VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  Mark and I started to get competitive, seeing who could get a shift done fastest. I basked in the glory of a high five from the crew: “Hunter wins!” I’d go back to the dressing room and be out of there in forty-two minutes. But eventually I felt guilty: My main gig was to speak to people who really wanted to hear what I had to say. And I had reached a point where my only concern was speeding through it so I could get the hell out of the studio.

  32

  Jokerman Dance to the Nightingale Tune

  Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan

  Martha:

  I got assigned the Paul McCartney interview, and I was beyond excited—I was shaking. Nobody could have been a bigger Beatles fan than me. I was a member of the official Beatles fan club; I couldn’t wait to get those brown paper envelopes airmailed from England with xeroxed newsletters in them. I even went to Beatlefest conventions. But then the Police needed me to introduce them somewhere at the same time, so the producers gave the interview to Mark. I was shattered. The interview ultimately got rescheduled, but they didn’t give it back to me. I don’t even know if it was up to Mark or not.

  Mark:

  It wasn’t.

  Martha:

  I died a million deaths.

  Mark:

  The Paul McCartney interview was for a special edition of an interview show I hosted called Liner Notes. I flew to London to do it—my first time in England—and brought Carol along. Paul was promoting his film Give My Regards to Broad Street, and he was still mixing the sound. He invited me into the control booth. George Martin was sitting in the booth, and we watched Paul in the studio, playing his violin bass; it was this surreal, amazing moment. We weren’t even shooting—Paul was just being gracious. Paul was beyond cordial, actually. He bent over backward to make me feel comfortable. He was very aware of how people reacted to him, and sympathetic about that.

  He laid down a bit of bass and came into the control booth. They were about to play back the movie to see how it worked when synched, so there was a freeze-frame of him up on the screen. I said something inane, “Wow, that looks just like you.”

  He said, “Oh, that’s not me. I’m dead, y’know.”

  Paul was a savvy guy—he knew what MTV was and he knew if he made me feel good, then I was going to say positive things on national TV in the United States. But then again, he was fucking Paul McCartney! He didn’t have to suck up to me—I was going to rave about him anyway! I walked away from that interview thinking he was operating on five more levels than I was, and had a much larger view of the conversation than I did. I was down in my trench, dealing with a dickhead director, who wanted all the questions written out in a script and didn’t even want me on camera. I wanted to talk a bit more about John Lennon, and the director wouldn’t let me.

  Paul was in command of the whole situation. Who’s done more interviews than him? If he didn’t want to talk about something, he could move on, and you almost wouldn’t notice. We were supposed to have fifteen minutes for the interview. That time went by quickly—I hadn’t covered half of what I wanted to talk about when Paul’s publicist started waving at me from behind the camera. I told Paul that they were asking me to stop. He gave me that impish McCartney grin and said, “Let’s not!” I flipped—Paul Fucking McCartney wanted to talk more with me! We went on for another forty-five minutes.

  After the interview, Paul asked me about what else I was going to do in London, and if Carol and I would be going out to dinner; she had come along to the studio. He mentioned a place, and then said, “Oh, actually, that’s a little pricey.”

  If Paul McCartney thought it was pricey, how much could it be?

  Then he suggested Stringfellows, which later became known as a trendy dance club, but at that time was more of a restaurant. And he got on the phone and called Stringfellows: “Hi, this is Paul McCartney, and my friend Mark Goodman is coming in with his wife for dinner tonight.” Paul McCartney made me a dinner reservation!

  Martha:

  A few months later, MTV was setting up an interview with Bob Dylan, who was touring behind his Infidels record. Bob requested that I do the interview, and Mark freaked out. He said, “You have no right to do that interview—you don’t know anything about Bob Dylan. I remember when you got here: All you knew about was Earth, Wind & Fire. I should do it.”

  Mark:

  I was so pissed. I felt like we were always battling to establish credibility with the rock community. And we were sending this inexperienced girl to talk to the voice of my generation? I couldn’t understand that thought process when MTV had me and J. J. available. Ideally me, of course.

