by Craig Marks
GEORGE BRADT: MTV was hardly the tolerant environment you might imagine. When I was an associate producer, we were preparing scripts to promote a benefit concert for AIDS charities with Jimmy Somerville and other gay and gay-friendly British artists. A female director said, “Who knows something about this concert with the faggots for the faggots?” It’s a little horrifying that people spoke like that in New York, in a supposedly creative company.
I was in a relationship with a male staffer who was also not out. Among the people I knew, I can think of eight who were gay, but only one who was out. There was a female couple—a writer and an administrative assistant—who went to great lengths to hide their relationship at the office. This did not stop someone in the news department from referring to the assistant as a “bulldyke.”
JOHN CANNELLI: I wasn’t out when I worked at MTV, but I didn’t go out of my way to hide my sexuality, either. I had gay friends and partners. I didn’t mix the personal with business. I was dealing with artists in an industry that was still somewhat homophobic. MTV could be a bit like high school, and jokes were made that today would be considered insensitive. But my reluctance to be more open was a personal choice. Did I think coming out might hurt my ability to get things done on behalf of the network, or that people would think differently of me? Maybe it was in the background, but that was my own issue.
TOM HUNTER: Abbey and I ran the Monday acquisitions meeting in a giant conference room, so we could hear from young staffers who went out to hear music all the time. One Monday, the conference room’s double doors burst open. Everybody turned around, and through the doors come six super-hot girls, blondes, wearing yellow rain slickers, fireman helmets, and very little else. And they were carrying a stretcher. Someone’s lying on the stretcher, covered by a blanket. The girls drop their rain slickers and they’re wearing little teddies. It’s practically pornographic. They put the stretcher down, and all together they pull off the blanket. And out pops Gene Simmons!
He sits up and says, “Sorry to distract you guys, but it’s hard to get your attention. I started a record label, and I brought a video to play you. I really want it played on MTV. I brought my kneepads. So who do I have to blow to get some spins?” Everybody starts chanting, “Hun-TER, Hun-TER Hun-TER.” Gene says, “Who’s Hunter?” They point at me. Gene drops to his knees in front of me and simulates a blow job. The room was total chaos. People were pounding on the conference room table. Gene goes, “All right, who else?” Everyone goes, “Ab-BEY, Ab-BEY.” So Abbey got the same treatment from Gene. One of my favorite moments of all time.
RICK KRIM: Elektra Records sent over a stripper once. A Mexican porn star. Kitten Natividad was her name. She had been in a bunch of Russ Meyer movies, and she was in the Georgia Satellites video “Shake That Thing.” She showed up at one of our weekly music meetings in a fishnet bodystocking. I remember her jiggling herself all over Tom Hunter’s head.
JOHN CANNELLI: People tried all kinds of things to get our attention. I had a corner office that overlooked the Marriott. And I got a phone call from someone at a label, saying, “Look out your window!” They’d booked a room opposite my office and hired a stripper to perform for me. That’s how they would promote an act.
STEVE BACKER: We signed a band called Danger Danger. Just the worst of the fucking hair bands. They were dreadful. But our label president, Dave Glew, was obsessed with a song and video of theirs, “Bang Bang.” I could get five videos onto MTV and it didn’t matter to him, because Danger Danger wasn’t in rotation. “Bang Bang” was going to be a smash record if it killed him. So he came up with this awful idea: The entire staff of Epic would put on hard hats—because hard hats symbolized danger, get it?—and walk to the MTV offices. I’m talking about the entire label. When the receptionist announced that Steve Backer had arrived for his 11 A.M. meeting, I’ve never been more mortified in my life. I still cringe when I think about it.
MARK GHUNEIM: MTV hated Toad the Wet Sprocket. Hated them. The hardest work I ever did was getting that band into rotation. I bought a dozen toads, put them in boxes with little airholes, and sent them to everyone in Abbey’s department. They were horrified. Horrified. I understood. It was cruel to the toads. But I would do anything to promote an artist.
