C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020
I loved the joyful confidence it
brought out in the girls around
me — an entirely different re-
sponse from their primal swoons
for Duran Duran. The cruelest
boys at our school (Led Zeppelin
or die) were already effective
misogynists and homophobes,
not at all afraid to belittle the
Go-Go’s and anyone who listened
to them.
I can’t help but sense a similar
tinge of disrespect in the glaring
fact that the band still hasn’t been
inducted into the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. But, as the Go-Go’s
taught us way back when: Can’t
stop the world; why let it stop
you?
[email protected]The Go-Go’s ( 98 minutes) premieres
Friday at 9 p.m. on Showtime.were ever apart, yet people still
tend to speak of the Go-Go’s in the
past tense — as if the breakup and
the bickering make a better story
than the music. What Ellwood’s
film restores, to an admirable
degree, is the power that Go-Go’s
fans drew from the band.
Kathleen Hanna, who fronted
the ’90s punk band Bikini Kill,
recalls going to a Go-Go’s concert
in 1982, when she was 14: “As a
young girl, going into a space
where women own the stage, and
own it unapologetically, like they
were born to be there — to me it
represented a moment of possibil-
ity.”
I also remember the thrill of
seeing the Go-Go’s in concert
when I was in high school. I
adored the music and how it
made me feel, but more than that,phere and deepest addictions, the
women managed to make what
many believe to be their best
album — 1984’s “Talk Show.”
“There are people who really
love that album, but I can’t even
listen to it,” Wiedlin says.
They were making their fans
happy by doing what they loved,
yet the Go-Go’s were secretly
miserable. All these decades later,
it’s heartbreaking to see that
some spots are still sore.T
he band officially dissolved
in 1985. They’ve reunited
frequently since the 1990s
for tours, released a fourth album
(“God Bless the Go-Go’s”) in 2001
and saw their songs i nterpreted
for a Broadway musical in 2018.
They’ve been back together and
simpatico far longer than theydiction) struggled to write more
songs. They were rescued by Val-
entine’s offering of “Vacation,” a
song she’d recorded with her old
band.
After the second album and a
grueling world tour, the bloom
began to fade. Canzoneri was
thrown overboard for a new exec-
utive management team — “All
men, not that that mattered,” she
recalls, with clear sadness. (Re-
morse over that decision is
shared by the band members,
belatedly.) The Go-Go’s fought
over money after Schock saw the
size of Caffey’s and Wiedlin’s roy-
alty checks for songwriting. Carl-
isle, on the verge of a successful
solo career, says she tuned out.
As soon as they became fa-
mous, the Go-Go’s seemed fated
to fold. In their fouled atmos-“We Got the Beat,” both of which
became Top 40 and MTV break-
out hits.
“It was the sense of being
packaged into a product — less
about art and more about money,”
Olavarria says, so she left. She
was replaced by Kathy Valentine,
a guitarist from an Austin band
called the Textones, who taught
herself to play bass over a manic
weekend and “basically learned
all their songs on a coke binge.”
“The Go-Go’s” benefits enor-
mously from its determination to
interview Olavarria and others
who were left eating the band’s
dust. The heady success of “Beauty
and the Beat” put the band on
fame’s brutal treadmill. I.R.S. agi-
tated for a follow-up album, while
Wiedlin and Caffey (who was by
now secretly nursing a heroin ad-The film strikes a buoyant bal-
ance of shared memories and
lingering hurts among close
friends. The Go-Go’s have re-
hashed their wild tales countless
times (an episode of VH1’s rocku-
mentary series “Behind the Mu-
sic” from 20 years ago stands out
for its spillage; Carlisle and Val-
entine have each written a mem-
oir), but what’s new this time is all
about the vantage point. The
Go-Go’s spent their heyday roll-
ing their eyes at any suggestion of
feminist strides; clip after clip of
media interviews at the time
show them emphasizing their
frivolous, party-girl image, claim-
ing they just wanted to play their
music and make lots of money.
