PASS GO

Kathy Valentine’s autobiography All I Ever Wanted is a great book, but not an easy one to read. Although its author is now much healthier and happier in 2022 than the young musician described in its early chapters, the traumas she suffered as a kid—betrayal, rape, and abortion among them—and the subsequent addictions that she battled in later life are hard to absorb.

Fortunately, Valentine is easy to talk to. Now 63 and sober for more than half her life, she looks back on the events described so vividly in her book with a clear eye. This is just as well, because even aside from the low points of her personal life, she’s been on a rocky journey. The Go-Go’s, which she joined in 1980 at the age of 21—picking up the bass despite zero previous experience of the instrument—were the first multi-platinum-selling, all-female band to play instruments themselves, write their own songs, and have a chart-topping album with their debut LP, Beauty & The Beat. The success of the early singles ‘We Got The Beat’ and ‘Our Lips Are Sealed’ fed a relentless, drug-fueled schedule and, in Valentine’s case, the acquisition of a dependency on alcohol.

After the Go-Go’s eventually crashed to a halt in 1985, Valentine recorded with bands such as the Bluebonnets and released solo music. The main band reunited in 1990, 1992, 2018 and this