(Crown Publishers)

www.crownpublishing.com

BY MIKE SHANLEY

After the Go-Go's got their first taste of fame with the release of Beauty and the Beat, Belinda Carlisle realized she couldn't go home again to the ratty Los Angeles punk scene that gave birth to her band. "My old haunts and old friends weren't that accepting; no one wanted to have anything to do with me," she recalls in her memoir Lips Unsealed (Crown Publishers). "I didn't feel like I had changed, but everyone else did."

Yet a few pages earlier, she recounts a slot opening for the Rolling Stones - a major coup for any band on an independent label, let alone an all-female one in 1981 - by tossing off a mere two paragraphs about how great it was to be able to say they played that bill, and how she didn't get to meet Mick Jagger. And a few pages after that boo-hoo about no one wanting to see her, she talks about traveling back and forth between Japan and California to be with a boyfriend, as if it were a bus trip across town. If she hadn't changed, she had no sense of appreciation for the fame she received. 

Sometimes it's hard to step back and get a good perspective on the successes and spoils of your fame. But in order to win back fans, and complete the Behind the Music story arc, it's always a good idea to beat yourself up a little, not just for the excessive drug use but for the privilege afforded by the success. In other words, a musician looks a lot more sympathetic and forgivable if they piss everything away and hit the street before they finally wise up and get clean. That never comes across in Lips Unsealed. Of course, Carlisle spends years hooked on cocaine, jeopardizing her band's initial run and numerous reunions.  But it's hard to feel complete sympathy for her when her day-to-day life with her wealthy husband and their houses in France and the U.S. are always there for her, even when she gets too whacked out to appreciate them.

Carlisle grew up in turbulent household - abandoned by her father, abused by her step-father. During high school she stumbled across the first wave of the L.A. punk scene when she and her friend Theresa Ryan became Dottie Danger and Lorna Doom, respectively, in the first lineup of the Germs. She didn't last too long with that band and formed the Go-Go's who, she brags from the get-go, were going to be "rich and famous."

Her prediction was accurate, since the band became the first all-female act to write and play an album that reached Number One on the Billboard charts. But the way she tells the story makes all the difference. The band discovers their unprecedented Number One triumph right as they're mulling over the death of John Belushi, an acquaintance and cocaine user. Suddenly the comedian's overdose doesn't matter anymore and the girls are drinking champagne. She moans about old friends ignoring her, yet Carlisle never even mentions the death of Germs singer Darby Crash (and gets his birth name wrong in his introduction). She repeats ad nauseum how she can't understand why people would want to see her perform and how terrified she is of being discovered as a poser. Not to dispute those feelings of insecurity, but they get hard to take while she lives in her ivory tower.

The self-doubt continues throughout the Go-Go's three albums and into her hugely successful solo career.  Carlisle meets her wealthy husband Morgan Mason along the way, and they move from L.A. to Southern France - with their nanny in tow, of course - when she can't stand the U.S. anymore. A year or so later - time passes in vague, unidentifiable increments in the book - they try London instead.

On top of the cost of moving, which never seems to be an issue, Carlisle had what she describes as a $300-a-day cocaine habit (not adjusted for inflation). She always seems to find the money to buy more, even when her albums flop or her husband seems ready to divorce her.

Like all rock memoirs, there is of course the happy ending. It comes after so many tales of almost getting clean, or lying and saying she's clean, that it almost reads like a story whose punchline was known from the beginning. Surprisingly, Carlisle's post-detox portion of the book has more wisdom and sounds more genuine than the narrative up to that point, which was sorely lacking in a greater perspective.

Lips Unsealed can be a fun summer read, especially at the beach. Her habit of ending stories with rhetorical questions notwithstanding ("What was I doing here? Who was I?"), Carlisle knows how to put pen to paper coherently, unlike some musicians. But sometimes she seems to miss the big picture, much like the rich and famous type of person she set out to be.