POP MUSIC REVIEW : The Go-Go’s Got the Beat--Again

It’s difficult to recall just how startling the arrival of the Go-Go’s on the scene really was almost a decade ago. There were other female bands around, but these were not leather girls nor mystical chiffon goddesses. That first album cover, with its aggressively cute imagery of beauty make-overs, threw it in your face, paving the way for the quintet to introduce a new, incontrovertible element into rock ‘n’ roll: frisky, unapologetic American femininity.

If that element is in rock to stay, so, just maybe, are the Go-Go’s. The quintet, split up for five years now, put the go-go back in the Whisky a Go Go on Tuesday by playing their first reunion show there, the site of many of their early, most unpolished gigs. (The show was a little-publicized warm-up date for their ballyhooed Universal Amphitheatre benefit for the Environmental Protection Act on Wednesday.)

Rough and fun, it served its ostensible purpose as good nostalgia, but the durability of the best songs also made you hope that they’ll live up to their furtive allusions about future projects together and decide to stay-stay.

Much has changed in the years since the Go-Go’s got up and went--most obviously in the life, image and career of singer Belinda Carlisle, the only group member to chart a commercially viable solo career.

Once the most roly-poly and tomboyish-looking member of the band, Carlisle has slimmed down and prettied up to the point of having that untouchable supermodel look. A question for many fans prior to the concert: Would Carlisle be able to reconcile her new, hard-fought, glamour-gal image with the old, casual, down-to-earth spunk of the Go-Go’s?

Indeed, Carlisle might have seemed a little overdressed for the occasion, wearing a long black dress with low decolletage--at least against drummer Gina Schock’s basic T-shirt and jeans, rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin’s short-shorts or bassist Kathy Valentine’s sheer polka-dot negligee.

When Carlisle sang the old refrain “This town is so glamorous / Bet you’d live here if you could / And be one of us” in the opening number, it was hard not to think of her calculatedly come-hither sex goddess look in her solo videos and wonder if it was even possible for her to find the irony in those lyrics anymore.

Ultimately, though, Carlisle proved as playful as the other members, and what incongruity there might have been between her image and the others’ worked its own purpose, if you think of her new look as the logical extension of that make-over on the first album cover. This material, too, challenges her voice in a way that most of the glossy, studio-fed solo songs she’s done are designed precisely to avoid; it’s nice to see a woman in an evening dress strain and growl a little.

The sound itself was expectedly raw--not so much in the manner of the old Whisky days, but more in how their recorded work was getting rougher just prior to the breakup. Their third and last album, 1984’s “Talk Show,” was easily their best, and Tuesday’s show really started to get going about a half-hour in when they performed the energetic rockers “Turn to You” and “Capture the Light” from it back to back.

Though the quintet will always be remembered most for frothy singles like “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat,” which emphasized the affable girlishness of the affair, the Go-Go’s had actually turned into a pretty solid rock band by that meaty third album.

Nothing dainty about Valentine’s thick bass sound or Schock’s straightforward club-band pounding, and nothing all that frolicsome about the underrated songwriting in tunes like “Mercenary,” performed quietly Tuesday with guitarist Charlotte Caffey on the piano. (“We’re gonna slow things down a bit, for our sake--us old broads,” Carlisle explained.)

Far from smooth, this show isn’t near ready for the road yet, but throwaways like “California Sun” and the Ventures-inspired “Surfing ‘n’ Spying” were great fun for a one-shot, and the strength of the best original material made one hanker for new additions to their abbreviated oeuvre.

Whatever their individual fortunes, the Go-Go’s remain a case of the whole being much greater than the sum total of the parts; here’s one vote for letting the beat go on.