Today, as women in their 60s,
there has been a reckoning with
the man-made barriers they
stared down 40 years ago. They’re
still a little mad about it, and
rightly so. This is where Ellwood’s
approach works splendidly as a
smart antidote to the rockumen-
tary genre.
There are two stories to tell
here: One is the usual rise and fall
(and rebirth) of a rock band,
replete with substance abuse,
bruised egos and money squab-
bles. The other story, existing just
beneath the surface, is about five
women who were under extreme
pressure to make more hits and
pretend that the discriminatory
obstacles in front of them were all
just fun and games. Although
“The Go-Go’s” works marvelously
as a scrapbook that will surely
delight the viewer who wants to
remember the catchy songs and
saucy attitudes, it’s also the first
time that the band’s story has
been rendered as a cultural tri-
umph instead of a cautionary
tale.T
he story itself is quite a
rocket ride (fueled by a lot
of booze and blow), begin-
ning in glad rags and garbage
bags in clubs along Sunset Strip,
circa 1978. Wiedlin, the band’s ace
lyricist, opens up about her sui-
cidal tendencies as a teen (and,
much later, her diagnosis of bipo-
lar disorder). The punk scene’s
DIY ethic all but rescued her from
a sense of isolation.
Wiedlin and her friend Margot
Olavarria decided to start an all-
girl band. They invited Carlisle —
the oldest of seven kids in a strict
San Fernando Valley household
who also found her escape in the
punk scene — to join as singer.
Joined by Elissa Bello on drums,
the Go-Go’s debuted at a club
called the Masque with a com-
plete repertoire of two songs,
which they played badly. “If you
were terrible, you were cooler,”
Carlisle says. “And anybody could
do whatever they wanted. It was
total freedom.”
Random luck and determina-
tion followed. A classically
trained pianist and songwriter,
Charlotte Caffey, left her own
punk band to join the Go-Go’s. By
1979, the band found a devoted
manager, Ginger Canzoneri. “I
love communities of women,”
Canzoneri says in the film. “This
band caught my interest for that
reason.” The Go-Go’s dumped
Bello in favor of Gina Schock, a
fierce drummer from Baltimore
who drove to L.A. “with $2,000
and two grams of coke” and
supplied the beat that tightened
the band’s sound. “I was deter-
mined to whip them into shape,”
Schock says.
A British ska band called the
Specials caught the Go-Go’s act
and invited the band to open for
them on a 1980 tour in England.
Such was Canzoneri’s devotion to
her clients that she hocked her
jewelry and sold her car to fund
the trip. Previous iterations of the
Go-Go’s story have cast this as an
adventurous launching point. At
the shows, however, the band
faced crowds of skinheads who
spit at them, threw bottles and
demanded to see their breasts.
“They hated us,” Wiedlin says.
“First of all, we were not ska, so
what the hell were we doing
opening for these ska bands?
Second of all, we were Americans,
and third of all — maybe worst o f
all — we were chicks.”
They returned to L.A. with all
kinds of buzz, but no record
labels would sign them. Miles
Copeland, who managed his
brother’s hit band, the Police,
signed the Go-Go’s to his bou-
tique label, I.R.S. Records. Ola-
varria, punk to the bone, started
to chafe at the perkier, janglier
sound that emerged with songs
like “Our Lips Are Sealed” andTV REVIEW FROM C1A fresh
look
at the
Go-Go’s
PAUL NATKIN/SHOWTIMEJORGEN ANGEL/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: From left, K athy Valentine, Jane Wiedlin, Gina Schock, Charlotte Caffey and Belinda Carlisle; Valentine, center, and S chock on the set for the
band’s music video “Vacation” in 1982; the Go-Go’s perform in 1982 in Copenhagen; a flier for a 1981 gig at the Rusty Nail in Sunderland, Mass., in 1981.SHOWTIME. GINGER CANZONERI/SHOWTIME