Fans, You Know It's True

By JAY COCKS

Here's an idea: give the withdrawn Grammy to Arsenio Hall. He started all this. "We were tired of being made fun of by Arsenio Hall," said Rob Pilatus, 25, at a rowdy press conference in Los Angeles last week. Pilatus, one half of Milli Vanilli, was struggling to explain how the duo's yearnings for legitimacy had provoked their German record producer, Frank Farian, into confirming what had long been show-biz rumor: that Pilatus and Fab Morvan, 25, were in fact techno-puppets, fronts for a studio-manufactured sound that sold 10 million copies of the album Girl You Know It's True, on which they never sang.

Producer Farian was using the same studio singers -- Charles Shaw, Johnny Davis and Brad Howell, the latter two of whom are credited with background vocals on Girl -- to make the new Milli Vanilli album, due out in January, and Rob and Fab were having none of it. After all, as far as the public was concerned, they were Milli Vanilli: they were the ones who went on tour and shook their booties; they were the ones who accepted the Grammy last year for Best New Artist. They demanded to sing for themselves. When the producer remained adamant, they fired him, he issued the now notorious announcement, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences withdrew the Grammy.

How did the pair get into this charade in the first place? It was, according to the boys, something out of an MTV Oliver Twist -- "a pact with the devil," Pilatus explained. He and Morvan were living a marginal life in a Munich housing project when, in 1988, Farian offered each of them $4,000 (plus subsequent royalties) to be seen but not heard as Milli Vanilli. "We just hope ((our fans)) understand that we were young, that we just wanted to live life the American way," said Pilatus. Some fans don't seem all that sympathetic. Two have filed lawsuits on behalf of deceived record buyers. The boys say Arista president Clive Davis knew they didn't sing on the album; Arista heatedly denies it.

At the press conference, skeptical reporters received video and audio tapes of Pilatus and Morvan demonstrating their own singing, then goaded the duo into a 15-second version of Girl You Know It's True. The performance, with their trademark dreadlocks shaking, only proved once more that looking good was what they did best.

In fact, in this age of video-driven, computer-written pop, you need a superstar to sell a song. Using studio personnel to supplement and even define a group sound is not an unheard-of practice in rock: Remember Phil Spector's use of other singers under the name of the Crystals, or Brian Wilson's hours in the studio concocting Beach Boys tracks? The new wrinkle is that the people who provide the sounds may not be exactly . . . well, charismatic on camera. Today's concert audiences want to see re-creations of videos, and that often demands intricate, high-energy choreography of a kind that makes live vocalizing extremely difficult. Madonna, Janet Jackson and the New Kids on the Block have all resorted to some lip-syncing in their recent shows to see them through the rigors of dancing. They have never, though, used surrogates for the sound that bears their name.

The Millis' sound, of course, was commercial enough, but it never rated high on the soul meter, no matter who was actually doing the singing. The whole controversy, in fact, is juicier than any of the duo's music. One thing can be said with certainty of the Millis: nothing so became their leaving like the life of it.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York and Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles