In 1982, the debut album from the Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat, went to No. 1, making the California band the first all-woman group to top the charts with songs they’d written and performed themselves. It was such a big hit that the Go-Go’s were constantly misnomered as the first successful female band, ever. While this conveniently ignored the achievements of their pioneering predecessors and contemporaries, there was some truth to the idea. Unlike the girl groups of the ’60s, the Go-Go’s operated without any men pulling the strings, without a Svengali figure as their shepherd. Their singles “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” were international successes, and the band’s faces were all over MTV and on the covers of People and Rolling Stone. It was a long way from where they’d started.
As the Los Angeles punk scene emerged in the late 1970s, it was inclusive, diverse, and pioneered by marginalized voices. Bands like the Zeros and the Bags spearheaded a community that encouraged the freedom of self-expression and self-celebration. The scene centered largely around The Canterbury, a derelict, roach-infested apartment building where members of the future Go-Go’s lived. As one version of the story goes, outside a house party in Venice, bassist Margot Olavarria invited two girls to join a band she was starting with drummer Elisa Bello: guitarist Jane Wiedlin, a helium-voiced former glitter rocker known as Jane Drano who was studying fashion design, and vocalist Belinda Carlisle, a former high school cheerleader and Monkees fan-club member who was supposed to play drums in the Germs under the name Dottie Danger until she was sidelined by mono. (Subsequent tellings of the band’s mythology often ignore Olavarria’s contributions, but as Carlisle wrote in her memoir, “she lit the match that started the fire.”) The four novice musicians dubbed themselves the Misfits; they quickly renamed themselves the Go-Go’s.
“Everyone we hung out with were all in a band and they weren’t any good,” Wiedlin later told Sounds. “So we figured if they could do it, why couldn’t we?” Inspired by the Buzzcocks’ pop-punk, they wore dresses made of garbage bags and wrote noisy, shambolic songs that celebrated BDSM, taunted music critics, satirized pretentious poseurs, and extolled the grimy hedonism of their digs. “I wanted to throw up on stage, rip my clothes off, and dye my hair,” Wiedlin told Flipside in 1979. Olavarria just wanted to “spit at Valley girls.”
Down the street from The Canterbury was The Masque, a ramshackle, heavily graffitied DIY venue in the basement of a porn theater on Hollywood Boulevard where, in May 1978, the Go-Go’s played their first show. Missing at that debut gig was Charlotte Caffey, who they had invited to join as lead guitarist. Caffey, who had previously played bass in the L.A. punk group the Eyes, had never played lead before. Yet her presence in the band was transformative, and not just because, as the band often joked, she was the only one who knew how to plug a guitar into an amplifier. Caffey brought in a pop sensibility, and she and Wiedlin quickly became a writing team; as the Go-Go’s became more technically proficient, their music evolved from punk to pop. “One must admit that the wildly amateurish musical approach of their early days has been replaced by a very competent barrage of near melodic tunes and singing,” one Slash magazine critic noted in May 1979.
In the summer of 1979, Bello was replaced by Gina Schock, a recent transplant from Baltimore. Of the five, Schock had the most experience on her instrument and, sensing the band’s potential, she imposed a tighter rehearsal schedule and work ethic. And so the Go-Go’s began their slow transition away from “a serious joke” to simply serious.
In 1980, while overseas on tour, the band released a demo for the UK punk label Stiff, led by a rough and tumble version of “We Got the Beat.” Composed quickly by Caffey on New Year’s Day 1980 while “listening to Motown songs, watching a Twilight Zone marathon, and getting high on a cocktail of stuff,” the band’s first hit is a two-minute ode to lighthearted bliss driven by a supercharged, Duracell Bunny rhythm section. Though the song failed to take off in Britain, it was big enough back home in California that their audience began to expand beyond the L.A. punk crowd. In December, facing a competing vision for the band and a nasty case of Hepatitis A, founding bassist Olavarria was replaced by Kathy Valentine, who had been playing guitar professionally since she was a teenager in Texas. With a series of sold-out shows at famed Sunset Strip rock club the Whiskey a Go Go looming, Valentine buckled down and learned the bass in four days. As the L.A. punk scene gravitated toward the hardcore sounds of Black Flag, the Go-Go’s were moving in the opposite direction.
Still, the group struggled to find a label. “The one thing I was greeted with without exception from every [record] company was ‘Oh, it’s an all-girl band,’” the band’s manager Ginger Canzoneri later explained. “‘Fanny didn’t make it, the Runaways didn’t make it, therefore girl bands don’t make it.’” Neither of these bands were failures by any definition: Fanny wrote their own songs and were the first all-female band to release a rock album on a major label; teenage rockers the Runaways also wrote and performed their own songs while challenging the confines of girl-group sexuality. Though both bands carved out space for the Go-Go’s to thrive, their successes were defined by a system outside of their creation, a system never intended to empower them.
On April 1, 1981, after countless rejections, the Go-Go’s finally signed with I.R.S., a small label that was home to the Cramps and the Buzzcocks. I.R.S. wasn’t their top choice, but its willingness to take a risk on the band was meaningful in the face of pervasive sexist prejudice they’d faced elsewhere. “The other record companies could only see that we were girls; they could never get past that point,” explained Wiedlin in a 1981 issue of Trouser Press. “It was either that we were girls so they didn’t want to take a chance, or we were girls and they wanted to capitalize on that.”
