By Crispin Sartwell

One of the regrets that haunts me in my sad, failed little life is that I was unfair to the GoGos. Back when they showed up in the early 80s, I thought they sucked, and I said so at least several times in print. They seemed so chirpy and happy, like a kind of cheerleading squad. The melodies of songs like "We Got the Beat" were uninteresting, and the arrangements were thin.

But I've been reading quite a great book, a biography of Darby Crash called "Lexicon Devil." (I will post a review in the next couple of days.) The GoGos figure as fairly major characters, as they did in another book I read recently, "We Got the Neutron Bomb." Anyway, toward the end, an incident is reported (at third hand, so I'm not vouching for its authenticity). A guy with a fourteen-inch dick, Donnie Rose, is butt-fucking one of the GoGos while she urinates down her leg and barks like a dog.

Now whether that is true or not, there is no doubt at all that the GoGos emerged from one of the most decadent, drug-addled, sex-crazed milieus that ever existed: LA punk of the late seventies. These people were fucked in every possible sense of the term.

Belinda Carlisle had actually been a high school cheerleader, but by 1979, she was an ace Germette. Her girlish gang was known as the Poodles. And if they made chirpy, happy pop music, they did it in a way that was utterly soaked in irony.

I was in DC at the time, and didn't know anything about LA punk aside from the names of some of the bands. But as I've learned about it all, I've realized that all those sweet little songs with those sweet little grins and those sweet little wiggles were hilarious.

So rock on into the night, oh GoGos. Hop like bunnies. Bark like dogs.