Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  But my lack of experience didn’t matter. None of the others had much either. The beautiful thing about punk was that you only needed to have the guts to try and the enthusiasm to think you could pull it off. We had both the guts and the enthusiasm, plus some additional craziness, and as we sat on the curb, we talked one another into a froth of excitement. Everybody we knew was in a band. Why not us?

  We sealed the deal by telling each other that at the least we could be as bad as everyone else, but the unique thing that happened and separated us from the pack from the start was that we also agreed that we didn’t have to be bad—and we could probably be better than most, and definitely cuter.

  I remember the looks we gave one another and the back-and-forth before we got up. It was like making a pact.

  “Is this for real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really serious?”

  “There’s no flaking out, right?”

  “Okay, if we’re a band, when’s rehearsal?”

  As far as I was concerned, we were going to be big. I had no doubt.

  * * *

  Our first rehearsal was at Margot’s apartment off Robertson Boulevard. We were pretty scattered and lost. We didn’t even know how to start; we barely figured out how to set up our instruments. We banged around, tried to write songs, and then went to Denny’s for dinner. We were situated in a booth, a mix of kicky hair styles and colors wrapped in cigarette smoke. All of us were in agreement that our first rehearsal had surpassed expectations. Hey, we’d shown up and done it. But we were missing something key—a name for the band.

  We tossed suggestions back and forth, and continued the discussion for a few days before we whittled the choices down to two, the Misfits and the Go-Go’s. Both were good names. We nearly chose the Misfits and went so far as to print up a flyer. But someone looked up “go-go” in the dictionary and found that it meant something like “uninhibited and free,” and we liked that. Everyone agreed it fit. And from that moment on, we were the Go-Go’s.

  We rehearsed in the basement at the Canterbury, then shuttled between there and one of the several tiny rehearsal rooms at the Masque, which we shared with other bands, including the Motels and X. Both bands gave us pointers. With our purple and fuchsia hair, we were a sight as we wheeled our amps down the street from the Canterbury to the club, which was beneath the Pussycat porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard.

  We came up with two songs, “Overrun,” a fashionably angry romp that I wrote, and “Robert Hilburn,” a tongue-in-cheek ode to the Los Angeles Times’s rock music critic written by Jane, who from the outset revealed herself to be an incredibly prolific and clever songwriter, something that was even more impressive considering she didn’t know anything about writing songs and learned the chords by putting masking tape with numbers on her guitar frets.

  That was the amazing thing about the band. We did everything by instinct—and it usually turned out to be right.

  The best move we made was realizing that we needed help. We needed someone to guide us through the basics, starting with how to plug in our equipment. We really were that clueless.

  Margot suggested that we invite Charlotte Caffey to join the group. All of us thought it was a brilliant idea. Charlotte was a California blonde with a sensibility that was more pop than punk. It was probably because she actually had some music training. I didn’t know her personally, but I knew who she was. She had played bass with the Keys and more recently with the Eyes, a band that I really liked. She also dated the Dickies’ singer, Leonard Phillips. And most important, she knew how to do all the things we didn’t.

  Margot and I approached her one night backstage at the Starwood and asked if she wanted to join us in our new band, the Go-Go’s. It’s funny to think that we hadn’t even played a gig but we were already talking as if there was nothing more real and happening than our band. Even funnier is that Charlotte said yes without pausing to think about it.

  I thought that was a little bizarre, since she was already in a group. But later Charlotte explained that she had been intrigued with the way Margot and I looked, and she figured we’d be fun girls to hang out with. She was also ready to leave the Eyes.

  We told her who was in the group and that she would play lead guitar, which she said sounded great. What she left out was that she didn’t know how to play lead guitar. But she learned.

  Our first performance was a going-away party for the Dickies at the Masque on May 31, 1978. They were leaving for a monthlong tour of the UK. The club was packed. People were right in our face as we played both of our songs and repeated “Overrun” as our encore. According to Connie, I was so nervous I peed my pants. I don’t recall, but I’m not denying it happened either.

