IN DECEMBER 1979, we opened at the Whisky for Madness, an English ska band whose recently released first alb.u.m, One Step Beyond, was earning them raves and a handful of hits, including "One Step Beyond ...," "The Prince," "My Girl," and "Night Boat to Cairo." They hit the town with a unique sound and the fun att.i.tude of English boys out for a good time.
At sound check, I clicked with the group"s lead singer, Graham McPherson, who went by the name Suggs. By showtime, we were flirting and having a good time watching each other onstage. Afterward, everyone from both bands went back to their hotel, the Tropicana, and partied pretty hard. I woke up the next morning in a chaise longue next to the pool. Suggs and several others were asleep in nearby chaises.
I shook my head, then checked my watch and suddenly bolted upright. I had to go to work!
After Madness left town, Suggs wrote me a few letters and sent me some English cigarettes. I knew he liked me, but I didn"t let myself imagine anything developing since I knew from following the bands in the English magazines that he was involved with punk beauty Betty Bright. Still.
A few months later, Madness returned to L.A. and I don"t know why I let myself, but I hoped Suggs would try to start something. He didn"t. I heard he might have had a dalliance with a cute waitress, but that was mere rumor and I didn"t want to turn my quaint romantic fantasy into a disappointment. Better to maintain the memory of a fun flirtation and not let it get messy.
That decision was probably smart, too, because Madness liked us and before they left town they invited the Go-Go"s to open for them on their UK tour that spring and summer. We jumped at the opportunity.
We knew going to the UK was one of the necessary ingredients on the way to success. It gave U.S. bands credibility. We saved for months before we could even think about affording to get there, but the prospect of touring the UK inspired one of the Go-Go"s most creative and prolific phases. During the first three months of 1980, we played at least every other week in L.A. and San Francisco, and Jane and Charlotte, separately and together, went on a writing tear that produced "How Much More," "l.u.s.t to Love," and "We Got the Beat," which Charlotte wrote in about two minutes while watching a rerun of the old TV series The Twilight Zone.
I loved those songs the first time I heard them and thought they were going to be hits. They sounded even better when Paul Wexler, the son of Atlantic Records cofounder Jerry Wexler, helped us record a four-song EP so we would have something to sell when we went overseas.
We flew to London in April, which was on schedule, but only after Ginger, showing more dedication than her job as manager required, sold everything she had, including her Mercedes, to make sure we could get overseas. Once there, we faced another issue, namely figuring out where to stay.
We arrived without a predetermined destination. We didn"t have a travel agent and couldn"t afford nice hotels. Those days were far off and merely a fantasy then. We crammed into a couple small and cheap hotel rooms while Ginger frantically searched for a home base. After a few days, she managed to rent a shabby but charming five-bedroom house in Belsize Park.
We turned the house into a crash pad for girls. Besides the eight of us (the band, Ginger, and our two roadies, Connie and Lydia), we sublet a room to some models from Los Angeles, a girl in the Belle Stars, and another from a local punk band. Everyone shared a bedroom, except for Lydia, who lucked into a single when her roommate, Connie, went back to the States.
Lydia occasionally made extra dough by renting her room to those of us who wanted, or needed, privacy for the night. Boys were always prowling around the house, but we didn"t have money to do anything. It was not fun being broke. Even beer was a luxury. When we toured with Madness, we waited for them to finish their preshow dinner and then dug through the trash for the sc.r.a.ps they threw out.
I still managed to gain thirty pounds over the next two months thanks to the Nutella I smeared on white bread every morning. And the beer and booze I drank every day when the entire city seemed to hit the pub. The good times often carried over to the house, which seemed to turn into party central. Big surprise, right? It was a house full of girls.
There was one particular party that was memorable because it got out of hand when all of London--from skinheads to celebrities--seemed to come. I don"t know how it happened, but well over a hundred people showed up and the crowd spilled out onto the street. I saw Ozzy Osbourne and tennis star Ilie Nastase, and since we didn"t know either of them, I wouldn"t have believed it was actually them if I hadn"t read about it later in one of the London papers.
