Days before the Go-Go’s are inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on October 30, drummer Gina Schock is debuting a photo-filled coffee table book that puts a very personal lens around the headlines the seminal band has generated through the years.
Made In Hollywood: All Access With the Go-Go’s is a passion project for Schock, who had her Canon at the ready during the early decades of the band’s 40-year career and shares a trove of pics and memorabilia with fans for the first time. The book also includes essays from all Go-Go’s members and others who were on the scene including Kate Pierson of the B-52’s, actress Jodie Foster, the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, original MTV VJ Martha Quinn and actor/comedian Paul Reubens.
“That hour and a half we’re on stage—that’s one part of what we do. And then there’s the whole rest of our lives that we’re spending together when we’re not on stage,” Schock says. “These photographs represent the way we interact with each other, the feeling of camaraderie and that we are a family. I think the book expresses that in a big way. We care about each other, and it’s real.”
Also real, and evident through the pages, is the level of shenanigans band mates Schock, Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle, Kathy Valentine and Jane Wiedlin took to amuse themselves while working nonstop to break through in an industry that initially didn’t know how to handle an all-female punk band that could rock harder than many of their male counterparts.
The Go-Go’s were the first band to land a title on the Billboard albums chart that was entirely female-written and -performed, 1981’s Beauty and the Beat, and they’re the first all-female band to enter the Rock Hall.
“We were all always coming up with ideas, and goal No. 1 was to keep ourselves amused and entertained. We could not tolerate one second of boredom. Whether we were sitting in an airport or sitting in a dressing room, somebody was on and was making it fun,” Valentine says. “The thing we always knew was that Gina would have a camera.”
Schock also sought photos from others in the inner circle. The book’s cover, snapped by former Go-Go’s manager Ginger Canzoneri, depicts the band members taking a break during the shooting of the “Vacation” video.
“We shot the video at the Chaplin soundstage, which was part of A&M Records at the time, a very historic place. After working a 12-hour day, we walked outside for a cigarette break, just to get out of the studio, and walked out to La Brea in our ‘Vacation’ outfits,” Schock says. “I can’t imagine what people were thinking seeing us traipsing down La Brea—and Ginger was just snapping photographs as we took our little journey. I thought the shot was really so perfectly Go-Go’s. We always had to have some fun element, something goofy.”
Schock, Valentine, and Pierson recently hung out with me on a Zoom. We talked about the Rock Hall, the new book and the particular magic of archiving your own past. Here are some highlights:
Rock Hall Ready
“It’s long overdue, but we figured better late than never, and we’re all pretty excited about it now,” Schock says of the band’s induction. “At first we didn’t really care that much because we thought it would never happen and so we kind of poo-poo’d it, but then when it actually happened… we’re excited. We’re waiting for the B-52’s to be inducted… what’s up with that?”
A Picture Paints 1,000 Words
“There’s nothing that brings you into an intimacy and behind-the-scenes kind of feeling than photographs,” Pierson says. “We actually started doing a book that was more interviews and it just didn’t feel right. We always just wanted to do a picture book because pictures show what its like. Backstage. Growing up. Particularly on tour, showing how hard it is and how crazy it gets. The pictures where you just want to goof off and look crazy because you’re so exhausted, Every band has these pictures where you’re all on the couch, just exhausted.”
“I feel like when people would pay attention to our band it was either like, ‘They were so bad, they did drugs, they had fights, they broke up.’ Even when we get inducted it’s like, ‘Oh, they were the first girl band to have a No. 1 record,’” says Valentine, whose own All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir was published last year. “I feel like everything gets focused on other than the fact that we were a working band of people really doing something extraordinary and difficult and fun. And it’s wonderful that people now get to see through that lens because it’s really about the interactions, the collective and the music. That’s the accomplishment.”
Breaking Ground, Looking Back
“In retrospect it’s more impressive,” Schock says. “When you’re in the process of doing it, you’re not really thinking about it as much because you’re so busy. You’re on tour and things are flying by, and you’re busy being a part of that. Now, we look back and think, Wow we really did make a mark. There’s people who come up to me and say, ‘I’m in a band because of you guys.’ That’s a wonderful thing to hear.”
“People ask what’s it like to be a woman in rock, but I don’t think Cindy and I felt that way so much. It was more we were just a really weird, unique kind of band and I think we broke ground musically,” Pierson says of B-52’s band mate Cindy Wilson. “That’s what I’m most proud of—that we worked together, most of our songs we wrote collectively in this collage jamming process and we decided early on we would split everything equally. And we also had no leader, so we also have a weird system, if any one person says no to something, that’s the default. Which makes everything really hard to move forward, but it’s a group collective, that’s what I’m most happy about looking back. We made a really good decision to split things equally and we have a family dynamic. And we still love each other, which is amazing.”
“The music business… I will never see it as anything other than a sound and a song,” Valentine says. “No matter what the era. If a band comes along that has the songs and captures a feeling in pop culture in a county where people are looking for what they represent, I think that’s still the same. We see that over and over again, regardless of whether people are buying records or CDs or cassettes or streaming. Certain bands just have all the elements come together and they’ve got the material, they’ve got the way of delivering the material they’ve got the voice people ant to hear, they’ve got the words, they’ve got the look.”
In other words, they’ve got the beat.
New B-52’s Doc On the Way
The Alison Ellwood-directed The Go-Go’s documentary debuted last July. The B-52’s are now headed down the same path, with Craig Johnson directing and Fred Armisen as executive producer.
“We are now in the process of also doing a documentary. I had archivists come to my studio in Woodstock and they’ve already been to Athens [GA],” Pierson says. “I spent all winter archiving and trying to organize my photos. I have all this Super 8 footage that I had no way to see, so they took them to be digitized. I took a lot of photos and slides. I don’t know why I took so many slides but I have a shit-ton of them in a bin. Keith Strickland has a lot of photos, and Cindy’s husband Keith Bennett. He was the archivist of all time; he has a ton of everything because he traveled with us from early on.
“Now I see how hard Gina worked on this book because it’s really hard to get it all together. But it’s fun going back. I wish we had filmed more, and had professionals. There were so many concerts where we were like, ‘We were so good, why didn’t we get a video or a film of this?’”
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