Belinda Jo Carlisle was born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California on August 17, 1958 to Harold Carlisle, a gas station employee, and his wife, Joanne (nee Thompson), a homemaker. Her mother met her father, who was twenty years her senior, at age eighteen, and Carlisle was born nine months later. She was named after her mother's favorite film, Johnny Belinda (1948). Carlisle was the first of seven siblings, with three brothers and three sisters.

Carlisle's first venture into music was in 1977 as drummer for the punk rock band the Germs, under the name Dottie Danger. She was recruited into the band by Lorna Doom, whom she had met in an art class while a student at Thousand Oaks High School. However, her time in the band was short due to her contracting mononucleosis, and she never recorded or performed live with the Germs. According to Pat Smear, upon quitting, she introduced her friend, Donna Rhia, who became her replacement. Carlisle does appear on one recording introducing the band at a 1977 performance at the Whisky a Go Go, heard on the live album Germicide (1977). Around this time Carlisle did some back-up singing for Black Randy and the Metrosquad.  Soon after leaving the Germs, she co-founded The Go-Go's (originally named the Misfits), with friends and fellow musicians Margot Olavarria, Elissa Bello, and Jane Wiedlin. Olavarria and Bello were soon out of the group and the new line-up included bassist-turned-guitarist Charlotte Caffey, guitarist-turned-bassist Kathy Valentine, and drummer Gina Schock. All five women were largely untrained musicians, and Carlisle recalls having to use tape as fret markers during their initial songwriting: "[Charlotte] had to show us how to plug in our amps," she said.  The Go-Go's would go on to become one of the most successful American bands of the 1980s, helping usher new wave music into popular American radio, and becoming the first all-female band who wrote their own music and played their own instruments to ever achieve a No. 1 album, Beauty and the Beat, which featured the hits "We Got the Beat" and "Our Lips Are Sealed". The Go-Go's recorded two more studio albums on I.R.S. Records, including 1982's Vacation, which went gold. "Head over Heels", from their 1984 album Talk Show, made it to No. 11.  In 1984, Carlisle made a foray into acting in the movie Swing Shift, starring alongside Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.

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