The Shirts

Before Orange Is the New Black, Annie Golden Put The Shirts First

Annie Golden’s route from CBGB to Hair began with The Shirts. A 1979 interview and the restored Paradise concert show why the band remained her priority.

Annie Golden and Arthur LaMonica of The Shirts onstage. Photograph by Marie Patanio.

As Norma Romano in Orange Is the New Black, Annie Golden could communicate with a look. Her character barely speaks. Long before that role, Golden had been making herself heard from the stage at CBGB. Her band was The Shirts, and when a film career opened up, she was determined to keep singing with them.

That commitment gives Live At Paradise 1979 more than a familiar face on its cover. The restored Boston concert catches a working six-piece at the moment Golden’s screen debut in Hair might have pulled her away. She was still there, touring behind Street Light Shine, with a band whose story deserves to be heard alongside her own.

From the Bowery to Hair

The connection between CBGB and the movies was unusually direct. In a 2001 Playbill interview, Golden recalled director Miloš Forman discovering her with The Shirts at the club in 1977. He cast her in Hair, released in 1979, in which she played Jeannie.

Golden’s account makes the transition understandable. “I always saw music and singing as storytelling,” she told Playbill. A song’s character and its words were already part of performing for her. Acting offered another place to use those skills.

The club and the theatre would keep crossing paths. In the same interview, she described bringing musicians and performers from her stage work together for a Shirts reunion at CBGB. The Bowery remained part of her working life as her credits grew elsewhere.

The band was still happening

In September 1979, Golden was already negotiating the practical consequences of Hair. Jack Garner interviewed her for Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle while she was in town with The Shirts. Film offers were coming in, but so were the band’s commitments.

She described a film opportunity that would have required her in New York when the group was busy. Her explanation was straightforward: “things are really starting to happen for the band.” Golden wanted music and acting to develop on a timetable she could live with.

The Paradise recording belongs to that same period. Recorded on August 27, 1979 for WBCN at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club, it preserves Golden alongside guitarists Artie Lamonica and Ronnie Ardito, bassist Robert Racioppo, keyboardist John Piccolo and drummer John “Zeeek” Criscione. The singer’s new visibility had not replaced the six-piece.

Annie Golden as Norma Romano, singing in the season-one finale of Orange Is the New Black. Watch the scene via Rotten Tomatoes TV.

Hear the band behind the familiar face

The current Paradise edition contains eighteen Boston selections and two additional performances from Amsterdam’s Paradiso in 1980. That distinction matters: Paradise and Paradiso are different venues, and the bonus recordings come from the following year.

The programme provides several ways in. “Tell Me Your Plans” connects with the band’s debut album, while “Laugh and Walk Away” belongs to the Street Light Shine period. “Outside the Cathedral Door” gives listeners a longer stretch of the band’s arrangements; “Don’t Get Me Wrong (Punk Rocker)” closes the Boston sequence. The Amsterdam additions are “I’ve Had It” and “Laura in the Lion’s Den.”

Prof. Stoned restored the performance from a stereo broadcast recording, rather than a multitrack session. His note in the edition’s booklet explains both the possibilities of spectral extraction and the limits of the original drum sound. The attraction begins with the performance that survived on tape.

A voice with several homes

Speaking to ArtScene SA in 2020, Golden described CBGB as a creative home base. She also looked back on recording The Shirts’ three original albums in London, New York and Los Angeles, before discussing her later band Golden-Carillo and her stage work. Her career had room for several kinds of music-making.

That is a useful way into The Shirts today. Orange Is the New Black may supply the recognition, and Hair the unexpected connection. Live At Paradise 1979 lets the band take over the story.

Continue with The Shirts’ reunion and first-hand memories of CBGB, then follow Arthur Lamonica’s later work in our Rome 56 interview. Explore The Shirts’ artist page for current editions and regional store links.