MTV Awards Is the Place to Be Seen : Pop music: Performing on tonight’s video music show has become one of the industry’s most coveted opportunities.

Van Halen, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most enduring bands, has never played live on television. Rock recluse Prince rarely appears in public, much less in front of a TV camera. Bad boys Guns N’ Roses and heavy-metal Metallica, which has the nation’s current No. 1 album, are in the midst of European concert tours.

Yet all four acts will perform live tonight at 6 on the MTV Video Music Awards--with Guns N’ Roses via satellite from Wembley Stadium in England.

More than any other music-industry event today, the fledgling Video Music Awards, which will be beamed to 140 countries from the Universal Amphitheatre, seem to pull rock, rap and pop stars together. Performing on the show--and, to a lesser degree, presenting awards--has become one of the industry’s most coveted opportunities.

“You can do the American Music Awards and Grammys, and you can make friends with Dick Clark or some Grammy people, but (MTV Networks chairman) Tom Freston and (program and talent relations vice president) Abbey Konowitch are without question the two most powerful and influential people in the music business today,” said Rush Management chairman Russell Simmons, who handles 40 acts, including one of tonight’s performers, rapper LL Cool J.

“American Music Awards and the Grammys are once a year, but MTV is there all year round,” Simmons said. “These people are people you want on your side. These are the image makers.”

“We’re fortunate that this has become the show to do,” Konowitch said. “We turn down, unfortunately, as many artists as we book on the show.”

Tonight’s presenters range from James Brown to Cher to Billy Idol, and Konowitch said that he had to turn down a number of “major stars” who wanted to hand out awards. They are waiting in the wings should anyone cancel, he said.

In simpler times, the cover of Rolling Stone was perhaps rock’s ultimate stamp of approval--and the most potent way for artists to reach the record-buying audience. Later, satellites made possible live performances before millions of TV viewers on the industry-voted Grammys and the public-voted American Music Awards.

Today, however, with the ability of music videos to make or break a new act, the Video Music Awards have joined--and, in some people’s opinions, surpassed--those forums as the best way for artists to reach their fans.

Konowitch chooses acts based on music trends each year. He rarely gets turned down, he said, although this year’s top nominee, R.E.M., did deny an offer to play.

“MTV is one awards show where everybody really wants to get in there and perform,” Paula Abdul said Tuesday at the Universal Amphitheatre before her rehearsal for tonight’s show. “This is our home. Here you have the camaraderie of your peers, your fellow artists. There’s not the tension and stress of the Grammys, where you’re worried about who’s going to win. It’s more of a hip, cool situation, and you feel looser up there.”

“This show is a vehicle that’s going to get me to the masses, and I’m going to vocalize and capitalize,” LL Cool J said during rehearsals. For him, the Video Music Awards are “absolutely” the most important awards show. “There is nothing that can channel you into the music-loving and record-buying public better,” he said. “MTV shoots you right into the vein, right into the pulse of music listeners--black, white, Chinese, everybody.”

Furthermore, the MTV awards show lets artists prove that they are legitimate performers, and not just manufactured video stars.

“In this day and age, it’s important to be seen live, especially since the Milli Vanilli situation,” said David Cole, one of the C’s in the new dance group C+C Music Factory, which is performing tonight. “For new artists, people have to know that you can perform, and that you’re not just a magic act that was thrown together.”

“Sometimes it’s hard for artists to go on stage and match what they do in a video. Sometimes they can’t,” said drummer Rikki Rockett, whose band Poison was a club act before it broke nationally on MTV with the single “Talk Dirty to Me,” which they’ll play tonight.

“This is a good chance for people to see us on TV, not in a video,” he said. “It’s good to come out and play, and if we screw up, so what? This shows them that we can play real music, and we’re bigger than our videos.”

The nominees are vying in 22 music-video categories covering rock, dance, rap and heavy metal, including technical categories such as directing, choreography and special effects--not that anyone notices. The awards are largely a sidelight to the three-hour musical extravaganza.

“I would venture to say that most artists, if they’re up for awards and are also performing, they’re more concerned about their performance than their awards,” said Larry Tolin, who manages Abdul. “It’s great to win an award. But that performance is what will leave the indelible impression on people’s minds for a long time.”

Last year’s Video Music Awards, which featured performances by Madonna, Janet Jackson, Aerosmith and Sinead O’Connor, were seen in 8.5 million households during their live simulcast on MTV and sister station VH-1 (later, a two-hour version of the awards show aired in syndication). That viewership, though, was less than half the American Music Awards’ 19 million households in January on ABC and the Grammys’ 17.5 million in February on CBS. But most managers hold that MTV is the crucial audience.

“The Grammys are much more mainstream,” said Peter Mensch, who handles two of tonight’s acts, Metallica and Queensryche. “Mom and Pop watch that. But for a rock audience, MTV is the channel. Our exposure isn’t as great, but it’s more dedicated to an audience that appreciates our music.”

The heavy-metal band Metallica, whose album has been Billboard’s No. 1 for two weeks, was added just last week. The group rearranged a European concert tour and flew in from Amsterdam Monday at a personal expense of $50,000 to make the show. After the awards tonight, they have to jump a plane to Mainz, Germany.

Mensch said it’s worth it. While MTV normally has only about 390,000 viewers at any given time--and most of them, he said, simply have it on in the background--the Video Music Awards rallies them together in one sitting. “It’s the biggest single hit you can get on MTV,” Mensch said.

Performing on the Video Music Awards isn’t cheap. One source said that some of tonight’s acts--which also include Don Henley, Mariah Carey and EMF--will spend more than $100,000 for their production numbers. One rumor floating around the Amphitheatre is that Prince will bring out 50 dancers. And Abdul’s managers freely admit that she is going to extremes for her number.

Of course, many of tonight’s acts have something immediate to promote. Prince has a new album due Oct. 1, and Abdul goes out on her first solo concert tour next month. “I hope my performance here gives a prelude to the kind of performance people can expect to see in the concert,” Abdul said.

On the other hand, Metallica’s other manager, Cliff Burnstein, points out that what’s good for the artists is also good for MTV.

“All MTV wants out of this is the greatest number of people watching, the highest ratings, the best syndicated deals and to charge the most for advertising,” he said. “So if they get a bunch of hot acts and cross a certain number of genres, they assure themselves of a hit show.”