R.E.M., Pearl Jam and the 1993 MTV Music Awards: I Was There

The year is 1993. Kurt Cobain is still alive and Dave Grohl is still “the new guy” in Nirvana. Aerosmith have revived their career, Madonna could still be counted on to do something that upset everybody, you got dressed to go out listening to En Vogue, R.E.M. became global superstars, and U2 took an entire satellite television station on tour. I was living in Tel Aviv, running an affiliate of Warner/Elektra/Atlantic, a job that never actually felt real even when I was in the middle of doing it every single day, and doing it well. The latter is the reason I am able to tell this story 30 years later. If I had been bad at my job none of this would have happened.

One of my sisters was getting married at the end of August 1993, and so I decided that I was going to combine a trip back to the Tri-State Area for the wedding with… going to London on the way to see U2 at Wembley Stadium on the Zooropa tour (for which I called in a favor from WB in London to ask Island for a ticket), and then, after the wedding, going to Los Angeles to visit the record labels there and oh, by the way, can you please get me a ticket to the 1993 MTV Awards, I asked my colleagues at WB International in a telex (or a fax, that was how you did business internationally with no time zone overlap). At the time it was announced, the VMA’s were going to be R.E.M.’s only performance in 1993. I had no way to get to see them on the Green tour and in my mind, this would make up for that. Seemed simple enough to do all of this on one trip.

Sidebar: This is not about U2 at Wembley, this is.

I arrived in Los Angeles the day before the VMA’s. I visited my pals at Geffen, I went to see someone at the Whiskey (I think it was Candlebox, lol) and everyone at the show was VERY EXCITED because Lenny Kravitz was there with Madonna. (Were they dating at the time? I think they were dating. They were the same height.) The next day I went out to Burbank to visit the Warner Brothers international team at the very 70’s mountain cabin vibe office building that was known as “the Rabbit Hutch” and find out about my VMAs ticket. Honestly, they could have told me to go pound sand. I just assumed they could help me and didn’t realize it was going to be a tough ticket, which I found out when I arrived and was told that they’d finally gotten me a ticket by telling Seymour Stein from Sire that they were trying to get the label manager from the Israeli affiliate into the VMAs, and he told them that I could have his ticket, that he’d find a way in. So not only do I have a ticket, I have a ticket that was better than what I was actually entitled to.