Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up

by Des Barres, Pamela

  I saw Dennis and his famous art collection a few more times, and we almost did the deed, but not quite. I visited him on the set of Colors, and got all agitated and excited about the whole thing for awhile, but then it petered out, and now we nod and say “Hi, how’re you doing,” whenever we see each other at a function or a restaurant on the beach. He’s got his gorgeous young dancer wife now, and I’m sure he worships her pussy appropriately.

  Michael and I decided an open marriage was a bunch of shit anyway. The idea of it hurt too bad—like something had soured beyond repair, failed, just too hard to live with. His romance with the model went underground, and I concentrated on the new career I had carved out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I

  My old friend Danny Sugerman called to tell me he saw I’m with the Band in a big pile at Book Soup, a very trendy, eclectic store on the Sunset Strip. Danny’s book about Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, had gone all the way to number one, and I thought it was significant that he was the person to tell me this sublime news. I hadn’t been expecting it to hit the stands for another month and I was giddy with anticipation. I drove straight to town, parked in the red, and ran in. There it was—right next to Glory Days, a book about Bruce Springsteen, with one about Paul McCartney on the other side, and another on the King himself right above me! There I was, in a heap among the grandest of rock’s goofballs. I pulled the Polaroid out of my purse and snapped away, announcing to all the people in the store, “Look! My book is out! Can you believe it?!?” I asked the person behind the cash register if he had sold any copies. “Sure, I’ve sold quite a few,” he said. “Congratulations.” I just stood there gawking at the stack of books with my teenage face on the cover, reeling inside. A lady came through the door, headed right for it, and started rummaging through the pages to get to the pictures of me twisting with my big, gorgeous Daddy, hanging tight to Keith Moon, standing with Mr. Zappa and the GTO’s in the recording studio. It was one of life’s finest, funnest fairy-tale moments. Pamela Ann Miller Des Barres from Reseda, California, was a published author. People were calling my agent for interviews, and the ball was about to start rolling.

  The publicity blitz hit in the next few weeks. It had been twenty years since the Summer of Love, and People magazine did a massive spread on the flower-power generation, incuding a full-page shot of the GTO’s out in the wild garden at Frank Zappa’s log cabin. There I was, my hair in frenzied ringlets full of flowers, my hand over my heart, gazing into the air with poignant aching hope. An expression that is still found on my face on occasion. Ha! Since I had written about love-ins and the Sunset Strip, was I about to become some sort of flagrant spokesperson for my generation? Someone who lived to tell the tale? Uh-oh.

  MTV called and wanted to interview me on the grand old days of groupiedom, so I sat in a booth at the Whisky a Go Go, reminiscing about Jim Morrison shoving a microphone down his filthy, black leather trousers right on the very stage in front of me twenty years earlier. In fact, I told many delightful Whiskey stories, but the one they wound up showing at least a hundred times (you can still catch it late at night if you’re lucky! Ha!) was the one about stripping Jimmy Page of his dripping wet chiffon shirt after a gig, pressing the damp fabric into my face, and breathing deep.

  The rock radio stations were chasing me! It seemed there was some real interest out there and the book might actually sell a few copies. Something I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about, even though it was number two on my psychic want list. Some of the more macho-dog DJs had been condescending, intimating I was a groupie-pig-loose-babe trying to make a buck by dropping Jimmy Page’s name along with my underpants. And I could always tell if they had actually read the book by the questions they asked. Real quick, I got the hang of defending myself while staying carefree and effervescent. When I wasn’t remorseful about my sordid past—which, of course, I never saw as sordid—I found it really pissed them off. I enjoyed throwing uptight moral value judgments back in people’s faces, listening to them sputter with frigid indignation. I took a lot of callers on the air, answering and evading all kinds of questions, which prepared me for the vitriolic onslaught I would encounter out on the road. The specter of AIDS had just taken hold of everybody’s mental genitals and put the fear of death into their bedrooms. “How can you talk about your sexual exploits when this god-awful disease is raging?” First of all, my sexual exploits are only a small part of this book, and hey, man, it was the sixties when all you could get was the clap! And I was looking for love—L-O-V-E—with all those magnificent musicians! Statements like these irked the plugged-up women who wore their panties up around their necks. They thought I should be weighed down with regret and remorse for my wanton ways. My only true regret was that I had been too stoned at times to remember every exquisite detail.

