I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  BOB SMALL: Don Henley kept an audience waiting outside in the sun in LA for four hours while they tuned a piano to his liking.

  JOEL GALLEN: Once Henley did Unplugged, more people took notice. We got a call from Capitol Records saying Paul McCartney wanted to do it. I said, “Let’s have this be the first one-hour Unplugged.” Until that point, we only did half-hour Unpluggeds.

  We went to London in January 1991, when the first Gulf War was under way. We flew over about four days before the taping and drove to McCartney’s farmhouse, north of London. He had a barn he’d turned into his rehearsal space. Paul said, “Okay, Joel, let me run the set for you.” He and his band did twenty-two songs, and something like nineteen of them were Beatles songs. “And I Love Her,” “We Can Work It Out,” “Blackbird.” And on the Beatles songs, he’s reading the lyrics off pieces of paper. I said, “Paul, when we do the show, you’re not gonna need a music stand, are you?” He explained that he hadn’t performed many of these songs since he’d recorded them, because the Beatles stopped touring so early. There’s a charming moment in the show where he botched the lyrics to “We Can Work It Out.” He actually stopped it and had to start again.

  BOB SMALL: During the Aerosmith taping, there was a girl between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry whose panties you could see on camera. Apparently, when McCartney did the show, he said, “Make sure that doesn’t happen to me.” We had Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Steve Stills’s throat closed up the day of the show. David Crosby said to me, “Listen, I don’t care if you stitch his mouth together, if you put a hot girl in the front row, he’ll sing.” So we did that.

  ROBERT SMITH: The only time I’ve been nervous about performing was MTV Unplugged. It was so stripped down and bare, and the audience was so close. There was no escape. It was one of the best things we ever did, actually.

  JIM BURNS: The most difficult Unplugged was Neil Young. We shot him at the Ed Sullivan Theater, the same night we shot Aerosmith. Neil was onstage, he was singing, and suddenly, for whatever reason, he got agitated and ran outside. He ran down Broadway, and Alex Coletti ran after him. Neil never came back to finish the show.

  BOB SMALL: Neil came running out of the Ed Sullivan Theater and jumped over a police barrier. I said, “I think we’ve got a problem.”

  JIM BURNS: Elton John kept people waiting for hours. We had a piano tuner come in, but at rehearsal, Elton said, “It’s out of tune.” So the piano tuner started from the beginning again. After an hour, Elton said, “No, it’s still out of tune.” Another three hours, Elton came out, played the piano, and said, “No, there’s still a little problem.” Finally, he said, “When I was starting out, I played in bars that didn’t have half these keys. Let’s just do it.”

  The biggest star behavior I saw was Mariah Carey. She had a hair person, of course; a makeup person, of course; a costume person, of course; and a woman who made tea for her.

  BOB SMALL: When Mariah Carey came in with her two lighting designers, the show went from credibility to prima donnas.

  JIM BURNS: The only image I can remember from the Yo! Unplugged show is LL Cool J’s deodorant. He had a wife-beater on, and when he lifted his arms, all you saw was his caked-on white deodorant. But he did a great job.

  BOB SMALL: Is that the kind of thing you stop a show for? This is the greatest show ever done, are you gonna stop filming because the audience can see his deodorant? And we’re still talking about it to this day, so there you go.

  RICK KRIM: I remember fighting Abbey to do Pearl Jam Unplugged. It was unprecedented to do an Unplugged on a new band. I don’t remember how, but I finally convinced him, and we taped Pearl Jam at 1 A.M. on the same day we taped Mariah Carey, to save money. I still get chills thinking about that show. It was one of the few times in my life that I saw a show and thought, This band is about to become huge. The moment where they did “Porch,” and Eddie stood up on his stool and started writing “PRO CHOICE!!!” on his arm, that was a seminal moment in their life. Mine, too.

