by Ann Powers
The suspension of codes was enticing; so was the temporary nature of that suspension. No terms would have to be radically redefined, because everyone had a place. Old terms could even be carried over, if they felt comforting. One account of backstage life during this period mentions a groupie “chastely” sleeping her way through the Rolling Stones’ entourage in order to finally get to Mick Jagger, taking liberties with that term to describe a woman using sex not for her immediate pleasure but to reach an admirable goal. Another anecdote had Ken Hensley, keyboardist for hard rockers Uriah Heep, begging one virtuous-seeming groupie to “take me away from all this” on a particularly abandoned night at the Whisky. “She did, and today she’s his old lady,” Circus magazine reported. These anecdotes about women who played by certain unspoken rules to get their men, avoiding profligacy and self-centeredness, exemplify how the groupie system valued order and its own kind of propriety.27 So do guides to the groupie world like “How to Meet Rock Stars,” published in Circus in 1973—a feature that echoed 1950s advice columns, except that instead of marriage to the boy next door, a wild night with a passing hitmaker was the goal, and strategies like “friendships with the older men who manage the stage or the security” were suggested.28
Reality was often not so rosy. Many young women were violated. The mere presence of underage girls required a web of adult complicity. Club owners and promoters, like Rodney Bingenheimer, made sure plenty of teenage cuties were available to entertain touring musicians. Hotel staff overlooked the semiclad women slumped in their hallways. Police apparently looked askance, or worse: in her memoir of teenage groupiedom, Robin Maltz recalls being nearly molested by a cop in exchange for his not hauling her in. Des Barres recalled seeing Led Zeppelin tour manager Richard Cole kick in a fan’s teeth for simply approaching Robert Plant from behind and startling him at LA’s groupie hangout the Rainbow Bar and Grill. “They thought they could get away with anything, and they could, because everybody wanted to be near them . . . It got to be incredibly sick,” she said of the scene around the band.29
The competition among the groupies also often took ugly turns. “Groupies groom groupies,” writes Robin Maltz. “Groupies hang out in cliques.” The system had definite winners and losers. The short-lived teen magazine Star served and promoted the Sunset Strip scene, offering advice to would-be teen seducers in articles like “Quiz: Are You Ready for an Older Guy?” and “The Black Foxy Lady: Can You Hold Your Own Against Her?” In a feature on the alpha kids of the Sunset Strip, Sable Starr consistently badmouthed her rivals, recounting one night when she wanted to pair up with Mick Ronson: “He was going with this ugly girl named Leslie and I can’t stand her . . . It just made me so mad that she was with him. Anyway she made faces at me so I went up to her and splashed her gin gimlet right in her face! After that, Mick came over to me and left Leslie sitting by herself with her runny makeup and sopping wet hair.”30
That adults would observe and take part in blood sport waged by drunk high school sophomores raises not only the obvious questions about agency and power, but more complicated ones about the way people avoid responsibility within situations that seem predetermined by established positions and rituals. As in pornography, the groupie system was both authentic and simulated—celebrated in song, made hip through fashion spreads, providing color in magazine features, eventually rendered nostalgic in films like Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, from 2000. As in a “money shot” orgasm scene, rockers and their conquering conquests did what was expected to achieve the outcome everyone agreed was most desirable. Is a game consensual if the rules prove exploitative? Some male rockers found the situation difficult to sustain, too. “Everyone felt pressure to live up to this previously unknown ideal of perfect sexual freedom,” one musician active in this era, who wishes to remain anonymous, wrote in a recent e-mail exchange. “It was quite common to feel like one was not living up to the modern ideal, that one simply was not fucking enough. The idea that sex necessarily involved a power relation that had to be thought about was completely foreign. I knew hundreds (yes) of young girls and many young men who put on false bravado about their sexual exploits and not only claimed more action than they had, but had more action than they wanted.”
