I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  LARS ULRICH: We had a lot of contrary energy. And we were fueled by a lot of booze and spunk. We’d had conversations about videos for “Fade to Black,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Master of Puppets.” We were trying to keep the band mysterious, and we felt there was an underlying purity to the whole thing that would be compromised by making a video.

  But we were on tour in Paris, in a dressing room with our managers Cliff and Peter, and they started talking about the song “One,” and about the movie Johnny Got His Gun, based on a book by Dalton Trumbo. And we thought that might be an idea worth embracing in a video. We’d use the movie footage, and then intercut band performance—but without really showing our faces. If you watch that video, there are a lot of shoulders and arms. We were proud to have struck the right balance between our own feelings about video and the commercial demands. We didn’t think of it as a particularly accessible video.

  WAYNE ISHAM: I’d been a Metallica fan since Ride the Lightning, I thought they were fucking awesome. I kept begging Robin Sloane to let me do a video for them. The opportunity came with “One,” but I couldn’t figure out how to combine the footage from Johnny Got His Gun with performance footage. I choked.

  ROBIN SLOANE: At the “One” video, James Hetfield had a sticker on his guitar that read, F-U-K BON JOVI. I said, “You have to cover that up, or MTV will not play this.” He looked at me, like, “Who the fuck are you? Give me some beer.” He refused to cover it. So I told the director, Bill Pope, to shoot in a way that no one can see the sticker.

  CLIFF BURNSTEIN: We gave MTV a seven-minute video. It was totally outside what they would normally play, so we asked for just one play, at night, but promoted. Like, “Metallica’s never made a video before, it’s seven minutes long, and we’re going to show it at a certain time.” We had only $25,000 invested in it. They played it once, at night, and the next afternoon, it was their second-most-requested video.

  JULIANA ROBERTS, producer: Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein are geniuses. They still fly coach. Cliff’s suitcase is a plastic bag. And he’s the smartest person I know.

  LARS ULRICH: The rise of “One” was amazing. We were in San Antonio in February of ’89. It was a Monday and we had a day off. Monday was the day that MTV’s countdown show—was it called Dial MTV?—would air that week’s newly eligible videos. “One” had been played once or twice over the past weekend. And that day, “One” entered Dial MTV at number one. We were stunned. We knocked off Bon Jovi. It was like we landed on another planet.

  I’ll say it hand on heart: We became MTV whores.

  STEVE SCHNUR: When Metallica made their video for “One,” they had really never been on more than seven or eight radio stations across America, but they filled arenas. This was when MTV used to do the Top 10 countdown in the afternoon. I remember calling Abbey Konowitch and saying, “I’m going to deliver you Metallica’s first video. And I’m telling you right now, as cocky as this might sound, it will be your number one most requested video before you even play it.” And Abbey was like, “What are you talking about?” To make it even more difficult, the video barely even had Metallica in it. He wouldn’t add it at first, even though, as I predicted, it was MTV’s most requested video. Metallica was too scary. MTV looked weak, just playing it in the overnight, at 2 A.M. And inevitably “One” became the number one video in the countdown.

  CLIFF BURNSTEIN: After seeing what the “One” video did for them, Metallica were just as interested in making videos as everybody else was.

  LARS ULRICH: When we started working with Bob Rock on The Black Album, and making records that sounded bigger, we wanted to widen our horizons and move on to more established directors. And Wayne Isham was by far the number one guy in rock videos. Some of these video directors are failed film guys, and they can be pretty full of themselves, pretty aloof, pretty contrived. Pretty full of shit, generally. But Wayne had this childlike excitement that just makes you want to go at it together.

  WAYNE ISHAM: For “Enter Sandman,” we all sat around a hotel room talking about our worst nightmares. Cliff Burnstein had the nightmare of being naked in front of a roomful of people. Mine is always about falling. And the video just went from there.

  LARS ULRICH: Running on the edge of a building, I think that was my nightmare. I’m not comfortable with heights.

