Free Dirty Rocker Boys by Bobbie Brown, Caroline Ryder Page A

sense that it was now or never.
    In the dressing room, I surveyed the outfits the stylist had laid out for me—skimpy red bustier with tiny denim shorts and red cowboy boots. Cute. Roller-girl waitress. Baseball groupie. Wow, there are a lot of costumes, I thought. I put on the red bustier and shorts first, walked out onto the set, and stood in front of the guys.
    “So?” I asked no one in particular.
    “Fucking hot,” said Jani.
    “So? Bobbie, you see that bathtub over there? You’re going to be naked and we’re going to fill it with whipped cream.”
    “Gross. You’re out of your mind,” I said, walking away.
    *  *  *
    The second day of shooting, an assistant handed me a bouquetof roses. I glanced at the card, thinking how sweet it was of Matthew to be sending flowers to me on the Warrant set.
    For my cherry pie. Love, Jani
    Oh. I waved the flowers at Jani, mouthing, “Thanks.”
    I overheard Jani talking to the director, saying how he wanted this to be a much better video than the one for “Heaven.”
    “Wait, you guys wrote ‘Heaven’?” I yelled. “Heaven” was one of my favorite pop hits of last summer. Warrant, it turned out, were the toast of the hair scene. Big riffs, pop hooks, party-time metal—the girls loved it. To many, Warrant were the purest embodiment of latter-day L.A. hair metal. With “Cherry Pie,” they were about to score the biggest of their three Top 10 singles.
    *  *  *
    “Quit tickling me,” I yelled at Jani as we rolled around on the sheets in front of the camera, smudging my makeup. That Jani was into me was obvious to everyone on set. When I gyrated my hips in my teeny-tiny shorts, shaking my bleached-blond hair around for the camera, I could feel Jani smile.
    “Oh, man, Jani really likes you,” said Kathy Conan, who was married to Warrant’s lead guitarist, Joey Allen. All the Warrant girlfriends were on set, and they were sweet as . . . pie. “This video is going to be huge,” said Kathy, exchanging numbers with me. Of course I agreed with her, just to be polite. Fromexperience, I figured it would pop up on MTV for a little while and then disappear, like the other videos I had done so far.
    In November 1990, “Cherry Pie” hit the radio waves, followed by the world premiere of the video on MTV. I was home in my pajamas with Matthew, watching.
    “I’m not sure how many of my scenes they’re going to use, probably just one or two,” I told Matthew, taking a handful of popcorn.
    The video opened with Jani spinning like a wheel, his polka-dot shirt open, black jeans tight.
    “Hm,” muttered Matthew.
    A flash of me, in the red bustier, red lipstick, and denim shorts.
    “You look nice, babe,” he said. There I was as a roller waitress with a slice of pie, tripping over Joey’s guitar cable. Then the pie landed in my lap. There I was in a baseball outfit, there I was in a tight black dress on the couch. Oh, and now they’re hosing me down.
    “Wow, there’s like, more Bobbie Brown than Warrant in this video,” said Matthew.
    Me and Jani in bed.
    “Well, congratulations, Bobbie,” said Matthew, trying his best to sound upbeat.
    “Cherry Pie” stayed at the top of the video charts for six months, and was in heavy rotation on MTV for almost a year. People thought it was outrageous, and a Canadian cable-TV music network refused to air it because it was “offensively sexist.”Which seemed ridiculous to me. The controversy made no sense to me—it was a sexy, playful little video for a sexy, playful song. Of course, the media commentary, good and bad, only benefited both me and the band. “Cherry Pie” was a hit for Warrant, and Bobbie Brown, the Cherry Pie girl, became a star.
    I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing, “Hey, Cherry Pie!” I still get it to this day. Tawny Kitaen, Whitesnake video babe, had paved the way, but with my more contemporary bubblegum-pop look, I became the poster child for early-’90s hair vixens. To my relief, I