Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  Morrison’s love-hate relationship with his teenage fans (groupies or not) reflected a deep ambivalence about his own erotic power. It manifested in abuse rooted in his mental instability and misogynistic tendencies, and possibly his resentment about having to perform heterosexual heroics when his own desires ran across a wider spectrum. But his overdetermined boorishness, coupled with unabashed displays of deep vulnerability, also unraveled conventional masculinity in powerful ways. “Over and over, as he performed these songs in concert, Morrison at the dramatic high points cupped his hands over his genitals,” novelist Bernard Wolfe wrote in Esquire. “The gesture was as ambiguous as the words: was he featuring these organs in carnalizing revelry or protecting them for one last moment from the imminent and urgently solicited smash-up?”65

  His stance confused people. Many rhapsodized about his allure. “On his face, there was the look of suffering of someone who knows he is too beautiful to ever enjoy true love,” Al Aronowitz wrote in the New York Times. Other accounts revealed the prejudices of the time: Jerry Hopkins, who would befriend Morrison and write the most successful of his biographies, claimed in Rolling Stone that “Jim Morrison looks as if he were . . . made up on the phone by two fags.” Morrison also earned comparisons to “the tinsel heat of a hooker,” “the bumps and grinds of a burlesque dancer,” and (from San Francisco eminence Ralph J. Gleason) Shirley Temple. “The only catharsis I received came from paroxysms of uncontrollable laughter,” allowed Marxist jazz writer Frank Kofsky. “The result of watching Jim Morrison’s ludicrous antics onstage.” Saturday Review’s Ellen Sander came up with perhaps the pithiest put-down of Morrison’s pretensions: she labeled him “Mickey Mouse de Sade.”66

  Morrison was acutely aware of this mixed reception, and like Hendrix, if not Joplin, expressed frustration about the failure of critics and fans to comprehend the intellectual framework behind his music. He spoke of reading psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and social philosopher Norman O. Brown, whose book Love’s Body promoted a notion of “body mysticism” that highly influenced the singer’s more portentous ideas of ritualistic self-sacrifice within live rock. Like many of his peers (including Joplin and Hendrix), Morrison was also smitten with the pessimistic vision of the counterculture presented in Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s film about two motorcycle-riding bohemians who set out to explore “straight” America and are ultimately murdered by a gang of Southern good old boys. The script for Morrison’s own short film HWY predated Hopper’s hit by two years, but resembled it in many ways; the crucial difference was that in HWY, murderous masculinity inhabited the soul of Morrison’s protagonist himself, who was a serial killer.

  The sense of failure within Morrison’s work—of self-defeat at the hand of the internal father, who is everywhere, despite the Oedipal murder enacted in the Doors’ most notorious set piece, “The End”—is present from the beginning, rooted in his psychological issues and bookish preoccupations. It’s difficult to know how in control this alcoholic, who may never have been sober for a show, was of his actions or words onstage. Yet Morrison’s determination to continually reenact the moment when counterculture dreams collide with the hand of the law—the literal law, and those patriarchal values embedded within would-be revolutionaries’ psyches—made the Doors, even at their most laughable, truly oppositional. Morrison’s antagonistic stance was all the more affected because it was directed at himself: a military son, a heterosexual ideal, a man who would slap a woman and then express sorrow at the act. Was he laughing inside? At whom?

  The thread that ran through Morrison’s life that best illustrates his position as both an archetype and an enemy of the male-defined law was his battle with the police over obscenity. Other rock stars risked being shut down—Hendrix for his lascivious movements, Joplin for curse words she threw out carelessly—but few made the moment of potential arrest the climax of the show. Once he’d written “The End,” an opus whose whole meaning rested in the forbidden utterance “Mother, I want to fuck you,” Morrison guaranteed that anywhere his band went, the police would be nearby. This was a literary move on his part. As a fan of the Beats and other writers whose books had been banned, Morrison knew that openly courting censorship would elevate his transgressions and make his lyrics part of a lineage he valued. But whenever Morrison was led from the stage in handcuffs or the sound was shut down on the Doors, the effect was more visceral. That the voice silenced was a deep baritone, and the body part hidden, a penis, created an ouroborous effect: this was masculinity devouring itself.

