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

by Pamela Des Barres

  At the new local mall, Pleasant bought a T. Rex album because she had been "flabbergasted" after seeing glitter-god Marc Bolan on TV; then she spied David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. "That was the first time I shoplifted anything other than bubble gum, and I stole it just 'cause of the way the cover looked-then the next week I shoplifted Iggy's Raw Power, and those are still two of my favorite records on earth."

  Well, if you're gonna steal, steal something worth stealing, right? When she ripped off a pair of white hot pants and wore them around the house, her mom was horrified. "Instead of asking where I got them, she said, `You look like Lolita.' I said, `Who's Lolita?' She told me to read the book so I went up to our guestroom and started reading. I apparently didn't hear when she called us to dinner, because I was in there, dumbstruck. I didn't think of Lolita in a pedophile way, instead, `Wow! A grown-up could be that excited over someone my age? Woo-hoo!' I started pondering this power I had, and in that same week I saw Cabaret with all those clothes and the crazy three-way. Forget it, I was never the same. I discovered Bowie and Lou Reed and it was an upward spiral into heaven. I knew what my path was. I wanted to be a completely glamorous creature-a'30s movie star mixed with a courtesan. Then I honed it to `I wanna go to L.A., get high, and fuck rock stars!' I spent most of my adolescence and twenties not thinking I was attractive, but when I look back at pictures I think, `Oh my God, I could have ruled the world!"'

  Soon Pleasant and her friends were busy shoplifting outfits to wear at rock concerts, hiding the fishnets, Lurex tube tops, and platforms under tie-dyed jeans and puffy Snorkel Arctic parkas. Their first secret adventure was to see Alice Cooper. "We stole everything we wore, including green nail polish, and put all our normal clothes in the locker at the Greyhound station. We put on makeup, sparkles, and beauty marks, then walked five blocks to the New Haven Coliseum in hot pants and tube tops, uproariously drunk and stoned. The guards wouldn't let us backstage. Then I remembered reading in Rock Scene that Alice Cooper always stayed at Holiday Inns. I knew his manager's name and called the first Holiday Inn. `Hi, can I have Shep Gordon's room, please?' They just put me through, and I heard a raging party going on, so we hitchhiked over there. They let us party with them, but since we looked like fucking fetuses, nothing happened-even though we wanted it to."

  What made Pleasant believe she could just sashay into Alice Cooper's hotel room in the first place? "I just didn't feel separate from them. I listened to the records over and over and always felt we would become friends if we met. I did feel like a fan but I also thought they would love me. I just thought we'd get along like gangbusters."

  Due to a wild array of circumstances, including red-handed sex and drugs, Pleasant was sent off to boarding school in Massachusetts. "I got a full scholarship. My mom thought it was going to be good for me, but little did she know I was fucking out of control, having sex with everybody and taking drugs, which was opening new realms for me. Then she told me we were moving, but didn't tell me where, and I cried for four hours because I finally had a bunch of friends that didn't think I was crazy."

  She wasn't bummed for long because her mom had gotten a job at 20th Century Fox in the City of Angels-mecca for any rock fiend. "I thought it was going to be Somewhere Horrifying, Iowa, and when she told me, `We're moving to Los Angeles,' I dropped the phone. I finished that term and got to Hollywood in the middle of my junior year. I had my first date with Rodney."

  That would, of course, be Rodney Bingenheimer, L.A.'s finest late-night DJ, Mayor of the Sunset Strip, who was always on the lookout for new girls in town. "He showed up at my door in his Cadillac and a pink Granny Takes a Trip suit, a la Rod Stewart. I was a foot and a half taller in my giant silver platforms. He was like an octopus." I tell Pleasant that dear Rodney also tried to feel me up the night I met him long ago, but you can't blame a fellow for trying. Rodney introduced Pleasant around town, and she was instantly welcomed into the budding prepunk scene.

  After sharing a welcome-to-Hollywood joint with "hot old man" Tony Curtis at a Tubes concert, she met a couple of soonto-be punk heroes. "A few rows in front of me, I saw George and Paul, who later turned into Pat Smear and Darby Crash. Georgie was dressed like Alice Cooper, and Paul was all in white with an Aladdin Sane lightning bolt and red hair. I threw them a note with my phone number: `Aladdin Sane, you cosmic orgasm, call me.'" The next day, Pleasant spent the afternoon slumming around vivid Hollywood Boulevard with her new pals. "Two or three days later they asked, `Do you like Iggy?' They knew where he lived and asked if I wanted to go. `Oh my God, yeah! Are you kidding? Am I breathing?' So we took the bus over to Flores Street. I'm so naive, I thought we were going to a Jed and Granny Clampett Beverly Hillbillies-type mansion, but it was a 1920s apartment. I'm thinking he must be in the penthouse, but no, he's in this hellish tiny, dark basement hovel up to your knees in clothes and fast food containers, beer bottles and open guitars with glasses full of cigarette butts on them, just horror."

