Lips Unsealed (6 page)

We went at it with a noisy recklessness and disregard that was so much fun we didn’t care what we sounded like, though we thought we sounded pretty good, or at least good enough. In the spirit of Johnny Rotten, we adopted
noms de punk
. Bobby became Darby Crash. Georg
became Pat Smear. Theresa came up with Lorna Doom. And I chose Dottie Danger.

Why Dottie Danger? It sounded cute and angry at the same time.

Darby and Pat had been down this road before. They’d started a band after being kicked out of high school. They called it Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens—a great name. But when they couldn’t get all those letters on a T-shirt, they renamed themselves the Germs.

We got really into the band as we practiced, picked up some steam, and set our sights on doing something Darby and Pat hadn’t done in their previous incarnation as the Germs—perform a show, a real show at a club.

We didn’t possess anything close to the skill and polish of bands that were headlining clubs in L.A., bands like the Ramones, Blondie, Television, the Quick, and Joan Jett. But we still got booked at the Orpheum Theatre in April 1977. We printed flyers and posted them around town.

However, as the date drew near, I got very sick and was diagnosed with mononucleosis. I had to drop out of the band and move back home with my parents for three months. Becky Barton, another girl from my high school art class, took my place. She called herself Donna Rhia. Hilarious.

I still attended the show. I wouldn’t have missed it even if I had been hospitalized. As I think about it, wearing a hospital gown might have been very punk. Anyway, as I recall, about eight people showed up to hear the band, which was typical of hard-core punk shows at the time. They drew fans who were early adapters and very plugged in or friends of the band. People didn’t just casually go check out a punk band, not one like the Germs.

You had to
want
to see Darby.

Among all his screaming and histrionics, he stuck the microphone in a jar of peanut butter and covered his body in red licorice. As Pat recalled, they were thrown off the stage after five minutes.

But we thought that was a huge success. The band had played in public! We felt validated and real. The Germs were considered legit and later on were regarded as L.A.’s first homegrown punk band. I had been
disappointed that I wasn’t able to participate as originally planned. I was also bummed about living at home again. I seemed to have regressed.

Little did I know I was about to rev up.

After recovering from mono, I stayed connected to the Germs as their publicist, which meant I put flyers up in record stores. I also announced the band before shows and stood off to the side of the stage, handing Darby his peanut butter, licorice, and salad dressing. I wished there had been a place for me, but another opportunity arose when my friend Connie Clarksville called and asked if I wanted to sing backup for Black Randy and the Metrosquad.

Someone had dropped out and they needed a fill-in. I was glad to help, and even happier when I found out I could take my place onstage wearing a dashiki and a beehive wig. It was the best dress-up party I’d ever been invited to. Black Randy’s show was like a circus, and part of the performance was the assemblage of this crazy horde of musicians, singers, and dancers, all of whom contributed in some way to his reworking of James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” as well as funny and funky originals he wrote about drugs, prostitutes, and whatever else crossed his mind. He had one song about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Randy was an acquired taste, both brilliant and self-destructive. Like Darby, he did heroin, which I didn’t like being around. Drugs, like the geographical divides that made for Hollywood punks, beach punks, and South Bay punks, created their own culture, look, and rituals. From what I experienced, there were two basic groups: those who did heroin and those who were into dropping acid and partying. The junkies were dark, violent, and scary. Those who preferred acid, like me, were more sociable, fun, and interested in a good time.

And I had a good time. Once I was healthy again, I moved out of my parents’ house and went back to Hollywood. Without my own place, I relied on friends letting me crash on their couches or in most cases, their floors. I didn’t care where I slept as much as I did about getting into hot shows featuring the Plugz, the Deadbeats, and the Screamers.
In July, Devo played at the Starwood, and the Ohio art school grads were so good they subsequently ended up being the house band at the Whisky.