  JIM BURNS: Bruce Springsteen was rehearsing with his band in LA, and we heard he wasn’t happy with how the band sounded. So he did an electric show, which was disappointing, I have to tell you. He was the inspiration to do Unplugged, and he couldn’t bring himself to do a couple of songs acoustically?

  BOB SMALL: When it became a big success, Jim and I were pushed further and further out of it. The network didn’t want us being promoted as the creators of the show. They would say, “We’re not big on credits here.” So I pounded the table and said, “You’ve given me so little, you can’t give me credit? You’re throwing me a few dollars and you’re not allowing me to take bows for it?” The little bit of money I got, I usually used hiring lawyers to fight for a bit of recognition. I said to them, “Why don’t you give us a VMA? Isn’t there an award for having an impact on music?”

  JIM BURNS: Bob and I get a piece of the money on MTV Unplugged records, DVDs, CDs, downloads. I bought a Mercedes, which I named “Rod Stewart,” because I got a big check for the Rod Stewart Unplugged record. He essentially paid for that car.

  BOB SMALL: Unplugged was not only popular, not only saved MTV’s ass in the music industry, it brought in a lot of revenue. There are over five hundred MTV Unpluggeds around the world, 390 of which I just found out about in the last year. There’s an MTV Unplugged perfume in India. Lately, they’ve given us our royalties for shows that were done without telling us. But I’m not as wealthy as you would imagine.

  JIM BURNS: Bob and I split up our professional partnership in ’92. I got tired of going in every day and apologizing to people who were working for us. Bob had a hot temper. He’d fly off the handle and scream at people. He was very angry that I left, so I had to deal with that for a couple of years.

  BOB SMALL: There’s a lot of stuff out there called Unplugged, including a Kermit Unplugged.

  JIM BURNS: “Unplugged” became part of the lexicon. I think it’s in the dictionary.

  BOB SMALL: The acoustic guitar became acceptable again. I saw U2 during the Zoo TV tour, and they did an acoustic set in the round. That had to be from Unplugged. I mean, some people think of Unplugged as the greatest influence on music in the last twenty years. I think it’s probably the greatest music show, next to American Bandstand.

  JIM BURNS: One person we could never get, because he was dead at the time, was John Lennon. I think that would have been the ultimate.

  Chapter 45

  “SILLY, SUPERFICIAL, AND WONDERFUL”

  CINDY CRAWFORD AND JON STEWART BRING BEAUTY AND LAUGHS TO MTV

  MUSIC WAS STILL THE BASE OF THE NETWORK, TO use Lee Masters’s phrase, but the base was getting smaller. Fashion—a significant component of MTV since the days when small-town kids began dressing like the Stray Cats or Madonna—came to the forefront with House of Style, hosted by Cindy Crawford, a goddess made human by her earthiness and stiff delivery. “MTV helped people relate to me as more than just an image,” says Crawford, who became an integral part of the channel, via VMA broadcasts and even comedy interstitials. Ben Stiller had his own MTV show, where he impersonated Bono and Bruce Springsteen, before moving on to network TV and Hollywood. And for You Wrote It, You Watch It, an early experiment in crowd-sourcing, MTV hired Jon Stewart, a self-described “bitter little hairy man” who a year earlier hosted Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central. You Wrote It—which has become synonymous with the phrase “short-lived”—also propelled the comedy careers of Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, David Wain, and Thomas Lennon. When it fell apart, Stewart became the host of MTV’s long-gestating talk show, which would be “far more casual” than Conan O’Brien’s or David Letterman’s shows, he told a reporter. “I’ll be wearing a cocktail dress.” Stewart drew more viewers than music-video programming did, and soon, MTV was airing it three times a day. As the channel got bigger, the videos got smaller.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: House of Style was like a comedy club where you try out your material. It didn’t have to be perfect. If you co
uld think it up, you were given a chance to try it.

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: I started at MTV in September of 1988, as a segment producer in the news department. They said, “Go interview the Beastie Boys.” It was so much fun—they poured beer on my head. One day, Doug Herzog said, “We’re gonna start covering fashion, and you’re gonna do it.” I was always stylish. And the two other writers in the news department, one was a Rastafarian and the other was reading Hitler books all the time.