  Afterward, everyone said we were great. We knew our limitations, but we agreed. We had the time of our lives, too.

  At the Masque, a band would play, finish, and then four other people in the crowd would get up and play. Almost everyone there was in a band or wanted to be in a band or knew the people in one of the bands. We played the Masque again a week or so later on a lineup that included the Bags and the Plugz. It felt like another triumph. I thought we were great, even better than before.

  A few days later, I was with Jane, heading downstairs to rehearsal at the Canterbury. Charlotte had traveled to the UK with her boyfriend. Jane and I were talking about the previous two shows, reliving every moment and detail, from the performance to the people we saw watching us. We were bursting with ideas and enthusiasm and dreams of a big future.

  I said, “You know we are going to be rich and famous,” which was such an uncool thing for punks to admit, but Jane agreed, adding, “Yeah, we are.”

  After Charlotte returned from the UK, we rehearsed and wrote with even more purpose and passion. We had fun and spurred one another on to work hard. A group dynamic quickly emerged. It was one of those things where, when I think back, I can see so clearly that our five personalities immediately added up to something that was greater than any of us as individuals could have ever been. It was the right chemistry.

  In other words, as we rehearsed and played, worked up our ideas and shared our dreams, and just hung out—because that’s what you did when you were in a band—we clicked as friends and had a fantastic time. And it translated onstage. The Go-Go’s were a “new, fun group” that “you can’t help but love,” noted a punk magazine review after our third show, by which time we had a dozen songs. And the review concluded, “In all, a dynamic set of female rockers.”

  I came off the stage that night feeling like we had played our best show yet. The review proved it.

  But then I popped a cassette of that show into the tape player of a friend’s car. Until then, I had never heard myself sing. I was horrified. I sounded terrible. I could carry a tune, but barely. I also screamed more than I sang.

  I hit the Stop button, put my hands over my face, and thought, Oh my God, I need to take some vocal lessons.

  I scraped together enough money to take lessons from a well-regarded vocal teacher, an older woman who lived in a charming home off Sunset, on Alta Loma, where she taught me scales and warm-up exercises. She also told me stories about performers, including her own experiences as a singer, and she treated me with a seriousness that even more than the things she taught me let me feel like I had it in me to be a real singer.

  As I told her, I was willing to work at it.

  six

  WE GOT THE BEAT

  WITH OUR day jobs, we all lived schizophrenic lives. Margot worked at House of Pies. Charlotte clocked in at Kaiser Permanente medical center. Elissa held down various waitress jobs. And Jane, who had studied fashion design, worked in a factory downtown making patterns. I think she even wrote a few song lyrics on those patterns.

  None of us had any money beyond what we needed to get by, but we didn’t care. We talked about getting rich and famous as if it wasn’t a fantasy. As long as we had en
ough for rent, food, and the occasional trip to the secondhand shop, we didn’t worry.

  I had a bank account but gave it up when keeping a minimum balance became nearly impossible after portioning out my paycheck from working at Petersen Publishing on essentials like clothes, shoes, hair, rent, bus fare, and nighttime fun. From then on, I kept my cash assets in a Barbie thermos. I carried it everywhere, too. During shows, I set it on the drum riser. I didn’t want anyone taking my last few dollars.

  Margot had a similar quirk. At some point in the evening, whether we were playing or partying, she would end up on the stage in whatever club we were in, shouting, “Where is my purse? Somebody stole my purse!” Then she cried. Then she got mad at everyone, grabbed the microphone, and shouted, “Motherfuckers, give me back my purse!”

  People got so used to it they rolled their eyes and said, “There she goes again.” As far as I know, her purse was never stolen. She was never able to remember where she had put it before she started to party. She always found it, though, and all ended well.

