Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  We broke the news to Elissa, who was understandably upset and ended up telling people that she’d been booted because she was dating a girl whose ex was our manager, and blah blah blah. It wasn’t true. Elissa was fired because she wasn’t reliable and it became obvious we needed a drummer with serious talent and attitude. Gina filled that role.

  It was a really hard thing to do and forced us to deal with the gossip she put out there, but we got over it, and Gina really did, as she had promised, make us sound dramatically better. She pulled us all together. We finally sounded like we were playing the same song. As we went into summer, we made a significant leap musically. Our songs got tighter and though they still had a punk edge they sounded more pop.

  Above all else, with Gina on drums, we really did have the beat; it wasn’t only apparent to us.

  A Los Angeles Times review of our July show at the Hong Kong Café noted that six months earlier all the group “had going for it was an all-girl novelty status and lots of enthusiasm. [But] it’s since grown into a fine rock band. Friday’s show introduced a better repertoire of material, a new drummer (Gina Schock—a feisty addition), and reveals the group to be steadily gaining control of its instruments. Guitar leads are still a bit ragged, but no matter—if it has managed to come this far in six months, its future seems more than good.”

  The review went on to say the band’s “ace-in-the-hole is its attitude, refreshingly free of the chip-on-shoulder butch stance commonly assumed by women rockers. The Go-Go’s don’t trade their girlish charms, but neither do they deny them. They are young and cute and enjoy being cute.

  “The focal point of the five-girl crew is singer Belinda Carlisle, an energetic beauty with bee-stung lips and a Monroe-esque vulnerability. Carlisle’s voice is adequate, but her charm as a performer lies in revealing that she cares. You like her for that.”

  We played there again two months later with the Bags, Fear, Extremes, and Gear, and a review in the local punk magazine Flipside said we delivered “an excellent set even if Belinda was drunk off her ass.” I was guilty as charged. Unaware that we were playing two sets, I took a quaalude after the first show and then slurred my way through the second set while sitting in a chair.

  Hey, those things happened.

  Once, to spice up a long drive to San Francisco in a rental van, I took a big dose of speed and put the pedal to the metal. Somewhere in the middle of California, a cop pulled me over and I broke into a fit of uncontrollable nervous laughter. Obviously it wasn’t funny, but I was imagining how the cop was going to react when he came over and saw that in addition to being high, I was dressed in a hot-pink, Indian-style dress with fringe, pink moccasins, and a pink headband.

  I turned to the girls in the back and asked, “What if he makes me get out of the car?”

  “He might,” someone said.

  “Then I’m probably going to piss my pants,” I said, laughing.

  Fortunately, as the cop checked my ID, I kept it together. He was a pleasant guy and allowed me to stay in the car even after glancing in the back at my snickering cohorts. In the end, he advised me to stick to the speed limit and let me off with a warning.

  seven

  MADNESS

  IN DECEMBER 1979, we opened at the Whisky for Madness, an English ska band whose recently released first album, One Step Beyond, was earning them raves and a handful of hits, including “One Step Beyond …,” “The Prince,” “My Girl,” and “Night Boat to Cairo.” They hit the town with a unique sound and the fun attitude of English boys out for a good time.

  At sound check, I clicked with the group’s lead singer, Graham McPherson, who went by the name Suggs. By showtime, we were flirting and having a good time watching each other onstage. Afterward, everyone from both bands went back to their hotel, the Tropicana, and partied pretty hard. I woke up the next morning in a chaise longue next to the pool. Suggs and several others were asleep in nearby chaises.

  I shook my head, then checked my watch and suddenly bolted upright. I had to go to work!

  After Madness left town, Suggs wrote me a few letters and sent me some English cigarettes. I knew he liked me, but I didn’t let myself imagine anything developing since I knew from following the bands in the English magazines that he was involved with punk beauty Betty Bright. Still.

