Pretty Mess

by Erika Jayne

  “Wow,” Peter replied. It was perfect. That was the take that we used on the record. I nailed it. That’s how I knew this was the right thing to do, that I was in the right place. Life gives you little signs, and it was something small, but to me it meant everything.

  Life said, “Mm-hmm. You’re supposed to be here.” But then it said, “Okay, now go work for it.” Not everything was as easy as that first take. Especially when we started performing again. That’s where Travis really came in with the production, the choreography, the costumes, and helping me create the package to support the music.

  When we started rehearsing, it was so strange that I really had the jitters. Why am I so nervous? Why do I feel crazy? I thought. I’d been dancing and performing since I was a little kid. I felt like it should be second nature to me.

  One day, I expressed this to Travis. “You know, Erika, when you step away and try to come back, you get scared,” he said. “That’s just the way it is. Now get your fucking ass back out there.”

  I had to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. You really have to live and breathe in those moments, because that’s where the growth is. The growth isn’t when things are good. It’s when it’s horrible and you stay in it. You improve when you’re unsure and it’s a struggle. We all have to look stupid and feel like shit in order to evolve.

  My goal was to make music and start performing again. A lot of the things I had to go through to get there were painful. But if you cower in those moments of pain, you will never have anything. I thought, What the fuck are you doing? You’ve spent this money. You’ve invested in yourself. You’ve just got to stick it out. That’s a lot of it. So much of life is sticking it the fuck out.

  Finally, we got our first gig. It was at a San Francisco sex party called the Nymphomaniac’s Ball at someplace called PleasureZone. It was for straight people, if you can believe it. The DJ had gotten his hands on my music and loved it, and he invited me to come perform three songs. Travis hooked me up with the costume designer Zaldy, a former club kid who has made costumes for Britney Spears, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and worked with Gwen Stefani on her fashion line. He does all of RuPaul’s costumes for RuPaul’s Drag Race and worked with Travis on the costumes for Michael Jackson’s This Is It tour. He made me a few rompers—one was fuchsia and one was a pale diamond color—plus an amazing blue catsuit with diamonds on the shoulders. I decided to wear the catsuit for that first night.

  I was excited to tell Tom the news. “So we got hired by this sex club. It’s kind of like a party they have once every couple of months. I don’t know, exactly. But I’m going to go perform.”

  “Great, hon. Go do it,” he said.

  “They’re going to pay me,” I told him.

  “Oh, even better,” he said. He was excited to see everything I’d been working on and to be there for the first show, so he decided to come with me.

  That always surprises people, that Tom would come to a sex party to see me. But let me tell you something: Mr. Girardi does not care. Tom’s seen it all, done it all, doesn’t care. People think because Tom’s older and is a well-respected attorney that he must be prim and proper and a stick-in-the-mud. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing fazes Tom. And at the end of the night, he even collected my check from the promoter like he was my business manager.

  I showed up at the venue, which was a huge old theater with a gigantic stage. I had four backup dancers and my tracks on a CD, which is funny to think about in the digital age. It had been billed as a sex party, but it wasn’t really a scandalous orgy or anything. It was mostly couples and mostly Asian. There was a lot of making out going on, but that was about all I saw. It seemed like the kind of joint couples would go to in order to find a willing third. If Erika Jayne can help set the mood for such assignations, she is absolutely happy to oblige.

  I was really hyped to be there, and the DJ was hyped to have us, too. I got out onstage and did our first song, and it was going well. From the stage, I could see the DJ and his setup at the foot of the stage and he was freaking out over the performance. He was dancing and flailing his arms around and just really getting into the whole experience. I finished the first song and started into the second, and the DJ started freaking out again.

  I was happy to have the positive feedback, but he got so into dancing that he hit his DJ rig and pulled the whole thing down. All the wires got pulled out and the lighting board crashed to the floor. Suddenly we were up onstage standing in silence, mortified, while a bunch of confused Asian swingers shot us dirty looks.

