Favorite Artists, Part 14: About The Go-Go's

Wow, that's a disgrace. I see that I haven't published one of these since last April. I had no idea I was so far behind. Anyway, let's talk about The Go-Go's and why they're on the My Favorite Artists list. 

The Go-Go's are the most successful all-female band of all time, and this in spite of an amazingly small discography. Their entire recorded output basically consists of three studio albums released between 1981 and 1984, a compilation album that included some interesting early and unreleased stuff plus a successful new single in 1991, an excellent studio album that most people (except for hardcore Go-Go's fans) were unaware of in 2001, and a slightly successful single released in 2020 in conjunction with a documentary film about the band.

In spite of this, The Go-Go's have remained a popular touring band practically since their inception in 1978, except for some time off here and there, and their lineup has mostly remained consistent. Their classic lineup consists of Belinda Carlisle on lead vocals, Jane Wiedlin on backing vocals and rhythm guitar, Charlotte Caffey on lead guitar, keyboards and backing vocals, Kathy Valentine on bass, backing vocals and guitar, and Gina Schock on drums and backing vocals. And if you read their bios, you'll see that these gals have definitely taken a lickin' (drugs, sex, drugs, more drugs, etc.) and kept on tickin'.

In many ways, The Go-Go's are an unusual band. We'll start with the obvious - there just haven't been that many successful all-female rock bands that have played their own instruments, written their own music, etc.. Offhand, I can think of The Bangles, Sleater-Kinney, L7 ... I suppose it depends on how you define successful. (Even The Runaways are largely known today because of the careers Joan Jett and Lita Ford had after the group broke up.) You get my point - The Go-Go's are the queens of a pretty selective sub-category of rock and roll.

Then there's the structure of the band. Belinda Carlisle is the face of the band, and clearly their most successful member in terms of name recognition, the success of her solo career, etc. However, behind the scenes, Caffey, Valentine and Wiedlin did the lion's share of the songwriting. Don't get me wrong, Carlisle's vocals were and are hugely important to the group's success. But of those big first three albums that are responsible for The Go-Go's' fame and popularity, Carlisle only even received partial songwriting credits for her lyrics on a handful of tracks. 

So how did a band with such a light recording output make the My Favorite Artists list, and do it slam-dunk style. Let me count the ways.

The first is the most obvious. I've made it clear in the past that I'm all about the vocals, and also that I've got a soft spot in particular for female singers. And this band has vocals up the wazoo. Belinda has always been a distinctive and very appealing lead singer. (Well, maybe not always, but we'll come back to that later.) The Go-Go's were pop punk before there was such a thing as pop-punk, and Belinda's cute little guttural growls fit their music perfectly. Add to that the fact that Jane Wiedlin is a fairly effective singer herself and all three of the other band members are also competent vocalists, and you've got a smorgasbord of sonic delight.

Next up is the songwriting. Once again, although their catalog is relatively small compared to a lot of other bands, its chock full of well written pop rock tunes. Consider if you will such tracks as "We Got the Beat", "Vacation", "Head Over Heals", "Our Lips Are Sealed" - these were some of the highlights of the early 1980's. The Go-Go's started as a punk band, and they never totally lost touch with the power of rock music - they just figured out how to imbue it with hooks.

Because their discography is so sparse, let's take a look at it album by album. Their first effort, 1981's Beauty and the Beat, was the LP that hoisted them to fame, and rightly so. Caffey's classic "We Got the Beat" was a #2 hit in the U.S., and was famously used in the opening sequence of Amy Heckerling's film Fast Times at Ridgemont High. (This was the film that launched Sean Penn's career, but let's forgive it for that.) Wiedlin and her former lover Terry Hall's song "Our Lips Are Sealed" was also a successful single, coming in at #20 on the Billboard charts. The LP also contained such other popular '80s songs as "Lust to Love", "This Town" and "Skidmarks on My Heart". The album itself reached #1 on Billboard, and has since gone double platinum. After the release of Beauty and the Beat, The Go-Go's were a world-famous band.

