One afternoon at my Girl Scout meeting when I was ten or eleven, I arrived with my guitar, just as I always had. In the hallway, I took it out and left the case outside the door. I entered the school community room with the guitar slung over my shoulder, next to my badge sash. I had minimal badges, maybe “Cooking” and “Painting.”
At a previous meeting, I had sung to the girls during the “getting to know you” part, to much appreciation. I assumed they would want to hear more, like at every meeting. That would be my spot. Singer. Just like the other girls were good at sewing, first aid, citizenship, social skills. My skill was music.
Midmeeting, after all the formalities, it was time for sharing.
Sharing—the talking kind—was the last thing I felt able to do. I held my guitar close, like a friend, its warm wood and curved body reassuring me I wasn’t alone. I strummed my wooden friend, took a deep breath, and launched into the latest tune my mom had passed down to me, “Long Black Veil.”
She walks these hills, in a long black veil
Visits my grave when the night winds wail . . .
“Stop!” the den mother said.
The room fell silent.
“This is not the time or place for that kind of sharing, entertaining,” she said. “Please put the guitar away.”
My eyes filled with tears as I sheepishly walked out the door. I felt kicked in the stomach and needed a minute. In that moment, not even my guitar could protect me, and it would be years before I learned how to say “Fuck you.” I knew I was supposed to put my guitar back in its case. Instead, I did what I always did when I wanted to feel better. I sat down on the linoleum floor in the hallway and strummed to myself. I found myself singing another song my mom had recently taught me. I almost sang out full voice, mimicking the way my mom had delivered the song, a folky blues with a slight yodel.
Down in the valley, the valley so low,
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
Hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow,
Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.
Roses love sunshine, violets love dew,
Angels in heaven, know I love you.
Just like that, my guitar’s magic powers were returned to me. It didn’t matter that my mom wasn’t with me or if I had an audience or not. There was a special relationship between the music and me that made everything hard a little easier, everything scary a little safer. I sang and I sang, calming myself. And I never went back into that room.
I decided at a very young age, This is who I am: a musician. After learning to play the guitar from my mom when I was ten, I brought it with me everywhere: school show-and-tell, my brief foray into the Girl Scouts. Anywhere I might be required to talk to anyone, I’d bring my guitar. Talking made me nervous, but I loved to sing and play.
* * *
When I was thirteen, I taught myself to play the piano. I loved to play all the minor keys—the black ones—because everything sounded good on them. They had a sorrowful dissonance that matched my moody heart and were easy to make sense of. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I could make it sound like I did. I started writing songs. Coincidentally, this was also around the time my parents decided I was fat and needed diet pills. I remained pudgy, but prolific, fueled by cigarettes and the amphetamines. By the age of fourteen, I was writing a song a day.
I read The Book by Alan Watts, and Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, and was constantly writing in journals about how I was looking for deeper meaning. I wanted to be Laura Nyro or Joni Mitchell. Laura Nyro, mostly, because of her urban, blue-eyed soul sound that reminded me of my first influences, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone. She wailed, almost like she was crying. I wore all black, like her—and like all of the other pudgy Jewish girls who loved her for making them feel like she was expressing just for them.
I banged away on my piano so much that my parents moved it into my room. It felt like a supportive move on their part. Most likely, they just needed a door to shut on all my teen angst. In my purple bedroom, with matching curtains and bedspread, my brown upright and me, I left all else behind. I smoked Marlboro Reds, hidden from sight, smoke blown out the window through a little crack. All I wrote about was boys. It’s embarrassing. I sang the stories of made-up love affairs. These were songs of unrequited love, going from falling madly in love to breaking up in the space of just one verse and chorus.
In high school, especially, music became my personality. I felt hollow and aimless without it, awkward and antisocial. I’d sit on the lawn during lunch and play my guitar and sing rather than socialize. I’d drive my old Chevy Nova to the end of the city, sit on the beach until the sun went down, and sing and strum the same songs over and over, like “Pleasant Street,” an early tune by singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. Or a Crosby, Stills & Nash song, with my buddy Johnny Segal, who years later, through the most bizarre circumstance, became a sponsor of mine in recovery.
