Sunshine, look at us now

It Girl

Becky Riordan: Everything changed after that night in the Cherry. Not just for her as an artist, but for the music industry.
It put everything in motion.

Calypso: Drake didn't like how much attention I was getting for my cover of his song. He started to feel overshadowed, and he dumped me for it. Just like that. I begged him not to leave me, said I would take my name of the credits. My first creative release- the first piece of music I was even a small part of- and I gave away the credit for a boy.
[Shakes her head angrily]
I stopped performing that song.
He left me anyways.

In December of 1970, a very public breakup occurred between rising it-girl Calypso, and lead singer of 'The Pirates' Drake. Features appeared in Camp Weekly, The Olympia, Gossip Girl, and more. After anouther string of failed flings, mainly with married men and rockstars, she was nicknamed 'The other woman.' A winter cover was released with the headline, "Everyone's favorite groupie, no-one's favorite girl."

Will Solace: We didn't see Calypso around the clubs for a while after that.

Calypso: I think I was sixteen, I didn't have any friends or family, and I was quickly discovering the lovely controlled chaos of pills. I started avoiding clubs on the strip, going to in house party's in rural LA. The pills came with the party's. I liked them, and people kept putting them in my hands.
It wasn't until much to late I realized it was never really controlled.

Rick Riordan: Zoë Nightshade entered the picture in 71. One year before the release of 'Glass Woman'
She didn't know or give a shit about music, and yet lot of the studio production on that record was credited to her- she was the only one Calypso would listen to, and the only one who wouldn't listen to Calypso.

Zoë Nightshade (Activist, Advocate for women in the workplace and equality in pay): When our parents split, they each took a child to the other side of the world. Our mom kept me in Greece, our father took her to California.
So no she wasn't really 'born and raised there' like people like to say. What they really mean is she is a product of 1960s American Rockstars- made up of more whiskey than water.
I love my sister, I support her in everything she does.
It wasn't always that way.

Calypso: Zoë shows up at my doorstep one day in the early 70s.
I was sleeping with Odessys at the time- Gods it sounds crazy now. I was turning sixteen in some odd number of months and I was sleeping with a thirty year old man.

Zoë: She was wearing a white slip dress, golden lace up sandals and a braided headband. Her hair was long and loose. I remember looking at her, seeing purple bags under her eyes and her chapped lips, somehow still so ethereal.
I recognized her from the magazines I read on the plane ride over.
I didn't get the chance to say a single word.
She just opened the door further and let me in.
I assume she knows me, she just let me in with no questions- no hesitation, so I'm sitting here at her dining room table thinking, so father did tell her about me. She must have been shown my picture.
And then she pulls out a bottle of champagne, takes a drink straight from a bottle, and says, "Who the fuck are you anyway?"

Calypso: I got robbed one time because I left the door open overnight. They took my favorite string of pearls and a joint. I was letting anybody and everybody into my house. I wanted company, but not publicity, and that was the way I thought to get it.
[pauses]
People don't like when you ask to many questions, and that because they always have something to hide. But they also live to talk about themselves, and by default they love anyone who will listen. I would listen, I would leave my door wide open and let them in, then I thought they would be ok again.
And when they weren't ok; when they overdosed and died the next week, or kept beating his kids and wife, it wasn't a warning to me.
It wasn't a warning about the path I was going down or the people I was surrounding myself with.
It was a hint that I had failed, that I hadn't given enough of myself. I would try again next time, try harder, stretch myself further.
And they put that shit in the paper.

Rick Riordan: Here's what everyone loved about her. She was ethereal, magnetic in the way that you were drawn to her knowing she was one of a kind.
But quickly, she no longer became something to admire, she became something to possess.
There were a lot of bad people around her

Becky Riordan: It's a dangerous thing to be adored.
Especially for a vulnerable young woman in the seventies.

Zoë: Every gossip column had a feature on her. She hadn't done anything, but people wanted to hear about it.
I wasn't a fan of the California life style, but I saw potential in Cal. I saw opportunity in the platform she could build.

Calypso: a lot of my escapades made it into the hearsay. My reputation got dirty real fast, but that didn't deter people's desire, so I kept climbing and the rags kept writing and the men kept coming and I just got fucking famous for drinking myself to death and getting left behind.

Zoë: Calypso was never a messy drunk. Never sloppy. She was what you would call a functioning addict. You'd look at her, watch her go through her days, and never know she was popping dozens of pills a day. Drinking herself to sleep. Doing lines while powdering her nose.
She was good at hiding things, good at getting high.

Calypso: Coke and pills with my lipstick.Whiskey and acids at noon, with a side salad. And anything and everything at night. When I wanted to sleep, red wine and seconals.
I had addiction down to the science.

Becky Riordan: The most notable of Calypsos early 70s relationships is with Odesseys. For lots of reasons.

Calypso: Odesseys lasted a few months. We met just after Drake, when he shared a joint with me in the ladies bathroom. I took a liking to him because he was clever. He took a liking to me because I was young. He would touch me in a hotel room and I would just feel sick. That's what I thought love felt like then, a nausea in your chest. A pain in your skull, the feeling where you can feel your pulse in your head and it makes your hands shake.
He would say, I need you honey. I need you like I need air. What he was really saying was, I need you to please me. I need you to please me and not tell my wife. And he would say that line again, say he needs me, and I would believe it. He would leave me alone in the hotel bed every week feeling like shit, bleeding in the sheets, and I swore I loved him. I swore I couldn't live without him.
But when he woke up one day and told me his wife had found us out and it was time we stopped seeing each-other, I screamed. I cried. I drank. I shattered glass in the pool nearly drowned. Zoë was the first one to tell me to make something of myself, instead of trying to give it all away. She was the one who told me put down the bottle, get off your ass and do something.
Odesseys really fucked me up.
But I survived.
Just like I did,
Every.
Fucking.
Time.
That was when I really started making music.