by Craig Marks
DAVE GROHL: Kurt played those few bars of “Rape Me” just to give everybody a brief heart attack. I didn’t know he was gonna do it. I don’t think Krist did either. Believe me, I was used to worse than that.
AMY FINNERTY: I was standing next to Judy McGrath when they started “Rape Me.” She grabbed my hand and we looked at each other, and she locked eyes with our stage manager and said, “No, leave it, leave it, leave it.” As soon as they launched into “Lithium,” the two of us just cracked up. We were so relieved.
SIR MIX-A-LOT: I was standing right near the stage when Nirvana was playing and Krist Novoselic threw his guitar way up in the air and it came down, hit him right in the face and knocked him out.
AMY FINNERTY: During the show, Eddie Vedder and Kurt made up by slow-dancing to Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.”
COURTNEY LOVE: We’re sitting backstage at the VMAs. Everybody in the world is in this big tent, and there’s a Guns N’ Roses camp and there’s a Nirvana camp. Literally, our roadies and their roadies are getting in fights. We stayed in our trailer most of the time because Kurt was sick, but we got bored, probably because there weren’t any drugs to do, except coke, and we wouldn’t have noticed that. So Kurt and I wander out to the main trailer with Frances, and Axl Rose comes over and he looks nervous. Everyone was watching us. I said something to him, I can’t remember what, and he said to Kurt, “Get your bitch to shut up or I’ll take you to the pavement.” Kurt was holding Frances, and in a moment of pure brilliance he said to me, “Shut up, bitch,” in the most deadpan possible voice. The whole room laughed at Axl. It was like your worst Freudian nightmare of a whole room laughing at you. I knew it would be a story I’d be telling many years later. Then Stephanie Seymour thought she’d be clever, and said to me, “Aren’t you a model?” And I said, “No, aren’t you a nuclear physicist?” At that moment, the world was definitely on our side.
DOUG GOLDSTEIN: I’d love to straighten out the story about Axl and Kurt Cobain. Axl loved Kurt’s music, but Kurt used to say not very nice things about Axl. And Axl could never understand why.
So we’re walking along, it’s me and Stephanie and Axl, and all of a sudden I hear this voice: “It’s Asshole Rose. It’s Asshole Rose.” It was Courtney. Axl said, “Fuck off,” and kept walking. She said, “Asshole. What are you doing, Asshole ?” So finally, Axl was pissed off and he walked over to Kurt and said, “Look, if you can’t shut that bitch’s trap, maybe I should shut yours.” The instigator in this situation was Courtney.
AMY FINNERTY: Courtney was obviously trying to rile Axl. He said to Kurt, “You better get a handle on your woman.” So Kurt screamed at Courtney, “Woman! You better listen to me!” At which point we all cracked up. But when Axl walked away, Kurt quietly said, “Honestly, that was really scary.”
DAVE GROHL: That was a really weird night. It felt like I was back in high school, and that’s one of the reasons I’d dropped out in the first place.
AMY FINNERTY: After the show I went back to Nirvana’s trailer. As I got there, I saw Duff McKagan and a couple of the guys from the Guns N’ Roses camp rocking the trailer back and forth, trying to tip it over. They were trying to get back at Kurt for his comments. I started screaming at them, “The baby’s in there, the baby’s in there!” They stopped, but it was ugly for a second.
MARK PELLINGTON: I was sitting behind Kurt Cobain at the VMAs. When they announced my name, he put up his hand and I shook it. And I remember Sharon Stone having had a lot of wine. She handed me my award and said, “Here you go, dude.” I ended up at David Fincher’s house. He was sitting in the bathroom, really depressed. I was like, “Dude, you’re a genius, what are you unhappy about?”
SAMMY HAGAR: Eddie Van Halen and I were in the men’s room with Flea and Anthony from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were saying, “What the fuck? You guys got our award. We wanted Video of the Year for ‘Under the Bridge.’” And “Under the Bridge” should have been Video of the Year. That fucking thing was killing.
