This week in Texas music history: Kathy Valentine’s first show with the Go-Go’s

On New Year’s Eve, 1980, bassist Kathy Valentine played her first concert with the Go-Go’s in Los Angeles.

The Go-Go’s are legendary, synonymous with the 1980s, and the first all-woman band playing their own material to top the Billboard charts with 1981’s debut album “Beauty and the Beat.” But many may not know the Texan connection through Kathy Valentine.

The Go-Go’s were already up-and-coming in the Los Angeles punk scene when guitarist Charlotte Caffey ran into Valentine at the Whisky a Go Go and asked her about filling in with the band. Caffey knew Valentine’s work from the Textones, the group Valentine and Carla Olson had brought from Austin to L.A. the year before.

Valentine agreed, joined the Go-Go’s, and the rest — chart-topping hits and global tours — is history.

Valentine wrote some of those hits: “Head over Heels,” for one, and “Vacation,” a Textones tune that draws a direct line back to the origins of Austin punk.

And Kathy Valentine was an originator. She’d been steeped in the Texas scene, a ’70s teen into ZZ Top and Doug Sahm, but she’d also been in a band in London when punk broke in 1975. Back in Texas, when the Sex Pistols brought English punk stateside, Valentine and her friends were at that legendary 1978 San Antonio show.

Inspired, Valentine, Carla Olson, Marilyn Dean, and Jesse Sublett then formed the Violators and the next month convinced Tejano bar Raul’s into giving them stage time.It worked, and Raul’s became ground zero of Texas punk.

Valentine and Olson split for L.A., the Textones, and the big time. In summer 1980, Kathy was back home from California, visiting Raul’s to check out the new bands. She met a guy from one of those bands, and a whirlwind romance ensued.

She wrote the song “Vacation” on the plane back to L.A. about that Austin trip – a tribute, too, to the scene she’d helped form and left behind. She’d come home again in the course of her illustrious career, forming the blues-rocking band the Bluebonnets.

She’d make it as a local legend and global icon, inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, a story told in full in her masterful memoir “All I Ever Wanted.”

Sources:

Tim Stegall, “Austin Punk Chronicles: The Shock of the New,” Austin Chronicle. August 5, 2022.

Kathy Valentine, All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020.

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