Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  The Masque emerged as the center of L.A.’s punk scene. It was literally an underground club—a hole-in-the-wall basement located beneath the Pussycat adult theater. By the time it closed in 1979, the little stage featured X, the Weirdos, the Germs, the Dils, and almost every other local punk band of note. Equally famous were its concrete walls, which were covered in graffiti that many considered made it one of the great, if not sacred, shrines to the origins of the punk movement.

  The Roxy and Whisky were still popular, as was the Starwood, but the bands that played those clubs were by and large big, or on their way up. The Masque was a big cold room filled with weirdos, misfits, and iconoclasts. If you were a punk, you fit into one of those categories, or you simply checked “all of the above.” I was one of the regulars and notable for the way my close-cropped hair changed colors almost as often as the club changed bands.

  Part of the fun I had was being able to dress up in whatever kind of outfit I thought about putting together. I preferred avant garde designers like Kenzo, but if I managed to splurge occasionally at Fred Segal or Neo 80, one of the few punk stores, it usually left me flat broke, and then I relied on my mom to make me clothes for work or I scrounged through thrift stores. I had an eye, though, so everything worked for me—or so I thought. I remember wearing a paisley dress and two-toned cowboy boots to work and then changing into a fifties-style prom dress with torn stockings and stilettos. I famously showed up once at a party wearing a Hefty trash bag.

  I often topped off my getup with a faux-diamond-encrusted tiara. Why not step into the role of punk princess? I thought.

  No sooner did I do that than a prince came into my life—Karlos Kaballeros. Karlos was the drummer for the Dickies, a band whose music I loved. He was also my type—dark, handsome, and Latin. I knew of him and the band before, but we actually met one night at a party in the Hollywood Hills. He thought he was laying a cool line on me (and he was) when he said I reminded him of a punk Kim Novak. Hearing that, I immediately acted out the sultry scene from the movie Picnic when Kim clapped her hands and swiveled her hips in a slow dance that put William Holden under her spell.

  It had the same effect on Karlos. He became my first real boyfriend, my first romantic boyfriend, too. He was also my first rock star. The Dickies were on the verge of being signed to a major record label, and that made them hot stuff around town. Despite the buzz, though, they were still as broke as everyone else. Karlos was like me in that he didn’t have a place of his own. After the parties were over the two of us would curl up together on friends’ floor spaces or couches.

  We had a pretty bohemian romance. We were broke, rarely sober, and always on the go. Our lives were about music. We went to shows, found parties, and made a few trips to San Francisco for concerts at Mabuhay Gardens, or the Fab Mab as everyone called it, in the city’s rather skeezy North Beach district. We ate at Johnny’s Steakhouse on Hollywood Boulevard, flicked our cigs as we walked down the Strip, and shared bottles of cheap wine along with our innermost dreams until we passed out on each other.

  After a couple months together, I sensed something strange going on with Karlos. It was a subtle change that made me think he wasn’t being forthright with me about our relationship. I didn’t say anything, but one night when we were meeting at the Whisky, I saw him walk in and got a sense that he was going to break up with me. And strangely enough, he did.

  He found me in the club, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and started to make small talk. I asked if something was bothering him, and after stammering for a moment, he said something along the lines of “I’m not good enough for you.” I understood where that was going and thought it was a pathetically weak way of telling me that he had found someone else. Regardless, I was crushed. When I asked what was behind his decision, if there was someone else or something else, he said there was nothing to discuss.

  I saw him a few nights later at a club. He was with another guy and they were about to leave on their motorcycles. For a moment, I thought about going over to them and having some words with Karlos. But, as hard as it was, I decided to leave it. Whatever I said wouldn’t make me feel better. He didn’t want me anymore.

  I had a hard time for months. Everyplace I went reminded me of him—or of us. I cried as I rode the bus to and from work; the city seemed so cold, empty, and lonely. I remember bursting into tears when I heard Rod Stewart’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest.”

