This year for the 2023 A-Z Blog Challenge, I’m going to begin by listing a song or musical subject, and then see how fast and how far I can completely blow up my own “stream of consciousness,” and head “off the reservation,” by linking every real, and “Zulu Delta-imagined” fact, piece of music trivia, or not so apparent connection to what is racing around my head to that song in an “unstructured, graffiti-like” format. Complete and utter nonsense! Turn it up and turn it on, but as Van “The Man” Morrison said…….”It’s already turned on!”

This blog contains portions of one of the two different emails with a friend of mine, that gave me the inspiration for this years A-Z Blog Theme.

The Go-Go’s released the song “Our Lips Are Sealed” in 1981.

The song “Our Lips” was co-written with Terry Hall from the Specials. Hall was from Coventry, England. During WW2 The Allies knew the Germans would bomb Coventry from a secret code they had deciphered from a recovered Enigma machine. The Allies decided not warn the locals, because they feared the Germans would know they had obtained the information from the recovered Enigma Machine, and had cracked the Axis Code.

https://zuludelta45.net/2013/04/24/u-571/

An oft-cited remark by music composer-producer Brian Eno, notes how the Velvet Underground’s debut sold very few copies – but that everybody who bought one started a band. Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go’s was one of them. She was a Conejo Valley cheerleader when she first heard the album among other alternative records, most of them British imports, that offered a respite from the soft-rock anthems dominating California radio in the ’70s. 

I had a girlfriend once who kind of looked like Belinda. She loved the Go-Go’s. I liked them as well…..and that girl too.

For a while, they were the House band at the Whisky A Go-Go in L.A. Sure, so were the Doors and Buffalo Springfield, but as I have written before, I would have love to seen Johnny Rivers as the House band.

I’m not really a baseball fan anymore, but I would still like to see Dodger Stadium. As a kid, I always thought it was so cool that it “seemed to me” to be the only National League Park with real grass.  I once saw a picture of Belinda in an LA Dodgers shirt singing the National Anthem. I really liked Belinda, and that picture…. although I didn’t care for her “recreational lifestyle.”

Belinda Carlisle

George DuBose has shot over 300 album covers throughout his career but was still assisting Manhattan photographers when he got the opportunity to shoot a rising all-female rock band. Even after getting signed to a label and flown to New York to record their debut, the Go-Go’s were so strapped for cash that after shooting the cover for Beauty and the Beat, their manager had to return their wardrobe of fluffy white towels back to Macy’s.

The band later claimed that they left so much Noxzema on their face, for so long during the photo shoot, that it was painfully burning their skin. 

There’s no controversy shortage of the “who, what, and where” for the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, but if you look at these women as truly the first all-female rock group writing and playing their own instruments (a few came close), it really is bizarre how they were not “inducted sooner”………sham of a “Hall of Fame” or not. In the “olden days,” studio musicians would just play on the albums for the band, including plenty of Men’s groups.

It may not have been the front row of the Fillmore, or the Fillmore East, but in my late teens and early 20’s, MTV was every bit as big and real for a young guy to learn, listen, and love musical groups. Especially on a limited, or non-existence budget, and slim opportunities to go see bands live. The Go-Go’s were big on MTV, but I don’t really remember seeing much of them.

A band that often now, and back then, got confused with the Go-Go’s, are The Bangles. 

I didn’t confuse them.

One of my favorite videos is the Bangles singing “Going Down to Liverpool.”

How could you not love it……..Leonard Nimoy is driving them around in a BMW. Nimoy’s son was a fan and convinced his father to be in the video.

The song was actually written by Kimberley Rew, for his band “Katrina and the Waves”, whose great other song “Walking on Sunshine” is one of the classic scenes in the movie “High Fidelity!”

Going Down To Liverpool