Their second album, Vacation, was a great deal less consistent, probably because the band was exhausted after the touring, hubbub, etc. leading up to and following Beauty and the Beat. Nevertheless, the title track was another iconic hit, reaching #8 on the Billboard charts, and it also had some other fine songs, including "Girl of 100 Lists," "Beatnik Beach", "Cool Jerk" (which was a cover of a 1960s song by The Capitols) and "Get Up and Go" (which achieved only minor success as a single). Vacation charted #8 in the U.S. on the Billboard album charts.

The Go-Go's third album, Talk Show, is really the one responsible for rocketing them onto my My Favorite Artist's list. For a long while, I would have told you that I thought it was the best overall album of the 1980s. In recent years, I've moderated that a little, and I now place Synchronicity by The Police and The Unforgettable Fire by U2 slightly above it. Nevertheless, it's still in the conversation for me as far as the best albums of the 1980s. It starts off on a high (and highly energetic) note with "Head Over Heels", which was the band's third most successful single of all time, and as far as I'm concerned, it never lets up. Other standout tracks include the LP's two other singles, "Turn to You" and "Yes or No", as well as Jane Wiedlin's "Forget That Day" and the slow but powerful "I'm With You". Talk Show reached #18 on the Billboard album chart.

After that, drugs, personality conflicts and exhaustion let to a breakup. This lasted until 1990, when they reunited for a benefit concert and a rerecording of "Cool Jerk" for a greatest hits comp. They reunited again in 1994 for the compilation LP Return to the Valley of The Go-Go's, which included a number of fun rarities including a live version of "Johnny Are You Queer?" (which they were the first band to ever perform live) and three newly recorded tracks. One of these, "The Whole World Lost Its Head", was another successful single. This kick-started the resumption of The Go-Go's' touring career.

Now that they were back together, in 2001, The Go-Go's released their final LP (to date), God Bless The Go-Go's. The album did come in at #57 on the Billboard albums chart, and honestly, quality-wise, it was probably as good as anything else the band had ever done. But by now there was a whole new generation dominating the music scene, and their one single from the LP, "Unforgiven", co-written by Charlotte Caffey and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day fame, never really gained any traction in the charts, fine though it was.

In the meantime, in between Go-Go's tours, all of the ladies have had solo careers. Belinda's has obviously been the most successful - with strong charting singles like "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", "I Get Weak" and "Mad About You", and several albums (especially her earlier solo efforts) selling quite well too. Wiedlin has had some moderate success herself, her highest-charting single being "Rush Hour" (at #9), and honestly, her Very Best Of comp is as strong a collection of songs as you could possibly ask for. The other ladies have also continued to stay active, playing in bands like The Graces (Caffey), House of Schock (Schock. Duh.) and The BlueBonnets and The Delphines (Valentine).

As for their reunion tours, I've seen them live twice. I saw them at Jones Beach in 2000, and they were excellent. I saw them again at The Westbury Music Fair in 2002, and at first, I was disappointed that the sound man had the instruments cranked up so loud that it drowned out Belinda's vocals. Then when I listened more closely, I realized that it was probably by design - she didn't sound great, and I assumed she had blown out her voice like Ian Anderson. Years later, when I read her autobiography Lips Unsealed: A Memoir, I realized that was probably when she was going through one of her struggling-with-addictions periods. I've heard clips of her singing after that, and her voice was fine (although in recent years, she's lost a step to age. But so have I.) Denise and I had tickets to see them live in 2020. Unfortunately, the pandemic put the kibosh on that.

The Go-Go's have added a few new lines to their resumes recently. Their music was made into a Broadway Musical, Head Over Heels, in 2018. They were the subject of a documentary film in 2020 (for which they released their first new single since 2001, "Club Zero"). And most recently, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021.

To wrap it up, although they only ever released just the four studio albums, the quality of those LPs was so high as to easily move The Go-Go's onto the list of My Favorite Artists. Belinda is still scheduled to be on the 80's Cruise that Denise and I will be sailing on this coming March, so maybe I'll even run into her then. Although I have no idea what I'd say to her - unless she cuts me off on the buffet line! Then I'll have plenty to say to her.

Next up in this series is a band that has gone through several incarnations: Fleetwood Mac!

