Imagine getting access to your favorite bands’ most personal possessions: private photos, posters, notebooks, tour laminates, equipment, clothing, booking schedules. There are even bus tickets, a hospital birth certificate and snaps of pet dogs. Imagine a dizzying array of their entire career, covered indelibly with their own mucky fingerprints, as well as their greatest glories and messiest misbehavior.
If your favorite band happens to be The Go-Go’s, you’re in luck. Because A View from the Throne: Gina Schock — Inside The Go-Go’s, is on show now at the Haight Street Art Center, and it provides an all access pass to all of the above. Chronicling the Los Angeles quintet in all of their freespirited, rule-breaking glory, A View from the Throne isn’t just an essential history of one of rock’s most important female bands, it’s awash with documentation that will thrill fans of all things ’80s.
Included here are Polaroids of David Bowie performing so close to the camera you can almost smell his hairspray. There are candid photos of The Police — one of which is carelessly labeled “Sting and Wife.” There’s a shot of Billy Joel clearly caught off guard backstage. Jodie Foster — considered by the band to be “the sixth Go-Go” during their heyday — makes an appearance. Joan Jett, Stewart Copeland and even the cast of Saturday Night Live (including John Belushi) show up too.
The extraordinarily personal exhibit is the result of the obsessive archiving that drummer Gina Schock did throughout the band’s career. One corner, featuring mind-bending short movies by surrealistic filmmaker Relah Eckstein, as well as ephemera related to Edie and the Eggs, add color and context to the subcultures Schock was passionate about, but don’t altogether make sense in the wider context.
The Go-Go’s, thankfully, are the real stars of the show. The many photos on display — a lot of which will be familiar to folks who own Schock’s 2021 book, Made in Hollywood: All Access With The Go-Go’s — viscerally capture what it was like to be in this band. Their little gang is captured next to broken down vans on highways, lounging in cramped backstage rooms and goofing off (hilariously) by the pool. There are even shots of the band partaking of white substances and wrestling in their underwear in cheap motel rooms.
There is prestige here too: statues celebrating the 2021 induction of The Go-Go’s into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a commemoration of the band’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, as well as platinum and gold records.
All told, this collection is a joy to behold. It succeeds in marking all of the band’s greatest achievements while never losing sight of their scrappy beginnings. Also indelible? The rollicking sense of humor that vocalist Belinda Carlisle, bassist Kathy Valentine, guitarists Charlotte Caffey and Jane Wiedlin, and Schock all shared. Being on tour with these women was clearly a riot. Inside The Go-Go’s will make you feel like you were there.
‘A View from the Throne: Gina Schock — Inside The Go-Go’s’ is on show at the Haight Street Art Center (215 Haight St., San Francisco) through May 16, 2026.
