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Backstage Secrets of Rock
Muses and Supergroupies
Pamela Des Barres
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Acknowledgments vii
Introduction viii
Tura Satana
Miss Japan Beautiful and the King 1
Cherry Vanilla
The Happiest Broken Heart 16
Gail Zappa
Love at First Sight 34
My Lady D'Arbanville 51
The Elusive Miss James 61
9,1 Cynthia Plaster Caster
Kicks 79
Dee Dee Keel
Hey Little Girl, You Wanna Come on the Bus? 101
Miss Mercy's Blues
Shock Treatment 121
Michele Overman
Love in Her Eyes and Flowers in Her Hair 140
10 Cassandra Peterson
The Virgin Groupie 157
Lori Lightning
Absolute Beginners 174
Sweet Connie
There's Only One Way to Rock 188
Gayle O'Connor
Crazy, Crazy Nights 205
Margaret Moser and the Texas Blondes
Slow Dazzle 217
Pleasant Gehman
Flesh for Fantasy 230
Bebe Buell
A Chat Regarding the Infamous G Word 248
Patti and Lisa
Dangerous but Worth the Risk 256
Miss B
Come as You Are 273
Pleather
The Male Groupie 283
Lexa Vonn and the Plastics
User Friendly 297
Sarah Madison
Miss You in a Heartbeat 318
Tina King
In So Deep 330
Amanda Milius
Let Me Stand Next to Your Flower 345
Static Beth
Size Queen of the Stars 364
Epilogue: Cameron Crowe
Almost Famous 371
Index 378
Little Wing is like one of those beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around ... you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing ... "Oh, there's one over there ..." It's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... Little Wing was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it.
-JIMI HENDRIX
We all started playing guitar for one reason: groupies. Groupies never torture you the way your girlfriend does. They never ask you what sign you are, why don't you call, and other horrific torture devices women have invented through the ages to maximize the amount of hoops the male species has to jump through in order to get to the honey pot. Every rock star knows the truth: while it's a lot of fun being on stage, it's more fun going back to the hotel for the encores.
-GENE SIMMONS
Groupies are beautiful. They come to hear you play, they throw flowers and underpants, they give you kisses and love. They come to bed with you. They're beautiful. We love groupies. r
-COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD
Groupies are a better ball, by and large ... they've had more experience and they're willing to try more things. The sex angle is important. But no more important than girls who are also good friends and make you feel like family.
-JIMMY PAGE
You were at school and you were pimply and no one wanted to know you. You get into a group and there are thousands of chicks ... little girls screaming ... man, it's power!
-ERIC CLAPTON
Some nights I look out and want to fuck the whole front row!
-ROBERT PLANT
I got into music for chicks and beer, and fortunately it's working out.
-MARK MCGRATH
I love 'em, they keep a young man hard. They're like our alter egos. They're doin' the same thing we are.
-STEVEN TYLER
I went through my crazy period in the '70s. Yes, I was Caligula. "Bring me thy drugs and women."
-PETER FRAMPTON
I only love musicians! I can't help it! Bass, drums, guitaryou've just got to play something.
-ASHLEE SIMPSON
Part of rock is dick, part of rock is going to see a gig and wanting to fuck the guy.
-COURTNEY LOVE
Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
-VOLTAIRE
Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
-NOEL COWARD
his book is dedicated to all the amazingly forthright women who have graciously told me their stories. I sincerely thank these bold, sassy, unrepentant dolls for taking me (and you) on stage, backstage, into hotel rooms, aboard tour buses, and into bed with them (and their chosen rock gods).
Kisses to the best agent a chick could ask for, Peter McGuigan. I didn't know chivalrous agents like Peter existed. And thanks to the folks at Chicago Review Press, especially my editor, Yuval Taylor-definitely a rebel in his field. Copious hugs to Patti Johnsen, who happily and expertly assisted me as my deadline drew near. Much appreciation goes to my oldest friend, Iva Turner, for focusing her considerable intelligence on this project, editing each chapter as I completed it. I needed an objective viewpoint, and that's exactly what she gave me. To all my gal pals who haven't seen much of me the past two years-we'll have dinner soon, I promise. Thanks to MDB for always offering excellent advice and being the best ex-husband ever. To my boy, Nick, for believing in his hippie-hearted mom. Endless adoration to my darling teacher, Light, for always pointing her laser beam directly at the truth. Thanks to Victor Hayden for just being Victor. To Bob Dylan, a source of eternal inspiration. To all the musicians who have rocked my universe and continue to do so. And to my boyfriend, Mike Stinson, for looking at me the way he does.
s a young girl, I was drawn to Jesus. Even though my parents weren't religious and rarely went to church, my sweet, perceptive mother made sure the Good Book was handy, and for my twelfth birthday, my dear Aunt Edna got me my first white leather-bound, gilt-edged Bible, which I still have. I voraciously studied the New Testament, especially the words printed in red ink. The words HE said.