  A few months later, Madness returned to L.A. and I don’t know why I let myself, but I hoped Suggs would try to start something. He didn’t. I heard he might have had a dalliance with a cute waitress, but that was mere rumor and I didn’t want to turn my quaint romantic fantasy into a disappointment. Better to maintain the memory of a fun flirtation and not let it get messy.

  That decision was probably smart, too, because Madness liked us and before they left town they invited the Go-Go’s to open for them on their UK tour that spring and summer. We jumped at the opportunity.

  We knew going to the UK was one of the necessary ingredients on the way to success. It gave U.S. bands credibility. We saved for months before we could even think about affording to get there, but the prospect of touring the UK inspired one of the Go-Go’s most creative and prolific phases. During the first three months of 1980, we played at least every other week in L.A. and San Francisco, and Jane and Charlotte, separately and together, went on a writing tear that produced “How Much More,” “Lust to Love,” and “We Got the Beat,” which Charlotte wrote in about two minutes while watching a rerun of the old TV series The Twilight Zone.

  I loved those songs the first time I heard them and thought they were going to be hits. They sounded even better when Paul Wexler, the son of Atlantic Records cofounder Jerry Wexler, helped us record a four-song EP so we would have something to sell when we went overseas.

  We flew to London in April, which was on schedule, but only after Ginger, showing more dedication than her job as manager required, sold everything she had, including her Mercedes, to make sure we could get overseas. Once there, we faced another issue, namely figuring out where to stay.

  We arrived without a predetermined destination. We didn’t have a travel agent and couldn’t afford nice hotels. Those days were far off and merely a fantasy then. We crammed into a couple small and cheap hotel rooms while Ginger frantically searched for a home base. After a few days, she managed to rent a shabby but charming five-bedroom house in Belsize Park.

  We turned the house into a crash pad for girls. Besides the eight of us (the band, Ginger, and our two roadies, Connie and Lydia), we sublet a room to some models from Los Angeles, a girl in the Belle Stars, and another from a local punk band. Everyone shared a bedroom, except for Lydia, who lucked into a single when her roommate, Connie, went back to the States.

  Lydia occasionally made extra dough by renting her room to those of us who wanted, or needed, privacy for the night. Boys were always prowling around the house, but we didn’t have money to do anything. It was not fun being broke. Even beer was a luxury. When we toured with Madness, we waited for them to finish their preshow dinner and then dug through the trash for the scraps they threw out.

  I still managed to gain thirty pounds over the next two months thanks to the Nutella I smeared on white bread every morning. And the beer and booze I drank every day when the entire city seemed to hit the pub. The good times often carried over to the house, which seemed to turn into party central. Big surprise, right? It was a house full of girls.

  There was one particular party that was memorable because it got out of hand when all of London—from skinheads to celebrities—seemed to come. I don’t know how it happened, but well over a hundred people showed up and the crowd spilled out onto the street. I saw Ozzy Osbourne and tennis star Ilie Nastase, and since we didn’t know either of them, I wouldn’t have believed it was actually them if I hadn’t read about it later in one of the London papers.

  In addition to the celebrities, we invited all types and were unaware that you didn’t mix punks, skinheads, and rockabilly boys. But they all converged at our house and after enough beer they beat
the crap out of one another. We woke up the next day and found the house trashed. It looked like a battlefield.

  Little did we know it was like a warm-up for our tour. We played rough clubs across Northern England, including Leeds, Newcastle, Coventry, and Liverpool. The conditions were difficult and trying. The weather was dreary and we were broke, lonely, exhausted, and uncomfortable. Worse, we had to deal with the hard-core skinheads at the clubs where we played. They got drunk, fought, and taunted us as we performed.

  Apparently that’s what they did. They were young, angry neo-Nazi extremists who hated everyone, including us—and that was before we played the first song. Once they saw we were five little girls from Los Angeles, they yelled vile things and called us terrible names. They spit on us too. They called it “gobbing.” I later read that the practice began at a Damned concert when someone threw a beer at Rat Scabies, and he grabbed the guy and spit in his face. I also heard it may have originated with the Sex Pistols.

