The first thing Jane Wiedlin tells me before our interview even begins is that, an hour or so earlier, she downed two beers. “It keeps me cheerful,” she says with a laugh. The disclosure dovetails with the reason we’re doing the interview in the first place, which is to unpack her new memoir, a tome that deserves a truth-in-advertising award for its title alone: TMI (as in “too much information”). “I’ve always been TMI!” Wiedlin proudly announces. “I’m the one who always wanted to expose the truth. This book is my first opportunity to do so.”
A portion of that truth has to do with the band she helped form in the late 70s, the Go-Go’s. The five-piece are not only the first all-female band who play their own instruments and write their own material to earn a No 1 album in the US but, astonishingly, are the only such group to hold that distinction nearly 45 years later. The group’s power-pop music, heard in zippy 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 all the way from Olivia Rodrigo to Wet Leg.
As it happens, three out of five of the other Go-Go’s members – Kathy Valentine, Belinda Carlisle and Gina Schock – have already published their own books, and while Wiedlin says she loves those women, she is quick to add: “They’re very private people. There are all these things they don’t want people to know, and I just don’t feel that way. I don’t feel it’s honest for me to tell my story and not tell my real story.”
When writing her story, she felt it was crucial “that I didn’t make myself look good. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life, and I don’t like blaming other people,” she says. “I want to take responsibility for what I’ve done and for who I am.”
At the same time, factors beyond her control played a major part in creating many of the most harrowing of those situations. Since she was 11, Wiedlin has experienced depression, leading to periods so torturous she made two suicide attempts over the years and has periods of ideation to this day. She has also dealt with bipolarity, a seesaw of highs and lows that, at its most manic in her has led to impulsive behavior that has damaged her already problematic relationships. (Wiedlin has been married and divorced three times.) “If you asked my partners over the years, I think all of them would tell you that I was a nut job,” she says matter-of-factly. “I can be very tough and hard on people.”
That view of Wiedlin stands at great odds with her sprightly image, an impression that strikes you the moment she opens her mouth. Her speaking voice has the adorable squeak 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 talking via Zoom from her hotel room in Cancun, Mexico, where she has flown to perform with Go-Go’s drummer Gina Schock at an 80s nostalgia music festival. Right before the interview, she granted a long meet-and-greet where she chugged those beers to ensure a cheery demeanor for her fans. That will to please forms a key motif in her memoir, a tendency that has often made her push down her true feelings. The result even shows in her prose style. While her book never flinches from the most painful parts of her life, her tone remains chipper and witty. “As a mature woman, I have to really struggle against being the ‘good girl’,” the 68-year-old artist tells me. “I’m a people-pleaser.”
She puts part of that down to her midwest upbringing in the 1950s, when girls were “told to just shut up and be cute”. Though she speaks about her parents in loving terms, there was a secret in the family that hints at tension below. In her 40s, she was told she had an older sister who was autistic and who died in a drowning accident before Wiedlin was born. She surmises she wasn’t informed earlier because her mother was made to feel guilty for all of it, leading to a lingering melancholy in her. “Back then, everyone blamed the mother for autism,” 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 hormones or that age, but I just went into this total slump,” she says. “It hit me like lightning.” It expressed itself, in part, in a love for transgression that found an outlet in the outrage of the glam-rock revolution. Wiedlin was then a young teen, by which time her family had relocated from Wisconsin to Los Angeles, a welcoming home for the new sound and style. “Glitter was so rebellious and artistic and fun!” she says. “It was just right for me.”
At the same time, she had a profoundly disturbing experience within the glitter scene. She and her teen girlfriends would regularly sneak out to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco in Hollywood, LA’s main breeding ground for glam rock. “I had delusions of meeting David Bowie there and him falling in love with me!” Wiedlin says with a laugh. “But Rodney was a serious predator, and he preyed on me and a lot of my girlfriends.”
Wiedlin says that Bingenheimer sexually assaulted her in 1973 when she was still a minor. Similar accusations have been leveled at him by several other young women from that time, including Kari Krome of the Runaways. (Several attempts by the Guardian to reach Bingenheimer for comment received no response.) Not long after the incident, Wiedlin tried to kill herself. 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 that suicidal ideation has “always been in the back of my mind. I actually wrote a song about it called Mail Order Bride, about this thing living inside of me that I just couldn’t get away from.”
However low her lows, she writes in TMI how her manic side made for highs that opened her up. As a teen, she discovered she was bisexual and also got into BDSM, eagerly. “There’s something erotic about the power between ‘subs’ and ‘doms’,” she says. “Growing up the ‘good girl’, there was something in me that felt safe with being submissive and having someone take over the power from me.”
