Dancing With Myself

by Billy Idol

  Fresh from my tiny Village shithole, it was wild to arrive in the swanky part of L.A. Giorgio’s house was all glass and marble, very ’70s, and he had one of those big projector TVs, a far cry from the tiny black-and-white set Brendan Bourke had lent me in New York. I accompanied Keith to a session he was producing at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. There was a ton of musicians set up in the studio, a mostly black band with horns, drums, and bass guitars at the ready. Keith went into a tiny booth separated from the rest and began playing a shaker for a couple of takes, hitting the groove immediately. “They weren’t recording me,” he explained later. “I was just playing for the musicians to keep time.” That says it all about what a rhythm machine he is.

  The plan was to work on the arrangements of the songs in a small rehearsal studio before recording them. We went through the arrangements of all the songs, but spent the most time on “Mony Mony.” I came up with another song called “Baby Talk” in case we needed something else.

  The next day, we went into Westlake Studios on Beverly Boulevard. The original Tommy James version of “Mony Mony” sounded like a tape loop, and we wanted that kind of rhythm from our drummer, but with a real guy playing it. In the end, we got it, and I was so happy, for in the process I had come to realize how important it is to be working with great musicians and talented people. Mick Smiley played bass, Quiet Riot’s Frankie Banali played drums, and on guitar was Asley Otten.

  Keith and I had agreed that “Mony Mony” should have an R&B feel, so we decided to add some black female background singers. We created a riff for the middle section, where we could put in a vocal arrangement later on. We also recorded versions of “Baby Talk” and “Untouchables.” Not bad for a single day’s work!

  We then recorded “Hot in the City” at Giorgio’s home demo studio, with Keith starting by laying the drums down himself, slowly building them from the ground up. The whole EP had a sound that was quite unlike Generation X. It was a new direction for me, combining the disco beats of the New York club scene with punk-rock guitars and choruses. It was an exhilarating breakthrough, a novel fusion, and took me far from my punk roots to a stylistic breakthrough.

  I was taking chances and doing something very different with this music by including sexy soul vocal licks by Stephanie Spruill and her two singing partners. Even the synth pulse that drove “Hot in the City” was something I hadn’t done before, but it did, in part, represent a musical direction that I had decided to pursue by embracing modern techniques while retaining an old-school vibe. Was it R&B? Disco? Techno? Rock? No, it was all of these ingredients combined into a single sound. It was something I enjoyed doing, and it was a new sound and feel that went together very well with the lyrics and music I was now writing.

  Keith mixed the songs with the help of engineer Brian Reeves at Westlake Studio A. We stayed up all night until eight the next morning finishing “Mony Mony.” Keith and Brian would check the mixes by playing them back in their cars as loudly as possible to find the correct balance. Keith had promised we’d have a blast creating the EP, and he did not disappoint. He had come to London for the final Gen X album, and now I had reciprocated by traveling to L.A. I had fresh ammo for the dance floor—now to take it back to New York and see what happened.

  * * *

  WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK, I took my finished version of “Mony Mony” to the Ritz on a Tuesday for dance night to debut it. Hardly anyone was there. People were lining the wall, but very few were dancing. I talked to the DJ, a fan of “Dancing with Myself,” and convinced him to give “Mony Mony” a spin.

  He placed the needle to the vinyl and suddenly, the jaded dancers who had been hugging the wall came to life. Instantly, the dance floor was filled with bodies doing ’60s moves like the Swim, the Donkey Trot, and the Mashed Potato. Everybody was into it! I had my follow-up to “Dancing with Myself,” and any questions I’d had about my decision to move to America began to fade.

  When it came to releasing the EP, Chrysalis Records’ A&R exec Jeff “Buzz” Aldrich thought “Hot in the City” was too good just to release as part of the EP. He felt it could be a single and should be saved for the album we would make next. So instead we put the Gen X version of “Dancing with Myself” on the EP, as it had not yet been officially released in the States. My first solo effort was a cool little record. I was truly on my own, crossing over from one gig to another somehow, without too much of a bump. It didn’t take long, and there it was in the New York record bins. The divider label read like a command: BILLY IDOL: DON’T STOP.

