Authors: Belinda Carlisle
I underestimated myself. One night I dropped some acid with Germs drummer Don Bolles and a group of friends. There were probably ten of us who decided to trip together that night. After ingesting the LSD, we walked en masse from the Canterbury to Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which was a decent walk when you were straight, but a flat-out adventure while tripping.
Once there, we crawled underneath the main gates and spent a couple hours exploring the grounds. We found the graves of Hollywood legends Rudolph Valentino and Tyrone Power as well as Virginia Rappe’s plot. Rappe was the silent film actress Fatty Arbuckle was accused of killing, a dark tragedy that had intrigued me for many years. We also goofed around in one of the old mausoleums, shaking a couple urns as if they were maracas.
As several of us were sticking flowers in our hair and joking around, we heard a deep, stern voice on a loudspeaker cut through our laughter and say, “Everyone stop whatever you’re doing and come out with your hands up.” It was the cops. I looked out toward where I heard the voice and saw several squad cars with their lights flashing just like on the old TV series
Adam-12
.
Oh crap, I thought as I was hit by a sick feeling I hadn’t felt since I was caught shoplifting from Thrifty. As my friends slowly marched out to face the police, though, I decided I wasn’t going with them. I didn’t
want to get arrested, not while still blazing on acid. Instead I hid behind a tombstone, not knowing how much of the fear I felt was because I was high and how much was because I was really scared.
After all the others were outside the gate and standing nervously in the glare of a spotlight from one of the black and white police cruisers, the cops issued several more orders to come out. I didn’t know if someone had said I was still in there, but I didn’t move—not even when they shined a powerful spotlight from another car in my direction, panning it across the grounds, searching for me.
I don’t think I breathed until they finally left. I guess they felt like they were hauling in enough weird-looking kids for the night and didn’t need one more girl with short platinum-colored hair. I continued to sit in the dark for some time, waiting until I felt certain the coast was clear. Then I sprinted through the lightless night as fast as I could, running breathlessly across the tombstones toward the cemetery’s other gate. I crawled under and walked back to the Canterbury.
On Santa Monica Boulevard, about halfway there, I bumped into Don Bolles, who had escaped, too. We looked at each other and shook our heads in disbelief. All the others had been taken to jail. Later in the week, a couple of the girls told me that they had spent several days in Sybil Brand, the women’s jail. They were pissed, but they’d had no choice. No one had any money to bail them out.
The year wound down with shows at the Whisky from the Deadbeats, the Mumps, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Screamers, and the Dickies (which I continued to see despite the heartache I felt watching Karlos). After one show, I met a guy who said he heard that Natalie Wood’s sister, Lana Wood, was having a party at her house, and he suggested we crash it.
Why not? We found her house, bypassed the valet parking out front in favor of parking on our own up the street, and walked straight into the party, where we tried to keep our cool and look like we belonged while gawking at stars. I remember elbowing my friend and saying, “Look, there’s Jack Haley Jr.” He had no idea.
Crashing fancy parties became something I did fairly often. It was cheap entertainment. I got dressed up, drank champagne, and tried to
look posh. The Chateau Marmont hotel was my favorite place to crash events. One night I stumbled into a hoity-toity celebration for a famous New York artist. After a glass or two of champagne, I ran out and broke all the lightbulbs in the hallway as I passed them.
Looking back, my life at that time stands out as surreal, colorful, vibrant, reckless, and irresponsible. I didn’t have any money but felt like I owned the town. Occasionally I was onstage as a backup singer, other times I was in the audience, but I was living the dream all the time. It was wonderful. The humdrum monotony of temp jobs in the daytime was minor compared to the thrilling anticipation of something wonderful happening at night.
I didn’t want to miss anything. No one did.
Word spread that the Sex Pistols were going to play at the Winterland Ballroom on January 14 in San Francisco. Only seven months had passed since “God Save the Queen” had been released like a firebomb across the airwaves. I had listened to it with Darby and Bobby; they had played it over and over, as if they were tattooing it in their brains. It provided our revolution with an anarchist anthem.