By the time I was fifteen, I was in a band. To this day, I don’t know how they found me, but I’m so grateful they did. The guys in the group had already graduated from high school. Still a high school student myself. With my guitar in my hand, I felt confident and right among these older guys. My voice, and my passion for the music they loved too, were my keys to earning my place with them: the bassist, Bob; the guitarist Frank; and the singer-guitarist, Patrick.
I loved all the guys in the band, but I loved Bob the bass player the most. One Saturday afternoon, I think it was at Frank’s house, big, tall, handsome Bob stood close to me. I could feel his breath, feel his backbeat, and his flirtation. We sang on the microphone together, our mouths close, our voices entwined, my knees shaking. As I write this, I feel gooseflesh rising on my arms. It comes back to me, whole.
Music was my key to everything. For me, it was like connecting the dots: an introduction to sexuality. My voice, my heart, my sex—a perfect trine.
My passions: music and guys.
* * *
My friend Rick Fleishman introduced me to the songs of Robert Johnson and stirred in me a deep love for blues music. I’d go to Rick’s house after school, and he’d play me blues records and show me blues guitar chords. There was something in the blues for me that I could finally name: I had the blues.
And Rick didn’t try to tell me that the blues didn’t belong to me. My Depression-era parents had the attitude that I had nothing to complain about because I had a roof over my head and enough food to eat. What they couldn’t understand was the blues went deeper than that, and the blues belonged to everyone who needed it.
Soon I was escaping to a folk, blues, and rock club in Hollywood called the Ash Grove (now the world-famous Improv comedy club). Blues clubs were cool clubs, and so I felt cool just for being there. I’d catch J. B. Hutto and His Hawks, Taj Mahal, and Willie Dixon, a round, happy dude who played a stand-up bass and was like a big teddy bear.
I went to the club frequently with my best friend, Rasma, the hippest chick I knew in high school and my partner in blues love. She was a year older than me, sixteen, and could drive. We’d show up, two white girls from Pacific Palisades High. But we felt like we were right where we belonged. Our love for the music gave us entrance.
Definitely underage, and not at all shy around my newfound heroes, I can remember slammin’ back a few swigs with these guys out of somebody’s brown paper bag of wine in the alleyway behind the club. One night in that alleyway, Willie Dixon and his harmonica player, Big Walter “Shaky” Horton, stumbled upon us, two young girls, smokin’ our Marlboro Reds, trying to get some air after the Chicago Blues All-Stars blew us away.
“Hello, ladies,” said Walter. “Enjoying the show?”
Startled, a little high on reefer, and sweaty, trying to be cool, we answered “Hmmm-huh.”
Big Walter took a swig from that bottle in the paper bag and offered it our way. It was dark, and we must have looked older than we were.
Willie, Cheshire cat grinnin’. “Want some?” said Walter.
The floodgates opened. Raz fawned: “Man, you guys killed it! We are such big fans. ‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby,’ ‘Wang Dang Doodle.’ ”
“You girls like the blues?” asked Big Walter. “Ain’t you girls a little far from home?”
“Oh no,” said Raz. “She sings the blues.” Pointed at me.
I died a little. And took a big swig out of that bag.
Willie laughed. Walter encouraged me to “Hum somethin’.”
“Oh no, not in front of you guys. I mean, you are, ya know, you guys,” I said and died a little more.
For the first time, Willie spoke, kind of grandfatherly, protective, all knowing: “You’ll get there, girl. Just keep doin’ what you love.”
“I love the sad songs,” I said.
“Everybody gets the blues sometimes,” he said. “It’s good to let folks know.”
And just like that, I was gobsmacked.
Always respectful and definitely amused by my fifteen-year-old adoration, these dudes looked out for me. But they didn’t treat me like a kid, so I didn’t really know they were looking out for me. I felt connected and accepted by them. Rasma and I found camaraderie in that bluesy community that drew us in and made us feel right at home.