  I was asked to do some promotion, and I agreed to go to L.A. to perform on Solid Gold, the U.S. chart TV show hosted by Marilyn McCoo and Andy Gibb. I had been missing Perri a great deal, so I arranged for her to fly from London to join me for the trip to Los Angeles. Along with Bill Aucoin, we flew out for the show, on which I was to lip-synch the words to the recorded track. After doing so much TV in the UK, I was up for it.

  When we arrived for the rehearsal, a choreographer had worked out all these ’60s steps for me to perform with the Solid Gold Dancers, but I told him, “I sing, they dance,” so he got them to perform their routine around me. My long, hard stare into the future at the end of my performance let everyone know, “I’m a punk rock ’n’ roller.”

  When we returned to New York, my goal was to find my own band so we could work up new songs to record and play live. My mind went back to my meeting with Steve Stevens. The two of us had hit it off right away, and he had agreed to help me put a band together to see if we were compatible. We met, talked some more, and decided to go ahead and form a group. Steve knew a young, good-looking bass player named Phil Feit, who knew of a drummer, Steve Missal, and it was in Steve’s room in the Eighth Avenue Music Building—a huge rehearsal facility located near Times Square—that we began to play together.

  This graffiti-covered building was not soundproofed, and the cacophony of noises emanating from bands of all genres practicing their music reflected the past and present. Our small rehearsal space inspired the title of the song “Hole in the Wall,” but the song was also loosely about the experience of scoring drugs. Then I came up with “Dead on Arrival,” inspired by my belief that by the time punk, in the form of the Sex Pistols, came to America, it was stillborn. It later became the name of Lech Kowalski’s punk film about the Sex Pistols’ apocalyptic tour of the States, though the song wasn’t included in the movie itself.

  Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye also had a room in the building, and I had a few good chats with him about the burgeoning NYC music scene exploding all around us. One night, after a rehearsal, we gave a young, punky disco girl named Madonna a lift somewhere. She seemed awfully confident for an as-yet unknown. I was beginning to feel comfortable in New York, and enjoyed being part of this community of musicians. I felt very much alive—not dead at all—but alive with a love for life, for music, for taking risks, for Perri. Alive with a love for New York.

  Although we had only learned a few numbers, when I heard that Max’s Kansas City was closing down, I went to see Steve Missal, who was in a band playing there that final night. Thinking it would be an honor to play there before it shuttered, I asked him if we could go on before they played. He agreed, and lo and behold, my first solo gig in the United States was playing the last night at the club where the Velvet Underground, Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls, Suicide, and so many of my favorite bands had once performed.

  Steve Stevens, Steve Missal, Phil Feit, and I played “Dancing with Myself,” “Mony Mony,” and the few other numbers we knew, which at the time amounted to our entire repertoire, but it was a kick to just get up there and play. It really helped make us feel like a functioning band, rocking in front of people in a legendary club that was about to close its doors. It was just our first gig, but Steve Stevens, even without the usual array of effects guitarists rely on for live performances, was outstanding. He can be blinding when he plays like that, raw, 100-watt straight through, slowly writhing in
the night like a sleeping serpent curling its body against mine, slowly sighing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IF YOU CAN MAKE IT HERE

  Fifth Avenue, Manhattan

  “NEW YORK, NEW YORK” WAS playing through the Olympic Tower elevator speakers as I ascended to Bill Aucoin’s high-rise apartment. It looked out over Fifth Avenue and was particularly spectacular at night, the passing car headlights illuminating the street below, turning it into a golden highway. New York lived and breathed like a pulsating animal, and it seemed, from this height, that it was possible to accomplish any dream or thought, no matter how high one’s aim. Dreams could become reality: the very height of this skyscraper attested to that.

