Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (35 page)

 

“Honey,” Aunt Evie said when I was finished, “what on earth happened?”

 

I shook my head. “I quit the band,” I said. “I can’t take it anymore . . .”

 

“Oh,” Aunt Evie said. “So . . . what now?”

 

“I’m going to cut a solo record. It’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry.”

 

The words sounded so strange coming out of my mouth, but the past few years had been so strange that I barely even noticed it anymore. Without another word, I walked straight to my bedroom, took a quaalude, and collapsed onto the bed before falling into an exhausted, drugged sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 23

 

Beauty’s Only Skin Deep

 

 

 

 

My first solo record, Beauty’s Only Skin Deep, was recorded in a rush, only weeks after I had quit the Runaways. What I’d wanted was a chance to take some time off and actually decide what my next step would be. In the Runaways I constituted a fifth of a band that had a domineering manager who forced most of the big decisions on us while keeping us totally in the dark about everything. Any attempts at influencing Kim’s “vision” were met with threats and insults. Despite being the lead singer of the band, I was expected to shut up and perform, just like everyone else in the Runaways. Having your own opinions or ideas was unacceptable Kim.

 

Kim had no respect for us as artists. He felt he knew what would sell, and felt that he had dominion over us because he had a proven track record. He would constantly go off on long tangents about all of the records he had made. One of his favorite lines was, “When you’ve made as many records as I have, then I’ll listen!”

 

While the Runaways had never achieved the kind of wild success in America that we had in Japan, we still had name recognition. I knew that a solo Cherie Currie record was my best chance to define myself, and put my career on the kind of trajectory that I imagined it should be on. But I would need time—the right sound, the right songs, the right feeling. I didn’t want to rush into anything.

 

It didn’t work out like that.

 

There were contractual obligations, and Kim and I had to deliver a new album for the label right away. That’s what he told me. There was no time for me to go away and write songs, or “find myself,” or any of the other stuff that I needed to do back then. I had to go straight into the studio and start cutting tracks. I can only liken the album to a shotgun marriage: I didn’t want to work with Kim anymore, but in a way, his presence was a comfort. It was what I was used to. It was the mentality that keeps a wife with a violent husband; even though Kim mistreated and demeaned me, the very fact that I had his full attention now was gratifying. Looking back, I can only think that this was a symptom of just how damaged I had been by my experiences in the Runaways. Kim had no interest in managing me over the long term, but we had to pack and deliver one final album together so we could finally end our relationship. It’s no surprise that the album turned out nothing like I had wanted it to.

 

If any phrase sums up most of Beauty’s Only Skin Deep for me, it was the one that Lita tossed at me a lifetime ago when I’d tried out for the Runaways with Suzi Quatro’s “Fever” as my audition song: “middle of the road.”

 

When we went to work on the album, Kim’s attitude of “father knows best” was unrelenting. He played on my love of “MOR” and all of the songs that he brought to me or was having written for the album were in that vein. From the very beginning, I was unhappy with the direction that the record was taking. If I didn’t like the songs—which was the case with most of them—Kim would shut me down. There was no time to argue, he told me. “You’ll have plenty of time to get it right on the next record!”

 

We cut the album at Larrabee Studios on Santa Monica, in West Hollywood. Kim showed up with a bunch of songs from the various songwriters he was managing (just to make sure that he squeezed every last potential cent from the royalties). He had hired an Englishman called David Carr, who was formerly in an English beat group called the Fortunes, to coproduce. He was a nice guy, and a talented keyboardist and singer. He had a nice vocal range, and sang with a slight lisp. Part of his job was to do layers and layers of harmonies. He was patient with me, which was something I wasn’t used to. Some of the sessions were just David and me, and it was nice to be able to relax a little away from all of the madness I associated with Kim. I added lyrics to a few of the tracks. It didn’t matter whether I liked the songs or not: I was expected to just show up and sing.

 

The songs themselves were swamped with syrupy, seventies pop production. I imagined the reaction of those amped-up kids who had been slashing the seats and beating the crap out of each other in the aisles at Runaways shows when they’d get a load of this. At the very least I found something perversely amusing about imagining that.

 

The sessions were quick and uninspired. I had come down with a bug and at times I was recording vocal tracks with a temperature as high as 101. Even Kim seemed more subdued than usual. Any spark, any fire, would flare for a moment, then dissipate just as quickly. Only two songs really stand out on this album for me, each for very different reasons.

 

“Science Fiction Daze” was my favorite. It was the closest I ever came to recording something that really brought me back to my Bowie roots. We bathed the song in trippy Moog synthesizers, and I was really happy with my vocals on that one.

 

The other song was called “Love at First Sight.” Back in Japan, where our fanatical fan base pored over every detail of our private lives, the story about me having a twin sister had proved endlessly fascinating. People just couldn’t believe that Cherie Currie, the wild-child singer of the Runaways, could have an identical twin sister. Never one to miss an opportunity for hype, Kim Fowley started feeding the Japanese press stories that there was no twin, and that the whole thing was a rumor. Then he would send out a conflicting story that Marie was real, and we were going to play some shows in Japan together. By the time he was done, there was a hysterical anticipation for me to return to prove once and for all whether there really were two Currie sisters. “Love at First Sight” would be the song that we performed together.

 

At first I was resistant. Again, it felt like I was being led around by the nose. I loved my sister, and I knew that my success had been hard on her. I also knew that more than anything she longed for a similar success. Although Marie would never, ever admit this to me, I’d heard via Paul that sometimes she pretended to be me, and even signed autographs as me. Marie wanted to sing, she wanted to act, and instead she was watching from the sidelines as I lived out her fantasies. It was easy to imagine how her long-ago decision to tell Kim Fowley to go get bent was eating away at her.

