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Summary
Summary
The women of the iconic eighties band the Go-Go¿s will always be remembered as they appeared on the back of their debut record: sunny, smiling, each soaking in her own private bubble bath with chocolates and champagne. The photo is a perfect tribute to the fun, irreverent brand of pop music that the Go-Go¿s created, but it also conceals the trials and secret demons that the members of the group--and, in particular, its lead singer, Belinda Carlisle--struggled with on their rise to stardom. Leaving her unstable childhood home at the age of eighteen, Belinda battled serious weight issues, having been teased for her pudginess throughout grade school, and grappled with her confusion about being deserted by her biological father as a child. This talented but misguided teen found solace in the punk rock world that so openly welcomed misfits--even though acceptance had its price. Not long after forming, the Go-Go¿s became queens of the L.A. punk scene--they sold out venues, attracted a fiercely loyal fan base, and outpartied almost every male band they toured with--and in the process kicked down the doors to the all-boys¿ club of eighties rock and roll. With a chart-topping debut album, Belinda found herself launched to international superstardom--and with that fame came more access to A-list parties, and even more alcohol and drugs to fuel Go-Go¿s mania. Inevitably, Belinda began to self-destruct. Lips Unsealed is filled with the wild stories that Belinda Carlisle fans are dying to hear--stories about the band¿s crazy days on tour with acts like the Police and Madness and the fabulous parties and people to whom the Go-Go¿s had exclusive access. But more than that, this candid memoir reveals the gritty flip side to the glitz, as Belinda shares her private struggles with abusive relationships, weight, and self-esteem, and a thirty-year battle with drug and alcohol addiction. This spellbinding and shocking look at her rise, fall, and eventual rebirth as a wife, mother, and sober artist will leave you wistfully fantasizing about the eighties decadence she epitomized, but also cringing at the dark despair hidden behind her charming smile. One of the rare adventures through rock stardom told by a woman, Lips Unsealed is ultimately a love letter to music--to the members of the Go-Go¿s, who¿ve maintained lifelong friendships, and to the beloved husband and son who led Belinda to sobriety--and the story of a life that, though deeply flawed, was, and is still, fully lived.
Author Notes
BELINDA CARLISLE is known not only as the lead singer of the Go-Go's, but also as one of the late-eighties most glamorous adult-pop soloists. Since then, Belinda has released five more albums and continues to tour internationally with botht he Go-Go's and as a solo artist. She divides her time between America and the South of France.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The Go-Go's lead singer who went on to a solo career recounts a remarkable early Cinderella story that morphs into a frank, though at times self-indulgent, story of drug abuse and failure. Hailing from a working-class section of Los Angeles, the eldest daughter of divorced parents, Carlisle struggled early on with shame over her mother's depression and her step-father's drinking problem; teased for her chubbiness, she sought escape from a difficult home and found it in the mid-'70s' burgeoning L.A. punk scene. Steeped in the brash music of Iggy Pop and Queen, crazy about the iconoclastic new look, she and her friends haunted Hollywood clubs while she worked as a hairdresser and secretary. In 1978 she, Jane Wiedlin, and Margot Olaverra came up with the idea of starting their own band, eventually adding Charlotte Caffey and Gina Shock, and within a short time the all-girl Go-Go's had moved from being a novelty to a super-cool pop band with their dance hit, "We Got the Beat." Alongside dizzying stardom came the requisite drug-and-alcohol frenzy, and much of this memoir is a chronicle of one party after another and a list of celebrity who's who. Carlisle writes candidly, and her chronic fear of being exposed as a "fake" is heartfelt and winning. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Erstwhile Go-Go and distaff rock-music icon Carlisle delivers the goods on her battles with substance abuse and life on the road in the band that was a somewhat more organic version of the Runaways. The Go-Go's were the first all-female band to attain a number-one sales ranking with an album of original material played by the band. Although Carlisle's subsequent solo career has now overshadowed her Go-Go's days, at least artistically if not in the public consciousness, much of the fun here is centered on the wild and crazy partying on the road during the Go-Go's commercial ascendance. Social interactions and psychic adventuring with bands such as the Police provide the behind-the-scenes fodder that rock fans love in their stars' memoirs, and the fact that Carlisle also interacted professionally with the likes of Don Henley of the Eagles adds to her recollections. Carlisle continues to make music but has widened her focus, appearing on a BBC cooking show. This warm, well-written bio brings her fan base up to date.