  Four or five years went by before I saw Karlos again. I was in the VIP balcony at the Starwood, checking out Mötley Crüe, when some guy began giving me a very hard time. We exchanged words and suddenly he cocked his arm to hit me. I saw it happening in slow motion, the way I had years earlier when my car flipped over on the freeway. Then from out of nowhere Karlos appeared, blocked the guy’s arm, and beat the crap out of him in my defense.

  I was extremely grateful, slightly embarrassed, and pleased to see that he still cared.

  five

  WE’RE HERE NOW

  MOOCHING A PLACE to sleep every night got old. I reconnected with Theresa, and we rented an apartment in the Canterbury, a large, run-down apartment building from the thirties on Cherokee. It was a terrible neighborhood, but only a block from the Masque, which was why, aside from it being cheap, it seemed like everyone we knew lived in the building.

  If someone had blown up the Canterbury, and God knows someone might have tried, most of Hollywood’s punk scene would have been destroyed. I heard rumors the Canterbury’s landlord was also a pimp and oversaw a theft ring. True or not, he was a dodgy guy—but perfect as the ringmaster for the characters who called the Canterbury home.

  All the punks had apartments throughout the building, including my friend Connie, who had gotten me into Black Randy. She was also a former beauty school student and sold drinks at the Masque. She had lived at the Canterbury for years and liked to say she predated the punks, having moved in when the renters were merely drag queens and pimps.

  Connie gave haircuts to anyone who wanted one and boasted about having hundreds of clients. Clients? To me, they were weirdos like myself who wandered into her apartment. Later, she was a roadie for the Go-Go’s. I always thought she was a riot. Once when we were bored, she pushed me down Sunset in a wheelchair while I pretended to be spastic. The more people we unnerved, the funnier we thought it was.

  Alice Bag was another major force of feminine creativity and vision who also sang backup with Black Randy and went on to lead her own bodacious but short-lived group, the Bags. She was another one of those marvels who were incredibly smart, opinionated, and prescient. She knew of music before anyone else did and swore by the Ramones until she heard the Weirdos, who memorably and famously told Slash magazine, “We’re not punks. We’re weirdos.”

  Alice was among the most committed to music and life on the fringe of art and acceptance. In every era, including the punk era, there are those who get notoriety and those who are just as instrumental and inspiring, if not more so, but for some reason don’t get the fame—Alice was one of those people. We were good friends. We got drunk together pretty frequently, shopped the thrift stores, talked endlessly, and hung out. I also remember making out with her on a bench as we waited for a bus on Vine Street. In those days making out with someone of your own sex was fashionable.

  The Canterbury was a great big interconnected stew of crazies devoted to two things, partying and music, though it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. You could stand in the courtyard at almost any time of the day or night and hear different music blasting out of every window—and believe me, that was the least of it.

  I was carried out or passed out more times than I can recall. Others were way wilder. I don’t even want to think about the strange bedfellows you would have found if you peeked inside those windows. It was insane, in a great way.

  Theresa and I had a studio apartment with a kitchen. It came with a disgustingly dirty and worn plaid sofa—the piece that qualified it as “furnished.”
We also shared a Murphy bed. One day, in a burst of inspiration, I set out to paint the bathroom bloodred, but I ran out of steam halfway through and never finished.

  I probably went out and never picked the brush up again. I expended more energy making sure I was at all the hot shows, whether the bill was the Screamers, the Ramones, and Blondie or the Weasels, the Bags, the Eyes, and the Quick.

  The Germs were also busy and productive that summer and into the fall of 1977, their most notable gigs being at the Whisky in September with the Weirdos and the Bags and then the next month when they opened for Devo and Blondie. I can still be heard on a vintage piece of video on YouTube introducing the band.

