by Jane Wiedlin
Living at the Canterbury
Fighting off the roaches
Like being in a dormitory
Till rental due approaches
Don’t know where we’ll get the cash
Spent it all on drink
I don’t know, but sometimes
It’s better not to think
And sometimes I don’t like to think
Living at the Canterbury
My friends think I’m a fool
Living at the Canterbury
It was 1976, and I’d just started college at Los Angeles Trade Tech, a cheap-ass school in downtown LA where kids from “the ghetto” went to learn a trade.
I wanted to be a fashion designer and desperately wanted to go to a chic, trendy school like Parsons, Otis, or FIDM. In typical style, my midwestern parents informed me that art school was a damn waste of their good money and if I truly wanted to be a fashion designer, all I really needed to learn was the trade and the tech. I was already plenty creative, so off to Trade Tech I went. I became, after growing up in the very white, very middle-class San Fernando Valley, a minority. Even though I wanted to be somewhere fancy and artsy, I loved college. After the loathed high school, it was a relief to finally be taking classes, learning things I was actually interested in, like pattern making, sketching, and sewing. In high school I’d had good friends, a small tight-knit group of kids called the Hollywooders because of our obsession with “glitter rock.” We lived for David Bowie, Roxy Music, T-Rex, and Sparks. The rest of the school (other than the stoners and the geeks, whom we got along with just fine) despised us and called us fags and trash. The jocks and the surfers were particularly antagonistic toward us. Later, in a life-imitates-art moment, hostilities temporarily ceased after Bernie the surfer Romeo fucked Nancy the glam Juliet. If memory serves, the cease-fire was short-lived.
We glitter rockers had our own hangout on a set of steps dubbed the Hollywood Stairs, which was our tiny kingdom (queendom?) at Taft High School. We all rechristened ourselves with “cool” glam names. I was Tiffany Teardrop, and some of my friends were Limor Lovestar, Nicki Northwind, Chelsie Vixen, and Benni Electra. We wore satin and sequins and ridiculous platform shoes. The high point of high school was when Joan Jett (who was already a locally famous up-and-comer) enrolled in our school for a semester. For thrills, on weekends our gang would sneak out and take the bus to Sunset Boulevard to go to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. All the English rock stars visited Rodney (a strange little man who later became a DJ on KROQ) when they were in town, and young girls were served up to them like fresh meat on platters. I never did fuck a rock star, but we met lots of wannabes like Zolar X, Silverhead, and a then-unknown Iggy Pop.
Once, a well-known promoter dragged me into the walk-in cooler in the back of the joint and started rubbing up against me. I remember him complaining about my belt buckle being in the way. In the way of what? I was numb, confused, scared, but just stood there, paralyzed. I was young and inexperienced, but after I went back out to the dance floor and saw the mess on my satin hot pants, I figured it out. Oh, precious youth.
I’d been struggling with severe depression since puberty had hit me like a freight train at the tender age of eleven. In the early seventies a lot of young people (and probably a lot of adults too) were convinced that at any moment nuclear bombs were going to blow the world to smithereens. My conviction that this was true, combined with raging hormones and a brain that was naturally colored blue, made me sweet and sensitive and a huge mess. I was completely convinced that life was utterly pointless. Just before my sixteenth birthday, crushed by the rejection of Ron, a boy at school with an actual David Bowie hairdo, I took three bottles of phenobarbital in an attempt to end it all. My suicide note was a love letter to David Bowie. One of my many brothers discovered me unconscious and I was rushed to a hospital.
I was in a coma for days, and it was feared that I was going to be blind and have kidney damage, but I (obviously) survived. My poor, besieged parents wanted to put me in a loony bin, but the psychiatrist next door (who later turned out to be a wife beater) told them to just get me a good shrink. This was before the days of antidepressants (praise Dog for them!). The two things I remember about my sessions, both solo and group, are, one, the shrink kept trying to get me to admit that I masturbated, and, two, one of the boys in my group therapy was suicidal because his cock was crooked. I never did admit that I masturbated, but I reckon that doctor helped me get through high school alive. Once I escaped high school and moved out of my long-suffering family’s home, I was still depressed as hell, but I was at least finally living the life I wanted. As an aside, it is so wild that I found life so pointless as a teenager, when just a few short years later I would be part of a band that was number one in the charts. You just never know what the future will bring. Painful, yes. Pointless, no.