  Kurt Loder was our main news anchor, and fashion stories had to come out of Kurt’s mouth. He was not comfortable doing it. The look on his face, going from a Guns N’ Roses story to a fashion story—he looked like he was about to die. We got a memo from Tom Freston which said, “What the fuck? Why do we have Kurt Loder talking about fashion?” That night, I wrote up a paragraph saying we should do a show about style. Within twenty-four hours, Doug Herzog said, “You’ve got $25,000 for your budget and you have to find a host.” My first host suggestion for House of Style was Johnny Rotten.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: I don’t think Alisa ever told me that. “We couldn’t get Johnny Rotten, but we got you.”

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: Herzog said, “Please go back to the drawing board.” He told me to look at fashion magazines, which I never read. But I saw there were these girls called “supermodels.” I saw photos of Cindy Crawford and thought she was a great idea because she was considered a sex symbol and I’d read an interview where she said she was already tired of modeling.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: Alisa was looking for someone who had credibility in the fashion world but who guys could also relate to, because MTV had a very male audience. And I’d just posed for Playboy. Alisa wanted me for House of Style, even though I had zero experience doing anything like that.

  DOUG HERZOG: I’d become smitten with Cindy Crawford. She was on the cover of all my wife’s magazines. So we asked, and not only did she say yes, but she agreed to host the show for free. That’s how badly she wanted to be on TV.

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: Her manager said no. Her modeling agency said no. I asked them to have her call me. When she did, I said, “Would you like to do a show about fashion? I don’t have any money to pay you.” She immediately said yes. The whole first year, she worked for free.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: My agents thought it was a waste of my time. I was making so much money modeling, per day, why take away from that? Other than Elsa Klensch on CNN, there was no fashion on TV. Look at how much TV has changed since then. Now, of course, an agent would say, “Yes, you should do it. And you should do a blog.”

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: The first show aired in May 1989. When the ratings came in, Herzog high-fived me and said, “You’ve got a show.”

  CINDY CRAWFORD: I was like a cardboard cutout in that first show. It’s cool that Alisa didn’t can me.

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: It wasn’t an easy show to do at first. People like Annie Lennox felt that if they talked about fashion, their music wouldn’t be taken seriously. So we covered a lot of hip-hop, because they were cool about style. We weren’t covering high-end designers, we were covering the cool ones: Anna Sui, Mark Jacobs, Todd Oldham. I wanted the audience to be girls in the Midwest who we could teach about style.

  JOHN VARVATOS, fashion designer: House of Style definitely had an effect on pop culture. To certain people, especially in the Midwest, it was their bible—it was their guidepost to fashion. There really wasn’t anything like it.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: House of Style seemed like it was on weekly, because they air the shit out of stuff on MTV. It seemed like each show was on a hundred times a week.

  ALISA MARIE BELLETTINI: We weren’t showing big butts and breasts—the show was respectful to women.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: We talked a lot about demystifying beauty. We showed Naomi Campbell putting zit cream on at night. We also said, “Look, fashion is great, but we’re holding our stomachs in at photo shoots.” One reviewer said House of Style was “silly, superficial, and wonderful.” I loved that quote. We couldn’t ask for a better review of the show, because that’s what fashion is all about.

  NICK RHODES: Going on House of Style was one of the funniest things we ever did on MTV. Cindy Crawford took us to Sears and we had to spend $200 on clothes.

  CINDY CRAWFORD: Simon and Nick were wearing dresses at one point, that’s all I remember.

  SIMON LE BON: I ended up in drag, wearing a zip-and-dash dress. And Nick made a suit out of ties, I believe. It’s hilarious.

  BETH McCARTHY: When MTV started making its own programming, there was that Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney feeling: “My mom has some costumes, my dad has a barn, c’mon, let’s put on a show!”