  Martha:

  Mark’s theory was that because I was friendly with Dylan’s publicist, I got him to feed me the interview—which wasn’t true. Mark yelled at me in our dressing rooms, just eviscerating me. He said that he was going to find out the truth: “When I find out, I’m not going to tell anyone in the office, but I’m going to tell you.”

  I responded, “Mark, I would have killed to interview Paul McCartney, but I wouldn’t have killed you.”

  Mark:

  That’s a good line. I don’t remember Martha saying it.

  Martha:

  Really? That sucks. It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever said in my life. It was a big moment of maturity for me: I stood my ground with Mark, and I had a good point.

  Mark:

  I was a dick. I don’t remember yelling at Martha, but I’m so sorry. I love Martha and I think she’s blossomed into the person that she wanted to be back then. I never meant to hurt her feelings, but I was just a jerk back then. So I apologize.

  The camera rolls on Martha Quinn, in a baggy black sweater, interviewing Bob Dylan, who has shown up in a zebra-print shirt—but first, she applies eyeliner to him. Dylan tells Quinn that his favorite videos are Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and the Police video “where they’re jumping around in the studio and they’re all wearing hats” (“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”). They discuss Manny Roth, proprietor of Café Wha?, where Dylan played some of his first gigs. Manny is also the uncle of David Lee Roth, making him the secret connection between Dylan and MTV.

  MARTHA QUINN: “What kind of audiences have been coming to the shows?”

  BOB DYLAN: “Mostly foreign audiences. In France, we had mostly French audiences. In Spain, we had a lot of Spanish audiences. In Germany, there were German audiences.”

  MARTHA QUINN: (deadpan) “What about Italy?”

  Martha:

  I flew to England and interviewed Dylan backstage at Wembley Arena. I was nervous, but I knew I had good questions. The interview went great. When it was over, one of Dylan’s assistants came up to me and said, “Bob wants to know if you can go to Ireland.”

  What?

  “Do you want to come on our plane to Ireland with us?” I jumped in a cab, raced back to my hotel, threw all my stuff in a bag, grabbed my passport, and zoomed back to Wembley. I missed the whole concert but drove right to the airport, where I boarded Bob’s private jet to Ireland.

  I wasn’t sure why Bob brought me along—he didn’t seem interested in me. But the next day, when we all got on the bus to go to the concert he was playing at Slane Castle, he was sitting with some girl that he had pulled out of the audience from the London show. I thought, “Oh, I get it. It’s like the Rolling Thunder Revue and I’m one of the players in the Bob Dylan parade.” That’s a legendary place of honor—I was flattered.

  The show was incredible—backstage, Bono, Van Morrison, and I were hanging out. Afterward, I was on Bob’s tour bus with the band and his family, heading back to the hotel, and the bus hit a motorcyclist. I don’t think the guy was killed, but it was pretty gruesome. I was sitting next to Dylan’s daughter, who was a little kid at the time. I grabbed her and covered her eyes, because I didn’t know if there were body parts outside.

  Someone called for a cab to take the Dylan kids back to the hotel. Dylan’s oldest son, Jesse, indicated that I sh
ould leave with them. I said, “No, no, it’s just you guys,” but he insisted. We made our way back to the hotel, and everybody was freaking out. I had a brilliant idea: I ordered brandy for everybody. “Here, kids, have some brandy!” I didn’t know what I was doing.

  The next day, I took a cab to the airport with Ian McLagan, the piano player from the Faces. I went to France, where I met a girlfriend of mine from Ossining High School. We stayed in Paris for a week, staying in a youth hostel on the Left Bank. I was having these worldly experiences, but I was also still very close to being a kid.

