All I Ever Wanted: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

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.” IIt’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.

I'm a Go-Go's and a Kathy Valentine fan. While most of us know the basics of the Go-Go's story, it's an entirely different matter to have an inside view of the band, the L.A. punk scene, and what it takes to be a working musician. Kathy is an excellent writer, which makes this book shine more than most music memoirs I've read. Highly recommended.

One of the first albums I ever bought with my own money was Beauty and the Beat. I was a fan through all the iterations and bought their albums even when I friends I only listened to METAL. I’d heard the stories of them more as a pick band before going full surf pop punk or whatever you want to call it.Kathy Valentine was there for nearly all of it. But more than what happened with the band is how her personal journey led her to the Go-Gos and the fall out she had to deal with when the band broke up.No life is ever a straight line. This book helps you understand that. And just because you’re good and work hard does not guarantee success.An awesome read start to finish. If you were ever a fan, this is the one book you want to read.

Kathy was always ,by far my favorite Gogo. Main reason I bought this. Highly recommended . Great stories, very well written. Hope there is a follow up.

I have read many musician/rock star autobiographies and this is one of the best! I am not a huge Go Go’s fan, however, being a musician, I love to read how an individual made it and all of the details about before, during and after their initial rise to success. The difference with this book is aside from Kathy being brutally honest and detailed, she is an incredible writer. She could and should be a novelist. Her descriptions are on par with Steven King, you feel like you are in the room with her, her words are borderline poetic. This book is honest, humble, insightful and grateful.

Very honest recounting of her upbringing, musical discovery, The Go-Go’s rocket ride to fame and subsequent implosion, and how nothing since was ever as good (except motherhood). Her point of view doesn’t always match the Showtime doc, but an interesting read nonetheless.

Kathy Valentine is an excellent writer. I purchased her memoir and had the pleasure of interviewing her on my podcast. "All I Ever Wanted" is a fascinating look into her life from a young age. Her writing is raw, real, and endlessly entertaining. She is so down to earth, it's almost surprising when she brings up meeting other rock stars like Bowie and Jagger. Valentine shared personal information about her life and let us into her world. I loved this book and can't wait for the next one.

Just finished “All I Ever Wanted” and I can’t recommend it enough. Whether or not you’re a fan of theGo-Go's or rock memoirs in general, Kathy is as real as it gets. It's long, but never gets boring and Kathy has lots to tell. Get the audiobook if you can: hearing her read it in her own voice, along with musical "commentary" written and performed by her, gives the story an added dimension as well as a layer of creative magic.

“All I Ever Wanted” is a one of the best music autobiographies I have read.It has many similarities to a book from an earlier generation - “High Times, Hard Times” by the jazz singer Anita O’Day. Valentine and O’Day were both clever, ballsy, single-minded, driven women determined to make their own way in the male-dominated music industry. Both succeeded but at the cost of serious addictions (heroin for O’Day, cocaine and alcohol for Valentine) which could easily have proved fatal. Both suffered sexual assault and both had pregnancies terminated, in Valentine’s case twice. We should be glad that Anita O’Day and Kathy Valentine cleaned up and lived to tell their tales. Several of Valentine’s contemporaries were’t so fortunate, notably her friend John Belushi.“All I Ever Wanted” is frank and honest, sometimes painfully so. Valentine comes across as warm, funny and generous although more than a little flawed and to her credit she doesn’t downplay the bad stuff. It is a considerable tribute to her long-suffering boyfriend Clem Burke that he stood by her for as long as he did. Valentine’s desperate efforts to create a commercially successful band after the implosion of the Go-go’s are like a slow motion car crash. You really, really want her to succeed but you know it isn’t going to end well.The cast of famous characters is extensive and Valentine is consistently generous in her praise of her fellow musicians. There are some nice cameo moments like Sting producing champagne to celebrate the Go-go’s album Beauty and the Beat overtaking The Police’s Ghost in the Machine in the charts and Valentine cadging a cigarette from her hero Keith Richards then persuading him to take her into the recording control room to watch Jimmy Page overdubbing. Richards’ laconic comment “We’re all in the same union” meant the world to her.Valentine is an excellent writer and has a great eye for the sort of small details which bring the story to life. My only tiny complaint is that a few more dates in the narrative would have helped to put things into context for those of us who did not follow the Go-go’s in the 1980s. It’s usually only when Valentine mentions a well known event (e.g. Chernobyl) that the reader can deduce which year she is writing about.I don’t know if Valentine is planning a sequel. I hope she is but it will have to be quite a book to meet the standard she has set with “All I Ever Wanted”.

I have always been a fan of the Go-Go's and enjoy reading books that any band or band members have written. Kathy's book is no exception. From the first pages it is well written and an honest account of her life before/during and after the Go-Go's. I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone.

Excellent auto biography,painfully honest and poignant and yet fun and uplifting.Remarkable the Go Gos survived the hedonistic 80s and are still gigging and producing new music.(checkout Club Zero)

I read it in 3 days, and I will likely read it again. Interesting read, and hard to put down. I enjoy music biographies/autobiographies. But it also includes broken family, girl/girl, boy/girl, and substance abuse struggles and dynamics. Many ups and downs, triumphs and failures. I look forward to the sequel. Enjoyed it.

I have read many rock, folk, and country biographies over the years. This is without doubt the most entertaining, and well written I have ever read.