I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  Richard wanted me to be his muse, no one else’s. I didn’t like the idea of a Svengali/muse thing. I wasn’t a muse. That seemed so passive and uninvolved. It was Richard who named my third album Muse. I was amused to be a muse, and that was something else to try on, but it wasn’t important for me to be one. I wanted to collaborate with artists on an equal footing. I was interested in being a part of the process, not simply a decoration to be manipulated.

  Jean-Paul’s method of enchantment went deeper and was more aggressive. Richard softened and sweetened me. For a while, looking at the disco sleeves, and the way Richard colored me green, navy blue, charcoal, you wouldn’t have known what color I was. Jean-Paul dug into me, bit into me, scratched and stretched me, and made very clear what the color of my skin was. His work with me was more a continuation of where Issey Miyake and Eiko Ishioka had been, exploring bodies, faces, settings, material, theater in the search for the sublime point—working in imaginary places, in cities not yet invented, with clothing not yet dreamed up, for impossible bodies, for a time that was neither daylight nor night, dream nor real, a twilight zone.

  That was where I saw myself. Always in between, on the way somewhere else. My head in the moment, but other parts of myself strewn across centuries and countries. I had always left myself open to movement and change. I didn’t want to go the way of Sy and Eileen, into a glitter-ball land more Liza and Bette. I didn’t want to boogie on down for the rest of my life.

  Disco was squeezing me into a room that was looking tackier and tackier, and I was worried I was going to be trapped. Meeting Jean-Paul and Chris Blackwell helped me follow my own route, into an elsewhere I felt more at home in. I knew I was hurting Sy and Eileen, but what they offered was not what I wanted. I had my own purpose and wanted to try other doors, other roads, other recipes.

  Disco had been an accident, but within a couple of years I had released my three disco albums—Portfolio, Fame, and Muse—produced by Tom Moulton. They were becoming his vision more than mine. They all followed the same formula—the thumping dance, the showboating Broadway, some inevitable French spice, the glossy, tightly arranged Philly frills. There were songs and medleys that were souvenirs of the Studio 54 era, and they had titles that referred to my modeling career and to my association with artists and photographers. I was becoming the decoration, and I was getting bored with that.

  They were the soundtrack to the party I was having, the clubs I was singing at, and they formed an informal trilogy. There was nowhere else to go, though, and disco was now the most loathed form of music—the essential racism, sexism, and homophobia of the white rock audience had forced it out of the way, which was easier to do when it became so crass and commercial.

  I had done my Studio 54 time. There were other clubs where the music was still about change and forward movement, which was actually about putting dancers deep into the moment. The Paradise Garage opened in SoHo in 1977 on the second floor of an old concrete parking garage, when disco was bending toward campness and stupidity. It was built on the utopian blueprint of the Loft. The kind of music that followed, best known as house, started at the Garage, and so it was also known as garage.

  At first, Paradise Garage was only a space with a great, towering sound system and those loyal nomads looking for a place where the experiments that had led to disco were still evolving. By 1980, it became more of an experience, possessing the atmosphere people remember, with Zen chill-out rooms, intimate lounge areas, and a movie theater, but without the dressing up and the celebrity-saturated, cocaine 54 thing. I was partial to that—I could take it all on—but the purity of the Garage connected me more to my mind-expanding acid trips. There were still parties, but on a different planet from the ones at Studio 54.

  The Garage was members only, and you had to be interviewed to become a member. That was a bit strange, having to pass a test to prove how free-spirited you were, but it seemed to work. There would be a thousand, two thousand people in there—by the 1980s even more—and for a while most of them knew each other’s names.

  There was no alcohol, so no need for a license, and the club could stay open as long as it wanted—its best hours were four in the morning until midday. They’d shut the doors at about 6 A.M., when there’d be a shift in the sound of the music. You’d go to bed around ten at night, get up at four in the morning, go to the Garage, and leave at noon, refreshed to the soul.

