Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies

by Pamela Des Barres

  Mercy took Lucky and moved in with her mother in Santa Monica where she continued self-medicating with a vengeance. "It's in my blood, from my father," she sighs. Arriving back in town, Mercy discovered a raw new sound shattering the bighaired complacency. "Anywhere something starts rumbling, I'm there," she insists. "From the hippies on, every decade, I've been there. I started getting into the punk scene. You could feel the energy of something erupting."

  Mercy became an integral part of the punk world, went to beautician's school on Hollywood Boulevard, and soon had her bejeweled fingers in ducktails and beehives all over town. "I don't know how I got into hairstyling. I could just take somebody and alter their looks and I loved that." Her specialty was "extreme rockabilly," and she created radical looks for the Rockats and Rockabilly Rebels, and even got her hands in Darby Crash's bristly locks. She got romantically involved with Brendan Mullen, the astute entrepreneur who opened the infamous Masque nightclub in Hollywood. "He invented punk," she spits. "OK?"

  It was about this time, when Mercy was skinny, spiky, and punked out that she ran into a certain well-muscled up-andcomer on a neighborhood street near the beach. "This guy picked me up by the belt loops and asked me to come visit him. I only recognized him because he was all over the TV-his first movie had just come out." Mercy turned up at the stranger's home and smoked pot with him and his bodybuilder buddies. "He was telling me all the things he was going to do, how famous he was going to be. He probably even told me he was going to be governor and was already plotting that." After some small talk, Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed Mercy by the arms. "He pinned me up against the wall and said, `I'd like to know what it's like to go to bed with you.' And I said, `You'll never know.' He was scary to me, even though he's much smaller in person than you think he is."

  When her mother got breast cancer and passed away, Mercy's life became even more rough and tumble, and Lucky went to live with her former in-laws, Johnny and Phyllis Otis.

  Through her old GTO partner Miss Lucy, Mercy slammed into Love's wild man Arthur Lee, who was trying to help Lucy get into an AIDS clinic. He was in between jail stints and Mercy soon found herself in grubby porno hotels with another of her favorite musicians. "Well, he watched porno. I didn't," she says firmly. "But I've always idolized him. He's such a genius in the studio." They had a brief, crazy affair until they met up with the cops late one night. "Art and I stopped seeing each other when we got pulled over by the police. They almost took him away, until I said, `Do you know who this guy is?' I started singing `My Little Red Book,' and they cut him loose. He took me to Jack in the Box and said, `You know, we've gotta split up,' so we did."

  I had been concerned about Mercy's death-defying habits for a long time, but even at her lowest point, she still retained her acerbic good humor, firebrand quotability, and gaudy elan. Somehow her total and utter Mercyness stayed intact.

  When she hooked up with a fellow she met on the crack circuit, I knew I was in for more hand-wringing. Leonard was dark eyed and good looking, a former air force vet with a monthly paycheck, which was part of the reason Mercy moved in with him and eventually married him. "We were a lot alike, but I had no idea he was so violent or I would have never dealt with him. One day he just started beating the crap outta me, but by that time I was too far gone. Once you start doing crack, you just dive into it." They smoked Leonard's entire check every month, and pretty soon the rent became an afterthought and they were living on the street, sleeping under the Hollywood freeway. I often found Mercy pushing a shopping cart, prodding through dumpsters for leftovers or something to sell. "Was crack your every waking thought?" I ask. "Waking?" she snickers. "There was never any sleep." It went on for years.

  "Yes, it went on and on, and when he bashed my face in I was gonna leave but I couldn't because I was stuck to him financially and I thought he'd change."

  It took awhile, but amazingly, Leonard did change. He put crack down and picked up a decent job at a Goodwill store downtown. But Mercy stubbornly kept smoking until the Easter Sunday she couldn't find her pipe. "I had put it out by the garbage cans and couldn't find the damn thing. So I said, `That's it.' Never to pick up again." After a beat Mercy adds, "Well, you gotta hit bottom sometime." She started going to AA meetings and reconnected with her gifted, charming, and tolerant son, Lucky.