In addition to the celebrities, we invited all types and were unaware that you didn"t mix punks, skinheads, and rockabilly boys. But they all converged at our house and after enough beer they beat the c.r.a.p out of one another. We woke up the next day and found the house trashed. It looked like a battlefield.
Little did we know it was like a warm-up for our tour. We played rough clubs across Northern England, including Leeds, Newcastle, Coventry, and Liverpool. The conditions were difficult and trying. The weather was dreary and we were broke, lonely, exhausted, and uncomfortable. Worse, we had to deal with the hard-core skinheads at the clubs where we played. They got drunk, fought, and taunted us as we performed.
Apparently that"s what they did. They were young, angry neo-n.a.z.i extremists who hated everyone, including us--and that was before we played the first song. Once they saw we were five little girls from Los Angeles, they yelled vile things and called us terrible names. They spit on us too. They called it "gobbing." I later read that the practice began at a d.a.m.ned concert when someone threw a beer at Rat Scabies, and he grabbed the guy and spit in his face. I also heard it may have originated with the s.e.x Pistols.
Regardless, gobbing caught on--and it caught us by surprise. Keep in mind that the clubs we were playing were more like large rooms in a bar, or next to the bar. The stages were slightly elevated platforms, and the audience was a few feet away. They may as well have been part of the show, and with their gobbing, they were.
They ran up to the stage, coughed up a wad of spit, and hocked it at us. It was unnerving, and getting hit with spit was downright gross. I never saw the gobs coming, but I felt my stomach turn after they hit. There were stories about performers getting sick after being hit in the eye or accidently swallowing someone else"s spit. We came offstage covered in snot, and I cried afterward, as did the other girls.
On the bright side, though, Stiff Records--the prestigious label that launched Elvis Costello, the d.a.m.ned, the Pogues, and Nick Lowe--released "We Got the Beat" as a single in the UK. They did it as a favor to Madness, but we didn"t care how it got done. On May 9, the label issued a press release that touted us as "5 girls from Hollywood aged 19 through 21, who play as good as they look."
"We Got the Beat" took off in the clubs and became an underground dance hit. Suddenly the Go-Go"s were making a splash. The Specials asked us to record background vocals for them, and we were nominated for Most Improved Band at the Club 88 Awards. We finished up our stay in London with a June show at the Emba.s.sy club that inspired a writer for Sounds magazine to observe we "broke down the barriers of music biz supercooldom to the extent that people more accustomed to posing were actually moved to shake bits of their bodies in time with the music."
He praised "We Got the Beat," "Automatic," and "Tonight." "Doing their thang each night in a motley collection of mini-skirts, Doc Martens and what looked like a job-lot of footless tights, they gave the impression that the five of them could have been thrown together as much by their unconventional [for L.A.] looks and non-conformist fashion tastes as by any shared interest in music ... But the point is, it all seemed disarmingly natural and uncontrived--the looks and the music."
He went on to praise our musicianship, especially Gina "for keeping the set so tight and powerful," and added that Jane, Charlotte, and I deserved "top marks for the best and most consistent unison singing I"ve heard outside a studio automatic-double-tracking machine."
It was a positive end to a long, hard trip. In a short time, we had grown up, toughened up and accomplished more than we expected--indeed, more than we knew.
Our homecoming gig at the Starwood was an instant sellout. While we had been overseas, Rodney had talked about the Go-Go"s as if we were stars in London, and he played "We Got the Beat" until it caught on here, too. As a result, lines for our show wrapped around the block. Our shows had always been crowded, but this was insane. We gave an inspired performance to the hometown crowd that included many friends and some of our earliest fans.
Two weeks later, we flew to New York for shows at the Mudd Club. It was our first time playing in the city and another sign that the Go-Go"s were gaining some serious buzz. Like London, New York was home to many of the bands we admired, among them the Ramones, Blondie, and the New York Dolls. We wanted to do well.