  I remember standing there thinking, I should know what to do here. But I had no clue. It’s not like we were going to sing a cappella. What does one do? Someone in the crowd shouted, “Start over!” But you can’t just start the show over.

  Still stunned, I shouted, “Thank you very much. Have a nice night!” I walked off the stage. The DJ hadn’t just exploded his equipment; he also blew up my whole experience.

  After that first performance, I thought, Oh wait a fucking second. That will never happen again. I made sure that everything was tight for every performance going forward. Not just my dancers, costumes, and singing, but that everything would be technically perfect as well. I wasn’t going to let another spastic DJ ruin my show.

  Having performed all my life as a young person, I knew the feeling of accomplishment of giving a good show. I didn’t get that the first time out. Or even the second time out. It took me awhile to find my groove and get my proficiency back. Even though I wasn’t having good shows right away, I knew what the payoff would feel like. So I just had to push through until I got to that other side. I knew that would come from just doing it over and over and over.

  I said yes to every show in every dive bar. I’ve performed on tables, in VIP areas, with no lights, in trains, and on nude beaches. I have performed everywhere. Anywhere someone wanted Erika Jayne to perform, she said yes.

  There are two reasons for that. Number one, because I love it. And number two, because I love it.

  The audiences weren’t always that great. Some people were really into it and knew the project. Some people didn’t care. Some people were just assholes. However, there was one thing they couldn’t do—they couldn’t stop looking. I knew that meant I was on the right track.

  Performing wasn’t the only way we were getting the word out about Erika Jayne. Peter, Travis, and I went to the Winter Music Conference in Miami a couple of times. It’s an event where lots of pop acts and electronic music stars can break out by getting their music into the hands of producers, DJs, remix artists, promoters, and all sorts of people in the industry.

  The first single from the Pretty Mess album was “Roller Coaster.” Strippers used to tell me that they loved to dance to the song, which was the greatest compliment I could ever receive. We decided we should make a music video for the song to try to get it more exposure.

  I went to Travis and Peter and told them that I had access to the historic Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. At the time, Tom was on the board of Boyd Gaming, which owned the casino. It was about to be demolished, but there was a window where we could still get inside with a camera crew. Then I told them that Tom and I were going on our annual Christmas trip, which we used to do with about fifty other couples. This year, it would be in the Bahamas and I told them they could come with a small crew.

  “I can work with that,” Peter said, and he wrote a treatment for the video. The story is something about me having a relationship with a mobster and running away to an island paradise with his employee. I’m abducted to a desert island before escaping once again with my lover, who carries me around shirtless in a pool. It was kind of cliché and all over the place. But what do you want? We were working with what we had.

  I was just starting out, and we were making it up as we went along. Travis choreographed it, and you can see him dancing onstage with me at the Stardust along with another dancer. I mean, looking back at it, it’s probably kind of dumb. But I had access to
this great shit, so why not use it? I was doing what every first timer does: making the most of the resources I had.

  It was almost a year between when I started working with Peter to when “Roller Coaster” was my first number one hit on the dance charts. The day I got the call from Peter is a very special memory for me. I was in Georgia visiting my family for my birthday, which is July 10. I was at my grandmother’s house, standing in the driveway. It was, as they say in hell, hot as Georgia in July.

  I got a phone call and Peter said, “I just want to let you know that the song is number one on the dance club chart.” It would later go on to be the number thirteen song on Billboard’s Year End dance club chart for 2007. Not bad for a rookie.

  “That’s amazing,” I told him. I then got to share the news with the rest of my family, including my cousin Jeremy who was standing with me in the driveway when I got the call. He was even more excited than I was. My grandparents were sick at the time, so it was nice that they could be there to share in my success.