  We played two shows in October, one early in the month at the Whisky and a second on Halloween at the Hollywood Roosevelt with the Germs, Satin Tones, and Mau Maus. With everyone dressed in costumes (not much of a change from our everyday appearance) and ingesting copious amounts of booze, quaaludes, hallucinogens, and God only knows what else, the atmosphere was especially festive. Being at the Roosevelt, it was also old-Hollywood and tatty, which I liked.

  And we seemed to be liked right back. A review noted, “Well, I can say that I have heard of them [the Go-Go’s], but I still can’t say that I’ve seen them, the band being totally obscured by a wall of sweaty, haphazardly costumed bodies. They have a strong sound, but I have no idea what their songs are about.”

  They were about us—our lives. They weren’t specifically feminine or different from songs an all-guys band might write. They were unique to what us girls saw and felt. Also, part of the reason people liked us was because we were a crazy, fun, energetic mess onstage. Quite simply, we were a good time—raw, but the kind of girls you wanted to see again.

  We worked hard and continued to mesh as a group. Charlotte, Jane, and I developed an almost telepathic understanding of each other based on ambition, backgrounds, and senses of humor. When we met to rehearse, no one took the lead. We tossed out ideas, tried each other’s songs, and got better.

  Slash magazine ran our first print interview/feature, and in it, Jane described herself as an “ex-Catholic, ex-cowgirl, ex-fashion designer.” Charlotte said that she possessed an IQ of 165 and declared herself a genius whose fantasy was “to be gang-raped by seven Mister Rogers clones.” I described myself as a reject from a “strict Southern Baptist home” who liked “huge sweatshirts, rabbit feet, the Hollywood cemetery, rosaries, penguins, the Marquis de Sade, and gin rummy.”

  Elissa and Margot were less outgoing and out-there but no less passionate than the rest of us, though Elissa was difficult and defensive in rehearsals and periodically a no-show, something you can’t be in a band, and she and Margot regularly clashed. It was a tough subject to broach, but all of us knew Elissa’s days were numbered.

  In early January 1979, we played the Starwood, before that club quit booking punk bands in favor of hair bands like Motley Crüe and Van Halen. I remember Alex and Eddie Van Halen crashing a few punk gigs and taking over the stage with a sense of good-natured mayhem.

  In his memoir, David Lee Roth said he screwed one of the Go-Go’s. Not true—unless there was some hanky-panky I didn’t know about. He may have exaggerated a close encounter the two of us had one night outside the Whisky following a Van Halen show. He was entertaining a gaggle of girls on the sidewalk, and I was walking to the Rainbow from my apartment. As I passed by, he grabbed me and we made out on the corner.

  Till that moment, we had never met. I’m not even sure that should be counted as a meeting.

  Such craziness was more routine than you’d think. Margot and I were doing acid one night and talking about the drive we had planned the next day to see a punk show, including Black Randy, in Pismo Beach. Around two A.M. I suggested we scrap the drive and hitchhike there. Margot said why not, and soon we were standing on the side of the Hollywood Freeway with our thumbs out.

  Within minutes, we caught a ride to Thousand Oaks—about fifteen miles, but also the off-ramp nearest my parents’ house!

  As we waited for another ride, I freaked out.

  “What if my dad drives by right now and sees me?” I said. “I’m blazing on acid and hitchhiking. I’ll be totally dead.”

  Margot laughed.

  “He’s not going to drive by at two thirty in the morning,” she said.

  Margot and I got as far as Solvang. Then someone gave us a lift into Pismo Beach, where we slept on the sidewalk outside the club until everyone else arrived that afternoon.

  In February, the Go-Go’s played two nights at the Mabuhay in San Francisco, our first out-of-town gigs and also at a club that gave us some word-of-mouth credibility. Poet-musician Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries, came to one of our shows with his crew of friends. His presence gave us some street cred, and I got zonked with him and his pals afterward.

