September 10th • 1h 49m
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Adam Curry. It's Thursday, September 10th, 2026. This is your
award-winning Gitmo Nation media assassination, episode 1902. This is no
agenda. I am traveling back from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to
Austin and then back to the hill country. So today,
for episode 1902... Special, best of, no agenda, these are
the MTV Chronicles. Enjoy! I am lead for manned traffic.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for
Anyways, I do have one print story if you're interested.
mankind.
I do have one print story if you're interested. I
think we'd share one with the No Agenda audience. one
And this relates to... I think it was 90, 1991.
And I was in Minneapolis. And I sent you the
link for this earlier, John. I was, it was probably
one of the, I've only done three commercials for real
products back in the heyday when I was Mr. MTV
guy. And one of them was for Sam Goody Musicland,
which no longer exists. It doesn't exist anymore. It's gone,
right? I'm pretty sure it's gone. And the biggest store
is at Mall of America, which, of course, is in
Minneapolis. Oh, I didn't know that. That was not the
biggest store. It was in Manhattan. At the time. And
that's where it was going to be done. The store
was huge. And so it's kind of like a spinal
tap where I'm pretending to be on a tour, some
fantastic tour. You know how all these commercials, they always
have to have a slide so you can put the
current offers on it. And so with almost like a
completely different voice in the commercial, you hear blank. Like
the Bengals. Milli Vanilli. You know, like all these great
people I'm on tour with, but it's really, it's the
Sam Goody Music Land tour. And, you know, I'm going
around, running around backstage and kind of like spinal tap.
This is the best concert I've ever been on. And
then I go to the stage, open the doors, and
then, of course, I open into the store. And that's
the stage or something. How creative. It's in the show
notes and it's one of the lamest things you've ever
seen. It fits perfectly. It paid. Not very much, but
it was, I think it was maybe. It was a
buyout, maybe $5,000, maybe. It was, you know, not a
good deal, but back in the day. Anyway. So I
was there for three or four days and the second
night, it's a quarter to midnight, I'm in the hotel
and it was a professional shoot. Everything was really well
done, a nice hotel room and the phone rings at
11:45. I pick it up and say, "Yeah, hello, is
this Adam Curry?" Yeah. Prince wants to know if you
want to come to a party at his house tonight.
And I say, let me think about it. Yeah. And
he's good because the car's downstairs waiting for you when
you are. I'm like, this is classy. And this, you
know, this is the 91. What was I? I was
in the late 20s. And holy shit. Sure enough, there's
a car, you know, black town car downstairs. And the
guy's just no word spoken, just get in, takes me
off. And then, you know, we go towards what people
have now seen on the news along the highway. There's
Paisley Park, and it's all lit up in purple. And
it's, you know, drive up to the gate. The gate
opens and go in, and there's metal detectors, which in
91, metal detectors at the airport was, you know, kind
of like throw your keys down, you know, your shoes
would never go off or anything like that. It wasn't
all that. you know like but it was odd you
never saw metal detectors anywhere else except at the airport
back in those days so go into this completely white
room everything's white and it's the lighting's a bit dim
but it's just all you see is white there's no
real color uh it's a uh you know it's a
uh rectangle so on one side like the short side
of the room there's a uh a dj standing kind
of on built-up ironworks you know it's like scaffolding and
he's playing some Prince tracks I've never heard in my
life before. Along the long side of the room, there's
a buffet from end to end, and it's nothing but
fresh fruit and juices. There's no alcohol, no alcohol, no
anything else, all just fresh ice sculptures, dripping stuff, and
wall-to-wall beautiful people, maybe 70 or 80 people. And this
is what heaven's like, obviously. Beautiful people, healthy food. And
it's in Minnesota, who knew? And I saw that there
was one or two of the extras from the commercial,
of course we're all beautiful, from the commercial shoot were
there. Like, hey, how are you guys doing? Yeah, yeah,
yeah. So we're hanging out and Prince was standing over
next to the DJ kind of hanging out just off
to the side by himself. I said, I'm going to
go over and thank him for the party. And they
went, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that.
You can't do this. What are you talking about? No,
no, no, it's, uh, you're too tall and you're too
white. I'm like, are you kidding me? This was really
the perception. You really shouldn't go talk to him at
all. I was like, fuck that. I go over. I
say, hey, I'm Adam. Thanks for inviting me. This is
very cool. He says, hey, good you came. I love
the thing you did on Halloween with your daughter. That
was fantastic. I really loved how you scared her, but
she was kind of having fun. He had seen everything.
And observation, he didn't come across as timid or shy.
Sure, he was wearing boots, but he also didn't come
across as like some miniature man. Just seemed pretty, pretty
normal. Yeah, and then I really didn't have much left
to say. I was like, hey, man, well, all right,
well, thanks. Yeah, enjoy. That was it. And then maybe
an hour or so later, you know, 2 a.m., the
party's over, which is signified by Prince's guys coming through
this room saying nothing, just kind of walking slowly amongst
everybody, flashing their flashlights on the ground. And everyone just
kind of flows out and the car was still there
waiting for me took me back And now that was
his little private concert hall. He had in there. Yeah.
Yeah, how big was it? It was really high, so
I'd say it would be like... uh like the size
of an aircraft hanger for um but not you know
for more like a a gulfstream not for a not
for a seven series anything but really high so about
that size and and the same type of high school
gym Three-quarters that size. The high school gym? Yeah. So
it was a medium-sized little hall. Yeah, it wasn't any
huge one by any means. um And there was this
other time that I stayed at Dan Hartman. Remember Dan
Hartman? Do you remember him? No. He had Relight My
Fire, I Can Dream About You. You don't remember? No.
Oh, how about Edgar Winter, Free Ride? Do you remember
that? Oh, yeah, of course. He used to play in
the city a lot. And Dan played bass for them.
So I was staying at his house one time in
Connecticut. A friend of mine was recording at his studio
at home, which back in the early 90s, you had
an SSL studio at your house? That was crazy. But
he had bought this with the studio from someone else.
What's SSL means? Oh, Solid State Logic. Those were the
big, you know, the 24 or 48 track mixers before
we got into real full digital. But these were Solid
State. That was a big deal back in the day.
And he said, you know, I bought this place and
above the studio in the attic, I found all these
boxes and somehow these are all masters, Prince masters of
him in the studio, but you know, not mixed. It
was just the 24 track tapes. He said, I'll put
it on and listen to it. It was unbelievable. You
hear Prince, you know, setting his own mic, setting his
own levels. It was mind boggling how good, and shit
you never heard before or have ever heard again, I
guess. Who knows what will come out now. Yes. Did
you ever fly Concorde? No, I missed that shoot. I
flew that four times. Did you poop on it? Hell
yeah! Four times? What would be the point? Let me
tell you, though, it was not a luxurious poop. The
Concorde was very uncomfortable. It's like a little tube. I
could barely stand up in the entire plane, and the
seats are very narrow, although the legroom is nice, and
there's no movie, or there was no movie, because there
wasn't enough time to start the movie. So basically, you
just sat there getting warm because at a certain point,
about two hours into it, the fuel is depleted, and
the fuel was actually used, talking the past tense to
cool the aircraft down which extends in flight it actually
grows and to top it off i had a drunk
liza minnelli behind me chattering the whole way it was
annoying Life's tough. At least I didn't pay for it.
Do you know who is a huge collector of Texas
art, in particular Alamo-related art? No. Phil Collins. Wow, that's
odd. Yeah, and he has his whole collection. Su-Su-Studio? The
studio guy, yeah. Or one more. Well, the Genesis guy.
Phil. Phil Collins. We all know Phil. Phil. Phil hates
me. He hates you. Yeah. There was a period in
the 80s where we would always be bumping into each
other. I'd have to interview him if it wasn't, you
know, at some, at Wembley Stadium for some kind of...
um you know one of those benefit shows he would
be in my studio and then a certain point he'd
just say oh curry too tall too much hair i
hate you and he would walk away Yeah. It was
loving. It was loving. I think it was love.
form of love. Yeah. It was in the air tonight.
My favorite Ozzy Osbourne story, and I don't remember if
it was he that told the story or if it
was one of the crew guys. But he had a,
in one of his concerts, he decided to have a
catapult kind of behind. Yeah. The catapult kind of behind
the band, and it was held down by these, I
guess, rubber... Rubber bands. Pull-downs. And I guess a rubber
band was going to pull the thing forward, and the
catapult had a pocket that was filled with chicken guts.
And the idea was that they were going to release
at some point in the song, they were going to
release, they're going to cut it loose and the catapult
is going to fly forward and throw chicken guts all
over the audience. Nice. But what happened was Ozzy ended
up, they had a guitar solo or something that ran
on way too long, and the rubber bands got kind
of stretched and loose. They didn't have enough oomph to
make the thing fly. So according to the story, the
catapult flies up and kind of just drops all the
chicken guts on Ozzy. That's a good one. It seems
like a believable story. Maybe I should. I've told her
before. Maybe I should tell my Aussie story since people
are always complaining. I don't talk about my old MTV
stories. Nobody's complaining. No, I got an email the other
day saying, hey, you need to talk more about your...
Hey, tell some stories here, you know? Your story's the
only thing we lifted a show waiting for some stories
from you. Tina's great. Hey, Adam, tell the Prince story.
Yeah, yeah, tell the Madonna story. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tell
the Aussie story. So I'll tell the Aussie story. People
have heard it, but I'll tell it again. Moscow Music
Peace Festival, you know the big CIA op. We all
went to Moscow and to get the kids to love
the Scorpions just before the wall came down. I'll just
cut straight to the chase because I didn't know that
at the time, but it makes a lot of sense
now. So we leave from Newark Airport, and it's a
crappy, I think it was a Stretch 727. Do you
remember those? Was it 727 or 737, the Stretch? No,
no, it was the 27. 727 Stretch, which looks like
they could snap in half at any moment. They were
funny looking. Yeah, and so that's what they chartered, Doc
McGee. Oh, yeah, I should mention the whole reason for
the concert is because Doc McGee, who managed Bon Jovi
and Motley Crue at the time, and busted in Florida,
bringing like some unbelievable amount of marijuana into the country.
And so they got to him and they said, hey,
instead of what's that in your mouth on this picture,
they said, look, why don't you organize a concert for
us in Moscow? and bring all your bands over there
and then we'll psyop the children. By the way... The
kids in Moscow, this is '88, I think, '88, '89.
had no idea who Bon Jovi or Motley Crue were.
