Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  I thought he liked me, too. It was one of those setups where everything clicked except for one detail. I didn’t like his hair. As I told Pleasant, there was too much of it. He needed a new do.

  Well, the next time I saw him, Buster had a nice clip. Imagine that. I guess he had somehow gotten the message. I let him know that I approved, and from then on we were a couple.

  He was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. Buster lived in Downey, where he and Phil Alvin had started the Blasters before recruiting Phil’s brother, Dave, who turned out to be one of the greatest songwriters to emerge from L.A. during that era. Buster showed me around the town, including the original McDonald’s restaurant and the two side-by-side apartment buildings that Karen and Richard Carpenter had built. They were named Close to You and We’ve Only Just Begun.

  Buster also took me to the butcher shops where he bought large meat bones, which he then boiled, fried, and occasionally used in lieu of drumsticks. I thought that was cool.

  Most of the time we went to shows and stayed at my place. I had traded my moped to a friend going to Europe for her white Cadillac, which was the ultimate cruisemobile. Buster and I felt like the first couple of Hollywood as we rolled down the Strip in the wide-body as a Jolly Roger flag flapped from the antenna. One of my favorite memories from that time is of Buster sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom, watching me put on makeup as he drank a beer from a bottle that was wrapped in a little brown grocery bag. And then for some reason he threw his head back and laughed at me.

  We had a problem within the Go-Go’s that wasn’t a laughing matter. It had to do with Margot. She was still a committed punk and felt that we were selling out with pop-sounding music. She was against anything that sounded too polished and commercial. But that was the direction in which we were headed, and it created serious tension within the band.

  It was even more problematic in that Margot was the one who originally helped put the Go-Go’s together. Jane and I were with her that night on the curb in Venice, but she lit the match that started the fire. That’s also why she gradually drifted into a very bad headspace. She had a different vision for the band, and on top of that she didn’t cope well with the demands of our schedule. She didn’t take care of herself and missed rehearsals, and when she was there she was contrary and argumentative.

  One day, as we struggled with the bridge to a new song, she stopped playing, which brought the song to a halt, and looked at us with a frustration that I found impossible to read. Then it became apparent that she simply didn’t like what we were doing.

  “Why can’t we play songs like X?” she said.

  I felt like she left rehearsals and bitched about us to her friends, like Exene Cervenka of X, who seemed to turn against us, especially me. I already felt like Exene thought I was a stupid, silly girl anyway. The thing with Margot, I was sure, made it worse.

  In the fall, Margot was arrested at the Starwood for buying cocaine. She stayed in the West Hollywood sheriff’s jail until her pal D. J. Bone-brake from X got her out the next morning. We came down hard on her for that screwup. That might have seemed hypocritical; none of us was an angel. The truth was, this gave us a problem we could substitute for the real issue—we weren’t on the same page. We were working hard and on the verge of signing a deal. We were playing six sold-out shows at the Whisky over New Year’s, three nights with two sets each night, and we didn’t want to worry that Margot might jeopardize all of our hard work.

  We needed a solution to the problem. After many private conversations, the consensus was that we were either going to remove Margot or she was going to remove herself.

  And that’s what happened.

  In December, Margot was diagnosed with hepatitis A. It was another sign that she wasn’t taking care of herself. We had to go to a clinic and get hepatitis shots, which put me in a foul mood. But we turned the situation into an opportunity to make a lineup change before the very important Whisky gigs.

  Margot was upset. She insisted she was well enough to play the Whisky shows. While explaining that that wasn’t our only concern, we auditioned replacements, including Kathy Valentine. Kathy had been playing professionally since her teens in Austin, Texas. At sixteen, she had moved to London, and then three years later she’d come to L.A. and cofounded the Textones. She knew one of our roadies and immediately fit right in.

  There was one glitch. Kathy had never played bass. But as soon as we asked her to fill in for Margot, she spent nearly a week learning the new instrument and all of our songs. Onstage, she played as if she had been doing it for years. I looked at her at one point and thought, We have to keep her. Kathy was of the same mind-set, and fully intended to stay.

