Lips Unsealed

by Belinda Carlisle

  Don’t get me wrong. We recognized the album’s charm. But we still wanted it remixed.

  We took our case to Miles, who said no. As he explained, he got exactly the record he had wanted from us. He loved it. Then, of course, as a wider audience responded positively to the album, all of us began to change our opinion and think, Oh, it’s not that bad. Later on, we upgraded it again. On June 12, “Our Lips Are Sealed” was released as the first single. We promoted it with an in-store appearance at the Licorice Pizza record store on Sunset Boulevard, and thanks to nonstop promotion from Rodney, plus advertising, the store was already mobbed when we pulled up in a limo. We stayed all afternoon, signing autographs for every single person.

  I was in Buster’s car the first time I heard the new single on the radio. We were on Sunset, and he turned up the volume. As much as I didn’t like my vocals, I couldn’t stop grinning, moving, or singing along with the radio. I was on the radio: I felt like a rock star.

  We celebrated the single with a sold-out show at the Roxy, and then a month later, at the end of July, we played one show in Palo Alto and immediately followed that with a much bigger bash at home. “Cute. That’s what I thought two years ago when I first saw the Go-Go’s,” wrote critic Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times. “Great. That’s what I thought after seeing the Go-Go’s concert Friday night at the sold-out Hollywood Palladium. The quintet not only has more spirit than ever, but its musicianship is also vastly improved …”

  For me, though, that show was as much a good-bye as it was a triumph in front of the hometown fans. I had moved with Ann McLean into the Trianon Apartments from Disgraceland, where, sadly, I felt a little too exposed and unprotected. I didn’t know how to deal with losing my anonymity. I just knew it made me uncomfortable. But I had no time to think about that or anything else.

  In August, we hit the road for a month of shows back east. We rented a big white van and piled in, all of us: band members, roadies, and equipment. We turned the van into a pit on wheels; I mean, we defaced it in every possible way, letting trash and stink pile up and writing on the walls as we drove from Boston to Philadelphia and into Canada, opening on an all-IRS lineup featuring us and Oingo Boingo and topped by the Police, who provided our first up-close exposure to real rock stars, with their big entourages, bodyguards, fancy coaches, and private jet.

  Sting was nice but aloof and seemed to be reading a Sartre book whenever he had free time. Gina palled around with Stewart, and Charlotte had a brief fling with Andy Summers. All of us attended Miles’s wedding in New York and jammed at the beautiful reception he had at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. We also played a show at the Ritz, where I spotted the Who’s Pete Townshend and other rock royalty checking us out. Even though I was not starstruck, I regretted not having been able to hang out with them.

  In September, as reviews and mentions of us appeared in People and Rolling Stone magazines, we returned to L.A. and watched with a mix of curiosity and amazement as our video for “Our Lips Are Sealed” hit MTV, the brand-new music TV network that had launched only the month before. I was clueless about the impact it would have on music, fashion, and pop culture.

  Just to show where my head was at, I thought making a music video was a stupid idea. I had grumbled about it being a waste of time and asked why I had to do it. It just seemed ridiculous, and so I gave it a half-assed effort. I couldn’t even be bothered to get out of the car when, after tooling around in the convertible, we pulled up in front of Trashy Lingerie and Jane did her solo, singing, “Hush, my darling.” If you look close, you can see me hiding; I’m bent down but the top of my head shows.

  We also tried to amuse ourselves by getting arrested. That’s how we ended up frolicking in the water fountain at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. We thought if we jumped in, a cop would see us, stop, and there’d be a confrontation, which we would capture on tape. But nobody came to arrest us. Cars just slowed and some guys honked and whistled at us.

  When I think back on those early days of MTV, all I remember seeing is a lot of the Split Enz hit “I Got You.” I noticed them because of a funny thing that happened a year earlier when I was living at Disgraceland. It was the night we were having one of the more infamous parties in that place’s history, an event we had dubbed the Forbidden Foods Party. It was girls only—no boys allowed. About thirty of us got together, and the two requirements for admission were that you had to wear a negligee and bring the most fattening food you could find.