They had no idea who Skid Row was. They didn't
care. You know who they knew? Ozzy. They knew Ozzy
Osbourne, and they had all these bootleg cassettes that came
in from Pakistan, and they knew Ozzy. So we're on
the plane. It's a crappy plane. No one's in first
class, so everyone's annoyed, and everyone's on edge. Of course,
this was supposed to be a... Hold on. The part
of the story that I didn't know before, I don't
think you told that part before, coming along because they
wanted to do this. They needed to do something in
Moscow and they needed a front. Yeah. No, but the
whole thing... It makes sense to me. It's a great
idea. The whole thing was to get the... Remember, the
Scorpions were there. The Scorpions were a German band, and
they had the Wind of Change, which is the only
hit they ever had that they didn't write themselves. Coincidence.
And that was the wind of changes. And that was
the big anthem when the wall came down, not but
a year, year and a half later. um so i'm
i'm there's all kinds of things there's an op involved
there's there's a definite op involved but i'm the only
person from mtv who goes along like this is dynamite
so how come you're the only one because wouldn't anybody
wouldn't somebody else want to go I think they only
offered it to one person. And I did headbangers balls,
so I was appropriate. I was the guy. And I
had the hair and everything. And I don't know. I'm
happy that they told me to go. I'm sure the
I'm sure you know what? I'm sure that downtown Julie
Brown was not having it. She's like, no, I'm not
going to go to Moscow, to Russia. Of course, this
was still Iron Curtain stuff. So anyway, we're on the
plane. And this whole concert, this whole affair is billed
as an anti-drugs, anti-alcohol concert. That was the front. Like,
we're doing this because we're going to show we can
have good, clean fun to the Russian kids. And we're
on the plane. Everybody's hammered. They're drunk as skunks, all
of them. and Ozzy was there, Geezer Butler was there,
Tommy O. I mean, there was a lot of Black
Sabbath was there. Whatever was still alive or barely alive.
And Sharon, who at the time, this is way before
the Osbournes reality show. This is way before Ozempic. And
Sharon was a big roly-poly British housewife. Now, she was
tipping the scales. And she's like... Very timid, didn't have
the big mouth that she has now. And so at
a certain point, Ozzy gets up and he has to
go to the bathroom. He's like, and so there's a
laboratory. You got his voice down. There's a laboratory mid
section of the plane and it's occupied. 'cause we're kind
of in the second, the back half of the plane.
And so Ozzie's standing there, "Sharon, Sharon, Sharon." And she's
like, "Oh Ozzie, just wait, Sharon." And what does Ozzie
do? He pees his pants right there in the aisle.
probably the saddest thing I've ever seen in rock and
roll ever. That is pretty pathetic. And that's my Aussie
story. That's uplifting. Well, this does give us a unique
opportunity since we have more than one. Ladies and gentlemen,
the No Agenda In Memoriam segment. I went back into
the VHS archives. Because in show business, you get to
say, yeah, I worked with him. *laughs* Don't you have
that? Oh, yeah. No, I work with him. Great guy.
Big fan of his work. Big fan. Big fan of
his work. Yeah. So we first have two clips. We
go back to 1988 to the plane ride to Moscow
known as the Magic Bus or the Get Doc McGee
Out of Jail Free Trip. Here's Adam interviewing Ozzy. Yeah,
News from the magic bus on our way to the
Soviet Union and no strangers to the ball of course
Ozzy and Zach. Guys, good to have you aboard. Well,
are we aboard? It's like a flying madhouse. Are we
actually flying is the question. I haven't checked recently. I
don't know what the pilot's doing up there, but he's
flying on autopilot. I hope it's on automatic pilot because
I hope no humans are. I thought you were flying
it. I think I was at one point. So you
just finished up the complete world tour. Yeah, I just
I just did 13 months. We're doing these two shows
in Moscow, and we're up for about a month or
so, and then I start writing and recording at home.
I understand Pete Townsend is in one of the back
clubs. He's in a soundproof booth. Ozzy, we're going to
take a look at breaking all the rules. Anything you
want to say about the video? Oh, it was a
lot of fun making it. Yes, yes. In-depth questions during
this interview. Ozzy, was it fun making the video, Ozzy?
I had every single rock radio station in America call
me yesterday. Hey, man, hey, you work with Ozzy, right?
What was he really like? Oh, man, we had such
good times together. But then, then, oh no, we have
Hulk Hogan. 71 is definitely too early. And I was
able to retrieve from 1993. the infamous rocket car of
death during Circus of the Stars as Hulk Hogan and
Adam Curry worked together and loved each other's work. Big
fans. Big fans. Hi, I'm Hulk Hogan here at Universal
Studios Florida where Adam Curry thought he was taking a
break from music videos. However, we're putting him right back
into MTV and that stands for Mucho Terrifying Vehicle. Yeah!
He'll take the ride of his life in a 600-pound
rocket car. Traveling at roller coaster speed, he'll be catapulted
into space, dropping 50 feet on his way to a
fiery, frightening crash landing. Are you ready, Rocket Man?
Good job, Kevin. - You got it, Gray. What a
Oh my god, let's keep our fingers crossed. There he
is. He's giving us a signal he's okay. He's okay.
He lives. Adam, how'd you like to see what we
just saw you do in slow motion, dude? Yeah, let's
take a look at it, Gray. Oh, what?
ride that was. It was so hot. I got the
headache from. Man. MTV's macho, terrific, wonderful Adam Curry. coming
up right after this right after these messages You gotta
see it. Roller coaster speeds. Yeah, I don't know. Well,
yeah, it was roller coasters. Roller coasters average about 45
miles an hour. It's very terrifying, John. In my rocket
car of death. You should post that video. It's on
YouTube. No. It's on the YouTubes. Yeah. 1993 Circus of
the Stars with my co-host Deirdre Hall. Boy, I've come
a long way. Yeah, have you kept in touch? Have
I kept in touch? At least Hulk Hogan will go
to heaven. We know that. That's a good, I don't
know. I've been to Moscow's airport. So Moscow, you go
into this airport, which was, I think, new at the
time. And the place is dark. I mean, literally dark.
And there's gypsy kids running around all over the place,
pickpocketing people in the terminal. What year was this, John?
What year were you there? About one year before the
fall of communism, which was some kind of horrible. Oh,
me too, like 88, 89? Yeah, something like that. Yeah,
that's when I was there. Oh, interesting. Yeah, well, I
wouldn't have been able to see it because it's so
dark in the airport, in the terminal. But anyway. I'll
be wearing the red rose. There was the funny scenes
were besides the kids running around, there was also one
in the entire airport. There was one automatic door that
opened and closed to let people in and out. And
it was surrounded by kids who kept jumping up and
down on the thing to open and close the door.
Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. Go ahead. You're right. It wasn't
like an Argus-based or electronic eye. It was a mat.
It was a mat. Pressure mat. that would open it
up. Right. So you can't get out that door. And
meanwhile, I talked to somebody about this, why the place
was so dark, by the way, and some guy told
me that, well, the deal is that it was designed
by a German company and they specced out all these
lights. There's all these little bulbs that were inset and
kind of cans. The whole ceiling was covered with them.
But there was no light coming out of them. He
said the Germans specced this thing out to a certain
wattage bulb, not to a certain lumen. And when they
used Russian bulbs, They got about half the lumens out
of them, so the place was pitch black. I was
there with the Moscow Music Peace Festival. Do you remember
that? No. Oh, that was, uh... Do you want to
get this story? Are you interested? Yeah, yeah, no, sure.
Okay, so Doc McGee, I don't know if that name
means anything to you. Yeah, it rings a bell. Yeah,
very famous manager of bands. And in the 80s, he
was the manager of Bon Jovi, Motley Crue. Those are
the two big ones. And he had been caught, I
don't know if he was, I think either he had
rented the Learjet or was registered to his name. There
was a Learjet that landed in Miami with like 5,000
kilos of coke. And so he got busted for it.
And the judge gave him kind of a get out
of jail free card. And he had to do some
great community service. So the idea was he would do
an anti-drug, anti-alcohol concert in Russia. And of course this
went up to some pretty high levels because this was
a political thing as well. He's clearly well connected in
all the right places. So off we went. And this,
I think it was 88. um in a in a
rented dc-8 some some crappy crappy plane uh so bon
jovi motley crew um ozzy osbourne but with um you
know the other black sabbath guys geezer butler and uh
Was it Tommy Iommi? And, uh... It was Skid Row.
We stopped in Germany, picked up the Scorpions, and then
we landed in Moscow. And it was for this huge
concert that would be held in Lenin Stadium. So we
were in the hotel right near Red Square where they
actually turned on the hot water in that part of
the city as a gesture to their guests. And I
could probably fill up three no agendas worth of stories
about that trip there, but I'll just give you one
that was pretty cool. Because, of course, you know, this
was the... I'll give you two stories. This was the
anti-drug, anti-alcohol concert. So on the plane, on the way
over, and this is when Sharon Osbourne was still just
a little rotund, kind of pale, no... no personality have
an English girl who was managing Ozzy Osbourne. So she
was on board. Ozzy was completely plastered. Everyone was plastered,
but Ozzy was really, really out of it. He's standing
near the lavatory because we were all kind of sitting
together. He's like, Sharon! Sharon! I've got to go! Someone
in the loo! Sharon! Because someone was occupied. Sharon's like,
oh, Ozzy, just wait. He wets himself right there, right
in the aisle. Just like a second grader, a huge
wet spot in his pants. Which really kind of set
the tone for the rest of the entire trip. Who
would pick that guy to go on an anti-alcohol tour?
That's my point. Oh, like the Motley Crue guys were
cool. Or Skid Row, come on. Or any of them.
