by Craig Marks
TOM FRESTON: The programming group decided to put “Welcome to the Jungle” on Headbangers Ball for starters. Not in regular rotation. It was getting played a couple of times a week. David Geffen called me and said, “Every time you guys play this thing at 3 A.M., our sales light up. Please leave it on.” Normally, I would never tell the programming guys what to put into rotation. But this was David Geffen. And the song kicked ass. Guns N’ Roses broke out.
TOM HUNTER: Freston called me and said we had to play “Welcome to the Jungle” in regular rotation. I said, “Have you seen the video?” He said, “One of the pieces of advice I got from Pittman was: When David Geffen calls, pay attention. And Geffen called me.”
ALAN NIVEN: I love the euphemistic quality of that statement. In other words, David is an incredibly powerful person, don’t piss him off.
TOM HUNTER: If we added it into regular rotation, we’d get shit from other managers and labels whose hard rock videos we wouldn’t play. So I handwrote it into the programming log—that way, the add wouldn’t appear in trade magazines. I gave it two plays a day in regular rotation. It got an amazing number of calls right out of the box.
NIGEL DICK: On the second Guns N’ Roses video, “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” all the girls from the Geffen office wanted to be in the video. There’s a scene with a guy on a dolly, pulling focus or something. He worked at MTV. Alan said we needed to put him in the video because he was part of the team that could make sure the video got played.
There’d been two previous attempts to shoot “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” We had the location and the crew booked, but the band was unable to appear because they were “ill.” I was quite happy, because I got paid each time.
DOUG GOLDSTEIN: Axl left some of the best of ’em waiting. He left the Rolling Stones waiting for a sound check. In late ’89, Niven took Axl to do a pay-per-view show in Atlantic City and he kept banging on Axl’s door. Axl said, “The longer you pound, the longer I’m gonna take.” Two hours later, Axl walks onstage and Mick Jagger is staring at him. And Keith Richards says, “I slept inside of a chandelier last night. What’s your excuse?”
JOHN CANNELLI: I’m in the “Sweet Child O’ Mine” video. I was there when they shot it, and they asked me to be in it. I’m like, “I can’t be in your video. People already accuse me of being on your payroll.” So they put me on a dolly and shot me so you can’t see my face. I have a clear recollection: It was the same day we shot Cher for the final “I Want My MTV” ad campaign, and she won the Oscar for Moonstruck.
DOUG GOLDSTEIN: “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is about Erin Everly, so it was important to Axl to have her in the video. He didn’t want to cause any shit with the rest of the guys by excluding their girlfriends: Angie, who was Izzy’s girlfriend; Mindy, who was married to Duff; and Cheryl Swiderski, Steven’s wife, are also in the video.
STEVEN ADLER: The girlfriends and wives, they didn’t demand to be in the video, but it was something that wasn’t said and had to be done. Everybody’s got a wife or a girlfriend in the video—except Izzy, who’s there with his dog. Or maybe that was his girlfriend.
NIGEL DICK: The idea for “Sweet Child O’ Mine” was simple. After the first couple of takes, I thought, God, this is awful. It’s so dull. Some execs from Geffen were standing behind me, going, “This is so fucking cool.” I’m thinking, I’m shooting a bunch of guys playing guitar. What’s special about this? But for whatever reason, people thought it was the hottest thing in the world. There’s nothing remarkable about the video at all, except, of course, for the band. Which is exactly how it should be.
DOUG GOLDSTEIN: MTV liked “Sweet Child O’ Mine” a lot. Cannelli was on-site, which he seemed to be for most of our videos in the early days. He said, “It’s a great video, Doug. We’re going to play it.” And the label relaunched “Jungle” after that. So they had two songs being played regularly on MTV. And it just took off.
NIGEL DICK: Soon everyone at MTV was like, “Yeah, we’ve always loved Guns N’ Roses!”