  The parties that followed the shows were as important to us insiders as the shows themselves. They gave everyone a chance to mingle, talk about the performances, compare what we’d seen and heard to every other band on the planet, and hook up. I was a huge fan of Devo, but I was always intimidated around Mark Mothersbaugh and the other guys. It wasn’t for any reason other than that they were smart college graduates who had a well-thought-out vision, and I feared not understanding whatever it was they were talking about.

  I also got a kick out of the Weirdos, especially the Denney brothers, John and Dix, who were fun on-and offstage. But I remember seeing the Stranglers when they rolled into town from the UK and getting a sense from their attitude and apparent aggressiveness that they were probably too much for a carefree party girl like me.

  I underestimated myself. One night I dropped some acid with Germs drummer Don Bolles and a group of friends. There were probably ten of us who decided to trip together that night. After ingesting the LSD, we walked en masse from the Canterbury to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which was a decent walk when you were straight, but a flat-out adventure while tripping.

  Once there, we crawled underneath the main gates and spent a couple hours exploring the grounds. We found the graves of Hollywood legends Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power as well as Virginia Rappe’s plot. Rappe was the silent film actress Fatty Arbuckle was accused of killing, a dark tragedy that had intrigued me for many years. We also goofed around in one of the old mausoleums, shaking a couple urns as if they were maracas.

  As several of us were sticking flowers in our hair and joking around, we heard a deep, stern voice on a loudspeaker cut through our laughter and say, “Everyone stop whatever you’re doing and come out with your hands up.” It was the cops. I looked out toward where I heard the voice and saw several squad cars with their lights flashing just like on the old TV series Adam-12.

  Oh crap, I thought as I was hit by a sick feeling I hadn’t felt since I was caught shoplifting from Thrifty. As my friends slowly marched out to face the police, though, I decided I wasn’t going with them. I didn’t want to get arrested, not while still blazing on acid. Instead I hid behind a tombstone, not knowing how much of the fear I felt was because I was high and how much was because I was really scared.

  After all the others were outside the gate and standing nervously in the glare of a spotlight from one of the black and white police cruisers, the cops issued several more orders to come out. I didn’t know if someone had said I was still in there, but I didn’t move—not even when they shined a powerful spotlight from another car in my direction, panning it across the grounds, searching for me.

  I don’t think I breathed until they finally left. I guess they felt like they were hauling in enough weird-looking kids for the night and didn’t need one more girl with short platinum-colored hair. I continued to sit in the dark for some time, waiting until I felt certain the coast was clear. Then I sprinted through the lightless night as fast as I could, running breathlessly across the tombstones toward the cemetery’s other gate. I crawled under and walked back to the Canterbury.

  On Santa Monica Boulevard, about halfway there, I bumped into Don Bolles, who had escaped, too. We looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief. All the others had been taken to jail. Later in the week, a couple of the girls told me that they had spent several days in Sybil Brand, the women’s jail. They were pissed, but they’d had no choice. No one had any money to bail them out.

  The year wound down with shows at the Whisky from the Deadbeats, the Mumps, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Screamers, and the Dickies (which I continued to see despite the heartache I felt watching Karlos). After one show, I met a guy who said he heard that Natalie Wood’s sister, Lana Wood, was having a party at her house, and he suggested we crash it.

  Why not? We found her house, bypassed the valet parking out front in favor of parking on our own up the street, and walked straight into the party, where we tried to keep our cool and look like we belonged while gawking at stars. I remember elbowing my friend and saying, “Look, there’s Jack Haley Jr.” He had no idea.

  Crashing fancy parties became something I did fairly often. It was cheap entertainment. I got dressed up, drank champagne, and tried to look posh. The Chateau Marmont hotel was my favorite place to crash events. One night I stumbled into a hoity-toity celebration for a famous New York artist. After a glass or two of champagne, I ran out and broke all the lightbulbs in the hallway as I passed them.

  Looking back, my life at that time stands out as surreal, colorful, vibrant, reckless, and irresponsible. I didn’t have any money but felt like I owned the town. Occasionally I was onstage as a backup singer, other times I was in the audience, but I was living the dream all the time. It was wonderful. The humdrum monotony of temp jobs in the daytime was minor compared to the thrilling anticipation of something wonderful happening at night.