In late 1976, a few months into college, I was reading the fashion newspaper Women’s Wear Daily when I came upon an article on punk-rock fashion! At this time I was still pretty immersed in the whole glitter-rock thing (which, like punk rock, was equal parts look, music, and attitude). Music was everything to me, though I never dreamed I could actually be in a band. I was going to be a famous rock ‘n’ roll clothing designer. Anyway, that day, looking at the photos of these wild-looking kids on Kings Road in London, I was instantly smitten. Suddenly everything changed for me. I started reading everything I could about punk rock. I started making my own punk-rock clothes and dressing in them, much to the chagrin of my teachers, to whom I’d previously been a pet. I still had my 4.0 grade point average, but now everyone labeled me a nut job. One weekend I visited a store on the Sunset Strip called Granny Takes a Trip. GTAT had been a glitter-rock clothes store for years, but they had started to lean in favor of the new punk-rock style. The Brit running the place liked my stuff (even though he had a lot of good ideas on how to improve my designs, which I ignored) and ordered a bunch of it. I was ecstatic. While I was there another girl came into the shop to hawk her wares, and we got to talking. Her name was Pleasant (I thought it was a fake name but I was wrong), and she was also a former glitter-rock fan. In fact, she had recently met some other kids who were also transitioning from glitter to punk. Kids she’d hung out with while stealing room-service food in the hallways of the Continental Riot (Hyatt) House Hotel. Food that had been eaten by the members of the band Queen! Some of those kids ended up becoming The Germs. Pleasant informed me that punk rock was not just in London; it was in Hollywood too! Well, you coulda knocked me over with a feather. I was so excited! She gave me a flyer to a new club called the Masque. I wanted to be part of something glorious and revolutionary and, most of all, infuriating to grownups. With the death of glam came the birth of punk, and I was all in. Pleasant and I became great pals and had an on-again, off-again fling going. We’d get wasted at parties and slip off to a quiet corner to mess around. It was all good fun, and as David Bowie had taught me, “Bi is best.” (I actually said this to my parents as a teenager! Oh, my poor mom and dad. What they went through with me!) The boys, and then the men, came and went in both our lives, but Pleasant and I are still dear friends nearly 40 years later.
The Masque was in the basement of the Pussycat, a porno theater. You entered through the back alley, down a long set of stairs. It was dark, filthy, and smelly. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. The first show I saw was The Alley Cats and The Controllers. There were about 40 kids there, and I knew right away I’d found my home. I made some friends, including Chloe, a tiny woman who was a wannabe hairdresser and gave me some really revolting hairstyles! Five different colors, four different lengths, all short, of course. Wouldn’t want to be mistaken for a hippie, who I quickly learned were “our” arch enemies. My hair was so wild that when I got a waitressing job at Norm’s Coffee Shop on La Cienega, I would have to wear a wig to work. Norm’s was an old-school Googie-type building, a restaurant frequented by the ancient Jews who lived in the Fairfax district. We served food like liver and onions, and I was frequently rewarded for my hard work with a quarter for a tip. “Here ya go, dearie!” Even then, 25 cents did not make a tip, but most of the patrons were really nice. My bravest act back then was to spit in the food of customers who were mean to me. I’ve always hated bullies. Chloe the fake hairdresser lived with the incredible band The Screamers, who, along with The Weirdos, were arguably the kings of the Hollywood punk scene. The Screamers lived in an old run-down house everyone called the Wilton Hilton. The guys in the band were handsome, sophisticated, and a bit older. They approached music from the art-school angle and were unbelievable live. So intense. So scary. So great. I hung around but was always nervous and shy. These guys were beyond me—and everyone else—in every way, and they knew it. They wrote songs about people like Eva Braun and Twiggy. They were twisted and fabulous. Everyone thought they’d be the breakout stars of our scene, but that is another story.