ALAN NIVEN: On the first video, Axl didn’t have confidence in his ideas or how they could be applied. But once he’d done “Jungle,” now he was David Lean. For “Sweet Child,” he had an incredibly involved story line that he wanted to apply with his microscopic sense of myopic detail. So I asked Nigel Dick to give me a thumbnail budget, and he said it would be at least $250,000. I told Axl and said, “By the way, we’ve got $35,000.”
Nigel came up with a brilliant idea. Anyone on the set who had a spare five minutes could grab a windup Bolex camera and shoot B-roll. He had one of his staff sit there all night long, loading the Bolexes with 16mm film. Then we did two different edits of the video, so when “Sweet Child” took off and the first video reached burnout stage, I dropped version number two to Cannelli and extended the life of the song at MTV. The first version was a mix of color and black-and-white, and the second was entirely black-and-white except for the final shot, when Axl fades into color.
JOHN CANNELLI: There was an element of danger with Guns N’ Roses. They seemed fragile; there always seemed to be a crisis. But God, when you saw them perform . . . I booked them for a concert called Live at the Ritz, and the show was amazing.
STEVE BACKER: Guns N’ Roses gave MTV a second wind. Dana Marshall produced a live show with Guns N’ Roses from the Ritz. I went to MTV and there must have been twenty people hunched into her office, just to watch her edit raw footage of Guns N’ Roses.
ALAN NIVEN: MTV had a conflicted relationship with mainstream America. They were club-dwelling, Manhattan-living aficionados who were more comfortable with music coming out of London than with what played in Peoria or Birmingham. They played hard rock only because they wanted to pay the bills. It was selling records hand over fist at the time.
NIGEL DICK: “Paradise City” was the biggest video I’d ever done. It cost $200,000, $45,000 of which was a payment to the unions at Giants Stadium. They got $45,000 for carrying a hundred camera cases thirty yards from a parking lot into the stadium.
ALAN NIVEN: We went from $35,000 to a $250,000 budget, shooting with six cameras at Giants Stadium in front of 77,000 people. I wanted to show the scale of the band’s phenomenon. I needed the audience. And Axl is resplendent in his brand-new white leather jacket.
PETER BARON: There’s an “It’s So Easy” video we never released. It had Erin Everly, Axl’s wife, in bondage. She had a ball-gag in her mouth. It was a bad look for them.
STEVEN ADLER: I never saw that, but I’d like to. Erin was a fox.
RIKI RACHTMAN: Sometimes you can find it on YouTube. It was a great video, filmed at the Cathouse in black-and-white, with Erin shaking her butt. I have no idea why it wasn’t released. Maybe it was the ball-gag.
PETER BARON: The first Guns N’ Roses video I commissioned was “Patience.” Alan Niven sort of codirected those early videos with Nigel Dick. We shot the conceptual part at the Ambassador Hotel, and the performance in Hollywood. Of course Axl showed up about seven hours late. And Izzy was screwed up. Coke was dripping out of his nose, but he didn’t realize it because his whole face was numb.
NIGEL DICK: Mostly what I remember about that video is a shitload of chicks and a snake.
ALAN NIVEN: Izzy, who was in the depths of a cocaine habit that was destroying him, sat in a dark corner while we were filming. When we looked at the footage, Nigel and I agreed to minimize Izzy in the video, because he looked wretched. He got sober not long thereafter, but that video represents the nadir of Izzy’s cocaine habit. There were other moments when Slash was in dire condition, and moments when Steven was in dire condition. Those were the three that had the biggest problems with excess.
STEVEN ADLER: I was sitting there rolling joints. That was my whole gig in that video: light incense and roll joints. As for Izzy, if you look at the cover of Rolling Stone when we were on it in 1988, he’s sitting on the ground, and if you look at his wrists, you can see the track marks. He was doing drugs longer than anybody, but he ended up getting it togeth
er better than anybody, and then he left the band because he got clean and couldn’t be around us.
JOHN CANNELLI: One night, I was hanging out with Slash and his girlfriend in their hotel room. It was late, we’d been drinking, and she asked if I wanted to spend the night with them. I’m pretty sure she meant more than just sleep on the couch. Now, as far as I know, she was speaking only for herself. There’s no reason to think Slash was in on the offer. But I said, “Gee, thanks very much, but I think I gotta go now.”
