by Craig Marks
There was a moment when “Every Little Step” was gonna be more elaborate. We met at the Sunset Marquis in LA, and I guess some gang had threatened Bobby’s life. Me, Liz Heller, Bobby, and Bobby’s brother were talking, and all of a sudden the bodyguard goes, “Everybody down!” And we’re on the ground at the fucking hotel, still talking about the video concept.
My videos were an integral part of creating Bobby’s brand, and when all was said and done, I made maybe $80,000 for, like, seven videos. That was before taxes. So I walked away. In 1992, when he had another album, Bobby’s people were coming back, like, “We have a $500,000 budget.” “We have $600,000.” “We’ll pick you up in a limo.” By that point, I’d heard the stories of what he was like, and I just wasn’t interested.
LIONEL MARTIN: I loved Bobby Brown from the beginning. He was cocky and spoke his piece. Bobby was like Flavor Flav. He’d show up late, and he had an entourage. He was a major star, and he was just about to marry Whitney Houston. The things he did were kind of crazy. It was a big part of his performances at the time to take his shirt off, even though he had a bit of a belly. In the “Humpin’ Around” video I did, he was in an elevator with a beautiful girl, one of the Fly Girls from In Living Color. His hands were all over the place. I mean, I turned red. But he didn’t care. Girls were coming up to us during casting, like, “We’ll do it for free, we just want to be in the video.” He had a lot of juice.
ANDY MORAHAN: When I worked with Bobby and Whitney, they’d just had a baby and they were sweet and happy. They weren’t crazy drug addicts. Although at the end of the shoot, Whitney went home with the baby and Bobby came out drinking with us in Miami, and we had to pull him out of a potential fight.
LIONEL MARTIN: Somebody called me from Arista’s video department: “Lionel, we’re thinking about doing a Whitney Houston video, and we’re looking at you, Ernest Dickerson, and Spike Lee.” I was insulted. And I said, “You should go with Ernest, he’s really good.” Click. I hung up the phone. I had this swagger, because I’d done a lot of hip-hop videos. They called me back five minutes later. I said, “No, seriously, I’m too busy right now.” To do an R&B video for Whitney Houston wasn’t something I was excited about.
They flew me to Ohio to meet her, so I guess the cockiness paid off. We sat down and were kind of staring each other down. She said, “I’ve heard some things about you.” I said, “Well, I’ve heard some things about you, too.” She said, “I’ve heard you’re kind of arrogant.” I said, “I heard you were a bitch to work with.” That broke the ice right there, she started laughing and talking. And she hired me.
JULIEN TEMPLE: Whitney Houston was very much her own person. She was much less subordinate to the record company than I’d thought she’d be. We shot part of “I’m Your Baby Tonight” at a park on the Hudson River, on New York’s west side. When I got there the record company had put up all these black drapes along the middle of the park where we were shooting—huge, five-hundred-meter runners. I said, “What the hell are you doing that for?” And they said, “We didn’t want Miss Houston to see the homeless people in the park.” When she got there, she went mad. She said, “What the fuck’s going on? Take those down. What do you think I am?” It was fantastic.
Chapter 43
“YOUR MANAGER’S AN ASSHOLE”
FISTFIGHTS AND PYRO FARTS: WAR BREAKS OUT AT THE MOSCOW PEACE FESTIVAL
ADAM CURRY: Doc McGhee had gotten busted for importing a huge amount of marijuana. His get-out-of-jail-free card was creating an anti-drug, anti-alcohol concert in Moscow. We left from Newark Airport and everyone was hammered. Ozzy had to take a piss and someone was in the lavatory, so he pissed his pants right there. He’s like, “Sharon!”