It was a hot, humid, and terribly uncomfortable summer day when we arrived. It felt like the hot air was coming straight up off the asphalt and then sticking to our skin. After renting a truck for our equipment, we didn"t have any money for a hotel, so Ginger arranged for all of us to share an apartment in the Village. Then we got there and found it didn"t have any running water or working plumbing.
After some frantic, p.i.s.sed-off calls to Mudd Club management, Ginger got several of us placed at the bartender"s apartment and a couple of us were farmed out to other employees. Once onstage, we forgot all about our makeshift accomodations. New York Times music critic Robert Palmer praised our opening show and said we played "tighter, more kinetic rock and roll than most all-male bands," adding, "They have an original, intelligent perspective on the rock and roll tradition and their place in it."
We partied the same way offstage. The first couple nights in New York were typical of the Go-Go"s, full of wild, reckless, carefree fun--and then I got out of control. After our second show at Danceteria, I got drunker than I had ever been in my life and had to be carried outside. I projectile-vomited all the way back to the place where we were staying and I stayed in bed for two days with a hangover that still ranks as the worst of my life.
After impressing all the right people, we returned home with a lot of heat and momentum. All the labels knew about us, and I am positive we would have been signed right away or perhaps even earlier if we had had a guy or two in the band, especially as a lead singer. Joe Smith, the head of Capitol Records at the time, personally told us that even though he adored us, he couldn"t sign the Go-Go"s because no female band had a track record worth investing in.
Yet we were the cool band in town and execs and A&R men from all the labels came to our shows that summer, including a big one in August at the Whisky with Oingo Boingo and the Surf Punks. We were also filmed for Urgh! A Music War, a British doc.u.mentary on punk and new wave bands that featured Joan Jett, the Dead Kennedys, the Police, XTC, Devo, UB40, and Echo & the Bunnymen, among the who"s who.
As I recall, we were shot performing "We Got the Beat" in the back of a truck as it cruised down Sunset. I wore a red Chinese dress and weighed about 175 pounds--excess baggage from London and New York. At the time, Ginger was offering all of us ten dollars for every pound we lost.
Miles Copeland, the founder of IRS Records, was working on the movie. At thirty-six, he was a music-industry powerhouse and visionary who had started his label when none of the established companies would sign the Police, which he managed. His younger brother Stewart was the group"s drummer, too. Now IRS was also home to the Buzz-c.o.c.ks, the Dead Kennedys, the Cramps, R.E.M., and Oingo Boingo.
We sensed that Miles was going to sign us. He had been sniffing around the band for a long time. Ginger had been in discussions with him off and on. We liked him. But as we wondered when it might happen, other questions about the band took precedence.
eight.
GOOD FOR GONE.
THE CLOSEST I came to any kind of normalcy was that fall when Connie and I shared an apartment on Hollywood Boulevard and I worked in the photo department at Peterson Publishing. For some reason, my boss, Jack Cook, tolerated me coming in late, hungover, and with purple hair. He asked about the band with seemingly genuine interest and ignored me when I was working out details with clubs instead of answering the phones.
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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.ses and big, lush bee-stung lips. n.o.body 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 heads.p.a.ce. 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 b.i.t.c.hed 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 subst.i.tute 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 hepat.i.tis A. It was another sign that she wasn"t taking care of herself. We had to go to a clinic and get hepat.i.tis 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 ba.s.s. 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 alb.u.m, 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 c.o.ke 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 alb.u.m and I think he had the same feeling the rest of us did--that it was going to be great.
nine.
LET"S HAVE A PARTY.
PER MILES"S DECREE, we made arrangements to record our alb.u.m 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.
One day I got a package with a half gram in it and later that night I went with Kathy to the Mudd Club, where we were having a good time when John Belushi sidled up alongside us. John was one of my favorite comedians, and he was an equally big fan of the Go-Go"s. He had seen us play the previous December at the Whisky and partied with us a bit backstage afterward. After Kathy and I traded h.e.l.los with him and explained why we were in New York, I asked if he wanted a hit of my c.o.ke.
