Featured Essay: The Go-Go Days Are Gone-Gone

by Chelsey Drysdale

I was eight years old in 1981 when The Go-Go’s released Beauty and the Beat. The day I purchased the album with allowance money was most likely one of the days my younger cousin and I rode our bikes on the trail away from the ocean toward downtown San Juan Capistrano, where she’d cross a bumpy, wooden bridge over the creek bed without slowing down as I walked my bike across that same bridge like a rule-following pedestrian should. In my memory, I gripped the handlebars on my shiny red Schwinn ten-speed, but that’s impossible because my grandma bought me that bike for my tenth birthday, leaving it in the entryway of her house with a big bow on it so I’d see it when I walked in the door.

In any case, my cousin and I completed our two-mile ride rolling into the back of the grocery store parking lot next to Condor Records, a store that’s been gone so long that no one quite believes me when I say it existed. At one point later it would be a deli with decent sandwiches. Now it’s an acai shop, but when I was a carefree, prepubescent kid discovering vinyl, Condor Records was my home away from home—that and Thrifty in the same shopping center, where we’d reward ourselves with two scoops of mint chip on cake cones for less than fifty cents. My first purchase at Condor was Devo’s Freedom of Choice, the only album in my collection as an adult that I can’t find, despite flipping through every record at my uncle’s house on a deep, ceiling-high metal shelving unit, a place my dad’s former albums now live because, in a weak moment, he gave them away. I do, however, still have Beauty and the Beat because no one on Discogs cares about The Go-Go’s. This past fall, out of financial necessity, when I sold fifty-five albums from my collection until I ran out of energy and expensive shipping supplies, I was relieved yet incredulous that this one didn’t sell—and equally surprised that the album I sold for the most money (ninety bucks) was Depeche Mode’s Violator.

When The Go-Go’s first album was released, I spent untold hours listening to it spin, singing along to every lyric from the bubble-gum pink inner sleeve, staring at the back of the speckled cover transfixed, where all five members appear in individual black-and-white photos taking bubble baths, looking both sexy and innocent—the epitome of a young girl’s fantasy self. I not only loved their music; I wanted to be The Go-Go’s, specifically Charlotte Caffey, the seemingly quiet background character who, on the cover, reads a book called Harlot and eats chocolate in her overflowing bubble bath. My cousin and I took turns wanting to be Gina Schock, the drummer, because drummers are rad, and who has a name like “Schock”? My cousin, though, wanted the limelight more than I did—the front-person position of Belinda Carlisle, who holds a rose in her bubble bath, her hair pinned up perfectly, dangly, wet bracelets hanging from her arm. What little girl wouldn’t want to wear flashy jewelry in a bathtub and sing songs like “Skidmarks on My Heart” before she understood what heartbreak truly was?

As my seven-year-old cousin and I argued about which Go-Go we’d become when we grew up, we danced around my living room in our matching Supergirl Underoos, screeching about emotions we had no comprehension of yet: “Lust to love was the last thing I was dreaming of!” I never wondered, What the hell is “lust”? I also had no idea I was singing about insomnia when I cried, “You can’t walk in your sleep if you can’t sleep!” I was as pure as I believed The Go-Go’s were. I couldn’t have known they swapped boys, snorted blow, and drank Hollywood punks under the table, and I’m so glad I didn’t.

I wore out that tiny two-piece Supergirl undergarment as much as I wore out that flat, round, black miracle of music, which, to this day, doesn’t have one substantial scratch on it. Even as a child, I handled vinyl by the edges and carefully wiped the dust off its grooves with a clean, smooth brush. It was all part of a ritual that no longer exists. Instead of riding a bike two miles, scouring a store, slicing through the plastic wrap down the open edge, carefully placing a needle onto a precious piece of hardware, and reading every word in the order the songs were intended to be heard, now when a favorite band releases a new album, I see it announced on instagram; I open Spotify (yes, I know it’s the devil); I add the album to my “Liked Songs” Playlist; and I hope I’ll eventually hear the whole thing on shuffle as I hit “next” to find the one song I’m in the mood for out of 10,796 other songs while I drive. It’s not the same.

When I outgrew The Go-Go’s and the Supergirl outfit, I never graduated to Wonder Woman because, by then my colorful garments had morphed into black, and my happy-go-lucky nature had become sullen as puberty hit and I discovered—mainly from my cousin’s older brothers and our youngest uncle—punk and goth music, opting to purchase Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and X albums instead of anything pop, which I eventually considered uncool. But as I look at Beauty and the Beat now, the cover’s edges worn, the well-loved sleeve crumpled with the memory of unsullied childhood hands, I recall that little girl who didn’t know pain or responsibility or anxiety, and deep down, I know she still resides inside me somewhere, calling out to her older self—who now understands all the lyrics—“Can’t stop the world. Why let it stop you?”

Chelsey Drysdale’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, PS, The Coachella Review, Brevity, and others. She edits at drysdaleeditorial.com.

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