I Want My MTV

by Craig Marks

  ADAM CURRY: I don’t get invited to the reunion shows. People at MTV hate me. I’d love to go back.

  NICK RHODES: The one mistake we made with MTV, without a doubt: We didn’t buy shares.

  MEIERT AVIS: Most of the videos on MTV were really bad. Duran Duran, or silly hair band: It was all phony people doing phony shit in phony situations.

  JOHN TAYLOR: Call me prideful, but I think the Duran Duran Greatest DVD is the best video compilation there is.

  DAVE HOLMES: I don’t think kids twenty-five years from now will be talking about a specific episode of My Super Sweet 16 the way we remember things about Duran Duran videos. I’m sure The Hills got good ratings, but it weakens the brand.

  STEVE ISAACS: I mean, Heidi Montag and her fucking double-G breasts, and her psychopathic ex-husband—that I know this much about those people, I can only blame on MTV.

  KAREN DUFFY: The name of my production company is Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe. This company called me back recently to make sure my credit card was real. And they said, “You’ve got the same name as the girl from MTV. Is that you?’ And I said, “Yeah.” And they go, “Wow, you’re Duff? You must be, like, sixty.”

  JULIE BROWN: When my daughter and I go out together, people come up and mention my work, which makes both of us very proud. If that’s all I got out of MTV, then money has nothing to do with it. Then again, that’s because I’m rich. If I was broke, living in my car, I’d be like, “Up yours!”

  CINDY CRAWFORD: I get a lot of people tweeting, “I loved House of Style.”

  PAULY SHORE: The Web site Funny or Die reminds me of how MTV was when I first started: no money, but as much freedom as you want.

  ADAM CURRY: I believe I’m the only VJ who has been successful in business after leaving MTV. That is a badge I am often given, and I wear it with pride. I cofounded an Internet company, Think News Ideas, Inc., that sold in 1999 for $450 million, just before the Internet bubble burst. I cofounded another broadcasting company, MEVIO, and we raised almost $50 million from premier venture capital firms.

  ALAN HUNTER: When people see the VJs, they have a sense-memory flashback. We were in their lives every day, and we got seared into their brains. We’re like a neuron that got triggered, never to be turned off. Some days, it seems like it was yesterday.

  SUSANNA HOFFS: The fact that the ’80s are now a beloved era is shocking. I never in my life thought I’d meet a person who’d tell me, “The ’80s are my favorite era for music.” My knee-jerk response, when I started hearing this, was to say, “Are you crazy? It was terrible. The ’60s, that’s the golden age.” But I realize, there is something wonderful about the lightheartedness of the decade.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE MONDINO: I thank God it’s over now. I’m happy that MTV doesn’t play videos. As soon as they stopped, music came back. People are making music for the pleasure of it, not to make money, because money’s not there any longer. There are good videos on the Internet, done by kids with no money, that are poetic and beautiful. Videos now are better than videos were in the’80s, because they are not made as packaging.

  DAVE GROHL: Ten or eleven years ago, Foo Fighters played a gig at a little bar in the Valley, to warm up for a festival tour. Afterwards we had a party and I was talking to this one chick who was a porn star. She was gorgeous. And she said, “I’ve met you before.” I thought, Uh-oh, what have I done?

  And she said, “I was one of the cheerleaders in the ‘Teen Spirit’ video.” I’m like, Oh my god, now she’s a porn star? Talk about the arc of MTV.

  TARSEM SINGH: My generation of directors—me, Fincher, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek—we ruined your visual world. We grew up on a completely visual culture, and we brought our candy video eyeballs to cinema. It’ll always be looked down on, shat on, and they accuse us of being bad for the film world. There’s a saying: Politicians, prostitutes, and ugly buildings all get respectable if they last long enough. The same is true for film movements. Shitty or not, in about twenty years, it will seem valid.

  LEE RITENOUR: MTV spawned American Idol and YouTube. The entertainment world is visual today because of MTV.