Soon after, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut, Beauty and the Beat, with producer Richard Gottehrer, a former Brill Building songwriter who co-wrote and produced the Angels’ hit “My Boyfriend’s Back” and later produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut and Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ Blank Generation. The record’s two singles, a polished version of “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed,” fit neatly into Gottehrer’s résumé of pop perfection. The latter, based on a love letter Wiedlin received from the Specials’ Terry Hall, with whom she was having an affair, encourages optimism amid rumblings of hurtful rumors. “Can you hear them/They talk about us/Telling lies/Well, that’s no surprise,” Carlisle sings, brushing off gossip with the relentless pep of a trained cheerleader.
The easygoing pleasure of these two singles is embodied in Beauty and the Beat’s cover. With a washed-out Jacuzzi color palette, it shows the five bandmates posed in towels, terrycloth turbans, and face masks, while on the back cover, individual members lounged in a bathtub pouring champagne, eating chocolates, and reading pulp novels. It was a far cry from the band’s grimy roots; many critics interpreted the girly photos as proof that the Go-Go’s had lost all punk credibility. (In reality, the shoot wasn’t so posh: The group had to return the towels to Macy’s in order to afford food and the Mr. Bubble gave them infections.)
Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark. “Tonite” captures the exhilaration of cruising down Hollywood Boulevard, where the band “get dressed up/And messed up/Blow our cares away.” “This Town” digs deeper into the city’s scuzzy glamour. “We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores/Discarded stars, like worn-out cars,” Carlisle snarls before Valentine rips a gigantic guitar solo. “Bet you’d live here if you could/And be one of us,” she taunts, offering a thrilling taste of their freedom.
While their attitude might be cooler-than-thou, the Go-Go’s offer an unabashedly sincere window into their hearts. On “Lust to Love,” Carlisle plunges into her vulnerabilities to chronicle the transformation from casual flirt to lovesick prisoner. Later, on “Fading Fast,” love’s spell breaks after one too many lies. As her bandmates cushion her devastation with mournful harmonies, Carlisle holds the pieces of her heart in her hands and looks forward with herculean resolve. Beauty and the Beat concludes with a chipper mantra: “Can’t stop the world/Don’t let it stop you.” Originally written by Valentine for her band the Textones, the song is not so much about blithe optimism as it is understanding your own potential, a reminder of the determination that fueled the band’s creation.
The Go-Go’s later claimed that the first time they heard Beauty and the Beat, huddled together in a car, they wept. “In the studio, we had thought we were making a great punk album,” wrote Carlisle in her memoir. “On hearing the final version, it sounded more pop than we had anticipated.” Here, they worried, was the final proof the Go-Go’s had entirely traded their punk roots for mainstream popularity. But once Beauty and the Beat was released in July 1981, many critics felt differently, calling it a record that “those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.” The band quickly changed their tune.
One month after Beauty and the Beat was released, MTV began broadcasting. The new channel helped catapult the Go-Go’s toward superstardom. In the video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the band drives through Beverly Hills in a convertible, their trademark garbage bags replaced by colorful summer dresses. Dubbed “America’s Sweethearts,” the Go-Go’s were considered “safe, wholesome, and proudly commercial.” Beauty and the Beat hit No. 1, they were nominated for a Grammy, and they opened for the Police on a massive stadium tour.
But the trappings of mainstream success did not shield the Go-Go’s from the sexism of the male-centric music industry. “It sounds like a joyous, bubbling celebration by five cute girls, with no thought inside their darling little heads save for tonight’s beach party,” griped NME’s review of Beauty and the Beat. “If this was an album by five guys from the USA it’d be hacked to bits by the critics,” said Sounds. Interviews and reviews focused on the band’s love lives, outfits, and novelty; when Annie Liebowitz photographed them in their underwear for their first Rolling Stone cover, the photo ran beneath the headline “Go-Go’s Put Out.”
The band was well aware of their sugar-coated image (Wieldlin once compared the band to Twinkies) but privately rebelled against it. They partied relentlessly, while Carlisle and Caffey struggled with cocaine and heroin addictions, respectively; rumors spread of pranks that involved harassing their tour manager with explicit Polaroids and an alleged sex tape. This dark underbelly of an outwardly bubbly band feels indicative of the contradictions that lurked around the band.
While the Go-Go’s achieved unprecedented chart success, there was a cost to this insurrection, one that brings up complicated issues of identity, integrity, and the blurring of genre lines—topics still fully relevant today. Would the Go-Go’s have become so popular if they retained the punk spirit of their early days? Probably not. But was there a way for them to retain this essence and still be successful? Yes, and to an extent, they did. The Go-Go’s wrote and performed their own songs, songs about independence and desire and control. They shifted a paradigm and inspired a new generation of women—from the Bangles to Hole to Bikini Kill to Sleater-Kinney—to make noise on their own terms. The Go-Go’s never hid from where they came from, and they never apologized for where it took them.