  We were in the middle of this party, drinking from a giant bowl of alcoholic punch, dancing around, eating, and acting crazy, when there was a knock at the door. We opened it and Neil Finn and some of the guys from Split Enz were standing there. They said they had just come to town and heard there was a party, so they showed up. It made perfect sense to me. What do you do when you get to town? You find out where the party is and go. So I told them to come on in and enjoy themselves.

  How could they not? There were thirty girls prancing around half-naked, eating pizza, French fries, cannolis, and cream puffs. They didn’t know what hit them. To this day, whenever I see Neil, he says, “Do you remember that party?” And there’s always a twinkle in his eye.

  In October, we flew to Rockford, Illinois, to open for the Rolling Stones, which was incredible just to say out loud. It was also weird, thrilling, and probably the most nerve-wracking gig I had played to that point—not because of the size of the crowd as much as knowing Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and the rest of the legendary band were watching us. Only a few years earlier I was in high school and listening to their albums.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any interaction with them other than seeing Mick stretching before the show. But that’s how those shows could be; you could have several bands backstage and they never saw one another because of their different preperformance rituals.

  Then we flew back to L.A. and performed several concerts up and down the coast before finishing up with three star-studded nights at the Greek Theatre. Talk about a great venue. The theater was outdoors and nestled in the hills of Griffith Park, and the number of stars in the sky seemed to match the number of stars in the audience. One night I looked out and saw Steve Martin in the front row. The next I saw Al Pacino. Midway through that second show I also spotted Rod Stewart and between songs I turned to Jane, made sure she saw the celebrities, and said, “This is really freaking me out.”

  As cool as I tried to look in the spotlight, I couldn’t get over the fact that these people, these stars, were coming out to see anything I was part of. I couldn’t reconcile the larger picture that people were interested in me. But they were; interview requests streamed in. I put on a funny face for People magazine, which photographed me goofing around with Buster for a profile on the band in October. The next month, I mused more seriously to the Boston Globe, saying that while success hadn’t changed me, I was “afraid of [others’] perspectives of me changing. I can’t exactly go out of my head and go dance and have a great time because I’m constantly being judged.”

  True, but it didn’t really inhibit my behavior. In November, we guested on Saturday Night Live, along with Bernadette Peters and Billy Joel. The appearance was a significant moment for us. Beauty and the Beat was number 20 on the Billboard 200 chart and climbing; the exposure on a show that defined hot to America’s youth was going to keep that momentum going. And in terms of pop culture, playing on SNL was huge; in fact, it blew my mind to think that we were big enough to be on the show.

  But Kathy, Charlotte, and I got ripped. We had sat around the studio all day, drinking the free booze, and when it was finally time to go on, we gave one of our worst performances ever. We played “We Got the Beat,” and we destroyed it. It didn’t even sound like a song. I knew it was bad, but excused myself from embarrassment by telling myself, Hey, we’re rock stars. We’re supposed to party. Wasn’t that the way it was done?

  As far as I was concerned, it was. A couple of drinks and sometimes a
hit of coke was the way I got ready. What was the big deal? A dancer stretched, a rock star partied. That’s the way I rationalized my behavior. More than twenty years passed before I faced the fact that I never went onstage sober not because I was a rock star but because deep down I was scared shitless—scared that I wasn’t any good and the audience would see me as the fake I feared I might be.

  The rock-and-roll lifestyle was lenient. By the time we returned from a brief end-of-November swing through the East Coast and played a small show at Palos Verdes High (which was videotaped and released as Totally Go-Go’s), I was doing coke regularly and not thinking twice about it.

  Well, that’s not exactly true. I thought a lot about it—how much I loved it. From the first time I did coke at the Canterbury, when a friend of Margot’s gave me a little bit to try, I couldn’t wait to do more. It sent me into happyland, far away from whatever else was on my mind. It always made me feel better no matter what else was bothering me.