  Hellish hovel, yes, but Pleasant was about to meet her very first rock god in the glistening flesh. "Iggy comes out of the bathroom in tiny cutoff shorts with the fly open, and that was it. I was in dumbfounded amazement'cause he looked so beautiful. His hair was all platinum and he was tan and healthy looking. He was completely incoherent, but had the most beautiful body, and that platinum hair, and it was Iggy POP!"

  Despite Pleasant's rather sophisticated upbringing, she had never even been in a man's apartment, let alone nestled amid the squalor of one of her heroes. "This is what was going through my mind: I had this $99 Sears plastic stereo and I would play Raw Power incessantly, and I'm sitting there thinking, `I can't believe I'm meeting the person who made that record.' I was just being quiet and he said, `Hey, nice to meet you,' acting like a lounge singer or someone's dad, shaking my hand with two hands. In hindsight, I think he may have been in the throes of meth-mania. I thought he was gonna be real mean and tough, but he was all nice with a big, pretty smile. `Come on in! Here, sit down,' clearing shit off the bed, cups from Taco Bell flying. So we're sitting down and there's kind of a lull in the conversation. I was trying to take this all in and he asked if anyone had a cigarette, so I gave him one and we smoked. I was all nervous and he said, `Anybody got any drugs?' I had a joint in my purse, so I said, `I do.' I'm sitting there thinking, 'OK, I'm gonna try to keep this roach forever.' I couldn't believe I was giving Iggy Pop drugs."

  Pleasant now lived on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and went periodically to Beverly Hills High. "I would wear my bathing suit under my clothes. I'd cut the first period or two, arriving in time for nutrition, long enough to get salads thrown at me and get called a faggot `like David Bowie.' I'd drop in on my art class because I liked to draw pictures of dominatrixes, then I'd walk across the street with my girlfriend to the Beverly Hilton. We'd go through the back door, take off our clothes in the ladies' room, grab towels from the maid cart, go out to the pool, and wait for people from Bad Company or whoever to buy us drinks-because they always would, you know."

  From the moment she arrived in L.A., Pleasant knew she wanted to write about rock and roll, and when she finished high school in 1977, she did just that. "I loved all the writers at Creem. Lester Bangs was amazing, but most of the stuff I saw in local publications was so dry and stupid. I thought, `I can write about music better than these people can.'" She submitted samples and wound up working for several local rags, which helped get her right where she wanted to be-backstage. "I was at all those early underground punk shows and crazy parties at people's houses, so I decided to start my own magazine, having no idea how to do it." She called the fanzine Lobotomy. "I copied the Frederick's of Hollywood bag and added, `Where Glamour Is a Way of Life.' The first issue had the Mumps on the cover. Lance Loud was the first person I ever interviewed and he knew it, and said, `You're doing great!"

  Pleasant ran into Iggy Pop a few times and he was charming, but she'd been too nervous to attempt meaningful chatter. It had been over a year since she last encountered him. Betwee
n Devo's sets, her editor at Slash excitedly told Pleasant that Iggy Pop was in the audience. "`You know him, right? Go ask him for an interview!' I said, `Well, I know him, but I don't really know him.' I had toppled over a balcony the night before and I felt ugly, fat, young, and stupid, with bruises on one side of my face, and this big bandage with stitches. I looked like a pudgy baby prizefighter, you know? I had on a Spiderman T-shirt with safety pins all over it and striped stockings with Converse high tops. I was embarrassed but went up to him. `Hi, would you like to do an interview for Slash? Do you remember me?' and he said, `Of course, why wouldn't I remember you! Why don't you just say hi like you're a human being?' We started talking and he said, `What are you doing after this?' He was with Toni Basil, David Bowie's choreographer, totally fucking Black Dahlia beautiful, with a giant orchid in her hair, and two tall, gorgeous, long-haired Farrah-y blondes wearing nice dresses. I felt like an idiot, so he says, `What are you doing afterward? Wanna go to the Whisky?" She was thrilled, but had come with Pat Random of Dangerhouse Records, and didn't want to be rude. Then Iggy asked her to meet him at Barney's Beanery, and she told him she would have to bring her date. "This guy was all excited because it was Iggy, and when we were getting his car from the parking lot, we saw Iggy driving this huge '60s white convertible, a giant fucking tank, with Toni Basil and the two girls. It was just the picture of glamour."

