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Dirty: “Swimsuit Issue”

Photo by Tony Mott

WHEN OUR ALBUM Dirty came out, the band made a video for “100%” with Tamra Davis directing again. It was intended to be a celebration of Joe. Thurston had seen a skateboard video that a young director named Spike Jonze had shot, where skaters drive the old car they’re riding in over a cliff, and decided to ask Spike to shoot the skate material. Tamra then showed Spike how to edit for a music video, and, after that, Spike’s career really took off. Jason Lee made an appearance in the video as the skater, and I also met Mark Gonzales, the skater-artist, who showed up at the shoot and opened his car trunk to show us painting after painting on brown paper bags. “Take whatever you want,” he said, but despite his generosity I took only one.

Later during that same shoot, Keanu Reeves showed up. He was good friends with the producer and had let me use his bass rig. Thurston and I had seen Keanu’s band play the night before at the Roxy in Hollywood. The audience seemed to be mostly made up of hookers with fake breasts and stilettos angled exclusively on Keanu, who spent most of the show with his back to the audience. Until then I didn’t know that so many hookers hung out at the Roxy. Keanu was incredibly sweet, and I had a huge crush on him.

In the video for “100%” I wore a bootleg Rolling Stones shirt that said “Eat Me.” As a result, MTV, which showed any number of videos of naked women grinding away, was reluctant to run ours. They felt my shirt sent a bad message to viewers.

After the band signed with Geffen, a story came out about an executive there who had sexually harassed his secretary. That was the inspiration for “Swimsuit Issue.” I found it strange that Geffen, like a lot of companies, had a “Secretary’s Day,” but secretaries never seemed to get promoted to anything above that level. The song was meant to spotlight that hypocrisy.

I’m just here for dictation

I don’t wanna be a sensation

Bein’ on 60 Minutes

Was it worth your fifteen minutes?

Don’t touch my breast

I’m just workin’ at my desk

Don’t put me to the test

I’m just doin’ my best.

Shopping at Maxfields

Power for you to wield

Dreams of going to the Grammys

Till you poked me with your whammy

You spinned the disc

Now you’re moving your wrist

I’m just from Encino

Why are you so mean-o?

I’m just here for dictation

And not your summer vacation

You really like to schmooze

Well now you’re on the news

I’m from Sherman Oaks

Just a wheel with spokes

But I ain’t giving you head

In a sunset bungalow

Hhh, hhh . . . Roshuma, Judith, Paulina, Cathy, Vendela, Naomi,

Ashley, Angie, Stacey, Gail . . .

For the “Dirty” promo we participated in an MTV-sponsored event, inviting people to submit videos anonymously. Our friend Phil Morrison’s was the best—it showed a parade of shirtless guys smoking cigars in a living room, slinking toward the camera—but when MTV found out it was his, and, worse, that he was a friend, they wouldn’t crown him the winner.

We also did a big-budget video for “Sugar Kane,” directed by Nick Egan and involving a lot of people who would later make big names for themselves. It was Chloë Sevigny’s film debut, for one thing. At the time she was working as an intern at Sassy, Jane Pratt’s magazine, and my friend Daisy asked Andrea Linett, who would later go on to cofound Lucky magazine, if Andrea knew anyone who could play the part of a girl disrobing during a catwalk fashion show. Nick, it turned out, knew Marc Jacobs—Marc had just released his “grunge” collection for Perry Ellis—and Marc agreed to let us use his showroom and his clothes, and also helped score models and fashion-world people to appear in the video. It was pure coincidence that it was Marc’s “grunge” collection—I don’t think we even realized it at the time.

Nick shot a lot of the “Sugar Kane” video on Super 8, and in the end, rather than keeping it normal-scale, we perhaps made the mistake of reducing it so the finished video on-screen looked like Super 8, which made it less commercial and airplay-friendly. Still, that was the beginning of Thurston’s and my friendship with Marc as well as Chloe.

In the early nineties, before social and online media, people still read newspapers and magazines and watched MTV, and the word on the street mattered more than anything. In 1990 my old friend Mike Kelley had a series called Arenas, where he would set down crocheted blankets on the floor, populated by used, thrift-store stuffed animals or dolls. Mike called them “Gifts of Guilt,” referring to the fact that the many hours it takes to crochet something makes the person receiving it feel the heaviest possible obligation to cherish it, and they’re stricken with guilt if they get rid of it. For the cover of Dirty, we used one of Mike’s images, which he’d titled Ahh . . . Youth! Inside the leaflet was the rest of the photo series taken from that time. They were a perfect symbol of American culture, where newness replaces the old, messy, fragrant, real, humanized form of anything, lest we ever be reminded of dying.