Honorable Mentions for 2021, R.I.P Mike Nesmith and Cruise News

I guess I'll start with the sad stuff first. Although I don't currently have The Monkees on the My Favorite Artists list, if you'd have asked 12-year-old me, they'd have been the only band on that list. In the raging battles that took place in my grammar school of "Which band is better, The Monkees or The Beatles?", I was firmly in camp Monkees. I would defend myself by pointing out that The Beatles weren't in their best period right then, pumping out singles like "Hello, Goodbye" and "Lady Madonna", but the truth is, I don't think I really need a defense -- yeah, I recognize that The Beatles are far more important to the history of music, and that they reached artistic heights The Monkees could only dream of. But in my heart, I still prefer The Monkees. And the heart loves what the heart loves.

Of all of The Monkees, Mike Nesmith was clearly my favorite (with Mickey Dolenz running second.) On their TV show, Davey was the teen heartthrob, Mickey was the funny one, Peter was the stupid one, but Mike was the sincere one. He was also the best songwriter in the band (although the majority of The Monkees' best known songs were written by excellent outside writers like Carole King and Neil Diamond.) I loved a lot of the songs that Mike was the lead singer on, like "What Am I Doing Hanging Round?" and "The Door Into Summer." And I'll always have very fond memories of a Frank Walker open mic gig on a night where the only two people in the audience were Valerie Griggs and myself (I think it was a bad-weather night), where we turned Frank into our own personal jukebox by requesting one Mike Nesmith song after another. Good times! (Frank was loving it, too!)

I thought about catching The Monkees live over the years, but it was very seldom in my adulthood that the four of them toured together, and the tickets always seemed to be a little overpriced. (And because he'd gotten fairly wealthy due to his mother having invented Liquid Paper, Mike was the one most often missing.) But Denise caught the last two surviving Monkees, Mickey and Mike, just last month at The Paramount, and she said that while Mickey was still hanging in their pretty good, Mike was looking kind of long in the tooth. I made an unfortunately prescient joke at that time that on their next tour, it would probably just be "The Monkee". I'm sad that I was right.

So Rest in Peace, Mike Nesmith. You've given a lot of people, including myself, a great deal of musical enjoyment over the years. The Monkees never really got the respect I think they deserved. But they had many fans who loved them.

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As the year is winding down and I'm trying to finish off listening to and rating all of my 2021 music so I can do my Best Of lists, I can tell you I consider it good year, but not a great year, for music. The truth is there were quite a few LPs that I liked, but none so far that I've ranked higher than 3.5 out of 5 stars.

But I can see that I'm going to have no problem filling out a Top Ten list, and have a decent number of respectable also-rans as well.

Here are some albums that I don't think are going to make my Top Ten list, although one or two of them theoretically still could. I've got three or four albums left to listen to this year, and then I'm going to give the Top 20 or one more listen, so maybe one of these guys will have a chance to jump up. However, none of them are in my Top 11 right now, so I feel fairly confident they're not going to jump up two spots to make my Top Ten.

Ad Infinitum - Chapter II: Legacy - I kept my promise this year to keep exploring symphonic metal music. This is the second studio LP by this really top-notch Swiss symphonic metal band.

Sting - The Bridge - This is probably Sting's best album in the last decade or so. For those of you who thought he was through - well, he's not. There are mysterious songs, songs of love and betrayal - this one's got everything. The main single, "If It's Love", is kind of a paint-by-numbers love song, but most of the rest of it is quite good.

Lindsey Buckingham - Lindsey Buckingham - Here's another old-timer who needed to show he still has something left in the tank. I suspect he was a little embarrassed at being canned by Fleetwood Mac the year before the pandemic hit, and this is his "I'll show them!" LP. He did a pretty impressive job. It's the only Lindsey Buckingham solo album ever that almost made my Top Ten list.

As December Falls - Happier. - This British pop punk band wins my Paramore-Album-of-the-Year award. They totally hearken back to Paramore's glory days, before Zac and Josh Ferro left the band, almost slavishly so. Some have criticized them for copying the Paramore pop punk sound closely. As for me, I'm just glad to have an album like this again, and if Hayley and her boys are no longer capable of giving it to me, I'll take it where I can get it.