  ADAM DUBIN: I was on the set of that video. Videos serve a purpose. They’re actually sales pieces for the band. You cover that up with as much art as you can, but still, it has to be serviceable. “Enter Sandman” was a new sound for Metallica—a shorter song, very catchy—and it’s basically about nightmares, so it’s not as intricate as some of James Hetfield’s other lyrics. Wayne delivered a straight-ahead video, with people falling and trucks coming at you. It works.

  WAYNE ISHAM: There were two stunt kids on the set. Troy Robinson was the kid who was in bed and then starts running to get out of the way of a truck. He was just incredible. His dad was Dar Robinson, one of the most famous stuntmen in history, who’d been killed on a set a few years earlier. When Troy’s running out in front of the speeding truck, and he leaps out of the way just in time? His father’s stunt friends were right there running with him.

  LARS ULRICH: Peter Mensch came up with the idea of documenting the making of The Black Album. We ended up making this film called A Year-and-a-Half in the Life of Metallica.

  ADAM DUBIN: I was told I had to convince them to do it. I felt like a lamb to slaughter. These guys were tough. They were the anti-MTV band. James Hetfield plopped down in a chair—he’s tall, he’s big, he’s Viking Lord Hetfield—and it’s almost like the way Lincoln’s sitting in the Lincoln Memorial. I start to explain how important it is that they document what they’re about to do. James just laughs, like a fuck-you laugh. He’s glowering at me. I realized I was getting shoved out the door, so I said, “Look, let me get a camera and shoot. I’ll show you the footage. If you don’t like it, I’ll go home.”

  I started filming in November of 1990. The record was supposed to be done in February. With Metallica, nothing is by schedule and everything costs twice as much. So I wound up living in recording studios with those guys for ten months.

  LARS ULRICH: We were pretty obnoxious back then. A guy named Lonn Friend, who ran the metal magazine RIP, was chronicling the making of The Black Album for his zine, so he was hanging around us a lot. RIP was owned by Larry Flynt, and every time Lonn would come down to the studio he’d bring us tons of RIPs, tons of Hustlers, tons of Barely Legals and Over 45s, and different fetish and gay magazines. We were a bunch of twenty-four-year-olds. So we’d rip out pictures and pin them to the walls of the studio. Some dude with a fourteen-inch cock would go up, and then some naked forty-five-year-old woman. And on an impulse, a picture of Kip Winger ended up on the studio dartboard. Adam Dubin was there shooting, and it ended up in the Year-and-a-Half in the Life of Metallica documentary and in the “Nothing Else Matters” video.

  KIP WINGER: My guitarist was like, “Hey, have you seen the new Metallica video? They’re throwing darts at your poster.” And I thought, Wow, that really sucks.

  LARS ULRICH: I’ve heard over the years from a number of people that Kip Winger didn’t think that was particularly funny. I didn’t have an issue with him personally—but he represented the opposite of what we were. And we were very much an “us vs. them” band. To me, they represented image before music, looks before credibility. It certainly wasn’t personal. It was never Kip Winger’s a fucking cunt. It was more Look at this guy’s hair.

  Chapter 39

  “THOSE HAREM PANTS CAME OUT OF NOWHERE”

  RAP BUSTS A MOVE INTO THE MTV MAINSTREAM

  SOON AFTER YO! DEBUTED, TV WENT BLACK: STARTing in early ’89, comedian Arsenio Hall’s talk show darkened the complexion of late night and regularly gave a spotlight to rappers; In Living Color introduced the idea of a black Saturday Night Live (complete with a token white cast member) and brought hip-hop dance and graphics to prime time; and Will Smith, wh
ose charming disposition had helped ease rap onto MTV, became a bigger star via The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Rap hadn’t just entered the mainstream—it had taken over.

  TAMRA DAVIS: Tone-Lōc’s “Wild Thing” was my first rap video. Matt Dike, who co-owned the Delicious Vinyl label with Mike Ross, was my best friend, and he wanted to rip off the Robert Palmer video “Addicted to Love.”

