The Go-Go’s are back again, still real, raw and ready for Coachella and Cruel World
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Perhaps no one is more excited about the reunited Go-Go’s upcoming slate of high-profile gigs than Gina Schock. The 67-year-old drummer missed the band’s last big Los Angeles shows — in 2022 at the Crypto.com Arena and a three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018 — due to health issues that required surgery on her thumb and to fuse three vertebrae together in her neck, respectively.
Now, however, Schock is healthy and looking forward to powering the band through a club set at one of their old haunts, the Roxy, on Wednesday, and then Friday and April 18 at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. After playing dates in San Francisco and Las Vegas, they’ll wrap it up at the Cruel World festival in Pasadena on May 17, making the Go-Go’s one of the few bands to play the larger, more eclectic and current Indio festival and the ’80s-leaning Pasadena fest in the same calendar year.
Their Coachella dates are headlined by Lady Gaga, while Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds top the bill at Cruel World. It all seems to make sense since the Go-Go’s bridge the gap between the pop leanings of Gaga and the L.A. punk scene that shared similar sensibilities with Cave’s early work with the Birthday Party.
Four-fifths of the band reunited for a rehearsal in Los Angeles in mid-February that left Schock pumped up. “I was very excited to be playing because I’ve been practicing for months. I haven’t played with the band for eight years,” she says via Zoom from San Francisco, her home since 2005.
Over the years, the Go-Go’s have reunited from time to time. In 2016, they staged what was billed as a farewell tour, leaving the door open to occasional future live dates, but no more full tours.
The last time they played a festival comparable to Coachella was at Rock in Rio in Brazil in January 1985, when the band was on their last legs after their incredibly successful first run. They exploded out of the Los Angeles club scene, scored a record deal with the then-fledgling IRS Records and topped the album chart in 1982 with their debut album, “Beauty and the Beat,” which blended their punk energy with pop sensibilities in the hits “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.” Incredibly, it remains the only album by an all-female band that plays their own instruments to top the Billboard album chart.
Yet by 1985, after two other successful albums, 1982’s “Vacation” and 1984’s “Talk Show,” the band was falling apart due to jealousy over songwriting credits, compensation, substance abuse and mismanagement.
Wiedlin, who had a hit collaboration with Sparks on the song “Cool Places” in 1983, left in October 1984, so Kathy Valentine slid over to guitar and the band recruited Paula Jean Brown to play bass for their two sets at the Rock in Rio festival, which drew more than 250,000 people each day. After those shows, the rest of the band flew home, but guitarist-songwriter Charlotte Caffey stayed in Brazil for a week, attempting to work through her drug addiction. “It was such a weird feeling that whole week,” Caffey says of that time in Rio. “I got home, and I dropped my own self off at a drug and alcohol hospital in South Pasadena,” she recalls.
Four decades later, she’s still sober. “That’s the most important thing ever that I did in my life,” she says. “All the people that worked there took bets on who would go out first,” she says of the staff at the rehab facility. “Of course, I was No. 1, and I’m the only one that stayed sober.”
The most private Go-Go, Caffey isn’t on social media like her bandmates. “The worst possible thought in my mind is having people following me,” she says in a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles home that she started with her camera off.
“I always loved writing the songs and performing,” she adds, “but I didn’t love all the stuff, like the fame. I’m not that public person. I love looking at what the other girls are doing. I find out when we’re not working together. I look at their socials and I’m like, ‘Oh, that looks really fun.’ I’m just more private.”
It’s not surprising that the Go-Go’s use social media to keep up with each other these days. Caffey, who penned the band’s 1982 No. 2 hit “We Got the Beat,” is the only band member still in L.A., where she lives with her husband since 1993, Redd Kross guitarist Jeff McDonald. Singer Belinda Carlisle, 66, has lived with her husband, Morgan Mason, a former political advisor and entertainment executive, in Mexico City for four years and outside the U.S. since 1994. Valentine recently relocated to St. Albans, England, near London, while Wiedlin was living on Hawaii’s Big Island but recently relocated to Berkeley in search of better treatment for the long COVID that has been dogging her for more than a year.