RICK KRIM: Pearl Jam wanted to play the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer” instead of “Jeremy.” They gave in and played “Jeremy” on the VMAs, then made up for it the next night. It was the party for Cameron Crowe’s movie Singles, which featured Pearl Jam and Soundgarden on the soundtrack. MTV threw the premiere party in downtown LA, and we booked Pearl Jam to perform. Fame was still difficult for Eddie to deal with, and he’d had to compromise the night before. In his mind, he’d sold out and played the hit. So he had a bunch of cocktails before the show. I saw him backstage, wearing an army helmet and kicking field goals with beer bottles. The show was a mess. He was wasted onstage. He kept yelling at security to let more people in, and the fire marshal kept coming onstage to shut things down. We had to carry Eddie off the stage and throw him in a car, because the show nearly turned into a riot.
STEVE BACKER: Eddie dragged me into a closet and started ripping for a half hour about how hard this was for him. He wanted to thank me for everything I’d done for them at MTV, but it was also kind of a good-bye. After that, Pearl Jam put everybody on notice that they weren’t doing videos anymore. Pearl Jam were awesome guys, but they weren’t, like, fun guys.
PETER MENSCH: Those VMAs were about as apocalyptic an event in the music business as I’ve ever been to. We managed Def Leppard. They went out there and played “Let’s Get Rocked,” the first single on an album that sounded way too slick for the times, and they got killed. It became clear to me that night that there was a whole new movement that I had completely missed. There was something transcendent going on, and we were not part of it. It really caused Cliff and me to think hard about our future as managers. We would go out to lunch every day and go, “What are we going to do?” It was clear that our bands from the ’80s, except for Metallica, were basically done.
DOC McGHEE: See, MTV was a culture for about ten years, before they forgot what lifestyle was. MTV would be on in your house twenty-four hours a day. The culture they started was Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions, Skid Row. And Kurt Cobain killed that culture like a light switch. I didn’t sign any band in the’90s, except for KISS, because I couldn’t get Rage Against the Machine or Pearl Jam, and the rest of the stuff stunk. Record companies signed every band that looked slightly like the Ramones. It wasn’t about showmanship. It was no fun. And I’m a fun guy.
Maybe it was time to be a little more socially conscious. There’d been so much decadence for ten or fifteen years. And I feel bad for anybody that has mental problems and commits suicide. That’s as sad as you can get. But if Kurt Cobain had done it four years earlier, that would have probably made me another $40 million. And I mean that in the nicest way.
Chapter 49
“YOU’RE NO BETTER THAN A RABBIT!”
FEARLESS TWENTYSOMETHINGS SHAPE A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
THE 26TH AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION GAVE eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, which they politely declined. Almost half of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds cast a vote for president after the amendment passed in 1971; by 1988, the percentage had eroded to less than a third.
Judy McGrath, one of the original MTV employees, had accrued a lot of influence at the network. She was an early advocate for Yo! MTV Raps and Unplugged, even though many staffers were opposed to the shows, and when both became hits, Tom Freston rewarded her foresight with a promotion to head of programming in 1990. She immersed the network in social issues, launching “Choose or Lose” as a way to encourage viewers to register to vote.
Next, MTV decided to cover the presidential race, assigning it to Tabitha Soren, who’d been out of college for two years when she took a job network reporters wait twenty years to fill. But Soren was “about as hard-driving and ambitious as they come,” Judith Miller wrote in the New York Times. Though Soren had less experience than her colleagues on the campaign trail, she had no less confidence.
When Bill Clinton contested George H. W. Bush’s reelection, young people voted in record numbers, and overwhelmingly suppo
rted the Democrat. After he was elected, Clinton appeared at MTV’s Inaugural Ball in Washington DC and certified the network’s influence by announcing, “I think everybody here knows that MTV had a lot to do with the Clinton-Gore victory.”
A video network had changed presidential politics. This was not public service—as Soren points out, MTV gained new advertisers and political influence by virtue of their role. Presidential coverage, one insider said, “helped redefine MTV” as more than a video network.
