Jane Wiedlin Bares All in TMI: The Go-Go's Guitarist on Bowie, Survival and Solo Years

By Daniel Okafor

Jane Wiedlin's autobiography, TMI: Memoirs of a Go-Go, arrived Tuesday, and the Go-Go's occupy less than half of it. That ratio is the point. "People just see me as a Go-Go," Wiedlin, 68, told Rolling Stone. "They don't know any differently. But if they read the book, they will discover I'm not just a Go-Go."

The book is a coming-of-age story that took five decades to finish. Wiedlin writes candidly about self-harm, suicidal ideation and her work as what she calls a "junior dominatrix." She felt suicidal from age 11 to 60. The crisis came to a head in 1996, when her then-husband found her cutting her arm and insisted she get help. "That was when my journey to mental health basically started," she said. "It's up and down. I still had another fucking suicide attempt after that, but at least it's been more up than down."

Her verdict on the present is blunt. "People are always like, 'Oh, the Go-Go's, they're role models.' I feel like a role model now. It took me my whole fucking life to get to this point."

What does Bowie have to do with it?

Plenty. Wiedlin discovered David Bowie's music at 14 and calls it the origin of everything. "If I hadn't found him as a kid, I don't know that I would've ended up discovering the punk rock movement, which was totally populated by ex-glitter-rocker kids," she said. She attended his Diamond Dogs tour in 1974 and opened for him with the Go-Go's on the Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983.

When Bowie died a decade ago, she stopped listening to anything else. "For a year after that, I didn't listen to any music except Bowie — nothing," she said. His death, combined with other events, triggered one of her worst mental health episodes. "I can't believe he's dead because he really never seemed mortal to me," she writes in the book. "Bi is best" is another Bowie inheritance, she says.

Why hold back nothing?

She didn't, mostly. Wiedlin avoided the book for years because she feared hurting people. Her 65th birthday changed the math. "I thought, 'If you don't do it now, you don't know what's coming,'" she said. Once she took responsibility for her own mistakes, the writing came easily. "I kind of barfed everything out," she said. "Writing the book was way easier than the editing … that was a bitch."

She skips the standard album-by-album structure partly because three other Go-Go's already wrote books. Also, she notes, her life is bigger than the band. She revisits her allegations of sexual misconduct against Rodney Bingenheimer, the DJ and promoter. The #MeToo movement reframed the episode for her: hearing other women describe their guilt over not fighting back made her realize, "Jesus Christ, I was 15." Writing the book later revealed that her first suicide attempt followed shortly after that molestation — a connection she had never made.

What happened to the solo career?

After quitting the Go-Go's in 1985, Wiedlin declared she'd rather be a failure on her own than a success with the band. Her current assessment: "I was an idiot to think that. I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about." She leaned heavily on her first husband, a music manager, and stayed, in her words, relatively invisible for decades.

Her pop-punk band Frosted released Cold in 1996 on DGC, to almost no audience — "maybe 2,000 of you around the whole world," she told her interviewer. She and her follow-up, Kissproof World, remain her two favorite albums. A friend at DGC told her the label's signing criterion was, "Would Kim Gordon think this is cool?" Wiedlin has never met Gordon. "It is so cringe," she said.

On the BDSM material, she's equally direct. "Power goes to the one that grabs it," she said. She describes the work as a power exchange rather than sex, one that opened doors into human brains, processing the world differently than "vanilla people" do.

What's next?

The Go-Go's are neither together as a five-piece nor formally broken up. Belinda Carlisle tours globally for two years straight; Wiedlin and Gina Schock have played recent shows with a backing band. Full reunions are "not in the cards, at least not for the next few years," she said.

The Go-Go's remain the first all-female band to top the album chart with their own songs — a feat unrepeated. "I have no fucking clue" what it would take for another band, she said, before adding that patriarchy still rules the music business. Her cover-song solo album, I Protest, is due in the spring. As for the Bettie Page musical she wrote decades ago: she hasn't read it in 30 years and would demand a major rewrite first.