  After the Whisky shows, we met privately and agreed Kathy was a better fit for where we wanted, and needed, to go. In January, Ginger was charged with the messy job of firing Margot. She was told that since she was the manager she had to do it. It was a chickenhearted move on our part, but none of us could handle the dirty work.

  Margot responded as expected. She protested, cried, begged, and denied any of the problems we raised really existed. Ginger kept responding, “It was the band’s decision.” And later Ginger told me, “It was really sad and awful.” I believed her.

  With Kathy on board, we were a unified group. We eliminated the tension and added a talented new songwriter all in the same move. We played through the chill of January, February, and March, performing sold-out shows with the sixties surf band the Ventures in L.A., and then hitting clubs up and down the coast. By spring, we were in agreement about Kathy; she felt like the missing piece. The picture seemed whole.

  It was around this time that Pleasant and I worked as secretaries for Marshall Berle, comedian Milton Berle’s nephew. He managed rock bands (he was working with Ratt, after being fired by Van Halen) and didn’t mind that we were blitzed on acid as we answered his phones. Sometimes Milton’s brother Phil came in to flirt with us. It was a fun place to work.

  The office was above a witchcraft store on La Cienega Boulevard, which we frequented, as we did a similar shop on Santa Monica Boulevard. I built a small altar in my room at Disgraceland. Even though Pleasant and I had serious boyfriends, we would cast spells on boys we liked. We would put a small amount of our period blood in a vial and surreptitiously drop it into the drink of whichever unsuspecting boys we were crushing on that night. It was something we had read in a book, and every time we did it, I laughed hysterically, thinking, If only they knew.

  For our gigs in March, my mom outdid herself making outfits for me to wear onstage. Since I had an eye but couldn’t afford anything, I sketched several outfits, bought fabric, and gave it to my mom, who worked magic with her sewing machine. And voila! I had an ultra-cool, totally original balloon dress made from a pink and purple giraffe print. I wore a purple faux-fur coat over it. The point was to look like a million bucks. And Jane was an original, too. She always looked cute.

  Our getups turned a lot of heads. One of those heads we turned belonged to Miles Copeland, who was already a fan. In April, following months of back-and-forth between Miles and Ginger, he finally signed us to IRS Records. We were very excited to finally get a deal and have the chance to make an album, but in private we shared disappointment that we weren’t getting a million-dollar advance from a big label, which had been our dream and probably would have happened if our band hadn’t been all female.

  The opinion of Capitol Records honcho Joe Smith echoed loud and clear: female bands didn’t work, and the return on investment wasn’t worth it. But none of that mattered after we came to an agreement with Miles. At that point, we said a collective Screw it, screw everyone, we’ll show the entire industry.

  We officially signed on April 1, 1981, and celebrated over dinner and drinks—lots of drinks—at Kelbo’s, a kitschy Polynesian restaurant in West Los Angeles. It was like a great first date, one where all of us knew we were going to see one another again and have a long and significant relationship.


  After dinner, we went with Miles to the premiere of the movie he was creative consultant for, Urgh!: A Music War, and I was impossible. I had done a bunch of coke at the restaurant and taken a quaalude before we left. Buster was out of town and I brought a cute skateboarder for company. We sat right in front of Miles and made out through the entire movie.

  At one point during the film, I got up to go to the bathroom and glanced over at my new boss. I felt his steel-blue eyes cut through me like a carving knife. Too wasted to care, I smiled and waved.

  He probably wondered what he had invested in. No, on second thought, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was going to make a Go-Go’s album and I think he had the same feeling the rest of us did—that it was going to be great.

  nine

  LET’S HAVE A PARTY

  PER MILES’S DECREE, we made arrangements to record our album in New York City. Before I left, Pleasant came up with the crazy idea of switching boyfriends because hers was in New York for work and Buster was in L.A. She reasoned that we could keep an eye on them, and it wouldn’t be cheating since we had agreed to it. We didn’t plan on telling the boys, and then we would switch back when I returned.