The Pistols’ incendiary album
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
soon followed, and it was pretty obvious from those songs, along with what I’d read, that Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, and the boys were like a fast-moving cyclone and I’d better do everything I could to see them before they blew apart.
A bunch of us felt the same way, like we needed to do whatever we could to get up to San Francisco. I went up with Theresa and a group that included Connie and others. She recalls us checking into a Chinatown hotel, trashing the room, and then being unable to find another place to stay, all of which is likely true. I just don’t remember any of it. I was probably on acid.
My memory of this trip kicks in right before the show, when I ran into other L.A. punks, such as photographer Jenny Lens, Hellin Killer, Margot Olaverra, and Jane Wiedlin, then known as Jane Drano, a cute, outgoing girl who was around the Masque and Canterbury from the
beginning. All of us were excited to be there, and the show more than lived up to any expectations we had of the world’s greatest punk band.
It was a miracle the Sex Pistols even made it onto the stage after a three-week tour across the southern U.S. that filled the underground with talk of new highs and lows of self-destructive behavior. It was all part of their larger-than-life reputation, which, in a way, transcended anything they played that night, though as I recall, the show we saw was brilliant.
I still get goose bumps when I picture Sid Vicious poised at the edge of the stage, in his leather pants, billowy white shirt, and black vest, grasping the microphone with both hands. I remember his hair sticking straight up and the violent way he thrashed through the band’s songs. By the end of the night, he was shirtless, and his skinny white torso was full of gashes that were dripping with blood, while Johnny Rotten was kneeling onstage, chanting, “This is no fun. This is no fun.”
Those words turned out to be prophetic. Within the week, Johnny Rotten announced the band had broken up and little more than a year later Sid Vicious was dead of a heroin overdose.
It was amazing. Inspired by the Sex Pistols show and determined to see punk rock in the place it originated, Theresa and I saved our money until we could afford tickets to London and spent two weeks there seeing shows, shopping, and looking for cute boys. We shared a room in a small, old hotel in Paddington, and aside from just the fact that we were in London, the most memorable part of the trip was when I woke up from a sound sleep one night and saw a ghost.
I didn’t just
see
the ghost. I had woken up because it was holding me down. I saw and felt it on top of me. I tried to scream but it wouldn’t let me open my mouth. It started to choke me, and just when I began to panic that I was going to pass out, it disappeared.
In the morning, I told Theresa what had happened and when she gave me the kind of disbelieving look you would expect, I simply said, “Believe what you want, but it was real.”
Back home, I was hanging out one night with Jane Wiedlin and Margot Olaverra at a party in Venice. The house was little and crowded with people, and at one point the three of us found ourselves sitting on the
curb, with beers and cigarettes. We talked about the Sex Pistols’ show in San Francisco, which was still fresh in our minds, and I added stories from my trip to London, and eventually we were talking about starting our own band.
Margot had been trying to get something together for months. She had, in fact, started learning to play bass and had already recruited another girl, Elissa Bello, to play drums.
Jane and I jumped in without having to think about it. Jane said she wanted to play guitar. I’d wanted to play bass, but since Margot had already claimed that role, I was left with one option—the lead singer. I laughingly admitted that my only previous experience as a singer was as a backup with Black Randy, which half the residents at the Canterbury seemed to have done, and before that, as a little girl singing along to
The Sound of Music
soundtrack.
But my lack of experience didn’t matter. None of the others had much either. The beautiful thing about punk was that you only needed to have the guts to try and the enthusiasm to think you could pull it off. We had both the guts and the enthusiasm, plus some additional craziness, and as we sat on the curb, we talked one another into a froth of excitement. Everybody we knew was in a band. Why not us?
We sealed the deal by telling each other that at the least we could be as bad as everyone else, but the unique thing that happened and separated us from the pack from the start was that we also agreed that we didn’t
have
to be bad—and we could probably be better than most, and definitely cuter.
I remember the looks we gave one another and the back-and-forth before we got up. It was like making a pact.
“Is this for real?”
“Yes.”
“Are we serious?”