Exactly. They were there for like four nights or five
nights. So on the second night, which of course consisted
of lots of vodka and just brazen drunkenness, it was
crazy. chapter of the Hell's Angels showed up in front
of our hotel. Didn't know they had one. And remember,
this was still before the wall came down. And they
were on Java motorcycles, you know, these Yugoslavian-built bikes. And
they were out of their mind, John. They were like
popping wheelies, flipping off the back. It was just, it
was like being in a fucking movie. And I'll just
never forget. It's like, you have this idea of what
a communist state, particularly what, you know, Moscow would be
like, and you're there, and it's just, there was no
control. It was mayhem. I looked at their technology. The
technology was like old gray Volkswagen buses with curtains. This
was supposed to be the highly technical KGB that could
eavesdrop on everything and had superiority over the world. No
way! Well, I'm reminded of, you know, Ronald Reagan when
he became president. He was shaking his fist at Russia
and he called him the evil empire. And he went
on and on and on. He did this for like
a while. Mr. Gorbachev, bring that wall down. But then
he went to Russia. And he never, he went to
Russia, and it was almost like he went to Russia
and had an epiphany, and he never, ever again said
anything about the evil empire. Because he saw it, because
it's not there, right? Yeah, he saw it was a
big bunch of bull. I mean, I noticed it. I
was staying in the Mir Hotel, which is across from
that Russian, that white building that got, you know, shelled
or whatever. And got some nice photos. And they had
mics in the room. were obviously because the mirror used
to be I guess it was it was the diplomats
hotel for a number of years and then it became
a public hotel. Were they like big Sennheisers instead of
micro stuff? No they had they were they were big
clunky mics but they had been they had been painted
over so many times because the room kept getting repainted
and they were all just a gob of paint. What's
that bump there? And in every floor there was a
woman that was the floor woman that you had to
check in with. They never really did any security. But
you were told before you went, if you did your
due diligence, you had to give them gifts constantly. Oh,
yes, the floor lady, if you wanted toilet paper or
if you wanted to make a phone call. Yeah, and
so you had to drop off toys. Apparently at the
time, the most valuable thing you could give people besides
cigarettes were like, I was told this, and they got
a kick out of it because most of them had
kids, and these little Tonka toys or these little mini
things, those little Hot Wheels, those little things, those were
like gold in Russia at the time. And so you'd
gift them with these. Did you go to the hooker
boat? Did you see that when you were there? Well,
when I was in Russia, Soviet Union, before the wall
came down, they told me, whatever you do, don't insult
the Kremlin. So Sebastian Bach and I, Sebastian of Skid
Row, we went and we were drinking vodka on Red
Square at 3 a.m. and we were trading T-shirts for
some of those cool Russian furry hats. We didn't get
arrested. We were there with Ozzy. But you could've been.
Could've- Several episodes ago, you guys played a clip of
Gene Simmons from Kiss, and Adam said he had a
Gene Simmons story, but never said it.
Spilled the beans. Oh. Do you think we'll get more
donations if I tell my Gene Simmons story? Well, I
don't know. Is it a good story? It's kind of
okay. Well, tell it. So Gene Simmons at MTV, you
know, in the MTV days when I was there, he
was managing bands. And, you know, notorious at MTV, and
I've said this many times, is, you know, your video
didn't really get played, like, because it was good. It
was a deal. You know, if we wanted Michael Jackson
on the Video Music Awards, then, you know, whatever Sony
pushed on us, we'd play that in the so-called buzz
bin, which is supposed to be this hip little thing,
course only played at 2 a.m. So Gene Simmons being
the you know kind of the brash guy that he
is he could not get it one of his bands
played so he burst into the music and I used
to be at the music meetings until I found out
there was a total scam he bursts in with knee
pads on jumps up on the table and says who
do I have to blow to get my video on
this network And so who did he blow? I was
smiling all the way back to the studio. I so
believe this. I so, so, so believe this. You know
that this happened to me once? What? Did I tell
you the story where this happened to me? This exact
same thing. My own Watergate. Should I tell you the
story? Yeah. So I just started at the television. I
was 19. I was on television in Holland. And I
was like super, super. There was only two stations. So
it was like everyone knew me. And I went to
go interview the Rolling Stones. So we're talking. When was
I 19, John? This is 1983, I think, 84. I
don't know. So I go to interview the Rolling Stones
in London. And we're in London. And it's like one
of these shoots where they're all like rolling around. And
it's hard to get them into the room. And we're
talking tape, right? We're talking analog. We're talking clapboards. You
know, this is way back in the day. Please, you
know, forget that you're in 2012. So finally, you know,
the guys stumble in. It was Keith and Woody. They
fall into the room. Like, oh, hold on a second.
They go in the bathroom. They're snorting coke off his
Bowie knife. You know, like, ah, so they finally sit
down. You know, we do the interview. It was great
because they were completely hammered. And then my producer says,
oh, man, you know, let's take a picture because we
can get this on the front page of the newspaper.
that you did an interview with him great promotion for
the show and no one had a camera Can you
imagine? This is 1984. No one had brought a camera,
but I had one of these newfangled Kodak disc cameras
in my briefcase. Remember those? The Kodak disc? Yep, yep.
They had a disc. Right. So I said, oh, I've
got the Kodak disc, which, by the way, crappy photos.
They took really crap photos. Yeah, they were little bitty
negatives or dinky. Yeah, like a view master. Yeah, exactly.
So they take a picture, and we go back. have
a service. And the service is the Dutch Broadcasting Corporation,
where they would actually take, it's called the press bureau,
you would give them your film and they would have
it developed and then they'd send it out to the
newspapers, etc. So I gave the disc to my producer.
And at the time I was dating one of the
Well, she would adjust. I'm already seeing where this is
headed. She had just started. She was an announcer on
television. They had these announcers in between. It's very much
like the BBC does with voice. In Holland, they would
have an announcer, and she would sit there and say,
oh, coming up next, we have this show and this
show after that. And then she would go away, and
then she'd come in like kind of a disc jockey
of television shows. A really pretty girl, Karoline Tense. Everyone
in Holland knows her. And, um... And then I was
like, oh crap, man. I took pictures of her with
the disc camera and they're not, they're like not flattering.
They're naked pictures. And so we broke into the press
bureau that night to retrieve the disc and then have
it developed somewhere else where we could actually get rid
of the prints. The evidence. The evidence. And I still
have these pictures, which is the best part. I've carried
them with me through two marriages. What? What a pervert.
But these things do happen. And I totally believe that.
How can we find out more about Nixon? This is
great. Well, I don't know. I think all the guys
involved with that... Actually, any one of the... I don't
know. How many of the burglars... would have been privy
to the real target. I think probably that creepy guy
that was always claiming to be all kinds of super
spy that used to light his hand on fire. What
is his name? G. Gordon Liddy would know. But then
you can't trust what he says. No. I don't know.
I don't think it's verifiable. I love it though. You're
going to tell us the Madonna story. Oh, the Madonna
story. Geez, I'm glad you reminded me. Yeah, well, you
were wandering off. Like you were trying to avoid it.
Anyway, go on. Now it's not all that big a
deal. So the way it works is you sit down
in the press office in their little cubby corner couch
so they can all listen in on the speakerphone, make
sure you're not saying something horrible. And I said, oh,
so you knew the new VJ. It's great. So this
was not a live in studio interview? This was with
the, well, no, TV Guide. TV Guide's a magazine. So
it was, yeah, they were interviewing me about being the
new VJ on the scene. Oh, okay. All right, go
on. And so, you know, you've been doing this because
I've been working in Holland and I've met lots of
celebrities. And so what did you think of Madonna? I
said, man, she's not really that nice. Well, hold on
a second. Why would they ask that question out of
the blue? Because MTV... No, it wasn't out of the
blue. It's like, okay, you've been working in television, you've
been working in music television, you've met lots of people,
you've done lots of interviews. So what are you thinking
of Madonna? Yeah, she's not that nice. I thought they
were going to shit a brick. And they like hit
the mute button. You can't say that. If you say
that, you're going to perform on the Video Music Awards.
You know, those deals they would do. Yeah, yeah, you
were just, you were being too honest. Yeah, exactly. You
don't want honesty. Nope, nope, that was foreboding. You weren't
hired to be honest. It was not your job. Wrong
thing, wrong thinking curry. You're hired to be a talking
head and I smile a lot. That's exactly. Shut up
and smile a lot, boy. Exactly. That's exactly what it
was. So yeah, and they hated me. They never got
press for me again after that. I was not to
be trusted with press. Well... It was a screw up.
No, it was honest. Yeah. It was such a double
standard. I don't want to get into it. And those
are the same people, probably with the same mentality that
are writing those notes in face bag. Certainly. Bitching about
one thing or another. From the same milieu. Because they
can be honest there. Yeah. So they're expressing themselves. Yes.
It's a private face bag group, so yeah, I guess
they can be honest there. Yeah. Well, then now you
know what's going on in the background of all media.
Yeah. So actually, so there's one woman in particular, and
I'm moving on back to the education stuff, if you're
okay with that. Yeah. I just wanted to hear the
story. Did I ever tell you the story when I
flew to L.A. with Sean Penn? No. We're open for
anecdotes on this show. Yes. This is back in the
MTV days, probably 88, 89, and there was a fabulous,
fabulous flight between New York and Los Angeles, and Los
Angeles and New York, that's all it did twice a
day, called MGM Grand Air. Oh, yes. That was an
interesting plane. MGM Grand Air was a 727 or a
737? I want to say 27. No, no. It was
a longer plane. It was either a 27 or a...
It was 27. 50 passengers. Of course, MTV paid for
this because they needed to get me out there. It
wasn't that much more expensive than a regular ticket, actually.
And so it had a bar. It was all captain's
chairs. And then staterooms. There were like four or five
staterooms where you could sit three people on each side.
A table could come up so you could eat. The
doors could close. Now, I had been in those once
before. Like a train. Like a train. I'd been in
those once before by myself, and it was fantastic. Because
you could move the two benches together. You'd have a
huge double bed. It was great. But this one time,
I'm in there with Sean Penn. in the stateroom with
his brother the one who uh who died and in
sean penn's mom and it was weird First of all,
his brother, what was his brother's name? I don't remember.
He was drinking beer out of the can, taking his
shirt off in the plane. Just bare chested there. The
mom was just very quiet. And it was really odd.
Hey, how you doing? Hey, you're that guy from VH1,
aren't you? I'm like, oh, Jesus. VH1. That must have
been the greatest insult of your life. Yeah, so I
said, yeah, that's me. Hey, what was it like being
married to Madonna, if you don't mind me asking? And
he said... Hell hath no fury. And then we pretty
much just looked at each other for the rest of
the flight. Very, very bizarre. So you never got into
a conversation with him? No, this is sad because I
knew him. I sat down with him for an hour
for a live radio interview, and he was a very
interesting guy. Legendary producer Quincy Jones, a giant in the
entertainment industry, has died. He leaves behind a legacy highlighted
by work with some of the biggest stars in American
history. Jones was born and raised on the south side
of Chicago, and he ascended to become one of the
first black executives to succeed in show business. Frank Sinatra
and produced, of course, the hit Michael Jackson albums Off
the Wall, Three
and bad. He also discovered Will Smith while producing The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He won 28 Grammys, an Emmy,
and an Honorary Academy Award. I feel like the most
blessed person on the planet to have come along the
path that I came in musically from 13 years old,
you know, starting with Ray Charles at 14, he was
16, and going to Clark Terry and Basie and Vinnie
Carter, everybody from Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, all the way
50 Cent. Wow. Quincy Jones died last night at home
in Bel Air surrounded by family. He was 91 years
old. I always thought Thriller was one of the greatest
produced albums in the history of music. It's fantastic. But
he produced Lena Horne. I mean, he orchestrated it. I
mean, but still, just the body of work he orchestrated.