  BOB PITTMAN: Before MTV, concerts mainly consisted of artists standing onstage, looking at each other. I went to a David Bowie concert in the ’70s that was considered state of the art because they had a cherry picker that lifted him up when he did “Major Tom.” But after Michael Jackson and Madonna, shows became performances, with spectacular choreography and light shows. MTV changed live concerts.

  SCOTT IAN: I couldn’t be happier that it’s gone. Videos were bigger than radio—that’s why so many bands sucked live, because you could just make a video and never have to tour. It enabled bands to become lazy. Now, if you want to sell records, you have to be a good live band and go on tour for eighteen months, like you did before videos.

  SEBASTIAN BACH: It’s an era that needs to be remembered, if only as a cautionary tale about the music industry and how killer it was, how fucking profitable and successful and fun. It wasn’t American Idol, it was Americans who were fuckin’ idols. We didn’t do a karaoke routine to an Aretha Franklin song.

  FRED SCHNEIDER: We want to put B52’s videos out on DVD, but who’s going to buy the DVD if you can get it for free on YouTube?

  CLIFF BURNSTEIN: Videos are now short-lived phenomena on YouTube. I read a study that 78 percent of YouTube views come within the first ten days of a video. That shows it’s totally fan-driven. You’re appealing to the people who already liked you. And what good is that?

  PAUL McGUINNESS: MTV and Viacom’s utter failure to transfer their huge, worldwide audience from cable television onto the Internet will go down in history as a disaster.

  KARI WUHRER: This Jersey Shore crap? What the fuck is that?

  ADAM HOROVITZ: I fucking love Jersey Shore. “You’re excluded from cutlet night!” That’s one of my favorite lines ever.

  ALAN NIVEN: Jersey Shore, what does that perpetuate except for the most negative aspects of human behavior? It makes the old, cliché-ridden hard rock videos look tame by comparison.

  DAVE KENDALL: MTV was demonized by intellectuals who thought we were debasing pop culture, and by right-wing Christians who saw it as polluting America’s youth. I hear the same debate now, about reality programming. It’s arrogant and holier-than-thou. People like reality TV. Who am I to judge that?

  JOHN SYKES: If you look at MTV recently, they were belly-up, until Snooki saved the network.

  MIKE DUGAN: It’s not my cup of tea, but God bless them. They’re getting 8.0 ratings on that show. If we got a 3.0, we were dancing in the aisles.

  JOHN TAYLOR: I don’t suppose Punk’ d ever changed anybody’s life. I can’t imagine anybody watching that and going, “Hey, now I know what I’m gonna do with my life!”

  SINEAD O’CONNOR: MTV has quite a lot to answer for. When video came around, the business transformed, and it became important how you looked. It became more visual and more materialistic. I mean, I hold MTV entirely responsible for the bling culture. It started when they made that show Cribs. Now you have a whole generation of young people who’ve been brought up to believe that fame and material wealth is what it’s all about. You don’t have young people saying, “I really want to be a singer,” they say, “I really want to be famous.” Then you’ve created a culture of people who feel they’re nothing unless they live in a huge house and have seven cars.

  NIGEL DICK: I often find myself defending MTV these days. MTV wanted to keep people watching for half an hour at a time. They couldn’t do that by playing a Guns N’ Roses video, then a Dire Straits video, then an Eddie Money video. Coke and Nike and Ford weren’t going to buy ads unless they knew a viewer was going to sit through the whole program. That’s how television works. You place an Apple ad in the middle of Two and a Half Men and you’ve got a guaranteed audience. End of story.

  TONY DiSANTO: Every new generation has made MTV its own. It was no longer their parents’ MTV, or their older brother’s—it was their MTV, and theref
ore it had to be a very different MTV than what it was before. The audience that misses the old MTV? It’s time for them to move on. It’s still a network for and about youth culture, whether you’re talking Jersey Shore or a new Lady Gaga video. MTV was always about being loud and irreverent. It’s a different network than when it started, but I think its soul is the same.

  LADY GAGA: I do miss when MTV played more music videos. However, it’s important to be modern and change with the times. As MTV changes, so does the Internet, and we all change with it. It’s now up to the artist to re-revolutionize what it means to put film to music.