As I got more and more into the Hollywood punk movement, it got harder and harder to live at home in the Valley. My mom would burst into tears when I’d come home with yet another ridiculous/fabulous hairdo. She even asked me whether I was mentally ill, which was kind of a compliment at the time. After my first suicide attempt at fifteen, my entire family, including, of course, my parents, never spoke of it. Ever. So in retrospect I can see why she was worried about me when I went punk.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I moved out of the Valley and into the Canterbury, a 1920s apartment building at the corner of Cherokee and Yucca, just one block from the Masque. The year was 1977. The Canterbury had previously catered to the influx of starlets in Hollywood’s glamour days, and though it was run down, it was still a fantastic building. It still had the original built-in vanities, huge walk-in closets, and a beautiful-if-decrepit fountain courtyard. I couldn’t afford the $185-a-month rent on my own, so I met a girl also looking for an apartment. Debbie Dub was just returning to California after living in London for a few years. Poor Debbie! I was a selfish, spoiled teenager and immediately took the one bedroom and all the closets, leaving her nothing but the Murphy bed in the living room. I ripped up all the old carpeting and painted everything, including the floorboards, bright white. I was really into surrealism at the time, so nothing nonwhite was allowed into “my” space. I turned one of the huge closets into a sewing room and hauled my enormous industrial antique sewing machine in there, where I continued to make punky clothes. The manager of The Weirdos, my favorite band, actually approached me about designing their stage wear (they always looked like hot/crazy men in their mismatched thrift-store finery), but alas, it didn’t end up happening. Still, I saw The Weirdos (and The Screamers and every other band that formed) dozens of times. I don’t think I slept for years; between school, jobs, and shows, there was no time to sleep, and that was fine with me. During the day, after a brief few hours of sleep the night before, I took crystal meth to stay awake at my job. I worked in a sweatshop factory downtown, where I wrote my punk-rock poetry (later to become lyrics) onto the patterns I was making for mass-produced cheap men’s sportswear.
Pulling up the old carpets left a huge gap around the baseboards in my trashy-chic starlet apartment. That, in turn, created a superhighway for every cockroach in Hollywood to come visit us. It didn’t help that, though I wanted to live in a perfect surreal setting, I was also a teenager. Naturally I was lazy about taking out the garbage. The stockpiled bags of trash in the kitchen created a truly horrendous roach and rat problem that I had no idea how to deal with. So I ignored it. I lived on Top Ramen, Kraft Mac & Cheese, and trail mix in those years, and my “grocery store” was the corner liquor store. I’d save coins to eat, and when I didn’t have enough money, I’d steal food. My apartment had a fire escape outside the kitchen window that I used like a balcony. I liked to sit out on my “balcony,” swigging beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching the hookers ply their wares. It was just the sort of life I pictured when I became a punk rocker. The biggest treat for me and the rest of the gang was saving up our pennies to eat at Johnny’s Steak-house on Hollywood Boulevard, just east of Cherokee Avenue, where the Canterbury was. For $1.99 you could get a real steak dinner with all the fixings. Never mind that the windowsills were covered with flies, dead and alive. It was steak!
