by Ann Powers
Too much stress on individual agency within hard rock’s sexual milieu obscures the larger forces that affected libertine attitudes. “Bands are power,” groupie Sweet Connie told one of her conquests, Michael Bruce of the Alice Cooper band. Within the 1970s rock scene, sex was a force that became systematized, and all had to find their place within that system. “It’s like I’m just a prostitute, right, but if I’m okay, maybe they’ll give me a Lincoln and make me a pimp,” David Johansen of glam-punk pioneers the New York Dolls said of auditioning for record labels, the entry into the hard rock hierarchy. With music becoming a major industry, its makers felt they were doing a job, and since the content sold was eroticized, it felt like sex work. This sense of obligation, even entrapment, extended to the touring life lasciviously chronicled by the rock press.13
The slippage between rock as pleasure and as labor connected its sex scenes to other realms: hard-core pornography, the gay nightlife of the bathhouse and the hookers’ pier, suburban swingers’ culture, and body-centered therapy styles like those illustrated in the bedside coffee table book The Joy of Sex. Now mostly remembered as chaotic—either liberating or criminal—these spheres were in fact systems, enabled by capitalism and maintained because they offered order as the boundaries of eroticism seemed to be irrevocably changing.
Many of the youngest participants in the Sunset Strip scene were from homes made newly unstable by changes in the family structure. In California in 1970, governor Ronald Reagan signed a “no fault” divorce law that created what one historian describes as a “divorce deluge.” Sunset Strip sleeeeeeze chronicler Robinson assumed the tarted-up kids she found there were children of mothers trying to negotiate the newly expanded terrain of single parenthood. “They were probably better off before they left Mommy, except that Mommy herself came to Hollywood to be a STAR. After all, Mommy is perhaps only 33 (unless those girls aren’t really 14) and she’s schlepping drinks in some cocktail bar on Hollywood Boulevard all day in a pair of high heeled wedges,” Robinson wrote.14
THE SOUND OF SOMEONE COMING
One avenue leading to fame for the hungry young women of 1970s Hollywood was hard-core pornography. Until the 1970s, few feature-length porn films existed. Most had vaguely instructional titles like Africanus Sexualis and Man & Wife and depicted “demonstrations” interrupted by professorial commentary. Deep Throat changed that, though cheaply made by people with little film experience. It possessed a coherent story line, a breakout star in perky Linda Lovelace, and sound. In New York, celebrities and ordinary folk mingled in the lobby before watching Lovelace discover pleasure through oral sex. They marveled at sights they’d never previously seen while eating popcorn.
Deep Throat made porn ordinary. Lovelace became a celebrity, securing a book contract and a magazine column and appearing on television talk shows. Although later she would allege that she was being severely abused by her husband and manager, Chuck Traynor, at the time she seemed as wholesome as any starlet. Equally rosy Marilyn Chambers had actually been an Ivory soap girl before making 1972’s Behind the Green Door. Constance Money, star of the witty romp The Opening of Misty Beethoven, resembled a sorority girl, while at thirty-six, Georgina Spelvin in The Devil in Miss Jones was every would-be swinger’s wife gone wild. Moustachioed Harry Reems and teen-idol type Jamie Gillis also seemed like ordinary folk. They possessed less glamour than the average Hollywood actor, and the stories structured around their sex scenes were amusingly accessible. No matter how much it might be still seen as a “pariah,” the new porn was no longer exactly an outsider art form—it was, as its leading theorist, Linda Williams, has noted, a genre among other film genres.15
The rise of hard core in the 1970s coincided with a surge of sexual explicitness in virtually every other popular art form, continuing to the end of the decade. The titillating television comedy came into vogue. Art films like Last Tango in Paris and Midnight Cowboy, the first X-rated film to win an Oscar, entered the canon. Grade schoolers passed around grubby copies of books like Jaws (the “wet panties” scene!) and Jacqueline Susann’s many bestsellers with the pages of the sexy passages earmarked. And sex sounds moved up front in music, too, years before disco: Barry White in soul, one-hit wonders the Jimmy Castor Bunch (“Troglodyte”) and the Chakachas (“Jungle Fever”) in funk, orgasmic Deep Purple and the sex gods Led Zeppelin in hard rock.
