MTV Ruled the World- The Early Years of Music Video

by Greg Prato

  "WEIRD AL" YANKOVIC: Even though it's a grey area and legally I don't necessarily need to, I always make a point of getting permission for each and every one of my song parodies. I'm not sure that we ever approached Joan Jett, because she wasn't one of the writers for "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," but we did approach Jake Hooker, who was. Jake also happened to manage guitar legend Rick Derringer, and he suggested that maybe Rick and I could work together. So because of that contact, Derringer wound up producing my first six albums. Toni Basil was great about letting me do my parody, as was Michael Jackson, to my utter disbelief. Michael loved the parody videos and was always very supportive of them. Madonna didn't write "Like a Virgin" — that was Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly — but she indirectly gave me the idea for my parody. As legend has it, she was talking to a friend of hers in New York one day, and wondered aloud, "When do you think 'Weird Al' is gonna do 'Like a Surgeon?'" Her friend happened to be a friend of a friend of my manager, and when word got back to me, I thought, "Hmm…well, sure, why not?"

  Stories Behind the Videos: Oddities

  -- Barnes & Barnes --

  ART BARNES: Well, I grew up working with some of the greatest film and TV talent ever [Art — aka Bill Mumy — played Will Robinson on Lost in Space.]. Making "Fish Heads" as a film was total guerilla filmmaking, on a cheapo, cheapo budget for the most part. We spent money where we needed to, on editing and transfers, but the making of it was done really low-tech. And I love that about it. We purposely wanted it to look scratchy and be a bit disturbing, while still serving that nursery-rhyme-type melody. We shot it on both super-8 and 16. There's nothing "video" about it. We used a hand-cranked Bolex camera for most of it and a couple of cheap super-8s. It was a collaborative project between Bill Paxton, Rocky Schenck, Joan Farber, me, and Robert Haimer. Billy really had the most energy and was basically the director. He's the one who pushed hard and got it on Saturday Night Live right after we finished editing. Rocky did the cinematography and was absolutely brilliant. Joanie did the design, make-up, and wardrobe. If you think it's easy putting false eyelashes and lipstick on fish heads...think again. Robert and I produced it, helped outline it, and set the tone. All of us suggested scenes that we filmed. We were like a tight little band. Those were good times. It was a lot of fun, and I like that we incorporated so many styles into it, yet it feels like it flows naturally. We started off in a black-and-white film noir homage, then used some cheesy animation, then cut to color. "Fish Heads" has been a positive thing in my life. I think the song and the film hold up as a genuine art project that works on a primitive melodic sense and has an adult wink built into it. It was very popular on MTV. Rolling Stone magazine named it "the 57th best video of all time." We continue to make money from it.

  ALAN HUNTER: It was so bizarre and underproduced and art school. It was kind of like the art graphics that MTV put in between all the videos. MTV was really groundbreaking when it came to the kind of art and visual graphics that was the glue and the interstitial material between the videos. They went to the best art design houses in Manhattan to get all that stuff. And they were just constantly experimenting. So to have something as underproduced and as bizarre as "Fish Heads"...that was true drug music. Again, I think there was so many styles of videos. That's why the audience was so large for MTV. Everybody enjoyed something. If you really did like the headbanging stuff, you had it. If you liked the new romance and the new wave from the U.K. Great. You got it. But if you just wanted to smoke pot and have a giggle at 2:00 in the morning, Barnes & Barnes gave MTV street cred for that. But it's bullshit to see four fish heads singing. [Laughs] We also had the Residents, with the big eyeball heads. It was sort of the "New York-centric art house school" video that made MTV cool. But you put "Fish Heads" up against a Rod Stewart video, it made it all better. The "Fish Heads" video and Devo videos were band-aids for all the other bullshit. It's kind of like, "Where else could you see that?" Early MTV was all music-based, but it was all different styles of artistic expression. I liked that.