Chvrches - Screen Violence - I seem to be in the minority, at least on the Sputnik Music website, in that I don't like this one quite as much as their 2018 effort, Love Is Dead. But it's still pretty great, and their collaboration with The Cure's Robert Smith on "How Not to Drown" is epic.

Gary Numan - Intruder - This LP continues in the same strong industrial vein as 2017's Savage (Songs From a Broken World). The only difference is this time, there's no one standout track to match up with that album's "My Name Is Ruin", which is why it will land just a little short of My Top Ten list. It's still plenty worthwhile, though.

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Lastly, I wrote a month or two ago about my own response to the pandemic in relation to the March '80s Cruise out of Orlando that Denise and I are booked on. Well, I've not only decided to go full steam ahead with that cruise - if the pandemic doesn't cancel it, I'm gonna go for it - but I've also booked us on another cruise in May out of Cape Liberty in New Jersey.

I've been wanting to try out a cruise from Celebrity Cruise Lines - I'm older now, and I'd like to try a slightly more upscale (and less child-friendly) cruise experience. So we're going on a 9-night cruise that will take us up to Newport, Rhode Island, then swing us down to Charleston, South Carolina for a couple of days, and then sail out to Bermuda before returning to New Jersey.

I've never been to South Carolina, and in case of any medical situations, I like the idea that we spend most of the time in US waters. If nothing else, at least it will get me out of the house for awhile, am I right?

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I'm hoping to get in one more post this week before Christmas, as I'm really just about ready to write that Go-Go's article. So I'm going to hold off on wishing you guys a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays until then.

About Song of the Day, Thanksgiving and this Blog

Well, you've probably noticed that I haven't posted on November's Song of the Day. That's because I kind of quit it. 

Here's the deal -- I was actually hosting the month, and for awhile things were going swimmingly. The theme I picked was Songs With a Color in the Title, and I started it out with "Red Skies at Night" by The Fixx. It was doing so-so -- some people got it, others who just don't have that '80s sensibility called it cheesy, but I'm kind of used to that. Eventually I added a second rec, the seriously weird "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" by The Mothers of Invention, from their classic LP We're Only It for the Money. 

But something happened along the way that happens a lot to me lately. OK, not just lately. I got aggravated with my fellow man. "Not you!" you say. "You're usually so even tempered." I know, right?!

It started when one of the chaps, with whom I get along fine, decided for some reason I'll never understand to give a score of .01 out of 5 to Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain". To "Red Rain"! If they'd have done that to "Red Skies at Night", I'd have been annoyed, but Jesus, who gives a score like to Peter Gabriel, especially on one of his best songs? I thought maybe he was just trying to torpedo it because he didn't want to win the highest score for the month, but he swore that that was just his assessment of the song, and that there was "nothing good about it".

Anyway, I took a breath and tried not to let it get to me. I was even thrilled a few days later when one of the guys whose musical taste is usually the total opposite of mine actually gave a 5 to my Zappa song. (To be fair, I knew he'd score it pretty well because he loves Zappa, but I wasn't expecting a 5.)

Then it all went horribly wrong. Somebody recommended Prince's "Purple Rain". Now I've never written about it here, because it's just never come up, but I consider Prince to have been a total goofball, an artist just too ridiculous to take seriously. Between the phase he went through were he changed his name to a Squiggle, to the time at the beginning of her career where he tried to talk the singer Vanity into going with the name "Vageena", the guy was just a total goober. Sorry to speak ill of the dead, but that's how I feel about it.

I never really liked Michael Jackson -- his style of pop was just never my thing -- but at least I understood why so many people revered him, and even I went out and bought a copy of Thriller (like everyone else). Prince I just never got, and I've always been mystified that so many musicians I respect hold him in such esteem. (Go watch the trailer sometime for his "classic" second film, Under the Cherry Moon and then try to tell me that he wasn't a total idiot.) The most I'll give you is that I actually like "When Doves Cry" and I sort of half like "Raspberry Beret". But on the whole, the guy was a bowser. (For the record, Denise likes him. Go figure.)