 

But if I recorded this song with her, what then? I sure as hell wasn’t willing to jump from one compromised situation like the Runaways into another. But unless this one song somehow kick-started a solo career for Marie, what would happen? Either she’d have to go back to doing what she was doing, or we would have to become some kind of double act. Neither of these options seemed like the right thing. However, with the studio clock ticking, I agreed to cutting the track. I felt I owed my sister that much.

 

“This will go over huge in Japan!” Kim told me. “You said you wanted to go back, didn’t you?”

 

“Of course. I loved it there.”

 

“This is a good move. It will cause an instant scandal back there. It will mean huge press coverage, and big record sales. And all you have to do is sing a song with your sister. How hard can that be?”

 

The song was a fairly pedestrian midtempo rock number, which had a little bit of a “sixties” feel to it, with plenty of opportunity for vocal harmonizing. We cut it in a day. Once Marie showed up in the studio, I was glad I had agreed to sing with her: she seemed so happy, so at home in the studio, and she really made me proud. The song came out sounding pretty good and then Kim went to work booking the two of us on a publicity tour of Japan to perform it to an audience that was already hysterical with anticipation.

 

Once the album was cut, it was rushed to market. We briefly shot a single promotional video, and Mercury didn’t even bother sending me out on the road. It was pushed out into record stores with zero promotion, and quickly sank without a trace. I suppose it’s something of a cult record now. I still get contacted by fans once in a while who discover it, and really enjoy it. Looking back, I can see more positives about it these days, but at the time I considered Beauty’s Only Skin Deep a failure. However, Kim was right about one thing: the promotional tour of Japan was a hit.

 

Marie and I were flown over there for two weeks to do interviews and lip-synch to the song a few times. The atmosphere between Marie and me quickly turned sour. I was pissed off that I was having to do my first solo tour with my sister in tow, and after the first half-dozen interviews the main thrust of which was questions along the lines of “Will you be recording more records with your sister?” I started getting belligerent.

 

“No,” I told interviewer after interviewer, “this is a onetime-only thing. I need to figure out where I want to go first.”

 

Of course, this didn’t make Marie feel good. She would be sitting on the couch next to me, an interviewer’s microphone shoved into her face, having to listen to her twin sister saying that as soon as we got back to the United States, she would be dumped. As every answer was translated into Japanese, the implication of my words was not lost on Marie: as soon as we were back in the United States, she would return to her old life while I’d go on to record more albums. In short, the whole idea blew up in my face in the exact way that I feared it would at the start. Marie agreed to recording this song as a onetime-only thing, and then resented me because I’d insisted that it really was a onetime-only thing. I could see her point. If the roles had been reversed, I would have been hurt and disappointed, too.

 

But what else could I do? I wasn’t about to give up my one shot at being a solo artist, and the Runaways still haunted me. I missed Joan and Sandy and wondered what they were doing. When their new album, Waitin’ for the Night, came out, I couldn’t even listen to it. It was too painful. Putting that part of my history behind me was incredibly hard. If they’d asked me to come back, I would have. I’d always felt that all the band really needed was a break, some time to assess where we were heading, and maybe a little time off to look after ourselves. But, it seemed they were doing just fine without me, and of course, that hurt a lot, too.

 

Despite the flurry of press interest, and the hysteria of the audiences when we’d do a public appearance together, Beauty’s Only Skin Deep was only marginally more successful in Japan than it was here in the States. We broke that first Runaways album by touring relentlessly. With this record, the songs were lackluster, neither Kim nor I really gave a shit, and Mercury barely promoted it. It was doomed from the start.

 

The best thing that Beauty’s Only Skin Deep did for my career was to free me from my management contract with Kim Fowley. I was finally in control of my own destiny. At least, that’s what I thought in the beginning. After Marie and I returned from Japan, I was ready to finally undergo that period of soul-searching and healing that I had longed for since quitting the Runaways. No more being told what to do by my management, by the record label, by anyone. I was ready to step out on my own.

 

That was the plan. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 24

 

One Hundred Ways to Fry a Brain

 

 

 

 

I was seventeen years old. I was out of the Runaways, and out of control. I had one solo album under my belt that had flown very much under the radar, but now at least I was a free agent. No more Runaways and no more Kim. It was only after quitting the band that I could look back on that period with any kind of perspective. In my head, I likened my time working with Kim to being sucked up in the vortex of a tornado: at fifteen years old, that chance meeting with Kim Fowley and Joan Jett had ripped me away from my regular, suburban childhood and deposited me, two years later, beaten, bruised, and confused, on the other side of fame. Sure, I was still well known, and I had three albums to show for it. Now I was Cherie Currie, ex–lead singer of the rock supergroup the Runaways, and solo artist. Once Beauty’s Only Skin Deep had come out, I finally felt that I could try to regroup and focus on what it was that I really wanted to do with myself. But first I wanted to have some fun. And my idea of having fun involved a lot of drugs.

 

My existence became a dizzying roller-coaster ride of uppers and downers. Tuinals, sleepers, or quaaludes when I needed to feel mellow. Cocaine when I needed a lift. I wasn’t much of a drinker, though. I thought, why spend all that time drinking when all I had to do was pop a pill for the same effect? Except now, without road managers and “nurses” around me twenty-four seven doling out the drugs, I had to pay for all the substances I ingested. My use of coke and pills was getting heavy. As well as feeling worn out, I was bitter: after three Runaways albums and one solo album for Mercury, people assumed that I was doing pretty well financially. Actually, nothing was further from the truth. The Runaways had been an adventure for sure, but it hadn’t given me any kind of financial stability. If I thought about it too much, it would eat me alive. So instead of thinking, I got high. With no source of income, and a mere pittance earned from my time with the Runaways, I found myself doing things for money that the old Cherie would never have done in a million years.