  Bill and I would meet often at his apartment in the sky to plan our next move. One night, he took me down several flights to where the newscaster David Susskind was having a party. As Bill talked, the city’s glittering magic began to take hold. “You can’t be scared of anything,” he would tell me. He would begin every telling phrase with “Lookit” and “I gotta tell ya.” Bill seemed to be an expert on everything. He had been successful in both television and music, and this young, blond punk kid from London hung on his every word. He had a concept of freedom that went beyond the norm, and enjoyed an openly gay lifestyle at a time when it wasn’t fully accepted. You must fight for your freedom but somehow have fun doing it; that was Bill’s credo. “Celebrate your personality!” I took his advice.

  Although he usually wore fine suits, Bill was probably the least “suit” person in the world. With an excited expression on his face denoting knowledge both moral and immoral accompanying his rapid-fire pronouncements and enlightened attitude, Aucoin bestrode the world like a colossus disguised as a businessman, flouting all laws and conventions. This is the man who literally made it snow one hot Christmas Eve in L.A. at a party he threw at the height of Kiss’s hedonism years. Bill was a dreamer who brought other people’s dreams to life. Had I become part of that dream? At the time I arrived in New York, Bill, who was then still managing Kiss, was looking for other art/music provocateurs to work with, Steve Stevens being one of those he found. He knew everyone on both coasts, and at the moment, those were the resources we were pulling on. From the windows of his high-rise, the horizon stretched to no end.

  I met the guys from Kiss on one of my first visits to Aucoin’s office. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons were there doing last-minute work for the cover of the album Music from “The Elder.” After the meeting, Gene very nicely invited me to lunch at a posh uptown restaurant, but instead of talking about the music scene, he talked about tax havens and how to organize money, which I found amusing, as I had only change in my pocket and nothing in my bank account.

  I was taking in New York and enjoying the experience. I met quite a few fellow English people in the city during my first few months there. There was a mate of mine named Mark May, who sometimes crashed in my room or in the adjoining makeshift greenhouse. I’d wake up really hungover and hear him pounding on the door to be let in, as the sun had come up and poured through the glass windows, waking him up with a thirst that drove him to desperation.

  There were so many clubs to go to, and it was great to have a pal to go with. Mark was really tall and had black, spiked hair, a little like Sid Vicious’s, so the two of us together were quite a sight. The constant nightclubbing until dawn was the only way to stay out of the close confines of my tiny room. Places like Club Berlin were reverberating to the sounds of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” or Depeche Mode’s “I Just Can’t Get Enough.” The English dance-rock invasion was in full swing.

  I had lucked into another scene that included the music I was already into. Clubs like the multifloor midtown Danceteria, the Lower East Side Brown’s, or the Nursery were open all night, pumping out post-punk dance-rock to a crazy scene of gyrating dancers, while the less motivated were junked and passed out on the floor and the stairs. Amazingly enough, Mark and I got ourselves thrown out of the Nursery one morning, which was practically impossible.

  In those days you could meet every class of person out at night in the New York clubs. The venues weren’t segregated by the music they played, as they would be later in the ’80s. The break-dance scene joined the uptown rappers with the downtown art denizens. I remember seeing Grandmaster Flash at the Ritz on Eleventh Street and hearing Afrika Bambaataa spin at the Roxy, a former roller rink on the West Side. You could see how the rap kids picked up style from the punk kids on Eighth Street in the Village, wearing cutoff fingerless gloves or leather wristbands.

  Music, sex, drugs, nightlife, sleep, do it again was our mantra. Living as if there was no tomorrow was key, seeing as the Sex Pistols and others had told us that there was no future, and we were convinced we were living in some Mad Max postapocalyptic world. At this time, New York was pretty run-down; it seemed like a future world gone wrong. The city was struggling back from an economic depression, but the low rents and overlooked laws fertilized a breeding ground for clubs, boutiques, and art galleries.

