This is The Motels button and logo.

In 1978, the band was starting to get noticed but we didn't have a logo. Everybody else did. I had been trying to settle on a distinctive and simple design for the band. Something red and black and seductive. We weren't remotely punk, so there was no point in trying to portray ourselves as such. I had a real fetish about red lips in those days. For subversive reasons, I wanted the lips to be full, lush, open, and inviting. And look like the "o" in Motels. After many, many designs, I settled on a pair of lips fitted into a script logo, but I just couldn't produce a good example with my handwriting and skinny lips. Yes, I actually smeared on lipstick and tried to get a usable lip print! Hopeless. I finally invited Martha, bass-playing photog Marvin Rinnig and his girlfriend to come over to my Echo Park apartment to put on red lipstick and kiss pieces of art paper. Everybody did, even us guys. Then I got everybody to start writing "Motels" in script, over and over, page after page until I had literally hundreds of logos and hundreds of lip prints. All the next day, I sifted through the lips and scripts until I found the perfect smack, and the perfect script with the right verve and rhythm and stroke. After all that work and experimenting, the winning lips and the winning script were both from... Martha after all. She was mad that she had trashed her really nice, expensive lipstick, using it for a crayon, "This better be worth it" .

From that point forward, the lips and the handwritten logo went on everything; buttons, T-shirts, our road cases, producer John Carter's glass coffee table, the souvenir keychains... everything.

The original lip print and script is still around, it's stashed in the archives with the other band stuff.

The Motels name lives on - Martha goes out regularly with a current version of the Motels and from all reports they are quite good and Martha is as charismatic as ever.