  I thought it was weird, but I shrugged and said, Oh well, let’s see what happens. It turned out absolutely nothing happened. It required scheming, work, and time, and once I arrived in New York I was way too busy.

  We shared suites at the Wellington Hotel on Seventh Avenue. Charlotte and Jane paired up in one room, and Kathy, Gina, and I unpacked in the other. We made an agreement that whoever brought a guest for the evening had to pull their mattress into the foyer. Gina always got a good night’s sleep.

  I don’t remember sleeping much, but it wasn’t because I was busy in the bedroom. We were in New York, and it was a twenty-four-hour playground. Kathy and I sat up one night at the kitchen table, talking about the boys we’d seen at clubs, and as we traded notes and stories, we got the idea of forming our own organization: the Booty Club, or as we officially dubbed it, the Booty Club Internationale (note the “e” on the end of Internationale, which we thought made it more sophisticated and European).

  We were so entertained by the idea of having our own girls’ club that we actually made up business cards that night and then went out the next day and had them laminated. Our idea was that if we were flirting with a cute guy, we’d flash the card and say, “Hi, I’m a member of the Booty Club Internationale.” I don’t think any of us ever used the cards, but we kept them in our wallets. They made us laugh. They still make me laugh.

  While sitting at the kitchen table that night we also discovered that we could see directly into an apartment in the building that was across from us, only a few feet away. We looked over at the window all the time, and after a while we saw that an older couple lived there, a man and a woman. But we could only see their torsos. He walked around in his underwear and T-shirt, and she was always in a slip. We were dying to see what they looked like, so one day we threw an orange at their window. They heard the noise, bent down, and we saw their faces. They looked like our grandparents. From then on, though, we threw all sorts of trash at their window, then eventually inside their window, and watched them try to figure out where the stuff had come from. Little did they know it was the naughty girls from across the way.

  And we were sort of naughty—at least I was. Before leaving L.A., some of us had started to get into cocaine, though none more than me. I finally had enough money coming in to afford such an occasional indulgence. The funny thing was, I only knew one person who dealt it—a guy in a photo lab on Santa Monica Boulevard. I had to have him FedEx it to me in New York.

  One day I got a package with a half gram in it and later that night I went with Kathy to the Mudd Club, where we were having a good time when John Belushi sidled up alongside us. John was one of my favorite comedians, and he was an equally big fan of the Go-Go’s. He had seen us play the previous December at the Whisky and partied with us a bit backstage afterward. After Kathy and I traded hellos with him and explained why we were in New York, I asked if he wanted a hit of my coke.

  Because of his reaction, I almost felt like I had insulted him. First his eyes widened, then he pulled Kathy and me close so we could hear him better, and then he proceeded to give us a stern lecture on the evils of drug use, fame, and the sycophant-filled world of show business. I was shocked. I felt kind of embarrassed and stupid for having offered him coke.

  A week later, the phone in my hotel room rang at one in the morning. It was John. He said he was in the lobby and asked if he could come up. I said, “Sure, we’re up.” A moment later, I let him in and then stood back, shocked, as he blew past me like a blast of wind and circled the room. He was wild-eyed and obviously wired. He took a huge vial of coke out of his pocket, dumped it on his hand, and looked at me and Kathy and the other girls with the face of a toxic teddy bear.

  “Do you want some?” he asked.

  We knew John had serious issues with drugs. If we hadn’t known, we certainly saw them laid out in thick, messy lines on our dining room table. We obviously weren’t Girl Scouts, but he was in a different league, and it scared us. We declined his offer to get high, and we said no when he invited us out to hit the clubs. None of us felt comfortable being part of that craziness.

  After he left, I turned to the girls and said, “Didn’t he just lecture us about not doing drugs and avoiding that whole scene?”

