Kathy Valentine is in the graffiti-covered toilet at The Whisky on Sunset Boulevard. It’s 1980. She’s there to see X (good call). Valentine bumps into fellow musician Charlotte Caffey and an invitation is extended—could Valentine fill in on bass for four upcoming gigs, two shows a night, around New Year’s Eve?
Valentine fibs—sure, she can do it.
Valentine is 21. But, as we soon find out reading the raw accounts in Valentine’s memoir All I Ever Wanted, she’s already got a wise old head. She’s not going to blow this chance. The morning after The Whisky encounter, Valentine borrows a bass—a small-bodied Fender Mustang—and gets to work learning the Go-Go’s material off a recording from one of their rehearsals.
“Making my way through the tape, one thing became clear through the distortion of the cassette player: the Go-Go’s had some really good songs,” she writes. “I hadn’t realized that in my limited exposure to the band. Each tune had a distinct personality and sound, all of them powered by great drumming and melodies. They blended punk, pop, surf, and rock like no one else.”
Onstage a few weeks later (back at The Whisky), it’s “near delirium … a rocket ship countdown.”
It’s tempting to say, perhaps, something cliché such as “the rest is history.”
But what makes All I Ever Wanted so compelling is that Valentine starts the memoir with this less-than-glamourous chance meeting (having been in The Whisky bathrooms around that era, I have a rough idea) and then takes us back. The first solid 100 pages (about a third of the book) deal with Valentine’s bumpy, tumultuous youth in Austin. Valentine grew up fast. An abortion at 12 years old will do that. So will getting high with your mother. So will navigating life with one parent whose basic approach is less than laissez-faire. Valentine writes that she “instinctively became self-sufficient, not needing much tending to.”
But music “had calibrated the imbalances of my life for as long as I could remember: listening to table jukeboxes, dancing the twist with my mom, singing along with bouncy bubblegum melodies.” And then she encountered the blues and a band called Cream. “I definitely had no idea what ‘the sunshine of your love’ was, but I couldn’t wait to find out.”
By seventh grade, Valentine was “smoking pot like a pro” and skipping school and this might all sound sort of typical or predicable memoir fodder but Valentine writes with such candor and a cutting, self-effacing style that it elevates above ordinary fare. Such as post abortion:
“From then on, I had an unspoken mantra: got a problem? Deal with it. Expel it. Chop it off. Abort it and move on. It took me a long time to understand or cultivate compassion. The evidence of the abortion was there, on the bloody pad I had to wear, and my cramping uterus, in my desolated capacity for grace. But more than that, I had lost my childhood, vacuumed out with the zygote, and with that loss, my mom and I had become like a couple of girlfriends getting out of jam.”
Valentine carries this gutsy determination into her musical career—first with an Austin outfit called The Textones that relocated to Los Angeles, and then taking full advantage of her chance with the Go-Go’s as the New Year’s Eve fill-in stint turned into an offer to join the band full time. First album, first big tour, and soon Valentine is caught up in the dizzy swirl of rock and roll stardom. Valentine is frank about her relentless, insatiable intake of drugs and alcohol, the band fights large and small, hotel life, van life, fighting for redemption after a sophomore release fails to impress, and her relationship with Blondie drummer Clem Burke. In one harrowing scene, Valentine recounts being trapped by an intruder in her house—along with Carlene Carter and Charlie Sexton—and balances “terror, self-preservation, survival, and indecision.” By this point, we know Valentine well enough to know that the indecision won’t last long.
Valentine is especially candid in discussing the split of the Go-Go’s cash, how a band that appears together on stage is truly five contractors whose income is inflated (or not) by songwriting credits. Valentine calls out unfairness where she sees it, including the surprise decision to shut the band down. Valentine is vulnerable enough to admit to envy when several of her bandmates’ careers blossom post Go-Go’s and she takes us through the business of going sober.
Valentine sneaks in terrific encounters with Keith Richards, The Police, Rod Stewart (that one’s a doozy), Bob Dylan, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Stewart and on and on. (Valentine is a female rocker Forrest Gump. Or maybe that’s just the way it is up there in the stratosphere.) For those who hung around L.A. in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, there are references to the Plugz and The Plimsouls and the aforementioned X. You get the feeling that Valentine had an effortless, easy way of making friends and expanding her network.
