POP : BACK TO THE BEAT : The Go-Go’s Battle Those Bubbly Media Tags to Return, Nine Years After the Breakup

Playing media tag is one of the prerogatives of being a rock star.

But once tagged with a simple “it,” a snappy, easy-to-digest image suitable for mass-retailing, “it” may be all the star is perceived to be.

The Go-Go’s were rock’s “it” girls of the early ‘80s: the first all-female band ever to make it big. They were celebrated for their fun-loving charm, for their best-buddies camaraderie, and for the garagey pop songs that propelled their first album, “Beauty and the Beat,” to a six-week stay at the top of the charts.

Looking back, Charlotte Caffey, the lead guitarist, reduces the Go-Go’s defining “it” to three words that she mouths with a blend of frustration, irony, and what-can-you-do-about-it resignation.

“Cute, bubbly, effervescent.”

The words practically hang there in quotation marks above the cushy gray couch where Caffey sits in a North Hollywood rehearsal room, flanked by two fellow Go-Go’s, rhythm guitarist Jane Wiedlin and bassist Kathy Valentine. In front of them on a wooden coffee table lies the Aug. 5, 1982, edition of Rolling Stone magazine, the one with the cover photo of five young women horsing around in chaste white undies, like junior high school girls at a slumber party. The headline, blocked out in pink letters, reads, “Go-Go’s Put Out.” It might as well have said, “Tag, You’re It.”

The Go-Go’s are not reluctant to dissect their past misadventures in the image-retailing game.

“It’s not that we weren’t that way, but there were other sides to us,” Caffey says. The argument is partly supported by the 1981-vintage “Beauty and the Beat,” which had its moments of winking irony to go with the cute, frothy stuff, and it is completely clinched by the darker, troubled tone of the band’s third and last album before their breakup in 1985, the critically esteemed but commercially disappointing “Talk Show” (1984).

“I’m still trying to sort out in my mind how much we were responsible for it,” ventures Valentine. “Society was going, ‘Here’s a successful girl band.’ It’s almost like we couldn’t be accepted and embraced . . .”

“Unless we were non-threatening,” Wiedlin finishes the thought. “If we had been angry, it wouldn’t have worked.”

“That’s what’s so great now,” Valentine resumes. “Women (rockers) are accepted as being sexual, angry, crude--all the things it was acceptable for guys to be all along.”

Seasoned by past pitfalls, cognizant of present possibilities, the Go-Go’s are back.

While the three guitar-playing members expounded last week during a pre-rehearsal interview, drummer Gina Schock, who had brought in the Rolling Stone copy so the band could autograph it for a friend, stepped out for a long break after concluding that they were having no problem handling questions without her. Singer Belinda Carlisle, who emerged as a glossy, slick-sounding pop diva after the Go-Go’s broke up, had an excused absence: she had just flown in from France, where she now lives with her film producer husband and their toddler son, and was being given the day off to recuperate from jet-lag.

The immediate cause of the band’s return is the recent release of “Return to the Valley of the Go-Go’s,” a double-disc retrospective of hits and rarities. As they did in 1990, when they regrouped for the first time to play an environmental benefit concert and promote the release of a greatest hits package, the Go-Go’s will do a short tour, which begins Sunday at the Coach House, and also includes shows Dec. 1 and 2 at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles. Vicki Peterson, the former Bangles guitarist, will fill in for the six-months’-pregnant Caffey, who decided it would be best to avoid the rigors of the road and concert stage until after her February due-date.

This time, the Go-Go’s aim to keep their reunion going. The members say that touring in 1990 enabled them to get over whatever hurt feelings remained from the band’s bitter initial split. When they heard that their old label, I.R.S. Records, was preparing a more complete retrospective release, the Go-Go’s, who weren’t happy with the 1990 hits package, decided to reconvene for the sake of quality control, and to top off the album with new material that brings the story of the band full-circle.