  MIKE ROSS, record executive: “Wild Thing” is a comedy about trying to get a chick into bed. Matt came up with the idea, and Tamra was willing to make a video really cheap. We’d never shot a video before. The idea was to put Tone in a suit, the way Robert Palmer’s in a suit, with the hot zombie chicks all around him. But he wouldn’t do it. I mean, he was a real gangster—a Rollin’ 60 Crip from Los Angeles. So he put on a Delicious Vinyl shirt, and it was the right move. All of a sudden, when the lights were on, Tone was funny and charismatic—a natural. We didn’t know he could turn it on like that.

  TAMRA DAVIS: We had no idea that Tone-Lōc was, like, a superstar. He had charisma. We hired some girls we knew from clubs—Cat, who’s a very famous English model; Annabella, a beautiful French model; Jade, who was Matt’s girlfriend; and Lisa Ann Cabasa, who’s Hawaiian and Puerto Rican. Matt and I were in a club and we saw Lisa Ann dancing, and she had the best ass we’d ever seen. She dated Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys for a while, and then she was with [surfer] Kelly Slater for five years.

  MIKE ROSS: Jade’s playing bass, Annabella’s playing guitar, Kat’s on keyboards, and Lisa Ann’s on tambourine. Tone’s DJ, M-Walk, wouldn’t do the close-up shot of the DJ scratching a record, because he thought we were clowning him. This other guy we were working with said, “I’ll do it.” So two different guys play Tone-Lōc’s DJ in “Wild Thing.” The budget was around $450, which probably went into catering and weed. Everything else was free. No one got paid.

  TAMRA DAVIS: I used three rolls of 16mm film and two rolls of Super 8, so my budget was $200. In those days, videos were ruled by money. I shot it myself on a handheld Bolex camera, and I did a double exposure that was right out of film school.

  We got a call from MTV, and thought for sure we were in trouble. Nobody had seen black and white people mixing together like that, especially black men. Matt said, “There’s no way MTV is going to show a black guy pumping up against a white girl.” But it was the most played video of the year, hands down. Every kid knew that video.

  MIKE ROSS: It didn’t look like anything else on MTV. We’d seen six rap videos on MTV, and four of them were by Run-DMC. To us, MTV was hair metal and Haircut 100 videos. So that wasn’t our focus. But all of a sudden, here’s a small label on the West Coast that out of nowhere has a video in heavy rotation. We were a couple of white guys in a dingy studio on Santa Monica Blvd. who’d gone global in the blink of an eye.

  YOUNG MC: We knew there was some importance to my “Bust a Move” video, because Tone-Lōc had such success with “Wild Thing.” The idea was to have me in the foreground, narrating the song, like Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone, and in the background to show the characters as I was speaking about them. It was one of the most literal videos ever shot. “Bust a Move” was a juggernaut. It was on the charts for forty weeks, which was pretty much unprecedented.

  MIKE ROSS: “Bust a Move” isn’t as good as “Wild Thing.” It was almost a year later. You can never recapture that initial energy. Young was a little awkward in front of the camera, so we created a lot of action around him. And there was some drama on the set—Lisa Ann, who was dating Adam Yauch, was the star of that video, but she was crying hysterically. Yauch was on the phone with her, and they weren’t getting along—I think he wasn’t happy that she was in our video, or he wanted her to be in his video.

  After “Wild Thing,” MTV wanted to start spiking hip-hop videos. And we gave them black artists they could play. Our videos weren’t super-safe, like “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” but it’s not anything they were gonna take shit for playing, like N.W.A.

  TAMRA DAVIS: This was before I directed Billy Madison and CB4, but I was already trying to work on comedy. Yes, the girls are in short skirts and I’m filming up their dresses, but they’re having a good time. The shot of the girl in the hot pants is straight out of Starsky & Hutch.

  MIKE ROSS: Cindy Leer is wearing the stop-go shorts, like a little version of Marilyn Monroe. She was in the Ramones video “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and was a local LA phenomenon.

  YOUNG MC: Flea is wearing pants that look like they’re adorned with a child’s toys. I wasn’t there, but the story was that he bobbed his head so much that he threw up. He was really going at it.

  MIKE ROSS: Flea’s standing on top of a truck, going berserk and violently rocking his bass. I don’t know if he was hungover or what, but he blew chow in between takes. This was before the Chili Peppers had really busted out. That’s the beauty of Flea—he’s all or nothing.