  I relied on it to keep me up and going despite our demanding schedule. In January, we hit Sweden and London, where we stayed at Miles’s stately manor in St. John’s Wood. It was a formal home, and Miles made us swear to following one unbreakable rule—no boys. His booming voice had barely ceased echoing through the estate before Kathy and I went out and brought two guys back to our rooms in the basement.

  We didn’t do anything with them. We just wanted to disobey Miles. It was like a sport.

  We also brought Lords of the New Church lead singer, Stiv Bators, back to Miles’s place after we played a few dates with his band. Years later, we found out Stiv had gone from bedroom to bedroom, smelling our underwear in a self-styled game of Guess-which-Go-Go stays in this room.

  I can’t say we were much better. In January 1982, we were in Atlanta and I was at dinner with one of our roadies at the local Holiday Inn, listening to him tell me in Penthouse Forum–type detail about his and our other roadies’ adventures from the previous night. They had gone to a couple bars and each of them had brought women back to the hotel and, according to him, engaged in various sexual activities that sounded too wild to believe.

  When I refused to believe what they said happened, the roadie with whom I was having dinner called another crew guy over to the table and had the tale corroborated.

  I wasn’t a prude, but whoa, I was shocked by what he said they had done. I wanted to know how these guys were able to convince women to do such things. What I really wanted to know was who these young women were; they met strangers in a bar and a few hours later were in a hotel room doing things that porn stars might have found hard-core.

  “What’s going on out there?” I asked. “What’s the secret?”

  “Alcohol,” our roadie said with a shrug.

  My curiosity turned into quite a topic of conversation. Later that night, long after our show, I was back in my hotel room when I got a call that the most freakish of the roadies was extremely wasted in his room and with the same girl from the night before, and did I want to join most everybody else on the tour in watching them go at it. Of course I did, and I hurried over there and joined the crowd. Someone videotaped it, too.

  Wasted, he had no idea he was being watched or taped, and she didn’t care. That tape was pirated and passed around among bands for years as an example of extreme rock-and-roll debauchery. For a long time, we thought it was funny. In retrospect, I came to regret it existed and didn’t want it to be part of the Go-Go’s legend.

  In February, we were back on tour with the Police, which was always lovely because of the luxurious way in which they traveled and their generosity to us. They saw us as little sisters. They were at the top of rock’s mountain and we were their younger labelmates on the way up. Sting brought a bottle of champagne into our dressing room one night to celebrate our success. It was nice. Those gestures went a long way and helped us forget that we drove from city to city in our white van while they traveled in a private jet.

  After a show in Denver, though, they offered us a ride back to L.A. on their jet. The temperature was near zero so we were grateful not to have to make the twenty-four-hour drive back to L.A. Instead we’d get home in a couple hours. As I watched the ground crew deice the wings, I thought about how nice it was going to be to get back home. Then we taxied out on the runway and suddenly one of the engines burst into flames. There was a loud pop, and then I heard someone yell, “Fire!”

  To me, it was like a starter’s gun when I used to run track. I jumped up, grabbed my thrift-store fur coat and trampled Miles, Andy, and even Sting on my way to the door.

  They made fun of me for months. But, as I told the guys, the lesson was clear. You don’t want to be near me if I’m in a panic because I’m going to run over you. I don’t care if you are the world’s biggest rock stars.

  We were doing pretty well ourselves. Success was amazing. I loved my bandmates like sisters. We didn’t have any of the jealousies or bullshit that came later. The grueling schedule created unusual demands and stresses, but the times were filled with excitement.

  The hardest part of our success in those days, at least for me, was going back home. I always wanted to get off the road and sleep in my own bed, but whenever I got there I found myself feeling sad, lonely, and isolated. I didn’t fit easily back into our scene. My old haunts and old friends weren’t that accepting; no one wanted to have anything to do with me. I didn’t feel like I had changed, but everyone else did.

