For Your Pleasure

19th August 2010

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Last night I started reading Belinda Carlisle’s tell-all Lips Unsealed. I am always reading books like this. The ones that start out with a boy-crazy, insecure girl-next-door changing her hair, getting new clothes, and then following some more outgoing and rebellious girlfriend (or gay manfriend) down to the Sunset Strip/East Village where she is introduced to yet more ways to change her wardrobe, massive amounts of drugs and loads of rock-n-roll penis. One fateful night, the stars are aligned, and the heroine of the tale realizes that she’s going to be rich, famous, and live a life of passion, creation, and inspiration. She simply wills it into the universe and suddenly, she’s cutting an album or doing Robert Plant in all the hotels of Venice. Of course, the drugs and other perils of fame ravage her mind and soul—but never her beauty— and she struggles to stave off the demons for the next decade or so. She suffers loss in some capacity, but re-emerges stronger, smarter and more gorgeous than ever. The motif never gets tired because it’s constantly reinventing itself through the guise of its protagonist: child-eyed groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres; child-eyed Mick Jagger muse, Marianne Faithfull; child-eyed Harrison/Clapton muse Pattie Boyd; dark-eyed and feral rock-child/ Mapplethorpe muse, Patti Smith; and now Belinda, a child-eyed/feral muse to little girls at home watching their Mtv.

Carlisle isn’t exactly considered a rock icon. Her sophistipop solo efforts, while breezy and free as the summer wind, do not lend themselves to raw, gritty cathartic explosions like Horses or Broken English. Still, unlike her other tell-all contemporaries, Belinda Carlisle was never just rock-n-roll arm candy. She was a frontwoman of a wildly successful all-girl punk band turned Pop turned “You’ll never escape ‘We Got the Beat’ ever in your lifetime no matter how hard you try.” She was friends with Darby Crash and Pat Smear. She had a crew cut and a nasty drug habit, yet she looked as sweet as bubblegum pie. Almost 100 pages in, though, I am still unsure of just what makes Belinda Carlisle’s obligatory “fast times” narrative unique or compelling. I await lurid descriptions of Go-Go’s on the backstage warpath, turning jelly-legged lil’ fan boys into a midnight snack shared by all members and then followed up with a coke-n-lude apertif. While Carlisle promises that havoc was wreaked, she withholds the evidence. Without sordid details, Lips Unsealed promises to be a PG-13 Behind the Music, albeit one with more childhood wounds exposed and superfluous fashion descriptions. If nothing else, I am now familiar with what fabric of pant she bought at Judy’s in the 7th grade.

As I enter the chapter that documents the Go-go’s halcyon days, I know the fall cannot be too far behind. Maybe these subsequent chapters will reveal the goods. I hope for at least one overdose, one affair gone terribly awry because of drugs and/or infidelity, more vivid descriptions of the Go-gos California misfit wardrobe, a lengthy exposition of why Jane Weidlin was the real genius of the group, and at least one allusion to Carlisle’s inner higher power.

Until then, the sounds of Belinda will suffice as a way to drown out my sick need to read about her larger-than-life misfortunes and high-profile sexual conquests.