DOC McGHEE: My conviction had nothing to do with the Moscow concert, okay? I mean, no judge says, “Oh, for being involved in a conspiracy to smuggle seventy thousand pounds of pot into the U.S., you have to put on a concert in Moscow.” They don’t say stuff like that. We always wanted to go to Moscow and do the first rock show in the Soviet Union. I wanted to do their Woodstock. Remember, I had gone through rehabs with Mötley and family members, so I said, “Let’s do this for kids that are being fried in the brain by electroshock therapy.” Because that’s the way they treated kids who abused drugs and alcohol. So how are they going to say no to us, if the proceeds from the show go to the Make A Difference Foundation, which I started, and we bring doctors to teach them how to treat addiction? It didn’t count for anything in court. It didn’t help me—except that it helped me personally, because it was the first rock show ever on Russian television, and it was televised in fifty-two countries.
We couldn’t get permits. Russian officials would say, “Sure, this is a great idea,” but nobody would stick their neck out and sanction it. We never had a permit to do anything. I brought sixty-four tractor-trailers into Russia with no permits. That show was absolutely insane. I almost had a nervous breakdown.
TOMMY LEE: This was the one time when all four of us in Mötley Crüe were sober. And everyone else on the airplane was drinking, doing blow, everything. Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath commandeered the liquor cart and was rolling it up and down the aisle. Ozzy had passed out in his seat. We were in agony because everyone was partying except us.
SEBASTIAN BACH: Zakk Wylde smuggled in Jack Daniel’s, and we were drinking it in the back. Geezer Butler was yelling, “Why the fuck am I playing in Russia? I should be at home with my kids.” Then he picked up the food cart and ran down the middle of the plane.
JOHN CANNELLI: I was on the private jet that transported all the artists from Newark Airport. Richie Sambora was dating Cher, who said to me, “Take good care of my honey!” There was really bad tension between Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. Mötley thought Bon Jovi were pussies.
ADAM CURRY: Before the broadcast went up to the satellite, it had to go through the Russian censors. They had a gray Volkswagen bus—that was the KGB. At that moment, I knew the Cold War was bullshit, because these guys had no technology.
DOC McGHEE: In that era, you could do the craziest shit, all around the world. I owned it. I was the fucking ringleader. Wayne Isham filmed himself pissing in front of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, in the middle of the night, singing “God Bless America” with the Russian flag flying in the background.
ADAM CURRY: A couple of us went to the hooker boat—a boat that had hookers. But everyone was like, “Let’s leave. These are not our kind of hookers.”
JONATHAN DAYTON: Wayne Isham was directing the live shoot and he hired us to come with him to Moscow. We ended up working for three days straight. At one point, I thought Val had died. She passed out and Russian paramedics had to come.
VALERIE FARIS: We had gone seventy-two hours without sleeping, and I was exhausted. A Russian paramedic stuck his finger down my throat to gag me, and I woke up.
There was a group of kids in Moscow that did tattoos with ballpoint pens and electric shavers, like a prison tattoo. We arranged for the guys in Skid Row to get tattoos, and the doctor who was with the tour advised against it. He thought they might catch hepatitis. The Russian kids were laughing that a heavy metal band was scared to get tattoos.
SEBASTIAN BACH: We were on at 1 P.M. So by one-thirty, I was getting fucked up. I could barely stand, and Doc’s brother Scott took my bottle from me. I was walking around, looking for booze, while Doc was doing a press conference against alcohol and drugs. I burst in screaming, “Somebody get me a bottle of vodka.” While Doc is talking about not drinking!
Doc’s brother Scott McGhee ran at me—he’s an ex–football player, for the Chicago Bears—and I ran to my dressing room and shut the door. He kicked the door down and put his knee into my throat, going, “You motherfucker. I love you so much, man. You can’t do that.” He’s crying, my tour manager—also an ex–football player—is crying. We’re all crying, the dressing room is destroyed, I’m fucking shit-faced. Those were some good times.
TOMMY LEE: We were told there would be no pyro�
��none of the bands were allowed to use it. And Mötley was synonymous with pyro. Then Bon Jovi started their set and they had these big explosions. I ran around the arena to the backstage area and saw Doc. He said, “What?” I ran at him and hit him in the chest. He went flying through the air. I said, “Tomorrow, when you wake up, you can get a job managing the Chipmunks, because you do not manage Mötley Crüe anymore.” And that was it.