DOUG GOLDSTEIN: When you’re dealing with two heroin addicts, a cocaine addict, and a bipolar lead singer, every day is mayhem. Well, three heroin addicts, actually: Izzy, too. But Izzy cleaned up midway through the Appetite tour. Rehab wasn’t working for some of the other guys, so I decided to sit in a hotel room for two weeks with Steven and give him sleeping pills, and clean up his puke and excrement. We went to the Orange Tree Resort in Arizona, and Steven is doing good, he’s about four days clean and sleeping until 4 P.M. because of the pills. I decide to go golfing, and when I get back to the hotel, there’s four ambulances, two fire engines, about fifteen cop cars, and three hundred people standing in a circle. Slash is there, naked. And bleeding. He’d come in overnight, to bring Steven heroin, I think. I told my security guy, “Earl, go to my room and get my briefcase.” I used to carry between $30,000 and $50,000 at all times, just for situations like this.
So I go, “Did anybody see anything here?” And a guy goes, “Yeah, I did.” So I walk away with him and he goes, “I saw him throw a maid to the ground.” I’m thinking, Okay, this is not good. I said, “I notice you got a little blood on your shirt. That’s, what, a $2,000 custom shirt?” He goes, “No, no.” I said, “Trust me, I know clothing. That’s a $2,000 shirt.” I bring out $2,000 and give it to him. “Think you’re okay going on with your day?” He said, “Yeah.”
The cops are cracking up because they can see I’m paying people off. I grabbed the hotel manager and said, “Give the maid $1,000 and an apology from us, please. What about the damage to the hotel?” He goes, “I’d say it was $700.” I said, “So another $2,000 will take care of that. Do you feel like pressing charges?” He goes, “No.”
This whole time, Steven is on his balcony, yelling at Slash: “You stupid heroin addict!” We got in the car as quick as we could and boogied. It probably cost $10,000, but I kept ’em out of jail.
TOM HUNTER: We’d had a show called Heavy Metal Mania, a weekly, hour-long dumping ground for metal videos, airing at 1 or 2 A.M. Then we started Headbangers Ball, made it a two-hour show, and ran it at midnight.
KEVIN SEAL: I hosted Headbangers Ball for a few months. I wore a leather jacket from wardrobe. These heavy metal people who try to induce concussions inside their own brains, I have a respect for that. But I’d never buy a record or go to a show. It made sense to have Adam Curry replace me. He had his own leather jacket.
ADAM CURRY: This is the big secret: Metal musicians were always professional, courteous, and gracious, happy that they were getting played on MTV.
GEORGE BRADT: I became an associate producer, and Headbangers Ball was one of my jobs. The metal bands were like businessmen. They were so excited to be on MTV, they’d do anything we said. No matter what the band’s reputation, they were nice and professional.
ADAM CURRY: If I’m recognized in public now, it’s always about Headbangers Ball. Sure, we had to play Bon Jovi videos. But Saturday at midnight, for three hours, we’d play Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden . . . It was a little niche when you could show crazy stuff, and I knew everyone was drinking beers and stoned. I would be on newsgroups, talking with fans. I always got asked, “Hey man, why are you playing Bon Jovi? This is our three hours.”
TOM HUNTER: The real genius happened when Doug Herzog had some of his guys take a look at the show. They wanted to get a host who had credibility with the audience. We needed a tattooed guy who hung with bands. And poof! We got Riki Rachtman.
TONY DiSANTO: I worked on Adam’s daily afternoon show Full Tilt. Adam used to call me his “boot-lickin’ lackey.” But it was all in fun. I also worked with him when he hosted Headbangers Ball. He’d wear a blazer for Full Tilt, and when it was time to tape Headbangers, he’d take off the blazer and put on a leather motorcycle jacket. Adam was bummed when they brought Riki on board to do Headbangers. Adam and Riki never became friends.
ADAM CURRY: I loved Headbangers Ball so much, and I was destroyed when Riki Rachtman took my job. He did his audition with Axl Rose. I was gone within a second.