  I didn’t want to miss anything. No one did.

  Word spread that the Sex Pistols were going to play at the Winterland Ballroom on January 14 in San Francisco. Only seven months had passed since “God Save the Queen” had been released like a firebomb across the airwaves. I had listened to it with Darby and Bobby; they had played it over and over, as if they were tattooing it in their brains. It provided our revolution with an anarchist anthem.

  The Pistols’ incendiary album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols soon followed, and it was pretty obvious from those songs, along with what I’d read, that Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, and the boys were like a fast-moving cyclone and I’d better do everything I could to see them before they blew apart.

  A bunch of us felt the same way, like we needed to do whatever we could to get up to San Francisco. I went up with Theresa and a group that included Connie and others. She recalls us checking into a Chinatown hotel, trashing the room, and then being unable to find another place to stay, all of which is likely true. I just don’t remember any of it. I was probably on acid.

  My memory of this trip kicks in right before the show, when I ran into other L.A. punks, such as photographer Jenny Lens, Hellin Killer, Margot Olaverra, and Jane Wiedlin, then known as Jane Drano, a cute, outgoing girl who was around the Masque and Canterbury from the beginning. All of us were excited to be there, and the show more than lived up to any expectations we had of the world’s greatest punk band.

  It was a miracle the Sex Pistols even made it onto the stage after a three-week tour across the southern U.S. that filled the underground with talk of new highs and lows of self-destructive behavior. It was all part of their larger-than-life reputation, which, in a way, transcended anything they played that night, though as I recall, the show we saw was brilliant.

  I still get goose bumps when I picture Sid Vicious poised at the edge of the stage, in his leather pants, billowy white shirt, and black vest, grasping the microphone with both hands. I remember his hair sticking straight up and the violent way he thrashed through the band’s songs. By the end of the night, he was shirtless, and his skinny white torso was full of gashes that were dripping with blood, while Johnny Rotten was kneeling onstage, chanting, “This is no fun. This is no fun.”

  Those words turned out to be prophetic. Within the week, Johnny Rotten announced the band had broken up and little more than a year later Sid V
icious was dead of a heroin overdose.

  It was amazing. Inspired by the Sex Pistols show and determined to see punk rock in the place it originated, Theresa and I saved our money until we could afford tickets to London and spent two weeks there seeing shows, shopping, and looking for cute boys. We shared a room in a small, old hotel in Paddington, and aside from just the fact that we were in London, the most memorable part of the trip was when I woke up from a sound sleep one night and saw a ghost.

  I didn’t just see the ghost. I had woken up because it was holding me down. I saw and felt it on top of me. I tried to scream but it wouldn’t let me open my mouth. It started to choke me, and just when I began to panic that I was going to pass out, it disappeared.

  In the morning, I told Theresa what had happened and when she gave me the kind of disbelieving look you would expect, I simply said, “Believe what you want, but it was real.”

  Back home, I was hanging out one night with Jane Wiedlin and Margot Olaverra at a party in Venice. The house was little and crowded with people, and at one point the three of us found ourselves sitting on the curb, with beers and cigarettes. We talked about the Sex Pistols’ show in San Francisco, which was still fresh in our minds, and I added stories from my trip to London, and eventually we were talking about starting our own band.

  Margot had been trying to get something together for months. She had, in fact, started learning to play bass and had already recruited another girl, Elissa Bello, to play drums.

  Jane and I jumped in without having to think about it. Jane said she wanted to play guitar. I’d wanted to play bass, but since Margot had already claimed that role, I was left with one option—the lead singer. I laughingly admitted that my only previous experience as a singer was as a backup with Black Randy, which half the residents at the Canterbury seemed to have done, and before that, as a little girl singing along to The Sound of Music soundtrack.