The Masque emerged as the center of L.A.’s punk scene. It was literally an underground club—a hole-in-the-wall basement located beneath the Pussycat adult theater. By the time it closed in 1979, the little stage featured X, the Weirdos, the Germs, the Dils, and almost every other local punk band of note. Equally famous were its concrete walls, which were covered in graffiti that many considered made it one of the great, if not sacred, shrines to the origins of the punk movement.

The Roxy and Whisky were still popular, as was the Starwood, but the bands that played those clubs were by and large big, or on their way up. The Masque was a big cold room filled with weirdos, misfits, and iconoclasts. If you were a punk, you fit into one of those categories, or you simply checked “all of the above.” I was one of the regulars and notable for the way my close-cropped hair changed colors almost as often as the club changed bands.

Part of the fun I had was being able to dress up in whatever kind of outfit I thought about putting together. I preferred avant garde designers like Kenzo, but if I managed to splurge occasionally at Fred Segal or Neo 80, one of the few punk stores, it usually left me flat broke, and then I relied on my mom to make me clothes for work or I scrounged through thrift stores. I had an eye, though, so everything worked for me—or so I thought. I remember wearing a paisley dress and two-toned cowboy boots to work and then changing into a fifties-style prom dress with torn stockings and stilettos. I famously showed up once at a party wearing a Hefty trash bag.

I often topped off my getup with a faux-diamond-encrusted tiara. Why not step into the role of punk princess? I thought.

No sooner did I do that than a prince came into my life—Karlos Kaballeros. Karlos was the drummer for the Dickies, a band whose music I loved. He was also my type—dark, handsome, and Latin. I knew of him and the band before, but we actually met one night at a party in the Hollywood Hills. He thought he was laying a cool line on me (and he was) when he said I reminded him of a punk Kim Novak.
Hearing that, I immediately acted out the sultry scene from the movie
Picnic
when Kim clapped her hands and swiveled her hips in a slow dance that put William Holden under her spell.

It had the same effect on Karlos. He became my first real boyfriend, my first romantic boyfriend, too. He was also my first rock star. The Dickies were on the verge of being signed to a major record label, and that made them hot stuff around town. Despite the buzz, though, they were still as broke as everyone else. Karlos was like me in that he didn’t have a place of his own. After the parties were over the two of us would curl up together on friends’ floor spaces or couches.

We had a pretty bohemian romance. We were broke, rarely sober, and always on the go. Our lives were about music. We went to shows, found parties, and made a few trips to San Francisco for concerts at Mabuhay Gardens, or the Fab Mab as everyone called it, in the city’s rather skeezy North Beach district. We ate at Johnny’s Steakhouse on Hollywood Boulevard, flicked our cigs as we walked down the Strip, and shared bottles of cheap wine along with our innermost dreams until we passed out on each other.

After a couple months together, I sensed something strange going on with Karlos. It was a subtle change that made me think he wasn’t being forthright with me about our relationship. I didn’t say anything, but one night when we were meeting at the Whisky, I saw him walk in and got a sense that he was going to break up with me. And strangely enough, he did.

He found me in the club, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and started to make small talk. I asked if something was bothering him, and after stammering for a moment, he said something along the lines of “I’m not good enough for you.” I understood where that was going and thought it was a pathetically weak way of telling me that he had found someone else. Regardless, I was crushed. When I asked what was behind his decision, if there was someone else or something else, he said there was nothing to discuss.

I saw him a few nights later at a club. He was with another guy and they were about to leave on their motorcycles. For a moment, I thought about going over to them and having some words with Karlos. But, as
hard as it was, I decided to leave it. Whatever I said wouldn’t make me feel better. He didn’t want me anymore.

I had a hard time for months. Everyplace I went reminded me of him—or of us. I cried as I rode the bus to and from work; the city seemed so cold, empty, and lonely. I remember bursting into tears when I heard Rod Stewart’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest.”

Four or five years went by before I saw Karlos again. I was in the VIP balcony at the Starwood, checking out Mötley Crüe, when some guy began giving me a very hard time. We exchanged words and suddenly he cocked his arm to hit me. I saw it happening in slow motion, the way I had years earlier when my car flipped over on the freeway. Then from out of nowhere Karlos appeared, blocked the guy’s arm, and beat the crap out of him in my defense.

