COVER WOMAN CALLBACK
STILL FEELS LIKE FAMILY
The Go-Go’s bassist (and February 2009 cover woman) discusses family in all its forms. BY BRIANNA CALERI
Hall of Fame since 2006 when their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, turned 25. This October, after 15 years, some personnel changes in the organization’s nominating committee and a Go-Go’s documentary by director Allison Ellwood prodded the museum to finally recognize the iconic girl group in its 2021 class of inductees. The five Go-Go’s join the Hall of Fame’s inductee list alongside the iconic Tina Turner and Carole King, who are both included as duos with less famous ex-partners, Ike Turner and Gerry Goffin, respectively. A long-overdue win for women in rock. The Go-Go’s will hit the road this fall and celebrate with a twice-postponed tour. Despite having shrugged at the past 14 snubs, they’ve expressed effusive excitement at the induction. Last year, Go-Go’s bassist (and despite a significant 27-year stint in Los Angeles, born and returned Austinite) Kathy Valentine took her legacy into her own hands and released All I Ever Wanted, a fast-paced but thorough memoir with all the best and worst sides of sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s sensational without sensationalizing. “A lot of women’s history and music is dismissed as not being relevant,” says Valentine, reflecting on the necessity of telling women’s stories. “Because of that dismissal, it kind of discourages future women. In the ’70s...I was 15 years old and learning to play guitar, thinking I was the only girl doing that besides Suzi Quatro in England. If all the other 15-year-olds had known that there were women starting bands, maybe...there would have been a lot more women in the music business.” At first, All I Ever Wanted is an unabashed genre book, more about the living spirit of genre and local scenes than, say, the specific origins of a punk/ new-wave girl group. Genre is a touchy subject for artists, a rigid expectation for trailblazers who feel pigeonholed by marketing that limits a more natural musical evolution. Valentine’s memoir proudly name checks blues staples, glam rockers (the lesser-known precursors to punk) and new-wave pioneers, tracing the social overlaps that come to define each movement. The origin portion of the memoir offers an Austin-centric study of music history, with lists of organizations and defining events anchoring each chapter in the world at large: the nightclub Raul’s, the birth of Saturday Night Live, plane crashes and murders. Personal notes saved over decades provide the content, and playlists the author compiled by year to jog her memory thrust her back into the feelings of listening to those songs when they were new. Valentine’s personal experience explains the logistics of becoming a punk musician and the frustration of being peddled as one in tabloids. Her reflective self-validation demystifies the oft-romanticized narratives in which musicians
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become famous simply because of charisma and talent. “I don’t even know when you’re in a scene, if you know you’re in a scene,” says Valentine, taking stock of experiences and trying in vain to compare them to emerging spheres now. “Bands go out and support each other—they’re all at each other’s gigs—and then the people that aren’t in bands like to be there because they want to see their favorite bands mingling. It just all comes together.” Always the planner, Valentine already has an arc for her writing career. She started with a memoir to position herself as a writer in a way she knew people would want to see. The rockstar story was a given. Her sobriety made her confident enough to try. Although she isn’t an avid social media user, she writes herself a sobriety birthday post every year that inspires a wave of warm responses and expressions of motivation.
Photos by Christopher Durst and Robert Matheu.
The Go-Go’s have been eligible to be canonized in Cleveland’s Rock & Roll
