by Craig Marks
I was shocked at how much new artists would bend over backwards to get on the channel. And then there was a tipping point where artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Guns N’ Roses could tell MTV to do anything. It was strange to see artists hold that kind of power over MTV.
KENNEDY: More than one artist complained about me, or refused to let me interview them. I had a pretty good head on my shoulders, so when someone said they liked me, I assumed they wanted something from me, like Duff’s phone number.
KAREN DUFFY: MTV really kept us on our toes. People were getting sacked left and right. I was on a six-week contract, and MTV would renew it for another six weeks. The network fed you with an eyedropper full of love. My friend Steve Isaacs was making $22,000 a year. He’d negotiated his own contract.
I was covering the Grammys at Radio City Music Hall, and afterwards there was a party at the Rainbow Room, where Howard Stern was doing a live broadcast, and he started talking about me. The next day my agents called and said, “What the hell happened? MTV just offered you a big contract.” That was a turning point. I owe it all to Howard Stern.
DAVE HOLMES: Karen Duffy is beautiful and spunky, and she knows everybody. Literally, everywhere you go, she knows everybody. She’s like the mayor.
KAREN DUFFY: I used the privilege of MTV to go to a lot of Saturday Night Live shows. I was dating Chris Farley and I was crazy about him. One time we were going to the Museum of Natural History to watch a shark movie. I was starstruck that I was on a date with him. It’s snowing like crazy, we were cutting through Central Park, and Chris kept falling. He kicked my feet from underneath me, and I did a face plant in the snow. We get up, we laugh. We get to the museum and everyone’s looking at me. I’m thinking it’s because I’m on a date with Chris. Then I looked in the mirror in the bathroom and all my makeup had run down my face, like Alice Cooper. I’m like, “Dude, why didn’t you tell me?” And he’s like, “I wanted you to look ugly so nobody else would go out with you.”
He jilted me for the most beautiful girl in the world, Laura Bagley. But every night I went out with Chris, he had women throw themselves at him. I don’t know any man that could scoop the poozle like Chris Farley.
KENNEDY: I was really disappointed by the way a few women at MTV responded to me. Karyn Bryant already had a reputation as being difficult, and she provided a great roadmap of what not to do. She was gone within a few months, so maybe she had reasons to be insecure. But being super-bitchy to someone who’s never been on TV? That was lame, and there’s no excuse for it.
PAULY SHORE: I’d been on MTV for about a month, and Sam Kinison asked me to open for him in Virginia Beach. I got to the venue and there were screaming teenage girls. About a year after I started at MTV, Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney offered me a three-movie deal.
TONY DiSANTO: I was Pauly’s intern. When he sees me, he still says, “Get me a cappuccino, Fat Boy.” That was his term of endearment for me. I once brought a script to his hotel room at Spring Break in Daytona. I knocked and nobody answered, so I opened the door and it was like a video—Pauly sitting in bed with twenty bikini-clad, big-haired ’80s girls. He said, “So, give me my script.”
We became great friends, and I ended up producing his show. Pauly was the first VJ who had nothing to do with music. He wasn’t a former radio DJ or a music expert. He was a comedian and a personality. His material wasn’t even all that great. It was more about his delivery and attitude. The music became secondary when he was on. When he did VJ segments, he didn’t even say the name of the next video. I think Pauly was the network’s first attempt at developing a youth culture–driven personality, as opposed to a music-driven one.
JOEY ALLEN: Pauly Shore came out on the road with Warrant, in our tour bus. He was with Savannah, the porn star, when we played Vegas. He was smarter than a lot of people understood at the time. He had no shortage of pussy, trust me.
PAULY SHORE: There was a lot of girls. There was Debbie Laufer, who was a Penthouse Pet in 1988. I was dating a Playboy Playmate, Cady Cantrell. There was a model named Jill Fink, who married Patrick Dempsey. And then obviously Savannah.