--Tribby, Mike Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Pat Benatar and Belinda Carlisle, who aimed at stardom from vastly different directions, reflect on their careers. SO let's assume that if you're reading this, you already know that the first cup ever to run on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggies. The goofy New Wave number was a shot across the bow, the perfect mission statement for the upstart network, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary this summer. O.K., then, smart guy, what was broadcast next-what was MTV's first "regular" video? The answer is "You Better Run" by Pat Benatar, and it's a reminder that for all the valid criticism that MTV received over the years for the ways in which women were represented in music videos, the channel's wide-open programming, especially in its early years, also offered a new opportunity for female musicians. New autobiographies by two of the women who were in perpetual rotation during MTV's first few years are a study in the divergent paths that could lead to rock stardom during the Reagan years. Benatar and Belinda Carlisle, lead singer of the Go-Go's, are such perfect mirror images it's almost cartoonish: New York versus Los Angeles, musical theater versus punk, eyes-on-the-prize ambition versus cocaine-driven excess. If their stories seldom rise above cliché, they are also examples of the fact that things become clichés for a reason, that they are are generally based on some kind of truth, especially in rock 'n' roll. The awkward title of Benatar's "Between a Heart and a Rock Place" gives a sense of the earnest, determined tone found in these pages, and in her songs, for that matter. Born in Brooklyn and raised on blue-collar Long Island, this daughter of two factory workers had to find her own way early. "I was forced to create a sense of independence," she writes, "an emotional armor that helped me protect myself." Singing became her goal, and high school revolved around training for Juilliard and beyond, though an early marriage marked the end of her conservatory plans. After a revelation at - no kidding - a Liza Minnelli concert, Benatar decides to pursue a performing career for real. She can hear the sound she wants; "not someone's idea of how a 'girl' would rock, but the real thing - only sung by a female." A guitarist named Neil Giraldo became the catalyst for this approach, and eventually became her husband as well. Once they found their formula, the hits started raining down - "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," "Love Is a Battlefield," six platinum albums in a row and four Grammy awards. Much of "Between a Heart and a Rock Place" is devoted to Benatar's insistence on remaining a regular person in the face of celebrity. "I've never done anything in my life that would excite a tabloid reporter," she says, even going so far as to label herself "Erma Bombeck with an edge." She seems happy enough, I suppose, though it doesn't feel as if she was ever having much fun. Throughout her career, Benatar remained committed to combating the focus on selling female performers for their sex appeal. "Sexy didn't even occur to me," she says. "I was much more interested in showing how strong-minded I was." When her record company tries to play up her looks, she finds it "offensive but also boring - typical of most men's thinking in postfeminist America" After her popularity begins to wane in the mid-1980s, and she slows things down for a while to raise her family, Benatar concludes that she needs to embrace the digital age and remake herself as, you guessed it, "a brand." To her credit, she has steadily released music and continued to tour, on her own terms, ever since. "While I made a pretty good rock star," she discovers, "I made an even better businesswoman." It's all well imentioned and admirable, but Benatar also includes a telling quotation from another '80s icon, Robin Leach. They were both on Howard Stern's radio show, and after Benatar recounted her family-centered, scandal-free life, Stern suggested booking her for a "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" segment. "She just spent 20 minutes telling you how boring she is," Leach countered. "Why would I do that?" He presumably wouldn't have had the same reaction to Belinda Carlisle, who went from working-class California girl with Top-40 tastes (and a brief fixation on the Manson family) to the heart of the Los Angeles punk scene to the featured spot in the Go-Go's, the first all-female band that wrote and played its own songs ever to hit No. 1 on the album charts. In "Lips Unsealed" (the title is taken from her band's signature hit "Our Lips Are Sealed"), the insecure little girl who "wanted to be Marcia Brady" claims that "my whole life changed the day I came across the cover of Iggy and the Stooges' 'Raw Power.'" Carlisle's punk credentials are strong; as "Dottie Danger," she played in an early version of the notorious, pioneering Germs, and the fledgling Go-Go's opened for the Circle Jerks and Lydia Lunch (though for special occasions, her mom was still sewing her outfits). Carlisle, who is fond of lists of adjectives, writes that those days were "surreal, colorful, vibrant, reckless and irresponsible." As her band acquires a shiny, irresistible pop edge, the singer discovers cocaine; "it always made me feel better no matter what else was bothering me." And from 1981 to 2005, the ups and downs of the Go-Go's, and