  Tragically, Jeremy died a few years later when his home burned down. After the fire, Renee and I went by his house. Out on the lawn near the front door were some things that he had tried to save by throwing them out of the front door as it burned. Among those things was a copy of my first CD.

  At the funeral, I told my uncle that I had seen it there on the lawn. “He was playing it all the time,” my uncle said enthusiastically. “I had to tell him, ‘You need to give poor Erika a rest!’ ”

  It’s nice to have that memory with Jeremy in the driveway. It was a special moment. It means a lot that he enjoyed my music and was proud of me.

  In that year, I had overcome a lot of obstacles and got back to one of the things that I loved the most. And when I had my first number one single, I proved a lot of people wrong. There were plenty of people who didn’t think I could do it.

  “Well, you know, it’s a really tough business and you’re way too old,” people would say condescendingly at cocktail parties when they heard about my new venture. They thought I was starting from scratch. They thought I was just some bored housewife who woke up at thirty-five and thought she was going to start singing and dancing. But no, motherfucker, that’s not it. They had no idea that I was trained, I had lived this life before, and I had not only the skill but also the determination to make it work.

  The internet also made all this possible. Being able to digitally distribute our music ripped the cover off the industry, and all the old rules were out the window. That made it possible for an “ancient” artist like me to find a foothold and be discovered, appreciated by fans, and able to sell records.

  It was so great to have people ask, “Oh, how’s your little singing and dancing thing coming along?”

  I would say, “Oh, it’s good. It’s good.” I didn’t need to enumerate my successes or tell them I’m Billboard’s number forty-two dance track artist of all time to prove them wrong. I knew I had accomplished what I set out to do. And I wasn’t lying. It was going well.

  When I listen to Pretty Mess now, there are still some great songs on there, but not all of it is amazing. It sounds like a beginning. You can point back to any singer’s first album, any director’s first film, or any author’s first book and see the mistakes they made. But you can also see what is great about them. That album is like a fawn standing up on four legs and learning to walk. It’s a little wobbly, but it gets there. You can hear the creation—right or wrong, good or bad—of something.

  I like to say that without Erika Jayne, Erika Girardi would just be another rich bitch with a plane. That is true. After all of those years of living Tom’s life, there was nothing more I could buy. There were no clothes collections, no garages full of cars, no amount of anything that was going to bring me the level of satisfaction that I have today. Without my project, I would have been relegated to a life of shopping, sitting on a few charity boards of no consequence, and standing silently by my husband’s side full of unrealized potential. That was what I was expected to do. Instead, I do what I love. I create.

  Even more than anyone else needed Erika Jayne to escape, I did.

  11

  GLITZ, GLAMOUR, FUN

  My first live performance with my creative director, Mikey Minden, was at Los Angeles Pride in 2009. This is a huge, weekend-long gay pride concert that attracts such major acts that LA Weekly calls it “gay Coachella.” It culminates in a giant concert on Sunday night when all of West Hollywood comes out to party.

  That year, we were performing on the smaller stage where the lesser-known acts appear during the day as all the Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, and Qs enjoyed themselves under the rainbow flags in the hot June sun. I hired Mikey, a skilled choreographer, to up Erika Jayne’s performance game, and that’s what he did for Pride. He put me on stage with four male dancers and had us work every inch of ourselves for the crowd.

  I was wearing a gray, black, and silver Brian Lichtenberg catsuit with a middle corset and, of course, a pair of knee-high Chanel boots. All of a sudden, in the middle of the set, I rolled my ankle, almost like it collapsed on itself. It was a combination of me getting a little too enthusiastic in my performance (“overliving,” Mikey would say) and the stage being slippery.

  This wasn’t the first time it had happened to me, and it happens to every performer at times during her career (yes, even Beyoncé). There I was, crouched down for a moment and a bit stunned, and I looked up at Mikey who was standing in the wings of the stage.

  He looked straight into my eyes and shook his head from right to left as if to say, “Bitch, do not give up. If you give up right now, you’re dead.”