  It was strange and stranger still in retrospect. John left our place and eventually found a cabdriver who drove him around for a couple of days as he hit clubs and late-night clubs and God knows where else.

  If it wasn’t the start of his rapid decline, it was part of it. I could tell he was in trouble.

  That said, our producers, Rob Freeman and Richard Gottehrer, had their hands full with us. We were either drinking and partying in the studio or hungover from the night before. Kathy and I went to clubs every night and stayed out until all hours. When the clubs closed around two A.M., we rounded up whoever was left and went to the after-hours joints, where we sang, played drinking games, and flirted until we crawled out at around eight in the morning.

  I don’t even remember when we worked. But we did—and we had fun. We were probably relaxed because we had such a wealth of good material. With what I know now after having recorded so many albums, I realize there’s nothing like that first album. You have years to work on that material—to write and hone as many songs as you can create—to get rid of the bad ones, perfect the good ones, and treasure the great ones.

  We actually had too many songs. One of my favorites, “Fun with Ropes,” didn’t end up making the album. We left those important choices mainly up to Rob, who had worked with Blondie, and Richard, who had written the pop classics “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “I Want Candy” in the sixties. They had taste and knew what they were doing.

  The album, which I had already titled Beauty and the Beat, came together pretty easily. I remember everyone having trouble laying down the basic tracks for “We Got the Beat,” which we were redoing from the UK version. Everyone’s timing was a little off. We took a break, ordered in pizza, and tried it again. We nailed it on the first take. Food always worked with us.

  The album’s biggest hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” was a gem that we’d played for a year. Jane had gotten involved with the Specials’ lead singer, Terry Hall, when we’d been in London, but he had a girlfriend. After we left, he sent Jane a letter about their complicated situation. She set some of the lines from that letter to music, added some lyrics of her own (she’s a genius), and voila, she had “Our Lips Are Sealed.” I knew it was a hit as soon as I heard it, and I was right. The song only got better the more we played it.

  The entire album was like a time capsule: “Tonight” captured the vibe of being on Hollywood Boulevard; “Lust to Love,” which Jane wrote, was immediately one of my favorite Go-Go’s songs; “Automatic” was about Jane’s boyfriend Dean, who was in the Rockats; “You Can’t Wa
lk in Your Sleep,” a Charlotte and Jane collaboration, was about Jane’s problem with insomnia and occasional tendency to sleepwalk; Kathy brought in the song “Can’t Stop the World,” which she had originally intended for the Textones, but it was such a natural for us. Finally, “Skidmarks on My Heart,” which I cowrote with Charlotte, was about my brother, who was going through a hard time; my cat; and my first car, the one missing the passenger side.

  Like the title, I came up with the concept for the album’s front and back cover before we ever left L.A. I thought putting us in face masks and wearing only towels was a look that would be timeless. Take away our identities and clothes and we were women who would be just as current in twenty-five years as we were then. And I think I was right. The back cover, showing all of us in a bubble bath, was supposed to be pure girly fun, and it was—except we shot the photo in our hotel room and the Mr. Bubble in the tub gave all of us an infection.

  We were back in L.A. and rehearsing for upcoming gigs in one of the large rooms at Studio Instrument Rentals, or SIR, a Hollywood production facility, when the label messengered a copy of the finished album to us. We ran out excitedly to the parking lot and listened to it from start to finish in someone’s car. Our hopes were so high and before we pushed the Play button we were all shushing one another. Then the drums kicked into the first cut, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” and we quieted down. We let the next ten tracks play without too many comments either way, and finally, after about thirty-five minutes, we just looked at one another for reactions.

  We weren’t happy—or as happy as we had hoped. In the studio, we had thought we were making a great punk album. On hearing the final version, it sounded more pop than we had anticipated.

  We weren’t going for anything as hard as Margot had wanted, but we’d had more of an edge in mind. Everyone had little criticisms. In my case, I was horrified by my vocals. They had been sped up and I found it painful to hear myself race through those songs.