The Go-Go’s bring “Beauty and the Beat” to the National Recording Registry

Belinda Carlisle, a child of L.A., and a couple of friends were teens hanging out in the city’s punk music scene in the late ’70s. Only one or two of them knew much about being musicians, but they threw themselves into it and by 1978, after a lineup change or two, started calling themselves The Go-Go’s. They were, she remembers, “terrible,” but so were most of the other bands. They spent three years putting together material. No major labels were interested, so they signed with scrappy little I.R.S. Records. When they got the studio mix of their first album, “Beauty and the Beat,” they were somewhere between shocked and furious. “We were horrified,” Carlisle, the group’s lead singer, laughed in recent interview with the Library. “It was like, ‘This isn’t us. This isn’t punk.’ I mean, I love the album, but there are songs that were sped up. I think in some songs I sound like a chipmunk.” Charlotte Caffey, songwriter and guitarist, said Carlisle wasn’t kidding. “We were screaming and crying and cursing like, ‘This is the worst piece of (expletive) we’ve ever heard.’ ” Despite their horror, the 1981 album slowly but surely went to No. 1, powered…

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