It wasn't long before I hung photos of Elvis next to the huge color portrait of a glittery Jesus that my dad brought home from Mexico. The way I felt about these icons was strangely similar, with one blasphemous exception: the King made me feel giddy and horny, while the King of Kings made me feel guilty about it. When I was about thirteen, and had just started rocking out, the pastor at the Methodist church I'd recently joined stated that dancing was a sin. I was dumbstruck and pored through the pages of my Bible, looking for the verse that made this horrid proclamation. I never found it. But aha! Psalm 150 says, "Praise Him with timbrel and dancing." Whew. I had no idea what "timbrel" was, but the passage gave me mighty relief.
Until I left the square churches behind and started calling Laurel Canyon "God's Golden Backyard," I assumed that the oft-mentioned Mary Magdalen was a fallen whore who Christ had redeemed. I thought it was cool that he risked his reputation by defending such a wicked girl, and many other so-called outcasts. If Jesus saved such a tragic wretch, there must be hope for me! But even before I discovered the truth, I suspected there was more to the story than a rehabilitated hooker. After all, Magdalen was the only recorded female disciple, and the first person he appeared to after the ston
e was rolled away.
As a teenager I read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, and a massive jumble of guilt was suddenly lifted. It gave me solace that, besides being holy, Jesus was also a man who struggled with life just like we all do. I went digging again. Where exactly in the Bible did it say that Magdalen was a whore? Guess what? It doesn't. Seventeen hundred years ago, an early church father (read: pious jackass) turned several shameless women in the Bible into one immoral sinner, and Jesus' beloved muse disappeared.
Long before The Da Vinci Code, before the books, documentaries, and discussions about what Magdalen's real relationship with Jesus might have been, I went on a quest to discover her true identity. I even took a vacation to Israel and wandered around Magdala, the seaside town where she was born. Shortly after my trip, I discovered an ancient Gnostic text, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalen, confirming my suspicions that she was indeed, the Lord's beloved. The disciple Peter asks, "Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us?" Levi answers, "But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us."
Since I had personally experienced the cosmic closeness that can evolve between a creative genius and an adoring fan, I began to see the Lord's closest companion as the first genuine groupie muse. In fact, the dedication in my book Rock Bottom reads, "To My Soul Sister, Mary Magdalen, the First Groupie." I was also inspired to write a poem:
From my newfound revelations and ongoing communication with the spirit of Magdalen, the idea to write a book about modern-day muses started swirling 'round my head.
I think Mary Magdalen was so cool, she was like the first groupie. I mean she was really into Jesus and following him around and I wish she would've left a diary. I mean all this stuff about Jesus, how wonderful he was, and how he's gonna save us. All I'd like to know is if he was a good lay. That interests me.
-Patti Smith, 1977
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a muse is "a source of inspiration: a guiding spirit." I believe this describes the role of the groupie. A brilliant, creative man is often brought to the height of his genius by the muse. Throughout the ages, such women have helped revolutionize the arts. The ancient Greeks brought us the nine Muses through the prodigious loins of Zeus, and since then, attention and blessings from a muse are certain to stimulate any mere mortal's creative juices. "Happy he whomsoever the muses shall have loved," wrote Hesiod. "Sweet is the sound that flows from his mouth."
When Dante Alighieri first laid eyes on his beloved Beatrice, they were only nine years old, and even after her untimely death, his Paradiso acknowledges her profound, inescapable influence on his every word. Salvador Dali's tempestuous wife Gala was so roundly recognized as her husband's muse that when a Surrealist painter was on a roll, he was said to be "in love with Gala." And although Zelda's ecstatic miseries tortured F. Scott Fitzgerald, she was constant fodder for his art. "I married one of my heroines," he once said, and admitted to lifting large portions of Zelda's diaries for The Beautiful and Damned. Constanze Mozart, given little respect by historians, was so adored by her husband that he couldn't bear being away from her. "I kiss and squeeze you 1,095,060,437,082 times," he wrote in a letter. To his sister he wrote, "When Constanze heard the fugues, she absolutely fell in love with them . . . she scolded me roundly for not recording some of my compositions in this most artistic and beautiful of all musical forms, and gave me no peace until I wrote down a fugue for her."
After his death at thirty-six in 1791, Constanze spent the next fifty years making sure Mozart would never be forgotten. She obviously loved his music. The music, the music, always the music.
No matter how she is viewed by those who believe she busted up the Fab Four, John Lennon obviously believed that Yoko Ono was his muse. "With us it's a teacher-pupil relationship. That's what people didn't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one. I'm supposed to know everything. But she taught me everything I fucking know." Yoko set her sights on John, even waited by his gate before finally drawing him in to one of her art shows. "As usual," he said, paraphrasing the cliche, "there is a great woman behind every idiot."
All creative souls need passionate encouragement from devoted admirers. There have always been dewy-eyed believers standing in the wings, eager to offer themselves up to the source of the enchantment. The phenomenon is nothing new. It's an ancient, enduring practice that will continue as long as artists feel the desire to create. I'm sure Beethoven's masterpieces aroused exquisite longing within audience members, and Mario Lanza's operatics inspired weak-kneed adoration. Sinatra's intrepid bobby-soxers waited by the stage door to get a glimpse of the swingin' crooner. But nothing is sexier than rock and roll. I was a preteen when Ed Sullivan chopped Elvis off at the waist so we couldn't see his hellfire swivel-hips, and I was contaminated right there and then. From that long-ago illicit moment to last night's rowdy MTV Awards, sensuality has oozed through amplifiers, spilled from guitar strings, and dribbled down microphone stands, wreaking riotous havoc.