There were groupies, all the time. That was kind of my thing. I used to have a road manager, Nick Light—his brother is Rob Light, one of the head guys at CAA—and he made it clear to them: If they came on the bus, they had to hook up with me. If they said, “Oh, I just want to meet him,” he wouldn’t let them on the bus. In the back of my bus, which I called “The Wood Den,” I had a basket of buttons that said GRINDAGE, and another basket that had condoms. I’d have sex with them with a condom, and they’d leave with a button. So it was win-win.
Chapter 48
“A PEP RALLY GONE WRONG”
“SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT,” GRUNGE, AND THE HAIR METAL APOCALYPSE
MTV HAD BECOME SICKENINGLY DECADENT, AND Nirvana came along as a corrective to the show-business follies of Paula Abdul and Pauly Shore, an enema to the idiocy of corporate rock—that’s the conventional plot synopsis of grunge. Here’s how one Nirvana biographer summarized the popularity of Nevermind, the band’s 1991 album, which (oh, the symbolism!) knocked Michael Jackson out of number one on the U.S. album chart and has sold more than 30 million copies: “People were choosing substance over image.” Juxtapositions and morality tales are convenient, but the truth is more complicated—Nirvana was as deliberate about their image as any other band of the MTV era, and far smarter about it, too.
Punk rock is usually said to be about refusal, saying no to mainstream culture and values. But Nirvana was not uncooperative with the mainstream. Rather than deciding to not make videos—as their contemporaries Pearl Jam quickly did, after MTV would not air the original version of “Jeremy”—Nirvana made great videos, meticulously overseen by Kurt Cobain. No matter how much they might have despised MTV, they made themselves part of it: videos, Headbangers Ball, the VMAs, Unplugged, interviews, a lengthy seven-song live set at MTV’s studios in January 1992, a day off before taping Saturday Night Live.
Sure, Nirvana’s roaring music and disorienting videos made other bands look conventional, and “Smells Like Teen Spirt” had as much effect as any video since “Thriller.” But MTV was too big and stable to be changed by any one band. A new roster of rock bands came on the air—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains, and soon Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots, and dozens more–but even as Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” gained in heavy rotation, MTV was also playing pre-grunge holdovers, including Def Leppard, Genesis, Vince Neil, Mr. Big, Slaughter, and Richard Marx. Nirvana didn’t kill video stars—they joined them.
AMY FINNERTY: I met Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic at a World Party concert at the old Roseland in New York. I said to Kurt, “Aren’t you in that band Nirvana?” He was like, “Wow. You know who we are?” I said, “I work at MTV.” At which point he and Krist couldn’t make fun of me fast enough.
Everyone in the MTV programming department was at a listening party for the new Guns N’ Roses album, and Mark Kates at Geffen slipped me an advance copy of Nevermind. From then on, I was determined to get this band all over MTV.
SAMUEL BAYER: I’d spent every dime I had to put together a spec reel. I knew Robin Sloane at Geffen Records, and I took her to lunch—I couldn’t even afford to order anything—and told her I was desperate for a job. I think she took pity on me.
ROBIN SLOANE: Kurt Cobain was the only artist I’ve ever known who had brilliant, fully realized ideas he could express in one sentence. With “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Kurt said, “My idea for the video is a pep rally gone wrong.” Kurt got some ideas for directors from watching MTV and taking notice of directors’ names. He liked Matt Mahurin, and I knew Matt’s assistant, Sam Bayer, and had seen his reel. He hadn’t made a video yet, but he’d been doing a lot of shooting on his own. Kurt looked at Sam’s reel and loved it, so I hired Sam. But there were a lot of problems between Sam and Kurt.
COURTNEY LOVE, artist: Kurt hated Sam Bayer. For “Teen Spirit,” Kurt wanted
fat cheerleaders, he wanted black kids, he wanted to tell the world how fucked up high school was. But Sam put hot girls in the video. The crazy thing is, it still worked.
SAMUEL BAYER: Kurt wanted to make something that felt like a cross between the movies Over the Edge and Rock ’n’ Roll High School. I had in mind something darker and more gothic.
DAVE GROHL: The idea was, the kids take over and burn down the school gymnasium, just as Matt Dillon did in Over the Edge, with the rec center. Kurt was a huge fan of that movie.
