“This Town”—Hollywood, CA

In July 1981, the Go-Go’s burst onto the L.A. music scene, a new band of authentically streetwise rockers with an appealing difference: they liked harmony and melodies. This was somewhat related to a bigger appealing difference: they were girls. I didn’t write “women”. I don’t think they’d have objected back then, because female youth—cynical, jaded, and wised-up--was a big part of the sell, the crowd appeal. They knew it, you knew it.  Belinda Carlisle was only 22 when she sang, “We all know the chosen toys/ Of catty girls and pretty boys…”

There was nothing synthetic about the Go-Go’s. A record label didn’t make them up. The musicians were minimum-wage and middle-class artists who worked among the rest of us, the fallen angels and not-yet-risen angels of the City of Angels. They played local clubs—there were plenty in those days-- and sharpened their craft. Then and forever, they’d dramatize glamour, power, corruption, and art, on the sidewalks and in the top offices of Hollywood, mock Mean Girl boasting with knowing irony, “This town is our town, (This town) is so glamorous/Bet you'd live here if you could. And be one of us!”

Half a century ago, Los Angeles wasn’t as cosmopolitan as it is today. Celebrity glamour was concentrated in only a handful of fancy places, like Dan Tana’s, Musso and Frank’s, or Dave Chasen’s. You see this in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The neighborhoods were less flashy, more middle class back then; think Ozzie and Harriet. “Everyone” in film and TV lived in Beverly Hills, the Hollywood Hills, Los Feliz and the canyons. Everything looked so sunny and clean and modern. Even in 2025, there’s still a lot of that here, much more than most outsiders believe, but the spots of tarnish are real.

Film, television, and music look like L.A.’s media triplets, but there are big differences between their business cultures. For one thing, writing and recording music is a lot less expensive than filming movies, so much so that artists can often afford to do it themselves. For rock and pop musicians, “Hollywood” isn’t just a metaphor, it’s an older, rundown city neighborhood of film noir apartment houses and cheap rents where they live, work, go to clubs and socialize.

At the end of the Seventies, before the Go-Go’s were signed to a record label, they recorded sessions at their own expense at a place I worked, Program Studios, on McCadden Place, just south of Hollywood Boulevard and east of Highland Avenue. A three-minute walk from the Chinese Theater.

A friend bought a financial interest in Program, which was owned by two of our neighbors. The husband was a German musician; his wife was Phil Spector’s chief assistant. Spector did all his business over a speakerphone, like a scene from Charlie’s Angels, rambling and ranting and cursing. It was worth it to her; it got her invitations to every industry event.

At Program, our skill helped bands get record contracts. Once they signed, with Arista, Elektra/Asylum, Geffen, A&M, whoever—they recorded at bigger studio facilities and we rarely saw them again. Once in a while, someone like Peter Case, leader of the Plimsouls made a nostalgic visit to Program to copy or remix a tape. In truth, circa 1979-’80, most of us thought the Plimsouls would break through before the Go-Go’s would. (The Plimsouls’ A Million Miles Away would get major soundtrack placement on Valley Girl (1983), but the Go-Go’s beat them to the screen with We Got the Beat in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.)

The tired streets of the actual Hollywood, a neighborhood of small businesses and light industry, are patrolled by the LAPD, and governed from City Hall in distant downtown Los Angeles. Fact is, in the metaphorical “Hollywood” of the world’s imaginations, there is no government. Movies and TV are not organized like the Vatican. Contrary to popular impression, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does not rule Hollywood; the industry haughtily entrusts AMPAS with holding the Academy Awards, plus agreeing on neutral things like tech standards.

Occasionally you’ll read about a politically tinged controversy over someone getting, or not getting, a star on the Walk of Fame. Protesters are seldom aware that the “Hollywood” of their imagination has nothing to do with it: recipients are chosen by the neighborhood’s Chamber of Commerce, largely made up of local businesses, like dry cleaners, liquor stores, dental offices, and the Frederick’s of Hollywood’s lingerie showroom. Those Boulevard of Broken Dreams sidewalks were the physical setting of the everyday life of musicians in L.A.’s punk and new wave bands.

Most of local live TV, and many of L.A.’s remaining AM/FM radio stations, are still near Hollywood and Vine. Some film studio lots stayed: Paramount, Raleigh, Sunset/Gower, Bronson among them. These are smaller, older facilities: most of the others moved out of Hollywood many years ago to more distant Los Angeles suburbs like Burbank (Disney, Warners, Columbia), or west Los Angeles (Fox), and Culver City (MGM, Selznick, later Sony), where land was cheaper and less hemmed-in by development.

Two of the biggest absences on the streets of Hollywood happened so long ago as to be hardly noticed anymore: the mid-Fifties end of network radio drama, which once employed thousands of voice actors, and the postwar “Television Curfew”, causing a slackening of demand for what were once hundreds of live performance venues staffed by thousands of card-carrying union members.

For decades, the Hollywood music district’s resulting mini-Depression blighted the vacant shops and empty parking lots of Vine Street, once the bustling home of AFM’s union hall, NBC Radio, and a whole busy array of rehearsal halls, equipment rentals, and between-jobs bars and hangouts.

That was the humbled, post-greatness state of the Los Angeles recording industry and the Hollywood neighborhood by the time the Go-Go’s moved in. “This Town” conveys lost glamour, lost virtue, and a sense that they’d arrived after the glory days of Hollywood ended. Generational disappointment helped feed their overdramatized but striking lyrics. In their debut album, Beauty and the Beat, Belinda Carlisle’s sweet voice sang a defiant, ironic “tribute” to Hollywood.

Today, the iconic Capitol Records tower still stands, blocks from what are still the west coast’s finest recording studios. This fall, Carlisle has been on tour. She’s 67; it’s still her, still with that distinctive sound, but serene, reflecting a healthier outlook. It’s one of those seeming paradoxes of growing up: there’s no one as cynical as a former innocent.

“Change the lines that were said before
We're all dreamers - we're all whores
Discarded stars, like worn out cars
Litter the streets of this town…This Town…”