VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave
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Nina:
After one of the New Year’s Eve shows, there was a VJ party, and then an after-party, and then a bunch of us ended up at the Hard Rock Café, which was staying open through the night, going into breakfast. We were at the same table as Robert Palmer and his date, who was wearing a very tight green satin evening gown. We were all seated together, but we weren’t really together. So the waitress comes around to take our orders, and his date kept answering, “Well, Robert will have this, and Robert will have that.” Robert never got to say anything.
When it was my turn, I said, “I’ll have whatever Robert will have.” Robert laughed; his date didn’t.
Mark:
By my last New Year’s, I knew exactly how much I could enjoy myself and still keep it together on the air. I had a couple of vials of coke, a couple of bottles of Cristal in my sight, and a pack of Marlboros.
During a break, I had some champagne, and I was lighting up a cigarette. Along came this crew of people, including Ian Astbury of the Cult, who had just come from the bathroom with the Beastie Boys. I was about to light up the cigarette when Astbury came strutting by and snapped it out of my mouth. I grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him down on the floor. I was about to punch him in the face, but somebody pulled me off.
That’s so not me. I’ve never had a fight in my life. I heard, many years later, that Astbury remembered the incident, felt bad about it, and apologized.
Alan:
I was hanging around with Ron Wood and his girlfriend in one of the greenrooms. They were both fucked up. Keith Richards came by the doorway, propped himself against the door, and said something unintelligible: “Hey, mate argle, what we do now yaaah.” Then he giggled, lit a cigarette, and moved on. Sometimes, there were moments I couldn’t believe I was even in the mix.
15
Take My Tears and That’s Not Nearly All
Romance and Its Discontents
Nina:
Even before I got the MTV job and moved to New York, my relationship with Danny was starting to chafe. He was the type of guy who took care of everything. He always told me that I didn’t have to worry about the business end; I should just play my harp and do what I do. In a lot of ways, he created the Nina Blackwood thing. I hadn’t been out of my parents’ house very long before I met Danny—but in the decade since then, I had grown up.
I don’t want to paint him as a bad guy—I still feel very indebted to him. And I was not good with business stuff. Sometimes Danny would be on the phone with me, talking about contracts, and I would get so upset, I would get the dry heaves.
Danny wanted to keep the personal relationship, but it would have ended, even if I had stayed in L.A. We went through a rough transition—sometimes I threw my phone across the apartment. I’m not a coldhearted person. I would go over to Alan and Jan’s place, and I’d be sobbing on their couch. More than anybody else, they got the brunt of what I was going through with Danny. It was very emotional, but even after we broke up, Danny stayed on as my manager—and he’s still my manager today.
Just before I left L.A., I was in the process of buying a white MG sports car. They were discontinuing them, and I was getting it as a collector’s item. I got to test-drive it once, and then I left it in California. I gave it to Danny, as a big commission. I guess it was a consolation prize: I’m gone, but here’s the car.
Martha:
During the first year of MTV, Tony resurfaced and we started dating again. One time, we even drove out to Jones Beach with Nina. I was thinking that now I had the MTV gig, maybe it would make Tony want me the way I’d always hoped for—it took me a long time to break out of that cycle. My being on MTV didn’t impress Tony at all. He was a cameraman, and he was always working on big movies; my job was just a little weirdo cable thing.
We went on vacation to Club Med, on the French island of Martinique. On the beach, tons of women were sans tops. Wildly throwing caution to the wind, I took my bikini top off—the first and only time I ever went topless. Within ten minutes, this couple came up to me: They were from some town in New Jersey, one of the few towns in the entire United States that had MTV, and they recognized me. I was saying, “Hi, yes, I’m Martha Quinn, nice to meet you”—topless.
Soon enough, things fell apart with Tony. One night, I came home to find he had dropped off a paper bag. My doorman handed me the bag: It was filled with objects that had significance in our relationship, like a blanket that I had crocheted for him, and a picture of me from high school. He had stabbed the eyes out of the picture. I was so upset, I threw the whole bundle in the incinerator. The whole thing with Tony was a life lesson: If he doesn’t think you’re indispensible, then he’s dispensable. I’m borrowing a concept from Honeymoon Suite’s “Feel It Again,” but it’s still true.
Mark:
Carol definitely suffered the brunt of my fame, or my alleged fame. In a lot of ways, she was an innocent bystander who got shafted.
Martha:
When we started at MTV, I would hear Mark on the phone with Carol in that tiny VJ dressing room. He was begging her to move in with him, saying stuff like, “You’d make me the happiest guy in the world.” I was jealous, in a moony way—like how Beatles fans felt when Paul McCartney got married.
Mark:
We ended up living in Carol’s place, on West Seventy-second Street next to the Dakota. After a while, we bought an apartment up in Riverdale, in the Bronx—in Willie Mays’s building. I never saw the guy, but I often parked right next to his car: It had a personalized license plate that said SAY HEY.