* * *
Years later, I would become very good friends with Susan and Clifford Antone, owners of Antone’s, the beloved blues club in Austin, Texas. They introduced me to all the greats. I had dinner at their house with Muddy Waters. He was quiet and gentlemanly and so grateful to be embraced by the Antones’ love of blues. There was always a stage for him to play there.
I got on the tour bus with grumpy Albert King. Partied a bit too hard with Bobby “Blue” Bland. Had a short but sweet love affair with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, which I’m sure neither of us can barely remember. After all, it was the early eighties.
I love and am uplifted by blues music. Always will be.
* * *
I straddled the music and drama departments in high school, and I was in school productions. But I never thought it was cool. I was embarrassed by the “drama kids.” They all seemed too shiny. Being in that band my junior year of high school with handsome Bob, the bass player, now, that was where I found my cool.
I wasn’t the lead singer. But I was part of the band. I’d sing some solos, lots of harmonies, tambourines, maracas—shake, shake, shake. I loved being in a band. Still do.
It felt/feels familial, organized, communal, loving, bonding—all the things I longed for from my family.
I had never fit in with a clique.
I had never played on a sports team.
But being in a band, playing music with other people makes me feel connected to the earth.
So when it was time to think about college, I didn’t. I just kept writing songs and hoping that soon I’d have my own band . . . somehow. When I was seventeen, I graduated from high school. That summer, I moved out of my parents’ house.
My father had convinced me to look at a school called Cal Arts in Valencia, California. And when I say convinced, I mean threatened to cut me off financially if I didn’t. A school of conservatory-type programs in theater, dance, music, and visual arts, you didn’t need high SAT scores or an outstanding GPA to get in. You got in by auditioning. I thought it might be cool to be in the music school. My father said he would only allow me (pay for me) to go if I went into the theater program. He clearly saw something in me from all my high school productions that I didn’t see. I figured if I got in, I’d sneak my way into the music school and bootleg classes. I also thought I’d never get in in the first place.
I approached that college audition with no attachments. I had no real desire to study acting. No fear of rejection. My attitude was light and breezy, unencumbered by expectation. Loosey-goosey. I can’t remember what my audition was, but it might have been the dark Elizabeth Proctor that I’d played in The Crucible in high school. Or Lady Macbeth, for which I’d won a high school Shakespeare award. Either way, I didn’t put a lot of effort into it, just recited a monologue I already knew. (Years later, when I was approached to audition for my first serious acting job on a TV show, Mary, starring Mary Tyler Moore, I had the same attitude. Actually more like, “Are you kidding? I’m not even looking for a job as an actor. I’m a musician!” Apparently that approach is gold for me.)
So at age eighteen, I got into the theater department at Cal Arts. I loved parts of it.
Paul Reubens and David Hasselhoff were both in my acting class. Paul was my fantastically colorful best buddy down the hall from me in the dorm. And David was a very sweet guy from the Midwest who was very enthusiastic!
We had an amazing mentor-teacher named Beatrice Manley, and we weaved our way through sense memory, scene study, movement classes—even fencing—for crazy long hours every day. It was intense.
But conservatory was conservatory. They wouldn’t actually let me audit music classes. So, at night, I’d have to make my escape, as much as possible, to the rooms where pianos were tucked away.
I had a roommate, a cello player, who had boyfriends. Plural. They used to have sex in the room when I was there. So I used to jump up in search of an escape. Paul would go with me. We’d smoke pot and find a piano, and I’d bang away on the keys, writing my forlorn, bluesy songs of woe. Paul used to love to sit on the bench beside me and have me sing my songs for him. He was my big fan. Paul’s love and friendship for me was a bridge.
School was all too much for me. Learning the craft of acting involves a lot of things, a process of self-discovery being the biggest requirement: looking deep into your own personal emotional life in order to mine the feelings, and bringing them to bear on the lives of those lurking in the imagination of the playwright or screenwriter. It’s courageous to go deep. I was too young, too veiled, too self-protected, to stand in the middle of myself.
In one sense-memory class, the carpeted classroom was darkened, the shades drawn, and we were to imagine ourselves back inside the womb. (Of course, my mother’s womb had been smoke filled, as with almost all women of her time. So, just like the womb, but sans smoke.)
