FEATURE:
Second Spin
The Go-Go’s - Vacation
__________
IN August…
The Go-Go’s’ second studio album, Vacation, turned forty. Not seen as strong and consistent as their 1981 debut, Beauty and the Beat, this album still deserves another spin. I feel the band (Charlotte Caffey – lead guitar, keyboards, back-up vocals, Belinda Carlisle – lead vocals, Gina Schock – drums, percussion, back-up vocals, Kathy Valentine – bass guitar, back-up vocals, Jane Wiedlin – rhythm guitar, back-up vocals) are superb throughout. I think that Vacation’s title track as the first cassette single. One of the reasons why Vacation did not get the same sort reviews as The Go-Go’s’ debut is because the group were starting to fall apart. It is quite rare to hear bands fall crack as early as their second album, but that was the case! Before continuing, Ultimate Classic Rock wrote about Vacation’s successful title track:
“When the Go-Go’s scored a hit with their 1982 single “Vacation,” the song’s music video became an MTV mainstay. Little did viewers know, the band was “cross-eyed drunk” while filming the clip.
The song was originally penned by the band's bassist, Kathy Valentine, several years prior. She’d enjoyed a brief romance with a young man while on a trip, and wrote the tune’s initial lyrics on the plane ride home.
"The short romance had softened me, and the words, written from true-life longing, resonated forever," Valentine later recalled in her memoir.
The bassist had been in a group called the Textones, and it was they who originally released “Vacation” in 1979. The song garnered little attention at the time, and Valentine joined the Go-Go’s in 1980.
The band’s 1981 LP, Beauty and the Beat, was a huge success, going two times platinum and scoring a pair of Top 20 hits. When the Go-Go’s went to work on their 1982 follow-up, Valentine suggested revisiting “Vacation.”
“We really loved the song, but it didn't really have a chorus,” Go-Go’s co-founder Jane Wiedlin recalled to SongFacts. “So Charlotte [Caffey] and I ended up working with Kathy a little bit more on the song, and sort of Go-Go-fying it, basically adding the chorus.”
Released June 26, 1982, “Vacation” would become the title track and first single from the group’s second album. And while making its music video, the Go-Go’s got a little goofy.
“It was a big-budget video because by that time we were really popular,” Wiedlin explained. “So we had a lot of money to do the video, which was the first time for us, because the other videos we just spent, like $5,000 on or something. It was fun, but it was a way of working that we weren't accustomed to. And I remember it being a really long day, like a 14-hour day, and about eight hours into it we all were getting really bored and restless, so we started drinking.”
“We drank champagne. Lots of champagne. Lots,” Valentine admitted in the book I Want My MTV.
The clip featured the band in two locations - an airport terminal, and waterskiing in formation. The latter was staged using a blue screen -- an already cheesy medium that the band’s inebriation only enhanced.
“By the time they shot the scene where we're on the water skis, skiing one-handed and waving and stuff, we were all really looped,” Wiedlin confessed. “It's so funny, if you look at us, look in our eyes in those parts, we're all like cross-eyed drunk.”
“Vacation” peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard chart, scoring the Go-Go’s yet another hit. However, behind the scenes fame was beginning to have an affect on the group, and the Vacation album was met with lower sales and mixed critical reviews compared to its predecessor. “Vacation” would be the Go-Go’s final song to reach the Top 10, and by '85 the group had disbanded”.
I am not going to say that Vacation is massively underrated and it is a classic. Nor too am I going to say that it is a disaster. I think that the album has been written off and seen as disposable because the group disbanded in 1985. Maybe a rush-released album so soon after their debut should have been avoided, but that was the reality for a lot of successful artists. That curse and thing about the ‘difficult second album’ is true here, but Vacation does have some highlights. The fact the group reunited and released God Bless the Go-Go's in 2001 meant that they did need time apart of to slow things down. Bassist Kathy Valentine left the band in 2013 due to irreconcilable differences. In 2020, a documentary movie about the group premiered at Sundance. The documentary features the formation and rise of the band through the 1980s breakup; ending with a 2019 reunion. On 31st July, 2020, The Go-Go's released their first new song in nineteen years, Club Zero. By In January 2020 the group, including Kathy Valentine, announced an eleven-date reunion tour scheduled to begin in June 2020. The tour was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On 30th October, 2021, the band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They announced plans for a 2022 U.K. tour with Billy Idol that would start in June 2022. I feel Vacation is a worthy album that should be reassessed. Not everyone feels strongly about it. It is interesting reading different interpretations of the 1982 album.
Five years ago, Beat wrote about Vacation on its thirty-fifth anniversary. Expectations must have been quite high following Beauty and the Beat in 1981. It is a shame that there was excess and tensions within the group:
“Vacation started off strong, but inspiration seemed as if had been stretched thin in order to quickly release a follow-up to the band’s best-selling debut. Leftovers from the Go-Go’s earlier live setlists unfortunately found their way onto the sophomore effort, effectively diluting what could’ve been a solid track listing. The obligatory cover tune "Cool Jerk" and the subpar "Beatnik Beach” sounded like fillers included to expand upon the album’s abstract beach theme. It resulted in the Go-Go’s second studio album sounding like the band members were left scrambling for quality material. Additionally, Jane Wiedlin's heavy reliance on Webster’s rhyming dictionary (as evidenced on "Girl of 100 Lists" and “It’s Everything but Partytime”) certainly didn’t help matters. Fortunately, Kathy Valentine was aptly able to pick up her cronies’ slack by contributing the effervescent title track, the accidentally prophetic "We Don't Get Along” and the ethereal closing ballad, “Worlds Away.”