  In a sense, they were right. Like the other girls, I was seeing the world, meeting new people, and having incredible experiences that were hard to relate to unless you were there and involved. So yeah, I guess I had changed. My mistake was thinking I could go back home and find things were the same as I had left them. That’s not the way it worked.

  ten

  EVERYTHING BUT PARTY TIME

  IN 1982, the Go-Go’s were nominated for a Grammy as Best New Artist. At the February event, we were up against Adam and the Ants, James Ingram, Luther Vandross, and Sheena Easton. We were thrilled, and I’m pretty sure we wanted to win, though I remember being more concerned about what I was going to wear to the awards show, which I thought of as the world’s glitziest prom.

  And as with my high school prom, my mom made my dress, a fabulous, princess-style gown with big gold-lamé puffed sleeves, a matching skirt, and a hot-pink bodice. I looked like Cinderella at the ball.

  But unlike Cinderella, I started doing coke in the morning and I was out of my head by the time Buster and I stepped out of our limo and hit the red carpet, which was lined with television crews, reporters, and photographers. Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, who was doing interviews for Good Morning America, actually took me aside before talking to me and told me to wipe my nose. That was embarrassing.

  Inside, I spotted Dallas actress Charlene Tilton, who was there with her country-singer husband, Johnny Lee. I introduced myself and said that I used to get her mail when I lived at Disgraceland, though I told her the actual address of the building rather than using its nickname. She said she’d never lived there and her husband quickly pulled her away.

  “Wow, that was rude,” I said to Buster. “I don’t care what she says. I still got her mail.”

  I was checking out other stars when Moon Unit Zappa, who was famous for contributing to her father’s satiric hit “Valley Girl,” came up to me and introduced herself. I told her that I was a real-life Valley girl, and we laughed.

  “I love your dress,” she said.

  “My mom made it,” I said.

  Moon stepped back so I could see her dress. “My mom made mine too.”

  As for the awards, Kim Carnes won Record of the Year for “Bette Davis Eyes,” and John Lennon’s album Double Fantasy was honored as Album of the Year, which provided the night’s most emotional moment when Yoko Ono came out to accept with her six-year-old son, Sean, and delivered a poignant speech on behalf of her slain husband, saying they both were proud to have made good music that contributed in a positive way to the plan
et.

  Quincy Jones won five awards that night. Al Jarreau took home three. And the Go-Go’s? None. We lost to Sheena Easton as Best New Artist, which didn’t bum us out as much as it caused us to lose interest in the rest of the show, and so at the next commercial break we got up and left, which, as we later learned from the network, was a no-no.

  But we didn’t know any better, and we were eager to join our boyfriends who had been hanging out backstage with Jerry Lee Lewis and other stars, having a grand time. We joined them and then hit the official Grammy ball at the Biltmore Hotel, where we sat at a table for a few hours, drank, and gawked at Ted Nugent, Joe Cocker, Tina Turner, Rick James, and other stars.

  I packed the next day for a trip to Japan, where the Go-Go’s were booked for a TV ad for Daihatsu. I had never been to Tokyo, and it was wild. Between the time change and the neon lights I saw from my hotel window, I felt like my senses were overloaded. The city looked like a giant club, and over the next couple of days, we treated the work that brought us there as secondary to exploring Tokyo.

  Before leaving L.A., I had returned a piece of furniture that I’d borrowed from a friend and met his neighbor, Jack, a great-looking guy who modeled in Japan. My friend had warned me not to get any ideas; Jack was gay. It turned out he was going to be in Tokyo at the same time I was, and after I got my bearings I looked him up.

  Jack knew the city, especially the nighttime scene, and he escorted me to several of the edgiest clubs. At one club, he introduced me to Isao, a makeup artist, who immediately led me onto the dance floor and stayed near me the rest of the trip. Isao had an exotic style, look, and energy unlike that of anyone I had ever met. I couldn’t figure out if he was straight or gay, but I was drawn to him without really knowing why, and as he put the moves on me, I let myself be seduced.