There weren’t so much cracks in our relationship as there were cracks in me. I loved Carol like crazy: She was beautiful, she understood what I did, plus she flat-out loved music. It didn’t hurt that she was kind of famous. Springsteen loved her, Stevie Nicks adored her, and Carol was great friends with Tom Petty and his wife Jane. But I just wasn’t ready to be with somebody. I was completely unaware of my own psychology. When I was a kid, my parents tried to send me to a shrink, and I never wanted to go. As time went on, it became evident that I didn’t know how to function in a relationship.
I proposed to Carol on the New Jersey Turnpike, just south of Newark. We were driving to Philly to see my parents. The gist of the proposal was “I’m not ready for this. I really love you but I don’t know if I can handle one person for the rest of my life. I’m just not sure. But I love you, let’s get married.”
Carol was like, “What?” She totally thought I was going to break up with her. What must that proposal have sounded like? But she accepted right away. She was really centered and she knew who she was. She had her share of insecurities, which ultimately contributed to the demise of our relationship, but she was more together than I was.
We got married in December 1982. MTV had been around for over a year, but I didn’t invite any of the other jocks to the wedding. The VJs were in the studio together for hours on end, but we hardly ever saw each other outside of it, except at music events. It was a relatively small wedding, maybe a hundred people, in a beautiful room at the Tavern on the Green with sparkling lights.
Walking down the aisle, I thought to myself, “You’re not ready for this now, but you will be.”
Martha:
I passed by the Tavern on the Green in a cab the night of the wedding. There were lights in all the trees, and I thought, “Wow, that’s Mark’s wedding party.” Mark had Carol, and Al had Jan, and J. J. was an adult, and I didn’t have anybody. I was on my own.
16
I’ll Kick You Out of My Home If You Don’t Cut That Hair
Makeup and Hairstyles
Alan:
The extreme hair and makeup mostly came from the other side of the Atlantic. While some American bands early on were getting used to the idea of wardrobe and the camera, we got exceptional videos from British bands no one had ever heard of like Ultravox, because the lines between music and trend were already blurred for them. The most memorable haircut was probably A Flock of Seagulls: The lead singer was
Mike Score, who was a former hairdresser. He came up with a style that was Mohawk meets mullet. On both ends.
Martha:
I didn’t think twice about Mike Score’s hair. When you’re young, you just think that everything your fellow young people do is cool. And anybody who doesn’t think so just doesn’t get it, right?
It seemed normal for male rock stars to be wearing makeup. In the ’70s, we had David Bowie and the New York Dolls, and even Kiss. But I interviewed Boy George and was struck by the amount of pancake he had on. He even plucked his eyebrows, which I’d never seen up close before.
Nina:
I was sent out to MC a show by Eddie Money—in New Haven, I think. Guys were starting to wear makeup in videos, and Eddie wanted to get in on it. He asked me to put makeup on him. I did, but it was not good—some faces should not have eyeliner on them. He had those sweet eyes, like a basset hound.
Mark:
Before we went on the air, they brought in a woman to teach us how to do makeup. She had worked on David Letterman’s morning show, and was waiting for Late Night to start. We had one lesson and we never saw her again. They gave us each a makeup kit.
Nina:
I loved that kit! I still have it. It was a big kit, with three layers to it, filled with brushes and powders and eye shadows. I never even opened some of it.
Alan:
It was weird: when local news anchors go to work every morning, they have makeup people and wardrobe people. We didn’t have jackshit. Part of it was MTV trying to save money, but they were also trying to keep us humble.
Mark:
I sucked at putting on makeup. I didn’t have a light touch—you could tell I was wearing cosmetics. J. J. really sucked at it. We both sweated a lot on camera, because it was hot under the lights. So the sweat would run down our faces and it looked like we had creases on our foreheads. I also looked like I had little slit eyes, because I wasn’t putting eyeliner on correctly. It was a mess. We looked like we should have been on public access cable in Mississippi. Eventually, I got better at it—but not much. We gauged Nina’s moods by how much rouge she had on. If she was really rouging those cheeks, we knew she was stressed about something.
Nina:
That’s just bizarre. I don’t even remember going to the studio and being upset, with the exception of when my dad died. And certainly the director or the cameraman never said, “You’ve got too much makeup on.” Honest to God, I don’t even know where people would get that from. Maybe I came across more moody than I thought.
Alan:
I tried to do as little makeup as possible: I just powdered and put on some concealer.
Nina:
Alan used to have his eyelashes dyed.
Alan:
It was pragmatic, so I wouldn’t have to put on eyeliner.
Mark:
I hated the process of putting on makeup. I decided I would dye my eyelashes too, so I could skip that step. Then I got used to being able to put a little makeup on and being able to go out at night looking better than usual! I didn’t look like a guy in Mötley Crüe, but I definitely came to rely on it.
Nina:
Later on, we had a makeup artist for guests, but in the early days, there was nobody. So when Steven Tyler came in for an interview, I helped him with his makeup. He thought my eyes were pinned, and he asked me if I was as high as he was. I said no. That was right before he got clean.