Sound was a key element that made the new porn different, signifying sex itself. Stag films, the cheap loops of women undressing or people engaging in coitus that circulated privately in earlier eras, were silent or added a tacky soundtrack. Narrative porn, aspiring to be like “straight” cinema, included dialogue, but the sex scenes used overdubs of the actors moaning and crying out, to enhance the erotic experience. Williams suggests that in this way hard-core pornos resemble musicals: the sensual impact of a song bursting through a story line. She notes that the sounds of pleasure and the sounds of music have similar rhythmic and melodic features. That Deep Throat fetishized the bodily region also crucial for singers seems less coincidental if you consider that sexual pleasure is also expressed through the voice.16
Before porn became audible, music was the only place where erotic noises regularly surfaced. They ran through the blues into doo-wop, within Elvis’s stutter and the Beatles’ squeals, echoed by their own teenage fans. But the stakes became higher once Linda Lovelace unleashed her moan. That assertion of sexual authenticity had to be answered. By mid-decade heavy breathing left its steamy imprint upon virtually every corner of pop. Significantly, however, the first voice to be deeply associated with a newly pornographic musical eroticism came from hard rock. It belonged to Robert Plant, the golden god of LA’s Riot House, one of the most elusive prizes on the sleeeeeeze scene.
With his signature curly mane, dimpled chin, and penchant for exposing his slender chest in cutaway jackets, Robert Plant was one half of ’70s hard rock’s most notorious sex-god duo, the Apollonian hero to guitarist Jimmy Page’s Dionysian/Satanic mage. Page’s onstage histrionics suggested a mastery that, rumor had it, he deployed with whips and chains in the bedroom. But if Page set Led Zeppelin’s erotic scenes, Plant provided the ejaculatory money shots; his signature moans and yelps, often strung together in improvised arcs that lasted for minutes at a time, did the pornographic work of authenticating his own arousal. “The raunchiness is in everybody; that below-the-belt surge that everybody gets at some time or another,” he told a journalist.17
Indeed, Led Zeppelin may be the band most associated by rock writers with not just arousal but orgasm. “Robert Plant gives me orgasms,” Donna Gaines recalls telling boyfriends who didn’t understand her dedication to the group when they first toured the United States. Des Barres, who dated Jimmy Page on and off, writes: “When you saw Led Zeppelin play, it was all over but the orgasm.” Brad Tolinski, like Gaines a suburban teen whose life was turned around by Zep’s many US tours, employs cinematic terms. “‘Dazed and Confused’ [the centerpiece of the group’s live performances] turned the sexual act into something very Cecil B. DeMille: orgasm as mystical experience. It sounded super dangerous. A Led Zeppelin orgasm wasn’t pulling a girl’s pants down in some alley.” When the musicologist Susan Fast interviewed female fans for her 2001 book on the band, the word came up over and over. “I swear that man has a hard-on at every concert,” one fan gushes. “Orgasmic.”18
Plant readily admits that he borrowed his jouissance from the blues. He also insists that his voice had certain insurmountable limits that made actually imitating artists like Muddy Waters impossible. Led Zeppelin’s thefts were particularly blatant, and the group has been sued several times for plagiarism. Yet the very strictures Plant acknowledges made Led Zeppelin original and tightened up the erotic tension they generated. Unlike many white musicians, he and his bandmates foregrounded differences of race rather than trying to overcome them. They decorated their heavy blues with pastoral flourishes borrowed from Romantic poetry and Celtic myth. Plant, most of all, sang in a keenin
g tenor instead of the deeper ranges where Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison dwelled. He didn’t sound like a smooth soul crooner or a growling bluesman. Violating, violated whiteness made Led Zeppelin stand apart in ways that other blues-based rock bands rarely did. The erotic effect this distancing had on its nearly all-white fan base was profound: its catharsis both exposed and blew apart the discomfort many still felt toward overt black sexuality while tapping into the release that the sexually forthright blues lineage provided.