Because of his reaction, I almost felt like I had insulted him. First his eyes widened, then he pulled Kathy and me close so we could hear him better, and then he proceeded to give us a stern lecture on the evils of drug use, fame, and the sycophant-filled world of show business. I was shocked. I felt kind of embarra.s.sed and stupid for having offered him c.o.ke.
A week later, the phone in my hotel room rang at one in the morning. It was John. He said he was in the lobby and asked if he could come up. I said, "Sure, we"re up." A moment later, I let him in and then stood back, shocked, as he blew past me like a blast of wind and circled the room. He was wild-eyed and obviously wired. He took a huge vial of c.o.ke out of his pocket, dumped it on his hand, and looked at me and Kathy and the other girls with the face of a toxic teddy bear.
"Do you want some?" he asked.
We knew John had serious issues with drugs. If we hadn"t known, we certainly saw them laid out in thick, messy lines on our dining room table. We obviously weren"t Girl Scouts, but he was in a different league, and it scared us. We declined his offer to get high, and we said no when he invited us out to hit the clubs. None of us felt comfortable being part of that craziness.
After he left, I turned to the girls and said, "Didn"t he just lecture us about not doing drugs and avoiding that whole scene?"
It was strange and stranger still in retrospect. John left our place and eventually found a cabdriver who drove him around for a couple of days as he hit clubs and late-night clubs and G.o.d knows where else.
If it wasn"t the start of his rapid decline, it was part of it. I could tell he was in trouble.
That said, our producers, Rob Freeman and Richard Gottehrer, had their hands full with us. We were either drinking and partying in the studio or hungover from the night before. Kathy and I went to clubs every night and stayed out until all hours. When the clubs closed around two A.M., we rounded up whoever was left and went to the after-hours joints, where we sang, played drinking games, and flirted until we crawled out at around eight in the morning.
I don"t even remember when we worked. But we did--and we had fun. We were probably relaxed because we had such a wealth of good material. With what I know now after having recorded so many alb.u.ms, I realize there"s nothing like that first alb.u.m. You have years to work on that material--to write and hone as many songs as you can create--to get rid of the bad ones, perfect the good ones, and treasure the great ones.
We actually had too many songs. One of my favorites, "Fun with Ropes," didn"t end up making the alb.u.m. We left those important choices mainly up to Rob, who had worked with Blondie, and Richard, who had written the pop cla.s.sics "My Boyfriend"s Back" and "I Want Candy" in the sixties. They had taste and knew what they were doing.
The alb.u.m, which I had already t.i.tled Beauty and the Beat, came together pretty easily. I remember everyone having trouble laying down the basic tracks for "We Got the Beat," which we were redoing from the UK version. Everyone"s timing was a little off. We took a break, ordered in pizza, and tried it again. We nailed it on the first take. Food always worked with us.
The alb.u.m"s biggest hit, "Our Lips Are Sealed," was a gem that we"d played for a year. Jane had gotten involved with the Specials" lead singer, Terry Hall, when we"d been in London, but he had a girlfriend. After we left, he sent Jane a letter about their complicated situation. She set some of the lines from that letter to music, added some lyrics of her own (she"s a genius), and voila, she had "Our Lips Are Sealed." I knew it was a hit as soon as I heard it, and I was right. The song only got better the more we played it.
The entire alb.u.m was like a time capsule: "Tonight" captured the vibe of being on Hollywood Boulevard; "l.u.s.t to Love," which Jane wrote, was immediately one of my favorite Go-Go"s songs; "Automatic" was about Jane"s boyfriend Dean, who was in the Rockats; "You Can"t Walk in Your Sleep," a Charlotte and Jane collaboration, was about Jane"s problem with insomnia and occasional tendency to sleepwalk; Kathy brought in the song "Can"t Stop the World," which she had originally intended for the Textones, but it was such a natural for us. Finally, "Skidmarks on My Heart," which I cowrote with Charlotte, was about my brother, who was going through a hard time; my cat; and my first car, the one missing the pa.s.senger side.