  In my case, after I’d been going for a few years, I would call Keith Haring and turn up with him. Andy had introduced us. We were always the last to leave. The Garage was heaven for Keith. It changed his life. He went every Saturday night for three or four years. He always said he was open to everything and spent his life “gathering information,” which is something I identified with. He gathered a lot of information, about himself and others, at the Garage. He developed the dancing outlines he became famous for by watching the dancers, hands up in the air, banging up against each other, life bursting around them, dancing until they dropped. Outside, his aliens, babies, penises, televisions, and barking dogs were sprawled on the walls, Dumpsters, and subway ads throughout the East Village.

  We’d go to Fire Island for tea parties in the afternoon. We were very easy together. Some people can be very draining. Like bloodsuckers. Keith was very relaxed and positive. He had this childlike innocence, which suited me. We were all individuals with similar sensibilities who were connected in various ways, as though it was always meant to be.

  If I had any personal appearances to do I would call Keith and tell him, I’m doing something tomorrow, and we would prepare something for the show really, really fast. He liked to try things out. I always liked each show to be visually different. I didn’t like to repeat myself. It got around that what I was doing was a one-off, which made it special. And it kept me interested. It’s boring to do the same thing over and over, especially because these club shows were very short. People would come to the shows dressing like me from an earlier show, so you would look out and see lots of me.

  He would paint my naked body like it was a canvas, and always differently. Keith always said that as soon as he saw me, he knew my body would be the ultimate body to paint. What Jean-Paul would do to me in a photograph, externalizing my spirit, Keith did to my actual skin and body. They both understood that the truly beautiful is always bizarre.

  I remember once when he painted me for a photograph, I went where I was going next with the paint still on. If I could, I would go out wearing nothing but his paint. Covered with Haring—his light and joy, his swoops and strokes, his handwriting—I would be dressed perfectly. As he painted me, I could feel myself change, become someone else, like my body, not my mind, was on an acid trip.

  The Garage was a cult, like the church, but unrestricted and nonjudgmental. It became a cliché to say so, but you felt it at the time. You’d be hit with the Holy Spirit. And if you go there and you are not going to dance, get the fuck out. You had to be ready to sweat your ass off. Then you’d get close to God.

  It was dark. There was no distracting light show. It was all about the music. It wasn’t a place you went to be seen or to search out the famous. If Mick Jagger or Diana Ross turned up, they were one of the crowd. You went to experience this brilliant new music. Music was the thing, the funk, soul, R & B, and edgy rock that had become disco, the best disco, and where disco was heading, into hip-hop, and the first foundations of house. The love and peace that were in the air, both in a lot of the songs they played, and the togetherness in the room, were a continuation of those anti-Vietnam protest songs people like Curtis Mayfield would sing and Roland Kirk would blow in the early ’70s, before there was disco.

  You entered by walking along an extended ramp, like a fashion-show walkway, and that was such a thrill, your heart would be pounding like you were about to enter a fantasy. You were about to become surreal—it made you realize how great music played in the right surroundings is in itself a surreal act.

  I had my baby shower at the Garage
when I was pregnant with Paulo. Debbie Harry of Blondie and Andy Warhol threw it for me. That’s showing you normal. (Paulo and Keith Haring would also become very close; to Paulo, he was Uncle Keith. They would draw together, like it was the most fun you could have in the world.) The papers called it the first disco baby shower, and Paulo was being talked about as “the first disco baby.” I did an interview with a magazine, Jet: “I want a boy—family tradition, boys first. It should be surrounded by music.” The magazine said I was hoping for natural childbirth and breast-feeding “if I don’t chicken out first.” I was dressed up as a deviant toy soldier, carried onto the stage by my troops on a pedestal, with the audience of lusty Garage boys screaming, “Show us the stomach, honey.” I then sang “Get Down on Your Knees.” The Garage was the kind of place where this kind of drama could happen—a world unto itself embedded in but separate from the surrounding city, where the party was more important than business, and the vibe reached higher than the skyscrapers.

