I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  JULIE BROWN: We shot Club MTV two days a month and did between fifteen and nineteen shows in a weekend. I went out with the crew to choose dancers for the show. I chose beautiful girls and great-looking guys. The boys had their shirts off, the girls had their skirts short and tight, and they danced on top of podiums, so the cameramen could shoot up to the dancers, and make it hot, but not disgusting. I always wore two pairs of underwear, just in case the camera took a slight detour in the wrong direction.

  KEN R. CLARK: Julie would come out of her dressing room in those outrageous outfits and say, “Can you see my cunt through this thing?”

  LOU STELLATO: We would shoot fifteen shows in two days, at the Palladium in New York, and then they would run the hell out of those fifteen shows. One of the dancers was Camille Donatacci, who ended up being Mrs. Kelsey Grammer.

  CAMILLE GRAMMER: When I tried out for Club MTV, I was nineteen years old, going to college, and working as a dental assistant. I was on Club MTV from the first episode to the very end. The pay was $35 a day. That barely covered parking and lunch. We basically did it for free. We would get to the Palladium at nine o’clock in the morning and we would dance until nine o’clock at night. MTV would always say to us, “This is great exposure for you.”

  BETH McCARTHY: I was in Tampa with Ted Demme and Colin Quinn for one of our Super Bowl shoots. They thought it would be hilarious to take me to a strip club. I’m like, “I’m not going.” So they took me through what I thought was the back door of a club, and it ended up being a strip club called the Dollhouse. All of a sudden I hear, “Hi, Beth!” And there’s one of the strippers waving at me. She was an ex–Club MTV dancer. The guys fell down laughing.

  MIKE ARMSTRONG: There was a horrific incident when they were taking the Club MTV dancers by bus to Daytona for Spring Break. As they approached a tollbooth near Baltimore, someone was trying to lower the shade, and the bus driver got distracted and plowed into cars at sixty miles per hour. People were killed. It was on the news. At the end of the day, a friend of mine who was on the bus approached two Club MTV dancers and he overheard one say to the other, “After all we’ve been through today, your hair looks great.” I’ve been telling that story for twenty-three years now.

  ALEX COLETTI: Not only did I segment produce on Club MTV, I performed on Club MTV. There was a group of people from MTV—me, the producer Bruce Gilmer, and Troi from the mailroom, who later became Star from the radio show Star and Buc Wild—who played various instruments. When artists would come and lip-sync on Club MTV, and they couldn’t afford a band to pretend to play behind them, we’d back them up. My brother played percussion. We backed up Roxette, Robbie Nevil, Rick Astley. I mimed a great guitar solo in Astley’s “It Would Take a Strong, Strong Man.”

  LOU STELLATO: I was very involved in Club MTV. I was Julie’s floor producer. I wrote the scripts for Julie. Yes, there were scripts for Club MTV.

  BETH McCARTHY: I still see one of the dancers from Club MTV, Laura B, because she’s now Tina Fey’s stand-in on 30 Rock.

  CAMILLE GRAMMER: At the end of the first year of Club MTV, I had a breast augmentation. I came back for season two and everybody was like, “Huh! Wow!” I don’t know if I got more camera time, but I definitely got a lot of fan mail.

  BETH McCARTHY: Camille was a pretty girl who started doing stuff to herself that made her not as pretty. I had a problem with her because I didn’t like the way she treated my friend Milt. Milt was a director at MTV. Camille was friends with Milt, and when she didn’t have a boyfriend, she would date him a little bit. Except that he took it to mean they were totally together.

  ALEX COLETTI: I knew Camille very well. She used to date Milt Lage. Milt and I went to London to do the Oasis Unplugged in 1996, and we had adjoining hotel rooms. We turned on a baseball game, and there was a shot of Camille and Kelsey Grammer at the game. That’s when he found out they were dating.

  LOU STELLATO: Milt Lage invented the Club MTV upskirt shot.

  CAMILLE GRAMMER: The cameramen knew what they were doing. The girls wore miniskirts, and then we realized it would be a good idea for us to wear bike shorts underneath, for those upskirt camera angles.