  MICHAEL IAN BLACK: MTV knew how to build their brand as a cool destination for youth, a cool place to hang out. But they didn’t know how to develop original shows. They needed cheap, youthful programming, and a large amount of it. The way to do that is to hire inexperienced people who will work for almost nothing—like the State, a sketch-comedy troupe I helped start at NYU in 1988. Fairly quickly, we ended up on MTV, which then launched the careers of several marginally successful comedians who you may or may not know today.

  LAUREN CORRAO: We did the original Ben Stiller Show in 1990. It was sort of a show-within-a-show: three or four music videos, and sketches in between. Fox saw it, and offered a sketch show to Ben. Their Ben Stiller Show won an Emmy. Losing Ben to Fox was an eye-opening moment. We realized people were poaching our talent. Ken Ober had gone off to do Parenthood, Colin Quinn had a development deal at Fox. Joe Davola also moved to Fox, and he was tapping all our talent. We would discover people and put them on the air, and then they’d get agents and move on.

  In 1992, we had a show hosted by Jon Stewart called You Wrote It, You Watch It. Viewers sent in funny stories, and they’d be reenacted by members of the State. You Wrote It, You Watch It was the precursor to both The Jon Stewart Show and The State sketch show on MTV the next year.

  MICHAEL IAN BLACK: You Wrote It, You Watch It was Jon Stewart’s first regular television job. It was not a success, largely because it was terrible. I mean, even when you say the idea, it sounds terrible. It was canceled, and we got our own show, The State. It was also clear that Jon Stewart had a future, and MTV gave him a talk show not that much later. It was exactly what you’d think an MTV talk show at that time would be. His coffee table was a knock-hockey table, and that seemed to embody what the show was. He had a semi-retarded sidekick named Howard, who was a cabdriver and sometime comedian. It was all the things you like about Jon Stewart—he was smart, charming, and funny, and also awkward. He was figuring out how to make a talk show.

  BETH McCARTHY: MTV had a problem holding on to talent. They’d discover Ben Stiller and Jon Stewart, but couldn’t do talent-holding deals, because the budgets were so small, and talent would eventually leave. But then MTV would go in the other direction, like with poor Mike Judge, who created Beavis and Butt-head. MTV robbed that guy. He got nothing.

  ABBY TERKUHLE, MTV executive: I was the animation guy at MTV—and Liquid Television was a testing ground for weird, animated characters. It was sort of like, “Where’s our Ren and Stimpy?” When I saw Mike Judge’s short film Frog Baseball—which was Beavis and Butt-head playing baseball with a frog—I got excited and flew Mike to New York. He was a musician in Texas, and created Frog Baseball while babysitting his kids.

  I told him we wanted to make twenty-six short films of Beavis and Butt-head . He asked if he should change the drawing. I said, “It’s perfect, it looks like a fourteen-year-old drew it.” Then he was worried, and he said, “Will I have to quit my band?” And I said, “Well, maybe.” We went on the air, and it was an instant hit. It carried on our tradition of irreverence, and also suggested that if you watched MTV all day, you might end up like Beavis or Butt-head.

  I went to see an Anthrax concert with Mike in New York, and this guy comes up to him and introduces himself—he was in some metal band. Mike and I both started backing up, afraid, and he
said, “I love your show. You trashed my video, but wait until you see the next one—it sucks even more.”

  Chapter 46

  “TIRED OF CHEAP SEX SONGS”

  R.E.M., U2, AND VAN HALEN (!) ELEVATE THE ART FORM IN THE NINETIES

  WHEN CDs WERE INTRODUCED IN 1983, FEWER than a million were sold. Four years later, annual sales were at 102 million, surpassing the number of LPs sold. After another four years, CDs were outselling cassettes. This funneled a lot of money into the record business and created a bubble that lasted well into the ’90s—not only were CDs priced higher than the other formats, many people were now buying CD versions of music they already owned on album or cassette. Labels had more money, and they spent more money.