While the twelve of us were lying on the floor in the fetal position, the teacher verbally guided us all to imagine the warm, cozy, safe feeling of being tucked in tight to our own little wombs. Once safely ensconced, we were to imagine pushing our way out and through. We wormed and wiggled on the floor. We didn’t make noise. We were being reborn.
The point of the exercise was to sharpen our senses; to experience everything for the first time. But I ended up in a fetal position, crying hysterically and frozen because I didn’t want to come out of my womby safe place. I had to be talked down from the exercise. Class had ended, lights came back on, and I was still in a corner in a ball. The world wasn’t the same as that smoke-filled womb. Maybe my lovely mother wasn’t fully equipped to hold her first baby. And this is what the exercise invoked: those early years, real or imagined. Whatever it had brought up, I didn’t like it, and I wanted to stuff it back inside.
Growing up, I had found a way to survive the empty spaces in my family and in myself, to not look too closely at my external or internal circumstances. Acting school started to blow my cover. Open my eyes. Shine a light where I was afraid to go.
I dropped out and went to work.
* * *
I got a gig as a chorus girl and understudy in the Broadway touring company of the rock musical Two Gentlemen of Verona, based on the Shakespeare play, with music by Galt MacDermot, who’d written the music for Hair. I blinked and was in a theater in New York, rehearsing. When I try to recall the experience, I have a sense of complete terror, masked by ballsy bravado fueled by my continued use of diet pills and cigarettes.
It was a rock musical. So in my mind, I was closer to my dream of rock star status than fucking theater school, but it was a stretch. I was still in the theater, which I wasn’t fully down with. Musical theater peeps really weren’t cool. I proudly wore my rock-chick attitude, black clothes and cigs, and just really did my best to not be a part of it.
We actually do end up where we’re supposed to be in this life. At least I have. Being an actor has clearly been my path, and I so desperately didn’t want it to be. Foolish little girl.
Thank God for amphetamines and alcohol at that time in my life. They both gave me courage. In recovery, there is a term: “Act as if.” It’s a tool for getting through shit that feels unbearable. When I heard it, it seemed natural to me. That had been my whole life: “Acting as if” I knew what the fuck I was doing in the world. What the fuck to do onstage in a Broadway show. Even the little things. Socializing. Things that required connection. Intimate things. Making friends. What to wear. What to eat. Who to be. Even now, I’m “acting as if” I know how to write a book.
When I got the part in Two Gents, not only had I been hired to sing and dance from the top tier of the scaffolding that was the set (and I am deathly afraid of heights), but also I was the understudy for one of the leads, which required me to show up for every rehearsal and learn her every move, just in case! I was both enamored and overburdened by the responsibility. I kept wondering, Isn’t she ever going to get sick? I hope she gets sick. Oh fuck, what if she gets sick?
But she never got sick.
Typical for being on the road, once the show had opened, daytime was free time. We never needed to be at the theater until six o’clock for an eight o’clock curtain. About eight months into our nine-month run , we were in San Francisco on a Friday afternoon. I was staying in the apartment of friends of friends from Cal Arts for our two-week stay in SF. So I’m hangin’ out with a few new SF buddies, smokin’ weed, early enough in the day to be bright eyed by six, when I was due at the theater. And the telephone rang.
“Well, tonight’s your night, girl. Finally, after all these months, she’s sick!” the stage manager said with more excitement than I could tolerate.
“Really?” I moaned, feigning identical enthusiasm. “How great.”
In my altered weed state, I’m sure I laughed for a minute and then broke out in a sweat.
After months of my complaining, “This bitch will never go down,” she had.
I didn’t feel as sure-footed as I had imagined I would be, and the pot didn’t help.
But by the time I got onstage, I had sobered up, straight as an arrow. And I felt at home, hitting my marks, knowing my lines, feeling confident, as I always did when I would actually get onstage, amid the make believe of it all. Second nature, as it had always been.
During the countrywide nine-month run with that show, my roommate was another soon-to-be TV star, Joanna Kerns. Blonde, blue eyed, and cheerful, she and I couldn’t have been more like night and day. But I liked her. I felt safe being around someone so wholesome.
