Among the facts that the band’s recent Showtime documentary made clear: Without the crucial early leadership of drummer Gina Schock—or her crack drumming—we likely wouldn’t be talking about them forty years later, and the history of rock would be a significantly different story. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic in the case of the Go-Go’s’ Gina Schock. But today the drummer happily admits that the success of their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, was a nice way to quietly give all the labels who passed on the band—simply for being female—a sort of middle finger. Schock will be the first to insist that the band “never thought about being girls in a band. We just did what we loved to do.” The classic Go-Go’s lineup coalesced by the end of 1980, and their historic debut album was released on July 8, […]

November 2020 Issue