  Pleasant wanted to stop for cigarettes, and as she was going into the liquor store, she was surprised to see Iggy coming out. "He said, `Let's ditch everybody and go see the Dictators at the Whisky, come on!' Iggy and Pleasant abandoned their dates and soon she was smack dab in that dreamy, incandescent picture of glamour, zooming through the night in the big white convertible. The Whisky was packed, so Iggy invited her to his pad in Malibu. "We were driving through that greenery part of Beverly Hills, and he had his arm around me. He was being super-nice and I was really stoked, but a little weirded out that we had ditched people."

  It got bone chilly cruising through Pacific Palisades, so Iggy gallantly pulled over to manually yank up the top, fiddling with the numerous old-fashioned snaps. "I was sitting there wondering `What do I do now?' Then he looks at me and says, `I feel like Richie Cunningham in Happy Days.'"

  Iggy was exuberant and upbeat about his upcoming trip to Berlin to record The Idiot with David Bowie. In fact, Bowie had rented the house in Malibu, which was quite different from the seedy apartment on Flores-more in keeping with Pleasant's idea of how the venerated shock-rocker should live.

  "He opened some red wine and we walked out to this rock jetty and sat down and talked about communism, the Romanoffs, Russian deconstructive arts, Berlin, cabaret, and Sally Bowlesbecause he was going to Germany. We talked about loneliness. I mean, we were discussing really deep shit, but I don't have the full-on gist of the conversation because we were pretty drunk."

  Back at the pad, Iggy played Pleasant demos of his new music. "Then he said, `Let's go to sleep,' and we went to bed and had sex, like, seven times. It was insane! I hadn't experienced anything like that yet. I also had nothing to compare it to-at least not on that level. I had been having sex, but I'd go with someone, try a door on someone's nice car-if it was open, we'd climb in the back seat and have sex. Anyway, Iggy was totally fucking awesome, he has a great body, which everybody knows, and a really huge dick."

  The next day, Iggy asked Pleasant if she'd like to move in for a while. Since she still lived at home, she told him she would commute back and forth. "The first time I stayed three or four days, and this guy, David, was also living there, acting like a houseboy. I'd sit on the couch, looking at a book and when I reached for a cigarette, there'd be David with a light. One day Iggy was completely high out of his mind and David mumbled, `Oh, he's just painting.' But I didn't know what that meant. Iggy was in this insane period: he had the whole house plastered with butcher paper and he covered himself in gallons of house paint, acrylic paint, spray paint-all this shit-pouring it over himself, running to the walls and jumping against them. He was making full-on body prints."

  The whole thing must have been overwhelming for a teenage girl from Middleton. "It was crazy," she agrees. "All my friends were very impressed, but I was a bit scared. I didn't know how I was supposed to act, it was so much to absorb. I hadn't been in these kinds of situations before. If I had just been ten years older ..."

  Along with the lunacy, a bit of tenderness found its way in. "We were very romantically involved, and sometimes I took care of him. He asked me to get the paint off him in the shower, so I scrubbed him with a scrub brush meant for the floor. It was on in layers, peeling off in plasticky-like curls, but some wouldn't come off. It was under his nails and in his nostrils-he had dreadlocks of paint. One night we went to the Whisky and he was covered in paint. I was underage, but of course we drank loads of cocktails."

  She was the baby of the duo, but Pleasant felt strangely protective of Iggy and was often concerned that he got so wasted. "I had a huge crush on him and we were having great sex, but it was beyond my realm of understanding-the amount of drugs he was doing, running into walls and stuff. In a lot of ways I acted like his mom, but he was protective of me too. It was sort of domestic bliss in a twisted way."

  At the end of summer, Iggy left Malibu to record with Bowie and explore the depths of Berlin. He told Pleasant he would stay in touch, but she didn't expect him to keep his promise. When he didn't call, she didn't crumble. "It lasted on and off for the summer and it was really interesting and cool. But I didn't have any thoughts about the future-I almost couldn't believe any of it had happened anyway. There was absolutely no context to put the whole experience in. I felt sort of lucky. I wouldn't say it was a blessing, but I felt like it had been a privilege."