ABBEY KONOWITCH: My detractors said I was power hungry, and I took credit for everything, and my ego was out of control. I wasn’t power hungry. The power came to me. I had a problem thanks to my friend John Sykes. John wanted to do me a favor. When Entertainment Weekly was doing its first list of the 101 Most Powerful People in Entertainment, in 1990, he convinced them that I was the most important figure in the music-video industry. Which I hated. It wasn’t fair to my staff, and it was damaging for me personally. Everyone from David Geffen to Tommy Mottola wanted to kill me. David Geffen said to Tom Freston, “Why would you let this guy have power over me?”
But I was the MTV guy. I mean, let’s be honest. I’m not giving you any bullshit. I was the MTV guy. I never thought for a moment that this shit was real. It was so surreal it couldn’t be real. But I had a really good time with it.
Chapter 37
“PEOPLE IN THE HOOD RUSHED TO GET CABLE”
HOW TED DEMME DID, DIDN’T, MAYBE DID, AND ABSOLUTELY DID CREATE YO! MTV RAPS
IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR MICHAEL JACKSON, WHOSE MUSIC didn’t fit MTV’s format, the network might have gone the way of the Betamax and other quickly failed inventions. In one sense, MTV learned a lesson: Black pop became an integral part of its programming. On the other hand, MTV had a show about movies before it had a show about hip-hop. As black pop transformed from Lionel Richie to Run-DMC, the network concluded that rap didn’t fit their format, once again prompting accusations of racial discrimination. (“We didn’t know if rap would fit MTV,” Lee Masters bravely admitted, after Yo! MTV Raps was a hit.) And for the second time, a form of music excluded from the network ended up saving the network—rap was MTV’s escape route from hair metal. Yo! started only through the relentless efforts of Ted Demme, a twenty-three-year-old underling whose bosses reluctantly made a concession that changed the network’s future, and sped Demme on his way to being a Hollywood director.
SCOTT KALVERT: The first big video I directed was “Parents Just Don’t Understand” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. I had the idea of doing a human cartoon, because the song was so funny. People were hesitant, though. They said, “They’re rappers. You’ve gotta put them on the street.”
ANN CARLI: The video had almost a Marx Brothers feel. And I would say it was a tipping point in hip-hop. Will Smith was a middle-class suburban kid from Philly, and what he rapped about was accessible. He wasn’t pretending to be from the hood.
DJ JAZZY JEFF, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince: The first video Will and I did was “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” That was also Will’s first time in front of a camera.
ANN CARLI: Will was a scrawny kid. He was seventeen, he usually had pimples, he wore baseball caps because he didn’t like to do anything to his hair. He was a bit awkward. So I was surprised when we saw the rough footage after the first day of shooting. Scott Kalvert and I said to each other, “Oh my god, this kid’s a huge star. The camera absolutely loves him.” I wanted to make a movie with Will. So I called Russell Simmons and said, “He’s going to be a movie star. He’s going to be as big as Eddie Murphy.” And Russell said to me, “He may be the next Malcolm Jamal Warner, but he ain’t no Eddie Murphy.” I still bug Russell about that.
BILL ADLER: “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was an important video. They were young, suburban-seeming kids from Philadelphia. Will Smith was not a scary black man. He was handsome, charismatic, good-humored, sexy. Not scary. And yet, he’s rapping. Okay, MTV programs it, and boom, their phones light up. If there was a tipping point for rap at MTV, it was the success of that video.
DJ JAZZY JEFF: That video introduced a lot of white kids to hip-hop.
JANET KLEINBAUM: There was definitely a lot of jealousy from other rapp
ers towards Will. “What is it about him, why don’t they like me, what are you doing for him that you’re not doing for me?”
KOOL MOE DEE: We shot “Wild Wild West” at an “Old West” park in New Jersey. I used to go there in fifth grade on class trips. It had wagon wheels and makeshift western scenes. We shot it in the middle of February, in freezing cold, and we were there for the better part of ten hours. I was numb. I told Scott Kalvert I was done shooting, and he acted like I was being uncooperative. But I was freezing cold.
