarket, I go to the front of the line. I don’t have time to wait!”

But Brown occasionally got her comeuppance, as when she caught her then-boyfriend in bed with a pre-fame Mariah Carey.

The VJs’ diva behavior got so bad that MTV would occasionally replace them with a goofy unknown — an NYU student and aspiring comedian named Adam Sandler.

While thoroughly covering the channel’s inner workings, the book overflows with tales of the era’s true stars.

One executive recalls visiting Michael Jackson in his private cinema as he watched an Elizabeth Taylor film with a group of people, only to realize that the “people” were actually mannequins. And while director John Landis endeavored to make Jackson “not look too crazy” while shooting “Black or White,” Jackson played hooky from the set one day because, it turned out, he was spending $50,000 at Toys “R” Us with Macaulay Culkin.

The increasing star power also created bitter rivalries, which often manifested at MTV events.

At the VMAs one year, as Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin from Guns N’ Roses left the stage, Motley Crue’s Vince Neil clocked Stradlin in the face. Guns N’ Roses manager Alan Niven threw Neil to the ground, only declining to smash him back when he realized that Neil’s nose job was too expensive to destroy.

As hip-hop entered MTV’s consciousness with Yo! MTV Raps — the show many credit with bringing hip-hop to mass culture — violence was often part of the deal.

After joking on the air about Big Daddy Kane, Yo! co-host Ed Lover found himself threatened by a man with a straight razor at Queen Latifah’s birthday party, requiring Ice-T to safely accompany him to his car.

And MC Hammer had to shut down a shoot when, in the midst of dealing with a kidnapping threat, mysterious men with Uzis appeared on the set.

Video’s glory era was squashed by two momentous events: the release of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which spelled the death knell for hair metal and caused McGhee to remark that “if Kurt Cobain had [committed suicide] four years earlier, that would have probably made me another $40 million”; and the introduction of “The Real World,” which earned higher ratings than videos had, thereby making videos a second tier priority at MTV.

Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighter Dave Grohl tells in the book of a night around 10 years ago when he was approached by a porn star who told him they had met before.

“She said, ‘I was one of the cheerleaders in the ‘Teen Spirit’ video,’” he said. “I’m like, oh my god, now she’s a porn star? Talk about the arc of MTV.”