Bee Girl “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?”

Was you ever bit by a dead bee? – Eddie, 1944 movie To Have and Have Not

You might be under the impression that the “Bee Girl” era actually happened with Blind Melon’s song No Rain released in 1992.  It actually goes back further than to 1983 with Joe Elliott decided to use Lauren Bacall’s dress in To Have and Have Not as inspiration for Julia Robert’s hooker dress in the movie Pretty Woman (see previous post “Oh! Pretty Woman).

One day Kurt kept pressuring me to come up with a new song.  Joe Elliott was standing near by.  I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with them that day and I sat down on the stage.  I said, “I’ve got no new tale to tell.”

After a minute, I stood up and started making up a song which became No New Tale To Tell performed by some of the former members of the band Bauhaus who formed the band Love and Rockets.  The song was released on the 1987 album Earth, Sun, Moon album. 

If you do not know who Bauhaus is, they were featured in David Bowie’s and Susan Sarandon’s ’83 cult classic The Hunger with their song from 1979 “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”.

The music video for No New Tale to Tale was the start of the Bee Girl era along with the image of a monkey, a symbol for Michael Jackson’s chimp Bubbles.  This included Kurt Cobain’s collection of toy monkeys and the use of a toy monkey in the Alice In Chains music video Grind.

The idea to start naming bands for “fruit” came from the use of “peach” in Pour Some Sugar On Me performed by Def Leppard and U Got The Look performed by Prince and Shiela E.  It also came from me joking around with INXS sayingthey were the vegetables and I being the fruit. 

This is how I came up with the name when Billy Corgan asked me what he should name his band and I said “Smashing Pumpkins” and also  named the band “Blind Melon”, with Melons and Pumpkins being a fruit.

The band Krokus which had been on tour with Def Leppard on the Rock Till You Drop Tour in 1983, released To Rock or Not to Be (a reference to the movie To Have and Have Not starring Bogey and Bacall) in 1995 also used the image on the cover art.

One day while Kurt (Cobain) and I were working on songs, he pulled a sheet of notebook paper out of his back pocket which happened to be the lyrics for what would become “Bee Girl” performed by Pearl Jam.

“Bee girl, you’re gonna die.
You don’t wanna be famous, you wanna be shy.
Do your dances alone in your room.
Becoming a star will become your doom.
Bee Girl, be a girl

You know time is long, and life is short.
Begin to live while you still can.
Believe in nothing, believe me,
Those who can be trusted can change their mind.
When the anxious is the present, unwrap your gifts, take your time.
Everything you imagine needn’t be stuck in your mind.
Bee Girl, be a girl… “ – Bee Girl performed by Pearl Jam

“She should have stayed away from friends
She should have had more time to spend
She should have died when she was born
She should have worn the crown of thorns
She should have been a son” – Been A Son, Nirvana

Oh! Pretty Woman

In ’82 Van Halen released a cover of Roy Orbison’s song Oh!, Pretty Woman on their Diver Down album.  This is one album my brother had and I loved.  My favorites being the cover of Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now) and Hang ‘Em High.  But, my all time favorite cover of Van Halen’s is Ice Cream Man, which Tommy Lee seemed to enjoy whenever I would sing it. 

Joe Elliott started paperwork getting a passport for me in the summer of ’83.  It was unknown to me his intentions, but when I returned from my grandmother’s funeral, my adopted mother’s mother, in Georgia the first of Oct ’83 everyone seemed to be upset about my disappearance. 

I told them of my grandmother’s long battle with Leukemia which she had been in remission with for years.  Joe wanted to do a movie about it, knowing I had also been babysitting off and on during the summer for a little girl in remission from Leukemia.  Kurt Cobain spoke up knowing my cousin had Type 1 Diabetes and worked for Xerox.  Of course, Kurt was a walking Encyclopedia of music and knew that Zerox was an early Adam & The Ants song.  There is actually an early home movie of Kurt trying to tear up a copy machine.   http://youtu.be/NxS_55Ql1Ks  While discussing the idea Joe came up with the title naming it Steel Magnolias released in ’89.

My adopted father’s mother, Isabel, a redhead herself, once owned a  beauty shop named Belle’s House of Beauty in Texas.   The picture is of my brother getting his first haircut.  This is where they got the idea for the beauty shop in Steel Magnolias and also name the character Belle Marmillion.

