The Go-Go’s remain the only all-female band that played their own instruments and wrote their own songs to make it to the top of the album chart.
The Go-Go’s remain the only all-female band that played their own instruments and wrote their own songs to make it to the top of the album chart.
T he Go-Go’s famously wore beauty masks and towels on the cover of their first album, Beauty and the Beat. Those towels were purchased from Macy’s in New York City, and directly after the photo shoot they were returned to Macy’s in New York City. “I couldn’t invest in all these brand-new, fluffy, white expensive towels,” explains the band’s then-manager Ginger Canzoneri. “We couldn’t afford those!” How can you not love this band?
As we learn in the ebullient, amazing, often hilarious Showtime documentary The Go-Go’s, the defining girl group of the Eighties can match any bro band in tales of wild excess and savage infighting, although I’m not aware of any guy group whose members once took pictures of themselves simulating giving birth to one another. Born in the late-Seventies punk scene in L.A., the Go-Go’s operated under the prime directive of punk, which was, “You may sound horrible and still call yourselves musicians.” At their first appearances at the punk club the Masque, we learn, the band played only three songs, and two of them were the same. When guitarist Charlotte Caffey first met singer Belinda Carlisle, the latter was wearing torn fishnets and a garbage bag.
The band took a tiny step toward pop when they fired their original drummer and replaced her with a more rhythmic Gina Schock, then replaced a bass player who chafed at any suggestion the group lean commercial in its songs. The others asked a musician from the punk scene, Kathy Valentine, if she played bass. Valentine, who played guitar, had not played bass, but she said yes anyway. “I basically learned all their songs on a coke binge,” she recalls of her self-tutoring three-day bender. Valentine would also bring major songwriting talent to a band whose lead singer, Belinda Carlisle, didn’t write.
Caffey came up with “We Got the Beat” by herself, on the piano, and worried that she’d be thrown out of the band for writing a pop song. Instead, the Go-Go’s recognized a good tune when they saw it, scored a record deal with a small outfit, and began to attract crowds in L.A. as punk died off. Still, major labels turned them down: Girl groups didn’t sell. But Miles Copeland, the founder of I.R.S. records, manager of the Police, and brother of Police drummer Stewart, saw things differently: “All girls? Punks? From L.A.?” He says. “Even if they were crap you would almost want to sign them. But they were good!” The band went to New York City to record Beauty and the Beat and exploit the Macy’s towel department. While making the album, though, Caffey became a full-blown heroin addict. Later, at a rock festival in Brazil, “Charlotte was so out of control that Ozzy Osbourne threw her out of his dressing room,” recalls Schock, “and that’s pretty f***in’ bad.”
A second knockout hit, “Our Lips Are Sealed,” and an accompanying music video made for $6,000 left over from the budget for a Police video launched the girls into the pop stratosphere. “None of us took it seriously. We wanted to get arrested and get that on tape,” says Carlisle. So everyone jumped in the Electric Fountain in Beverly Hills and frolicked mightily, but no one paid any attention. The thrown-together video became a mainstay of early MTV, and Carlisle’s ability to smile and sing at the same time signaled that the Eighties would be like the sunny spring after an endless winter. Thirty-eight years after the Go-Go’s did it, they remain the only all-female band that played their own instruments and wrote their own songs to make it to the top of the album chart.
The Copeland connection earned the Go-Go’s a critical gig opening for the Police on their world tour, which didn’t work out quite the way anyone planned: One day in Atlanta, Sting came into the girls’ dressing room with a bottle of Champagne to tell them that their album had just surpassed the Police’s Ghost in the Machine on the charts. “They were the greatest opening act of all time,” says Stewart Copeland. “Their songs were so bright that they would just light up the room.”
Then it all fell apart, in the usual way. “Being in a band, you become each other’s best friends as well as each other’s worst enemies,” Schock says. They’d tell interviewers, “We’re like sisters.” “Yeah, we were like sisters that f***in’ stab each other in the back,” recalls Jane Wiedlin. The band was rushed into a second album they didn’t have enough material to fill out, and averted disaster only by dusting off and improving a song, “Vacation,” that Valentine had written for her previous band. The third album failed to go gold or hit the top ten, rhythm guitarist-songwriter Wiedlin departed the group, and Schock complained of being tired. The others doubted her. “It turned out she had a hole in her heart. . . . Yeah, so, our bad,” said Wiedlin. The band “decided to have this final weekend in Palm Springs together just in case Gina croaked,” Wiedlin says. “We had this special rule that Gina was not allowed to do cocaine. She could only do booze, Valium, and mushrooms because, y’know, we were keeping her safe.”
In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whose members include such questionable acts as the Rascals, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, the Go-Go’s have not yet been awarded their proper place. As Stewart Copeland puts it, “What the f***? They’re not?” After the world sees Alison Ellwood’s splendid documentary, that omission is bound to be put to rights.