  I've made certain to stay in touch with my outrageous pal, whatever shape she might be in, and our friendship took an unforeseen shift in 1998 when my sweet mother, Margaret, moved in with me. I took the newly clean and sober Mercy to the hospital to visit with her, and it was evident in their comfortable chitchat that, despite appearances, down deep Mercy and Mama were kindred spirits. Although Mercy worked part-time at Goodwill with Leonard, she came to my house and entertained my mother three days a week, which blessedly gave me time to run errands and write.

  Three years later when Mama passed away from a lifetime of puffing Pall Malls and Virginia Slims, Mercy made an eloquent, wry speech at her funeral. She surprised us all by putting a toy gorilla that sang the "Macarena" in Mom's casket to keep her company-because it had cracked them up so many times.

  Mercy is now an auction clerk at www.shopgoodwill.com in Los Angeles, listing an array of unique hand-picked items that are snatched up daily by happy bidders. She is eight years sober (yay!), but sadly, Leonard went back to his dismal old habits and they haven't seen each other in over two years. She lived with me for awhile after she found him smoking crack with a hooker, and recently got her own pad in a grandiose, antique building downtown, not too far from Skid Row.

  Luckily (it's good she didn't call him jinx!), her son Lucky was blessed with the bluesy Otis bloodline. He played bass with his revered grandfather in The Johnny Otis Show for several years and is an esteemed musician in his own right. Her lanky, hazel-eyed boy is now hosting his grandfather's radio show, showcasing the same music that his mother was devoted to back in juvenile hall.

  That Mercy is here to tell this tale is a downright miracle, since her hazardous life has consistently been in jeopardy. The night Janis Joplin OD'd, Mercy was with their dealer. "He was on his way to see Janis and he said, `I want you to try this heroin,' but didn't tell me why-so I did it while he sat by with a shot of coke. I said, `I'm going down too fast,' so he gave me the coke to bring me up, watching everything I did. Later that night, I heard on the radio that Janis had died."

  So much of her time was spent high and looking to get high, does Mercy wonder what might have happened if she had made different choices? "Oh, yeah, all the time," she admits freely. "Opportunities just knocked at my door and I sat down and got stupid ... got stupid. But I married Shuggie, who I dreamed I was gonna marry, who I really wanted to marry: that was my main goal in life. And I'm sure it was to produce Lucky. Yeah, sometimes I go back and think, `Why didn't I pursue Al Green instead of Shuggie Otis?' Maybe things would have changed, maybe I would have ended up with Al. But if I had taken any other road, there would be no Lucky, and as much as I've screwed up with him, he's the real reason I'm still on the planet."

  After all the ups and lowdowns she has experienced, Ms. Mercy Fontenot is still the most memorable, uncompromising, point-blank woman in any room. Her very presence is a vivid reminder that walls cannot hold your soul. "If I could sing," she tells me finally, "the title of my song would be, `The Blues Ain't Nothin' but a Color, Baby."

  Love in Her Eyes and Flowers in Her Hair

  was twirling all over the dance floor at the Palomino club as the Flying Burrito Brothers played their cosmic American music to a handful of devoted diehards. Lost in the final notes of the strum and twang, I was pleasantly brought back to the smokefilled honky-tonk by a blonde sweet-teen who had noticed the sparkly cross around my neck. "I know you're wearing that cross because you love Jesus," she purred. The chiffon-clad sylph soon joined Miss Mercy and me on the floor, and as the evening progressed, she and I fell in love the way only hippie-chick flower children could back in the intoxicating spring of 1969.

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p; I immediately wanted to touch her, and she returned the favor, stroking me with babysoft intensity, her huge aqua eyes brimming with delight. After a couple more tunes, we rushed to the ladies room to find out more about each other, and it was quickly revealed that she was there to see the Burritos' front man, Gram Parsons. They had recently spent a romance-filled four days in New York, and Michele was taking a chance tonight, hoping for a reunion. Alas, it wasn't to be, as Gram had just gotten back together with his ladylove Nancy, but Michele put on a brave, beautiful face and took it in stride. My adored Chris Hillman wasn't giving me the time of night either, so Michele and I kissed each other's rock and roll wounds and found wistful solace in our instant camaraderie. The impish newcomer from Manhattan and I quickly discovered we were soul sisters, simpatico spiritual seekers, and, eventually, roommates.