  Morrison’s self-imposed mandate in such moments was to not seem like a martyr. He relished the absurdity of his position. “It’s pretty playful, really. We have fun, the kids have fun, the cops have fun. It’s kind of a weird triangle,” he told Rolling Stone a few months after the Miami incident, which led to his conviction on charges of indecent exposure and profanity. He elaborated: “You see cops today, walking around with their guns and uniforms and the cop is setting himself up like the toughest man on the block, and everyone’s curious about exactly what would happen if you challenged him.” Morrison was not a political activist, but he clearly saw the disruptions he staged in concert as an attempt to disrupt a legally defined balance of power framed within a conversation about obscenity. “Why don’t we have a little revolution here?” he uttered before reaching into his pants in Miami. Morrison recognized that it was just a little revolution—just a momentary crack in the continuum of language, which he could make with his body, but which the subsequent containment of his body in handcuffs would erase.67

  It was a failed revolution. By most accounts, and certainly all the official reports, the audience in Miami was more disgusted by Morrison’s slurred words and gestures than they were incensed. The star’s previous encounters with the legal system had all ended relatively calmly, but this trial dragged on and elicited little public sympathy. Morrison himself seemed to have realized that the sloppiness of his action rendered it ineffective, and perhaps that it was overblown. In a thoughtful interview a year after the event, he spoke of the privileged position that made him not much of an outlaw at all. A fan of and borrower from the blues, Morrison admitted that the African American world from which much of his source material originated had far worse problems as a criminalized community than he ever would: “My eyes have been opened up a bit. There were guys down there [in the courthouse], black guys, that would go on each day before I went on. It took about five minutes and they would get twenty or twenty-five years in jail.”68

  The Miami incident isn’t generally remembered as a closing bell on the 1960s; that dubious honor goes to the deaths of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison, or to Altamont, the Northern California festival where a Hells Angels member killed an African American concertgoer as the Rolling Stones played. Yet Morrison’s sacrifice of his cock on the altar of silence did strike like a final blow, to both the idealism that imagined erotic freedom as a magic force erasing inequity and the implicit body-centered critiques of that simplistic thinking that the era’s “sexiest” rock stars carried out. Next would come a wave of explicitly sexual mass media that left hippies in the dust of their body paint, and the advent of identity-centered politics that would bring fully to the surface the issues Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison raised in their music. It was the 1970s, the age of porn, heavy metal, and disco, and the sound of sex rang everywhere.

  6

  HARD AND SOFT REALITIES

  LONDON, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK, 1971–1979

  In 1971, after an acoustically flavored performance in a former air raid shelter in Haverstock Hill, London, twenty-four-year-old singer-songwriter David Bowie encountered America. America came to him in the form of a threesome: Cherry Vanilla, a rock groupie who liked to flash her tits; Leee Black Childers, an underground photographer with Magic Marker in his hair; and Wayne County, one of New York’s leading drag queens. They’d hoped Bowie’s rumored freakiness would match their own, but were not impressed. “We just looked over at him and said, ‘L
ook at that folky old hippie!’” County later recalled.1

  Vanilla, Childers, and County were denizens of the Factory, the New York art studio and decadence wormhole where high society, commercial art, and the low life came together under the cool gaze of pop art pioneer Andy Warhol. They were in town to perform a play called Pork that involved the cast exchanging obscenities on white prop telephones. “It really was all very wild, vicious cheap, perverted, boring, all those Warholian things,” Bowie’s then-wife and chief image strategist, Angie, wrote in her memoir.2 Bowie had already visited the Factory once and begun aligning himself with its house band, the Velvet Underground, whom Jim Morrison had also checked out a few years earlier. The Lizard King was more troubled than intrigued by the bondage and street prostitution scenarios favored by songwriter Lou Reed. Bowie was open to what Morrison found depraved, striving to move beyond the hippie longing for an Eden in which men and women still assumed “natural” roles. He needed what drag and kinky sex practices offered: theater and in-your-face individualism.