  MICHAEL IAN BLACK: There’s a sense of mourning for MTV among my generation, which I don’t share. There are so many other outlets now to find music. The Internet is better suited for that job; within twenty minutes, you can find twenty bands you’ve never heard of, and see videos from bands you’d likely never hear of, even if MTV still existed in its old form. For a few years, MTV was a great place, if you were into white music. But it was also a business. And the business evolved.

  LOU STELLATO: Is Kurt Loder still at MTV? Is he a pile of dust?

  ED LOVER: Where is hip-hop on MTV? Bring it back. MTV needs to find two cool guys that love hip-hop as much as Dre and I, and bring back Yo! MTV Raps.

  FAB 5 FREDDY: People come up to me and say, “Fab, we wish there was Yo! MTV Raps.” I tell them, “So you really would want to see me standing there interviewing Soulja Boy?” Then it hits them. I go, “Dude it’s not me, it was the music.”

  “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC: I haven’t really followed the programming since it became the all-reality, all-Snooki channel. But I very much miss the old MTV.

  FLEA: When they were great, music videos on MTV were like a short film festival for housewives in Nebraska. A couple of years ago, I was talking to the film director Milos Forman. He said, “I loved MTV. All those short little films . . . how great.” And it dawned on me how right he was. And now that it’s gone, I really miss it.

  STEVIE NICKS: I just want to say, I want my MTV. And I’m so sad that MTV doesn’t play videos all the time. It breaks my heart. I do, I want it back.

  RIKI RACHTMAN: You have no idea how I miss it. If they wanted me to host a rock show again, I’d probably do it for free.

  GREG HAYMES: If you Google “worst music videos of the ’80s,” I think Blotto are in the Top 10 results. As long as they remember us, that’s all we care about.

  TREVOR HORN: A couple of years ago, I met a very prominent politician. And he said, condescendingly, “Oh, you’re that ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ chap.” And I thought, Yes. And they’ll remember me long after they’ve forgotten you, mate.

  Acknowledgments

  Carrie Thornton thinks “Let’s Dance” is the greatest video ever made and still has a videocassette copy of The Cure Unplugged. She was an avid champion of the book at Dutton, and a superb editor in the old-fashioned and seemingly defunct sense of the word. Her assistant, Stephanie Hitchcock, educated us on technological advancements we’d somehow missed in the past twenty years and reminded us helpfully of our production schedule and gently of our failures to be on time. PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit took us to lunch, let us choose the restaurant, represented our interests with maternal fervor, and never once asked nervously, “Are you guys making progress with this book, or what?”

  Thank you to the one-hit wonders, Hall of Famers, MTV alumni, lifelong bizz-ers, cue-card-reading VJs, madcap directors, long-suffering producers, and briefly famous extras who shared their memories and insights with us. Thanks to John Lack, for starting MTV. A tip of the hat to Joni Abbott, Ted Demme, J.J. Jackson, and Ken Ober, MTV fixtures who were recalled lovingly by all who knew them.

  A list that acknowledged everyone whose assistance we appreciate would be a separate book in itself. These are some of the people who were especially generous in helping us: Bill Adler, Jennifer Ballantyne, Lisa Barbaris, Angela Barkan, Michelle Bega, Brian Bumbery, Sharon Cho, Ed Christman, Tom Cording, Dennis Dennehy, Sarah Weinstein Dennison, Gayle Fine, Paul Freundlich, Billy F. Gibbons, Carrie Gordon, Randy Haecker, Ambrosia Healy, Robert Hilburn, Darren Hill, C.C. Hirsch, Anne Kreamer, Jolyn Matsumuro, Michelle McDevitt, Claire Mercuri, Jim Merlis, Fachtna O’Ceallaigh, Mitch Schneider, Gina Schulman, and Jill Siegel. Warm thanks to MTV’s Jeannie Kedas, who replied without fail to each and every one of our beseeching e-mails.

