VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave

by Nina Blackwood

  The inaugural Video Music Awards took place on September 14, 1984. Major awards (in the shape of the MTV “moonman” astronaut) included:

  Best Video (The Cars, “You Might Think”)

  Best Male Video (David Bowie, “China Girl”)

  Best Female Video (Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”)

  Best Concept Video (Herbie Hancock, “Rockit”)

  Best New Artist (Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”

  Artists performing on the show were David Bowie (“Blue Jean”), Huey Lewis and the News (“I Want a New Drug”), Madonna (“Like a Virgin”), Ray Parker Jr. (“Ghostbusters”), Rod Stewart (“Infatuation”), Tina Turner (“What’s Love Got to Do with It”), and ZZ Top (“Sharp Dressed Man”).

  Alan:

  The afternoon of the show, Madonna was rehearsing her performance of “Like a Virgin” while a bunch of us—me, a producer, some executives—milled around in the Music Hall, about halfway up an aisle. She started off her routine on top of a big wedding cake, and she was blocking her moves on and around the cake. She strutted around, and then started rolling on the ground, and her wedding dress was definitely giving her trouble. It got bunched up, or snagged on something, and her boob popped out. Madonna was totally casual about the public reveal—she stuffed herself back in and kept going. All of us got really quiet and looked at each other, clearly thinking, “Did I just see what I think I saw?” I wanted to start giggling like a schoolkid, but I kept it together, because we were just fifty feet away.

  Her performance that night had no mishaps, but we all had our hopes.

  36

  I Said to the Man, “Are You Trying to Tempt Me?”

  White Lines

  Mark:

  In high school, I hadn’t done cocaine—I had only read about it. I asked Thierry, my meth connection who ended up getting deported, “What’s coke like?”

  He said, “Well, Mark, it’s like shitty speed.” I tried it, but I wasn’t into it because back then, I preferred meth and acid.

  Alan:

  Two days before Jan and I got married, I visited my brother Randy in his Birmingham apartment, drinking beer with him and a buddy of his. Randy said, “Well, little brother, you want to do some cocaine?” I did my first bump and waited for the ceiling to lift off, only to experience a really clean high. The first hit is always the best. I didn’t do another line until I had been at MTV for a year or so. I could afford it then, and it was part of the New York scene.

  Mark:

  Coke was a social thing for me. It was what happened when you went out, the way that people used to pass a joint around. People still passed joints around, but in the ’80s, they also did blow. It was cool to be out late, and to say, “Hey, do you want to go do a bump?” I was always shy, so it gave me a way to talk to people. If you had great blow, it gave you credibility.

  Nina:

  I hate that drug with a passion. I tried it when I still lived in Ohio—just once. I was so hyper to begin with, I couldn’t breathe. I went home: My heart was pounding and I couldn’t swallow. I called the hospital; they told me to drink milk, which helped.

  People say, “I bet you saw a lot of things.” Yeah, I did. I saw cocaine ruin so many people. I believe it’s even worse than heroin, because with heroin, people know they’re getting into something heavy, but with cocaine, people think they’re fine.

  Alan:

  Early on at MTV, we were pulling long shifts at the studio, and I knew Mark and J. J. were doing bumps in the dressing room. For them, it kept their energy up. I didn’t do coke on the job because I was terrified of its effect—but I was pissed they didn’t offer me any. Shortly thereafter, I mentioned it, and they were like, “You do coke?” They were appalled and pleased that little brother partook.

  Mark:

  I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan when he was headlining at the Pier. He knew me, but not well. I saw him backstage, and asked him if he wanted to do a bump somewhere. He said, “Yeah, come back to my hotel.” So I went back, and there were some other people in the room I didn’t know. I’m sitting on one bed, and he’s sitting on the chair, and he says, “Anytime, Mark. I brought you back here, what the fuck?”

  I said, “Well, I didn’t know if—”

  “Yeah, it’s cool, it’s cool.” I stayed there for a few hours, doing coke with him. He was a little more into it than I expected—I didn’t know that he had this terrible problem. I was generally oblivious to other people’s habits, not because I didn’t know people could get addicted, but I never had that issue myself. I loved to do coke, but if I couldn’t get some, it wasn’t a big deal.

  Alan:

  One Tuesday night, there was a big party at the Palladium, and everybody was there: MTV staff, industry people, friends, musicians. I was hanging out with a couple of the MTV producers, and one of them said, “J. J.’s got coke.”

  I said, “Aw no, it’s a school night, man.”

  “Well, we’re not going clubbing. Just hanging here.”

  I got tapped to approach J. J.: “You got a little something?” He was a little irritated—when you’re packing, you don’t want people to bug you for it—but he handed me a teensy rolled-up old plastic bag. Enough for a few rounds, but not enough to get in trouble. I thought it was funny that he had this mini-packet in his pocket, and it made me wonder how many of them he had. Was he planning on doling them out to get people like me off his back?