  Iggy moved on and so did Pleasant. Her fanzine was shaking things up and she went on an extended trip to New York. "New York was run over with all these beautiful English boys, punks and teds," Pleasant recalls. "Also Sid Vicious was in town, right before the Nancy Spungen murder. We used to see him all the time. We'd look at each other, batting our eyes, saying, `Oh, he looks like a vampire, he's so tall and pretty."

  When she returned to L.A., Pleasant succumbed to the extreme rockabilly charms of Levi Dexter and the Rockats. "The Rockats were all cute. They looked like horror movies in a great way. They had all these fashion models draped around them, and Marianne Faithfull sniffing around. They were the It Boys and converted the punk scene into rockabilly." There was a photo session set up with the Rockats and the girls who hung out at the Masque, but Pleasant wanted to stand out in the punked-out, green-haired leather crowd. "I thought, `I have to look like fucking Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida.' I did my nails, movie-star makeup. Instead of putting grease on my hair and spiking it, I let it be all soft. I wore this bias-cut zigzag '50s blouse, high heels, and the tightest pencil skirt I could find. I walked in there, wearing my bullet bra, and the photographer says, `Why don't you stand right between those two?' meaning Levi and Smut. It worked like a charm."

  I remember when the scorching punkabilly Rockats bebopped into town with their Brit Teddy-Boy sneers and radical rockabilly pomps, helped along by Miss Mercy's scary scissors. All the girls groveled over Levi, but Pleasant's blatant charms won him over and they became a hot item. When Levi was on tour, Pleasant continued down the same rocky road, wild about a stunning British up-and-comer, Billy Idol, the lead singer for Generation X. She wrote glowing reviews in Lobotomy, then promptly sent them to his record label in London, along with spray-painted Gen-X T-shirts and a bluntly candid love letter.

  Luckily, her old friend Rodney Bingenheimer was fast becoming the hipster DJ at KROQ and invited her to come to the studio the night Billy was calling in from England. "So I'm hyperventilating, and Rodney says, 'OK, someone wants to talk to you.' I say `Hello, this is Pleasant,' and Billy goes, `Oh, I got your package last week.' We were on the phone for an hour and a half."

  A few weeks later, Billy came to town and didn't have a bit of troubl
e tracking Pleasant down. Another would-be groupie followed them around the market, trying to horn in while they were buying vodka, so Pleasant did what any self-respecting cateyed doll would do: she let the air out of her tires. She took Billy up to Runyon Canyon for a glittering view of Los Angeles. "I thought it would be a really bitchin' place to bring him because it had a crazy pirate, jungle vibe, loads of L.A. history, and you could see the whole city. We had already smoked pot, and one hit of pot to me is like three tabs of acid. We were looking at the view and it was just like, `Fuck, it's beautiful.'"

  So what was it like to gaze at Billy Idol in the moonlight? "He was one of the most beautiful human beings ever. His skin was like cream. No shit, I mean, he looked like someone carved him perfectly out of pearls. His hair was white and he looked like a baby chick in a good boy way. Fucking beautiful eyes, and he was really funny. He had a great wit, a funny laugh and a sharp sense of humor. Maybe he wasn't the most cerebral person on earth, but he was quick, well read, he caught onto things and was sarcastic but not mean tempered. He had a nice skewed view on things. He could have been a big asshole but he wasn't."

  As the lights twinkled below, Pleasant and Billy drank spirits, passionately made out, and thought they were alone. Then Pleasant heard rustling noises. "I was nervous in this total sixthgrade way but trying to be unflappable. From the corner of my eye, I saw this amorphous shape and screamed at the top of my lungs! I jumped on Billy, my legs wheeling around like a Roadrunner cartoon! The shape flew up, and a bum clambered out of a sleeping bag, and said, `Got a cigarette?' Any form of cool fled in that moment, and the ice was broken."

  The next day Pleasant took Billy to a big bash and the insistent groupie from the market was back and wouldn't lay off. "She was being totally uncool, and I was no stranger to brawls and bar fights. Joan Jett was there and said, `I got your back,' because it looked like there was going to be a big chick fight. I don't think I was planning to set her hair on fire, and I wouldn't dream of doing it now, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I lit up a good chunk of her hair with a lighter." Pleasant measures about three inches with her fingers, smiling sheepishly. "Like about that much."