  “We all had blue and multicolored hair; we were wearing big blond wigs and huge platform boots and purple stockings,” County remembered. “And he was wearing those floppy hats and the long, stringy hair, and he took one look at us and you could see that this was what he wanted to do.”3 Within three years, Bowie was living in America, transformed into Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual space alien who blended Little Richard’s whoop-it-up with the Velvets’ hard-edged sensibility. He wallowed in futurism. “What frightens me . . . is that people are holding on to a century that is fast dying,” he told an interviewer. “That includes a lot of young people as well.”4

  Bowie’s jeremiad captured a prevalent mood: the counterculture and its sexual revolution had hit a barricade of old ideas that could not be cleared away by peace-and-love fantasy. Women and homosexuals were in open rebellion, forming consciousness-raising groups and marching in the streets. At the other end politically, a “silent majority” identified and mobilized by President Richard Nixon embraced more traditional values. Caught in the middle were Vietnam veterans radicalized by the war but distressed by a moral collapse that, some felt, was embodied by women who had defied, sexually betrayed, or simply become unrecognizable to them.5

  Unsettled and sometimes disappointed, people turned inward, intimate. They explored the new self-help psychology surfacing from the dust of drug-fueled psychological explorations, communal cults, and health fads. Many turned away from any thought of a vast common ground and focused on building resplendent identities that distinguished them within subcultures. The vision of a united hippie front “half a million strong,” as the folk singer turned auteur Joni Mitchell had sung about Woodstock, was being replaced by these smaller insurgencies. “It’s a gay Woodstock!” a participant in New York’s first gay pride march declared, but the marchers only managed to go five blocks. The revolution, as the political soul man Gil Scott-Heron sang in 1971, would not be televised. Change would come from special-interest groups or evolve in private, through community, consumerism, and leisure.6

  One private activity that surged in public visibility was pornography. Soft-core publications like Playboy and underground stag films had existed for decades within homes or clubs, and burlesque had taken up residence in red-light districts since the days of Little Egypt. But new decisions changed what was permissible. A presidential commission found (to Nixon’s horror) that pornography had no measurable detrimental effects on society. The definition of “hard core” by the Supreme Court established a separate sphere for explicit content, exemplified by the Triple-XXX theaters that surfaced in every major city. Porn producers, emboldened by nudity-splashed European art films, created narratives instead of stags’ plotless, soundless “beaver” loops. By 1972, when Deep Throat became a national phenomenon, porn chic drew both elites and average Americans. The details of sex became much more visible, audible—and enticing. As one scholar writes, “When the pursuit of quality sex, of proper orgasms, began to loom as a large part of the carnal story, so hard-core arrived, speaking not just of sex and fucking, but of better sex.”7

  It was this fractured, changing America that David Bowie entered during the 1970s. His music and performances touched all the era’s bases: he questioned gender roles, explored sexual reenactments onstage, and experimented with the different forms—hard rock, glam rock, and disco—that most directly engaged with this nascent sexual openness. A traveler in a brave new world, Bowie soaked it all up.

  QUEENS OF THE SUNSET STRIP

  By 1972, as David Bowie and his band the Spiders from Mars spent a working holiday at the Beverly Hills Hotel, teenage energy permeated the night close by on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. “Kids who can’t be more than twelve years old, boys with lipstick smeared on their faces, girls with all those kitschy, klutzy shoes, hot pants, and feathers,” rock scribe and trend spotter Lisa Robinson wrote about the scene on the Strip that year. “Like some kind of fungus, it’s slowly creeping across the country, but it’s at its best in LA. I’m talking about sleeeeeeze.”8 Bowie and crew partied nightly alongside other satin-clad purveyors of arena rock in clubs like Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco.