  I thanked him, and headed into the bathroom with three of my MTV friends. We all walked into the stall like a gaggle of geese. I reached in my pocket—and the bag had busted in my pocket. Everyone was saying, “Nooooo!” I turned my pocket inside out, and some of it spilled on the floor. One guy was using his finger to wipe it off the bathroom floor. We weren’t strung out—we just really wanted that bump. I held out the pocket, and one by one, my pals hoovered my pocket, inhaling every residual bit of blow.

  The three of them got their desperation hits, but I was left with an inside-out pocket and no ability to contort my body to reach it. It was the stupidest thing ever.

  J. J. asked, “You guys do all right?”

  I said, “Yeah, but do you have another one?”

  His look in response—oy!

  Mark:

  I was in Champaign, Illinois, for the first Farm Aid. We went out to dinner the night before with John Fogerty, Carlene Carter, and a bunch of other folks. In the men’s room, I offered Les Garland my vial. He did some and I did some.

  Then I was standing at a urinal next to John Fogerty—both of us were peeing. I stretched out my arm to hand him the vial. He said, “I don’t know what that is, but I don’t want any of it.” I felt like the biggest schmuck in the world.

  Alan:

  I was good about keeping school days sacrosanct—I didn’t do cocaine on weekdays, just on the weekend. I’ve always had pretty good willpower, and the idea of not having my wits about me when I had to go in front of the camera scared the shit out of me. But once in a while on a Friday night, if Jan and I didn’t have anything to do on Saturday, we’d get some coke, see a show, and go clubbing. Staying out until six-thirty in the morning was the norm. It didn’t feel like a dark period—I was stepping out with my wife.

  I fucked up once. I made the mistake of scoring a gram before the weekend. Thursday night, me and the honey were going to go out, have a lightweight club experience, and make an early night of it. But by midnight, the coke was burning a hole in my pocket, and we succumbed. Then it was two in the morning, and I knew I had the earliest shift on Friday, but we weren’t heading home. Four A.M. turned into 5 A.M., and I was thinking, “Man, I have to be at the studio at eight-thirty.” At 6 A.M., we were having breakfast at the Empire Diner, drinking as much liquid as possible, trying to come down.

  I went home long enough to take a shower. I was still buzzing when I got into the studio at eight-thirty, and my excuse to the crew was “This cold is kicking my ass. I’m so miserable. Will y’all help me get
through this?” They all knew exactly what was going on, and they were kind of bummed out—they were used to J. J. coming in from the clubs, but they didn’t expect it from me. One of the stage managers said, “Al, we never see you get fucked up.”

  The reason for that is I don’t operate well when I’m fucked up. Taping that day was an hour of hell. I sat there, looking at the television camera, knowing that a million people out there were watching me sniffle. “Oh God, okay. And that was the Rolling Stones, and coming up, U2. Can you give me another Kleenex?” I never even came close to doing that again.

  Mark:

  Les Garland called J. J. on the carpet for having a coke problem, and J. J. was not happy. He told me, “Garland was telling me with a straight face that I had to clean up my act.” They lived in the same building on the Upper West Side, and J. J. had gone through some situations with him. J. J. said there was one night when Garland came home so fucked up, he couldn’t get into his own apartment, and J. J. had to drag him in. So the hypocrisy pissed him off.

  Alan:

  MTV started doing spring break coverage, which meant doing live segments on the beach with lots of half-naked college kids, drunk off their asses. I can’t think about those broadcasts without remembering the smell of stale beer and suntan lotion. The first one we ever did, MTV put me on a bus with some university students from Ohio all the way to Florida—my job was to be the court jester for that seventeen-hour ride. I messed with them all day and all night. When we finally got down to the beach, I was exhausted, but we had a couple of days off before we had to start filming.

  I went out and partied with the producer and some camera guys. We hit the Fort Lauderdale clubs, accepting the gracious hospitality of the managers of each one. They wanted to be friendly, and that meant offering us some blow. I was cavalier about who I accepted lines from. In a sober corner of my brain, I knew the potential consequences of getting busted, but there were no MTV handlers keeping me out of trouble. For whatever reason, the channel didn’t worry about that. Of course, TMZ and phone cameras didn’t exist at that time.

  Another night, I broke off from the crew and went looking for the busload of people I drove down with; I knew they were at a party somewhere. I walked up and down almost every floor of my hotel, only to realize that they were in a different hotel. So at three in the morning, I had a half gram of blow in my pocket and was in the sad situation of hunting for a party.

  I walked past a door and heard a party going on. I looked at the door number, went up to my room, and called that room. When they answered, I said, “Hey, is Charlie there?” I didn’t know a Charlie, I was just making up a name.

  The guy on the phone said, “No, man, must be a different party.” Then he asked, “Are you Alan Hunter?”

  “Uh, yeah, I am.”

  “All right! Hey, everybody, it’s Alan Hunter.”

  Then I said, “It sounds like you’re having a little party down there.” It was totally shameless, but I was desperate. They invited me to what turned out to be a very lame party. They couldn’t believe I had come down to their party—at 6:30 A.M., back in my bed, I couldn’t believe it either.