By the time Vacation was recorded, each band member's contributions had become apparent; Belinda was the voice and "beauty" of the bunch, Valentine and Schock were obviously the most proficient musicians, while Caffey and Wiedlin wrote the lion's share of catchy hooks and (sometimes) biting lyrics.
Album producer Richard Gottehrer seemed too focused on making the band sound like a throwback to the bygone era of 60s girl groups, analogous to the first two Blondie albums. Furthermore, I’ve always thought "Speeding" should've followed “Get Up and Go” on the album, instead of being relegated as an overlooked B-side. After all, “Speeding” (featured in the 80s cult classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High and its accompanying soundtrack) not only tied in perfectly with the album's theme, but would’ve been a fantastic choice as Vacation’s second single. The much weaker “Beatnik Beach,” which hideously sounds like a cheer squad routine, should’ve remained only as a B-side, allowing room for “Speeding” to make a more cohesive album. Also, swapping the placement of “We Don't Get Along” and “I Think It's Me” would’ve tightened up the album’s first half, which ironically was how the track listing initially appeared on the LP label's first pressing. Luckily, with today's technology, it's now possible to rectify the album's imperfect running order, creating a far more enjoyable listening experience. Of course, none of this kept me from playing Vacation incessantly, nor lining my bedroom walls with enough Go-Go’s merchandise to make it look like a shrine to my favorite group”.
It is a shame that there is a lot of mixed reaction to Vacation. The album did get to number eight in the U.S. upon its release. The group released their third album, Talk Show, in 1984. They would then not return with a studio album until 2001. In their review, Rolling Stone did offer some positives when it came to Vacation. They provided it four stars in 1999:
“What Vacation brings to the band's brand of squeal-appeal pop is a fresh curiosity about the world and a treasure trove of precise details. This is the sound of women at work: when the band members slam into "Vacation," you know it's not just something they want; it's not a vestige of the idle party girls they portrayed on the first LP. Instead, Belinda Carlisle's tight, strained vocal tells you that a vacation is something they need–proof of the nonstop touring band they've become.
Carlisle's wispily exhausted tone on "Vacation" is just one of an array of new voices she's developed for this record. Her singing has become deliriously witty; within her high, narrow range, she's located a full persona. Thus she can trill sweetly on "Girl of 100 Lists" one moment, and then come on frazzled and disgusted a few minutes later in "We Don't Get Along."
It helps, of course, that Vacation is filled with first-rate songwriting that offers Carlisle a wide range of emotions and characters. Where Beauty and the Beat was stuffed with New Wave pom-pom cheers like "We Got the Beat," Vacation opts for quick studies of moods and relationships. The album is one long meditation on escape–from the road, from men, from daily drudgery. Sometimes the band makes a game out of its chores. On "Get Up and Go," the Go-Go's exhort each other to pick up the pace: they could be jogging or stuck in the middle of a flagging onstage performance. Then there's Jane Wiedlin's "Girl of 100 Lists," a devilish parody of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. Instead of caressing sunshine and kittens, however, Wiedlin invites Carlisle to sing about teenage girls' obsessions: "What shall I wear/Who will I kiss," Carlisle muses dreamily.
In fact, as the album progresses, dreams themselves take on great significance. For Go-Go's trapped on the road, dreams are a primary means of escape. The loveliest expression of this is "This Old Feeling," a reverie written by guitarists Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey. It's a perfect pop song: an ethereal melody is anchored by Kathy Valentine's bass as Carlisle's voice skims the surface of a pleasant memory just beyond reach. Rarely has the woozy pleasure of a good daydream been rendered more movingly in rock music.
Sometimes, though, the daydreaming takes on a desperate edge. In "Worlds Away," Gina Schock's drums throb distantly, like a fading pulse, and Carlisle sings an eerie chorus in a depressed croon: "I find myself wanting/To be sleeping/To be dreaming/To be worlds away...." Instead of the soothing effect the melody suggests at first, the song becomes a chilling expression of exhaustion and despair. As written by Wiedlin and Valentine, "Worlds Away" joins the lonely cries of women from Virginia Woolf to Marilyn Monroe for comfort and an otherworldly warmth.
If you think it's ludicrous to invoke Virginia Woolf in the presence of the Go-Go's, well, that's your problem. Vacation is fully cognizant of its own ambitions while remaining true to its creators' motto of female fun, fun, fun. It's not as if this is a perfect record: the band's cover of "Cool Jerk," a tune the Go-Go's have been yammering ever since their earliest days as New Wave know-nothings in L. A., sounds just as dumb and dull as they've always made it sound.
But nearly every song on Vacation is eager to demonstrate some new skill. "He's So Strange," for instance, might be just another I-don't-know-what-boys-like anthem except for the cutting guitar line that razors across the last verse – it slices the song with urgent aggression. You're left feeling that Carlisle doesn't think this strange boy is worth another second of her thoughts, and that decision is exhilarating–for her, for us.
The Go-Go's don't just sing songs about fun anymore; they toy with the idea of fun, asking: What does it mean? Is it worth it? And they turn it inside-out on "It's Everything but Partytime," surely the most dour song ever written about hedonism: "We're only looking for a good time/But what we get is empty rhyme.... It's everything but partytime." Does the it in this song refer to the newfound stardom of the Go-Go's? Will they survive their own good times? Stay tuned for the next vacation. (RS 377)”.
I wonder whether there will be another album from The Go-Go’s. The group seem to be in a better place than they were in 1982. With induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a documentary, they performed together earlier this year. It leads me to believe they will do something together. Maybe hampered by struggles in the band and the speed in which they recorded Vacation, their second album is slightly derided and ignored. I don’t think that is fair. Even though it could never meet the heights and brilliance of Beauty and the Beat, I feel Vacation deserves…
A fonder look.