Yeah, he was talented. For Sinatra. Yeah, so I had
a live interview with him in the early 90s on
Hitline. Hitline, USA, coast to coast. And I was like,
do you have a copy of it? I wish I
had a copy of it. Oh, you didn't keep it.
And the producer, Dana Miller, he died years ago. Yeah,
they're driving dead. If anyone knows. And he was the
executive producer. His name was Dean. I forget his last
name. He went to jail for some real estate scam,
some real estate fraud. So I have a feeling that
Endless Summer Entertainment archives no longer exist. But I do
remember this interview. Somebody has it in their basement. I
hope so. It was set up in a studio, like
a recording studio, and it was dimly lit. There was
a table in the middle, two chairs, two mics. And
I'm there. I didn't see Jones, like what am I
gonna ask this guy? This is quite the talent. He
comes in with a bottle of Latour. And he slaps
it down and says, let's have a great hour. And
we drink the bottle of Le Jour. Oh, I don't
remember. But Quincy was a real one. So when I
was at MTV and we would, none of this was,
rarely was anything live. We would tape segments. And on
Thursday, we would tape for the weekend. That would be
called a 48. So we tape our segments, which is
essentially the lead-ins, the intros and the outros of the
videos without the videos. And that would be put together
later by the tape jockeys up in Long Island. They'd
literally start a U-matic with my segment and then start
the second U-matic with the video. And this was the,
we had made a deal. This is how it went.
Made a deal. We would give Michael Jackson the planet.
We would receive the planetary premiere of, I can't remember
which video it was. And this became competitive because we
had not purchased BET at the time and BET um
you know they would they would you know whoever could
dedicate more air time you know it's a commercial deal
commercial deals and then we threw in like a video
music award appearance all this stuff And so it was
Michael Jackson weekend for the planetary premiere of whatever video.
And, you know, so you work a full day from
nine in the morning till, you know, five at night.
And you're doing segments throughout the day. There's a lot
of coordination. There's changes. I mean, yeah, my life was
really hard being a VJ. But it was, you know,
actual work. And then Friday, we would typically only do
a 24, which would be for Monday's air. And Thursday
evening, we all got a call, oh my God, you
have to come back early. We've got to do three
days worth of programming on Friday. So not just the
48. We've got to do the Monday as well. We've
got to redo the whole weekend. Because contractually... We had
promised every single time we said Michael Jackson to follow
it by the King of Pop. And of course, that
had not made it down to the studio, so we
had to go back and re-tape every single segment saying,
and now it's time for the planetary premiere of Michael
Jackson, the king of pop, with his new video. And
that's how it works. That's how you're completely controlled. The
king of pop. The king of pop. That's cute. Let's
get this out of the way. What was with the
hair that you had there? Where did that idea come
from? My ex-wife. It was, oh, okay. And it made
me famous. It was a total, yeah, the hair. You
see, because. You had the hair. Luckily, you had the
kind of hair that could do what that hair did.
Well, when you have enough Aquanet. which is what we
had in the day. You could probably, and anybody could
make that hair. You just have to grow it long
enough, blow dry it, and tease it. Did you go
into makeup every day in the morning? My ex-wife would
do that every single morning before I left the house.
She would do my hair. I was incapable of doing
my hair myself, which made me a slave to her
and to the hair. I'm not kidding. I was afraid
to go anywhere without her because I couldn't do my
hair. This is no joke, by the way. That's funny.
That's sad is what it is. It's sad. However, if
it looks distinctive, according to the Merv Griffin theory of
celebrities. People with big heads are successful on television. And
he would know. Look at the people he's hired. And
look at people who are successful on television. If they've
got a big head, and that usually goes with a
small body, then you are going to be successful. Al
Sharpton. There you go. It's like a head on a
dwarf. Well, I will retell my story of Michael Jackson
when I was going to award him with the Video
Vanguard of the Decade Award, which forever was to be
now named the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. And we
were starting the the the ceremony there in his studio
in Los Angeles and all of a sudden he stopped
He had to had his guy come over a little
whisper in his ear guy came came back with a
crate And he had to, so he was standing on
an apple crate. Yeah, the full one? Yeah, well, he
put it on his side, though, so it was probably
about three-quarter apple crate. Huh. Michael Jackson was not really...
By the way, that's what you're supposed to do. When
people out there, when you're watching TV and you got
some midget standing next to some guy who's tall, it's
because they're not doing their job. You're supposed to put
the midget on a crate, on an apple crate or
whatever they call it. And they're usually painted black so
you can't see them. And you can have a half
full one, a quarter one, and a full one. And
if you get up, I think they're four inches. It
raises you four inches. Yeah, that was about it. Michael
Jackson, not a short guy. If you Google Adam Curry,
Michael Jackson, you can see the picture. It's on the
interwebs. And you'll see that he's standing next to me.
He's almost as tall as I am. And there's a
Christmas tree growing out of the back of my head.
It's one of those great MTV shots. Thank you. It's
been fantastic. Except for Tina Turner dying. Yeah. She was
sick for a long time, but that really sucked. I
had good times. She seemed to be pretty spry in
her 80s. Well, she had a serious illness. She had
all kinds of problems. But man, that was a nice
lady. I had a lot of fun times with her.
Yeah? Whoa. Should I tell you one? Should I tell
you a fun time? Go for it. Okay. So she
came, this is when I was in Holland, this is
how far back our relationship goes. And she came to,
I think she was doing a concert, yeah, I'm pretty
sure she was doing concerts. And this is like 84.
So as one does, of course, you're coming to the
Netherlands and the top record retailer has to have attention
because, you know, that's how it works. That's the way
it used to work. You know, the number one guy
in retail, you got to kiss his ass. So the
record company set up this special lunch for this guy
who was a real farmer. I mean, he spoke farmer
English. He was just, he was a real, it's hard
to explain, but in Holland people understand when I say
he was a real farmer, just like a redneck, basically.
And they invited me because she was going to be
on my show to interview her. And basically it's us
in this restaurant eating at a table. And this guy
presenting this huge, ugly, triple platinum piece of crap that
you can't take back with you. It's just one of
those horrible music industry things. And he starts off by,
yes, I'm so happy here to have Tiny Turner with
us today. And you could just see everyone cringing. No
one dared say, like, dude, it's Tina Turner. Tiny Turner
has sold so many records here in the lowlands. We
love it very, very much. And she was just, and
I looked at her and I said, because I was
sitting across from her. It's like, I'm so sorry about
this. This is, welcome to the Netherlands. And she was
so proper and this was in her. I think beyond
Thunderdome, Dane. Remember when she came back from England? I'm
Tina Turner. I talk like this. Remember that? And she
got all Thunderdome-y. No. Anyway, once the chicken arrived, I
know it sounds racist, but man, Annie Mae Bullock, she
dove right into the chicken with her hands, screw the
cutlery, and we had a great lunch. And many laughs
ensued over the douchebag.
Anyway, just one of the many fun moments with Tina
Turner. Turn it down to the trophy. Oh, I'm sure
it got left behind at the record company. No one
wants that stuff in their home. It's not a trophy.
It's one of those, it's like four feet long and
has four, you know, platinum records. The stuff you've got
on your wall. Yeah, no, I don't. You've got it.
Even I don't have the four foot long one up.
Yeah, I put it in the garage, actually. I decided,
new house. I used it to stop the car. New
house. I decide not to put any of that in
the house. It's in the garage. kind of like a
Pennzoil sign. That's where I got all that stuff. Since
you brought up David Bowie, I need to tell you
something. kind of interesting about Patricia. First wife number one.
First wife. Ex-wife number one. There we go. Who is,
if anything, John, what is she? She is a promoter?
to be admired by anyone involved with publicity. And I
always hold the belief, I think I've mentioned on the
show, that when you use the media for your own
benefit, when you use the PR for your own benefit
by whatever it is to get your PR, your message
into the media. When you least expect it, it comes
back like a boomerang in 10 times force, then knocks
you down. And this is exactly what happened to her.
Well, what happened? Well, David Bowie dies. As with every
country, every television station, they had a talk show and
they brought in a whole bunch of people to talk
about David Bowie. And they had five or six people.
There's always like, you know, the DJ with the orange
hair. Rolling Stone magazine, who has, you know, like a
cardigan and a pipe, you know, a bunch of douchebags
who have never met David Bowie, never met David Bowie.
The only person who's met David Bowie is Patricia. And
I think I've told the Bowie story, her Bowie story,
haven't I? No, I have not heard Patricia Bowie story.
So when she was 20 and Bowie was 25, then
I was minus two. I was not in existence, barely
in existence. she did these song contests, and she did
one in Malta. And David Jones, David Robert Jones at
the time, was performing before he changed his name to
David Bowie. This is how long ago it is. And
so she's asked about this story. She wrote it in
her book, and she tells a story that, you know,
they hooked up, they smoked some weed, and they, you
know, had some sex, and they were running around the
beach of Malta, and that he had some kind of
loincloth outfit on that looked really funky, really strange. He
had, like, shitty teeth. and her punchline is he kept
playing this song on his guitar as we walk on
the beach and like, oh, can you stop with this
annoying song already? And it was Space Oddity. So I
think that's a funny story. Now, um, this is like
a music business story. Do you know who Seymour Stein
is? The name rings a bell, but no. Okay, Seymour
Stein is the guy who first, he, legend in the
music business, started Sire Records. And Sire Records, you know,
had many famous artists, but Seymour Stein is really known
for Madonna. He really took Madonna into mainstream, did the
first big album with her, and he was her, Sire
was her record label in the very beginning of her
career. I've hung out with him back in the mid-80s
in London. And just one of these really weird guys,
typical music industry guys. He had a fish tank in
his office with 50-pound notes at the bottom of this
aquarium. And there were piranha swimming in the aquarium. It
was like, you're welcome to go grab the 50-pound note
if you don't mind your hand getting eaten by a
piranha. This is really one of these guys, right? Hilarious.
And his ex-wife... Linda Stein was also a legend in
the music business. She was a manager, famously, of the
Ramones. And she was the most abrasive woman you can
imagine. I mean, she would yell. She would scream at
people. She'd tell Joey Ramone, shut the fuck up. When
they were touring in England, he was complaining about everything.