GIRLS WILL BE BOYS AND BOYS WILL BE GIRLS
What Sable Starr didn’t realize about Pamela Des Barres when she called her an old bag in a room full of rockers decked out in satin, spangles, and feathers is that Des Barres had helped invent the personae of the guys Starr was trying to steal from her. In 1968 Des Barres was in a band called the GTOs; a performance art troupe, really, with little musical experience, but all the flower-power swagger five groupies making free-rock noise could produce. Avant-pop star Frank Zappa had assembled the GTOs when he realized the women backstage at his shows had as much, if not more, creative energy than the men they hotly pursued. The music never gelled, but as a style unit Miss Pamela and her peers had significant influence, most directly on a band recently relocated from Phoenix that went by the drag name of their male lead singer—Alice Cooper.31
Free love hadn’t opened Alice Cooper, the singer, to bisexuality; born Vincent Furnier, he was an avowed heterosexual who liked old Hollywood movies and considered Bette Davis’s Gothic-camp performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? primary source material. But like many artists at the turn of the 1970s, Furnier was beginning to think that the impetus for cultural change might not be communal effort, but individual revolt. He wanted to inhabit the new role of the rock star: not envoy of a larger movement but hero within a ritual space where outrageous dreams and encroaching nightmares could be enacted. Theatrically kicking aside the anxieties that haunted Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison, 1970s rock stars like Alice Cooper took on the decade’s challenges by turning them into stories told on their own constantly reconstituting bodies.
In his academic analysis of glam rock, Philip Auslander invokes fellow theorist Richard Schechner to posit that rock stars specialize in “showing doing”: not just letting an expressive act flow forth in a seemingly natural way, as Hendrix or even Morrison did, but theatrically “pointing to, underlying, and displaying” every move. To show doing, properly, you need a costume. The porn star’s costume is nakedness. Alice Cooper knew a musician going naked would be arrested—and besides, he was homely. His solution came when he met GTOs member Christine Frka one day in Hollywood. The extremely slender, giantly Afroed Miss Christine was a magical wraith, a dream girl whose look invoked Storyville and the graveyard in one fell swoop. She and Alice became lovers, and he convinced his bandmates to let her work some sartorial wonder on them.
“Alice got in deep with Miss Christine,” Alice Cooper bassist Dennis Dunaway wrote in his 2015 memoir. “They became hand-holding fashion clones. They not only wore each other’s clothes, but you might say they wore each other.” Cooper himself described the style Frka developed for him—one that would help make him one of the biggest rock stars of the early 1970s—as “a pair of black leather pants worn underneath a torn black lace slip with some GTO lingerie, smeared Bette Davis makeup, unusually long hair, and black lace gloves. It was shocking even to the hippies.”32
Other artists in Los Angeles and elsewhere were making equally outrageous moves. David Bowie was rethinking his own hippie drag, getting ready to go alien. In New York, there was the Velvet Underground, whose leader, Lou Reed, favored motorcycle-boy leathers, and whose drummer, Moe Tucker, was a boyish woman who was Reed’s twin just as Miss Christine was Cooper’s. And in San Francisco, most outrageously of all, there were the Cockettes, a mixed-gender, communally oriented, predominantly gay collective that began doing weird variety shows in North Beach venues. On New Year’s Eve 1969, the Cockettes staged one such “Nocturnal Dream Show” at a run-down Chinese-deco theater called the Palace, wearing lampshades and coconut bras, the women among them going topless, the men forming chorus-girl kick lines as the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” played on repeat. One Cockette told entertainment reporter Rex Re
ed that the goal was “sexual role confusion.” It was the spirit of the day.33
Within a year, the Cockettes would gain another member, perhaps the most glorious androgyne of that early gender-fucking period and, indeed, of the whole 1970s. Around the time Vincent Furnier was transforming into Alice Cooper, Sylvester James, then a high schooler known as Dooni, was tiring of his own drag scene in South Central Los Angeles, where he’d perfected a 1920s blues queen look as part of a party-circuit gang called the Disquotays. He’d soon relocate to San Francisco and join the Cockettes. His pristine look, modeled on Josephine Baker, was a striking contrast to the chaotic countercultural mess his fellow Cockettes made. So was his voice: a burnished-chrome falsetto he’d first cultivated in the gospel church and perfected listening to old Billie Holiday sides. Sylvester would eventually emerge as a star in his own right, an out gay man who came to embody the spirit of a different 1970s phenomenon, disco. Sylvester certainly got Bowie’s attention. When the Spiders from Mars failed to sell out San Francisco’s Winterland in 1972, the glam king explained away the failure by saying, “They don’t need me—they have Sylvester.” Opening for him, Sylvester had flown through the former ice rink, hitched up to a cable “like a big-boned, glittering brown Tinkerbell.” Androgyny had truly taken flight.34