ABBEY KONOWITCH: 1990 through 1992 was the second golden era of MTV. We knew who we were. There was an exciting balance of videos, music programming, and pop-culture programming. Our news department was influential. MTV had a great relationship with Madison Avenue and a great relationship with the record industry. We became so powerful that we got credit for every change in music.
JUDY McGRATH: I believed social issues, politics, and culture were all part of music. And so we brought in the “Choose or Lose” campaign. I had a lot of debates with people over that. I thought we could have a voice in politics. And others believed that was a big mistake, that we were an entertainment network, and we weren’t equipped, nobody would watch, and we’d be be laughed out of town. I thought the adults in Washington needed to pay attention to our viewers, and they needed to do so on the viewers’ terms. And clearly, Bill Clinton understood the value of Arsenio Hall and MTV. There’s a hilarious interview with Kurt Loder and Ross Perot. Kurt sat down with Ross, and Ross turned it into a public service announcement to the MTV audience. He said something like “Now, if you’re out there and you’re doing drugs and you’re having sex, you’re no better than a rabbit. You’re a rabbit!”
LINDA CORRADINA: “Choose or Lose” is the thing I’m most proud of doing at MTV News. I loved getting young people to understand the electoral process. We sugarcoated it, so it didn’t feel like we were teaching anything, but we were. And we kept MTV on the air! When cable operators were complaining about Spring Break coverage, MTV would get grief and they’d want to drop us, so we’d point to MTV News. We were the smart department that did something good.
TOM FRESTON: During the 1992 presidential election, we decided to enter the political realm. We thought we could activate young voters in a nonpartisan way, because voting among the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old demographic has always been the lowest. And Doug and Judy and Dave Sirulnick thought we could get the presidential candidates involved. I knew this PR guy, Ken Lerer, through Pittman. He worked with Robinson Lake Lerer and had helped us through various controversies. They were very active in Washington, very politically connected. We couldn’t get arrested in Washington, and Kenny became our point person.
TABITHA SOREN: I worked at World News Tonight with Peter Jennings after my college classes, then I’d change out of my suit, into jeans, and go to MTV. They needed someone to write the news for Headbangers Ball. MTV was my parttime job throughout college, and I also worked at CNN and WNBC-TV. When I graduated in ’89, I got a job as a reporter at the ABC station in Burlington, Vermont, covering the state house. After a year, they promoted me to anchor. It was kind of impressive, but it was a rinky-dink station, third in the ratings. Vermont bored me to tears, so I quit and came back to New York.
Kurt Loder had scheduled a two- or three- or four-week vacation in Barbados, and he was not going to cancel that, no matter what. They didn’t have a substitute to do the news. Dave Sirulnick had me read the teleprompter at the studio, and I didn’t make any mistakes. I was a really good fill-in.
The news department started to get much bigger and more professional, less like a playpen. Kurt’s a total curmudgeon. He smoked in the building, even though he wasn’t supposed to. When you walked into his office, you felt like you were in an ashtray. He had little patience for the stupid machinery around bands. It was great to have him setting parameters for the rest of us. Now, would he show up at the airport with his photo ID? Not always. Would he remember his credit card, so he could rent a car? Not so much.
Kurt was going to get all the veterans. I was never going to interview Mick Jagger or Bruce Springsteen, no one who had a son my age, because I would have made them look old. Kurt couldn’t sit down with the Black Crowes and see them as anything but ripoffs of the Rolling Stones, whereas I thought, The more bands that sound like the Rolling Stones, the better. So it was useful for MTV to have somebody who wouldn’t be pissy to a band that sounded slightly derivative.
ALISON STEWART: I moved from the production department to MTV News by showing them some writing samples. The news department was changing. It wasn’t just going to be a PR machine for artists, which was always the difficulty: You wanted to ask a confrontational question, but the artist’s video was in heavy rotation.
TABITHA SOREN: Even though I was twenty-four, it seemed logical to me that I could cover a presidential race. I come from a middle-class background; my dad’s in the military. I went to college to get a job, not to get an education. As a freshman, I was already trying to find a place to work. In New York, I’d covered Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. When I was in Vermont, I’d covered a gubernatorial race, as well as Bernie Sanders running for the House of Representatives. I had mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional races under my belt. Dave Sirulnick was interested in having serious news, so I suggested we cover the presidential campaign. He said, “I’d have to have people who are really passionate about doing it.” And I said, “That would be me.”