He didn't like the food. And she just said, then
get the fuck back to America, you fucking... Legendary. And
it's funny because as far as I know, Seymour Stein
was gay, if not... at least by, but it was
really weird, these two, and of course, they did break
up eventually, so she was ex for a reason. um
Legendary woman. In fact, She had cancer, and she had
been operated on cancer, and this is just one of
those famous stories about her, so take it with a
grain of salt. Four hours after the operation, she was
already on the phone yelling at someone to fuck something
up. Just crazy. um They found her bludgeoned to death
in her apartment yesterday in New York on Fifth Avenue.
Oh, really? Yeah. It wasn't in the news out here.
Well, there you go. But it's just, it's one of
those, you watch, the stories will come out, I'm sure,
because, you know, lots of artists dealt with her, so
I'm sure people are going to be talking about this.
You watch, it's going to be an interesting story. Richard
Marx is crazy. You don't even mention him in the
book. But it's a great story. No. Why don't you
call him up? No. Tell him if you can tell
the story. I don't need his permission to tell the
story, do I? Well, if you don't want to get
sued, maybe. Well, see, now I don't want to do
a book. Boy, you're easy. What a pushover. The worst
thing about Richard Marks, who I had a... I don't
even know who... You're talking about somebody nobody knows who
you're talking about. Are you kidding me? Richard Marks in
the 80s and 90s had number one hits back to
back, you know, just because you don't... He was the
Marks Brothers? Who are you talking about? Okay, I will
play you a Richard Marks song. He sings? He's a
singer? Yes, he's a singer. Yes. But what group? Richard
Marks. He's just Richard Marks. Oh, I never heard of
him. No, I'm not surprised you've never heard of him,
but he's quite famous. Let me see. He has all
new songs. Where's his biggest hits? Was it right here
waiting for you? Right here waiting for you, Dick Marks.
Ehhhh This kind of stuff. Oh, this is the kind
of stuff I don't like. That's probably why I never
heard it. No, of course not. This is boring. That's
Bryan Adams, hold on a second. Light some candles, people.
Wait, that's Bryan Adams, that's not even Richard Marks. Oh,
you don't even get the right guy. Here we go,
this is him. This is him. There's your 1980s DX7
synthesizer sound. He comes out of the smoke. Oh, yeah,
this is good. Oh, yeah, he's got his blue jeans
on. He sits down at the piano. I don't, uh...
You don't remember this song? No. It sounds like a
dime a dozen. It's a long intro. Okay, you can
stop it. No, I want to hear him sing now.
Slowly So I made a joke about his hair once
on MTV, which was okay. You know, I had hair.
Did he have long hair, short hair, or bald? He
had big hair. He had big hair like you had.
Yeah, and I said, there's Richard Marks with his hair
at number four on the top 20 countdown. He tried
to get me fired. He literally tried to get me
fired. What? Because I made fun of him. He went
to make fun of you. You said he had hair.
That's I'm telling you. He went to Abby Conowitz. He
went to Rick Krim. The irony of if he's bald.
No, he's not. Well, no. The hard part is, you
know, he's married to. You won't know her either. Daisy
Fuentes. Now you don't know Daisy. Nick Fuent is his
sister? You're hopeless. This book is not for you, okay?
This book is not for you. Don't worry about it.
Don't read it. Mimi and I will make a book,
and we'll make a book, we'll make a book. And
I want to do that whole download the PDF, and
if you want to buy it, then value for value,
just send me some money. Yeah, you'll get something out
of it. No, I won't get nothing. You'll get nothing
out of it. No, you'll get something. You just want
me to do it so I can go on a
promo tour and promote the show. I think it would
be a good benefit for not having anything about Richard
Marx, though. No, no, because that was a legendary fight.
This is legendary. Wow. And then we were on a
live. You're unselling the book as we speak. on a
live radio show and he says, I hope you get
cancer. That was Richard Marks. That was kind of cute.
Yeah, so there's good stories there. It's good stories. France,
you're next. USA, you're up. And I've done some celebrity
pageant judging in the past. My favorite was in Secaucus,
New Jersey with Boy George as my fellow judge. This
was after the heroin. It was all fat and bald
and stuff.
Nice guy, but damn. Boy George judging the women. I
don't know. I'm going to show my support by donating
to No Agenda. Imagine all the people who could do
that. Oh yeah, that'd be fab. ♪ Children ♪ Certainly
hope you've enjoyed part one, hour one of the MTV
Chronicles. I wish we could chat with John about it.
But of course he was there throughout every single story
that I told. Many more on the way. And because
I am, as we speak, on an airplane, probably about
to land, if you were listening live, coming back from
Rotterdam to Austin, then on to the Hill Country, the
trolls were able to hear everything. I'm sure they had
a lot of fun trolling along. But no donation segment
for today, which means on Sunday we will have an
extra special Thank you. through the donation segment. Probably even
get him to do a tip of the day since,
after all, he is the creator of the tip of
the day. So go to noagendadonations.com. Your time, your talent,
your treasure is all appreciated. Thank you all very much
for supporting No Agenda. And Hour 2 of the MTV
Chronicles is coming at you right now. Do I get
to tell my Times Square story from 1987? Yes, I
would like you to go, and then I'm going to
bring out the good news about all this. Why would
anybody go to Times Square? Well, this is my story,
1987. I had arrived at MTV in October and a
month to get set up. Then my first big gig
was live from Times Square. I was on Times Square
by One Time Square. They had the camera up in
the One Time Square building, and I was down there
by the recruiting station. You were on a platform? No,
no. I was in the crowd, on the ground, in
the crowd. Were there squealing girls? Yes, but there was
none of this Nivea crap. Nivea bullcrap. I don't know
what you're talking about, blue Nivea bullcrap. They didn't have
that this year? Nivea sponsors that. I didn't watch that.
Well, neither did I, but I assume that Nivea sponsored
it again. They always do that. I didn't hear anything
about Nivea. And they'd assigned to me an off-duty cop.
with a big-ass gun. Okay. And Paul Reiser. What was
the tossing to Adam? Let's toss it to Adam down
on time. Paul Reiser, the comic? Yeah. Oh, it's typical.
Whenever they're going to do a live show, they bring
in celebrities who are anything but television hosts. And they
suck. They always suck. So Paul Reiser, I think... Maybe
Sandra Bernhardt as well, who's definitely not good at just
off-the-cuff unrehearsed. stuff when MTV wants to be, you know,
trying to be a family friendly. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway,
I thought it was quite an experience because those were
the days when, you know, there were hookers on Times
Square and sex shops and. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The place
was really. And it was grimy and grungy and people
just, you know. Great. Puking all over the place and.
You know, there was many there were as many or
even more cops back in that era in Times Square,
but they didn't do anything about anything. No, no. It
was a corrupt little enclave. It worked fine. Peep shows.
Yes, it was good. Crappy theaters. Good times. Porn shops.
Good times. It was like Grand Theft Auto. It was
realistic. It totally is. And now it's like you think
you're in Disneyland. Yes. At MTV, we had something called
Light Switch. It's time for light switch. Oh, what's that
we said? Well, we have a new director of programming
coming in, who was... I want to say her name
was Silverstein. I think she had like some, her daddy-o
or something. And her great idea was we're going to
have these blue screen. We'll have all these virtual sets.
And so what happened was you'd have, you see it,
MTV would come up, a video would end playing, you'd
see a diner and there'd be like Tony, the Tony's
in the diner making a deli making sandwiches. And there
was a little portable TV on the countertop. And I
would be in that little TV announcing the next video.
It was the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my
life. Fucking moronic is what it was. In the summer
of 1990, MTV... had a problem. They needed to get
Budweiser to advertise on the network. I think I've told
this story before. No. And they couldn't figure out how
to get Budweiser. And they asked me to help them
pitch an idea. And the idea was, instead of creating
some programming that Budweiser would want to sponsor, they went
to where Budweiser was already naturally, and that was Spring
Break. And that is the entire reason for the creation
of Spring Break on MTV. Now, that is not native
advertising per se. That's more product placement. However, if you
go back to those early days, and I had to
do some of this. I think it was... Uh, South
Padre Island, I think? Which, funny, I live in Texas
now. Um, do you remember Spuds McKenzie, that fucking dog?
So we had to do... Bull Terrier. Yes, we had
to do like the top 20 countdown with spuds next
to me. I remember we needed Michael Jackson to... to
perform on the Video Music Awards at MTV. And, you
know, so then the dealing starts. You gotta, well, then
you have to do this. You have to, you gotta
play this video. And then we also... said, well, we'll
give you an award. It'll be the Michael Jackson Video
Vanguard Award of the Year. named after him. And I
think J-Lo just received it. And it is presented as
the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award of the Year. We
also, by the way, promised that we would always say
Michael Jackson followed by the King of Pop. And we
did. In fact, we once had to record a whole
weekend all over again because we hadn't been told we
had to do it. Anyway, I digress. So Tim Cook.
No, I don't think that's a digression. That idea that
you have to say the king of pop was ridiculous.
That we had to go back and re-record everything because
we didn't say it. That was ridiculous. That was off
the hook. That was two days of work. This is
the thing that I learned and several people told me
in my late teens. early 20s You know, and I
was, you know, it was kind of like one of
these unspoken things, and this person said to me, no,
I see that you've got, you know, twitches and tics,
but... I think it makes you look interesting. And... And
I always took that to heart because. These were good
looking women. And believe it or not. You're interesting when
you're not like everybody else. And this is the same
for versions of, you know, whatever they call the autism
spectrum, etc. Don't worry about it. Seriously, I still to
this day have. It's gotten much better because I've become
much calmer about it. But I was on television with
Tourette's. And it was crazy. I was able to control
it. But man, it took so much out of me.
And once I kind of let it go, I mean,
you know, when Mick Jagger says to you, man, you
got a weird tick, but it's kind of funny with
an English accent. That's when you're living. Yeah, Mick Jagger
thinks I'm interesting. Name dropper. I helped her get started
in show business. Did I ever tell you that story?
Okay, here we go. Yeah. Yeah, I just remembered. At
MTV, we had VH1 at the time, and she was
doing comedy stand-up at Rascals in West Orange, which is
a pretty small place, and she was not really getting
anywhere very much. And Steve Leeds, who was director of
On Air Talents, whatever he was, who now does the
same job at SiriusXM. He said, I really want to
get Rosie O'Donnell on VH1. So Adam, would you please
do the audition with her? And so essentially I sat
there and she talked and just made jokes about me
the whole time, which was, yeah, she said, Adam Curry,
like you're such a Barbie doll. Like you have Mattel
stamped on your butt. It was marginally funny, but that's
how she got started. Then she got on VH1 and
that's how her career was launched. So I take full
responsibility. I'm very sorry. Yeah, you could have just gone
back to the guest and said, you know, she sucks.