  -- Blotto --

  SERGEANT BLOTTO: We didn't even initiate [the "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" video]. That was something that some kids from...I think Plattsburgh, were in video/film and needed to do something for their senior project in college. They loved Blotto and thought, "Let's make a music video." This was well before MTV was on the air, obviously, since the video aired on the first day. They were just doing it for a fun little school project. I think our total budget for that video was $11, which I think we spent on ice cream and donuts in one scene, when I'm walking down the street stuffing donuts into my face. We didn't get permits to do any of the shooting. We just went and did it. All of the concert footage was done at a club here in Albany, called JB Scott's, which has long disappeared. And we did other stuff. We got permission from some shoe store to go shoot the "shoe store scene," but the other stuff, we went down to the Empire State Plaza, which is the New York State Offices, and went in with the camera and did some shooting on this escalator. We'd go down to Central Avenue and film some stuff. I can't even remember whose house we used for the Allied Van Lines moving scene, where we were carrying some enormously heavy sofa down some stairs. The thing that I remember most is the beach scenes, which we filmed in Lake George. We were filming in I think it was April, so if you look at the video, you'll see there are no leaves on the trees. That water was cooold. But hey, it's for art. So we're in it. The "Metalhead" video was fun. It was a bigger project. We hired somebody and storyboarded the whole thing. The concert footage for "Metalhead" was filmed at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, which is still in operation. We also filmed a lot of that over at Union College in Schenectady. We commandeered somebody's room at a fraternity house for the "metalhead room." I remember vividly sitting there on the bed with these headphones on. It was so low-tech, it was beautiful. We wanted to get a smoking headphone effect, so what I had done is taken some headphones, gutted the speakers on them, drilled holes in the back of each earpiece, and taken some clear plastic tubing and stuck it in there. So when we were filming it, I'm holding onto the headphones, and as I recall, Broadway and Bowtie were sitting on the floor — to the side of the bed, just out of the camera view — smoking these big cigars, and blowing the smoke through the plastic tubing. One of my favorite shots in that video — that we also shot at Union College — of standing out on one of the campus roadways, and we had these bikers that were fans. I'm standing there with my legs wide apart, and somebody's helmet fell off the back of their bike, and one of the other bikers kicked it, and it went rolling right through my legs! It was a total accident and not planned at all. I think we went back and tried to do it again and couldn't get it, and said, "Alright, let's hope we got that first one." That was more of a production and less of a "Gee, what the hell's going to happen?" — which is what "Lifeguard" was. Just yesterday, the Today Show was doing some segment on tanning or something, and five people called me up. "Hey, I just heard 'Lifeguard' on the Today Show!" The beauty of it is there are thousands of songs about love...there is only one song about lifeguards. [Laughs] Every year, it's one of those perennials that just pops up and starts getting more airplay at the beginning of every summer.

  -- Utopia --

  TODD RUNDGREN: At this point [circa the "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" video], we're making videos because we have the space to make the videos in. We see them, to a certain degree, as a promotional element. We're still doing the songs that could or would be released as singles. But our expectations are somewhat different. In that particular instance, we're conveying to people the underlying sense of humor and irony that the band is all about, and that some people may or may not be familiar or aware of the existence of. [Laughs] Doing this kind of almost live-action cartoon was a way to convey the lyric of the song, but more than that, our skewed way of seeing things.

