Perhaps no one is no longer enthusiastic about the next list of high-level concerts than Gina Schock. The 67 -year -old drummer missed the latest Los Angeles shows in the group – in 2022 at The Crypto.com Arena and a three -night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in 2018 – due to health problems that required surgery on his thumb and to merge three vertebrae together in his neck, respectively.
Now, however, Schock is in good health and is looking forward to fueling the group through a club taking place at one of their old lairs, Roxy, Wednesday, then Friday and April 18 at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. After playing dates in San Francisco and Las Vegas, they will wrap the Cruel world Festival in Pasadena on May 17, which makes one of the rare groups to play the Indio larger, more eclectic and current Indio festival and the Pasadena festival in the 80s during the same calendar year.
Their coachella dates are drawn by Lady Gagawhile Nick Cave and bad seeds Top the Bill at Cruel World. All of this seems to have a meaning from the GO-GO-Go bridge the gap between Gaga's pop slopes and the punk scene that shared similar sensitivities with the first cellar work with the birthday party.
The four-fifths of the group met for a rehearsal in Los Angeles in mid-February who left Schock. “I was very excited to play because I have been training for months. I have not played with the group for eight years, ”she says via Zoom de San Francisco, her house since 2005.
Over the years, Go-Go have met from time to time. In 2016, they organized what was presented as a farewell tour, leaving the door open to dates of occasional future, but no more complete visits.
The last time they played a festival comparable to Coachella was Rock in Rio in Brazil in January 1985, when the group was on their last legs after their first incredibly successful round. They exploded from the Los Angeles club scene, marked a recording contract with IRS discs at the time and went beyond the album list in 1982 with their first album, “Beauty and the Beat”, which mixed their punk energy with pop sensitivities in the successes “Our Lips Are Selced” and “We Got The Beat”. Incredibly, he remains the only album of an entirely feminine group that plays their own instruments for the head of the Billboard albums.
However, in 1985, after two other successful albums, “Vacation” in 1982 and “Talk Show” in 1984, the group collapsed due to jealousy on writing credits, remuneration, drug addiction and mismanagement.
Wiedlin, who had a successful collaboration with Sparks on the song “Cool Places” in 1983, left in October 1984, then Kathy Valentine slipped on the guitar and the group recruited Paula Jean Brown to play bass for their two sets at Rock in Rio Festival, which attracted more than 250,000 people every day. After these shows, the rest of the group returned home, but the guitarist-songwriter Charlotte Caffey stayed in Brazil for a week, trying to cross his drug addiction. “It was such a strange feeling all this week,” said Caffey at that time in Rio. “I got home and dropped into a South Pasadena drug and alcohol hospital,” she recalls.
Four decades later, she is still sober. “This is the most important thing I have made in my life,” she says. “All the people who worked there took bets on who would come out first,” she says about the staff of the rehabilitation center. “Of course, I was n ° 1, and I am the only one to remain sober.”
The most private go-go, Caffey is not on social networks like his group comrades. “The worst thought possible in my mind is to have people who follow me,” she said in an interview zoom in her house in Los Angeles that she started with her camera.
“I always liked to write the songs and play,” she adds, “but I didn't like everything that, like fame. I am not this public person. I love to look at what other girls do. I discover when we do not work together. I look at their social ones and I say to myself: “Oh, it looks really fun. I'm just more private.
The Go Go are preparing to perform at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival as well as in a cruel world.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
It is not surprising that the Go-Go uses social media to hold each other these days. Caffey, who wrote Hit No. 2 in the group in 1982 “We Got The Beat”, is the only member of the group still in Los Angeles, where she has lived with her husband since 1993, Redd Kross The guitarist Jeff McDonald. Singer Belinda Carlisle, 66, lived with her husband, Morgan Mason, former political advisor and entertainment director, in Mexico City for four years and outside the United States since 1994. Valentin recently moved to St. Albans, England, near London, while Wiedlin lived on the Big Island of Hawaii but recently moved to Berkeley be a treatment for the long covid.