She found reflection for such feelings in the bondage fashion of LA’s emerging punk rock demi-monde. In that same period, she began cutting herself, a behavior she didn’t understand at first and which was, then, barely talked about. “Later on, I realized it was a way to try to relieve pressure from the anxiety I was feeling,” she says.
At the same time, she was finding her creative voice. The amateurist ethos of punk encouraged Wiedlin to form the Go-Go’s along with the other young women. “If it hadn’t been for punk, there’s no way I would have become a musician and songwriter because I wasn’t talented!” she says with a giggle. “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. But as time went on, my songwriting started to grow.”
In fact, she became one of the band’s prime writers and lyricists, and while the group quickly amassed a cult audience, the major labels shunned them. “The industry never took the Go-Go’s seriously,” she says. “It was a ton of sexism.”
Though the band were part of LA’s first punk wave, along with brutally hard acts like X and Black Flag, she believes they weren’t given credit due to their gender. After two years, they finally got an indie label, IRS, to sign them. Shortly after, their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, became a surprise smash in 1981. A big part of the breakthrough came from 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 bit later, she found out that Hall had just as horrible an inner life as she did, having been abducted 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.”
Popular as the Go-Go’s became, they were often seen as too “girly” to be taken fully seriously. Some of that came from the media, including Rolling Stone, which put them on the cover twice but always with sexualizing cover lines like “Go-Go’s Put Out” and “Women on Top.” “That was not who we were,” Wiedlin says. “We never exploited our sexuality.”
Sudden fame brought expectations and commitments that wore the group members out, causing them to turn to heavy drinking and drugs to get through. “We were worked to death,” Wiedlin says. During the height of their fame, it irked Wiedlin that the lion’s share of the attention went to lead singer Carlisle, who rarely contributed any writing. “I had grown up in the punk culture where everyone was equal,” she says. “Then all of a sudden we’re trying to have dinner in a restaurant and fans come up and pretty much shove us over to get to Belinda.”
Voicing that opinion tarred Wiedlin as “the jealous one”, a charge she strongly rejects. She also wound up being the first one to leave the group, which soon led to the whole band’s breakup. While she earned a solo contract that produced the exuberant top 10 hit Rush Hour, most of her work, heard on four solo albums, failed to click. She wasn’t happy with much of it either, worsened by her male producers. “I didn’t have the confidence in myself then to be the boss and to get what I wanted,” she says.
She felt far more comfortable being assertive in the role-playing world she discovered through a dominatrix friend, who helped her become one too. While in her earlier BDSM experiences she enjoyed playing the “sub” for sexual pleasure, she found it psychologically illuminating to play a dominatrix for a change. “The dungeon was really fun,” Wiedlin chirps. “There was something about all these men paying huge amounts of money to be humiliated or wrapped up in crazy bondage. It was like being in an adult playground.”
During the 90s, she also launched a band she very much enjoyed, froSTed, who played a purer brand of punk, encouraged by the grunge revolution. Moreover, in 2009 she became what her book jacket calls “the world’s first atheist ordained minister”. (Wiedlin admits she has no way of verifying whether she was indeed first.) Even so, she’s clear about her motivation for the move: to officiate gay marriages, saying: “I was so excited when my many gay friends were finally allowed to get married that I said, I want to be part of this!”
Her second motivation was to trumpet her unwavering atheist beliefs. “We’re not inferior to Christians,” Wiedlin declares. “In fact, I feel like we’re superior because we’re not being good because we have a vengeful God, and we want to get into heaven. We’re being good for good’s sake.”
Despite such bright spots, Wiedlin’s inner life continued to roil. Only 10 years ago, at age 58, she was properly diagnosed as bipolar and given the drugs and therapy sufficient to ease the turmoil. “For a really long time I was just bare-knuckling it,” she says. “Psychiatry has come a long way since the 80s and 90s.” Not that she feels she’s finally “cured”.
“I will always have what I have,” she says. “But once you realize that, it makes it slightly better.”
Along with her inner issues, she’s vexed by the fact that no all-female band has matched the Go-Go’s feat from all those years ago – this, despite the fact that solo female artists dominate current pop. “There’s a lot of talk about equality but I wonder if it’s really true,” she says.
The reality of that has caused her to champion women more vociferously than ever. “I hate to say it, but fuck men!” she says. “All of troubles of the world? Men! All the gross shit? Men!”
That’s one reason she enjoys living alone at this point, and why she believes she always will. That personal space has given her time to finally begin concentrating on her own needs, a mission greatly advanced by the memoir. “To be honest, I was scared to write this book and tell my story,” she says. “I was afraid of hurting people. But I was determined to do it and I’m glad I did. Finally, I’m justfucking telling it.”
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TMI is out now in the US and Australia and on 26 November in the UK
