In 1982, the debut album from the Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat, went to No. 1, making the California band the first all-woman group to top the charts with songs they’d written and performed themselves. It was such a big hit that the Go-Go’s were constantly misnomered as the first successful female band, ever. While this conveniently ignored the achievements of their pioneering predecessors and contemporaries, there was some truth to the idea. Unlike the girl groups of the ’60s, the Go-Go’s operated without any men pulling the strings, without a Svengali figure as their shepherd. Their singles “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Are Sealed” were international successes, and the band’s faces were all over MTV and on the covers of People and Rolling Stone. It was a long way from where they’d started.
As the Los Angeles punk scene emerged in the late 1970s, it was inclusive, diverse, and pioneered by marginalized voices. Bands like the Zeros and the Bags spearheaded a community that encouraged the freedom of self-expression and self-celebration. The scene centered largely around The Canterbury, a derelict, roach-infested apartment building where members of the future Go-Go’s lived. As one version of the story goes, outside a house party in Venice, bassist Margot Olavarria invited two girls to join a band she was starting with drummer Elisa Bello: guitarist Jane Wiedlin, a helium-voiced former glitter rocker known as Jane Drano who was studying fashion design, and vocalist Belinda Carlisle, a former high school cheerleader and Monkees fan-club member who was supposed to play drums in the Germs under the name Dottie Danger until she was sidelined by mono. (Subsequent tellings of the band’s mythology often ignore Olavarria’s contributions, but as Carlisle wrote in her memoir, “she lit the match that started the fire.”) The four novice musicians dubbed themselves the Misfits; they quickly renamed themselves the Go-Go’s.
“Everyone we hung out with were all in a band and they weren’t any good,” Wiedlin later told Sounds. “So we figured if they could do it, why couldn’t we?” Inspired by the Buzzcocks’ pop-punk, they wore dresses made of garbage bags and wrote noisy, shambolic songs that celebrated BDSM, taunted music critics, satirized pretentious poseurs, and extolled the grimy hedonism of their digs. “I wanted to throw up on stage, rip my clothes off, and dye my hair,” Wiedlin told Flipside in 1979. Olavarria just wanted to “spit at Valley girls.”