The go-go with the most successful solo career with tubes “Heaven is has place on Earth”, “I Get Laik” and “Mad About You”, Carlisle recently announced live dates in Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom for the fall, after playing in Australia and England last year. However, she recognizes that she owes everything to Go-go.
“If it was not for go-go, I would not have a solo career. It's just a fact and I know,” she said in a zoom interview in Mexico. “The whole story of this even happens something that, I think, is extraordinary,” she said about the group she co-founded in 1978 with Wiedlin and the original bassist Margot Olavarria and the drummer Elissa Bello. “I'm really proud of that because we really worked hard. The group has occurred against all expectations. ”
Perhaps nothing sums up better than the group's induction at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021. Foo Fighters, who includes guitarist Pat Smear, another refugee from the Punk scene, was also inducted that year. Before Carlisle joined the go-go, she had a passage as a singer of germs with the guitar smear. “I have a photo of me, Jane, Pat Smear and Belinda standing there,” says Coffey, “and we looked at:” You realize that it was never a thought in our mind at the time “.
Caffey then returns to a memory with Smear and his group comrade, singer Bobby Pin, who had not yet adopted the nickname Darby Crash. They asked her how old she was. She does not remember her answer but remembers Smear's response in 1978: “You are too old to be a punk.”
At 71, Caffey is the oldest go-go, but when she lights her zoom camera, she has a youth who denies her age. Like many, she says that the “Lockdown has spoiled with my mind” and she stopped focusing on music for a section. However, playing go-go songs in your home studio below “has opened all of this creative thing for me now. I feel like I am ready to start again, ”she says.
In the United Kingdom, Valentine, 66, also crosses a creative rebirth. The author-guy-guitarist who brought the top 10 of the Top 10 “Vacation”, occurs as a solo artist. She also launched a new group of entirely feminine stars with the drummer of the baseball project Linda Pitmon, the singer-guitarist Brix Smith in the fall, and the bassist-singer of Pogues Cáit O'riordan called Psycher, and is preparing to start writing a sequelae in her book acclaimed in 2020 “All I Ever Wituding: Memoir “. “I feel like I am 16 years old and I'm going to arrive in music music,” she said during an interview zoom.
She also came to recognize the full impact of the legacy of the Go-Go after a recent trip to Vienna to visit Lenny Kravitz and her guitarist and her former roommate, Craig Ross. “Lenny presented me a younger person while leaving the go-go.” No, you don't understand. They were the biggest group in the world! And I say to myself: “No, we are not.” And he said: “Yes, you were the biggest group in the world!” I am always surprised by the cultural scope of Go-Go. »»
Reached by phone in San Francisco, Wiedlin, 66, is also pleasantly surprised by the renewed interest and activity surrounding the group in the last decade, including the 2018 Broadway musical “Head Over Heels” featuring their songs and the beginnings in 2020 of the documentary “The Go-Go's” to the Spending Film Festival, which led to the induction of the group Rock and roll Hall of Fame. “And now Coachella and Cruel World, which I would never have thought that we were asked to do,” she said.
Since she has undergone treatment for the persistent effects of Long Cavid, Wiedlin has not been able to go to the group's rehearsal in Los Angeles at the end of February, but met to play with a resident colleague from Bay Area and plans to find the group for rehearsals before the Roxy concert.
She, like other members of the group, is happy to see new acts such as fully female Rockers colleagues based in Los Angeles The Linda Lindas carry the torch, and hopes that others show up to keep the rock'n'roll in life.
“You have the whole phenomenon of groups that do not write and do not play instruments, and it is more a question of dancing and appearing well,” she said. “It's good, but being an elderly person, I really appreciate rock'n'roll, noisy guitars and people who play instruments. This is something I love, and I would hate that it disappears entirely.”
“I am very proud of our group,” she adds. “We have never used any support tracks or anything. We are very raw live and we are very real.”