MTV wouldn’t play the video. Even when “Wild Wild West” got to number four on the pop charts, they wouldn’t play it. Over and over, we’d hear, “It’s not our format.” I was no Rick James, but I made a lot of noise about MTV not playing hip-hop. Shortly after I spoke out, they played Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” It felt like, “Yeah, we’re gonna play rap, but we’re not gonna play you.”
A lot of people don’t know “Wild Wild West” is part of why Yo! MTV Raps was put on the air. Ted Demme told me that once “Wild Wild West” made it onto the pop charts, rap was hard to overlook.
FAB 5 FREDDY: Russell Simmons was going to BET and begging them to put some kind of rap show on the air, and they wouldn’t. The look, the attitude, the swagger—at the time, rap was a complete affront to what black music had been.
PETER DOUGHERTY: Ted Demme was an assistant in my department, the promotions department. We had nothing to do with producing shows. We were into hip-hop, and Ted was very keen to do a rap show. He used to put a note under Judy McGrath’s door every week. I think they looked at the idea and said, “Is it going to scare our core audience away?” Little did they know hip-hop kids would become the core of MTV’s audience. Ted was essentially telling the music department, “You don’t have a clue what’s going on, you’re missing the next wave of music.” They didn’t want somebody from another department telling them how to do their jobs. But that’s the way Teddy was. You could say, “Oh, he’s a runaway train,” or you could say, “What a cuddly bunch of energy.” Luckily, MTV found his enthusiasm endearing.
When “Parents Just Don’t Understand” became huge, that cleared the way—we were given the green light to do a pilot. I hooked up with Revolt, an old graffiti artist, and we did the logo together. We shot an hour-long pilot in Texas with Run-DMC as the host, plus Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, and JJ Fad.
TOM HUNTER: Here’s how Yo! happened. An independent promotion guy bought me lunch one day and said, “Do you know what’s going on with rap? It’s huge, and MTV should play it.” He told me about Video Music Box, the Manhattan cable show hosted by Ralph McDaniels. So I started to look at rap sales numbers and became convinced that we should do a show.
I’d bring it up every week at my meeting with Lee Masters, and his argument against it was consistent: “We’re white, suburban, male, affluent. That’s who we are.” When Pittman left the channel, he told Lee to pay attention to that audience profile. Finally, I got desperate, and I said, “Lee, give me from 2 to 3 A.M. on Tuesdays and let me put rap there.” He still said no. I said, “Okay, how about we do a one-off, two-hour rap special, and you let me air it between noon and 6 P.M. on either a Saturday or a Sunday?” He finally said okay. Then Judy brought in Peter Dougherty and Ted Demme.
We got the highest ratings in the channel’s history. I walked into Lee Masters’s office the next day and said, “Do you believe me now?”
ABBEY KONOWITCH: When I started at MTV, I was full of piss and vinegar. I could do anything I wanted! Ted Demme and Pete Dougherty came to my office and said, “We have an idea. We get no ratings on Saturday night. We want to play an hour of rap videos in that time slot. It’s gonna be a smash.” To me, it sounded like the stupidest idea ever. I said to Lee Masters, “What do you think?” He goes, “Who’s gonna watch that? The audience for rap would never be home on a Saturday night.” I said, “Let’s have them at least put a budget together.” When Ted put a budget together, we said, “Go ahead and try it. We got the ratings first thing Monday morning, and it was the highest-rated show MTV ever had.
STEVE LEEDS: When I worked at Channel 68, we had a Saturday afternoon show called Fresh Rap. Then when I got to MTV, I said to Lee Masters, “We should be playing more urban videos.” He didn’t believe there were enough rap videos to do a show, so I brought him a couple of air checks of Fresh Rap. He agreed to try a one-off weekend special. Ted Demme got wind of that, and he became the producer.
LEE MASTERS: What’s the expression? “Success has many fathers.” There are conflicting stories about who was truly the creative forced behind rap on MTV. I have to tell you, it was Ted Demme.