  Mark:

  Drugs thrashed my body; I have cirrhosis. Right now, I don’t have too many symptoms that you can see from the outside, but I’ve been told that surgery is in my future. If I had never done drugs, I’d be a lot healthier today.

  37

  I Was There to Match My Intellect on National TV

  The Toughest Interviews

  Mark:

  Before MTV, I interviewed a lot of people on the radio; most of the time, it went pretty smoothly. The worst were probably Bob Geldof and Joe Jackson. Geldof was pissed off that America didn’t recognize him, and Joe Jackson was just a pain in the ass. In general, interviews went better at MTV. After the first couple of years, musicians knew the power of the channel and its effect on sales, and that changed the timbre of the conversation: they’d pay attention and engage with you more. Many were fans of ours. There were exceptions, though.

  Martha:

  Early on, we learned that the bigger stars, the Mick Jaggers of the world, were totally nice and professional. The ones who were younger, or felt like they had more to prove—some of them were total jerks.

  Nina:

  I interviewed Bow Wow Wow, and the little brats didn’t want to answer the questions. Liz Nealon, who was the producer of the segment, put the kibosh on that. The singer was fourteen years old, which was way too young to be giving us that much attitude.

  Mark:

  I loved the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album—this was before “Relax” got placed in Body Double and the single took off. I made sure that I got to interview them when they came to New York.

  The band was basically two gay guys, Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford. I thought they were lovers, but I didn’t know for sure. They were pretty young, and it was their first time in the city, so they stayed out all night at the clubs and rolled into MTV for the interview in the morning. Fine, no problem.

  I was asking them basic questions, introductory new-band stuff. Holly would say yes, and then whisper in Paul’s ear for a while, and then they’d giggle. I laughed, trying to play along, but all I was getting were the one-word answers and the giggling and the whispering.

  Finally I said, “Listen, you know what? America doesn’t give a shit about you. I think your band’s great, and I’d love to talk to you guys. So if you want to do this interview, great. If not, let’s just stop right here.”

  Holly said, “Yeah, let’s stop.”

  I had never stopped an interview before in my life. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. Holly came back to the studio a couple of days later, apologized to me, and did the interview with somebody else. I don’t think he wanted to apologize, but his manager probably said that they needed MTV on their side.

  Martha:

  I was scheduled to interview the Romantics—“Talking in Your Sleep” was rising up the charts. The night before, there was some party at a recording studio, maybe the Power Station. Nina and I went, and we ran into the band. It was friendly—we all had our picture taken together.

  The next day they came in, and it was like a reunion—“Hey, how you guys doin’?” We started talking on camera, and randomly, one of them said, “Well, you know Wally, the guy you had sex with.” I was frozen. There was a Wally in the band, but I had no idea why they would say something like that—nothing at all had happened between us. It was totally random. I was completely embarrassed, because this was happening in front of the crew I worked with every day.

  I’ve played that moment back in my mind many times. In the replay, I stand up and announce, “You know what, gentlemen? This interview is over.” And then I unclip my microphone, throw it down, and walk out, leaving them dumbfounded and ashamed. Instead, I sat there like a stone, and went back to reading my cards: “So who produced the record?” My internal monologue was “MTV is going to fire me if I don’t get this interview. I have to keep going.” At the time, I didn’t realize that the interview was much more important to the Romantics than it was to MTV.

  After that happened, I got a call from Les Garland that I really appreciated. He told me, “You don’t have to take that. If that ever happens again, you can stop the interview.”

  Alan:

  MTV sent me out to L.A. to interview Prince, and he canceled. I did get to hang out at the Greek with the Go-Go’s and the Bangles and various Hollywood up-and-comers. I met Drew Barrymore that night—what a little charmer. Only later did everyone find out she was doing drugs at a very young age. I should have realized something was wrong with a thirteen-year-old at a club at one in the morning.

  Martha:

  We did a contest where the prize was a date with Prince to see his movie Under the Cherry Moon, plus he would play a concert in the winner’s hometown—which turned out to be Sheridan, Wyoming. I covered the event, and before the concert, Prince came up behind me and said, “Oh, you seem
tired.” He didn’t say anything else, but that might have been the most substantive conversation any VJ had with him during my time at MTV. Prince was another artist I had a huge crush on. I thought, “I’m perfect for you! I’m short!”

  Alan:

  I worked really hard to prepare for my Ozzy Osbourne interview—I was a big fan. But when he came on the set, his vibe was immediately crazy: lots of sniffles and tics and general weirdness. Sharon was diplomatic: “Oh, he’s sick and he’s taking some medicine for his virus.” It might even have been true.

  Ozzy sat down, and started saying, “This is all right, this is all right. I’m okay, are you all right?” I tried to calm him down, and then we started taping. I asked my first question, and he didn’t even come close to answering it. It was just this fugue state of “Oh, oh, really, really, you know, no, it’s right, I didn’t do this.” I tried another question, and he kept being unintelligible. He wasn’t being an asshole—he was just incapacitated.

  I looked over at the producer and said, “What are we going to do here?”