SEBASTIAN BACH: I was right there. Tommy said to me, “Your manager’s a fucking asshole.” Then he grabbed my bottle of vodka and chugged it—I mean, like, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp—ran over to Doc, and punched him in the head. Doc was walking around with tears in his eyes. It was a bad fucking scene. Mötley wouldn’t fly back in the same plane with Doc.
DOC McGHEE: Mötley felt like I fucked them, which I didn’t. There was a malfunction—one tiny piece of pyro went off on one side of Lenin Stadium. It was a popcorn fart. I was backstage, and I didn’t even hear it. When Tommy came at me, I was shocked. I had no idea what he was talking about.
We were all kinda burned out. Nikki almost died of an overdose a year and a half before that. Vince had killed a kid in a car crash with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks, and crippled two other kids. I mean, the catshit was piling up. And when the catshit gets bigger than the cat, you’ve got to get rid of the cat.
ADAM CURRY: On the way back, everyone was ripped from this ten-day journey. Jon Bon Jovi had his personal doctor along for the ride, and he started handing out yellow pills. It was Halcion. A few years later, Halcion was taken off the market in some countries because people were committing suicide. We certainly slept, but I was fucked up for a week.
Chapter 44
“KERMIT UNPLUGGED”
AN ACOUSTIC MUSIC SHOW MORPHS INTO A WORLDWIDE MEGABRAND
MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO DESPISED MTV CITED the channel’s preference for pageantry over authenticity, which had been the measure of all musical acts until the end of the ’70s. Authenticity meant Bob Dylan, aiming his songs against violence, injustice, the government, and conformity. In the video universe, it didn’t matter if you wrote your own songs or performed with the assistance of dancers and prerecorded vocals—Paula Abdul and Bruce Springsteen might equally make a great video. MTV grew more confident in its beliefs as time passed, until pageantry became almost the entirety of the channel: lip-syncing Germans, rappers who danced better than they rapped, rock bands whose hair was better than their music, and millionaires whose new songs doubled as beer or soda commercials. MTV needed some balance, and it came from two producers who didn’t work at the channel and were disgusted that “hot chicks and cute boys” now ruled the music business.
JIM BURNS, TV producer: Bob Small and I went to a Bruce Springsteen show at Madison Square Garden, and Bruce kept getting called out to do encores. The last encore, he came out alone, sat down on a stool, and sang and played an acoustic guitar. As we were leaving, I said to Bob, “You know, I think that could be a show.”
I’ve known Bob since 1970, when I was a freshman in college and we worked on the same political campaign for two weeks. My mother got me a job on Wall Street, then she got me a job at the Metropolitan Museum. But I’d always wanted to be in show business.
BOB SMALL, TV producer: I’d been a roadie in college: Bowie, during the East Coast leg of the “Diamond Dogs” tour, Jefferson Starship, Peter Frampton, Elvis Costello’s first American appearance. I did a couple of Brecht plays, and after I realized, This is where the girls hang out, I became a theater major. You see Threepenny Opera and then you see Bowie, and you see a connection. I was driving a cab, working in off-Broadway theaters, and hanging lights with Mark Brickman.
JIM BURNS: We sublet space from Fred/Alan, the advertising agency for MTV Networks. We were their in-house production company, and we did specials for HBO and Lifetime. And we wanted to start pitching shows.
BOB SMALL: We pitched an acoustic music show. They said, “Well, folk music doesn’t work on MTV.” We tried to explain, it’s not folk music. I’m an old hippie. Music shouldn’t be reduced to how cute you are, or how clever the filmmaker is. I directed music videos, and the labels would say, “Could you stretch the video and make them look thinner?” You didn’t see fat guys with beards on MTV, you saw hot chicks and cute boys. There are other things besides pop music. I’ve got a big mouth, so I kept pursuing it.
JIM BURNS: Our one ally at MTV was Judy McGrath. She had us pitch the show to two or three different people, and nobody liked it. They kept turning us down. We also pitched it to PBS, who didn’t like the show. Then Judy got some added responsibilities, took over the running of the studios, and she said, “I have a little bit of money. Can you shoot a pilot in the VH1 studios?”
