Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (32 page)

“You weren’t this irresponsible when you were recording the first album!”

 

“Come on!” I snapped. “What the fuck, Marie? How can you stand there and give me this speech?” I’d thought that my sister was way hipper than this. I thought that she understood!

 

“You were never this irritable either!” she added.

 

We stared at each other. I didn’t look away; I put my eyes right on hers and held her gaze. She was the first to look away. “I’m just worried about you, is all,” she said finally. “Look, I’m sorry . . . I guess I don’t understand everything that’s going on with you. But I do know that you’re my sister, and I love you and I worry about you. That’s all.”

 

I could see tears welling in her eyes now, and I felt them forming in my own eyes as well. We’d always been connected like that. “You’re so pale,” she said, “and you’re starting to get dark circles under your eyes. You’re my sister, and I love you, okay? It’s my job to worry!”

 

She hugged me tightly, and I hugged her back. We stood there in the darkness, holding on to each other for dear life. My mother and my brother were gone. Sometimes it felt like my father was slipping away from between my fingers, so it was good to hold on to Marie. To know that she was still there. All of the anger was forgotten. A part of me never wanted to loosen my grip on her.

 

“I love you, too, Marie,” I told her, feeling my tears squishing against her cheek. We stayed like that for a moment. “Now,” I whispered after a while, “can I please have the pills back?”

 

A few days later. It was midnight, and I was sitting with Joan outside of Brothers Studio smoking a cigarette. It had been a rough day. We spent an entire evening trying to get the bass line for “I Love Playin’ with Fire” down. The fun was totally gone; it was just hack, hack, hack. Mostly we spent our time getting drunk and making fun of each other. A strange kind of cabin fever had taken hold of us. All of the excitement had drained from the songs as we played them again, again, again until Kim and Earle decided that we’d nailed it. All of the inspiration and the energy of the first album had gone. Queens of Noise was beginning to feel like the Runaways on autopilot.

 

“Joan,” I said as I stubbed out my cigarette, “what would you say if I told you I thought we should all take a break for a while?”

 

Joan gave me a funny look. “I’d say you were nuts. Why?”

 

“Man . . . I dunno. I just don’t think I can handle the pace.”

 

“The pace?” Joan shook her head. “The pace is part of the fun, Cherie! You know that.”

 

“But I’m not having fun! I miss my family. I really miss spending time with them. With everything that’s going on . . . I just feel like they need me. Like I need them. Didn’t you miss your home when we were out on tour?”

 

There was a long silence as Joan considered that one.

 

“Look, Cherie, I guess we come from different worlds. I never had a fancy house in Encino like you did. We had to scrape for everything, all our lives. I mean, yeah, I guess I missed my mom, my brother and sister sometimes. But home? There’s not that much about it worth missing.”

 

I pulled out another cigarette, looked at it for a long time, and then put it back. I had to record vocals later. I needed to pace myself. “I really think that it would be good for all of us to take a break. Everybody’s on edge. I just think we all need to take some time to cool off before the next album comes out.”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Joan said. I could hear anger creeping into her voice. “We’re on the way up, Cherie! You can’t just take a break when you’re a new band, just on the rise. That’s insane! It’s instant death. We’ve worked so hard—if we did that, we’d be over. Finished!”

 

I knew that what Joan said made perfect sense. I just really wished that it didn’t.

 

When I looked into Joan’s eyes, I saw someone who was getting severely pissed off. I saw something else in there, too—a glimmer of fear. When it came right down to it, Joan was the backbone of the group. Sure, there were others who could shout louder, who could stomp their feet harder, but Joan had that certain something that set her apart from the rest of us. I guess she had that elusive “rock-and-roll authority” that Kim was always carrying on about.

 

“What about . . . what about if I took a break? You can sing my songs for a couple of shows. I’m just so . . . so—”

 

“Don’t give me that crap!” she said. “Whether you like it or not—whether we like it or not—the Runaways is all five of us, okay? Even with just one of us missing, we don’t have a band anymore. Don’t you understand?”

 

The bottom line was that I was beginning to think I couldn’t handle the responsibility anymore.

 

“You can yell and scream and deny it all you want,” Joan said coolly, “but if you flake on the Runaways, you know that you’re going to fuck it up for all of us. You’ll kill the band. It’ll be over.”

 

“What about my family?” I pleaded. “I have to think about them! I’ve barely seen them in the past year . . .”

 

“And what about us?” Joan countered. “The Runaways are a family, too. Who sat by your side in the hospital when you were sick, Cherie? I didn’t see your fucking family doing that! Your parents weren’t there. Your sister wasn’t there. It was me.”

 

That silenced me. I remembered the feeling I had when I woke up from the anesthesia and saw that Joan was sitting by my bedside, softly holding my hand. I knew that by far Joan was the closest friend I have ever had. After all, she was one of only five people in the world who could truly understand some of the crazy stuff I was going through right then. I thought of all of the good times, of all of the laughter we had on the first tour. I knew that I couldn’t do this to her. I couldn’t let her down. It simply was not an option. I started to nod my head, and I said, “I’m sorry. Man, I’m just tired. I’m stressed. I’m not going to flake.”

 

“I know.” Joan put her arm around me, and held me close. “We’re making history here,” she said. “Nobody said this was going to be easy. Just remember you can talk to me anytime. Okay?”

 

“Okay.”

 

Joan stood, and stretched. She looked at her watch. “Fuck. It’s almost twelve-thirty. Let’s go see if Jackie has figured out her bass line yet.”

 

“Sure . . .”