Alan:
After the first year, MTV did pay for our haircuts. We went to Il Maquillage, this hoity-toity salon on the Upper East Side. It was predominantly a rich women’s place—Bob Pittman’s wife went there, so we did too. They started putting highlights in my hair. I had a mullet. The desire was to have it look nice and clean-cut at the ears, but longer in back. I went on a personal appearance, and a kid came up and said, “Hey, man, I had my hair done just like you.” He turned around, and I didn’t think his hair looked like mine—but he did have a mullet. Where did the mullet start? Was it with bands like the Romantics and the Hooters? I don’t think I was copying any of those bands, but I know I didn’t create the mullet.
Nina:
I’m one of those girls who cannot set her own hair to save her life. When I moved to New York, I hooked up with this hairdresser Edward Tricomi, who’s very well known now. He saw my hair and said, “Oh, it’s so ’70s—I’m going to update it.” The next thing I knew, he had chopped off half of it and I was worrying I was going to lose my job. Looking in the mirror, I almost passed out—I thought they might fire me, because they loved my hair. I’m not the type of person who faints, but I was gasping, “Bring me tea.”
The people at MTV didn’t complain—they just said, “We wish that you would’ve told us first.” So my hair was kind of asymmetrical and it was really blond—it just kept getting lighter. I met a lot of girls who were trying to copy my hair, and sometimes guys. I met a guy, years later, who looked very Nuno Bettencourt: He had gorgeous straight hair down to his waist. And he told me that when he was growing up in Pennsylvania, he thought my hair was the coolest, and he got a perm. With his beautiful hair! Mine wasn’t a perm, it was naturally wavy—but I might have been responsible for a whole nation of teenagers getting bad perms.
Martha:
My short haircut in the ’80s was completely an accident. If my hair is the wrong length, it will stick out perpendicular to my head, and no amount of blow-drying will fix it. Early on, I got a haircut at that evil length and did not like it at all: The only thing I could do was make it shorter. So for a long time, I had that short hair, and even became known for it. It was ironic, because when I was a kid, my mother insisted on my getting a pixie haircut, and I hated that pixie. I used to wear tights on my head, pretending I had long hair. And there I was on MTV with that pixie cut again.
Mark:
In the ’70s, I had a Jew-fro. I kept that the first couple of years at MTV, and it became my defining thing. I was okay with it: If Mike Nesmith had the hat on The Monkees, I had the hair on MTV. It also contributed, apparently, to a lot of people thinking that I was on Welcome Back, Kotter. I’d be walking down the street, and people would shout, “Epstein! Yo, I love you, man.”
After a couple of years, the word came down from on high that Bob Pittman hated my hair and wanted me to get a haircut. John Sykes told me, and my first thought was, “Fuck you! What is this, high school?” At the time, I was friendly with Ian Hunter, from Mott the Hoople. He invited Carol and me over to his house one Boxing Day. And he had very similar hair to mine, so I asked him about it. He went to José Eber, who had a salon in Beverly Hills and cut people like Farrah Fawcett and Elizabeth Taylor. Ian was raving about José, so the next day I said to Sykes, “You want me to get my hair cut? That’s who I want to do it.”
José wasn’t coming to New York, so they had to fly me out there, first class, and they put me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. On the day I was supposed to fly west, I lost my wallet. It wasn’t quite so stringent back then in terms of needing an ID to get on the plane, but you needed a driver’s license to rent a car. I told Sykes that I would have to postpone the trip a week or so, until I got a new license. He said, “Pittman will kill me. No, no, no, you have to go.” So they hired me a stretch limo.
I was terrified about the haircut—I knew people would be looking at it every day on TV. So I figured I’d take my time; I wanted José to do whatever he thought was cool, but I wanted to make sure it worked for me. The result was that I sat in his chair for six hours. I was calling John Sykes hourly to give him updates. If it was today, I’d take a picture with my phone and send it to him, but without that technology, I had to try to describe it to him. And he would ask, “Well, does it look different?”
While we were arguing about it on the phone, Cher came in. I said, “Cher, what do you think? This is my new—”
Cher snapped, “I don’t give a shit! Get the fuck out of here—this is my appointment.”
That stretch limo waited for me the whole six
hours. Afterward, I called Corbin Bernsen. He was a friend of mine from New York—we worked out together. He had just started doing L.A. Law. So I kept the limo, and then I picked up Corbin and our friend Cameron Crowe, and we all went out drinking together. I never heard anything about the hair when I got back, so I guess they were happy with it. They spent enough on it, with the first-class ticket, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the limo for forty-eight hours straight. I called it the ten-thousand-dollar haircut.
17
And Now You Find Yourself in ‘82
Early MTV Videos-a-Go-Go
Mark:
In some ways, it was a blessing that MTV didn’t have that many videos in the early days. If we had any more Rod Stewart or Meat Loaf videos, maybe we wouldn’t have played so much alternative music.
Alan:
U2 had a song called “I Will Follow” that Mark rightly spotted as a hit when they were totally unknown. I watched Bono with his white frilly shirt, ruffled cuffs, and huge mullet; I focused on the shirt more than the pleading voice. My response was, “Really? I don’t see it.” I would have made a lousy A&R man. But I got tapped to do the U2 interview. They came on the set, and I said, “With me today, the Edge and Bone-o.” They laughed, and the Edge kept elbowing Bono: “Bone-o, Bone-o, Bone-o.”