  In spite of our full-plate lifestyles, Michele and I have remained close friends, and I hop a jet to Portland to hang with her for a few days. When she throws open the door of the apartment she shares with her (much younger) boyfriend Evan, I marvel once again at how childlike she is. Michele has retained all the qualities I was mad for the day we met-open-hearted innocence, wide-eyed expectancy, and an innate sweetness that lights her up like a candle in the moonlight.

  After a couple of days catching up, Michele takes me to a vividly green park where we spread out on a blanket and reminisce. She has amazing recall. "I remember very well the first time we saw Zeppelin together," she laughs. "We hitchhiked out to the Long Beach Arena, which was our typical mode of transportation in those days. You knew Jimmy was interested in you because everybody kept sending you messages telling you so. Robert and I were together already and he told me, `Jimmy really wants Miss Pamela,' and to pass the message along. Ah, yes, I remember it well."

  Before young Michele danced with me at the Palomino, she had already dallied with Zeppelin's twenty-year-old singer during their debut American tour. "When I first met Robert, they were staying at this second-tier hotel, the Gorham, and every groupie in New York was after him. He was unbelievably gorgeous.

  On both coasts, word was out that the four lads in Led Zeppelin were way too risky. "I saw them at the Scene and everybody said, `This guy Robert really likes you,' but I was intimidated by him because I knew every groupie, including the really hardcore chicks like Devon Wilson, was after him, and I didn't want to get involved. The night of their concert we were at Ratner's, a Jewish dairy restaurant next door, and Robert saw me and came over. `Oh, there you are. Would you like to come up and see my etchings?' He literally said that to me. He was just a boy, a man-boy, and I was slightly intrigued, but then they played, and after that. .." Yes indeed. When you saw Led Zeppelin play, it was all over but the orgasm.

  "I was standing in the back of the theater, and I could not believe my eyes. He was wearing a green velvet suit and he threw the microphone up in the air and introduced himself-'My name is Robert Plant.' I thought, `If this guy likes me the way everybody says he does, he's gonna get me because he's totally IT!"

  Long before she attracted the Golden God, Michele had already led quite an unorthodox life, raised by her bohemian maverick mother in a tiny Greenwich Village walk-up, surrounded by hipness. "My mother, Gina, was definitely one of a kind, way ahead of her time, and took a lot of flack for her beliefs. In those days, it took a lot of guts to be different. She was absolutely gorgeous. I think she was just born weird. But as nutty as she was, her kids came before everything, so I always felt loved and cherished."

  She was adored but free as an uncaged canary, haunting coffee bars and rock clubs while her mother worked nights as a waitress. "When I was very young I wanted to live like Ozzie and Harriet," Michele admits. "I wanted stairs with carpeting and a pool in the backyard, a dad in the house and a kitchen where we'd all have breakfast around the dining table in the morning."

  Michele and her older sister, Franny, never saw their missingin-action father, however, and Gina served up dishes that Beaver Cleaver couldn't even imagine. "My mother was a spiritual seeker. She got into Zen Buddhism and was one of the first people in New York on the macrobiotic diet. When I was eleven, she became a vegetarian, and I grew up on brown rice."

  Living with an eccentric mother sometimes took its toll on the girls. "When you're a kid and your mother is weird, walking around barefoot, even in the Village, people made fun of her and it was embarrassing. But she was true to herself and brought us up the best way she knew how."

  At least Michele didn't have to sneak out to smoke her first joint. "It was kind of cool, I smoked pot with my mom one time and she said, `You know, this is very nice, but I'm like this all the time anyway.' It was true."

  Even though I know Michele grew up with music all around her, I ask why she started falling for musicians. "My very first love, my first crush in kindergarten, was Elvis Presley." I should have known since I also discovered Elvis at a very young, loveme-tender age and never got over it. "I had fantasies that he would come pick me up from class and wheel me away on a cot. I actually got as far as lying down on this portable bed with Elvis. Pretty precocious, huh?"

  As a young teen, Michele was free to roam the world's trendiest streets. "My mom knew a lot of jazz musicians and artsy people, so it wasn't a foreign milieu to me. In those days there were folk singers in the park every weekend, and I was always around people playing music, so it was normal. The first job I had after school was at the Night Owl Cafe, where a lot of groups got started: the Lovin' Spoonful, Dylan, the Mamas and Papas, the Doors."