“This retrospective was going to be put out with or without our involvement, and it was a perfect excuse to get together again,” Carlisle said in a phone interview the day after the missed rehearsal. The band members dipped into their personal archives for tapes of early gigs and rehearsals, thereby casting fresh light on the Go-Go’s origins on the Los Angeles punk scene in 1978-79. They also wrote nine new songs and recorded three of them for the album: “Good Girl,” “Beautiful,” and “The Whole World Lost Its Head,” which has been made into a video. All are catchy, overtly ironic garage-pop fare; the revived band features a Carlisle who sings in a more burry and expressive voice than she could muster a decade ago.

Pleased with the results, the five Go-Go’s say they want to press on.

“It inspires us to want to make another record together,” said Carlisle, who also plans to record her sixth solo album early next year. “That’s a big possibility down the line. I don’t know about any heavy touring schedule; everybody has their families and their own projects. But there’s definitely time to get together and at least write, spend the next year coming up with new material and recording it at the end of the year or whatever. It’s a very feasible thing to do.”

Reunions such as the Go-Go’s’ are also a very trendy thing to do. With nostalgia dawning for ‘80s New Wave music (an inevitability, now that the high school class of ’81 has pushed past 30), it could prove the most commercially feasible thing to do as well. Take into account the fact that the post-Go-Go’s careers of Caffey, Wiedlin, Valentine and Schock have been fitful at best, and that Carlisle’s solo sales have dwindled following the gold and platinum success of her first three albums, and there is no shortage of potential ammunition for scoffers who want to level charges of opportunism.

The Go-Go’s hope to arm themselves against such attack with persuasive new songs.

“The way I keep looking at it, there are opportunities that keep coming to bring us back together, and this time we’re not going to fight it,” says Caffey, invoking fate.

“When something feels really good and right, we go by our instincts,” adds Wiedlin.

“The only way we’ll know if the Go-Go’s have artistic validity or mean anything is to do a record,” Valentine says, putting in the final word on whether the Go-Go’s story merits a second act. “We made ourselves really happy with (the new songs) we’ve recorded. I don’t want to feel we have something to prove.”

The Go-Go’s retake the field at a time when the prevailing mood in rock has swung around to the opposite of cute, bubbly and effervescent. As the band’s comeback single remarks in passing, with some satisfaction, “punk rock isn’t dead.” And some of those young punks, with their songs glowering and noisy, might be inclined to write off the Go-Go’s as lightweights.

Wiedlin says she is pleased that the new retrospective chronicles the band’s punk origins. At the same time, she acknowledges, the image that set in later could be something “to overcome, almost.”

The otherwise affable Caffey sharpens her tone and throws in some well-enunciated expletives at the thought that the Go-Go’s might be given anything but respect for their part in breaking down the old stereotype that groupie and chick singer were the only positions in rock for which women need apply.

“Against all odds and obstructions in our way, we were just doing it. We didn’t necessarily write about women’s rights or talk about it. We were just doing it. If you want to call punk an attitude, it’s still with us. Being in a band is being punk, no matter what. You have to dedicate your life to it.”

The Go-Go’s applaud the attention being given to Liz Phair, L7, Hole, and others in the parade of women rockers who have become prominent in the ‘90s. And they say they don’t worry if those musicians neglect to cite the Go-Go’s’ contribution.

Valentine says she never gave credit to the Go-Go’s’ female predecessors, such as the Runaways, the teen-age glam-rock band of the mid-’70s that was put together as a novelty by a record producer. “But to be totally honest, when I saw the Runaways, I was totally jealous,” she recalled. “I wanted to be in the band. Suzi Quatro--I flipped out. I never gave them credit when we were doing interviews, so I don’t blame (‘90s women) now” if they gloss over the Go-Go’s when they talk about influences.

“I’d like to get to the point where there’s never a women-in-rock article again,” Valentine concluded. “But we were the first ones to have some success, to reach No. 1, and that belongs in a women-in-rock article.”

In their first run, whatever measure of dedication and pioneering spirit the Go-Go’s possessed was ultimately not enough to withstand the pressures of being young and suddenly famous. Infighting set in, and Caffey and Carlisle later admitted that they were hampered by serious substance abuse problems. Wiedlin was the first to leave, in 1984. Caffey and Carlisle gave up drugs, then decided upon sober reflection that they didn’t want to be Go-Go’s any more. They declared the band finis in the spring of ‘85, to the considerable chagrin of Valentine and Schock.