  One evening, they connected with two star groupies. These high school burnouts had turned scene queens by being utterly forward and adopting personae suiting their illegal ID–worthy names: Sable Starr and Lori Lightning. Both made it clear that Bowie was their conquest, and a competition ensued. He had eyes for Lori, whose real last name is Mattix. The next time he was in town, Bowie took her to his hotel bungalow, where he donned a Japanese kimono, a hallucinogenic version of the bathrobe Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner famously wore. He had Mattix wash him in the tub. The evening proceeded—according to Mattix, anyway—as one might expect.

  Mattix recalls this night as a beautiful and happy one, not least because she’d bested her rival. “Two hours later, I went to check on Sable. She was all fucked up in the living room, walking around, fogging up the windows and writing, I WANT TO FUCK DAVID.” Others recall Mattix’s initial encounters with Mr. Stardust differently. Another teen then, Nancy McCrado, later told Bowie’s biographer Paul Trynka that Starr and another teenage girl initially broke into Mick Ronson’s room and were rejected by the focused guitarist, seeking solace with Bowie later. Lori joined them at that point. “David was tired, but eventually proved more obliging than his lieutenant,” Trynka writes.

  Both accounts likely contain some truth: adult male rockers regularly had relations with underage girls in this particularly depraved phase of the rock and roll lifestyle. Those girls often relentlessly pursued the men, and displayed their sexual allure as a source of power, yet doing so ultimately disempowered them—for example, when they were passed to another in the band or on the road crew. Among rockers, this was what you did in the 1970s: ask for action, and ye shall receive.9

  When Bowie died in 2016, the wave of reverential remembrances was broken by assertions that his encounter with Mattix made him a statutory rapist. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was intimate with Mattix from 1972 to 1974; her mother gave him permission to pursue that relationship. This didn’t prevent Page from keeping Mattix hidden in his room at the Sunset Strip rock hotel the Hyatt House (fondly known as the “Riot House”) on nights he went carousing. Mattix’s “romantic” imprisonment, which she accepted as a protective measure, at least spared her public humiliation, unlike the Hyatt House groupie who on one night, according to a Time magazine article on the hotel, “was propped up in the corner of an elevator and rode up and down for 90 minutes before her presence was reported.”10

  “Attracted by the concentrated power of the performing artist, the groupie wants to get as close as possible, into the eye of the hurricane, and she doesn’t mind getting a bit storm-tossed along the way,” read a definition of “groupie” in the hard rock–oriented teen magazine Circus in June 1974.11 The highly visible presence of groupies in a milieu where women rarely found a lead role is a major reason feminis
ts and conservatives alike developed a view of hard rock in particular as irredeemably misogynist. More recently, some female memoirists, journalists, and scholars have reclaimed the groupie role as strategically empowering. Academic Lisa Rhodes concluded after interviewing numerous groupies that they typically had few regrets about their time on the rock scene. “The groupies were not stereotypes, they were not pornographic tropes, they were not just mindless starfuckers,” Rhodes writes.12

  The figure of the groupie remains a vector for anxiety about music’s ability to both dissolve protective rules of behavior and reinforce a paradigm that limits women’s freedom. Groupie tales are sometimes celebrated as a sign of more open times, before the clampdown of feminist-driven identity politics in the 1980s. (Though groupies still operate in every popular music milieu, their presence always seems to signify the past, whether idealized or frightening “dark ages.”) Horror stories—most famously, the Led Zeppelin “shark incident,” in which members of Led Zeppelin’s road crew allegedly molested a woman using a fish they’d caught from the window of Seattle’s Edgewater hotel—vie with adventure tales like the ones Pamela Des Barres recounts in her 1987 bestseller I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, which rehabilitated the term for a “post-feminist” generation. Discussions always turn on the issue of individual agency, the notion that one or the other party possesses the power of choice. In some accounts, male musicians are cast as predators; in others, female groupies are extolled as autodidact liberationists.