Chris O'Leary, best known for the excellent Bowie Songs Blog, started a new site a while back called 64 Quartets where each entry is about a different 4-piece band. There's only a handful of entries so far, and one of them was an extremely thorough and granular entry about The Bangles that really gave me a deeper appreciation for a band I hadn't given a whole lot of thought to. 

1. Call On Me

2. Mary Street

3. Want You

4. Dover Beach

5. All About You

6. James

7. Silent Treatment

8. More Than Meets The Eye

9. Let It Go

10. In A Different Light

11. Standing In The Hallway

12. Return Post

13. September Gurls

14. Not Like You

15. Complicated Girl

16. Glitter Years

17. Bell Jar

18. Watching The Sky

19. Some Dreams Come True

20. Where Were You When I Needed You

21. Single By Choice

22. Grateful

23. Sweet And Tender Romance

24. Mesmerized

25. Talking In My Sleep

Track 1 from the "Getting Out of Hand" single (1981)

Track 25 from 3 x 4: The Bangles, The Three O'Clock, The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade (2018)

The Bangles will always be tied to The Go-Go's in the public's mind. The two biggest all-female bands of the 1980s, and really of all time, were both from Los Angeles and both, for a time, signed to IRS Records and managed by Miles Copeland. And unfortunately, both got chewed up and spit out by the music industry so quickly that they initially broke up after just 3 albums. 

The Go-Go's came along first and had some Germs-adjacent L.A. punk cred, while The Bangles were associated with the Paisley Underground '60s psych rock revival and had beautiful harmonies and jangly guitars, so musically they were fairly different (although The Bangles did play gigs with The Descendants and Black Flag, so they weren't completely separated from the punk scene). But there was some accidental sense of torch-passing there more than any direct competition -- The Bangles released their debut album a couple months after The Go-Go's released the last album of their original run and were close to splitting up. And to their credit the bands seem pretty friendly with each other -- Susannah Hoffs co-wrote a track on the Go-Go's reunion album, Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's co-wrote a 2003 Bangles single, and Vicki Peterson filled in as a touring Go-Go for a while in the '90s.

The Bangles haven't been afforded quite the same level of prestige of The Go-Go's as the trailblazers who came out of the gate first (documentary, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, etc.). They were technically bigger in terms of RIAA plaques and Hot 100 stats, but it felt like they got pushed around by their label more into making records full of session players that wasn't really representative of their sound and their influences, especially when two songs from outside writers, "Walk Like An Egyptian" and "Manic Monday," became huge smashes. And the public focus on Susanna Hoffs as the breakout star of the group kind of did a disservice to how the band had 4 talented singers and songwriters, with Vicki Peterson as an equally capable frontwoman, former Runaway Michael Steele a natural rock star, and even drummer Debbi Peterson singing lead on the closest thing their first album had to a hit, "Going Down To Liverpool." So it's fun to strip away the hits and get a better sense of who The Bangles really are. 

Before the Paisley Underground scene started to come together, Susannah Hoffs played in a band called Unconscious with her childhood friend/sometime boyfriend David Roback, later of Rain Parade and then Mazzy Star. And the debut Bangles single that got them signed to IRS, "Getting Out Of Hand," had a b-side, "Call On Me," that was co-written by Roback, conceived as an answer song to Beatles deep cut "I'm Looking Through You." That single, and the group's self-titled EP, are collected on the 2014 compilation Ladies and Gentlemen...The Bangles! with other early tracks. When the Bangles broke up, Columbia released the first of many best-of compilations. And the 1984 b-side "Where Were You When I Needed You," a cover of a minor '60s hit by The Grass Roots, was one of the non-album tracks included on 1990's Greatest Hits, which went platinum. 

The Bangles' debut, All Over The Place, was the only one of their '80s albums were they were more or less left to make the record they wanted to make, and it's excellent, by far their best, but it didn't sell. Different Light and Everything have some insanely slick stuff on it, but there are still songs that showcase the Bangles well as a band - "Return Post" has a really cool outro where the band sort of moves between a swing rhythm and straight time in an impressive way. Michael Steele didn't sing lead on the band's most famous songs outside of her one verse on "Walk Like An Egyptian," but all three of her tracks on Everything are standouts (including "Complicated Girl" and "Glitter Years"). "Let It Go" is probably the prime example of all 4 members of the band writing and singing together. And the presence of a cover of Big Star's "September Gurls" on a triple platinum album like Different Light really highlights how unusual The Bangles were, the kind of nostalgic power pop record collector nerds that usually toil on the margins actually getting to the top of the charts for once. 

Somewhat inevitably, media's focus on Susanna Hoffs seemed to hasten the group's breakup, although Hoffs never really got a solo career off the ground (her self-titled 1996 abum has three songs co-written by Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, which is fascinating to hear). And the band seemed to get along better after reuniting and making a couple independent albums without label A&Rs pushing them around to make a hit. In 2013, The Bangles played a couple of shows with three other Paisley Underground bands -- The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, and The Three O'Clock. And in 2018, all four bands made an album, 3 x 4, in which they covered each other's songs. The Bangles covered  Rain Parade's "Talking In My Sleep," along with The Dream Syndicate and  The Three O'Clock's songs, and The Bangles songs that the other bands cover on the album are all, naturally, early stuff from before they really hit the mainstream. Rain Parade covered "The Real World," one of David Roback's last recordings before he died in 2018. 

It's sad to think that the phenomenon of an all-female instrument-playing rock band band becoming successful and mainstream famous kind of lived very brief life through these two bands in the '80s, with The Runaways paving the way for them in the '70s. The most commercially successful all-female band since then would probably be either L7 or HAIM, although Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney would have them both beat in terms of overall influence and legacy. Maybe it's progress that there have been a lot more bands with men and women playing together since the '80s? I don't know, but women have definitely been keeping punk and alternative scenes alive for in recent decades, and I've seen some great bands comprised of women at the DIY level, and I don't know if they'd tell you they love The Bangles or be embarrassed by the thought of them, but The Bangles were kind of awesome. 

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