I fell in love with Terry very early into my new life. He was deathly white, with huge brown eyes and a shock of dark spiky hair (once he got the right haircut of course). He liked Kerouac and Bukowski. He claimed he was just a fan and didn’t play an instrument. Later it turned out he was actually a fine drummer, and he joined The Bags and then The Gun Club. I invited Terry to move into my Canterbury apartment rent-free, without first asking or consulting Deb Dub, of course. Jesus, I was a dick then! Terry didn’t pay rent and didn’t have a job. At first I didn’t care—it was punk to be unemployed! Later it became an issue, as I made almost nothing and was now working for two. When I meekly asked him to get a job to help pay rent, he dutifully went out and got one. He’d disappear “to work” every day, nine to five. I was so happy to have a working man for a boyfriend. Terry would come home to my all-white-but-filthy flat at night, tie me up, and (consensually) abuse me. “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” It was my first real-life experience with BDSM after having obsessively read Story of O and 9½ Weeks over and over as a teenager. I was a total closet perv, too ashamed to talk about it or admit it. Luckily the punk scene was loaded with BDSM imagery (check out Vivienne Westwood’s early T-shirts!), and Terry really “got” me. I understand now why. Back then so many punk rockers—especially me—were enamored with legendary fifties pinup star Bettie Page. Bettie Page was the undeclared gorgeous queen of my “tribe”: half devil-girl, half angel. Of course I adored her. Still do. Bettie was the perfect physical embodiment of a divided soul. Sadly, my punky-pervy honeymoon with Terry proved to be short-lived. I learned from friends that instead of working, Terry was actually spending his days wandering Hollywood Boulevard, hanging out in the many used-book stores and crappy coffee shops, reading and caffeinating. Looking back on this almost 40 years later, I think this was clever and funny and, of course, very punk rock. At the time, though, I was heartbroken. Sayonara, Terry.
Punks quickly took over the entire Canterbury, and it really was like a dormitory. Doors were left open and unlocked. Girls and boys would be running through the hallways at all hours of the night and day, borrowing guitars, food, booze. A typical night out involved walking 400 feet to a show at the Masque, or possibly some other seedy temporary club location. The audience consisted of the same 100 kids—the scene had grown a lot in a year!—most of whom were in bands themselves. Most times it would just be a night of swapping, kids going from audience to stage then back again. It felt like Our Scene. It was our scene. There was an endless stream of boozing, barfing, dancing, and fucking. As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in a boring middle-class neighborhood, but I was no Pollyanna. I was working to be as good at being bad as I possibly could. Most of the punk kids I knew had been raised Catholic like me. There was just something about that religion that brought out the inner rebel in teenagers. If you grew up in that cult, you had an understood, unspoken frame of reference. We called it Catholic Damage. It made you want to be as bad as possible, all while still being a little bit scared of Hell way deep down inside.
Bands were forming and re-forming faster than you could keep track of. Everyone was welcome, girls included. It was even okay to be gay in the Hollywood punk scene. It was an inclusive scene, centered on art, creativity, and fun rebellion against grownups. By 1978 nearly everyone was in a band, except for a lone few girls. That was how The Go-Go’s formed. Belinda Carlisle lived across the courtyard from me with her best friend, Lorna Doom of The Germs. Belinda was beautiful and glamorous and always perfectly put together, even when she was wearing a trash bag for a dress. She kept her makeup in a cookie tin and made spare money on the foreign currency trading market. How the hell she knew how to do this, I still have no idea.
Eventually it became painfully obvious that you needed no prior knowledge to form a punk band and that we were the only kids left who hadn’t done so. So Belinda, Margot Olavarria (an adorable girl with rainbow-colored hair just back from two years in London), and I decided we were going to be a band too. Hey, why not? We were perfectly capable of being just as incompetent as everyone else. No matter that we didn’t know how to play our instruments—we were going for it! The manager of the Canterbury (who also happened to be some kind of shyster Pentecostal minister) started letting everyone use the basement of the building as a rehearsal room. Soon our little fledgling band was down there too, learning to play our instruments, cranking out fast, loud music, and having a blast. With Belinda living in one apartment and me in another, it only made sense that we’d use the basement, even though it was in no way a safe situation. It was spooky as fuck down there, and Hollywood was a dangerous town in those days. After rehearsing a bit, we would wheel our amps a block down the street to the Masque and play shows to an ever-growing “crowd” of enthusiastic friends/fans. It was so exciting! After a few short months Charlotte Caffey, a real musician, joined our group. Char actually knew how to read music. You may as well have told me she spoke ancient Aramaic, it was so exotic and so impressive. Charlotte and I later became a songwriting team, and to this day I am still in awe of her genius.