Anyway, I gave "Purple Rain" a mediocre score, a 2.4 or 2.5, something like that, and I expected to get blasted for it. But then, much to my amazement, one of the regulars gave it an even-lower 1 out of 5, and declared that while he actually rated the song much higher than that, from now on, he was going to give any song that anyone rec'd that was a classic an automatic 1, in protest. And right after that, another one of the guys also scored it a 1 and said he was going to do the same.

Now, in a way, I get it. The actual idea of Song of the Day was always to rec a somewhat obscure song that you like that you think might have flown below other people's radar. Instead, we've had songs like Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" and Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" win the month, and that is kind of weird. But as soon as you start ranking songs strategically, on any other criteria than what you actually believe the song deserves, you've gone down a dark hole. It's a short step from there to, 'I think Running Up That Hill' deserves a 4.8 but I'm going to give it a 2 so my song has a chance."

Anyway, right about that point, my aggravation meter went off, and I just needed to get away. It was either that, or I was going to start getting into arguments that would make me more and more irritated. So I made sure the gang had what they needed to finish off the month, and I removed myself from SOTD.

If any of you want to know how it turned out, you can find the list for the month at Sputnik Music Song of the Day November 2021 and the YouTube playlist at November SOTD playlist. The winning song for the month was the rec for November 30, "Blue Leaves, Red Dust" by Youth Group.

I mentioned Thanksgiving because it's relevant to the discussion of my "aggravation meter", and why, as I've spoken about before, I find myself becoming more and more of a housebound shut in. Because it just seems that more and more lately, when I have to deal with other people, I just hate it.

Now don't get me wrong, it wasn't the family or friends at Thanksgiving, it was other people.

Here's the story -- at around 1PM or so, I left to pick up my brother at the train station. I got there a little early, pulled into a spot, and waited for the train. As I did, much like the playground scene in The Birds, first one car showed up, then another, then another ... you get the picture.

And it was all going fine, until one pinhead got the bright idea that instead of pulling into a spot, he would wait right at the front of the lane that people would be using to leave the parking lot once they've picked up their parties. Because he was obviously way more important than the rest of us, so why should he have to wait?

Sure enough, a minute later, another brain surgeon sees this and says, "Great idea!" and pulls in right behind the first fellow. Pretty soon, you've got a train of these VIP's parked one behind the other, and blocking in those of us who pulled into actual parking spots.

The train arrived and my brother found me right away. But of course we couldn't go anywhere, because there was a line of cars behind us locking us all in as we waited for the original fool to move. And naturally, his party were the last people off the train, and there about four of them, and they all had suitcases that they had to spastically try to shove into his car before he could move and let everybody else start to leave the parking lot.

As you'd expect, as this was going on, I was narrating all of this to my brother, in between shouting out the car window, "Hey, you want to step it up there, Blondie?!" to the last of the morons trying to fit a suitcase into a car as though it was a square peg and the car was a round hole. (Actually, to her credit, I think the reason she was having so much trouble was she was flustered, because she, at least, had the good grace to be aware that she was mucking up the progress for everyone.) And my brother was laughing hysterically, because, well, he's my brother and he knows me.

The moral of the story, of course, is that I continue to grow older and crankier, and less and less tolerant of the foibles of my fellow human beings.

Anyway, I'm not exactly sure where this blog will be going in 2022. I'm not going to shut it down, because I still want to continue the My Favorite Artists series, and if Omicron allows Denise and I to go on the 80s cruise in March, I'd like to write about that, too. But I'm really not expecting to be going back to live shows anytime soon, especially with COVID seemingly picking up steam again. (In fact, we had a bit of a scare this week, as Denise had been exposed and also was showing symptoms. Luckily, she tested negative, and she's almost better now.) 

So while I've been trying to at least write two entries a month over the course of this last year, one of which has been my monthly description of the Song of the Day list, I don't know that I'll have the material to make that happen anymore. But when I figure it out, I'll let you know.

In any event, I'm trying to finish up my listening for 2021, so if nothing else, I'll have the year-end Best Of lists coming out in a few weeks. Until then, if I don't get another post up before the end of the month, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!