Tom Cruise would go on to adopt a little girl with Nicole Kidman and name her Isabella.

Kurt Cobain later would talk about how Nirvana would practice above a beauty shop in the early years.  My grandmother’s birthday, February 24, also happened to be the day Kurt and Courtney got married in 1992.

(My grandmother’s Social Security Card application)

 Michael Jackson knew I loved the tv show Beauty and the Beast which ran from 1987 to 1990 starring “Linda Carroll” Hamilton (Courtney Love’s mother’s name is supposedly Linda Carroll) as Belle and Ron Perlman as the Beast Vincent.  Linda Hamilton is the ex-wife of film director James Cameron (this is important and will post about the development of Titanic later).  Disney put into production the development of Belle about this time and released the animated Beauty and the Beast in 1991. 

Sometime during all of this the actor Eric Roberts found out what was going on and invited to Alabama to meet me.  His motive was in looking for scripts for his sister, Julia, another redhead. 

Plans for a trip were rescheduled for the weekend before Halloween which fell on a Monday.  I didn’t know this would mean skipping a day of school.  They dressed me in a brunette wig and large sunglasses and we left on Joe’s private plane.  We arrived in Dublin and Joe took off through customs and the airport ahead of us being mobbed by paparazzi.  I heard Kurt ask if Joe had let them know he was arriving.  Joe gave a quick interview distracting them while we finished in customs then climbed into a Range Rover.  We climbed into the Range Rover parked behind his.

The home was large, but not quite what one would call a mansion by today’s standards.  It had a mortar and rock facade in a very European style.  Joe met us at the door and came up behind me putting his hands over my eyes leading me through the front hall into the main living area.  When he took his hands away I was staring at green rolling hills through a window that spanned the length of the room.  The window was made up of panes of beveled glass which obscured the view some.  I gasped as a white hairy beast rounded one of the green mounds charging toward the home.  At first I thought it was a horse.  A few seconds later this mud covered behemoth was sitting on the white marble in front of me.  This is when I realized it wasn’t a horse at all but a dog, a Great Pyrenees actually.

Development of the script for the ’90 movie Pretty Woman was well under way on this trip and changes were being made.  Joe decided to use Lauren Bacall’s dress in the 1944 film adaption of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not as inspiration for the “hooker dress”.

Sweet Sacrifice Origin

I’ve written about the origins of Evanescence in an earlier post, but here are just a few words about the songs.

Sweet Sacrifice and the duet Broken were two of the first songs I made up at 15 and told them the artist I wanted to perform it would be called Amy Lee.   

The title to Sweet Sacrifice was to tie into Pour Some Sugar On Me which I wrote with Joe Elliott of Def Leppard and to Sugar Walls which was performed by Sheena Easton. 

Sweet Sacrifice 

It’s true, we’re all a little insane.

But it’s so clear,

Now that I’m unchained.

I used what I knew at the time which was making reference to albums my brother had and I would listen to while he was not home.  His collection of albums included Aerosmith, Van Halen, Billy Squier, and ELO.  ‘The definition of Aerosmith’s Toys In the Attic (meaning insanity) influenced the first line, where Van Halen’s Unchained is mentioned in the third.

The line “Blow me away” from Sweet Sacrifice I used in another song performed by the Deftones named Change when I was 15 or 16 (’83 or ’84).  The title for Change was taken from David Bowie’s Changes, but the song itself was inspired by the ’46 movie The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Martha Vickers as Carmen (pictured). 

“Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has anymore moral sense than a cat. Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had.”– General Sternwood

Another line from The Big Sleep inspired the song Something In Your Mouth performed by Nickelback.

“If I did, she’d just suck her thumb and look coy. (about Martha Vicker’s character Carmen)”-General Sternwood

Years later Kurt Cobain decided to cover the band Flipper’s ’84 song “Sacrifice” and Def Leppard members wrote the line“A whole lotta somethin’ you can’t sacrifice” for the ’87 song Women.

The idea for the 2006 The Open Door album started with an 1844 photograph at The Getty Museum of the same name by William Henry Fox Talbot http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=71564

The change I wanted to make for the design of the album cover came in wanting it to show the image of Amy Lynn Hartzler walking out the door from the inside.