“The one thing I was greeted with without exception from every company was ‘Oh, it’s an all-girl band,’” the band’s manager Ginger Canzoneri later explained. Still, the group struggled to find a label. punk scene gravitated toward the hardcore sounds of Black Flag, the Go-Go’s were moving in the opposite direction.
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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. 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. 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. 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. And so the Go-Go’s began their slow transition away from “ a serious joke” to simply serious. 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. In the summer of 1979, Bello was replaced by Gina Schock, a recent transplant from Baltimore. “One must admit that the wildly amateurish musical approach of their early days has been replaced by a very competent barrage of near melodic tunes and singing,” one Slash magazine critic noted in May 1979. 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.
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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. punk group the Eyes, had never played lead before. Caffey, who had previously played bass in the L.A. Missing at that debut gig was Charlotte Caffey, who they had invited to join as lead guitarist. Olavarria just wanted to “spit at Valley girls.”ĭown 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. “I wanted to throw up on stage, rip my clothes off, and dye my hair,” Wiedlin told Flipside in 1979. “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. “Everyone we hung out with were all in a band and they weren’t any good,” Wiedlin later told Sounds. (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. 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. The scene centered largely around The Canterbury, a derelict, roach-infested apartment building where members of the future Go-Go’s lived. Bands like the Zeros and the Bags spearheaded a community that encouraged the freedom of self-expression and self-celebration. As the Los Angeles punk scene emerged in the late 1970s, it was inclusive, diverse, and pioneered by marginalized voices.