  A very special thank-you to the MTV and music executives who provided not only their recollections, but personal photographs, as well as many invaluable introductions: Jeff Ayeroff, Peter Baron, Ken R. Clark, Adam Curry, Amy Finnerty, Tom Freston, Les Garland, Doug Herzog, Abbey Konowitch, Rick Krim, Judy McGrath, Bob Pittman, Fred Seibert, and John Sykes.

  We ruthlessly exploited our uncomplaining interns: Rituleen Dhingra, Janay Meertens-Deans, Meghan O’Connor, Adam Olivo, Eric Sandler, and Rachel Yecco; Aaron Gonsher and Joe Jasko especially distinguished themselves with uncompensated toil. We hope they have long editorial careers and assign us lucrative work in our sunset years.

  Dorian Lynskey sent encouragement and insight from England. Elizabeth Goo d-man and Rob Kemp helped us organize an overgrowth of research.

  Judythe Cohen was stellar with the tedious task of transcribing our audio files. Trinitie Kedrowski of Kedrowski Transcriptions was as quick as she was accurate, and Luke McCormick and Cory Merrill added timely assistance as well.

  There were several books we found useful in our research: Inside MTV, by R. Serge Denisoff; MTV: The Making of a Revolution, by Tom McGrath; MTV Uncensored , an authorized history created by MTV; The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video, by Michael Shore; Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture , by Andrew Goodwin; Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes, by Saul Austerlitz; and Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, edited by Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg.

  Our ideals for writing an oral history came from reading two great ones: Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told By Its Stars, Writers, and Guests by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, and Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.

  We also made prodigious use of the Web site MVDB.com, a remarkably comprehensive and accurate database of music-video information compiled by the saintly Alex S. Garcia.

  A note on sourcing: All quotes in the book come from interviews conducted by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. The main introduction and some chapter introductions incorporate a few quotes from other sources—we’ve denoted those quotes by placing them in the past tense (“Keith Richards said”) rather than the present tense (“Janet Jackson says”).

  The writing of this book was made easier by some products we love: Apple Computers, Diet Coke, DropBox, Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Scrivener, Skype, Valium, Wellbutrin, YouSendIt, and YouTube. We don’t know how Charles Dickens survived without them.

  From Craig Marks: Thanks to my employers and coworkers at Billboard magazine and Popdust, who pretended not to notice while I YouTubed early-’80s new wave videos at my desk. Thanks to my friends and fellow music journalists, whose ideas about and knowledge of videos I blithely ransacked and whose support for this book was incalculably fortifying. And I’m indebted to René Steinke, who selflessly put my needs, and our son’s, ahead of her own over and over and over again. I can only hope that this book is one one-hundredth as good as her next one is sure to be.

  From Rob Tannenbaum: Thanks to Gabriela Shelley, for encouragement, for making me laugh, for leaving me alone, and for timing the birth of our child to follow book publication by three months; to my parents, Mort and Sydelle, who would have kvelled; to my aunt and uncle, Sylvia and Julian Ander, for, respectively, cooking brisket whenever I ask and finding a good red wine to accompany it; to my brother, Rick, and his family, for love, support, advice, and assistance; and to Steve Randall and Jimmy Jellinek, for not pointing out that watching videos had become w
ay more important to me than some of my other contractual responsibilities.

  The authors can be reached by e-mail at IWantMyMTVBook@gmail.com. Where appropriate, corrections will be made in subsequent editions of this book. Please find us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/IWantMyMTV), Twitter (@ IWant MyMTVbook), and YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/IWantMyMTVbook). God save the Buggles.

  Cast of Characters

  PAULA ABDUL is a choreographer and singer who won four Video Music Awards in 1989 for the David Fincher–directed “Straight Up.” She is currently a judge on Fox’s The X Factor.

  BRYAN ADAMS had many hit singles in the 1980s, including “Cuts Like a Knife,” “Run to You,” “Heaven,” and “Summer of’69.”

  BILL ADLER worked as the director of publicity for Def Jam Recordings and Rush Artist Management from 1984 to 1990.