Perhaps no one is more excited about the next list of high profile concerts of the meeting gathered that Gina Schock. The 67 -year -old drummer was lost the last great shows of the Los Angeles Band, in 2022 at Crityto.com Arena and a three -night post in the Hollywood Bowl in 2018, due to health problems that required surgery in their thumb and to merge three vertebrae into its neck, respectively.
Now, however, Schock is healthy and is anxious to boost the band through a club in one of its old places, Roxy, April 9, and then April 11 and April 18 at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. After playing dates in San Francisco and Las Vegas, they will end at the cruel World Festival in Pasadena on May 17, which makes the few bands to play the festival and the Indian Festival, California de Indio larger, more eclectic, and the Festival of the 80s in the same calendar year.
Their Coachella dates are headed by Lady Gaga, while Nick Cave and the bad seeds exceed the bill in Cruel World. Everything seems to make sense since the gauges of Gaga's Pop inclinations and the punk scene of which he shared similar sensibilities with Cave's early work with the birthday party.
Four fifths of the band gathered for an essay in Los Angeles in mid -February that left Schock pumped. “I was very excited to play because I have been practicing for months. I have not touched the band for eight years,” he says through Zoom from San Francisco, his house since 2005.
Over the years, the GO-GO have met from time to time. In 2016, they organized what was announced as a farewell tour, leaving the door open to occasional live live dates, but no more complete tours.
The last time they played a festival comparable to Coachella was in January 1985 in Rock in Rio in Brazil, when the band was in their last legs after its incredibly successful career. They exploded outside the Los Angeles club scene, obtained a record contract with the records of Irs Records and led the album list in 1982 with their debut album, “Beauty and the Beat”, which combined his punk energy with pop sensibilities in the successes “Our lips are sealed” and “We Got The Beat”. Incredibly, it is still the only album of a band of women who touches its own instruments to head Billboard's list of albums.
However, in 1985, after two other successful albums, “vacation” of 1982 and “Talk Show” of 1984, the band was falling apart due to jealousy about compensation credits, compensation, substance abuse and poor management.
Wiedlin, who had a successful collaboration with Sparks in the song “Cool Places” in 1983, which left in October 1984, so Valentine slipped to the guitar and the band recruited Paula Jean Brown to play the bass for her two sets at the Rio Festival in Brazil, which attracted more than 250,000 people every day. After those shows, the rest of the band flew home, but guitarist composer Charlotte Caffey stayed in Brazil for a week, trying to overcome her drug addiction. “It was such a strange feeling that all week,” says Caffey about that moment in Rio. “I got home and dropped into a drug and alcohol hospital in southern Pasadena,” he recalls.
Four decades later, she is still sober. “That is the most important thing I did in my life,” she says. “All the people who worked there bet on who would first come out,” he says about the rehabilitation facilities staff. “Of course, I was number 1, and I am the only one who remained sober.”
The most private Go-G, Caffey is not on social networks like his bandmates. “The worst possible thought in my mind is to have people following me,” he says in a Zoom interview from his home in Los Angeles who began with his camera.
“I always loved to write the songs and act,” he adds, “but I did not love all things, like fame. I am not that public person. I love to see what the other girls are doing. Discover when we are not working together. I look at their social ones and I like it: 'Oh, that looks very fun.' I'm just more private.”
The Go Go's are preparing to act at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, as well as Cruel World.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
It is not surprising that Go-Go use social networks to keep up with each other these days. Caffey, who wrote the number 2 success of the band in 1982 “We Got The Beat”, is the only band member who is still in Los Angeles, where he lives with her husband since 1993, Redd Kross guitarist Jeff McDonald. Singer Belinda Carlisle, 66, has lived with her husband Morgan Mason Search for a better treatment for long treatment that has been the one that has been a year.
The Go-Go with the most successful solo career with the successes “Heaven is a place on Earth”, “I get deak” and “Mad About you”, Carlisle recently announced live dates in Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom for autumn, after playing in Australia and England last year. However, she acknowledges that everything owes it to the go-go.
“If it weren't for the Go-Go, I wouldn't have a solo career. That's just a fact and I know,” he says in a Zoom interview from Mexico City. “The whole story of IT even happens is something that I think is extraordinary,” he says about the band that co -founded in 1978 with Wiedlin and the original bassist Margot Olavarria and drummer Elissa Bello. “I am very proud of that because we really work hard. The band occurred against wind and tide.”
Maybe nothing summarizes that better than the induction of the band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. Foo Fighters, which include the guitarist Pat Smear, another refugee of the Los Angeles punk scene, were also included that year. Before Carlilse joined the Go-Go, he had a brief period as a singer of the germs with smear on the guitar. “I have a photo of mine, Jane, Pat Smear and Belinda standing there,” says Caffey, “and we look at each other, 'you realize that this was never a thought in our minds at the time'”.
Caffey then returns to a memory with smear and his bandmate, the leader Bobby Pin, who had not yet adopted the new nickname Darby Crash. They asked him how old he was. She can't remember her answer, but remember Smear's response in 1978: “You are too old to be a punk.”
At 71, Caffey is the oldest Go-Go, but when he turns on his zoom chamber, he has a youth that denies his age. Like many, she says that Covid “Lockdown got with my mind” and stopped focusing on music for a stretch. However, playing Go-Go's songs in his studio at Casa de Abajo “has opened all this creative for me now. I feel that I am ready to re-create,” he says.
In the United Kingdom, Valentine, 66, is also going through a creative rebirth. The composer-bassist-guitarist that brought The Go-Go's the Top 10 Hit “Vacations”, is acting as a solo artist. A new star band has also begun, the Linda Pitmon baseball drummer, the singer-guitarist Brix Smith of The Fall and Pogues Bassist-Singer Cáit O'Riordan called Psycher, and is preparing to start writing a sequel to her accelerated book of 2020 “All i Ever Wanted: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir”. “I feel that I am 16 years old and I will do it in the music business,” he says during a Zoom interview.
He has also recognized the total impact of the GO-GO legacy after a recent trip to Vienna to visit Lenny Kravitz and his guitarist and his former fourth partner Craig Ross. “Lenny was introducing me to a younger person who simply came out of the go-go. 'No, you don't understand. They were the biggest band in the world!' And I say, 'no, we were not.'
Rearlet 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 musical Broadway Festival, Which Led to the Band's Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. “And Now Coachella and Cruel World, which I never thought we would be asked to do that we would do,” she says.
Since he is receiving treatment for the persistent effects of Long Covid, Wiedlin could not reach the band trial at the end of February, but has gathered to play with the resident of the Bay area, Schock, and plans to meet with the band for rehearsals before the Roxy concert.
She, like other members of the band, is pleased to see new acts such as her fellow women's rocks based in Los Angeles, Linda Lindas carries the torch, and expects others to arise to keep rock 'n' roll alive.
“You have all the phenomenon of groups that do not write and do not touch instruments, and it's more about dancing and look good,” she says. “That's fine, but being an older person, I really appreciate rock 'n' roll, strong guitars and people playing instruments. That is something I love, and would hate that it disappears completely.”
“I am very proud of our band,” he adds. “We have never used support clues or anything. We are very raw live and we are very real.”