After The Go-Go’s formed, things really started heating up in Hollywood. Bands began to perform at real clubs, like the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. This was about as prestigious as it got in those days, and I’ll never forget the night that X was there, playing a two-set sold-out night in 1980. I was there, of course. Everyone was there. X was now the biggest, best band on the scene. In between the two sets Exene discovered that her sister Mirielle had been killed in a car crash on the way to the show. Exene was understandably inconsolable. Nobody knew what to do. Everyone was in shock. John Doe threw a chair through the big plate-glass window of the dressing room, unable to handle his feelings. I remember sitting on the floor in a corner of that dressing room. I wasn’t really a friend; I was too in awe of them to be that. I was just another part of the tribe, and bands didn’t really have private dressing rooms back then. I didn’t know what to do. I was so uncomfortable being in the midst of this insane tragedy. I started cutting myself with a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle and playing with the blood to distract myself from the horror of it all. Later I read an article in the Los Angeles Times in which the journalist talked about that night, mentioning a little punk girl ritualistically cutting herself in a nihilistic way. It was like he was a scientist observing the behavior of some far-flung tribe from the deep jungles of the Amazon. It felt so strange that some total stranger had noticed me as I was doing something meaningless to me. That he’d assigned meaning to what I’d been doing. That I was part of the narrative. X played the second set anyway, and they were more brilliant than ever. I felt like the club was going to burst into flames, the intensity was so great.
Yup, the Canterbury was like a dormitory—a dormitory with heroin, rape, and plenty-loud punk-rock music. A schism, based on drug use, started forming pretty early on. We were all in agreement that nobody was allowed to smoke pot. Pot was for dirty hippies. The Great Punk Divide happened because some of us stuck to booze, pills, speed, and hallucinogens, while others moved on to shooting heroin and dilaudid, a synthetic opiate kids took when they couldn’t score the real thing.
The idea of shooting drugs was really scary to me. I still had a few lines I was afraid to cross, needles being the primary one, though I do remember smoking angel dust one afternoon in the early days. I don’t know why I did it or where I got it, but I got so high, I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I wandered over to the Masque and climbed down the stairs to hide. The guy hired as caretaker there, a Scientologist named Larry, found me in a corner of the basement freaking out. Scientology was a new thing then, and they had their headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard. We used to try to mess with them, taking their tests and lying about everything. It was something to do, a way to pass the time. Anyway, after smoking the dust, I was crying, crumpled up on the filthy floor. Larry the Scientologist held my hand for hours until I came down from the high. Maybe he tried to recruit me; if so, I don’t remember! Either way, it was a kind moment. It did not stop me from being a wild child, but I did stay away from angel dust thereafter.
I remember the excitement in the apartment building one day when it was discovered that the bag lady who we called Miss Conehead had died. Bag ladies were people who, back in the days when the government helped people, lived on SSI, money you could get if you were declared crazy. Miss Conehead had lived in the Canterbury far longer than any of us and was a real character. She always wore a tall, pointy hat and a wimple, like a princess from the Middle Ages—hence her nickname. I thought she looked about a hundred years old, though for all I know she could have been in her fifties. I had a less-than-firm grasp on such things in those days, plus she was crazy. I often wonder if Miss Conehead had been in the building since its heyday, an aspiring starlet who just never caught a break. Anyway, Miss Conehead lay dead in her apartment for days—sad that—when finally the coroner came and took her body away. Her apartment just sat there, untouched, for weeks. Her family had obviously abandoned her long ago. When it became painfully clear that no one was coming to remove her possessions, I snuck in there and stole one of her dresses, a lovely white 1950s sundress that I still own to this day. I can’t bear to part with it, and sometimes I think I’m the only person alive who still remembers her and still thinks about her . . . of course partially because I still feel guilty about stealing that dress. Catholic Damage.