She grounded me. Helped me to peel back some of that cool exterior I wore so defiantly.
Joanna came from a sports background, with all the discipline and structure that entails. As much as they were foreign to me, I had a craving for those regimes and preparations. I watched, and learned, out of the corner of my eye.
Because God forbid somebody thinks I don’t know it all. There I am, constantly “acting as if.”
There is no better training for performance than being in a live onstage theatrical production. No television show or movie set I’ve ever been on has required the same amount of focus and commitment that the theater demands. There is no second take on opening night. There is no “Don’t worry, they’ll fix it in the mix.”
I complained about it, but I really liked it.
I liked the focus of the moment, terrifying as it was.
* * *
The fact that Two Gentlemen of Verona was a Tony Award–winning theatrical production somewhat satisfied my dad.
The gig at least helped to upgrade me to second-class citizen in his eyes. A step up from college dropout. I proudly presented my first paycheck to him, hoping to receive a small “Attaboy.” But he just couldn’t help himself. His response was the usual: “Well, that’s great, but then what are you going to do?” I could never really satisfy him. Him, who I have spent my whole life trying to please.
The moment, never fully appreciated.
I suppose my father’s attitude did teach me the benefits of “having a plan” and kept me driving forward. But it also gave me the sense that nothing was ever good enough. It’s taken me years to want and appreciate what I have. Right here, right now. Instead of always thinking that the next thing will be better.
After the touring production ended, in the fall of my twentieth year, I got a job as a singing waitress. There was a restaurant in Santa Monica called the Great American Food and Beverage Co. All the staff had special talents. Magicians, comics, songwriters, poets. The deal was that you would serve the food, or wipe down the table, or bus the dishes, or sling the hash, and then stop everything and perform. You had to audition to get a job there. And no restaurant experience was required. Lucky for me—because I had none.
I turned out to be a for-shit waitress.
Intolerant and clumsy.
But I could sing.
My saving grace was my talent. Once again, as through most of my life, my skill as a performer found me friends and, always, forgiveness. My talent has always gotten me off the hook. I could get your order wrong, spill blue cheese dressing on your lap, whisper under my breath “what an asshole” you were, and then pick up my guitar or go to the piano and sing you an awesome rendition of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” You’d tip me big and forget all about my sloppy, rude behavior. It was like the rest of my life. How I got by.
So I was a singing waitress. Alongside Danny Elfman, who became a dynamo of a composer (he and the other members of his band Oingo Boingo all worked there); Rickie Lee Jones; Matthew Wilder, who went on to produce No Doubt; and many more supertalented folks would rotate through on their way to anywhere else. At least at the Great American, you could still call yourself an artist while waiting tables.
One night in 1975, Gene Simmons from the new band Kiss came to the restaurant after playing a gig as the opening act at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. It was their second tour.
I was their waitress, and Gene decided I was to be his.
When you heard me sing, you’d generally like me. Sometimes want to date me. That was my calling card. Maybe my weight wasn’t as perfect as my dad wanted it to be, or I wasn’t as “book smart” as my Harvard-educated brother, David, whom Dad admired openly. But I could get your attention with my voice. I loved to sing. I knew I was talented. I wanted to feel better about myself, and although I couldn’t always silence my own critical voices, when I sang, they were overtaken.
When Gene saw me in the restaurant that night, before I had sung for him, he was flirting, I could tell. After I’d sung for him, he saw my talent. Then I had two things he liked. A kind of sassy, badass, cute chick and a voice. I took him home with me that night because he was quite persuasive.
At first, I thought Gene was really weird. Nobody knew who Kiss was back then. They just wore a lot of makeup. But he was cute and had a lot of confidence. When he paid attention to me, something inside me bloomed.
The morning after our first night together, Gene came to band practice with me. The band, which I’d recently joined, was a little like the Mamas and the Papas meets the Fifth Dimension. At least, that’s how our eventual record company saw us.
