Going, Go-go’s, Gone
One of the most infectious bands of the ’80s is hanging up its hooks
DURING THEIR 19-date farewell tour that traversed two countries but only one month (August), the Go-go’s pranced onto stages to Grand Funk Railroad’s ’70s classic “We’re an American Band.” Damn straight they are. The only distinctly distaff band to write and record an album that spent six weeks at No. 1 ( Beauty and the Beat), the Los Angeles–based quintet has always been a rock ’n’ roll symbol for “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
The Go-go’s played their final show on August 30, in their hometown. If you were born in the ’60s, that’s the sound of time shoveling dirt onto your adolescence. Or, more accurately, it may feel as if the lights are coming on in the basement as someone frantically yells that the cops are at the front door. In 1983, Cyndi Lauper had a massive hit with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” but the Go-go’s and their legion of predominantly female teen fans were already peeing in the bushes at that party and on a quest for another bottle of Bacardi. When “We Got the Beat” rose to No. 2 on the charts in 1982, seditious suburban girls suddenly had an anthem.
That the Go-go’s—guitarist Charlotte Caffey, drummer Gina Schock, guitarist and backup vocalist Jane Wiedlin and lead singer Belinda Carlisle (bassist Kathy Valentine had a messy divorce from the band four years ago)—have gone-gone is bittersweet. Their music, a fusion of punk and pop that was mislabeled New Wave, is ageless. Like another Socal quintet, the Beach Boys, whose songs native Angelenos Carlisle and Wiedlin heard on the radio through- out their prepubescence, the Go-go’s wrote infectious songs that captured both the joy and angst of teendom. It’s no accident that Cameron Crowe’s landmark 1983 film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, opens with Schock’s inimitable drum intro for “We Got the Beat.”
The beauty of the Go-go’s is that they were not molded by a record executive or found in auditions for the new Mickey Mouse Club. They rose up from the same overflowing-toilet punk scene that produced the Runaways, Black Flag and X. In the late 1970s, Carlisle, who grew up in Newbury Park and was a high school cheerleader (she was, like, a Valley girl), was seduced by rock ’n’ roll. On a stalking expedition at the Beverly Hilton in hopes of meeting and getting an autograph (selfies were still decades away) from Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, she met a pair of burgeoning punk rockers, Darby Crash and Pat Smear (the latter was later a frequent collaborator on guitar with Nirvana). The trio, along with a girlfriend of Carlisle’s, would go on to form the seminal L.A. punk band the Germs.
Carlisle, then a drummer known as Dottie Danger, immersed herself in L.A.’S flourishing punk music scene, an antidote to the bell-bottom soft rock (i.e., flaccid rock) that dominated the airwaves in the mid-’70s.
A bout with mononucleosis prevented Carlisle from ever taking the stage with the Germs, but she met Wiedlin, another regular in the L.A. punk scene, and they started forming a band. The Go-go’s were not L.A.’S first all-female punk
outfit to make noise—that would be the Runaways, fronted by Lita Ford and Joan Jett. Unlike the Runaways, though, the Go-go’s wrote songs that emerged from the underground and became radio-friendly hits. There was never an issue of the Go-go’s winning the war of the photo shoots, of being more sexually appealing: They simply wrote irresistible sub-three-minute pop songs, not unlike the early Beach Boys and Beatles.
It may sound like heresy to mention the go-go’ s in the same sentence with those “B-boys,” but similarities cross the gender lines. Like those two bands in their early years, the Go-go’s wrote short, upbeat songs with catchy hooks that not only captured but created a zeitgeist. People may have surfed before Brian Wilson learned to play the piano, just as teenage girls hung out in packs and drank too much before the Go-go’s trashed their first hotel rooms. It’s just that now both subcultures had a playlist.
Like the Beatles, the Go-go’s went abroad to hone their chops as a band, touring England in support of Madness and the Specials. Without that dues-paying experience, the band would have never gone beyond being Sunset Strip favorites.
When the Go-go’s returned to the U.S. and embarked on a tour with the Police in late 1981, they were less known outside the 310 area code than Moon Unit Zappa. Then their singles “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat” were released. Before long, the Go-go’s had the No. 1 album in the nation. The Police’s Ghost in the Machine “dropped back to No. 6, and we were opening for them,” Carlisle told Rolling Stone. “Sting came into our dressing room with a bottle of champagne and said congratulations. [The Police] were really gracious about it.”
Their final show, which took place just a mile or so northeast (and 38 years later) from where the band first played sets at the Masque and Whiskey a Go Go clubs, should not be the last show the Go-go’s play. That should come at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, but there’s just one problem: The Go-go’s have never even been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In the 34 years since Beauty and the Beat shot to No. 1, no other female rock group has even come close to charting that high. And those groups never appeared to be having as much fun—few bands have—as the five young women who once appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing only giddy smiles and their underwear.
It was a character from another Cameron Crowe film, Almost Famous, who also appeared—at least in the movie—on a Rolling Stone cover. In one scene, standing on the roof of a home at a raucous high school party, intoxicated by both booze and fame, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) proclaims, “I am a golden god!” What happens when you truncate those final two words to their first two letters? “I am a Go-go!”
WHEN “WE GOT THE BEAT” ROSE TO NO. 2, SEDITIOUS SUBURBAN GIRLS SUDDENLY HAD AN ANTHEM.