Parties happened nearly nightly at the Canterbury. One night I was at a get-together with my good friend Alice Bag, a girl I’ll call The Vampire, and Shannon, a newer member of the punk tribe who later started the Castration Squad. Alice lived in the Canterbury with her boyfriend, Nickey Beat, the hard-hitting but sweet drummer for The Weirdos. Alice was gorgeous and ferocious, and the lead singer of The Bags. The Vampire had crazy, jacked-up-looking teeth, pointy and menacing. She was volatile and frightening . . . truly frightening. She looked like goth before goth existed. The three girls had recently started a joke girl-gang they called The Pyranas.
That night someone offered me some pills that I, of course, immediately swallowed, no questions asked. We were all drinking cheapo wine, getting drunk as skunks. The Vampire started into this long tirade about how she was really and truly a genuine vampire and that she was the real reincarnation of Drusilla, sister of Caligula. (This next part is told by Alice, because I had blacked out from the pills and wine by then.) Everyone was laughing at her and dared The Vampire to prove her claims. The Vampire got pissed, grabbed my arm, and started sucking on it. I protested feebly, so then, of course, everyone started laughing at me and pounced on me, covering me with bites and hickeys. (Trust me, this was no big thing back then.) Later that night I made my way back to my apartment, still in my zombie blackout, where my boyfriend, Terry Bag, awaited me. Terry was so irate that I’d been “raped” by them (I hadn’t—I’d been pranked punk-rock style, but still) that he spray painted “Pyranas Suck” all over the elevator of the building. He was furious, and I appreciated his gallantry, but I felt more embarrassed than anything by this event, and that was only because I couldn’t remember what actually happened. The big problem then became that Terry was the drummer of The Bags, and The Bags was Alice’s band! So eventually Terry’s outrage at my “assault” morphed into him claiming he was just mad that he hadn’t been there to watch the action go down (bow chicka wow wow). A classic Canterbury Tale.
There were parties for the “regular” kids (my word) and parties for the shooters. Of course, lots of the IV users had come from the same normal background as me, but at some point two paths emerged then diverged. It was sad to see that divide in a scene that was already pretty fucking small. I remember Rob. He came from Arizona and was the cutest, sweetest boy ever, but he got caught up with the shooting crowd and ended up dead. This was a guy who started off looking like the president of the Chess Club and ended up looking like the Walking Dead. I remember Greg, gorgeous and sexy. I had a mad crush on him. We “dated” for a little while, but there was always a strange space between us. He was so secretive. It even turned out that he was seeing Charlotte while he was seeing me! Charlotte and I later wrote the song “He’s So Strange” about him. Go’s before Bro’s.
I didn’t know what Greg’s secret was (heroin) until he ended up dead. Shannon, one of The Pyranas, died in the nineties of AIDS complications, caused by IV drug use. The Vampire was another one of the members of the “other crowd.” She was a real tough broad and mean as hell when cornered. The Vampire had no problem picking a fight with anyone—bikers, cops, she didn’t give a shit. She was fearless. When she got raped one night at the Canterbury, things took an awful turn toward the dark. If that tough-as-nails chick was vulnerable, everyone was.
There were a lot of turning points in the Hollywood punk scene. I always remember when I started feeling like the scene had grown a little too much. When guys from Orange County started showing up, ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. When it went from being female friendly and gay friendly to more testosterone driven. When mock fighting became real fighting. And when people started dying from drugs. Meanwhile The Go-Go’s got more and more (and more) popular. We started getting accused of being sellouts. We started playing places other than Southern California, until finally we weren’t part of the Hollywood scene at all anymore. The scene continued on without us, and the history books erase The Go-Go’s from the chronicles of those days, because it is just too much work to try to imagine how we had ever been a part of it. But we were part of it. I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced what I did, to have been there at the beginning when everything was possible and everyone was welcome. I feel even more lucky to have survived it. It was the time of my life.
a“Living at the Canterbury,” performed by The Go-Go’s, written by Jane Wiedlin.