The word groupie started out innocently enough. I remember the first time I heard it spoken at the Continental Hyatt "Riot" House on the Sunset Strip. I was standing by Led Zeppelin's shiny black limo, smoothing my pink feather boa, reapplying my gooey Yardley Slicker lip gloss, preparing to slide in next to Jimmy Page for a hot night on the town. As the car door slammed, I heard a shrill voice from the gathered throng behind the roped-off area: "Look at that girl, she must be a groupie." Hmmmm. The word made sense. It's true I spent a lot of time hanging out with groups, so I wore the new moniker proudly for a brief spell. It wasn't long before the sparkling, newly minted utterance made it into the dictionary.
Alas, the G word quickly became a scurrilous accusation. Some women, claiming to be forward-thinking, began branding groupies as backward-thinking concubines, when all we were doing was exactly what we wanted to do! To this day, the word groupie is usually used as a pointy-fingered put-down, aimed like a poison dart at the girls who make it backstage-dancing in the wings, sitting atop amplifiers, climbing aboard private jets-the ones lavishly draped on the arms of much-desired, seemingly unattainable rock stars. There is only one Robert Plant, after all. One Steven Tyler. One Nikki Sixx. One Eminem. And millions of salivating fans.
What makes a fan take that precarious leap into the center of the regaled and reviled G word? For me, it was always the music. The seductive howl of the electric guitar, the throb of the bass, and the sensually moaned promises made my heart beat below my waist. The lyrics! How did they know what was whirling around in my head and pulsing through my veins? Where did it come from? How did they write that song that made me feel so wildly alive? I wanted to be in on the cosmic secret. I wanted to get so close to the music that I could taste it-and nothing was going to stop me.
Now it's 2007 and the groupie mentality hasn't changed. Yes, it's more difficult for music devotees to get close to their heroes, but they will always find a way.
While Googling around on the Internet, I came across a perceptive piece by Robert J. Lewis from www.artsand opinion.com. I got in touch with him, and he gave me permission to quote from his "Guitars, Gonads & Groupies Are Wild."
We mock and deride them, dismiss them as tramps and tarts, in order to disassociate ourselves from the ethos that compels them to give themselves away to total strangers ... When we find ourselves inexplicably drawn to the gods who created the B Minor Mass and Abbey Road it is because we are drawn to and want to participate in the very mystery of creation itself.... For when all is said and done, the groupie, without apology, is simply and frankly expressing his/her devotion to the principle of creation. That young women will continue to give themselves away to lead guitarists in tight pants, total strangers known only through their music, confirms the exceptional status of the artist, who by making exceptional demands on himself, commands
the means (the groupie) to genetically preserve and transmit his gift.... There should be no shame in this; the only shame is to deny the longing.
In 2003, Virginia Scharff, a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, wrote the book Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West with a chapter entitled "The Long Strange Trip of Pamela Des Barres." It felt a little weird being analyzed in a scholarly text along with an Indian squaw and a civil rights activist, but at least I was in fascinating company. "To find the story of a woman traversing and remaking the landscape of the counterculture in a more or less skilled and knowledgeable fashion," she writes, "we need search no further than the comic and troubling odyssey of self-proclaimed groupie Pamela Miller Des Barres.... It was the music that first called Pamela, and literally millions of other girls, out of themselves in quest of a bigger, wider, higher reality." Later in the chapter, Professor Scharff states, "Pamela Des Barres is the Lewis and Clark of wanton women, who prowled the land anew, from sea to shining sea." Yikes.
There are actually professors who teach entire courses on the topic. During the last few years, I've heard from several college students writing term papers on the groupie phenomenon. Here's a paragraph from Jessica Waks's 2005 thesis, "Groupie Slut or Groupie Goddess? The Paradoxical Nature of Groupies and Rock Culture": "Groupies were some of the first sexual warriors, fighting to bag the men they wanted and to fulfill their wildest fantasies. As young women struggling to find their own identities in rock culture, they chose to be with the band rather than stuck under Mick's thumb."
The rabid curiosity about our mythological rock gods, past and present, hasn't abated a smidgen. I hear daily from dolls that desperately want to know how I did it, and how can they meet the rock god of their dreams? I've also heard from women who managed to discover for themselves the heady high of being romantically linked, even for a night, with their favorite unruly rocker.
From Elvis's penchant for girls frolicking together in white cotton panties and "Top Forty Flickers" landing'60s pop idols to the Rolling Stones' array of infamous supergroupies and Winona Ryder's long list of rock conquests (Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner, Paul Westerberg, Beck, Collor Oberst, Pete Yorn, Ryan Adams), the beat goes on. With so many musicians snapped up by models, porn stars, and actresses (Gwyneth and Chris Martin, Drew Barrymore and Fab Moretti, Denise Richards and Richie Sambora, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Pamela Anderson and ...), the groupie's quest is even more difficult.
Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies Page 1