The Og-Ogs... Now here's a tale...

The Masque
... When we were first building the Motels, it was obvious that we needed a full-time rehearsal space. Blocking time at S.I.R was hopeless, way too rich for our East Sunset blood. Renting out a storefront somewhere was also thrown out, we would never pass the credit check. Martha, or one of her friends, hooked us up with Brendan Mullen, who had created the Masque. The Masque was supposed to be a fun, underground hangout for Brendan and his friends to jam music, hang out and have parties. Then it was going to be a club. After the Fire Marshalls made it impossible to stay open as a club, it was then reborn as rehearsal space, with occasional "benefit" shows, to keep the place running. It must be told that this space was directly underneath the Hollywood Boulevard Pussycat XXX Theater. The ceiling had an ominous quality that made it hard to not think about what it must be soaked in. There were lockable rooms all around a central open space, divided by walls that must have been made out of drumskins, because you could hear absolutely everything that was going on in the next room. Which was usually alcohol and speed-fueled punk, with mangled, shrieking, unintelligible, distorted machine-gun vocalizing on top of it all. (This effect was immortalized in the Plugz' droll album cut, "Wordless", which was about 50 seconds of a dead-on impression of what we all heard through those Masque walls, followed by the same exact recording played in reverse -- you could not hear any difference) You couldn't hear yourself play, let alone think. Most bands solved this problem by playing so loud in their rooms that they blotted out any noise from next door. The rent for these slices of heaven was $250 a month. Just to illustrate how broke we were, the two of us could not reliably scrape up $125 apiece each month, so we shared our rehearsal space with Rick Wilder and his Berlin Brats. At $62.50 each per month, we could just about handle it. So Martha owned a pretty decent P.A. to sing through and we set it up in our shared space. Every time we would come in to play, the P.A. would be destroyed, the 'Brats had fried the high frequency drivers. Over and over. I would fix it, replace the parts, they would smoke the drivers again.

The Go-Go's
When we were down to the last pair of driver diaphragms that I could scam, we'd had about enough of the Brats wrecking our gear and trashing the rehearsal room, so we decided to move to the far end of the facility (three rooms down). At first, there was nobody on either side of us and we could actually write and rehearse. (The Screamers became neighbors later, their rather interesting rehearsals came through the wall loud and clear.) But the money was still a problem. So we got new roommates, this girl band called the Go-Go's. They were cute, their hair matched their socks; pink, aqua, green, orange. I recognized Charlotte Caffrey from her previous band, The Eyes, the rest I didn't know. Jane "Drano" Weidin looked really petite and extremely young, but actually was a graduate from Pasadena Art Center, with a degree I think, in fashion design, so that explains their visual impact. Margot was the bass player and she was friendly and outgoing but more of a true punk, she often got drunk, got into fights, black eyes, the whole nine yards. The drummer was Lisa "Car" , lead vocals and dancing was handled by Belinda Carlisle who seemed very Beverly Hills. To share this room, we set up, the P.A. speakers at each end of the narrow, long room. The microphones were lined up right in the middle of the room, our amps pushed against one wall, and the GoGo's equipment on the other wall, facing ours. When it was our turn, we just turned the mics our way, their turn, they spun them around in their direction. They rehearsed early and quit at 8:30, 9:00. We came in late, at 9, and would go till 1 or 2AM. We only saw each other for a few minutes at a time, as they were closing down and we were showing up. The GoGo's were learning on the fly. Except for Charlotte, they had never really played instruments before, they were really struggling. They sounded really bad, I mean not even funny bad, just really bad. About six weeks into this shared arrangement, I got cornered by a couple of GoGo's, "Why do you guys sound so good, and we sound so bad? We practice all the time at home and all the time here." I could hear that they were all in different keys, and nobody was remotely in tune. So what do you tune to? A harmonica? Pitch pipe? Tuning fork? No, they say, we tune to the dots, and we're very careful. Problem was, they were not tuning to each other, and the pitches they ended up at were completely random: F, E-and-a-half, D-molished. I said, no, you have to all tune to the same standard, whipped out a tuning fork from my guitar case, explained how we passed it around so we were all dialed in to the same exact standard. Showed them how the guitar pickup would amplify the tuning fork so you could tune to it, and pass it around... I hung around after and listened through the door, they sounded really good. A few days later at the 9PM changeover, it was Thank You so much for showing us that, we sound a thousand percent better now! For better or worse, I am the guy that finally showed the GoGos how to tune.

Then there was the Lipstick Incident. The GG's showed up at each rehearsal fully dressed, coiffed, and made up. It was a style statement as much as a music project... At first, our P.A. sounded great, punchy, crisp, clear, distinct. As time went on, each week the vocal sound got duller, foggier and more muffled. Even the inexperienced girls noticed it and wondered what was wrong. I checked all the wiring and everything, nothing was wrong. Then I checked the microphones. The screens were totally packed solid with lipstick, completely spackled shutwith lipstick. I took all the mics home, disassembled them, removed the screens and boiled them on the stove until the lipstick melted and floated away, then put them back together and brought them back to rehearsal. Removable Go-Go-shields became the order of the day after that.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, we were able to move out of the Masque and begin rehearsing in professional circumstances thanks to an influx of (borrowed) Capitol Records money, and no longer had that weekly contact with colorful roommates. They very quickly began a curve of improvement that accelerated all the time. Nicole Panter became their manager. At one show at the Arena in Culver City, I was bowled over. I hadn't seen them in a couple of months, and the difference was night and day. They were in tune, they were tight and solid. The new drummer was solid as a rock, they sang harmonies and it was all in time and in tune, and it really rocked. The band at that point were almost an R&B band, they had a killer version of Cool Jerk, a strange artsy thing called Automatic, and the poppy Skidmarks On My Heart. The GoGo's made it for a reason, and it was more than just being cute and bubbly. They had an organic kind of soul to the music that their constant practicing had not extinguished. This Day-Glo button is from that early time when they were just on fire. I liked the Go-Go's.