  That may have been the craziest trip of my life. On the way back home, I had a one-night layover in London. Walking around, I ran into Valerie Bertinelli, who had been married to Eddie Van Halen for a couple of years; the band was doing a European tour. I spent the day shopping with her and Alex Van Halen’s wife: The two of them were buying all these expensive things that I couldn’t afford. When Valerie pulled out her credit card, it was a gold card—and gold cards were très chic back then—with the name VALERIE VAN HALEN. That was the raddest thing ever.

  In the evening, they all went out, and invited me along. Eddie Van Halen joined us, as did Neal Schon from Journey! Everyone was sweet, but I felt like a total third wheel. I couldn’t shake the feeling of who am I to hang out with these superstars? J. J. wouldn’t have felt that way, but I did. We went to some happening club and couldn’t get in. We were standing on the street, so Neal started talking to this huge bouncer: “This is Eddie Van Halen, you know, from Van Halen. Dude, he played the solo on ‘Beat It.’ ” And that got us in!

  Back in New York, I dated Jesse Dylan for a little while. He really looked out for me, but I wasn’t at an age where I could appreciate such devotion.

  Nina:

  Jesse called me one time, because Hurricane Gloria was coming in. It was a major storm, and they were evacuating a lot of the Eastern Seaboard. Jesse was worried about Martha, so he contacted me. I told him that I didn’t know where she was, but I was sure she was fine.

  Martha:

  A few months after Jesse and I broke up, my neighbor at One Astor Place told me she had seen him walking down the street, holding some girl’s hand. I called him up and went totally insane, throwing my phone across the room like I was the Incredible Hulk. Gawd, what a drama queen.

  33

  The Kids in America

  MTV Contests’ Winners and Losers

  From the promo for the “Paint the Mutha Pink” contest:

  VOICE-OVER GUY: “It’s our little dream house—the MTV Party House! You win it, you own it! Like it or not! It’s smack in the middle of the heartland: Bloomington, Indiana, hometown of John Cougar Mellencamp! And, oh yeah, you have to paint it pink. You can be the grand-prize winner and owner of the first rock ’n’ roll estate. And we’ll even throw in a housewarming party! Just call up twenty-five of the wrong people and we’ll fly everybody in for the weekend. John Cougar Mellencamp is your barbecue chairman. And later that night—”

  JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP, SHIRT LARGELY UNBUTTONED: “The house band’s going to be me, and I’m going to be playing in your brand-new living room!”

  VOICE-OVER GUY: “Even later, there’s a private screening of Universal’s new movie, Streets of Fire. We never know when to stop! You’ll also get a Jeep CJ—we’ll paint it MTV pink! A complete stereo system from Pioneer, and a garage full of Hawaiian Punch fruit punch! Here’s how to enter and win! Just send an average American postcard to the MTV Party House, P.O. Box 1280, Radio City Station, New York, New York, 10101. One thousand runners-up win a John Cougar Mellencamp album, Uh-Huh. So pack your bags—you’re moving!”

  JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP, WITH PAINTBRUSH IN HAND: “I give you the deed, and the keys, and then we paint the mother pink.”

  Alan:

  I did the “Paint the Mutha Pink” contest with John Cougar Mellencamp. Martha went out a month later when the girl got the house, but I did pre-interviews in Bloomington, Indiana. We were riding around Bloomington, trying to put together some stories, and running out of daylight. As we drove down a road, I spotted a couple of horses in somebody’s backyard. I jumped out and interviewed one of them, the other horse nervously prancing close by. And then in the middle of my “interview,” the mare opened up her legs and started prepping for nookie. Not being a farm-raised boy, I had never witnessed such an act. I was only five feet away from this breathtaking event—I continued to interview her, thinking we’d air it somehow, when the lady of the farmhouse came out the back door screaming at these two lovers, barking at them to stop. The MTV audience saw the foreplay but mercifully, nothing after.

  As for Mellencamp, he was a sweetheart. He had an attitude, but he appreciated what MTV did for him.