  The DJ booth at the Garage was very difficult to get to, and it was guarded. That was the pulpit, ten feet off the ground. It was the one place where you could get a drink. There was spiked punch in a couple of bowls in the early days, to give you a lift, but officially no alcohol. I liked hanging out in the DJ booths. Among a writhing, dedicated sea of people blissed out on beat, it was the only place where you could get away for a while. It was like an island of calm in the middle of a stormy sea. Not many people were allowed in the booths. Frankie Crocker was allowed in, on one of his visits to check out new sounds for his radio show.

  I would sit on a stool in the booth and have a glass of champagne and watch main Garage DJ and club conceptualist Larry Levan at work, dropping the needle onto the wax with such precision, playing with the volume, bass, treble, measuring the silence between certain tracks to the millionth of a second. There was no time to say hello. You didn’t want to mess with his concentration. He wouldn’t let you anyway. It was as though he were on a high wire as he structured his set and wrote his history of music. Drop in, take it all in, feel his power and mastery. It was such a privilege. Watching him was like being right next to Hendrix as he played the guitar on stage.

  After a night there, it was like you had been worshipping, but there was no preaching. They called it the Church because a great Saturday night would end on Sunday. People would be going home from the Garage as people went to church, and the two audiences would cross over. I remember once on a Sunday around midday, downtown, no one really around, and there was someone walking down Hudson Street totally naked. Not drunk, but nude. Very erect and proud looking. And you just knew he had been to the Garage. He had that look on his face. No clothes. A sense of peace after a night of the best kind of noise. He was thinking, Nothing bad will ever happen to me. He would never need protecting.

  I wanted my music to be played in these places. I wanted to perform in front of that crowd like I had in front of the Studio 54 and Le Palace people. For that to happen there had to be an incredible change in how the music sounded.

  At his house high up in Jamaica, as the light drifts off into a radiant gloom and the crickets perform all around us, sounding like they’re on quite a trip, Chris Blackwell remembers how we went about making the change.

  I loved “La Vie en Rose.” The intro went on forever, it used a drum machine, a gentle groove, building the drama, and it was brilliantly produced. It still sounds great today, nearly forty years later. That was an early sign of the movement into technology.

  He didn’t want you in the studio until the track was done, and that was the only problem, really, in how Tom Moulton worked. It was a new way of making records where the artist had minimal contribution to how the track was built; in fact, the singer was low down on the priority [list] of the producer, just something to add at the last minute to give the track some identity. He distanced you from being involved in your own music, and I think by [his] not involving you and your personality, the tracks had less and less impact. There was no sense of your own identity on your own records, because you were not allowed to be a part of the creative process, even if in terms of the music reacting to your presence and your energy.

  This was the problem with disco ultimately, that it became more and more anonymous despite it being all about performance and visuals. Those three disco albums represented that—how a very strong character is somehow ignored by the music. Your music needed to be all about Grace Jones, but it was ultimately more about the producer, who used Grace Jones as the face, the person who [would] promote the music, but not the spirit. The first one was so strong, and it put you in a great position, but the next ones tended to copy that. I decided I wanted to produce the next album, because I thought it was an interesting problem to work out.

  I thought we were in a bit of trouble after the third album. It didn’t sell very well, and I thought that you were very strong, but the music was getting weaker, and it wasn’t who you were. I thought, Well, part of the trip is that you are scary. When people thought about you, as a performer, in your photographs, the whole image they had of you, there is a shock feeling. I thought, My God, you’re Jamaican, whether people know it or not, so let’s give you a rock-steady Jamaican bass and drum. I didn’t want to lose what Tom Moulton had done on “La Vie en Rose,” but I wanted it to move on into what was happening to music because of the development of electronics and now that punk and disco had become more sophisticated and knowing.

