How The Go-Go's Perfected Pop-Punk
The Go-Go's debut album, Beauty and the Beat, is universally regarded as an '80s pop and new wave classic. It's rightfully celebrated as the first album by an all-woman band who played its own instruments and wrote its own songs to top the Billboard 200 albums chart. But it was revolutionary in more than one way: It's also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s. If groundbreakers like the Ramones, the Buzzcocks and Blondie had shown that pop and punk were not mortal enemies, here was a band that showed how the two styles could merge with certifiable success. Beauty and the Beat paved the way for bands like Green Day and No Doubt and artists like Avril Lavigne. It was the whole Go-Go's package — the sound, the songs, and the fact that five women who loved both the Beach Boys and the Germs were creating this music — that set the template for a future that seems inevitable in hindsight. It took punk places it hadn't been before, even if the scene wasn't always ready to go there.
Beauty and the Beat introduced the world to "We Got The Beat" and "Our Lips Are Sealed" — but not before the Los Angeles punk scene heard them first. Those singles, written by guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, had evolved over the course of many nights spent sweating and screaming alongside their friends and fellow musicians at the Masque, Whisky a Go Go and the Starwood, all havens for the tight-knit community that counted X, the Bags, the Germs, the Dickies and other experimental punk acts in their ranks. This is the scene Alison Ellwood focuses on for the first half of her new documentary about the band, which was enthusiastically received by fans and critics alike when it was released on Showtime on July 31. A treasure trove of archival footage brings viewers into the front row of these early gigs, right alongside Belinda Carlisle, baby-faced and beaming up at the headliner, and Jane Wiedlin, in her torn t-shirts and smears of fuschia makeup. It drives the point home that the pop icons we know were punk kids first.
NPR Music spoke with the Go-Go's, as well as Miles Copeland III, who signed them to I.R.S. Records, and Beauty and the Beat producer Richard Gottehrer, to take a closer look at how these punks changed pop. Friends from the L.A. scene spoke to us as well, including Alice Bag, renowned artist and frontwoman of the Bags; John Doe, founding member of X, author and L.A. punk historian; photographer and scene documentarian Theresa Kereakes, a childhood friend of Carlisle's whose work appears in The Go-Go's; and Pleasant Gehman, L.A. punk musician, artist, performer and host of The Devil's Music podcast (and former roommate of Carlisle at their notorious Hollywood apartment, Disgraceland).
"Here's the thing we always say: You can take the girl out of punk, but you can't take punk out of the girl," says Charlotte Caffey, lead guitarist. "Honestly, to this day, we're all in our 60s, we're still those same bedraggled little ragamuffins that we were. It's in us; it's part of who we are."
PUNK ON WOMEN'S TERMS
The members of the Go-Go's converged in L.A. in their early 20s, and thrived in a scene that encouraged them to pick up an instrument and play it, loudly — whether they knew how to or not. This diverse, inclusive and growing contingent of musicians was building something separate
