‘My partners would all tell you I was a weirdo’: Jane Wiedlin on Go-Go Dungeons, Fame and Sexual Freedom | Music

The first thing Jane Wiedlin told me before our interview even began was that, about an hour earlier, she had two beers. “It keeps me in a good mood,” she says with a laugh. This disclosure dovetails with the reason we’re doing the interview in the first place, which is to unpack his new memoir, a tome that deserves an advertising truth award for its title alone: ​​TMI (as in “too much information”). “I’ve always been TMI!” Wiedlin announces it proudly. “I am the one who always wanted to reveal the truth. This book is my first opportunity to do so.”

Part of that truth has to do with the band she helped form in the late ’70s, the Go-Go’s. Not only are the five-piece the first all-female group playing their own instruments and writing their own material to earn a No. 1 album in the United States, but, surprisingly, they are the only group to hold this distinction nearly 45 years later. The group’s power-pop music, heard in energetic hits like Our Lips Are Sealed and Vacation, led to their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, inspired a Broadway play and influenced modern female artists from Olivia Rodrigo to Wet Leg.

It turns out that three of the five other Go-Go members – Kathy Valentine, Belinda Carlisle and Gina Schock – have already published their own books, and while Wiedlin says she loves these women, she is quick to add: “They are very private people. There are all these things that they don’t want people to know, and I just don’t feel that way. I don’t think it’s honest for me to tell my story and not tell my story.” real history.”

In writing her story, she felt it was crucial “not to make myself look good. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life and I don’t like to blame others,” she says. “I want to take responsibility for what I did and who I am.”

At the same time, factors beyond his control played a major role in creating many of the most distressing situations. Since the age of 11, Wiedlin has suffered from depression, leading to periods so tortuous that she made two suicide attempts over the years and still has periods of ideation today. She also dealt with bipolarity, a seesaw of ups and downs that, in its most manic form, led to impulsive behavior that damaged her already problematic relationships. (Wiedlin has been married and divorced three times.) “If you asked my partners over the years, I think they would all tell you I was a nut job,” she says matter-of-factly. “I can be very tough and harsh with people.”

This view of Wiedlin is at complete odds with her cheerful image, an impression that strikes you as soon as she opens her mouth. Her speaking voice has the adorable cry of a beloved cartoon character, an image enhanced by her animated appearance, highlighted by purple hair and a pink blouse that wouldn’t be out of place on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. We’re speaking via Zoom from her hotel room in Cancun, Mexico, where she flew to perform with Go-Go drummer Gina Schock at a nostalgic ’80s music festival. Just before the interview, she gave a long sit-down where she drank those beers to ensure a happy-go-lucky attitude for her fans. This desire to please is a key motif in her memoir, a tendency that often led her to repress her true feelings. The result is even seen in his prose style. Even though his book never shrinks from the most painful moments of his life, its tone remains lively and witty. “As a mature woman, I really have to struggle with not being the ‘good girl,’” the 68-year-old artist tells me. “I’m a people pleaser.”

She attributes this in part to her upbringing in the Midwest in the 1950s, when girls were “told to shut up and be cute.” Although she speaks of her parents lovingly, there was a secret in the family that hinted at tension. In her 40s, she was told she had an autistic older sister who died of drowning before Wiedlin was born. She assumes that she was not informed sooner because her mother felt guilty about the whole thing, which led to a lingering melancholy within her. “At the time, everyone accused the mother of being autistic,” she says. “I can’t even imagine having that burden.”

Wiedlin’s depression arrived around the time she got her first period. “I don’t know if it was the hormones or that age, but I went into a total breakdown,” she says. “It hit me like a bolt of lightning.” This was partly expressed in a love of transgression that found an outlet in the outrage of the glam-rock revolution. Wiedlin was a young teenager then, and her family had already moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, a welcoming home for the new sound and style. “Glitter was so rebellious, artistic and fun!” she said. “It was just what I needed.”

At the same time, she had a deeply disturbing experience within the glitter scene. She and her teenage friends regularly sneaked into Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in Hollywood, Los Angeles’ main breeding ground for glam rock. “I had the illusion of meeting David Bowie there and seeing him fall in love with me!” » Wiedlin said with a laugh. “But Rodney was a serious predator, and he preyed on me and a lot of my girlfriends.”

Wiedlin says Bingenheimer sexually assaulted her in 1973 when she was still a minor. Similar accusations were made against her by several other young women of the time, including Kari Krome of the Runaways. (Several attempts by the Guardian to reach Bingenheimer for comment received no response.) Shortly after the incident, Wiedlin attempted suicide. The assault “absolutely affected that,” she says today. “I didn’t know how to say no and because I let it happen, I thought it was my fault.”

Wiedlin says suicidal thoughts have “always been on my mind. In fact, I wrote a song about it called Mail Order Bride, about this thing that lives inside me that I just couldn’t get away from.”

As low as her lows were, she writes in TMI how her manic side caused highs that opened her up. As a teenager, she discovered she was bisexual and also enthusiastically took up BDSM. “There’s something erotic about the power between ‘subs’ and ‘doms,'” she says. “Growing up as a ‘good girl,’ there was something in me that felt safe in being submissive and letting someone take power.”

She found a reflection of these feelings in the bondage fashion of Los Angeles’ emerging punk rock demi-monde. Around the same time, she began self-harming, a behavior she didn’t understand at first and was barely talked about then. “Later I realized it was a way of trying to relieve the pressure of the anxiety I was feeling,” she says.

At the same time, she found her creative voice. The amateurist ethos of punk encouraged Wiedlin to form the Go-Go’s with the other young women. “Without punk, I would never have become a musician and songwriter because I had no talent! » she said, laughing. “I didn’t know what I was doing. But over time, my writing started to grow.”

In fact, she became one of the group’s main songwriters and lyricists, and although the group quickly gained a cult following, the major labels shunned them. “The industry never took Go-Go’s seriously,” she says. “It was a tonne sexism. »

Even though the band was part of LA’s first punk wave, alongside brutally tough bands like X and Black Flag, she believes they weren’t recognized because of their gender. After two years, they finally found an independent label, IRS, to sign them. Soon after, their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, became a surprise hit in 1981. Much of the breakthrough came with the single Our Lips Are Sealed, which Wiedlin co-wrote with Terry Hall of the Specials and Fun Boy Three, who was briefly her boyfriend. A little later, she discovered that Hall had an inner life just as horrible as her, having been kidnapped and sexually abused when he was 12. He was also bipolar and later attempted suicide. “He was a good guy,” Wiedlin says, “but he was also tortured.”

As popular as Go-Go’s became, they were often considered too “girly” to be taken fully seriously. Part of this came from the media, notably Rolling Stone, which put them on the cover twice, but always with sexualizing lines like “Go-Go’s Put Out” and “Women on Top.” “That wasn’t who we were,” Wiedlin said. “We Never exploited our sexuality.

Sudden fame brought expectations and commitments that exhausted the band members, forcing them to turn to alcohol and drugs to cope. “We worked to death” says Wiedlin. At the height of their fame, Wiedlin was irritated that the lion’s share of the attention went to singer Carlisle, who rarely contributed any writing. “I had grown up in punk culture where everyone was equal,” she says. “Then all of a sudden we’re trying to have dinner at a restaurant and fans come up and push us to get to Belinda.”

In expressing this opinion, Wiedlin was called “jealous”, an accusation she strongly rejects. She also ended up being the first to leave the group, which quickly led to the group’s breakup. While she landed a solo deal that produced the exuberant top 10 hit Rush Hour, most…