  Regardless, gobbing caught on—and it caught us by surprise. Keep in mind that the clubs we were playing were more like large rooms in a bar, or next to the bar. The stages were slightly elevated platforms, and the audience was a few feet away. They may as well have been part of the show, and with their gobbing, they were.

  They ran up to the stage, coughed up a wad of spit, and hocked it at us. It was unnerving, and getting hit with spit was downright gross. I never saw the gobs coming, but I felt my stomach turn after they hit. There were stories about performers getting sick after being hit in the eye or accidently swallowing someone else’s spit. We came offstage covered in snot, and I cried afterward, as did the other girls.

  On the bright side, though, Stiff Records—the prestigious label that launched Elvis Costello, the Damned, the Pogues, and Nick Lowe—released “We Got the Beat” as a single in the UK. They did it as a favor to Madness, but we didn’t care how it got done. On May 9, the label issued a press release that touted us as “5 girls from Hollywood aged 19 through 21, who play as good as they look.”

  “We Got the Beat” took off in the clubs and became an underground dance hit. Suddenly the Go-Go’s were making a splash. The Specials asked us to record background vocals for them, and we were nominated for Most Improved Band at the Club 88 Awards. We finished up our stay in London with a June show at the Embassy club that inspired a writer for Sounds magazine to observe we “broke down the barriers of music biz supercooldom to the extent that people more accustomed to posing were actually moved to shake bits of their bodies in time with the music.”

  He praised “We Got the Beat,” “Automatic,” and “Tonight.” “Doing their thang each night in a motley collection of mini-skirts, Doc Martens and what looked like a job-lot of footless tights, they gave the impression that the five of them could have been thrown together as much by their unconventional [for L.A.] looks and non-conformist fashion tastes as by any shared interest in music … But the point is, it all seemed disarmingly natural and uncontrived—the looks and the music.”

  He went on to praise our musicianship, especially Gina “for keeping the set so tight and powerful,” and added that Jane, Charlotte, and I deserved “top marks for the best and most consistent unison singing I’ve heard outside a studio automatic-double-tracking machine.”

  It was a positive end to a long, hard trip. In a short time, we had grown up, toughened up and accomplished more than we expected—indeed, more than we knew.

  Our homecoming gig at the Starwood was an instant sellout. While we had been overseas, Rodney had talked about the Go-Go’s as if we were stars in London, and he played “We Got the Beat” until it caught on here, too. As a result, lines for our show wrapped around the block. Our shows had always been crowded, but this was insane. We gave an inspired performance to the hometown crowd that included many friends and some of our earliest fans.

  Two weeks later, we flew to New York for shows at the Mudd Club. It was our first time playing in the city and another sign that the Go-Go’s were gaining some serious buzz. Like London, New York was home to many of the bands we admired, among them the Ramones, Blondie, and the New York Dolls. We wanted to do well.

  It was a hot, humid, and terribly uncomfortable summer day when we arrived. It felt like the hot air was coming straight up off the asphalt and then sticking to our skin. After renting a truck for our equipment, we didn’t have any money for a hotel, so Ginger arranged for all of us to share an apartment in the Village. Then we got there and found it didn’t have any running water or working plumbing.

  After some frantic, pissed-off calls to Mudd Club management, Ginger got several of us placed at the bartender’s apartment and a couple of us were farmed out to other employees. Once onstage, we forgot all about our makeshift accomodations. New York Times music critic Robert Palmer praised our opening show and said we played “tighter, more kinetic rock and roll than most all-male bands,” adding, “They have an original, intelligent perspective on the rock and roll tradition and their place in it.”

  We partied the same way offstage. The first couple nights in New York were typical of the Go-Go’s, full of wild, reckless, carefree fun—and then I got out of control. After our second show at Danceteria, I got drunker than I had ever been in my life and had to be carried outside. I projectile-vomited all the way back to the place where we were staying and I stayed in bed for two days with a hangover that still ranks as the worst of my life.