  Back in L.A. we opened at the Whisky for Lydia Lunch, another poet/street icon around whom I always felt intimidated just because I thought she was so damn smart. Being around people like that often made me feel insecure about my own abilities or at least caused me to question what I was doing and wonder whether I was really any good at it, which, as I eventually learned, was ultimately a self-defeating and damaging way to go about life.

  Our next show was with the Circle Jerks at Blackie’s, and during the show a fight broke out between the Hollywood punks and the beach punks. Each gig was eventful like that; there was, it seemed, never a dull moment—or a dull person.

  As the punk culture spread, certain areas of Hollywood looked like they were straight out of the movie Mad Max via London’s Kings Road, and the transformation created tension in certain parts of the city. Even I grew to see there was a dark side to some punks, particularly the groups that were into heroin and those who were into violence.

  By and large, though, there was tension between the punks and the police just like there had been ten years earlier between the hippies and the police. Even a lightweight like me felt it when I walked down Sunset Boulevard and saw the cops eyeing me and my friends for no reason other than we looked and dressed different from most people.

  That tension erupted on March 17, a night that became infamous in L.A.’s punk history as the Elks Lodge Massacre. There was a well-publicized punk show at the Elks Lodge across from MacArthur Park just west of downtown. That it was Saint Patrick’s Day added to the partytime atmosphere. We were on the bill that included the Plugz, the Zeros, the Wipers, and the Alley Cats. It was an all-ages show, and about eight hundred people turned out.

  We played after the Zeros and were followed by the Plugz, who had gotten halfway through their set when all hell broke loose. I was hanging around and talking to friends, but not anywhere near the activity that allegedly caused the problem. According to what I heard and read, around eleven P.M. someone threw a beer bottle against a wall outside the lodge, prompting the manager to call the cops. The LAPD responded by sending in an army of cops in full-on riot gear, and they stormed the place. One account said they’d been ordered to “charge the hall and clear the ballroom.”

  As soon as the cops arrived, I got the hell out of there. I could feel the ominous change in the air, and I knew better than to hang around. Most of those who did were beaten up. The police ended up putting out a story that they’d had plainclothes officers on the site earlier in the evening and they’d witnessed people fighting in stairwells and throwing beer bottles. One cop even went on Rodney’s radio show that night and blamed the punks for causing the melee. The officer in charge told the Los Angeles Times they’d gone into the lodge only because it was “a real life-or-death situation.”

>   I saw none of that. The mayhem started when the police showed up and kids were dragged from the hall and out onto the street, clubbed, and hauled away. There was a press conference the next day at the Masque where a bunch of punks presented the other side and accused the LAPD of causing the “massacre.”

  As I recall, Jane, Charlotte, Margot, and Elissa had, like me, managed to get away before the violence started. However, our manager, Ginger Canzoneri, was beaten with a nightstick. It was scary, dangerous, and one of those very unfortunate events now relegated to a footnote.

  Around this time we were having trouble with Elissa, who was proving unreliable, and we were quietly looking for a new drummer. We put out word through the grapevine and somehow it reached Gina Schock. Gina was a talented, serious, and trained drummer from Baltimore who had come to L.A. with Edie and the Eggs, an art-house group fronted by Edith Massey, a favorite actress of cult movie director John Waters.

  Gina saw us play at the Whisky and sent word that she was impressed—and thought we could be even better with her as our drummer. Something about that attitude appealed to us, and we invited her to one of our rehearsals. Obviously we made sure Elissa wasn’t there, but that wasn’t hard since part of our problem with Elissa was that she frequently missed rehearsals and didn’t seem to be taking the band seriously enough.

  When Gina walked in, I saw her frizzy hair and overalls and thought, wow, she doesn’t look like a punk rocker. She definitely didn’t look like a Go-Go. But that could be rectified with a trip to the thrift store and some hair dye, and it wasn’t nearly as important as how she played. It turned out Gina played phenomenally well, and we invited her to join the band.