“Yes.”
“Really serious?”
“There’s no flaking out, right?”
“Okay, if we’re a band, when’s rehearsal?”
As far as I was concerned, we were going to be big. I had no doubt.
* * *
Our first rehearsal was at Margot’s apartment off Robertson Boulevard. We were pretty scattered and lost. We didn’t even know how to start; we barely figured out how to set up our instruments. We banged around, tried to write songs, and then went to Denny’s for dinner. We were situated in a booth, a mix of kicky hair styles and colors wrapped in cigarette smoke. All of us were in agreement that our first rehearsal had surpassed expectations. Hey, we’d shown up and done it. But we were missing something key—a name for the band.
We tossed suggestions back and forth, and continued the discussion for a few days before we whittled the choices down to two, the Misfits and the Go-Go’s. Both were good names. We nearly chose the Misfits and went so far as to print up a flyer. But someone looked up “go-go” in the dictionary and found that it meant something like “uninhibited and free,” and we liked that. Everyone agreed it fit. And from that moment on, we were the Go-Go’s.
We rehearsed in the basement at the Canterbury, then shuttled between there and one of the several tiny rehearsal rooms at the Masque, which we shared with other bands, including the Motels and X. Both bands gave us pointers. With our purple and fuchsia hair, we were a sight as we wheeled our amps down the street from the Canterbury to the club, which was beneath the Pussycat porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard.
We came up with two songs, “Overrun,” a fashionably angry romp that I wrote, and “Robert Hilburn,” a tongue-in-cheek ode to the
Los Angeles Times’s
rock music critic written by Jane, who from the outset revealed herself to be an incredibly prolific and clever songwriter, something that was even more impressive considering she didn’t know anything about writing songs and learned the chords by putting masking tape with numbers on her guitar frets.
That was the amazing thing about the band. We did everything by instinct—and it usually turned out to be right.
The best move we made was realizing that we needed help. We needed someone to guide us through the basics, starting with how to plug in our equipment. We really were that clueless.
Margot suggested that we invite Charlotte Caffey to join the group. All of us thought it was a brilliant idea. Charlotte was a California blonde with a sensibility that was more pop than punk. It was probably because she actually had some music training. I didn’t know her personally, but I knew who she was. She had played bass with the Keys and more recently with the Eyes, a band that I really liked. She also dated the Dickies’ singer, Leonard Phillips. And most important, she knew how to do all the things we didn’t.
Margot and I approached her one night backstage at the Starwood and asked if she wanted to join us in our new band, the Go-Go’s. It’s funny to think that we hadn’t even played a gig but we were already talking as if there was nothing more real and happening than our band. Even funnier is that Charlotte said yes without pausing to think about it.
I thought that was a little bizarre, since she was already in a group. But later Charlotte explained that she had been intrigued with the way Margot and I looked, and she figured we’d be fun girls to hang out with. She was also ready to leave the Eyes.
We told her who was in the group and that she would play lead guitar, which she said sounded great. What she left out was that she didn’t know how to play lead guitar. But she learned.
Our first performance was a going-away party for the Dickies at the Masque on May 31, 1978. They were leaving for a monthlong tour of the UK. The club was packed. People were right in our face as we played both of our songs and repeated “Overrun” as our encore. According to Connie, I was so nervous I peed my pants. I don’t recall, but I’m not denying it happened either.
Afterward, everyone said we were great. We knew our limitations, but we agreed. We had the time of our lives, too.
At the Masque, a band would play, finish, and then four other people in the crowd would get up and play. Almost everyone there was in a band or wanted to be in a band or knew the people in one of the bands. We played the Masque again a week or so later on a lineup that included the Bags and the Plugz. It felt like another triumph. I thought we were great, even better than before.
A few days later, I was with Jane, heading downstairs to rehearsal at
the Canterbury. Charlotte had traveled to the UK with her boyfriend. Jane and I were talking about the previous two shows, reliving every moment and detail, from the performance to the people we saw watching us. We were bursting with ideas and enthusiasm and dreams of a big future.