Meantime, A week and a bit, I had the wit of the cover art with the glamour shots on the back and the "ugly" beauty treatment band portrait on the front. Regardless of how the members thought of themselves relative to their L.A. punk scene roots, bands with women were still subject to glamourisation. The punk wars had won some headway (The Slits, The Passions, The Raincoats, The Au Pairs) but they weren't American so The Go-Gos made a statement in their record cover that, be it ever so subversive, still had to acknowledge the showbiz way. When I did get back up to the family seat in the tropical gateway of Townsville I was able to put the disc on for the first time and listen to the whole thing. At that point the cover could have been birdshit white for all I cared as the music was so strong.
What became the single led the set. Our Lips Are Sealed began with a simple but compulsive 4/4 on the drums. A palm-muted bass and guitar joined in, running down a three chord riff. A high clear ringing lead guitar figure came in like a bell. Belinda Carlisle enters with a voice both sweet and on the verge of breaking into anger. Everyone's gossiping but she holds firm and responds to dirt with silence. For the first two short verses the A-G-D progression is cut from pop tradition and done so energetically that it's magnetic. But then, all of these are major chords, it goes up a minor third, back down one, then up ...
I'll just cite the chords: F - D - Bb - E - A - D. That comes out of nowhere. Those chords gloriously don't belong in the same progression, at least not then. It's not even using a relative minor. They must have just sounded good when Jane Weidlin wrote it. What I didn't know until the following year in an interview in Juke or summat was that she wrote it with Terry Hall from The Specials/Fun Boy Three. They had a fling while The Go-Gos toured with The Specials. Hall sent Weidlin the lyrics and she did the rest. In the documentary she accounts for the weird chord shifts as the work of a young unschooled songwriter. To me it's the work of a natural songwriter finding the drama and emotion in the movement of chords, wanting to get away from the humdrum of the A-G-D of the verse which, compelling as they make it here, cannot escape its traditions, until the chorus (usually where the reverse happens and the tension is dissipated by the big bright scheme that gets us all listening). Dig? The chorus is where it tightens winding up until the title phrase at the end. The middle eight is heralded by a lessening in the arrangement with a bass led riff and Weidlin's own nitrous oxide vocal lulls the other figure in the song. Back into the verse (I'm shivering a little just recalling it) she uses this as the descant to the verse. And THEN the tension of the chorus happens again. After a few reiterations of the big major key title phrase we end clean, feeling like we've had (I'm quoting a review about a Richard Brautigan book) just the right amount of icecream on a hot day.
While I'll here I'll mention the video which, by the time I'm back in Townsville, was on Countdown every episode until it had to be when it got into the top ten. A lot less slick than music videos were getting, the home video look gives it a school project commitment that a glitzier piece would have missed. The band get into Carlisle's groovy red car and drive to a lingerie shop and then to a fountain where they dance and frolic as they mime the song. This is intercut with what is either a small venue gig or a practice where they are gong through the song. My half-decade older brother in law reported it to me as being sexist and demeaning, amping up the girlyness of the band but all I saw was an extension of the joke on the album cover: all dolled up in their street clothes in the car but more seriously in their stage gear for the performance scenes. It flips the bird on anyone saying they were bought up by the industry money and were playing along. They actually looked in complete control in a way that contemporaries like Loverboy never did.
How Much More plays a little more pedestrian but still has a surprise in the chorus after an impressive stretch of a single note over rising progression. If the the band is marking time here, Carlisle's power lifts it. And then there are some more inventive vocal harmonies that don't need to be there but gladden with their presence. Tonite hikes up the pace with a high droning guitar riff. Carlisle shows again how a clipped vocal delivery with conviction trashes all other attempts of superteen rock. More good vocal arrangement but this never sounded as strong as the best on the record.
Lust to Love crawls in with a palm muted guitar figure climbing like a spider through a minor mode. Carlisle comes in with an acidic confession of social power ambushed by real emotions. Suddenly the whole band kicks in with clean power chords for the prechorus which blasts into a glorious chorus with contrary motion between chords and vocal melody, a hooking central section and a power dash to the minor chord in the finish. Carlisle's controlled insistence on the strength of the melody is supported by a wordless descent through the minor tonality in the backing vocals. Repeat. Send in a clear and clean solo which can be sung and return to the cinematic base of the spidery riff and bitterwseet voice of young experience audibly aging. The highpoint.
This Town probably shouldn't have been put right after Lust to Love as it starts with a similar rapid palm muting figure. Then again it's clearly distinct and something jollier like Can't Stop the World might have robbed Lust of its intensity. When I first heard This Town I thought it was the B52s. That skeletal chunking rhythm with the spy movie guitar riff. Ominous. Carlisle's catty lead vocal is quickly thickened with close harmony. Before the verse feels over the chorus comes at the other end of a shining harmony ascent through the minor scale. A guitar solo after two verse/choruses is more of an instrumental break, rhythmic and brooding, world-building rather than band beating. It leads straight back into the chorus, now more glamourous than earlier. The words are a collision of images: "we're all dreamers, we're all whores" and in the chorus "this town is our town, it is so glamourous". Come and join in but stay away, it's ours. There's a sternness to it that suggests the writers were both part of and spurned by a scene that tastes, chews and spits out.
