Lips Unsealed (10 page)

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 had 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.

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.

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.