  After impressing all the right people, we returned home with a lot of heat and momentum. All the labels knew about us, and I am positive we would have been signed right away or perhaps even earlier if we had had a guy or two in the band, especially as a lead singer. Joe Smith, the head of Capitol Records at the time, personally told us that even though he adored us, he couldn’t sign the Go-Go’s because no female band had a track record worth investing in.

  Yet we were the cool band in town and execs and A&R men from all the labels came to our shows that summer, including a big one in August at the Whisky with Oingo Boingo and the Surf Punks. We were also filmed for Urgh! A Music War, a British documentary on punk and new wave bands that featured Joan Jett, the Dead Kennedys, the Police, XTC, Devo, UB40, and Echo & the Bunnymen, among the who’s who.

  As I recall, we were shot performing “We Got the Beat” in the back of a truck as it cruised down Sunset. I wore a red Chinese dress and weighed about 175 pounds—excess baggage from London and New York. At the time, Ginger was offering all of us ten dollars for every pound we lost.

  Miles Copeland, the founder of IRS Records, was working on the movie. At thirty-six, he was a music-industry powerhouse and visionary who had started his label when none of the established companies would sign the Police, which he managed. His younger brother Stewart was the group’s drummer, too. Now IRS was also home to the Buzz-cocks, the Dead Kennedys, the Cramps, R.E.M., and Oingo Boingo.

  We sensed that Miles was going to sign us. He had been sniffing around the band for a long time. Ginger had been in discussions with him off and on. We liked him. But as we wondered when it might happen, other questions about the band took precedence.

  eight

  GOOD FOR GONE

  THE CLOSEST I came to any kind of normalcy was that fall when Connie and I shared an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and I worked in the photo department at Peterson Publishing. For some reason, my boss, Jack Cook, tolerated me coming in late, hungover, and with purple hair. He asked about the band with seemingly genuine interest and ignored me when I was working out details with clubs instead of answering the phones.

  Then craziness took over when my friend Pleasant Gehman invited me to take the empty bedroom in her two-bedroom apartment at Disgraceland, an aptly named building in the heart of Hollywood. The landlord was Jayne Mansfield’s ex-husband, former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, and the array of characters who passed through this place made it the most famous crash pad in the punk universe.

  I had gone there a year earlier with Suggs, looking for a party, and ha
d been shocked by the conditions in which Pleasant and her roommates existed. Clothes were piled as high as people, food had been left on every possible surface, the walls were filled with random scribbles and band posters, and it was as dirty as you would expect from a party pad that had the same hours as a 7-Eleven. It never closed.

  I don’t know what about me had changed when I moved in, but I embraced the pigsty as my palace, too. In a small part, I might have thought of living there as a rite of passage or—believe it or not—a measure of prestige. It could have been convenience, too. But thinking back I believe it was all about being close to Pleasant, a singer, poet, artist, journalist, and later on a belly dancer. She was like a punk Gertrude Stein: charismatic, brilliant, and fun.

  I met her one night on the roof at the Continental Hyatt hotel; both of us were looking for Nils Lofgren, who had played at the Roxy. I recognized an original when I saw one. Pleasant glammed herself up like a 1950s-style Lolita, in a little T-shirt, with heart-shaped glasses and big, lush bee-stung lips. Nobody looked like her. Or lived like her.

  She shared Disgraceland’s front bedroom with her boyfriend Levi Dexter, who led the English rockabilly band Levi and the Rockats. I took the back bedroom and immediately painted it bright blue, and then added gold stars on the walls. I parked my Puch moped in the living room. Pleasant’s friend Ann McLean slept in the closet. A couple times we put on rubber gloves and tried to clean the place, but it was futile.

  Soon after I settled in, I began a two-year relationship with the Blasters’ drummer, Bill Bateman—aka Buster. We’d crossed paths at clubs and parties, but it wasn’t until Pleasant set up a situation one night at the Troubadour that Buster and I were able to talk more intimately and get to know each other. He had on a striped shirt and wore a bandana around his neck. I thought he looked cute, and I liked him even more as we talked.