She's really bad. Just don't put her on. It's a
huge mistake in your career. No, I actually went to
see her at Rascals in West Orange. She was funny.
I liked her. But this is awesome. That's what you
brought on us. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Now,
of course... Nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet, nyet. Now... Here's one
for the show. So I left from JFK last night
on Virgin. And at JFK, you can't actually check your
bags in at the check-in desk. You have to then
take your bag to the TSA screening machine, which is
a little bit further up. So I'm rolling my bag
down. And I knew I had a huge delay, so
I'm taking my time, and I'm feeling pretty good. And
so I roll my bag over, and there's this TSA
agent. She's about 6'2".
She's extremely milfy. I think she's pushing 30 and late
30s, 40. And John's stunning, a stunningly. sexy, tall woman
in uniform. And I'm like, and so, you know, she
looks at me and I look at her and we're,
you know, we're eye to eye, right? And you have
to understand when you're tall, like I am, you just
don't get that a lot. I'm like, oh, hi. And
she's like, oh, hi. And I hand off my bag
and I said, don't you just miss hugging people your
height? She says, oh, it's been such a long time.
I said, come here, baby, give me one. So I
hugged her and we're like, we're doing this big embrace.
And all of a sudden she realizes she's like, uh,
you gotta get the girl fired. But it was a
nice hug. It was good. You have to understand, you
know, the only time that I had the best hug
I ever, I think I told you that, the best
hug I ever had was with Shaquille O'Neal. - Really?
- Yeah, I was interviewing him. - But he's a
big dude. - Yeah, he's seven foot whatever, and I
was interviewing him for something, and I said, "Shaq, can
I just ask you one last question, man?" He said,
"Yeah." I said, "I know you can feel my pain
here. Would you mind if I just hugged you? It
would be so nice to be hugged by someone bigger
than me." And he says, "Absolutely." He just engulfed me.
- Oh, God. - Yeah, it's nice, man. Hugs are
good. So Kennedy. Oh, that's my buddy. Almost killed you.
I tell that story. She broke my butt. Should I
tell this? I should probably tell the story? Yeah, you
might as well re-refrain the story because we have not
heard it for probably five years. MTV Beach House, first
year, great idea. We all go out to... Quag, which
is you got the Hamptons and then you got all
the poor people. They live in Quag because it's beyond
the Hamptons. Big house on the beach. It was an
experiment. Worked out really well. It later became a reality
show when everybody realized that all that happened in MTV
Beach House was just a lot of drinking and screwing
around. So all the VJs would be out there for
the summer. It was a real pain in the butt.
You'd drive three and a half hours from the city
to get there. And, you know, so we did all
the typical beach house things and then we're on wave
runners these days known as jet skis, which they're not.
They're wave runners. And so I'm doing my segment. You
know, but I'm sitting on the wave runner and the
camera guys on the other wave runner. And, you know,
I'm doing my segment and all of a sudden Kennedy
rams into me. with her wave runner thinking she was
funny and so i i go flying off the wave
runner and hit my left buttock right on the edge
of the the wave runner and to this day there's
still a crease in my butt And it was black
and blue for months. And she never really said sorry,
which I've always wanted to talk to her about. And
I almost got on her podcast, but then they canceled
on me. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah. Well, her podcast
isn't that good. I, of course, have forgiven her since
then, but it'd be fun to talk about it. Well,
she's quite lively on Gutfeld. I got butt slammed. That's
right, Trolls. I literally got butt slammed by Kennedy. There
you go. So there's a couple things I'll say here,
you know, because I have been kind of following the
Osmonds over the past couple weeks, mainly because, you know,
Marie was in Dancing with the Stars, and I like
that show. She passed out, right? So that kind of
got her into the news. I know Donnie. In fact,
I raced against him in a celebrity race in Denver
during the, it was an indie event, IndyCar, when I
was working for MTV. He won the race by the
way. I was impressed. We were all out partying and
he was walking the track at 5 in the morning,
finding the apex and all the fucking perfect curves. He
wanted to win. He really wanted to win. I raced
in a Gio. Did you now? Yes. MTV. We followed
the Indy circuit one year, and it was one year
they had the race in Denver, the street race in
Denver. And they had the celebrity. race and it wasn't
a grand prix or an indie car grand prix style
thing um well it was on the streets it would
be grand prix more than well well it was the
cars whatever it was the same cars yeah uh except
for you you had a geo yeah so it was
like the guy the drummer from white lion johnny gill
you know uh i'm sure one of the motley crew
guys was there and i had the in-car camera i
got to find that footage because i of course i
went around the corner and crashed into the wall and
kept going You did? Yeah, yeah. The stick shift had
come up about two feet, but otherwise it still drove.
But the commentary, because when you're in the car and
you're skidding around and you hit the wall and you
bounce off, it feels like, wow, man, this is spectacular.
Then you see the footage on TV and the commentator,
it's literally like, what? Because it's a Geo. They go,
you know how slow it looks then? It looks like
I'm a grandma who's lost control. And the guys who
were going to call the official race are like, oh,
there's Adam Curry from Oh, okay. I was like, dude,
can't even hold on to the wheel. My Geo story.
I've made this mistake myself once. When I was interviewing...
You can make the mistake, but you can't do it
on... No, but I just want to tell you how
embarrassing... I make the mistake all the time, so maybe
I'm too harsh. Oh, come on. Sidney, you're in the
news business as a news model. Yeah, if you're in
the news business, you don't think Sidney is... And he's
reading this on the prompter. Yes, of course. These people,
they don't know. Tucker Carlson also, it's all prompter. There's
nothing that's not from the prompter. He may write some
of that stuff himself. These people don't write it themselves.
And they're idiots. They're just idiots. I have done this
myself. I was interviewing Fleetwood Mac. This is in the
late. So you had a conversation with with that guy,
Steve Nix? No, much worse. I said so worse. Yeah,
worse. I said, so do you think Lindsay Buckingham will
ever come back into the into the group or is
she done with it? I remember Mick Fleetwood looking at
me and going If his penis fell off, maybe. That's
funny. It was horrible. I don't think it's worse, but
it's bad. It was for me. Horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible.
When Mick Fleetwood had brought the band back together briefly
in the mid, almost late 80s, mid 80s, and it
was without... I think it was without Lindsey Buckingham. Yeah,
Lindsey Buckingham was here. Maybe Christine McVie, wasn't it? She
quit, too. But I remember talking to Mick Fleetwood, doing
an interview. I had two big gaffes in my career.
This was the Fleetwood Mac one, where I said, so,
Lindsey Buckingham, is she going to be on the tour
this year? The other gaffe, just while we're on it,
the other gaffe was when I was interviewing Jermaine Jackson,
who had a song with Pia Sidora, When the Rain
Begins to Fall, from some movie soundtrack. And, of course,
I said, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Jackson. You
know, it's one of those cringe-worthy moments when you do
that. Riddle me this. Why is that guy's name not
up there with Hendrix and Clapton and Becks? I mean,
he is beyond belief. It should absolutely be there. So
I interviewed him back in the late 80s. And he
came into the studio because I think it might have
been Headbangers Ball. I don't remember. And this is, you
remember these days, Larry, back in the day, like when
even the VJs got gold and platinum records. And like,
yeah, thanks for helping, son. Here's something to hang on
your wall. me his signature Steve Stevens hammer guitar. I
still have it. I still have it. Signed by Steve
Stevens. Yeah. He was just a nice guy. Yeah. Yeah.
And so New York, right? His New York accent. Very
much so. He literally walked down the street. Oh, he
just walked down the street to the studio. Had a
guitar case. Here, Adam, how you doing? These guys were
all very, very New York. Very New York. Love that
about him. And then there's a classic guitar story. Joe
Satriani, who I think is also just virtuoso. The guy
is so good. You can look it up on YouTube.
There's two versions. There's a longer version, and he's going
to give me guitar lessons. He's going to show me.
Now, I'm not actually holding a guitar, but he has
a guitar. He says, okay, Adam. And he says, now,
this is, I mean, he does some, and he has
a little bit of stuff back and forth, but that's
not really what makes you a great guitar player. And
here's something you can practice, Adam. faces so it was
teaching the right face to make when you oh when
you hit when you hit this one you go you
gotta get point the lips back like that and you
gotta close your eyes that's what makes a great guitar
player right there that's great stuff Yeah, you can have
the sound. It's not in the gear. I mean, Ted
Nugent told a story about Eddie Van Halen where when
he met him, he's like, you know, how do you
get that sound? And Eddie handed him his guitar. He's
like, I played it. I sound like Ted Nugent still.
I don't know how he, you know, made those sounds.
It wasn't trickery. It wasn't gear. It was just pure
talent in the way he played. Talent and tone, man.
That's what it is. Yes. And the tone comes in
the hands.
Yes, it does. Yeah. You cannot fake it. However, you
had to play it backwards because it was a gold
or platinum-plated version of, I guess they call it the
mother. Right, so it was an inverse, right? Inverse, yeah.
So you literally had to play it backwards, but they
did play. They actually did play. Later, it was just...
I mean, I still, mine still have, later I got
the CD versions from Michael Jackson and Aerosmith, which is,
those are some of my, I like those because I
can always, you know, connect the story to it. But
I have a lot of the old school platinum and
gold records and they all have a little cassette stuck
to the. The right hand bottom corner, you know, because
it also sold on cassette back in the day. And
those, of course, over the years have, you know, come
unglued and dropped and they're kind of loose in the
case. Memorabilia is fun. Def Leppard. In, I don't know,
90... Maybe 90 or 91, Def Leppard did a tour
in the round. And, um... Okay. MTV sent me out
to go cover him in... man, I want to say
Atlanta, the Omni, I think that, yeah, I think it
was the Omni in Atlanta. I think so. I can't
remember what it was. And they were in the round.
So, you know, there's audience on all sides. And the
way they got the band, you know, from, you know,
the dressing room into, you know, underneath the stage was
in, you know, these big laundry carts. And so before
the lights went down, you see these folks, you know,
just push along these laundry courts and the guys got
out. And that's kind of how I in this the
way you know the way the memes were working it's
like yeah just hiding him there But the press is
mad. That's what they did with David Lee Roth. Wow.
Here's another story. In the Eat Em and Smile Tour,
they get him from one side, from the stage to
the back to ride the surfboard across the audience. He
rides this giant surfboard. And that's how they had him
in a road case. But it was a big road
case. It probably had a seat in it. It probably
had some Jack Daniels and a fan and whatnot. And
they pushed him over there. And then he floated across
the crowd on a surfboard. And, of course, the press
was mad. While Steve I was playing an amazing solo.
