Jon Small: Steve, I can’t remember his last name, from Profile Records came down, he was also in the same building, and said “Hey, I love that [Whitney Houston] video. I want you to do a video. Would you like to do a video for a group named Run DMC?” and I just said, “Well, it’s not getting on the air.” He said, “Well, we’re gonna try to get ours,” then I said, “Well if you can get Aerosmith in it, then you’ve got a shot at it.” And they (Aerosmith) were dead. There was nothing happening. They meant nothing. So I heard the song, and they wanted me to direct the video for some reason, so I walked up to MTV and said, “If I make this video with Run DMC and Aerosmith, would you play it?” They went “Nope”. (Laughter)At this point, Small (as video producer) and Billy Joel had been crafting videos that continued to address the dearth of African American faces on MTV by featuring African American actors in Joel’s videos. Small decided to portray the destruction of those barriers in a very literal sense by having Aerosmith and Run DMC play on opposites sides of a real wall, and then destroy what was keeping them apart.
Jon Small: So I’m listening to the song for maybe a half hour when I came up with the idea of the wall. We’re gonna break down the wall because the wall was, in my mind, again, MTV. That was the wall, that was the same wall with Billy Joel when we put the black band in his video. They wouldn’t play ‘black’. That’s when I came up with the idea that the wall was not only separating the music styles but was separating black and white, and I didn’t see any difference in black and white. So, I wrote the idea, they bought it, and then I had to get on this I spoke to Tim Collins, who was Aerosmith’s manager, and he said, “Hey, these guys just got out of rehab.” (Laughter) “There is just no way you, we can do this in New York because these guys— these are heavy junkies. You gotta be out of New York.” So where do we go? The heroin capital of the world — Union City, New Jersey. (Laughter) Bad place. So we set up this thing. I find the location, I came up with the set, the design, the whole thing, and we’re gonna do it, and I convinced them. I got on the phone with Steven Tyler and explained to him. He only said one thing to me that was important. “Please don’t make a fool out of us.” He was really not into — don’t forget, he hasn’t stepped into the video world yet.
― Stockhausen's Ekranoplan Quartet (Elvis Telecom), Friday, 18 November 2011 20:30 (fourteen years ago)