The Tragic Real-Life Story Of The Go-Go's

"Girl groups," or female vocal trios, had been a part of American pop music for most of the 20th century, but it took until 1981 for a rock band consisting entirely of women, who played their own instruments and wrote their own material, to score a number one album. The record: Beauty and the Beat. The history-making band: Los Angeles punk combo-turned pop-rock outfit the Go-Go's. Singer Belinda Carlisle, guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, bassist Kathy Valentine, and drummer Gina Schock ruled the early 1980s with irresistibly catchy, radio-friendly rockers like "We Got the Beat," "Our Lips are Sealed," "Vacation," and "Head Over Heels." The band also made a splash in the early days of MTV with its cool, funny videos, but by 1985, the Go-Go's were over and solo careers were underway for most members, particularly hit-making pop star Carlisle.

The Go-Go's reunite often, offering up nostalgia with their tightly-crafted '80s classics. Behind the scenes, however, the bright and sunny-sounding California band endured the frightening and troubling history of a band far more metal. Here's the sometimes out of control, out of sync story of the Go-Go's.

Belinda Carlisle was the lead singer of the Go-Go's and so also, its face. Media outlets that covered the band fixed on Carlisle's appearance. "[They] mentioned how much I weighed — so I was 'cute and chubby,' 'pretty and plump.' It was always about my weight," she told Deseret News. Carlisle had been long self-conscious about weight issues; in her memoir, Lips Unsealed, she recalled being called "fat and stupid" by her family.

Go-Go's bandmate Jane Wiedlin first spotted Belinda Carlisle in L.A. punk clubs because she skipped the usual uniform of skimpy miniskirts in favor of vintage dresses. "At the time, I thought it was just extraordinarily hip. Now I know it's because she thought she was heavy," Wiedlin told Rolling Stone. During Carlisle's time in the Go-Go's, an eating disorder took hold, which in turn led to a dependency on drugs, which she found helped keep her weight lower. Carlisle also struggled with cycles of binge-eating and overcorrecting. "I had a terrible relationship with food," she told ABC News. "If I did eat something wrong, I would be on the treadmill for hours and hours. And where I would beat myself up, and thought, well if I ate a bite of that cookie then I would just eat as many calories and count them as I went along, up to five and six thousand a day."

Bassist Kathy Valentine lived a life befitting a rock star, one of excess, instability, and a lack of boundaries ... and yet a lot of that went down when she was a child, well before she was ever a member of the Go-Go's. According to The Statesman, Valentine's father, an airman from Lubbock, Texas, split around the time the future rock star was three, leaving her mother, Margaret, to raise the child alone. Kathy Valentine didn't have a lot of structure from her mother — it was the 1960s and Margaret embraced the decade's wild spirit, giving her daughter free rein to do whatever she wanted, according to her memoir All I Ever Wanted (via Washington Post). 

By age 12, Kathy Valentine was sexually active, going to bed for the first time with a high school-age boy. It resulted in a pregnancy, and as termination was illegal in her home state of Texas at the time, she and her mother drove to California to obtain the procedure. A year later, Valentine was hitchhiking and wound up at an apartment of two young men, one of whom assaulted her. She also did drugs (sometimes with her mother) and rarely attended school. In her freshman year of high school, Valentine dropped out of school to attend an alternative institution called Greenbriar, and shortly thereafter, things improved greatly when her mother's boyfriend — a drug dealer who'd escaped prison — taught her how to play the guitar.

Shortly after joining the Go-Go's in 1978, guitarist Charlotte Caffey traveled to England with her boyfriend, Leonard Phillips of punk rock band the Dickies, which is where she ramped up her consumption of substances from more pedestrian fare to heroin. In the book More Fun in the New World: The Unmaking and Legacy of L.A. Punk (via Billboard), Caffey wrote that she "snorted something the size of a matchstick tip" and didn't think she would experience any effects. Instead, she "instantly became addicted" and spent nearly seven years dependent on heroin, keeping it a secret from the other Go-Go's.

After the band was signed to IRS Records in 1981, Caffey thought six weeks in New York — away from her drug suppliers — to record Beauty and the Beat would help her kick the habit, but she instead trolled around the city's seedy Alphabet City neighborhood in search of heroin. As the Go-Go's became more successful, Caffey added cocaine and fair amounts of alcohol to her daily habits and would frequently drive under the influence. All the while, she remained the band's most active songwriter. In 1984, at the suggestion of new Go-Go's bassist Paula Jean Brown, according to the documentary The Go-Go's (via the New York Post), Caffey checked into a rehabilitation program.

The Go-Go's loom large in '80s rock, but the band's time at the top was extremely brief. Their first album, Beauty and the Beat hit stores in 1981, and the third and final album (not counting a 2001 reunion record) came out three years later. According to singer Belinda Carlisle's memoir Lips Unsealed, guitarist Jane Wiedlin told the band that she'd be leaving the Go-Go's after their final tour dates in October 1984. She'd apparently "had enough and needed to do her own thing," and had entertained the notion of leaving the band even earlier. The Go-Go's continued on, briefly, with bassist Kathy Valentine moving to guitar to replace Wiedlin and hiring new bassist Paula Jean Brown.

But for Belinda Carlisle and guitarist Charlotte Caffey, the band was out of steam and they didn't have the energy to force it to keep going. And so, in 1985, those two chief creative forces in the Go-Go's broke up the band. But they didn't tell other veteran members Kathy Valentine and Gina Schock, or even let them vote on the idea. According to Valentine in her memoir All I Ever Wanted (via the Washington Post), she and Schock were called to their managers' office, where they were coldly informed of the Go-Go's ignominious end.

The Go-Go's aren't all that active of a band anymore as far as recording new material goes. The group released little more than three albums in the '80s, a reunion LP in 2001, and the one-off single "Club Zero" in 2020. The Go-Go's of the 21st century earn a comfortable living playing the old hits, live and in concert, to its throngs of adoring fans. The band toured in 2011, 2012, 2013, but not in 2010. A series of concerts were scrapped when guitarist Jane Wiedlin suffered a severe enough injury that prevented her from touring.

According to a post on the website of her comic book Lady Robotika, Wiedlin was hiking near her San Francisco home in May 2010 when she tumbled down a 20-foot cliff. "I knew something was terribly wrong with my knees as I rolled down the mountain, because there was a horrendously loud popping noise, like champagne being uncorked," Wiedlin said. After two days of bed rest, an MRI on her left knee revealed an "exploded ACL," or the tendon that joins the leg together in the knee. She required surgery and a year off from live music to fully heal, but that was just on the left one. "I don't even know yet what is wrong with my right knee because my insurance would only pay for one MRI at a time," Wiedlin wrote.