  At that time we had Black Uhuru on Island, and first of all, the name is great, and it has bloody, mysterious connotations—the Mau Mau tribe used to daub the word uhuru in blood on the house of those they murdered, and the fighting insignia of the Mau Mau terrorists is long braids smeared with blood. The name Black Uhuru was very scary because of that, the black reinforces the uhuru, and you get a very powerful feeling of what they are going to sound like. Then you’d see Sly [Dunbar], Robbie [Shakespeare], Mikey Rose, and Duckie Simpson walk into a room, and my God, you’d run for the hills.

  Their music sounded like their name, and I thought it would be great to get Sly and Robbie to give that kind of edge to you. There was something about you that was more from that world than from disco. More a member of the Uhuru tribe than the disco tribe. We’d recently made a record with Marianne Faithfull, Broken English, with this great, screaming guitar; I thought that was something to get into the new mix, a solid sense of the midrange, because reggae never had an interesting midrange. It was still the early days of computer music, but I wanted to find someone to boost the midrange.

  Wally Badarou was recommended to me as doing something interesting in that area, and it was exactly what we needed in terms of creating a Grace Jones sound. His DNA, his Parisian/African roots, were perfect. When he was young in West Africa, he listened to James Brown, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Congolese rumba, Afro-Cuban cha-cha, early salsa, but also Hendrix and [Carlos] Santana, and he was experimenting with electronics. He’d played on M’s “Pop Music” and later on Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love”; he’d played on a few anonymous disco records, which he saw as funk for the masses. He didn’t look down on them. He was deeply passionate about the new studio toys that were emerging at the time. He was a multi-instrumentalist who saw the synthesizer as a way of opening up the number of instruments he could play. It was new territory; there were no scripts to follow, bringing synth music into other styles, but Wally had the right musical instincts.

  I was after a mix of the very Jamaican, a very organic groove, with something technologically brand-new. I reached out to Wally, and he was a genius to have in what became a group known as Compass Point All Stars, because we recorded at Compass Point Studios, which I had opened in Nassau in the Bahamas, with a core of Sly and Robbie, Wally, Mikey, and Sticky Thompson. Then there was Barry Reynolds, the guitarist from Marianne Faithfull’s record, which gave the group a rock dimension. There were different histories and styles—the reggae rhythm, the rock energy, and the new electronic elemen
t coming from someone with an African background and yet a Euro touch. Wally had worked on disco records in Paris, so there was something coming from that Parisian side—you had a continuity, a link with those disco records and the French chanteuse element. Later, as part of the All Stars, there was Tyrone Downie, who’d played keyboards with Bob Marley and the Wailers and Burning Spear.

  I wrote “My Jamaican Guy” about Tyrone, because when we were in the Bahamas recording I remember him in the swimming pool, and he came out of the water with his dreadlocks flashing in the sun. As he came out of the water, he shook his dreadlocks like a dog would to dry off, and the water sprayed around him like sparks flying, and I thought of the idea, my Jamaican guy. We were not having an affair; it was an impression of something around me. I was watching things as a voyeur, being excited by something unexpected. It doesn’t mean it was about something real that I was involved in. I was using my imagination.

  The Compass Point All Stars were an experiment in finding a Grace Jones sound. They were all working on various projects for Chris elsewhere, and he brought them together. Chris took all my different worlds and stuck them all together to create the Compass Point All Stars—the erotic French side, the acid-tripping rock ’n’ roller, the Jamaican drum and bass, the androgynous, android electronics—it was magical, this assembly of pieces that fitted together. We would try out the mixes at the Garage, which had the best sound and most sophisticated system in the city, and therefore the world, at the time.

  Lots of labels would use it as a testing ground. Once a mix sounded great through Larry’s speakers, you knew you were onto something. He treated the speakers like they were his orchestra and he was the conductor. He put a lot of work and time into making sure the speakers/orchestra were perfect for the room, his ears, that they could deliver awesomely loud volume without distortion, and that they lost nothing of the detail when a complex, exciting multitrack studio mix was played in club conditions. There was an art to all of this, as well as a science, and also something that is about magic. It’s voodoo. Once those Compass Point mixes sounded right coming out of the Garage speakers, we knew we’d cracked it.