then Carlisle's solo career after the band broke up, become a backdrop for her history with the drug. Unfortunately, after a while, drug stories get dull. Carlisle is no Nikki Sixx, so while there are some disturbing episodes (a trip through the slums of Rio looking to score), "Lips Unsealed" isn't even a lurid thrill ride, just a reminder of the endless slog of addiction. After moving to the South of France (playing boules with Yves Montand, striking up a friendship with "Fergie," the Duchess of York), Carlisle still finds herself snorting coke in the bathroom of her son's school. She even shows up drunk for the standard rock star moment of redemption - her "Behind the Music" interview. Finally, much to everyone's relief (including the reader's), she gets clean, through a combination of A.A., yoga and, oddly, a consciousness-raising mushroom trip. Her journey, she writes, has been "sad, tough, amazing, stupid, silly and enlightening." And this summer, the Go-Go's attempted, then cancelled the latest in a series of farewell tours (she quotes one writer who cracked, "Not since the Who has a band had a harder time sticking to breakup vows"). "Between a Heart and a Rock Place" and "Lips Unsealed" were no doubt cathartic for the women who wrote them, and you sure want to cheer for survivors like these. But the singer Michael Hutchence of INXS, with whom Carlisle had a brief tour fling, once offered her a revealing insight about the odd relationship between fans and lead singers. "They fantasize about much more than is really there, don't you think?" With Benatar and Carlisle, it's New York vs. Los Angeles, musical theater vs. punk, ambition vs. excess. Alan Light is the director of programming for the public television series "Live From the Artists Den."
Excerpts
Excerpts
One I Think It's Me At eighteen, I worked at the Hilton Hotels Corporation, photocopying papers for eight hours a day. When I wasn't doing that, I was ordering toilet paper for hundreds of hotels. I was bored out of my mind. Making matters worse, I had the world's most hideous boss. He looked for reasons to call me into his office and chew me out. Most -people would've quit, but I didn't care. Besides needing the money, I knew I wasn't going to be there long. I was going to be a rock star. I was absolutely certain of it. I had always been like that: someone who dreamed big and believed those dreams could come true if I kept at them. I probably inherited that from my mom. Raised in Hollywood, Joanne Thompson was the eldest of two children of Roy, a plant manager at the General Motors facility in Van Nuys, and Ruth, a homemaker whose head-turning beauty and dramatic flair had inspired her as a younger woman to pursue movie stardom. When those dreams didn't pan out, she turned into an obsessive fan who read all the gossip magazines and took her daughter to movie premieres where they ogled the stars walking the red carpet. Like my grandmother, my mother was drop-dead gorgeous. Photos of her as a senior at Hollywood High show a redhead with a great figure and big, lively eyes. She was a knockout. I think she could have had a shot at a career in front of the camera if she'd had ambition in that direction. By her own admission, though, she was too naive and shortsighted. She didn't have a plan. "I didn't think about what I wanted to do," my mother once told me when I asked how she had envisioned her life going after high school, adding that she saw herself as Debbie Reynolds and "thought everything would be, or should be, happy, happy, happy. "Then I got married," she continued, "and I found reality." Actually, she found Harold Carlisle, a James Dean look-alike whom she met while still a high school student. He was her dose of reality. He worked at a gas station near the school. Though he was twenty years older than her, she fell in love with him. "I was so stupid," she told me. "He was a bum." They married right after she graduated and on August 17, 1958, less than nine months after she accepted her diploma, she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Belinda. C'est moi! I arrived in the world via special delivery, otherwise known as a C-section. According to my mom, I was too large for her to push out naturally. Apparently size was an issue for me from day one. Two years later, my mom gave birth to a boy, Butch; and two years after him, she had my sister Hope. Even now she doesn't talk much about those early years. From the little she has revealed, she was in over her head as both a wife and a new mother. She's described it as a time when she learned "the tricks of the trade." Translation: Barely out of her teens, she was juggling three small children in a cramped Hollywood apartment, making do without much money, and trying to figure out life with a much older man. According to her, my father wasn't happy about having children. I can sort of understand his position as he was an older man who impregnated a high school girl, married her, and then found himself in a situation he may not have envisioned for himself. Why did two more children follow if he was against having a family? Good question. To this day, my mom is reluctant to speak about those early years. She has too many wounds that are still tender and raw. When I was five and a half, we moved to Thousand Oaks, a fifty-mile drive northwest over the hills from our Hollywood