The omnisexual mood of the early- to mid-1970s was generated by messy gender-fuckery that, in 1973, Creem magazine called “the most conspicuous trend in rock and roll” in its introduction to an “Androgyny Hall of Fame.” The corners of the counterculture sympathetic to such things—like the Cockettes’ San Francisco and Warhol’s New York—eventually pushed rock’s closet open, in a way. As Creem noted, a Londoner, Ray Davies of the Kinks, “brought the question to American airwaves” with “Lola,” his 1970 love song to a transvestite; then Bowie became the beautiful face of this “magical uncertainty tour.” Rock’s legacy of gender and sexual code-switching stretched back to “Queen Bitch” Little Richard, and included everyone from Bob Dylan, who allegedly wore rouge on the cover of his album Highway 61 Revisited, to Bowie compatriots like the lipsticked and feather-boaed New York Dolls and the “possibly post-sexual” Iggy Pop. Creem’s guide was undershot with a certain nervousness. Noting that many of the day’s leading gender-benders, including Bowie, were men married to women, the article’s introduction ended, “Will the real homosexuals please stand up?”35
Creem’s distress at the “ungay gay” showed how difficult it was for even open-minded rock-scene habitués to grasp that sexuality could be anything other than cast along a straight-gay binary. Auslander argues that what made 1970s androgyny so powerful was that its constructed nature—hobbled together, as Alice Cooper said, with bits of pilfered lingerie and ripped motorcycle gear—challenged the deep presumption that gender was ultimately a stable, biologically determined human trait. Rock and pop stars struggled with how to best represent the moment. The most interesting ones expressed ambiguities in ways that opened fans’ minds but acknowledged that such inner unrest could feel violent, and even like a violation. “I’ll suggest certain things: maybe that I’m gay or super-macho,” Cooper said then. “Those are all lies. But that’s Alice. Alice is a liar.”36
Many people wondered if they might, too, be liars in the 1970s. Wives and husbands were questioning their vows. Bisexuality was in. Dubbed a trend, the orientation earned cover stories in Newsweek and Time. At West Coast “sex farm” retreats (to use journalist Tom Wolfe’s term) like Sandstone, which blended New Age religion, self-help, and erotic exploration, individuals and couples combined in every formation possible. Open marriage became popular. Feminists critiquing patriarchy turned from heterosexuality as a political gesture that, for many, uncovered hidden same-sex desires. Via Warhol’s factory, popular texts like Gore Vidal’s 1968 sex-change saga Myra Breckinridge and John Schlesinger’s 1969 male-hustler film romance Midnight Cowboy, the trans musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the subversive drag star Divine, Americans were expanding their definitions of the ideal man, woman, or whichever.
Alice Cooper was one of the first and most all-American peddlers of this unsettled self. Like Iggy Pop’s band the Stooges, who emerged from the Detroit psychedelic scene around the same time, Cooper recast the counterculture’s societal questioning in terms that were both individualistic and highly confrontational. “We looked right into the eyes of our audience with arrogance about who and what we were,” Cooper writes about the group’s early gigs with hippie bands like Blue Cheer. Unlike David Bowie, who adopted the icy cool of a literal (space) alien, Alice Cooper was an unkempt everyfreak: plain, hairy, with amateurish makeup and a stage show that borrowed from horror movies instead of Bowie’s favored literary sources. His voice was artless, creaky; his drag persona felt lumpen, not elegant. Too gross for LA, the band relocated to Michigan in 1970, and it was there that it found its lumbering groove in songs like “I’m Eighteen,” an anthem of what Steve Waksman calls adolescent “terminal confusion.” The dirge-like chord progressions of “I’m Eighteen” explode into cacophonous, almost unpleasant but irresistible release, expressing the more tortured aspects of ambiguous identity: the alienation, fear, and loathing that the half-metamorphosed caterpillar experiences in the cocoon. Like many Americans trying desperately to evolve to fit new sexual ideals, Alice Cooper never got his wings. If he had, he would have smashed them anyway.37
Fracture, a floating turmoil, the creeping sense felt on both the right and the left that society was veering out of control—these were the moods of the 1970s. The era confirmed what the 1960s counterculture had revealed to the parents and kids of the baby boom: that self-transformation inevitably generated both inner and social turmoil. Writing of a “Me” Decade, Tom Wolfe perceived a narcissistic turn that “smacked of vanity,” an aristocratic impulse to buff up one’s personality “like a high-class piece of psychological cabinetry,” newly available to the masses through a mix of loosened morals and greater general wealth.38
This is not how many people experienced the 1970s, however. Gay men put their bodies on the line in the street protests that began with Stonewall. Feminists also struggled with street confrontation and risked rejection by family members. Many in communities of color had grown deeply cynical of the integrationist ideal and were struggling to retain a sense of their own lineages. Heterosexual white men, still dominant, felt destabilized, too—uncertain of what authority still resonated. “I know what I am, what I am is a man!” screamed Ray Davies at the climax of “Lola.” What did that even mean anymore?