We walked into that whole thing really cautiously, because we didn’t want to misrepresent the band. There were certain things we found to be really funny about music videos—tits and ass and pyrotechnics, shit like that—and when we showed up at the video shoot, we were like, Wait a minute, those cheerleaders look like strippers. There’s fire over there? Hold on. A lot of people we worked with didn’t understand the underground scene or punk rock.
SAMUEL BAYER: I scouted LA strip clubs for the cheerleaders. Kurt didn’t like them; he thought they were too pretty. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to put unattractive women in the video. I think Kurt looked at me—the way I talked, the way I acted, everything—and saw himself selling out to the corporate way of doing a music video. So anything I did was construed as corporate. But to me, these were nasty girls. They had rug burns on their knees. In my eyes, the whole video was dirty. It’s all yellows and browns. It was the opposite of everything I saw on MTV at the time; every video was blue and backlit with big xenon lights. It was MC Hammer dancing, and Guns N’ Roses swimming with dolphins. It was ridiculous. I was a painter. I was trying to rip on Caravaggio and Goya. I just wanted to make the greatest music video you ever saw for $25,000.
ROBIN SLOANE: The problems at the shoot weren’t Sam’s fault. All the kids in the bleachers were drunk, and they seriously wrecked the set. It was out of control. To Sam’s credit, he kept shooting.
DAVE GROHL: We did a couple of takes and the audience just started destroying the stage, tearing shit apart. People were out of control and the director’s on a bullhorn screaming, “Stop! Cut!” And that’s when it started to make sense to me: This is like a Nirvana show.
SAMUEL BAYER: The day of the video shoot was pure pain. Kurt was miserable. We didn’t get along. He hated being there. I think at one point my nerves were fried, the set was chaotic, the band didn’t like stuff, and I yelled, “Shut up!” at the kids we’d recruited. That was a turning point. I became the enemy. And then Kurt refused to lip-sync. Danny Goldberg, or some other big cheese on the set, had to beg Kurt to sing the song a couple times. And maybe it was his venom coming through, but I’ve been on two hundred music-video sets since, and that was the best performance I’ve ever seen.
ROBIN SLOANE: Sam didn’t know how to edit. Most directors hire editors, but Matt Mahurin is a control freak, and Sam learned from Matt. Sam’s edit had a lot of footage of the janitor and not nearly enough of the band. He fixated on the janitor. He’d have him on screen for thirty seconds in a row. He said, “The janitor shot is so great.” But of course the most interesting thing in this video is Kurt. Fuck the janitor.
I said to Sam, “You’ve got to edit this the way Kurt wants.” Sam was like, “Fuck you, I’m the director.” And I’m like, “Fuck you, I’m the record company. I’m taking it away now.” Which is what we did. We hired an outside editor to finish it. It was a very ugly scene.
SAMUEL BAYER: I was a young filmmaker, and when you’re young you get too close to your subject matter and things become too precious. There were some characters in the video, a principal and a teacher, that Kurt was adamant had to come out. He was right, but I couldn’t see it. Kurt flew down to LA, and it was the last time I saw him. It was a very contentious meeting. And Robin Sloane, who was great to me, made the decision to bring in an outside editor to finish cutting the video. The editor was Angus Wall, who became David Fincher’s editor—he won the Academy Award for The Social Network. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was one of his first jobs.
GARY GERSH: Not everybody at Geffen was excited by Nirvana. A lot of executives were shaking their heads, going, This is all well and good, but we’re having a lot of success with Cher and Whitesnake. The first pressing of the album was thirty thousand copies, and I made a bet with someone in the sales group, for a relatively large amount of money, that we’d sell thirty thousand within the first month. More than one person took the bet. We sold thirty thousand the day it came out. Within the next seven days, I think we shipped half a million records.
AMY FINNERTY: Initially, Abbey Konowitch said, “Look, the visuals are great, and they have a catchy name, but beyond that, I don’t really know what this is gonna do.” And I basically testified for Nirvana. I said, “I’m your target audience. I understand why we’re playing Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul and Whitesnake. But this is what we should be playing. And if there isn’t a place for this, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Give this video significant rotation for a month, and I promise you’ll see some return. If you don’t, you can reconsider my position.”