I thought Riki was a douche bag, because I didn’t think he could do the job. He wasn’t a TV guy. I bumped into him years later at LAX. I was running a publicly listed company which I started. I had seven hundred employees; he was managing a porn star. I kinda felt good about that.
RIKI RACHTMAN: Put it this way, if you said “Riki Rachtman,” you thought Guns N’ Roses. If you said “Adam Curry,” you thought Bon Jovi. You wouldn’t picture Adam waking up in a gutter, but you knew I did. You wouldn’t picture Adam getting arrested, but I did. I was living the rock n’ roll lifestyle without ever picking up an instrument. I opened a club called the Cathouse in September 1986, a mile or two from the Sunset Strip in LA. I hate saying it, because I’m patting myself on the back, but it was the most important rock club of that era. Everyone played there: Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat, Black Crowes, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains. I didn’t see Headbangers Ball, because the chances of me being home on a Saturday night were nil. On Saturday, we got hammered.
I was with Guns N’ Roses when they got their record deal, all the way up to recording Appetite for Destruction, when all of a sudden they became the biggest rock band in the world. We’d see Adam Curry, and it didn’t make sense for him to be on Headbangers Ball. So Axl said, “Do you want to be a VJ on MTV? I’ll make a call.” I walked into my audition with Axl. Would I have gotten the VJ job without him? I doubt it. I had no TV experience—I had drinking experience, that’s all I had. I started hosting in January 1990—I wore a Motorhead shirt and a studded leather jacket with a blue circle for the Germs, because I wanted to hold on to my punk roots. I still don’t feel comfortable saying the word, but that show made me kind of famous.
I never had any say in what we played, and there were many videos I hated that did not belong on Headbangers Ball: Bon Jovi, Winger, Warrant, Slaughter, Firehouse, all the pretty, long-haired boys. I mean, we were even playing their ballads.
JOEY ALLEN: Riki was a bandwagon guy. Once you weren’t in vogue anymore, he was the first to say, “Oh, I hated that band.” That guy’s got no backbone.
JANI LANE: I had a good relationship with Riki, until grunge came along, and there was a huge backlash against hair metal. It wasn’t cool for his image to be palling around with us.
DAVE MUSTAINE: I had a good time as a correspondent for Headbangers Ball. But there was a sad sack hosting the show, this sap named Riki Rachtman. For some distorted reason, this guy liked for me to pick on him. And I didn’t know him well, so I couldn’t pick on him with any real fondness. I felt uncomfortable when I would do it, because I didn’t dislike him. I just wasn’t one of his friends, like a lot of guys who would come on the show.
Off the air, he seemed genuine. But on the air, he took on a kind of self-deprecating, slapstick approach, and I didn’t dig it. Towards the end, they took pity on us and let us do the show without Riki, since he had become a caricature of himself.
RIKI RACHTMAN: Dave had fun picking on me and putting me down, and I don’t mind being the butt of a joke. But the feud wasn’t real—I mean, he invited me to his wedding, we went skydiving together. Except for one time when he said onstage, “Why doesn’t Riki Rachtman just kill himself and put us out of the misery?” He did apologize, and then we were good friends.
LARS ULRICH: I’ve always liked Riki Rachtman. He was one of the kings of the LA nightclub scene, so there was a tremendous amount of respect. He was one of us. I mean, he made it easy to poke fun at him, but it was a nudge-n
udge, wink-wink type of thing.
CURT MARVIS: Metallica famously wasn’t interested in making videos, but Q Prime, their managers, asked if we could help Lars and James edit footage for a long-form home video called Cliff’Em All. So they were constantly in our offices. Lars and James would buy a case of this shitty beer called Meister Bräu, for $4. And they would go through a case of beer in—I’m not kidding—an hour. Then they’d go across the street and buy another case. I never saw them eat.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN: Metallica were anti-everything. That whole positive social mood of the ’80s? Fuck that. It was embodied in their attitude toward videos: We’re not going to make videos; that’s for fuckin’ posers.