  Mark, who was over six feet tall, favored small girls with gigantic tits, so it was brilliant to see him contort hs long, lanky frame as he leaned forward drunkenly while ogling some NY punk chick with really big hooters late at night at the Peppermint Lounge. Bands like Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers played while we stood on the balcony above the general mob. We called ourselves the Chosen Scum because we could get into the Ritz balcony or past the velvet ropes of any club in town. At one party, they were handing out Special K, a hallucinogen that turned your world somewhat inside out for a time, letting you reside in an alternative universe before bringing you back. I’d usually sleep until two in the afternoon, wake up, rehearse, head out to eat, and then do drugs, which people gave out freely. Most of the time, I could get away with having zero money but still get fucked up on the free booze, free coke, and free pot, with all the broads I could take home. I still loved and missed Perri, but sometimes when opportunity stares you in the face, you take solace in somebody else’s sheets. Sometimes it was a matter of going home to a different apartment or just hanging out to share drugs. Drugs have a way of making it easy to give in to temptation and, later on, to explain away transgressions without allowing reality to sink in.

  One of the first gigs I went to at the Ritz was a Prince show. At that time, he was wearing a raincoat with thigh-high socks and a jock strap that squirted water during his guitar solos. There weren’t many people in the audience—he was yet to be the superstar he would become—so I stood not far from the stage to watch him. I liked where Prince was trying to go. He was having fun with the music and at the same time being sexual and outrageous. His music’s groove-driven sound, with its machinelike quality, was exactly what I had in mind. And even though I had my own unique take on it, I was starting to realize it wasn’t just me who was traveling down this road. The mashing-up of rock, soul, rap, and pop marked a major change in music that would rule the ’80s.

  In 1981, New York City was a melting pot for all the different genres that were converging at that moment in time. From downtown punk and jazz to midtown disco to uptown rap and salsa—it was anything goes, as long as it had attitude. America was entering a new decade with a new president. The country was hungry for new fashions and fresh ideas. Just like in the UK in 1976, it was the outsiders, those on the fringe of society, who would come into their own as they led the way from the extreme to the mainstream. America had been safe inside its AM/FM radio walls of the ’70s, but that system was not going to do it for the new generation hitting the nightspots. The bridge-and-tunnel people of the New York tristate area wanted a scene of their own. The gradual unification of musical styles from New York and around the world was beginning to propel that change.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HOT IN THE CITY: THE MAKING OF SOLO BILLY IDOL

  One Sheridan Square, New York City

  MTV LAUNCHED IN AUGUST 1981, the same month I began recording my first solo album. I already had “Hot in the
City” in the can as a first single, but we had to see what else we could come up with. I was scrambling for ideas, but I wanted to give Steve Stevens and myself a chance to grow and possibly write together, as Tony and I had in Generation X, to capture that camaraderie, the back-and-forth of ideas, with the final goal of the song realized, recorded, and released. Life needs that kind of energy and connection. Fuck, I need it.

  Steve had a song title, “Shooting Stars,” that I liked. I felt that my experience with using drugs could be incorporated into the lyrics. I was also thinking about my roommate and landlady, Fish. “I think it’s kinda sick, she thinks she’s really hip . . . Well you wanna play the fool, you wanna be so cruel.” I’m probably singing about myself and making it sound like it’s about a girl. But really, it’s about both sex and drugs. I was in thrall to drugs, but as yet they hadn’t taken over completely. The real me still poked his head through, and so we had another song for this album.

  Gary Cooper once remarked on the wild American West, “Well, we brought law and order to the territory; built railroads, homes, towns, and I guess you might call it civilization . . . but by damn, wouldn’t it be fun to tear it down and start all over again?” I suppose that’s what I was doing by going solo. I was trashing the old, tearing it down to make way for the new and the necessary. Reworking my music was stimulating, but it didn’t come easy, especially as I was so used to having Tony there. Still, I had to carry on into this new world of discovery. This new Billy Idol band was a good bunch of guys. It was time to play the songs we’d written, write more songs, and get them down on record.