  ROGER POWELL: That was really somewhat astounding. [Laughs] First of all, Todd had the equipment to do this blue screen stuff. It was his concept to do this, with the bugs and all that. The
thing that I would say about all of our productions was that they were certainly low-budget. They were sort of medium-tech. They always had a home-spun, "Let's-go-out-and-put-on-a-play-in-the-barn" kind of a quality to them. They were not super-polished. But I think they sort of fit the vibe of Utopia. Our videos, there would be a lot of volunteer people that would just come and do things, like sew costumes together. Or at one point, we hired a bus and brought people up from New York City to be an audience for "Rock Love." For "Feet Don't Fail Me Now," which, by the way, I think ended up in Dr. Demento's list of the "Ten Most Demented Videos of all Time," the costumes were pretty interesting. I had to get in this funky costume and then go against the blue screen. And that got to be awkward, because there was a bunch of shots where we're in different contorted positions. I remember one, where I had to look like I was upside down. I had to hang from a bar, in this costume, while trying to hide parts of my body that didn't have the costume on, and having to curl up into a spider position. This, along with another video we were doing, "You Make Me Crazy," I had come back from a European visit to promote my solo album, Air Pocket, and while I was over there, I was in a traffic accident and had cracked ribs. I had been home for a while, but every now and then, if I moved the wrong way, I'd get these spasms. And I remember having those because of all this awkward body contortion. And in particular for "You Make Me Crazy," there's a scene in the end when all hell breaks loose, and we're jumping over furniture, and they actually had to take me to the hospital after, because my whole chest was just shaking in spasms! We were trying to be as inventive as we could with what limited props and limited resources we had. We were lucky enough that we had our own video studio, which meant we could take our time to do things. We weren't under someone's watch, where it was burning a thousand dollars an hour or something. On the other hand, that was about all we had — the studio and the equipment. We didn't have the budget for high-tech special effects. We made it more about the story and what we could get away with. But "the bug video" ["Feet Don't Fail Me Now"] was interesting because we always were surrounded by art people and costume people. We had the talent that we needed. These people made us a sofa out of a hot dog bun and cigarette butts! We had this whole miniature set. It was literally a foot and a half wide, with all the furniture emulated, as if you were in a bug's home. And then we would shoot the other stuff against the blue screen, and when the miniature set was in the background, it looked like it was full size, and there we are in those scenes. I thought it was a very clever use of our medium-tech approach.

  Fun at MTV

  ALAN HUNTER: Nina posed for Playboy magazine in the '70s. I got wind of it in the dressing room one day. Mark and I were totally blown away that Nina appeared in it, but none of us had seen the pictures. On one of my personal appearances my first year, some kid comes up with the magazine, plops it on top of the table of where I was signing autographs, and says, "Hey, I thought you'd like to see Nina's spread." I was like, "Holy cow!" There were like hundreds of people waiting to step up. I couldn't just sit there to ogle it for a while. But I took mental snapshots really quickly, came back, and told Mark I had finally seen the prized pictures of Nina. It was pretty bold. She was not bashful in those photos, I'll tell ya.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: I did it way before MTV. I think viewers started writing about it. I think how it came up was Playboy decided to re-run the photos, which they always do, when somebody starts to get any degree of celebrity. Penthouse did that with Madonna. Because I had signed a release, they had the permission to do that. So it was like, "OK...here it goes." I got brought into the office of the executive producer. When I did [the photos], I worked as a model. I was quite naïve, and I didn't really think of that as seriously as what it is. And then, all of a sudden, it seemed like I had done something bad. It was just weird. They were trying to decide how to handle this. What am I supposed to do? I didn't release the pictures. Really, what was I supposed to do? They never threatened to fire me or anything like that — that wasn't it — but they did call me into the office. What can I say? I can't even say I'm sorry, because I didn't release these things. And then later on, look at where they are! Come on, I mean, Jenny McCarthy was one of the people they hired after I left [who had also posed for Playboy before joining MTV]. And certainly what I was wearing was much less risque than the girls prancing around in the videos, y'know? That didn't help with the "video vixen" thing. It really pushed it in that direction. And I still, to this day, get mad at my manager [Laughs]