Robert Plant did, arguably, sometimes sound like a black man—or a black woman, Tina Turner, for example, as channeled by a white one, specifically Janis Joplin. In early reviews of Led Zeppelin, Joplin was the most often cited vocal influence. Even Plant’s fashion choices, his flowing curly locks, his scarves and bangles, were extremely Joplinesque. Plant’s lithe quality, his determination from the start to master the dynamics of the soft push as well as the hard thrust, mitigated the band’s force and allowed women fans a way into Led Zeppelin’s music. It also reflected Joplin’s gender-bending: if she sometimes tipped into masculine excess, he risked the feminine kind.19 Joplin, of course, loved to imitate the sound of orgasm, and this may be the most significant vocal trick Plant learned from her. The moans about two minutes into “Dazed and Confused” are gentle, but soon grow more aggressive, intermingling with Page’s distorted guitar effects. While Joplin would decenter the sound of her already loose bands with her libidinal cries, Plant remained locked in with his. The last thirty seconds of “Dazed and Confused” pound to a climax that’s almost cartoonishly linear.
Plant understood what he was doing: “I was playing into character with the songs.”20 Focusing on the rhythmic aspects of the wordless passages in Led Zeppelin songs, groaning in sync with the players surrounding him, Plant engaged pleasure in ways that resembled porn performance. What happened in the musical margins was central, in that it disrupted the stories Led Zeppelin’s songs told, via moments of driven release. This is what sex scenes do in porn. Like a porn star, Plant was playing a role, but also genuinely feeling its effects; there wasn’t a sense that he could stop once he was swept up in a song. Everyone in the clubs and, eventually, the arenas where Led Zeppelin played believed that what was happening onstage was real. Though not visibly “jizzing,” as male porn stars did, Plant made sounds that went beyond conventional musicality, and he did so not as a novelty, but as the core of his vocal performance. Another way Robert Plant blended the feminine into his machismo was this repetition; every night onstage, he came multiple times.
Just as straight men saw other men’s erect penises for the first time in hard-core films, so Led Zeppelin’s white male rock fans heard a new expressiveness about sex emerging from an ideal version of themselves. The loose structures and commitment to noise that hard rock borrowed from psychedelia made room for a capaciousness that singles-oriented rock and roll artists like Elvis, or even the pre-1970s Rolling Stones or Beatles, rarely accessed. In that space, a singer like Plant could roll around, get hard, go soft, come back, and take his time blowing his wad.
But this new heavy rock was not freeform; like porn itself, it was programmatic. Jimmy Page, a hardworking professional who’d reached a plateau with his previous band, the Yardbirds, carefully assembled Led Zeppelin as a commercial enterprise. Undeniably creative, Led Zeppelin was also functional; the band’s practice of “rewriting” tried-and-true blues songs further illustrated how much Page wanted this band to hit its mark. Reviewing the first Led Zeppelin album in Rolling Stone, John Mendelsohn found it formulaic. (He also called Robert Plant “prissy.”)21 That formula was just what American rock audiences craved—it ordered the drives and emotions the sexual revolution had unleashed. By the time the second album’s moan-infused “Whole Lotta Love” had hit the Top 5, 21,000 people had showed up to see them in a 10,000-capacity venue in New York, and Mendelsohn was eating his words. “Hey man! I take it all back!” he wrote, sarcastic but resigned. “You’ve got to admit that the Zeppelin has their distinctive and enchanting formula down stone-cold, man.” This band wasn’t going away.