  Martha:

  I flew out to Indiana, and went to John’s house, which was very nice, in a woodsy area. We went swimming in his private lake, with a dock in the middle. He had the second Mrs. Cougar Mellencamp hanging around, Victoria Granucci, and I couldn’t get over how gorgeous she was. Then we went and painted this house pink.

  Alan:

  MTV had bought the house cheap. We gave the house away to the poor winner, and it turned out it was on top of a toxic waste dump. John was furious.

  Mark:

  They literally had to tear the house down and buy another one across town and paint that mother pink.

  Alan:

  I don’t know if anyone said, “How are we going to vet this shit out in the future so this doesn’t happen again?” Obviously, they should have.

  Nina:

  We did a lot of “One Night Stand” contests. People sent in their postcards, and we’d pick one at random. The winner would fly with a VJ on our quote-unquote MTV Learjet to see a concert. They’d see the show, go backstage, and come home on the same night. Once, at the Rhinebeck, New York, airport, the winner and I were posing for pictures in front of the Learjet, which had the big MTV logo on the tail. And as they took the picture, the logo fell off. It was just taped up there.

  Alan:

  One of the early One Night Stands was with Journey. We went to pick the winner up somewhere in the Midwest—Iowa, maybe? I flew out there on a commercial jet, and met up with the winner and three of her friends. Four really sweet people, but very heartland. She kept telling me that she just couldn’t believe she’d won, and kept hugging and pawing me. Her friends were dying to ask me a thousand questions. They’d have their chance, because we all piled into a Learjet for the four-hour return flight to John F. Kennedy airport: The Journey concert was in Long Island. For four goddamn hours, I was the entertainment. There was a lot of “Wow, man, I can’t believe it’s you” and “Whoa, can we take a picture?” I was trapped in this plane with four very enthusiastic fans. And then “Have you ever met Duran Duran?” and “What’s Martha Quinn like?” By the time our wheels touched the tarmac at Kennedy, my face and my brain were dead.

  Nina:

  It’s funny that Alan, of all people, would run out of stuff to say. He never does, and sometimes you wish he would.

  Martha:

  I did the One Night Stand with Fleetwood Mac. I was eating dinner with Fleetwood Mac and whoever the winner was, and Lindsey Buckingham said to me, “Hey, if you ever come to California”—saying I should give him a call. I swear I did this: I put up my hand and said, “Oh, I’ll find you.” First of all, that was so rude. Second of all, how was I going to find him? Was I omniscient? For years, I’ve wanted to apologize to him, but I never saw him again.

  Mark:

  I went to New Orleans for the One Night Stand with the Rolling Stones. I was running around the French Quarter, drinking pretty heavily. The humidity was disgusting, and the poverty was overwhelming; every twenty feet in the Quarter, there was a group of little black kids who would dance, do crazy stuff, anything so you would give them money.

  The winners were happy, but I felt bad for them. It was a whirlwind: You were in the rock ’n’ roll fast lane for twenty-four hours. But we had dinner
, we went to the show, we went home. We didn’t get to go backstage or meet anybody. I could understand we wouldn’t get to see Mick or Keith, but c’mon, we’re MTV. How come we didn’t get to say hello to Charlie Watts or Bill Wyman—one of the loser Stones? A lot of what we did was about access—be a roadie with Van Halen!—and with the Stones, we had no access. And in my typical fashion, I was moaning about it: How come I have to do the crappy one?

  Nina:

  I flew to Winnipeg to do the One Night Stand with Men at Work. I was excited—I love flying—but I wasn’t feeling good. At the concert, I was seeing purple polka dots. On the way back, I started running a fever; somehow, I contracted bronchitis and laryngitis at the same time. But it was a treat for me, even though I was sick, because I had never been in a Learjet. I love speed: fast planes, fast cars, fast motorcycles, fast boats, fast horses. I had been reading books about planes, so I was very happy to be in this Learjet, because they’re little souped-up sports-car airplanes.

  Mark:

  Learjets are Volkswagens with wings. Fun, but it’s terrifying being in a plane that small, where you can’t even stand up.