COURTNEY LOVE: The first time Kurt and I slept together was at a Days Inn in Chicago, ’cause, you know, that’s how Nirvana rolled. I’d seen “Smells Like Teen Spirit” quite a few times by that point, but we were having our first postcoital moment, and we’re watching MTV and the video came on. I pulled away from him when the video came on, because it was his video, his moment, he was the king of the fucking world, and he put his arm around me and held my hand and pulled me closer to him. Which was symbolic, like, “I’m letting you into my life.” That really endeared him to me.
The next time I saw the video with him was at the Omni Northstar Hotel in Minneapolis. I’d flown there to fuck Billy Corgan, who still had lots of hair. I hadn’t had sex in a while and I needed to have some. I didn’t even know Nirvana were playing that night. Kurt and I wound up at the Northstar Hotel and our daughter Frances was basically made that night. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on MTV every five fucking minutes.
SAMUEL BAYER: I was at a girlfriend’s house one afternoon, laying on the bed watching TV, and I saw it. That video immediately gave me a career. Everyone wanted to do a Nirvana-type video: Ozzy Osbourne, Johnny Lydon, the Ramones. They all wanted that look. That first year, the videos I did were all just imitations of Nirvana.
KEVIN KERSLAKE: “Teen Spirit” crossed the Rubicon. Nirvana became the mold for success, the way Poison had been four years before. There are many ironies within the history of MTV, and that is one of them: The revolutionary fights the dictator, and ultimately becomes the dictator. It’s just swapping chairs.
AMY FINNERTY: The first time I saw Kurt after the video took off was backstage at Saturday Night Live. We were in the greenroom and he said in that scratchy voice, “Hey, Amy. I heard you played our video. Thank you so much. I thought you were the VP of Post-it notes over there, I didn’t know you had any power.” He really didn’t know that I was in the programming department. He had no idea what my position was.
DAVE GROHL: It all came down to Amy Finnerty. She championed the band. And she became a part of my family—coming down to Virginia and staying with my family and vacationing with us in North Carolina.
“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC: My manager was having a very tough time getting Nirvana’s management to return his phone calls, and I very much wanted to do my “Smells Like Teen Spirit” parody. So I called Victoria Jackson, who I’d just done a movie with—she was on Saturday Night Live and Nirvana was performing there. And I said, “If you get Kurt Cobain alone in a room, please put him on the phone with me.” And she did.
So I talked to Kurt and he said, “Is it going to be a song about food?” I said, “Actually, it’s going to be about how nobody can understand your lyrics.” And he’s like, “That’s great. Go ahead.” That was the last video of mine MTV put in heavy rotation.
AMY FINNERTY: When MTV News reported on the Vanity Fair article about Courtney’s drug use while pregnant, she an
d Kurt would complain to me about Kurt Loder. They didn’t want to talk to him again. And then—I’m not sure why—Kurt decided he wanted to make up with Loder. I told the news department and they were thrilled, and we jumped on a plane to Minneapolis. Kurt and Kurt did the interview, and then Loder and Krist Novoselic decided to go to Krist’s room and have a couple of drinks.
After a while, I went to check on them, and the door was ajar. I walked in, and no one was there, but the room was completely destroyed. I mean, broken glass tables, broken televisions, a full wet bar with every glass broken. It was totaled. I went down to Loder’s room and same thing: The room was completely wrecked. And there sat Loder and Novoselic, each smoking a cigarette and drinking a brandy. I was like, “What happened?” And they just smiled and smoked. Loder denied any participation, but I have a hard time believing Krist would ruin his room and then ruin Kurt’s room, too. Nirvana’s tour manager and I had to settle up with the hotel. They did upwards of $30,000 in damage.
PETER BARON: I took Kurt and Krist to do Headbangers Ball. Kurt wore a big yellow ball gown. He was completely fucked up. He was sleeping the entire time we were waiting to go on.