THE GROUPIE SYSTEM
Offstage, Led Zeppelin defined the top tier in the groupie system. Page, Plant, and Bonham represented a more accessible fast-life ideal than glam rockers like Bowie, whose theatrical freakishness never grabbed the heartland. A new way of talking about rock was brewing in the media and among fans, and the blatant but contained sexuality of Led Zeppelin fit it perfectly. Meanwhile, back on the Sunset Strip, groupie hierarchies were hardening. Des Barres noticed a change from the free-love vibe she’d enjoyed in her early days, as the mood of camaraderie dissipated. She and Sable Starr especially tousled, with Starr once screaming, “Give it up, you old bag!” in her direction at a party for Elton John. Des Barres was then twenty-five.22
Such rude rejoinders made sense in a rock scene that had abandoned the hippie pretense of sex as the foundation of loving community for a more individualistic, hedonistic, and adolescent erotic vocabulary. For some, this felt freeing—guitarist Kid Congo Powers fondly recalled Rodney’s English Disco as the place where he, as a gay teen, could safely explore: “The older men were trying to get girls, while the younger boys were just there to be gay, fashionable and dancing around music and musicians and excitement. The girls were all necking with each other. I was in heaven. I had found a home.”23 Others were horribly betrayed. Kim Fowley, the manager of the all-female teenage band the Runaways, allegedly assaulted at least two women connected to the group, including Runaways bass player Jackie Fox. He committed these acts at parties, in front of many bystanders. “We all watched. We were all high,” one member of the scene later remembered. “It’s that haze and not knowing what to do. It was all about drugs, rock and roll, and sex back then.”24
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were expected to solve problems in the 1970s, not create them. Anyone thinking otherwise was a killjoy. This attitude could be seen all over the rock press, increasingly full of blatant sex jokes and images of seminaked women . . . and men. Rock bands loved (or were persuaded by their management) to pose shirtless, and bottomless, too, in ads that lent a pornographic aura to music magazines. Grand Funk Railroad, the catchy Michigan blues-rock outfit whose massive 1973 single “We’re an American Band” paid lyrical tribute to hotel-crashing groupies, showed off hairy chests in several ad campaigns and, surrounded by tiny flags, in the gatefold photo of the album named after their biggest hit. Other bands who bared flesh included Southern rockers the Allman Brothers, David Bowie’s pal Iggy Pop, and jokers Dr. Hook, who posed in the low-rent porno magazine Zipper. Alice Cooper took his nudie session to another level, wrapping a boa constrictor around his private parts.25
While some images still evoked pastoral hippiedom (the Allman Brothers frolicked in a picturesque river), often these naked efforts came off as more comical than alluring—the sex joke as a marketable commodity. Ads like the one for Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman’s solo debut Monkey Grip, which showed a manicured female hand firmly stimulating a banana, or the one celebrating the name of the progressive rock band Wishbone Ash by showing a vagina-shaped chicken bone being licked by a feminine tongue, fit in not only in music magazines but in the pornographic ones—not just Playboy, but Penthouse and Screw—where rock bands were beginning to seek new audiences. Album cover artists also aimed for raunch, with the 1972 illustration for the forgotten boogie band Mom’s Apple Pie taking the pastry for the most lurid. Referencing Grant Wood’s classic painting of tight-lipped farmers American Gothic, Nick Caruso’s illustration shows a buttoned-up country maid licking her lips and holding a pie with a slice removed, dripping, looking just like a wet vagina.
Editors and writers at music magazines happily engaged in the increasingly pornographic repartee. San Francisco’s underground newspapers had highlighted the Rabelaisian work of cartoonists like R. Crumb, whose images of massively endowed women had also appealed to Janis Joplin. Now, cartoons were more in league with fart jokes than fantasias—direct a
nd often confrontational. Creem, the Detroit magazine that best captured the emerging 1970s zeitgeist, often used photographs to make crude asides: an image of Raquel Welch, half-clothed, with a caption about “hot tortillas”; a topless shot of a female J. Geils Band fan, a backstage pass affixed to her nipple. Creem had several female editors, and its own promotional campaigns—like the “CREEM Mate of the Month” centerfolds who were usually pudgy comics or hirsute rockers instead of airbrushed girls-next-door—poked fun at the ubiquity of porn. When Deep Throat went nationwide, the publication’s star critic Lester Bangs wrote a highly critical review of the film, finding its imagery dull and belabored: “If porn’s an effort for Chrissake, then sex as a national pastime is doomed,” he wrote.26
At that point, sex in America hardly felt doomed, but it did sometimes seem to scream out for a little order. This is what the groupie system provided. A hardworking band could pull into a new town and expect to be greeted by young women who, like wartime nurses, would offer them succor. In return, those women would gain status in a world where few other roles were available—there were barely any females onstage, on the road crew, in management, or working in positions of power at the venues. Becoming a groupie placed women in rock on a kind of solid ground, however imaginary it ultimately proved. The simulated sex at the core of early-1970s rock could be made tangible within encounters that took place in in-between environments like hotels and backstage areas, where the moral codes women were questioning via the emerging women’s movement—and which men found incompatible with life on the road—were temporarily suspended. The stable element in this dizzying milieu was the conventional double standard in which men had power and women gained power through them.