In the end, Valentine puts you in the middle of one of the most influential bands—not just all-girl bands—of the 1980’s. As Valentine admits, the invite to join the Go-Go’s was a fluke that particular night at The Whisky. Or was it? From an early, early age Valentine had learned how a songs had the “potency” to deliver deep responses. Cream “opened a portal to an unexplored hidden self, making my heart ache with anticipation of what might be waiting to be discovered.” I
It’s not about hanging out with Kathy and the Go-Go’s that makes All I Ever Wanted rock. It’s hanging around all that desire.
Final note: I highly recommend the audio book version, which includes Valentine compositions between chapters. Definitely adds to the experience.
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From the Publisher
Praise for Kathy Valentine's All I Ever Wanted
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Amy Poehler on All I Ever Wanted“Kathy Valentine takes us on an epic tour of honest storytelling. All I Ever Wanted is a raw look at the highs and lows of being high and low. Long live the Go-Go's!” —Amy Poehler |
Jenny Lawson on All I Ever Wanted“This book is the equivalent of the best concert I ever attended, possibly better. I was utterly sucked in and immediately devoured it. Honestly, just read it. SO GOOD. You’re welcome.” —Jenny Lawson, New York Times best-selling author of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, and You Are Here: An Owner’s Manual for Dangerous Minds |
Augusten Burroughs on All I Ever Wanted“Like a scorching guitar solo emerging from the prettiest pop song, Kathy Valentine’s All I Ever Wanted blows away every other music memoir out there. It’s the raw, real story of a Texas girl who raised herself and became a legend through sheer grit and talent, from raucous rocker to pop princess and back again. In prose that is powerful and relatable and unsentimental and funny and scary, Valentine takes readers from the depths of a dark childhood to the electric heights of superstardom. It’s a stunning journey, masterfully told.” —Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors and Toil & Trouble |
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Reviews with images
An intimate and powerful journey through the music scene of the 1980s.
I have read "All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir" by my old schoolmate Kathy Valentine. She found fame as a bass player for the Go-Gos - the first all female band to send an album to #1 on the charts in the United States. In the first part of her story, she tells of her early life, before her musical career took off. Chapter 7 is devoted to her time at Greenbriar, an alternative school/hippie commune that we attended together back in the early 1970s. She tells about Dave Mahler, the Greenbriar schoolteacher who first taught her how to play the guitar, out there among the post oaks and junipers. And shares some eye-opening adventures from her teenage years. But the main body of her memoir concerns her exploits with the Go-Gos during their rise to fame in the first half of the 1980s, and with the wild range of fortunes that followed afterwards. By sharing her collaborations, friendships and encounters with legendary musicians, actors and comedians, Ms. Valentine takes us on an intimate and powerful journey through the music scene of that era. It is such an intense story that I found myself putting the book down at the end of each short chapter to consider what I had just read before picking it up again. An easy familiarity with the complex music world she inhabits comes through clearly, together with an adroit and finely developed literary style. Highly recommended.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020
An intimate and powerful journey through the music scene of the 1980s.
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020
I have read "All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'N' Roll Memoir" by my old schoolmate Kathy Valentine. She found fame as a bass player for the Go-Gos - the first all female band to send an album to #1 on the charts in the United States. In the first part of her story, she tells of her early life, before her musical career took off. Chapter 7 is devoted to her time at Greenbriar, an alternative school/hippie commune that we attended together back in the early 1970s. She tells about Dave Mahler, the Greenbriar schoolteacher who first taught her how to play the guitar, out there among the post oaks and junipers. And shares some eye-opening adventures from her teenage years. But the main body of her memoir concerns her exploits with the Go-Gos during their rise to fame in the first half of the 1980s, and with the wild range of fortunes that followed afterwards. By sharing her collaborations, friendships and encounters with legendary musicians, actors and comedians, Ms. Valentine takes us on an intimate and powerful journey through the music scene of that era. It is such an intense story that I found myself putting the book down at the end of each short chapter to consider what I had just read before picking it up again. An easy familiarity with the complex music world she inhabits comes through clearly, together with an adroit and finely developed literary style. Highly recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020
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Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2020
Top reviews from other countries
Michael Ramshaw
Something in it for everyone
Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2022
Dr. David Griffiths
A lot more than just the Go-go's
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2022