The Go-Go’s Kathy Valentine Still Has the Beat

Decades after the Go-Go’s early ‘80s heyday, bassist Kathy Valentine and the band are finally getting their due for their contribution to pop music history. On Oct. 30, the band will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

This comes after The Go-Go’s, a documentary about the all-female band, premiered on Showtime last year to critical raves and the band released “Club Zero,” its first new song in 19 years. Valentine also published her acclaimed 2020 book, All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ’n’ Roll Memoir (named after a lyric from “Vacation,” the Go-Go’s 1982 top 10 hit that she cowrote).

And in May, Valentine, 62, graduated from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, with an interdisciplinary degree in fine arts and English, while her 18-year-old daughter, Audrey, graduated from high school.

“In a perfect world, I would have graduated at a different time than my daughter,” Valentine says, referring to possibly overshadowing Audrey’s big moment. “But it might make for some pretty good photo ops. And I keep tormenting her by telling her I’m going to apply for grad school wherever she gets in as a freshman. And she gives me a look, like, ‘I’m horrified.’ ”

Getting her college diploma later in life was “kind of like a bucket list thing” for Valentine, who’s eager to start the next chapter of her life as a writer. “Every time I take a class, I’m just so fired up by the possibilities I could go in,” she says. “Life just always seems to open up with education.”

In her younger years, Valentine pursued music over academics. Writing in her memoir, Valentine credits her mother, who allowed the teenage Valentine to run wild and experience the pleasures and pain of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Not an approach everyone may agree with, but for Valentine, it paid off.

“It’s not all like her being negligent or her being not present or her not giving me guidance or boundaries,” Valentine says. “That’s a big part of the story, but also about her support that enabled me to do this. If I had stayed in a regular, traditional school, I probably wouldn’t have learned the guitar. I think she’s very much part of why I became a musician.”

Picking up the guitar while attending an alternative school about 40 miles from her native Austin, Texas, Valentine started her first band by the age of 16. After gigging with a few bands and jamming with such Texas legends as Doug Sahm, Valentine moved to Los Angeles when she was 19. In L.A., she and singer-guitarist Carla Olson formed the Textones, and it was with that band that she first recorded her song “Vacation.” She opted to jump ship and switch to bass to join the Go-Go’s in late 1980.

Just a few months after she joined the band, the Go-Go’s were signed to I.R.S. Records, for which they recorded the album Beauty and the Beat. Featuring such hits as “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat,” and fueled by video play on MTV and frequent touring, the album rose to number 1 on the Billboard pop albums chart, becoming the first album by an all-female band who played their own instruments to top that chart. The Go-Go’s — Valentine, singer Belinda Carlisle, guitarists Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey, and drummer Gina Schock — went from punk rockers to pop queens.

“Vacation,” retooled with input from Caffey and Wiedlin, was tapped as the title track for the band’s second album, released in 1982, and became a top 10 single.

Valentine also cowrote “Head Over Heels,” the hit from the Go-Go’s third album, Talk Show. But by 1985, the Go-Go’s collapsed in a haze of drug and alcohol abuse, overwhelming personal problems and ill will over songwriting royalties.

 While writing her memoir, Valentine came to the realization that male musicians had repeatedly stepped up and helped her during her career. “After the Go-Go’s, I was  quite lost after we broke up and I got sober. I was a little lost musically,” she says. “I wasn’t sure of my identity anymore, and the musicians in my life that were guys kind of rallied around me, made a band with me and helped me figure things out again. So it has been a lifelong pattern. I was really happy to be able to write that and get that out there.”

Following the Go-Go’s demise, Valentine played with a few other bands, but they failed to match the success of the Go-Go’s, who reunited in the ’90s. In 2012, a broken wrist kept her off a Go-Go’s tour, and in 2013, Valentine was fired from the group. She sued the group, alleging her ex-bandmates were trying to deprive her of her fair share of the band’s revenues. That’s also when she began writing her memoir.

 “Writing the book really healed those feelings in a lot of ways,” she says. “There were a lot of silver linings to that. Part of it was being out of what, for a time, was a rather dysfunctional and toxic environment. I was not the first and only person to bear the brunt of that kind of negativity,” she adds. “On one hand, I did take it personally. On another, there was a whole other part of me that recognized that it wasn’t just about me. That it was a dynamic that had gotten very toxic.”

Valentine’s lawsuit against the band was eventually settled out of court, and she rejoined the Go-Go’s in 2018, just before the jukebox musical Head Over Heels, a 16th-century romance set to the group’s music, opened on Broadway. Valentine had planned to play dates with the band in the summer of 2020 and 2021, but they were scratched due to the pandemic. Still, the Go-Go’s are in a good place, and in late June they announced concert dates for December and January.

“I think the documentary and coming together in our 60s — really healing and letting go — is one of the highest points we’ve had,” she says. “It’s almost like it’s gone beyond creating and having this collective momentum that is charging toward success. That was exciting and exhilarating. But for where I am now, what’s happening with us as human beings is a real highlight.”

Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

From left, Charlotte Caffey, Belinda Carlisle, Kathy Valentine and Jane Wiedlin perform at the curtain call for "Head Over Heels," a 16th-century romance set to the Go-Go's music, which opened on Broadway in 2018, the same year Valentine rejoined the band after a break of several years.

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