“What have I got that makes you want to love me?” Alice Cooper asked in “Is It My Body,” an agonized yowl of a song that was the B-side to “I’m Eighteen.” “Is it my body, or someone I might be? Something inside me?” Iggy Pop asked the same question using the shards of a broken whiskey glass when he cut himself onstage during Stooges performances, howling about wanting to be a dog or having no fun. “He rubs his body, he contorts, bending over backwards until his head nearly touches the floor,” wrote Mike Jahn in the New York Times after witnessing the Stooges at a Cincinnati festival. “He rolls his tongue around. He makes grotesque shapes with his lips. He is very ugly and precociously sexual. The audiences love it. They don’t understand it. Neither does he, most likely. But they are drawn to watch him with mouths agape.” David Bowie loved Iggy Pop, too. Once he tried to kiss the Detroit singer during a press conference, and Pop punched him in the face.39
“Personality crisis! You got it while it was hot!” David Johansen of the New York Dolls yelled in that band’s signature riff-ripped tirade. “But now frustration and heartache is what you got.” Like kids who’d followed Bowie’s glitter trail out of the American hinterland but then slipped on Alice Cooper’s grease and stayed in the gutter, the Dolls anticipated New York punk’s “rip it up and start again” ethos five years before that movement coalesced. Like Iggy Pop, they put the glop in glamorous: Johansen was a habitué of Andy Warhol’s art world, but like his bandmates, he was from the o
uter boroughs, not Manhattan, and he retained a street-tough sensibility. “I would be a sex murderer if I didn’t wear these pumps,” he once told Lisa Robinson while sporting spangled women’s heels. “You know you could be in fatigues, and put on pumps, and look totally queer.” Such aggressive and tacitly homophobic language was common among 1970s hard rockers, who found energy in the disarray of the period, including the profoundly mixed signals androgyny chic created. Guitarist Mick Ronson of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars made a similar, if more benign, comment to a journalist in 1973: “I’m gay inasmuch as I wear girls’ shoes and have bangles on my wrist. I get offers to—but I don’t accept them.”40
For homosexuals in the 1970s, the glam world of hard rock could be a shelter or a source of frustration. Music critic Jim Farber, then a teenager, experienced the era as a time when he could show outrageousness without necessarily making its essence clear: “With my attachment to glitter, as a nervous, virginal mid-teen, I wasn’t announcing my coming out but ensuring my staying in,” he wrote in 1998. “Pledging allegiance to glitter rock awarded me a safety zone in which I could both sidestep all definitions of what it meant to be a boy and stave off a commitment to what it would eventually mean for me to be a gay man.” But to Creem writer Vince Aletti, who as an out gay adult in 1972 was already turning toward the more openly homosexual scene that would become disco, the patina of androgyny chic was “bullshit . . . Just another restriction of the straitjacket. Or, in this case, straight jacket.” Noting that for all of the air kissing and lipstick application Bowie and Pop and Johansen did, “there are no songs about homosexual love,” he demanded that songs come out of the closet, too.41