\nThe Go-Go\u2019s are back again, still real, raw and ready for Coachella and Cruel World\n
Perhaps no one is more excited about the reunited Go-Go\u2019s upcoming slate of high-profile gigs than Gina Schock. The 67-year-old drummer missed the band\u2019s last big Los Angeles shows \u2014 in 2022 at the Crypto.com Arena and a three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018 \u2014 due to health issues that required surgery on her thumb and to fuse three vertebrae together in her neck, respectively.\n
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\u2019ll wrap it up at the Cruel World festival in Pasadena on May 17, making the Go-Go\u2019s one of the few bands to play the larger, more eclectic and current Indio festival and the \u201980s-leaning Pasadena fest in the same calendar year.\n
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\u2019s bridge the gap between the pop leanings of Gaga and the L.A. punk scene that shared similar sensibilities with Cave\u2019s early work with the Birthday Party.\n
Four-fifths of the band reunited for a rehearsal in Los Angeles in mid-February that left Schock pumped up. \u201cI was very excited to be playing because I\u2019ve been practicing for months. I haven\u2019t played with the band for eight years,\u201d she says via Zoom from San Francisco, her home since 2005.\n
Over the years, the Go-Go\u2019s 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.\n
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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, \u201cBeauty and the Beat,\u201d which blended their punk energy with pop sensibilities in the hits \u201cOur Lips Are Sealed\u201d and \u201cWe Got the Beat.\u201d Incredibly, it remains the only album by an all-female band that plays their own instruments to top the Billboard album chart.\n
Yet by 1985, after two other successful albums, 1982\u2019s \u201cVacation\u201d and 1984\u2019s \u201cTalk Show,\u201d the band was falling apart due to jealousy over songwriting credits, compensation, substance abuse and mismanagement.\n
Wiedlin, who had a hit collaboration with Sparks on the song \u201cCool Places\u201d 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. \u201cIt was such a weird feeling that whole week,\u201d Caffey says of that time in Rio. \u201cI got home, and I dropped my own self off at a drug and alcohol hospital in South Pasadena,\u201d she recalls.\n
Four decades later, she\u2019s still sober. \u201cThat\u2019s the most important thing ever that I did in my life,\u201d she says. \u201cAll the people that worked there took bets on who would go out first,\u201d she says of the staff at the rehab facility. \u201cOf course, I was No. 1, and I\u2019m the only one that stayed sober.\u201d\n
The most private Go-Go, Caffey isn\u2019t on social media like her bandmates. \u201cThe worst possible thought in my mind is having people following me,\u201d she says in a Zoom interview from her Los Angeles home that she started with her camera off.\n
\u201cI always loved writing the songs and performing,\u201d she adds, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t love all the stuff, like the fame. I\u2019m not that public person. I love looking at what the other girls are doing. I find out when we\u2019re not working together. I look at their socials and I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, that looks really fun.\u2019 I\u2019m just more private.\u201d\n
It\u2019s not surprising that the Go-Go\u2019s use social media to keep up with each other these days. Caffey, who penned the band\u2019s 1982 No. 2 hit \u201cWe Got the Beat,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.\n
The Go-Go with the most successful solo career with hits \u201cHeaven Is a Place on Earth,\u201d \u201cI Get Weak\u201d and \u201cMad About You,\u201d 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\u2019s.\n
\u201cIf it wasn\u2019t for the Go-Go\u2019s, I wouldn\u2019t have a solo career. That\u2019s just a fact and I know that,\u201d she says in a Zoom interview from Mexico City. \u201cThe whole story of it even happening is something that I think is extraordinary,\u201d she says of the band she co-founded in 1978 with Wiedlin and original bassist Margot Olavarria and drummer Elissa Bello. \u201cI\u2019m really proud of that because we really worked hard. The band happened against all odds.\u201d\n
Perhaps nothing sums that up better than the band\u2019s 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\u2019s, she had a stint as the singer of the Germs with Smear on guitar. \u201cI have a picture of me, Jane, Pat Smear and Belinda standing there,\u201d Caffey says, \u201cand we were looking at each other like, \u2018You realize this was never a thought in our minds back then.\u2019\u201d\n
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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\u2019t recall her answer but remembers Smear\u2019s response back in 1978: \u201cYou\u2019re too old to be a punk.\u201d\n
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 \u201clockdown messed with my mind\u201d and she stopped focusing on music for a stretch. Yet playing the Go-Go\u2019s songs in her downstairs home studio \u201chas opened up this whole creative thing for me now. I feel like I\u2019m ready to create again,\u201d she says.\n
Over in the U.K., Valentine, 66, is also going through a creative renaissance. The songwriter-bassist-guitarist who brought the Go-Go\u2019s the top 10 hit \u201cVacation,\u201d 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 C\u00e1it O\u2019Riordan called Psycher, and is getting ready to start writing a sequel to her acclaimed 2020 book \u201cAll I Ever Wanted: A Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll Memoir.\u201d \u201cI feel like I\u2019m 16 and I\u2019m gonna make it in the music biz,\u201d she says during a Zoom interview.\n
She\u2019s also come to recognize the full impact of the Go-Go\u2019s legacy after a recent trip to Vienna to visit Lenny Kravitz and his guitarist and her former roommate, Craig Ross. \u200a\u201cLenny was introducing me to a younger person just going off about the Go-Go\u2019s. \u2018No, you don\u2019t understand. They were the biggest band in the world!\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018No, we weren\u2019t.\u2019 And he goes, \u2018Yes, you were the biggest band in the world!\u2019 I\u2019m just kind of always still surprised at the cultural reach of the Go-Go\u2019s.\u201d\n
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 \u201cHead Over Heels\u201d featuring their songs and the 2020 debut of the documentary \u201cThe Go-Go\u2019s\u201d at the Sundance Film Festival, which led to the band\u2019s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. \u201cAnd now Coachella and Cruel World, which I never thought we\u2019d be asked to do,\u201d she says.\n
Since she\u2019s undergoing treatment for the lingering effects of long COVID, Wiedlin was unable to make it to the band\u2019s 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.\n