Side two and We Got the Beat. My eye popping first hearing in Rocking Horse is in the account linked to above but basically it's this. Toward the end of the year, I was bumming around Brisbane until I got the train up to Townsville for the holidays. I stopped in at Rocking Horse records in Adelaide St. Even if you didn't have a particular thing you were looking for you'd find something. The staff were constantly visited by friends or regulars so regular they were on first name basis with the people behind the counter. A lot of the records in the stacks were import copies with better vinyl and cover art quality than the local product or just the only copies, there being no local release. I used to start anywhere where no one else was looking and just keep flipping until I found something. I was doing that when some changed the record from whatever had been on to side two of Beauty and the Beat. Then I had the EXPERIENCE.
All that means is that the song We Got the Beat hit me with its thunderous energy, brilliantly orchestrated arrangement of a rock band augmented only by a piano. The momentum of the verses and the sudden widening of the choruses as the vocal went up and the chords plummeted down like a rollercoaster. The guitar solo was like a fuel injection, running through the scale until with a cymbal crash the key changed and it felt twice as big. Then on to the final verse and chorus and then the coda call and response before the chant over the driving riff led to an abrupt stop which felt like whiplash. I still listen to this song when I want to energy with big vocal interplay. It's the reason I bought this album.
Fading Fast is like a welcome pause from the energy of the previous track. A quiet arpeggio on a clean electric guitar. Carlisle comes in serious and clipped: "You thought that I was on your side..." Someone needs to be told to leave in plain terms. The lyric is just that, no puns or street talk, just plain statements. What makes up the rest is a forward driving solemnity that doesn't seem to belong in a teen anthem but here it is. The chorus doesn't include the title, it's a reinforcement of the verse and is in the unrelieved minor with a similar modal movement in the final lines of each stanza. But then, after a verse-long guitar instrumental, we get a thrid section which is as close to major tonality as we'll get here. It involves some very fine complex vocal arrangements in which Carlisle and Weidlin sing overlapping lines that reinforce the other and end with the title line, "you're fading fast out of my memory" back in minor territory. The song ends with two of these in a row and a repeat of the title line and a clean stop.
Automatic begins with a backwards note on a bass or a piano that gives way to a steady drum pattern and then a bass and guitar lopping figure whose repetition and modal tonality give it a mystery movie feel. Carlisle comes in with the most emotionally ranging vocal on the disc, describing unconnected sex in a sharp rise to the minor third in each line." Angles sharp clash together, Time and consciousness sever." When the circular motif in the guitars and bass is not rolling on there are gaps that end in backwards echo or are filled with the drums playing perfect time. A verse towards the end has two vocals sing lines from different verses in call and response and then the riff is picked up and plays into the fade, no relief, no end.
The album ends on what might be considered fillers or side two songs but they're fun for all that. You Can't Walk in Your Sleep (If You Can't Sleep) a good joke for the chorus in a song about insomnia. Skidmarks on My Heart matches a big drum pattern with powerchords and a good progression with a screeching lead vocal of frustration with a full harmony chorus "Oh skidmarks on the my heart. You've got me in fifth. You're bruning rubber like my love". A great surf guitar solo and doo-doo backing vocals and back to the big chorus. Kathy Valentine's only composition Can't Stop the World has a post punk treatment of of a Shirelles style boy girl song with a big 1-4-5 chorus and descending last line. A dual guitar break sounds like a Buddy Holly workout that adds energy and splits after one iteration. Great fun.
The Go-Gos had come from a punk scene that was taking leaves from the spikier UK well, political and critical here and there but quickly consolidating into the same kind of cultural rulebook that all scenes establish. So, when with a few lineup changes due to differences between what they'd started to do and what they wanted to grow into, the band found their feet in the kind of grindy pop rock on this record. Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey had established themselves as a sturdy songwriting partnership, buidling muscles in structure, harmony and wit. But if you see the clip from Ugh a Music War of them doing We Got the Beat you might notice they don'd just lack a little polish but the arrangement feels a little hollow (even though it has more backing vocals than the recorded one). Enter Richard Gottehrer.
Gottehrer was a generation older than the band but he had some serious credentials as regards what they might do to crash through. He was Brill Building and went on to produce as well as write. My Boyfriend's Back, I Want Candy and Hang on Sloopy are all his. And then into the late '70s he understood the undercurrents and produced The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. By the time The Go-Gos came past his desk he was on it. He kept their stage energy but highlighted their melody, keeping the guitars mostly clean and ringing instead of the then overdone distortion on every song. He brought out more of the vocal sophistication already there to finish these tracks with some of the finest voice work on any rock record of this time (the backings and harmonies are really that good). He found the concentrate within the band and created one of the strongest and most durable debut albums of the rock era.
So, after Mum tapped me on the shoulder on the platform at Townsville station and I rode back to Aitkenvale and I debriefed my first big year of Uni, I retired to the rumpus room where the smaller kids and their cronies dive bombed in the pool across the patio, and put this record on. I found a beer in the downstairs fridge and then I put the record on again.
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