  I will never forget that one little movement, because that was just what I needed. Someone to remind me that the key to being a great performer is rolling with whatever happens, thinking on your feet, and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. My dancer Sean Braithwaite bent down and picked me up, and I continued like nothing had happened. Let me tell you, this was no little sprain. It got quite painful, but I never let the crowd know there was anything wrong.

  With that little bit of pushy encouragement, Mikey and I forged a bond that can’t be broken.

  I had first met Mikey while I was still promoting singles from the Pretty Mess album, and I felt like Erika Jayne needed a change. You know when artists become stale? It’s when they stop challenging themselves and become complacent. You have to keep the collaborative vein open. Once you close that down, once you’re not willing to look outside and say wow, that’s a new, fresh take on something, that’s when you become uninspired and not fresh. Trust me, I’m always fresh, and we’re always bringing in young talent to reinvigorate the act.

  I was introduced to Mikey through the late Jerry Heller, the manager who was behind the rap group NWA. Tom had once provided Jerry and NWA rapper Easy E with some legal advice. Jerry’s nephew was doing some road managing for me and said, “You know who you need to meet? This kid Mikey Minden. He’s amazing.”

  At the time, Mikey was the creative director for the Pussycat Dolls show in Las Vegas. He really helped Pussycat Dolls creator Robin Antin take her creation to the next level. What he was doing there was very much in line with the hair-whipping, floor-working insanity that is Erika Jayne. He was only twenty-four years old when we met at a restaurant. He walked in, bold and confident, in full Mikey regalia, with arms full of bracelets, fingers full of rings and his then-signature perfectly waxed eyebrows. Before he even sat down, he said to me, “Have we met before?”

  I don’t think we ever had, but it was almost like we did. He’s one of those people I just hit it off with on so many levels. A month later, after we shot the “Give You Everything” video, I was at his twenty-fifth birthday party at Apple Lounge in West Hollywood. We have been friends and collaborators ever since.

  He perfectly understood Erika Jayne and what I was trying to do with her. Both Travis and Peter had worked with the greats of the music industry and lent a certain amount of polish to our work toge
ther. They thought Erika Jayne should be a perfect, sparkling diamond. Immediately Mikey brought his grit and youthful defiance to the project. It was like he was saying, “Oh, you think you’re fancy, Erika? Let me show you what I think.”

  Mikey reexamined everything I’d done so far. Everything with Peter and Travis was technical, but with Mikey it was raw and rule breaking. He saw something different, and we were able to expand on it and keep going, which is really cool.

  I was reaching into my gut and figuring out what this project was, who I wanted to embody, and what I wanted to say. There’s a theme to the whole Erika Jayne experience, which is ripping off the layers of myself to get to the person inside. It’s about being comfortable enough to reveal the darker, sexier, secret side that polite society frowns upon that all of us have lurking in our subconscious and that’s dying to get out.

  The best thing about our working relationship is that we really push each other. If I wanted to push any limit—or what I felt was pushing a limit—Mikey would say to me, “Bullshit. You should go further, and let me tell you why.” He encouraged me to really be free, be fearless, and embrace this entire over-the-top, provocative doll character that we created.

  The first thing we worked on together was the music video for “Give You Everything,” which was the first track we recorded for Pretty Mess but the third single I released. I already had a director and a concept for the video. Basically it’s a little story about me falling in love with a guy who is trying out to be one of my dancers. There were a bunch of dance breaks, and Mikey came in to choreograph those.

  I already had the hair and makeup in place, but Mikey suggested a team of stylists as well. Just like me, he thinks wardrobe is where the character really comes out. Those costumes lent an edgier and fresher vibe, for sure. We went up to film the video at a public elementary school in Santa Barbara. They had the most beautiful theater I’d ever seen in my life. It was Spanish Mission–style that had been completely restored and was full of top-of-the-line equipment. It was absolutely stunning.