  KEN R. CLARK: In the very beginning, everybody took cabs, and everybody complained about that, because some nights, we would get out late, and they'd want to have a car sitting at the curb. So they contracted a town car service. The first one was kind of a lower-class town car company, I think it was called XYZ. And all the town car companies back then worked on a voucher system, so you actually had to have the damn car vouchers when you rode in the car. You had to find the voucher, and the driver would put "to and from" and give you a copy of it. That's how MTV got billed for it. There was always tension between the VJs and MTV about Communicar usage. It got to the point where I was only allowed to issue a certain amount of vouchers, one for each direction, and ten if they had extra things to do that week, because people would take them to clubs, and that wasn't part of the contract. Mark had gotten into a town car to come down to the studio one morning, and part-way down, realized he didn't have any car vouchers. Which had happened pretty regularly. They'd forget them, so I'd have to wait for the car to pull up and run out with a voucher. And most of the drivers were fine about that. It took an extra ten seconds. And this guy went apeshit! He started turning around and driving Mark back to the apartment, and Mark was up in Riverdale, in the Bronx. I have somewhere in the vault a memo that Mark had written, probably to Bob Pittman, about this horrible experience. It was like two pages, overly dramatic, like his life had flashed before his very eyes. I'm sure it was a bummer, but it seemed a bit embellished. But the guy had at some point taken a screwdriver and was attacking Mark over the front seat! [Laughs] And Mark finally bailed out of the car. It was either moving or stopped at a light, and he bailed out and ran. We remember him calling the studio from a payphone somewhere, all pissed off, because he was stranded on the Upper East Side, and he probably didn't have any cash, because VJs never had any cash. We ended up firing the XYZ car service and went with Communicar.

  ALAN HUNTER: I remember being called to task about an Andy Warhol interview that I did. I was interviewing Andy Warhol after he directed a Cars video ["Hello Again"] down on the Lower East Side. So I was interviewing Andy and had a great interview. Those were the kinds of interviews that I liked. People in that world I felt more comfortable with, than being "the rock journalist." I remember shooting the shit with him in the middle of a tape change, and I had bought an Andy Warhol poster a week before, a 20-dollar poster. I brought it and said, "Would you sign this thing?" And I said, "Alright! I bought it for 20 bucks...and now it's worth 30!" He thought that was funny. I was just kidding. And one of the VPs at MTV called me about a week later, because he'd seen the tape. And he said, "Look, we can't be making fun of the artists and celebrities we have on MTV. You might offend Andy Warhol...I'm afraid you did." Are you kidding me? It was overkill. The more corporate it got, the more money they started making, the more audience we had, the more they were being looked at by the industry, the more all the execs were getting phone calls from all their buddies in all the other parts of the industry. You go out to dinner with the head of Arista Records, and he goes, "Look, don't let those VJs make fun of this new girl I'm about to hand you. Would you tell them to lay off?" We'd get the memos.

  KEN R. CLARK: Nina was my best friend of those original VJs. Nina and I struck a bond immediately. I think it was because we were both from Ohio, perhaps. But Nina was genuinely just the nicest, most down-home gal in the world. Here's a funny little insight into the VJs. Everybody thought Martha Quinn was "the cute little girl next door," and that Nina Blackwood, wi
th the bleach-blonde hair and the whole get-up, was some kind of crazy, wild, party girl. And, in fact, nothing could have been further from the truth.

  NINA BLACKWOOD: Adam Ant, he came down, and I used to get teased about that, because Adam invited me to his concert. He invited me to his hotel restaurant to have rice pudding with him. That's it! And for months, I never heard the end of it. Nobody ever believed that nothing else happened. I chose to be professional. There were times when the artists that came in would ask me out, and I wouldn't go, because I thought that it was unprofessional. And, consequently, a lot of the events that I was invited to, I was with my friend, who's a publicist, Ida Langsam. So I heard one rumor. They go, "She's gay." And I'm like, "I am not!" They either think you're some rock n' roll groupie, and if you're not, then you're gay. And I'm just Nina, who likes long-term relationships. I don't know how these people in the public eye deal with the scrutiny that happens nowadays. I wouldn't be able to handle that. I'm so glad that wasn't around when we were there, so you could actually have a semblance of a private life.