  Even a freewheeling hippie chick had to make a buck, and Michele's second job had her modeling in the window at Betsey Johnson's original Greenwich Village boutique, Paraphernalia. "It was so much fun. All the gay guys would come up to me and say, `We just want to tell you how fab-u-lous you are; we love watching you dance in the window!' I have this incredible photograph, a double exposure of me on my little platformand an old couple, a man and a woman, looking in the window, smiling at me."

  It made perfect sense that Michele's first love would be a musician. Ralph Scala was eighteen and Michele only fourteen when they began their passion fest. "When you're first in love, the whole world revolves around this person-all your happiness hinges on them." Ralph's band, the Blues McGoos, had a hit song, "Ain't Seen Nothing Yet," and he took Michele on the road with her mother's blessing.

  The band moved into the au courant residential Hotel Albert, home to a plethora of struggling rockers, and Michele moved in with them. "I was literally getting fucked during lunch break, then I'd trot back to high school. And sexually, I had no idea how lucky I was. I didn't know yet that all guys weren't so considerate of their partner's feelings. He was an incredible lover, and I remember my first orgasm. I wasn't trying to have one, when all of a sudden, spontaneously, it felt like my insides were rushing out my body, and I thought, `So that's what everybody's talking about!' I was fifteen years old."

  Despite the divine orgasms, Michele was getting antsy, thinking about other rock guys while gamboling in the sack with Ralph. The young couple broke up, and she soon came across another sexy fledgling musician, Steven Tallarico. "In '68 there was a club in the Village called Stone the Crows, where this wild guy sang with his band, Chain Reaction. He was oh-so-cute with his exaggerated Beatles mop top." Steven Tallarico later altered his Italian moniker somewhat, formed Aerosmith, and became Steven Tyler. And he still makes the little girls swoon. But back in 1968, the beloved only child still lived with his folks in Yonkers.

  Steven's upbringing mirrored Michele's, and the two renegades were soon crazy about each other. "His dad was a jazz musician and his parents were away a lot, so Steven had the house, just north of New York City, and it became an essential hangout. We did so many drugs-not anything really serious, we took a lot of acid, smoked tons of pot. The one and only time I did chloroform was with Steven. You put it on a cloth, inhale, and get really fucked up."

  Seventeen-yearold Michele and nineteen-year-old Steven had a chaotic fli
ng that lasted almost a year. "Steven was a maniac, he was just nuts," she marvels. "He had so much personality-just one of those people with no brakes, no filter, just total id. He used to freak me out, doing things like squashing a banana through his teeth. He had this huge mouth and the goop would come squirting out everywhere!"

  I think Steven Tyler is one of the hottest men ever, so I ask about their amorous adventures. "He was the best lover. I mean, he was the absolute best," she assures me. "He lived in the attic on the top floor of the house. He had speakers on either side of his pillows, and when you laid in bed, you were immersed in this wall of sound. He used to make this sexy blowing noise in my ear," she says, demonstrating with a gentle whooshing sound. "Yeah, I gotta give him all the credit for being a wonderful lover. He was very uninhibited, physically and sexually free, and in touch with his body." Does she remember any of the music coming out of those pillowside speakers? "He used to play an album by the Hollies all the time, and now, whenever I hear that song `Hey, Carrie Ann,' I think of making love with Steven Tyler."

  Chain Reaction played the coolest clubs in New York, and Michele enjoyed watching Steven take over a room. "One night they played Salvation, a circular club with a dance floor in the middle. Steven was the front man, but he played all the instruments: the keyboard, the lead guitar, the bass, and he got behind the drums. You knew he was gonna be famous because he was such a madman. You had to be that kind of brave, brilliant, and over the top to make it."

  The Yonkers house became a crash pad, and Michele had to step over piles of stoners to get ready for school. "He picked me up from high school one day, and I even remember what I was wearing: this pretty, fitted dress made out of an Indian bedspread. He handed me a pill and I asked, `What is it?' and he said, `Oh, it's just a mild upper,' so I took it. I brought it up years later and he swears it didn't happen this way, but I remember it well. The acid was very strong, and we got wrecked at the Circus club in the East Village that actually had a circus going on with trapeze artists and clowns."