apartment. It got us out of the city and into a fairly rural area with dairy farms and post-Korean War housing developments. Our neighborhood was the low end of working-class and we were among the poorest of the poor, though at my age I didn't know rich from poor. We moved into a small, pink and brown 1950s tract home at the end of a cul-de-sac. The street was lined with trees; I thought it was beautiful. The backyard was a hardscrabble mix of grass and dirt with a cheap metal swing set lodged in the middle that was like an island of fun. The problem was getting to it. My dad had an extremely territorial pet rooster that roamed the yard with an ogre-like temper and threatened us kids whenever we went back there. My dad had a similar temperament. He didn't threaten us, but he left no doubt that he ruled the roost. Even on good days, there was always an undercurrent of tension. I know my parents could barely afford the house, but that was only one of their problems. My mom didn't trust my dad, or his explosive temper. Sadly, I felt the same way after I was literally caught in the middle of one of their more physical arguments, with one of them pulling my legs and the other my arms until it seemed I might split into two pieces. Our move into the Valley coincided with my dad working at the GM plant in Van Nuys, though he didn't last there long before he started a -carpet--cleaning business. I don't know whether he left or was laid off. I remember my mom hand-painting a logo on the side of his van. It was like the christening of an ocean liner because after that he spent most of the time on the road. As part of the change, my mom sought comfort and companionship with the handsome carpenter who lived across the street, Walt Kurczeski. It turned out Walt had his own demons, but I didn't know about them then. At that point, he was my mother's special friend. Many years later, when I asked how their friendship had started, she said, "He was there when I needed him--with marriage or without." All I knew was Walt was at our house whenever my dad wasn't there, which was more often than not. I didn't question the arrangement until one afternoon when I was waiting in front of my house to ride bikes with Eddie, a little Mexican boy who was one of my best friends. He walked up to me looking uncomfortable and announced that he couldn't ride bikes with me that day or any other day. When I asked why, he said his parents didn't want him to play with me anymore. I didn't understand. We played together almost every day. "Why?" I asked. "Because my mom says your mother is bad." My mother was bad? I didn't understand what he meant or why he said such a hurtful thing, and his words left me bleeding from a hundred little wounds. I held back tears as I raced home. I ran into the garage, sat on my bike, and cried while trying to figure out why my friend's mother would've said such a mean thing about my mom. It didn't make sense. My mom was a sweet, shy, young woman. She wasn't bad, and she didn't have the capability of being mean. She fought with my father when he called from the road, but she sounded defensive and usually hung up feeling scared. After a few minutes, I went inside and looked for my mom. She was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I stared at her through a film of tears in my red eyes. I lied and pretended nothing was wrong when she asked if I had been crying. I felt like I would hurt her if I told her that someone thought she was bad, and my instinct was to protect her. She was twenty-five years old. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was wearing a cute dress that she had made herself, as she had most of her clothes, as well as my school outfits. None of that was bad. She liked to watch movies. She also sang around the house, played piano, and clapped when I danced for her. None of that was bad either. At worst, she was troubled. But bad? I could think of only one possibility for Eddie's words--Walt. He was at our house for dinner and often still there in the morning. He was more of a companion to my mom than my father was. I grew used to him being around without really thinking about why he was there. Of course, in retrospect I know why. My mom and dad had split. I don't know if they had officially separated or divorced, but they weren't together anymore. My mom never mentioned it. Walt's presence was assumed. He continued to show up after we moved to Simi Valley, and then to a rental in Reseda, and yet again to an even smaller home in Burbank that was so close to the freeway that I went to sleep and woke up to the sound of cars speeding past. Even after the final move to Burbank, my mother, sister, and I continued to shuttle back and forth between my grandparents' home in Saugus and those of various friends of my mother. Just as we were never given an explanation of Walt's presence, my brother, sister, and I were never told why we were constantly moved around. To this day, if I shut my eyes and think back to that time, I can feel the sense I had of being unsettled and uncertain and of wondering why we couldn't stay at home. It was confusing and chaotic. Maybe this moving around was why, years later, I took to the road so easily--it reminded me of this time in my life. Excerpted from Lips Unsealed: A Memoir by Belinda Carlisle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