And it was a contest and it was a hundred
winners and it would be, it was a cool MTV-like
contest actually. A hundred winners would go to the North
Pole for a concert with Metallica. Actually, it was Metallica,
Hole, so Courtney Love, and one other band, I can't
remember. And we did a cybercast from the North Pole,
and it was pretty interesting, because the only way to
do it is we took a multiplexer, so we could
take 24 phone lines and basically convert that into like
150 kilobits per second or whatever. And we had that
linked all the way down from Tuk to Yuktuk. which
is Northwestern territory. So, and, you know, literally like, you
know, a couple miles inside the Arctic Circle there. Well,
let's get back to the how did you get to
the North Pole? the dark period it was light for
24 hours straight which was really really weird Um... And,
of course, you're up there. We had our crew, and
we're sleeping in the oil barracks, if you will. And
as is Metallica, as is everybody. And so, you know,
we're looking. There's nothing to do, obviously. And it's dry,
right? There's no alcohol. It's forbidden. But, you know, we
figure we can probably figure something out. So we go
outside and it's midnight. But, you know, kids are riding
around on their bikes and it's as if it were
midday. And so some of the kids come over and
we're, you know, say, hey. Wait, wait, wait. Let's back
up a minute. There's a bunch of people at the
North Pole. Well, it's not exactly on the North Pole,
North Pole. within. I don't know. What is it? 50
miles, 75 miles. Yeah. There's all kinds of villages. I
thought it was pretty barren up there. It was pretty
barren up there. Oh, okay. No kidding. You know, the
next town was several hundred miles, and that was... Inuvik,
I think is what it was called. Anyway. September actually,
I remember because it was my birthday. I put my
toe into the Arctic waters. of the pole. I dip
my toe in. It's a tradition, I think, is what
it was. So we say to these kids, hey, man,
do you know we can-- Tradition. --we can get something.
Oh, you want the drug dealer? Yeah, he lives in
that house right over there. drunk dealer. I swear to
God. These kids riding around on their bikes. It was
a fantastic experience. Well, you got me on that one.
I know another guy who, like a year or so
ago, went to Antarctica. There's a cruise, I guess, you
can take. Icebreaker. Icebreaker cruise. Yeah, I think I've heard
about that. Yeah, you leave from somewhere in South America.
It gets down at the tip, down in southern Argentina,
I suppose. and boat over there and crack your way
into the... And that's supposed to be even worse than
the Arctic. It relates to why I was there. I
was shooting a television commercial for Sam Goody. And we're
shooting it at the Sam Goody store in the Mall
of America because, of course, that's their flagship store. It's
the biggest one or whatever. And so it's like a
three-day shoot. And the second night I'm there, I get
a call around midnight in the hotel room. So I
pick it up and, yeah. Yeah, Prince has a party
over at Paisley Park, which is famously in Minneapolis as
well. He says, do you want to come? I'm like,
let me think. Yeah. He said, okay, well, there's a
car downstairs waiting for you. And so I got whisked
away to the Purple Palace. And there was a party
at the Paisley Park. Yeah, it's a happening town. So
how was the party? Did you get to meet Prince?
Yeah. Was he going by the name Prince at the
time? Yeah. No, I think he was going by the
name of Prince at the time. Yeah. So you come
in, you go through a metal detector, which makes sense.
And then there's a whole bunch. It's really clean. Now
you know you're going to a real party. Real party
when you go through a metal detector. Yeah. So it
was a big room, lit, but dimly lit, but a
white room across one side. just the nicest buffet I'd
seen in a long, long time. And there was a
DJ with like a mobile setup, and he was playing
all kinds of Prince tunes you've never heard before in
your life. And it's like, there must have been 150
beautiful girls and boys, nothing else, of course. It was
kind of funny, because Prince was standing over by the
speakers near the DJ. And I was talking to a
couple of people. I said, I'm going to go over
and say hi to him. And this one girl, I
kid you not, says, oh, you better not do that,
man. You better not. Why not? Well, because you're like
six feet tall and you're white, man. That's two strikes.
You don't want to be talking to Prince. Fuck you.
So I went over, introduced myself. And the guy was
not, first of all, he's not that small. You know,
the stories about him, you think he was an Oompa
Loompa. But anyway, and he was really nice and he
knew, you know, what I had done on MTV just
the previous week and he said, and my daughter had
been born maybe she's a year old and said, how's
your daughter? And he knew what was going on. It
was fantastic. He's a business. He's a artist slash businessman.
Absolutely. Why would he be a jerk like this girl
thinks? Because, well, she obviously likes to project that image
for good reason because he doesn't want to be bothered
by every schmuck in the world. By her in particular,
I think. And the coolest thing, though, was because the
party ends at a certain point. You know, Prince, of
course, he only made his appearance and he was there
for a little while and then he disappeared. And then
all of a sudden, you know, his guys come through
this room and all they do is they just kind
of like flick flashlights on and off pointed at the
floor. And they just walk around. They're clicking their flashlights
and everyone knows, oh, it's time to go. And then
within 15 minutes, the whole place was empty. Huh. Yeah.
So like a slick party. Very slick party. In hindsight
though, I was thinking, you know, we started our careers
around the same time and I work with her. When
I was 19, I think she was 20, maybe I
was 20, she was 21, and she was on the
show I was presenting at the time in Gitmo Nation
Lowlands. And this was when she had her first hit,
I Want to Dance with Somebody. And I recall thinking,
wow, she's really strange. She was a complete, in hindsight
now I realize she was, of course, an MKUltra subject.
She was completely mind-controlled. Did whatever her handlers told her
to do, not a single smile. We were young, you
know, like when you're young, you're supposed to be like,
man, isn't this cool? Can you believe this shit? This
is awesome. Look what we're doing. We're on TV. You're
singing. You know, no, just nothing. Just a complete non.
Blink stare. Raquel Welch passed away and that reminded me
that I met her in the late 80s. Raquel? You
called her Raquel? Raquel. Raquel Welch. I thought the other
name was funnier. You did meet her. How was she?
What kind of a person was she? I met her
in the late 80s. Maybe it was like 88, 89.
And I can't remember if she was in a movie
or she was part of a, maybe it was some
promotion. And I remember MTV said, oh, you should go
there and make it, you know, she'd go and see
what's going on or something. I didn't know what it
was. It was very early on at MTV when I
still lived in the city. Did she make a pass
at you? No, she was really very quiet. very docile
like just almost like you know almost didn't say anything
and and she must have been like 50 or early
50s then here's the thing here's the thing that i
noticed And this is going to sound weird, but it's
the only story I have about Raquel Welch. I'll never
get to tell it again. Just like Christina Applegate, she
had a layer of fur, a fuzz. like all over
her face and her arms, very light, very, you know,
like bleach probably, just fur. Like her face had... Furry.
Yes, her face had fuzz on it. And I remember
going, wow, that's kind of interesting. And the same thing
happened to me when I met Christina Applegate at the
MTV Awards one time. Some women have fur. Did I
ever tell you that, that I interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis?
No, this is a story for the show. Yes. Did
she hit on you? Because you were a good-looking guy
back in the day. I was into it. What is
this, Dvorak? I'm still a stud. Back in the day.
I digress. It was probably 19... When did Footloose come
out? So Footloose came out. I think it was either
foot or mouth. I interviewed Kenny Loggins. And maybe it
was... Top Gear. I can't remember. But then, oh, yes,
because we're doing something for the MTV Awards. I was
in Los Angeles and then I interviewed Jamie Lee Curtis
and it was right around when Fish Called Wanda was
coming out. and was at her house. And I remember
it was, she said, so it was after we were
done recording, and we're just chatting, and she says something
to me, and I don't get the joke, and she
says, Adam, don't you know I was born a hermaphrodite?
And I'm like, what? He says, yes, my parents chose
female for me, but probably was the wrong choice. Well,
she said it was probably the wrong choice. Yes, that
that was probably the wrong choice for her. Isn't that
interesting? Then we walk out for coffee. Then coffee, we're
back in the cocktail reception area. And the king and
queen are just mingling. And the queen comes over and
I'm talking with her for 20 minutes, just drinking coffee.
And she's very tall. And she, I'd say, well, she
had five inch heels on. I looked very closely at
what she was wearing because I know I had to
report to a number of women in my life. I
mean, she's a very charming woman. Deep brown eyes. Lots
of wrinkles around the eyes. Very little, very little makeup.
Maybe just a base. Almost nothing. Hair. This was not
a big public event. I don't even know if she
washed it. It looked stringy. No, I'm being honest. I'm
being honest. Yeah, a little bit like a hippie girl.
And by the way, about halfway through this 20 minutes,
there was a hair flip. I just want to say.
I'm like, oh, hair flip. Uh, Gray- I'm not glad
you noted that, that's good. Was right next to me!
Did she hit you in the face with her hand
or anything in the process? No, no, no. There was
a, so she was wearing a gray pencil skirt. What
bugged me was the jacket. These details aren't interesting. There
are women who listen to the show, John. Think about
the demo. the demo just for a second she was
wearing a gray pencil skirt yeah the problem was the
jacket was so how many pencils does it make so
ill-fitting in the back that the it was like she
was holding her shoulder blades back and it was kind
of the perch this is unacceptable it was It's like
no one looked at her and said, nah, that jacket's
no good. Only vintage jewelry, very understated, but not really
pretty. Just looked like old grandma's old stuff. I'm sure
it was grandma's old stuff. You know, the old queen.
Yeah, it was grandma's old stuff. Yeah, sure. But, you
know, nothing like mind-boggling. Just, I was like, eh. You
know, wasn't really spectacular. That's just me. So then, but
listen. And she says, How's your daughter? She's great. Yeah,
yeah. She's doing all kinds of fun things. Comparing notes
as parents about, you know, my daughters, they're now 15.
I think they know everything. And your girlfriend or wife,
girlfriend, she works at Ronald McDonald House. Yeah, she runs
the whole thing. So, yeah. And she knew everything, all
this stuff, all these details. Yeah, they had the dossier
open. Yeah. The two of them got together before the
thing? I said, what do you think we should talk
about with these idiots? Well, I think they must have...
I don't know. Let's see what we got here. I'm
hoping... Look at this. Well, this curry guy's kind of
interesting. I met the Queen. She invited me to Buckingham
Palace. I went into the front gates with the chauffeured
car, you know, waited in this hall with other people.