Ted came into my office and pounded on my desk. And this part of the story is embarrassing for me, but when we okayed the show, I called him to my office and said, “I’m glad you’re doing it, but this show will not get ratings, okay? I don’t want you to be bummed out about it, and I don’t want you to feel like you’re a failure.” Of course, we got the ratings in, and it was stupid how successful it was. So I called Ted back in and said, “Can you do another one next weekend?” Then we got the ratings in again, and I said, “Can you do a daily half-hour show?” Ted was the front guy. He was so gregarious and persuasive; he basically charmed me into letting him do it.
DJ JAZZY JEFF: Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were on the very first episode of Yo! MTV Raps, which Run-DMC hosted. We were on tour with Run-DMC, Public Enemy, a bunch of us, when “Parents” started getting big on MTV. Both Will and I remember the cheers getting louder for us night after night. One night before the show Will said, “I’m gonna try something.” He was going to rap a verse of “Parents” and ask the crowd to chant the next one. I’m sitting there with my fingers crossed, hoping this works. Will’s up there and raps, “I remember one year my mom took me school shopping,” and twenty thousand people sang back, “It was me, my brother, my mom, oh, my pop, and . . .” When the tour started, we were going on second. After about two weeks, somebody says, “Okay, you guys go on third.” Then, “Okay, you guys go on fourth.” Before the tour ended, we were going on right before Run-DMC. And that was all because of the success of “Parents,” and mostly due to the video.
ALEX COLETTI: We did a Yo! MTV Raps weekend to launch the show, with a whole week of VJ segments with Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Will and Jeff came up from Philly by train every day; we didn’t put them in a hotel.
PETER DOUGHERTY: Hiring Fab 5 Freddy as a host was a no-brainer. He was involved in the art world, in the hip-hop world, the graffiti scene, he had been in Blondie’s video “Rapture.” And he was not a gangster. The way he dressed—he was not a typical b-boy. He could float through different worlds, highbrow and lowbrow, and not be out of place.
FAB 5 FREDDY: My on-air persona was an extension of my character in the movie Wild Style, who was a hip, cool, knowledgeable guy. Essentially, I’m a cool nerd, if you will.
Being on MTV was nowhere on my radar. I’d become restless with painting in the late ’80s, and started thinking about music video. I’d learned the rudiments of filmmaking when I was in Wild Style—it was my idea to combine break dancing, graffiti, rap, and DJing. Prior to that, these things weren’t on the radar of pop culture. Ann Carli at Jive said, “I’ve got a video for you to direct.” It was “My Philosophy,” by KRS-One. I used images of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Marcus Garvey, and Hailie Selassie. My father was active in social change; he marched on Washington, he was in the room when Malcolm X was assassinated. My grandfather worked with Garvey. I was from that ilk of conscious black folks.
When we were shooting “My Philosophy,” people were asking, “Yo, Fab, you think this will get aired on MTV?” I made an announcement: “Nobody else ask me that. I’m making this video so black, that’s not even a question. I am not trying to get on MTV.” And then “My Philosophy” was the final video on the pilot for Yo! MTV Raps.
When they hired me, I was adamant about not being cooped up in a studio
like the other VJs. Things were emerging from other parts of the country, so we talked about what’s going on in Philly, we had Too Short and Ice-T from LA, Luke from Miami, Texas with the Geto Boys. We would jump at opportunities to travel and show this culture. Rap was spreading like Ebola.
DMC: Until Yo!, Run-DMC was the only hip-hop kids saw on MTV. Once Yo! started, they got to see Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy, the Geto Boys, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Leaders of the New School, X-Clan. Yo! showed the diversity of hip-hop. And everyone was dope as hell. When you went on Yo!, it wasn’t about your video, or your clothes, or your money. You had to perform live, and you had to be better than your record and video.
MC HAMMER: Fab 5 Freddy launched my “Turn This Mother Out” video in Times Square. That’s the show where I had Jennifer Lopez as one of my backup dancers. Yo! said, “You have to get to New York.” My dancers were in Florida, for my next show. They go, “Don’t worry, we can get some dancers from New York to do it.” When I get up to the dance studio to pick out dancers, J.Lo is there. She stood out, even then. There were tons of girls in that room, but her energy, her look, and her disposition got her in all the shots. I’m sure I flirted with her.
