Lips Unsealed (12 page)

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.

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 planet.

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.

I didn’t know if I was attracted to him, merely curious, or getting myself in trouble. I had partied so hard over the past few months and crossed so many time zones that I didn’t have clear judgment when it came to people or my boundaries. He was like a new drug, a new escape.

Indeed, I couldn’t stop thinking about him when I got back home, and as soon as the Go-Go’s took a much-needed break in March and April to work on our next album, I told Buster that I was going back to Japan to hang out with my new friends, Jack and Isao. We had planned for the break to be our time together, so he got pissed off when I left and probably knew that our days as a couple were numbered.

I didn’t care—and didn’t want to talk about it.

It wasn’t one of my finer moments.

During breaks in the Go-Go’s writing and recording sessions, I made several trips to Japan. I traveled back and forth as if the long flight was a short commute. It wasn’t, and those trips cost a fortune. They were one of many examples that showed I wasn’t exercising good judgment. Isao was another example. In Tokyo, I actually spent most of my time with Jack, drinking greyhounds and shopping in Harajuku, but once it was nighttime and the neon lights were flashing throughout Tokyo, I found myself hitting the clubs with Isao.

My strange friend led me from one club to another. I got the sense he was quite a playboy. Everyone knew him. I followed him around as if I would be lost without him, which was true. When we went out, I had no idea where I was. I was lost, figuratively and literally. That scared me.

Our affair lasted for a while, but it was dependent on me going to
Japan. It never matched the intensity of those initial months, and then, as could have been predicted, it devolved into one drama after another as I gradually and painfully found out Isao had numerous model girlfriends from the West that he didn’t tell me about.

I probably got what I deserved, considering I was doing sort of the same thing to Buster. Even though he was the easiest-going person I knew, we were on different schedules, both of us consumed by the often-conflicting demands of our bands. It took serious commitment to make that kind of relationship work, and while Buster may have been ready, and in fact wanted to get engaged, I wasn’t capable of such deep responsibility to another person, let alone myself.

At the beginning of March, I was at SIR with the girls and taking a break from rehearsal when I got a phone call from John Belushi’s wife, Judy, asking if I had seen John. She knew our social circles sometimes crossed at night. She said he was in L.A. and had gone AWOL on her, and she was concerned. I hadn’t seen him, and none of the other girls had either.

Less than a week later, on March 5, John was wheeled out of the Chateau Marmont hotel on a coroner’s gurney. He had died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine at thirty-three years old.

The following day, we were back at SIR and talking about John’s death and comparing notes about what we had either heard on the news or from other people, when Ginger walked in with a bottle of champagne. Our album,
Beauty and the Beat
, had hit number one on the
Billboard
album chart. We popped the cork and screamed. It was the first time in rock-and-roll history that an all-girl group who had written and played their own songs had an album that went all the way to the top.

We toasted one another and talked about the past few years and everything that we’d gone through since day one. After partying all afternoon, I went back to my apartment and continued to celebrate by myself until the good times unraveled in a frightening breakdown.