ALISON STEWART: I was sitting in the newsroom and Dave Sirulnick walked through and said, “Alison, you like politics, right? We’re going to cover the presidential election. I’d like you to produce it. Can you go to New Hampshire next week with Tabitha Soren?” Within a week, we were in a New Hampshire classroom with Bill Clinton. We were overwhelmed. CBS takes up two hotel rooms just for their editing equipment. Here we are, a tall, aggressive redheaded woman and her short, black, frizzy-haired producer, with a computer and some folders. I was twenty-five. Other reporters made fun of us. “MTV News? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I can’t tell you how many times I heard that. These were the same people who, a year later, were asking me for tickets to the Rock n’ Roll Inaugural Ball.
DAVE SIRULNICK: During the course of the campaign, we probably interviewed then-governor Clinton six or seven times. Some reporter asked President Bush, “Would you ever go on MTV?” And his answer was, “That teenybopper network? Why would I do that?” All year, we asked to do an interview with the president. Then, forty-eight hours before the election, we get a call from the White House: President Bush will do an interview with you.
TABITHA SOREN: I was given ten minutes in the back of a train with George Bush, who was snarky and dismissive. I had prepared; he hadn’t. I asked a question about his tax returns, and they stopped the interview.
ALISON STEWART: The Clinton campaign got it right away. Bob Kerrey got it. Jerry Brown changed his clothes before we interviewed him, from a suit into a flannel shirt. Tom Harkin was like, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn.”
We didn’t need to talk about social security or tax cuts. We focused on jobs, student loans, gays in the military. It was a big risk. We would have been a laughingstock if we hadn’t done a good job.
ETHAN ZINDLER, Bill Clinton campaign staff: My title in the Clinton campaign was assistant press secretary for youth media outreach. I wrote George Stepha-nopoulos a long memo in June, outlining a strategy for targeting youth media, including MTV, college papers, college radio, etc. MTV’s coverage was huge. In retrospect, it seems rather antiquated, given how far we’ve come with the Internet and Facebook, but back then, putting a politician on anything other than mainstream network television news was considered way unconventional.
DOUG HERZOG: I was dumbstruck at how fast our election coverage took off, and how seriously we were taken. We hired a woman who worked for CNN to host part of it, and it turned out to be a disaster, because she sucked and was completely wrong for us. I was convinced we couldn’t throw a bunch of kids at the pre
sident, and it turned out that was exactly what we did, and exactly what we should have been doing.
TABITHA SOREN: The network threw a lot of weight behind our coverage. The key was, it opened up a lot of new advertisers for them—maybe cars, maybe AT&T. It became lucrative for them. Also, it allowed Viacom to throw more weight around in Congress, at a time when there was lots of cable legislation.
TOM FRESTON: I went with Ken Lerer and Judy Miller to the ’92 Republican Convention. The same Judy Miller who worked at the New York Times during the run-up to the the Iraq War. She decided she wanted to do a New York Times Magazine piece on MTV’s political impact.
TABITHA SOREN: As soon as they saw I wasn’t showing up in a halter top, as soon as I started talking, it was pretty clear I was there to ask politicians about their platforms. The reporters scratched their heads at us, but once the New York Times followed me around and wrote about us, it legitimized us.
DAVE MUSTAINE: My goal as an MTV correspondent at the ’92 Democratic Convention was to show that there are people in metal who are intelligent and articulate. So I went up to Oliver Stone at the convention, and he seemed like he was out of his mind on drugs. I also talked to two politicians with the same last name: Bob Kerrey, the war vet that lost his leg? Nice guy. But John Kerry is a total asshole. He and Phil Jackson, the Chicago Bulls coach, were two of the rudest guys I’ve ever talked to. Phil Jackson looked into the camera and said, “Fuck MTV.”