 

I got up and Joan opened the door to the building. I smiled at her, and we walked back inside. I could hear the music echoing down the corridor already. I wanted to feel good, I wanted to feel okay, but it was getting harder and harder. I was tired and worried. Once the album was done, we would be back on the road. Then, if Kim got his way, we’d be right back in the studio cutting our next record. I didn’t know when it was going to stop. All I could do was keep showing up, and hope for the best. Who knew, maybe things would change once the second album was done. At the moment it felt as if things couldn’t get any worse, at least . . .

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 21

 

Live in Japan

 

 

 

 

Once the Queens of Noise had been completed, we were put back out on the road immediately to do our second U.S. tour. This time around the venues were bigger, and we flew everywhere. We did huge sold-out shows, and had the likes of Cheap Trick and Tom Petty as our opening acts. When we’d pull into town, we’d hear our songs blasting from the local stations: Mercury was really pushing the album. As well as the glamour of flying around the country and playing big shows, there was also the other side of it all: the quiet moments after the shows, like the time we’d spend washing our stage clothes with Woolite in hotel bathrooms. It was Lita who’d taught us how to do that. Until she intervened, we had been wearing the same sweaty jumpsuits and stage clothes for the entire tour.

 

No sooner had we wrapped up the second U.S. tour than it seemed we were about to leave on our first Japanese tour.

 

The Runaways embarking upon their first Japanese tour was the highlight of my time in the band. Unlike in America, where the press and a large section of the general public could never get over our ages, or shake off the suspicion that somehow the Runaways were some kind of Monkees-type band overseen by Kim Fowley, people really got us in Japan.

 

“Cherry Bomb” was a huge hit, topping the Japanese pop charts. Kim had told us that the reception in Japan was going to be much bigger than it had been in the U.S., but I had to admit that going into it, I was quite nervous. Although the second U.S. tour had passed pretty much without incident, after my experiences in Europe, I feared that another long foreign tour might prove to be the band’s undoing.

 

Before the tour, Kim arranged for a photo shoot for Japanese prepublicity and the glossy tour book, which would be sold at our shows. When he told me that the photographer would be coming to Aunt Evie’s house to do the session, I immediately cross-examined him about the pictures.

 

“Will the other girls be coming over to my house, too?”

 

“No. He’s taking some solo shots.”

 

“But what about the other girls?”

 

“Don’t worry about them. Everybody is having a solo shoot. That’s the way the photographer wants to do it.”

 

I thought that this was strange, but let it go. On the day of the shoot, the photographer had me dressed up in a pretty revealing outfit. It was a much more risqué shoot than anything that an American photographer had attempted with me before, and I remember that it made me feel uncomfortable. I figured that the photographer must know what he was doing. He kept instructing me, in broken English, how to pose.

 

“Move legs . . . like this!” and he would illustrate by moving his hands apart. “Open!”

 

The shoot had been going on for quite some time when my Grandma peeked in on us; she nearly fainted when she saw what I was wearing and how I was posing. Seeing her teenage granddaughter posing like that for some random Japanese photographer really upset her. She came charging in, screaming at the photographer and attacking him with her cane. The guy nearly dropped his camera in surprise, and ended up grabbing his equipment and fleeing the house, with my grandmother in hot pursuit.

 

I laughed it off at the time, but those pictures would definitely come back to haunt me.

 

I knew that the tour had to go well. Tensions in the band were pretty high, and one of the main issues was with Jackie. Her relationship with the others was at an all-time low. Her weakness as a bass player was becoming far too apparent, and there were many discussions about how her playing skills were holding back the band live and on record. Also her attitude drove us all nuts. She would have nothing to do with the rest of us when it came to letting loose and having fun. If she didn’t have her nose stuck in a book, she was indulging in her next favorite pastime: whining.

 

Normally, I consider myself quite a tolerant person. But when you’re in a band that is constantly on tour, other people’s bad habits can quickly become totally unbearable. There was something about Jackie’s voice that really got to me. Listening to it was like having a nail driven into my brain. When she started complaining—which was often—it took on a really gut-wrenching quality.

 

Jackie whined about everything. About our schedule. About the songs. About money. About Kim. About our bad habits. About our drinking. About our drug taking. Sometimes being in the Runaways was a little like taking the wildest school trip ever with some of the baddest girls in high school. Unfortunately, Jackie’s presence was like having the world’s most uptight teacher along for the ride.

 

Also, the tensions between Lita and me were going nowhere. In order to defuse them, we tried to limit our interaction, but of course this was next to impossible on tour. All it took was the slightest thing, and Lita would be shouting and screaming at me, and I had had just about enough of her.

 

On the upside, Scott Anderson was suddenly, and unceremoniously, booted from the Runaways crew. Kim never gave us a reason, and I wasn’t egotistical enough to assume that it was because of how he’d treated me after he’d got me pregnant. We assumed that he’d wanted more money or more control, and we figured that Kim would never have agreed to that. No doubt Scott thought he was irreplaceable. I would have loved to see the look on his face when Kim booted his sorry ass to the curb. I just wish I could have buried my foot up there on his way out. It was a relief to know that I wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore.

 

The Japanese tour lasted for a couple of months. Coming to Japan was our first experience of being treated like real superstars. It was like Beatlemania—Runawaymania, really! We were huge on the radio over there, and had already attracted a devoted and fanatical fan base. Everywhere we went, people stopped to give us beautiful gifts, ask for autographs, and pose for pictures. Our Japanese label spared no expense, and we stayed in only the grandest and most luxurious hotels. It was the only tour we had ever done in which we didn’t have to share rooms: not only that, but the rooms that we had were incredibly extravagant.

 

We were on an immediate high upon arriving in Japan and realizing just what a big deal the Runaways were over there. That high became very short-lived when we got a look at some of the prepublicity that had been going on. The first problem was an article in a prominent music magazine that featured some of the pictures taken at Aunt Evie’s house.