  ADAM HOROVITZ: When it came time to make a video for Paul’s Boutique, we got to pick a director. I liked a couple of videos from They Might Be Giants, so I said, “Let’s find that guy,” and that’s how we got Adam Bernstein to direct “Hey Ladies.” We threw in every stupid ’70s reference we could think of. Mike’s dressed as John Travolta. I give Bella Abzug a high five.

  We were living in a house on Mulholland Drive that we’d rented from a Hollywood filmmaker couple, Alex and Marilyn Grasshoff. The Grasshoffs had a huge walk-in closet that was locked, so we picked the lock, and inside were all Marilyn Grasshoff’s clothes from the ’70s. I mean, it was a gold mine: fur coats, fur hats, crazy leather pants. So we were wearing her clothes in the video.

  SHOCK G, Digital Underground: The shoot for “Doowutchyalike” was a true and real party first, a video shoot second. We rented out a hotel in downtown Oakland—the entire hotel—and threw a wild three-day party, Friday though Sunday. To give you an idea of how much fun it was, it wound up costing twice the approved budget to finish. Every time we ran out of dough, the video rep who was on the scene would call the label and say, “This is gonna be bananas! You gotta send more money and let us finish!”

  “Doowutchyalike” was voted number forty on MTV’s Top 100 video countdown of 1989. Then “The Humpty Dance” was a hit with MTV, but damn near every other sentence was bleeped out, anything with a sexual reference. We were baffled, because there’s not a single cuss word in the entire song. Meanwhile, songs that boasted mad violence and murder were left uncensored—which makes perfect sense when you think about it. It’s not robbers and killers that make the world unsafe, it’s all those dang 69 rear ticklers. The even-more-backwards thing was, the bleeps made it seem more offensive. “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom” became “I once got busy in a muthafuckin’ bathroom” after your mind filled in the blanks.

  RUPERT WAINWRIGHT, director: When I started, I didn’t really like rap. I was like, God, this is annoying. There weren’t many black directors around. And almost exclusively doing black videos. For two or three years, people thought Rupert Wainwright was some black dude, until I got better known. At first, my friends would go, “You’re doing a rap video? Oh, I’m sorry.” They thought I was a nerd because I wasn’t directing Whitesnake videos. Six months later, all the white boys on the West Coast suddenly became black.

  We got a call to do a band I hadn’t heard of, N.W.A. I listened to “Straight Outta Compton,” and it had a good beat. For the video, I came up with the idea of a revolution in Compton, panic in the streets, stuff like that. Then I listened to the song a little harder. And I realized, this could actually cause a riot. So I flipped the idea on its head, and we shot a police sweep, which made N.W.A look like the victims of police brutality.

  We were shooting in the LA River, a concrete culvert about a hundred meters wide and twenty meters high, where four inches of water travels through. Three hundred people were watching from the overpasses and bridges. It was a hot day, and I said to Eazy-E, “Do you want to change what you’re wearing? You must be kind of hot. Do you want
to take the jacket off?” And he pulled down the top part of his jacket, revealing a bulletproof vest. I wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest. So I realized, I needed to dress appropriately when around Eazy.

  Here’s what would typically happen with N.W.A: We would meet at Jerry’s Famous Deli for, like, three hours while I went through the video concepts. I’d get a sense of consensus and then there’d be a quiet voice from the corner: “No, man, it’s wack.” I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. “It’s wack.” And everyone else would turn and go, “Yeah, man, it’s wack.” But five minutes ago you all loved it.

  Then Eazy would get up, throw the bill at me, and say, “You pick it up, white boy.” I probably would have picked it up anyway, but I didn’t need it thrown in my face. And Dr. Dre was always the one who’d come along and say, “I’m really sorry, he’s just a bit tense right now.” Dre had the best manners and was always kind of apologizing for Eazy.

  Nobody in N.W.A fucking coughed or farted without Eazy’s permission. It was weird. Dre was the musical genius of the group. Ice Cube was a great rapper. But the group was totally in Eazy’s control. He’d make a decision and bang, that was it. There was no dispute.