Give the preface, give us a little idea. You weren't
just, oh, let's get Adam over. That's exactly how it
was. Is there some other reason? No, it was just,
hey, he's in town. I hear he's in town. He's
a podfather. Bring that mofo over. It was the relaunch
of the Queen's website. the royal website and uh and
so there was a a party and it was what's
the um Tim Berners-Lee. So maybe it came through him.
That would be something that he would have said, oh,
yes, Curry's here. um and uh i i still had
the invitation it was beautiful you know like a like
a block of wood Her Majesty requests your attendance. And
so they pick you up in a car. It was
a Mercedes, by the way. Oh, the horrors. And they
went right through those front gates of Buckingham Palace. And
then we went in this big hall and waited for,
I don't know, 20 minutes. But it was a hall
that was interesting because it had just all these master
artworks that you recognize. Oh, that looks like Rembrandt Van
Gogh, but you don't really recognize the painting. And then
we go in and then we all get to meet
the queen. And she's standing on a box, of course,
and she had her gloves on and she wasn't holding
her handbag like she was in that picture meeting the
new prime minister. And I did something which you're not
really supposed to do, but I promised myself I had
to do it. And I looked into her eyes when
I shook her hand. You're not supposed to do it?
No, no, you're not supposed to. Are you supposed to
look down or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I saw
nothing. It was kind of eerie. She's a robot! Kind
of eerie. I don't know, I don't know, man. They
weren't slanty, so I don't think she's of the list,
or she hadn't transformed. And the only other thing I
can really say is that she served mums champagne. which
is kind of like, really? I mean, that's like... $20
a bottle in HEB. Well, it's not that cheap, but
it's a real champagne. And they have a higher end
version. It was just a standard, standard mums. It's not
really that great. And I'm sure I voted for Bill
Clinton. I'm quite sure of it, you know, because it
was cool. Boxes or briefs, Mr. President. And I got
an invitation from Hillary to go visit the White House.
Did you really? I want to know more about this.
Yeah, I wish. I wish. You didn't go? No, I
was on assignment. I think at the time I was
doing the... I was the only guy who could ski
at MTV. And they did a deal with the pro-Mogul
skiing tour, which meant someone had to go out. Unfortunately,
someone had to go to every single awesome skiing place
in the United States and British Columbia. I went to
Whistler and I would do the top 20 countdown, a
couple of segments. And when I got back, someone said,
oh, yeah, this came to you up at the office.
And you have to understand, the office and the studio,
there was two different worlds. The MTV News department, which
came in at a certain point, and they hated us.
They just hated the VJs. VJs were just scum to
them. We never got invited to the Video Music Awards.
Oh, yeah, you can have a ticket. Oh, yeah, you
can get a ticket if you fly yourself out. Oh,
yeah. Wow. Yeah. And this invitation had come in from
the White House. I still have it. It had come
in from the White House. The First Lady requests your
presence. but so I it already passed by the time
I got the invitation You gotta say hello to General
Flynn, General Flynn. Come on over, come on over, come
on over, come on, come on, come on, come on,
come on, come on. You make him sound like a
cat in a cartoon. Anybody who knows Joe will be
like, that's Joe. That sounds exactly like Joe. Yeah, okay.
And so we go over like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
do a picture, do a picture. And Flynn is there
basically just being inundated by people the whole time, taking
pictures with him. Yeah, that's what he does. He's got
his tuxedo on. And then we line up for a
picture. And then Joe's like, did you ask him where
Putin was? He looked around. That's what I would have
done. I mean, I barely had time to thank him
for his service.
But Joe was like, yeah, this is General General. This
is Adam Creep, Headbangers Ball. And Flynn looks at me,
huh? What? Headbangers Ball? What of all the things Joe
could have said about me is like, hey, Headbangers Ball.
Oh, brother. Flynn gave me a look like, OK, who's
the lawyer? because I had my suit on. Remember Gopher
and Usenet? Those were the days. Gopher. Gopher, man. That
was the pre-Golden Age. Did I ever tell you my
gopher story? No. Yeah, probably, but tell me again because
I easily forget some of these stories. So I'd registered
MTV.com. Then I ran it on a Headless Son 3
at DigX in Virginia, I think, above a Chinese restaurant.
And I really just said, what domain names? I don't
know, MTV.com. Okay, boom, didn't have to pay anything. Same
time I got Curry.com. I was like, okay, I'll get
that. And Elvis.com, I had that, a lot of domain
names. And of course there was no web then, so
I set up a Gopher server. And that, you know,
for me as a VJ blonde and everything, you know,
setting, compiling binaries and doing all those, it was quite
a learning curve, but I got it to work. And
I put up little bits and bobs. Now, for those
of you who don't know what Gopher is, it was
a text-based navigation system with hyperlinks and was pretty much
the precursor to the web. And then I got a
cease and desist from the University of Minnesota. And they
said, well, you're using that commercially. I said, no, this
is not MTV. This is me. I'm doing it. They're
letting me do this because they don't think the internet
is going to be anything. And they're very proud of
the keywords they have on AOL. So we're had, they're
all happy. Yeah. Keyword MTV. That's right. Yeah. And music
television. Whoa, it was a double whammy. And I think
they also had some gateway on Prodigy, so they were
all set. I didn't realize that Gopher had a provision
against commercialism. Yes. And they said, you need to pay
us $5,000. I'm like, I don't have $5,000. I don't
have it. And, uh, but I came up with, you
just had a website. Where'd the gopher angle come in?
Because I was, I was using gopher on mtv.com. So
when you could use it, you know, it's a gopher
D. So it's a demon. It's a service. It's the
actual software that makes gopher work. Okay. So they were
saying you have to pay a license. I can't pay
that. And then we came up with a deal and
you can, if you, if you search for this on
YouTube, you'll find it. I said, what I'll do is
I'll wear the university of, uh, Minnesota, I think. I'll
wear your Gopher t-shirt on MTV. You mean like a
sweatshirt or a t-shirt? No, a t-shirt. And they said,
okay. That was it. That's worth 5,000 bucks. Probably more
at the time, but yeah. Anyway, I've never heard that
story. Yeah. I think I remember that one. That's pretty.
That's what happened. Watching this trial, though, took me back
to my time in court with MTV Networks. And particularly
during the prosecution, I recall so vividly having gone through,
because, you know, I had, for those who don't know
it, I'd registered. Prosecution? Were you under some criminal indictment?
That's the way I felt. It felt like prosecution. It
was the lawyer for MTV. It was the lawyer for
MTV. Felt like prosecution. You were being sued. Let me
explain how it felt, though, because I think it's the
same general thing. And so this is about MTV.com, which
I registered. They said, don't worry about it. We don't
give a shit about the Internet. and they didn't even
ask for it back. They just sued me, so I
countersued and went back and forth. So then we went
through discovery. And I, you know, I was literally... with
two interns for days in a lawyer's office pulling emails
off of floppy disks. This is how, I mean, this
is a long time ago. This is 1994, I think.
But I recall so vividly MTV's lawyer presenting their case
and sitting there going. Well, e- shit, did I do
something wrong? If you put it that way, it sounds
like I'm a horrible person. And even though it's just
like, well, wait a minute, that's the facts, but you're
presenting it in a really different light and it makes
me look horrible. And I just remember how scary that
was. And I think that that's, you know, when you
get the same facts and you have prosecution versus defense
in this criminal trial. It's kind of the same thing.
Like, well, you can turn everything in different directions and
make it sound a certain way, and we have the
benefit of knowing a lot more. What's the best dirt
in there? Well, it's all good dirt. The way they
did it is, I haven't really ever seen this. Essentially,
they interviewed a lot of people. I know they interviewed
me for like five hours and recorded it all on
tape. And they transcribed it and they just put all
these quotes one after another for 600 pages about different
topics. And it was pretty interesting. It's a long read.
But it's, uh, they had my quotes right, so I
presume they did everyone else's quotes right. And as it
turns out, what I suspected, I now know for sure,
that I was fired from Headbangers Ball thanks to Axl
Rose and Doug Herzog. Axl Rose got me fired. Why?
Because his heroine buddy was Ricky Rackman. And of course,
Ricky Rackman has no talent. And then Axl, they were
watching me on Headbangers Ball. And Axl says, hey, man,
wouldn't you want to be a VJ? And he said,
"Don't worry, I'll make a call." And of course, Axl
Rose calls MTV, they're all blowing him. And like 24
hours later, I was off the show. That's deplorable! guys
That's deplorable. That's totally deplorable. I fought to get Guns
N' Roses played on the show.
in the band actually like him. But yeah, it's true.
MTV would not touch Guns N' Roses. They're like, we
can't play this. He's got a video where he's getting
electrocuted in an electric chair. And I'm like, yeah, play.
And then they started playing them and then they got
me fired. Serves you right. And look at where I
am now. You have to understand that I am persona
non grata in the official circles. So MTV has its
30th anniversary on August 1st. Yeah, guess who's not going
to be in it? Seriously. Me? I'm not going to
be in it. You're right. Yeah, John, you're excluded. And
they're going to be talking about Headbangers Ball and that
douchebag Ricky Rackman will be on like he owns the
show. I shouldn't get too far. I mean, you know,
it's what happens when you sue a big corporation and
win. I wouldn't invite you either. It's bad. But it's
like they're erasing me. What do you expect? I'm rubbed
out. I'm rubbed out from history. They just erased me.
So the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, yeah.
You know what? Here's what will happen. I'll show up.
They can't get you out of the Swamp Thing movie.
That's where you're going. That's true. Now I'm there forever.
I'll show up and they go, hey, Adam Curry, great.
That'll be a $39 entrance fee. No, no, no, there'll
be two big goons hauling your ass and throwing your
butt out the door. Get out of here, kid. Well,
there you go. Maybe that should turn into a book
one day. What do you think? I'm sure there's more
that I can talk about. MTV Chronicles, I don't think
we've ever done one of these. We may have had
some of Adam's stories, but not necessarily the MTV Chronicles,
so... I hope you enjoyed it and definitely something we
can do again in the future. Again, it sounds like
an audio book or just a book in general. It
might be something there. I've got to think about it.
The Memoirs. A reminder, we have special guest co-host Dana
Brunetti, Mr. Hollywood himself. producer of mega hits like House
of Cards. Um... Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades of
Greyer, many more. Captain Phillips, we'll talk about all of
it. And we'll run through the news with him. And
he's even buying a microphone especially for it. So tune
in for that. That'll be live Sunday, regular Gitmo Nation
time. Remember... Without your support, nothing else happens. Value for
value. Noagendadonations.com. Until Sunday. Adios, mofos. Hooey, hooey. And such.