JUDY McGRATH: When they came in with the idea, they said everybody told them MTV would never do the show. The minute I heard it, I knew it would be fantastic for us.
BOB SMALL: Yo! MTV Raps had just started. It was the height of metal. Nobody took out an acoustic guitar. It just didn’t happen. Nobody believed in Unplugged. We had four hours to set up the pilot, and four hours to shoot it. The budget was like $18,000. I couldn’t get money to hire a director. They said, “You direct it.” I was carrying drapes and hanging them on the set. We couldn’t get people there. If you look at the first few shows, the makeup person and the PAs are sitting in the audience. I remember handing out cards in the street, “Come see Sinead O’Connor.”
JIM BURNS: It’s a simple idea, which is why a lot of people take credit for it.
JOEL GALLEN: Unplugged was my baby. It sort of started at the ’89 VMAs, with Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora sitting down with acoustic guitars, doing “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “Wanted Dead or Alive.” That was the jumping-off point. Unplugged came from an outside production company. I was the one who said, “In order for this to be very MTV, we have to do what Jon and Richie did. We have to find big rock bands who are normally loud and electric, and strip it all away and have them play acoustic. That would be cool.”
ABBEY KONOWITCH: I needed Bon Jovi to be on the VMAs in 1989. Doc McGhee said, “There’s no way they can do it. The band isn’t even together on that date. A couple of the guys are in Europe.” I said, “I really need them.” Doc said, “I can’t make it happen.” So I said, “If Johnny and Richie sat in the middle of the stage without the band and did ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ acoustic, it would be as good as having Bon Jovi on the show.” So they played “Wanted Dead or Alive” in the middle of the stage at the MTV Awards, acoustic, and it was the showstopper.
ALEX COLETTI: Jon Bon Jovi thinks he created Unplugged, but Bob and Jim had a development deal in place for months. A thousand people claim they created Unplugged.
BOB SMALL: Please do not credit Bon Jovi for creating Unplugged. Jon Bon Jovi thinks he was the inspiration for it. He wouldn’t even do the fucking show until 2007.
JIM BURNS: The VMAs happened in the first week of September 1989, and Joel Gallen—who was executive producer on Unplugged as well as as the VMAs—suggested to Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora that they do an acoustic set at the VMAs. It was a success, people liked it, and that did help sell Unplugged to the network. But Jon did not create the show. The credit says, “Created by Jim Burns and Bob Small.”
BOB SMALL: Joel Gallen was upset that Jim and I got the “Created by” credit. He went after us with a vengeance. I have faxes from him saying, “You can’t say this to the press.” He successfully took center stage. By the time the show was getting nominated for Emmys, you would think it was all him. Taking our producer credit away eliminated us from being on the Emmy list. I have said that to him many times, to his face.
JIM BURNS: Bob and I created the show. We sold the show to MTV. Joel did a great job as executive producer, I can’t fault him on the work he did. But he has claimed credit for creating it. It’s really a character flaw. That’s my grievance with Joel. There was always tension between us.
ALEX COLETTI: The fifth episode was billed as Joe Walsh and Frie
nds, and Joe showed up with only one friend—Ricky, his bass player. We thought it meant his famous friends, but apparently that got lost in translation. Bob Small found Dr. John in the bathroom at National Studios—he was appearing on Carol Leifer’s talk show. We rolled in a piano, and Dr. John and Walsh did the Eagles song “Desperado.”
JOEL GALLEN: Joe Walsh was our breakthrough show. He played “Desperado,” and Don Henley, who wrote the song, wouldn’t give us permission to air it. Abbey Konowitch reached out to him, and Henley sent back a three-page fax about why he didn’t want Joe Walsh performing the song. We said to Don, “Why don’t you come on and perform ‘Desperado’ the way it should be?”
JIM BURNS: Before that, the show was two groups doing a couple of songs each, then doing a song together. Jules Shear was the host. But when Henley came on, he didn’t want to play with anybody else. And Jules was very awkward with Henley. That’s really when it changed.