Three girls and two guys: Alan Miles, Jimmy Lott (who, coincidentally, had gone to school with Gene Simmons; it really is a supersmall world), Franny Eisenberg, Carolyn Ray, and me. Alan, Jimmy, and I wrote the material. We had great harmonies, catchy tunes, and Jimmy and I switched off lead vocals. Gene dug it, took us to meet Neil Bogart, president of the label that Kiss was on, Casablanca Records, and Neil signed us. Just like that. On the spot.
So my waitressing job at the Great American manifested itself into my first record deal. It all happened very quickly. As I remember, we sang for Neil in his office on Sunset Boulevard, a swanky setting for us young hippie musicians, and within the month we were in NYC, recording an album with producers Dave Appell and Hank Medress, who’d had an early hit when his band, the Tokens, released “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Before we knew it, the simple tunes that we’d always sung around a piano and an acoustic guitar had been produced. They had production values that we weren’t even sure matched the way we wanted our music to sound. Our bandleader, Alan, tried steering our ship as close to the simple sound our music was intended to have. However, as sometimes happens, the record-making machine overwhelmed him.
We came out with a pretty good record, not without a lot of pushing back (thanks, Dad, for that lesson), trying to remain true to our sound.
The album was called Moon over Brooklyn. We didn’t even have a name for the band at mastering. Release date was swiftly approaching, and nothing seemed to fit.
Neil Bogart came up with the idea of calling us “the Group with No Name.” I thought it was ridiculous, but who was I to argue? I was twenty-one and my dream of making records was coming true.
It’s what I’d always wanted.
It’s what I knew I was supposed to do.
So there we were. As part of the marketing campaign, the label released mysterious ads showing the five of us, just our heads, naked shoulders, with a big question mark under the photo. They were released weekly until the record came out, and then that ridiculous name was revealed with the drop of our first single, “Baby Love (How Could You Leave Me).”
We signed with a manager. We put together a touring band and played promotional gigs, some choice TV spots, including Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and a few local gigs.
We got some airplay. But not much.
The label released another single, “Never You Mind,” a song I cowrote.
We sold a few records, but not enough to warrant making another one for Casablanca.
We were picked up by Elektra Records. Released one single. And then, through a combination of a lack of record sales and band infighting, we split up.
Meanwhile, Gene and I were an off-and-on thing—at least I thought we were.
Gene was only five years older than me, but he seemed like an adult. He was on the straight and narrow. He never smoked pot or even drank alcohol. I’d never met anyone like that in rock ’n’ roll. Or anywhere, actually. He was disciplined—a businessman, really. He understood the record business and what it took to be a success. Everything he did, I knew was right. I so looked up to him.
He was like my focused roommate Joanna during Two Gents, who worked tirelessly toward her goals. A trait I was in awe of and wasn’t able to do, yet.
“You know what? You’re going to be a star someday,” Gene told me once.
“But you know what’s going to fuck you up?” he continued, staring at me with his big brown eyes that I had fallen for, hard. “Men. You have a tendency to give it all up for a guy. Don’t do it.”
Gene had a way of making me feel like I was the only girl in the room and on his mind. Despite the hundreds of Polaroids of other women I eventually found in his New York apartment one afternoon, after he’d flown me in to see him. He was always honest about his love of women. I was never foolish enough to think I was the only one.
Sort of.
At twenty-two, without even realizing I was doing it, I fantasized I would be the exception. It took me years to learn when people tell you who they are, believe them.
Around this time, I’d met Freddie Beckmeier, when he’d come to audition for the touring band of TGWNN. Finally believing that Gene was not my one and only, I started dating Freddie. We quickly became an item. When Freddie asked me to marry him, Gene was still on my mind. So I called him.
“Hey, it’s Katey,” I said, heart in throat. “Freddie asked me to marry him. I’m not sure how to answer. I’ll say no if you want to marry me.”
Gene laughed.
He knew I had to ask, even though I already knew the answer.
There was that book of Polaroids. I finally had to genuinely accept that I wasn’t the only one. And also, that he wasn’t going to let me lose myself in him and jeopardize my future. He’d told me not to give it up for a guy.
And I never did. I heeded his lesson. It was invaluable. No matter how much my relationships struggled or cost me, I never let them stop me. I always kept working.