  LOU STELLATO: For some reason, they booked the Dead Milkmen to perform on Club MTV. And the band didn’t take their performance seriously. During the interview they handcuffed Julie, either to a mic stand or to one of the guys in the band. She tried to keep it together, but it got ugly. And when we faded, she ran back to her dressing room. They were cracking up in the truck as it was happening. She was on the stairwell at the Palladium, with snot running down her nose, saying, “I can’t fucking believe it!”

  JULIE BROWN: The Dead Milkmen handcuffed me. I got a bit pissed about that.

  DEBBIE GIBSON: Everyone at my school watched Club MTV. I wanted to be on that show. But one thing I never liked; they made you lip-sync. I was more petrified of lip-syncing than singing live, because if you messed up live or your voice sounded edgy, so what? But if you’re lip-syncing and you forgot a riff, then you looked like an idiot. Then you’re Milli Vanilli. And I was already in a genre people didn’t seriously.

  FAB MORVAN, Milli Vanilli: Milli Vanilli made dancing a focal point in our videos. We didn’t have much budget, right? We didn’t have access to those top directors in Germany, we didn’t even have a stylist. I did all the choreography. Because when we did “Girl You Know It’s True,” the first video, no one thought it would become so successful. You can see the difference in our third and fourth videos, “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Blame It On the Rain”; we were selling records, so those videos had a little more like a real story.

  ABBEY KONOWITCH: Steve Leeds and I were at the Club MTV tour date [July 21, 1989] when Milli Vanilli got busted for lip-syncing. I thought they were charismatic onstage; it was like a gymnastics show. Steve brought it to my attention that they weren’t singing. They would lip-sync, and between verses they’d say something like, “Yeah man! All right!” They could barely speak English! It was hysterical!

  BETH McCARTHY: The first time Milli Vanilli came in to be interviewed, we were all thinking, There’s no way these two guys are singing those songs. They don’t even speak English.

  CLIVE DAVIS: Milli Vanilli was the brainchild of Frank Farian, a German record producer. He was probably the number one record man in Europe. When Arista licensed the record for U.S. release, I had never seen the group. I didn’t even meet them until they’d sold 2 million records in America. Frank Farian furnished us with the videos. We had no idea Rob and Fab didn’t sing on the record. We were as shocked as the public. It turned out they were paid union scale; they weren’t even getting royalties. Farian took the position that this was done all the time in Europe.

  FAB MORVAN: My response to that is very simple: If a pin drops in the company, Clive Davis will know about it. That’s all I have to say.

  KIM MARLOWE, manager: The singers Frank Farian used were very unattractive, older—one of them was fat, one was skinny. I don’t mean to disrespect them, but they didn’t have stage presence. They had decent voices, but you still have to be a great performer, you have to be able to rip up those stages and control an audience. You’re either a star, or you’re not a star. Rob and Fab were stars. They had a great look and a great image.

  Frank Farian is a very talented producer, but he is an unbelievably despicable human being, period. Because he gets young talent, signs them to contracts, and then gives them a small amount of advance. Rob and Fab didn’t sign a lip-syncing deal. He brought them back many months later and told them what they were gonna do. “And if you don’t, you have to pay the money back.”

  FAB MORVAN: We were not hired, we were trapped. You sign a recording contract with a big producer, and you get your little advance money. “Cool, we’re gonna get some food, some clothes, take care of the trademark—the hair.” Then he said, “You have to lip-sync. If you want to get out of the contract, pay us back all the money we paid you.” And at this point, what can we do?
The only way we can repay the debt is to work, to do what they asked us to do.

  So we do it, and then you get addicted to the lifestyle, to being a rock star. Who doesn’t want to be a rock star? But in the end, when the party’s gone and you’re all alone, you face the reality: “Damn, I didn’t sing on the records.” And that hurts. That’s one of the reasons we ended up hanging out with the night. You know, sex, drugs, and alcohol gets down in the night. The night is your best friend, because you want to escape the pressure, and once you start selling more and more records, more is demanded from you. You have to make sure you hide this very heavy secret.

  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.

  Chapter 35

  “THE FIRST TIME I SMELLED FREEBASE”

  MTV PARTIES DOWN AT SPRING BREAK

  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.”