The Go-Go with the most successful solo career with hits “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” “I Get Weak” and “Mad About You,” Carlisle recently announced live dates in Germany, Belgium and the U.K. for fall, after playing in Australia and England last year. Yet, she acknowledges she owes it all to the Go-Go’s.
“If it wasn’t for the Go-Go’s, I wouldn’t have a solo career. That’s just a fact and I know that,” she says in a Zoom interview from Mexico City. “The whole story of it even happening is something that I think is extraordinary,” she says of the band she co-founded in 1978 with Wiedlin and original bassist Margot Olavarria and drummer Elissa Bello. “I’m really proud of that because we really worked hard. The band happened against all odds.”
Perhaps nothing sums that up better than the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. Foo Fighters, which includes guitarist Pat Smear, another refugee from the L.A. punk scene, was also inducted that year. Before Carlisle joined the Go-Go’s, she had a stint as the singer of the Germs with Smear on guitar. “I have a picture of me, Jane, Pat Smear and Belinda standing there,” Caffey says, “and we were looking at each other like, ‘You realize this was never a thought in our minds back then.’”
Caffey then flashes back to a memory with Smear and his bandmate, frontman Bobby Pin, who had not yet adopted the moniker Darby Crash. They asked her how old she was. She can’t recall her answer but remembers Smear’s response back in 1978: “You’re too old to be a punk.”
At 71, Caffey is the oldest Go-Go, but when she does turn on her Zoom camera, she has a youthfulness that belies her age. Like many, she says the COVID “lockdown messed with my mind” and she stopped focusing on music for a stretch. Yet playing the Go-Go’s songs in her downstairs home studio “has opened up this whole creative thing for me now. I feel like I’m ready to create again,” she says.
Over in the U.K., Valentine, 66, is also going through a creative renaissance. The songwriter-bassist-guitarist who brought the Go-Go’s the top 10 hit “Vacation,” is performing as a solo artist. She has also started a new all-star, all-female band with Baseball Project drummer Linda Pitmon, singer-guitarist Brix Smith of the Fall, and Pogues bassist-singer Cáit O’Riordan called Psycher, and is getting ready to start writing a sequel to her acclaimed 2020 book “All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ’n’ Roll Memoir.” “I feel like I’m 16 and I’m gonna make it in the music biz,” she says during a Zoom interview.
She’s also come to recognize the full impact of the Go-Go’s legacy after a recent trip to Vienna to visit Lenny Kravitz and his guitarist and her former roommate, Craig Ross. “Lenny was introducing me to a younger person just going off about the Go-Go’s. ‘No, you don’t understand. They were the biggest band in the world!’ And I’m like, ‘No, we weren’t.’ And he goes, ‘Yes, you were the biggest band in the world!’ I’m just kind of always still surprised at the cultural reach of the Go-Go’s.”
Reached by phone in San Francisco, Wiedlin, 66, is also pleasantly surprised by the renewed interest and activity surrounding the band over the last decade, including the 2018 Broadway musical “Head Over Heels” featuring their songs and the 2020 debut of the documentary “The Go-Go’s” at the Sundance Film Festival, which led to the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “And now Coachella and Cruel World, which I never thought we’d be asked to do,” she says.
Since she’s undergoing treatment for the lingering effects of long COVID, Wiedlin was unable to make it to the band’s L.A. rehearsal in late February, but has been getting together to play with fellow Bay Area resident Schock and plans to reunite with the band for rehearsals before the Roxy gig.
She, like other members of the band, is pleased to see new acts such as fellow L.A.-based all-female rockers the Linda Lindas carry the torch, and hopes that others arise to keep rock ’n’ roll alive.
“You have the whole phenomenon of groups that don’t write and don’t play instruments, and it’s more about dancing and looking good,” she says. “That’s fine, but being an older person, I really appreciate rock ’n’ roll, loud guitars and people playing instruments. That’s something I love, and I would hate for that to go away entirely.”
“I’m very proud of our band,” she adds. “We’ve never used backing tracks or anything. We’re very raw live and we’re very real.”
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