I was extremely grateful, slightly embarrassed, and pleased to see that he still cared.

MOOCHING A PLACE to sleep every night got old. I reconnected with Theresa, and we rented an apartment in the Canterbury, a large, run-down apartment building from the thirties on Cherokee. It was a terrible neighborhood, but only a block from the Masque, which was why, aside from it being cheap, it seemed like everyone we knew lived in the building.

If someone had blown up the Canterbury, and God knows someone might have tried, most of Hollywood’s punk scene would have been destroyed. I heard rumors the Canterbury’s landlord was also a pimp and oversaw a theft ring. True or not, he was a dodgy guy—but perfect as the ringmaster for the characters who called the Canterbury home.

All the punks had apartments throughout the building, including my friend Connie, who had gotten me into Black Randy. She was also a former beauty school student and sold drinks at the Masque. She had lived at the Canterbury for years and liked to say she predated the punks, having moved in when the renters were merely drag queens and pimps.

Connie gave haircuts to anyone who wanted one and boasted about having hundreds of clients. Clients? To me, they were weirdos like myself who wandered into her apartment. Later, she was a roadie for the Go-Go’s. I always thought she was a riot. Once when we were bored, she pushed me down Sunset in a wheelchair while I pretended to be spastic. The more people we unnerved, the funnier we thought it was.

Alice Bag was another major force of feminine creativity and vision who also sang backup with Black Randy and went on to lead her own bodacious but short-lived group, the Bags. She was another one of those
marvels who were incredibly smart, opinionated, and prescient. She knew of music before anyone else did and swore by the Ramones until she heard the Weirdos, who memorably and famously told
Slash
magazine, “We’re not punks. We’re weirdos.”

Alice was among the most committed to music and life on the fringe of art and acceptance. In every era, including the punk era, there are those who get notoriety and those who are just as instrumental and inspiring, if not more so, but for some reason don’t get the fame—Alice was one of those people. We were good friends. We got drunk together pretty frequently, shopped the thrift stores, talked endlessly, and hung out. I also remember making out with her on a bench as we waited for a bus on Vine Street. In those days making out with someone of your own sex was fashionable.

The Canterbury was a great big interconnected stew of crazies devoted to two things, partying and music, though it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. You could stand in the courtyard at almost any time of the day or night and hear different music blasting out of every window—and believe me, that was the least of it.

I was carried out or passed out more times than I can recall. Others were way wilder. I don’t even want to think about the strange bedfellows you would have found if you peeked inside those windows. It was insane, in a great way.

Theresa and I had a studio apartment with a kitchen. It came with a disgustingly dirty and worn plaid sofa—the piece that qualified it as “furnished.” We also shared a Murphy bed. One day, in a burst of inspiration, I set out to paint the bathroom bloodred, but I ran out of steam halfway through and never finished.

I probably went out and never picked the brush up again. I expended more energy making sure I was at all the hot shows, whether the bill was the Screamers, the Ramones, and Blondie or the Weasels, the Bags, the Eyes, and the Quick.

The Germs were also busy and productive that summer and into the fall of 1977, their most notable gigs being at the Whisky in September with the Weirdos and the Bags and then the next month when they opened for Devo and Blondie. I can still be heard on a vintage piece of video on YouTube introducing the band.

The parties that followed the shows were as important to us insiders as the shows themselves. They gave everyone a chance to mingle, talk about the performances, compare what we’d seen and heard to every other band on the planet, and hook up. I was a huge fan of Devo, but I was always intimidated around Mark Mothersbaugh and the other guys. It wasn’t for any reason other than that they were smart college graduates who had a well-thought-out vision, and I feared not understanding whatever it was they were talking about.

I also got a kick out of the Weirdos, especially the Denney brothers, John and Dix, who were fun on-and offstage. But I remember seeing the Stranglers when they rolled into town from the UK and getting a sense from their attitude and apparent aggressiveness that they were probably too much for a carefree party girl like me.