Carlisle went on to her solo successes, bringing along Caffey as a songwriting collaborator and a member of her backing band. Caffey, who is married to Jeff McDonald, singer of the thrash-pop band, Redd Kross, also formed an all-female band, the Graces, which released an album in 1989. Schock’s solo career amounted to just one record, the 1988 release, “House of Schock.” Wiedlin, who now lives in the San Diego County community of Escondido, put out three solo albums between 1985 and 1990, then decided to take some time off before resuming her songwriting about a year ago. Valentine vacillated between hard rock and traditional blues and R&B;, and still hasn’t managed to put out an album.

Carlisle, meanwhile, says she has focused primarily on the European market in recent years. In January, she left Los Angeles for a country home in the south of France.

Back in Los Angeles last week, she spent a morning doing demos for another glossy solo album (she says the European audience didn’t go for the somewhat less slick ‘60s-influenced sound of her 1993 album, “Real,” so she’s returning to the mainstream pop stuff), then turned up at an afternoon rehearsal to acclimate herself once more to rocking with the Go-Go’s.

On the phone afterward, she said she has no problem going back and forth between two distant stylistic poles. “It’s two separate things I love doing,” she said. “I love the sort of raunchy pop (that the Go-Go’s play), that garagey sound, and I love the classic pop song, which is what I grew up with on the radio. It’s not hard switching gears at all. The Go-Go’s sometimes feels far more comfortable than being on my own. It’s the comfort of having four other people up there.”

This time, the Go-Go’s have a strategy for not having five different people falling into the kinds of internecine struggles that destroyed the band the first time around.

“Our formative years were just a pressure cooker,” Wiedlin said. “We don’t want to have that again. You have to take care of each other, otherwise this machine just eats you alive.”

Back then, the members were in their early to mid-20s.

“We used to do every single thing we were told,” Valentine said, which led to a frazzling pace of recording and touring.

“We had no experience at all. We thought it’s what every band did,” Caffey added. “It was insane.”

Now the Go-Go’s are in their mid-30s, except for Caffey, a still-fresh-looking 40. Their second go at being a recording band figures to be more stable and settled. “Now,” Valentine says, “We can say, ‘We need to take a weekend off.’ We know we’re not going to ruin our careers or the success of the record. We’re just reserving the right to say no.”

Carlisle agrees that a low stress quotient is vital if a reunion is to take. “We’re not putting any pressure on ourselves. We don’t have any concrete game plan. We just have the desire to do a record, and we’re winging it as we go along. Getting serious and intense about it is going to take the enjoyment out. I want to have fun with it.”

In their rehearsal room, fun and mutual acceptance seem to be running strong.

Wiedlin, a pixie-like woman who looks young enough in her knit ski cap and flannel shirt to play Winona Ryder’s kid sister, starts the interview by admonishing Valentine: “You’re picking. Stop it.”

Valentine takes this bit of mothering (or is it older-sistering?) without annoyance. “No I’m not. I’m stroking my chin.”

Later, as they run through their live set (sans Carlisle’s singing), the two will join in a kick-step game of footsie as they knock out the beat of “We Got the Beat.”

Schock, who looked as if she had gotten up too early when she first walked in, is now smiling as she slams crisply on her kit. During breaks, she is ready with salty quips. Peterson, the substitute player, is all diligence and serious concentration as she works to get down her parts.

Caffey plays the coach, listening from the couch while holding a pad full of song titles jotted in blue ink, occasionally suggesting changes in the song order.

“It’s cool to watch,” she says of her new vantage point on the sidelines. The other day, she recalled, “I was saying, ‘Yeah, it’s a great band.’ I was gonna cry . . .”

Whereupon Valentine, overhearing the expectant mom, spun around and gave her a hug.

”. . . but maybe it’s ‘cause I’m all hormonal.”

* Who: The Go-Go’s.

* When: Sunday, Nov. 20, at 8 p.m.

* Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (5) Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit and turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

* Wherewithal: The show is sold out.

* Where to call: (714) 496-8930.

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