  The television talk shows wanted me! Along with Diana Faust at Morrow, I got my very own publicist, Mitch Schneider, who booked me for three whole weeks on TV shows across the country! Yippeeki-yay-ki-yo!

  II

  Just as I was gearing up for the book tour my friend Joyce Hyser called to tell me Warren Beatty was considering buying my book as a property for her to produce. Elated, I went to the bright top of Mullholland Drive a few different times to meet with Joycie and Warren, but even though he seemed to be very intrigued by the idea, it never quite manifested. Warren was wild about Joyce, but he still held a powerful, rapt gaze whenever he spoke to me—the gaze that made many strong women fall into horny, quivering heaps. The way he listened was also magic, as if he crawled into my eyes to get the full picture the way I saw it. I know it’s a cliche at this point, but he really does have a cosmically beguiling way with the ladies. He even included Joyce when he gave me a compliment; “Pamela has pretty legs, doesn’t she, Joyce?” At one of the final meetings, during a healthy-salady lunch in his spotless chrome kitchen, after studying me like the clue to the universe was locked within my nearsighted blue eyes, Warren said to Joyce, “Pammie looks just like my sister, doesn’t she?” People have always told me I look a lot like Shirley MacLaine, and I think it’s a great compliment. I hope I can kick as high as she can when I’m fifty-five. And I would really like to join her waaaay out on that precarious limb someday. I admire her because she brought the massive message to the masses.

  Soon after this complimentary incident Joycie had a little party at a cool soul-food joint on Pico, and she told me Bob Dylan was going to be there. I had met him once before at the Troubador, the night I threw daisies at Waylon Jennings’s feet. I guess it was about 1970. Willie Nelson introduced us and Bob gave me that wet-fish handshake while I gazed at his Ray Bans in the dark. I stood there hopefully in my garter belt for a few lonely moments while he looked off into the murky distance, but I suppose he didn’t feel like chatting. I had finally met Bob Dylan, and he didn’t give a shit.

  So Joycie invited Bob to her bash and I found myself in his presence once again. I’ve gotten over just about everybody. I’ve met almost everyone I wanted to meet except for Stephen King and Prince. It has taken me a long time, but I finally realized all my heroes are silly, insecure human goofballs just like me! What a relief. Still, no one on the planet ever inspired me the way Bob Dylan has, so I was happy to be in the same room with him again. When we were introduced, I got a handful of damp fish once more and assumed that the wimpy pompano was a form of protection from getting too many people in his face. Since it was more like good-bye than hello, I started dancing to some Motown, and when I dance I lose my mind. It’s my form of meditation, and I go O-U-T, so imagine my surprise when I came back down to earth and Bob Dylan was standing in front of me, watching. “Do you want to dance?” I asked before I could think about it too hard. He grinned from inside his shades and encircled me from behind, where he hung on for thirty minutes. It took a couple songs by the Temptations and one by the Four Tops before I got adjusted to his sense of rhythm, which was as jarring and jangling as his lyrics. Yes, dolls, time stopped, but
because I had recently become friends with his girlfriend, Carole, I didn’t even have the old flirtation temptation. He did say one of the best things that’s ever been said to me, however. He asked what I did for a living, I told him I was a writer, and he said, “What else do you do? I can think of twenty or thirty things I’d like to do with you.” (Twenty or thirty? OhmyGod!!) He stepped back and studied me. “Yes, you could take you anywhere.” Wow. What a compliment.

  It seemed like all the cute young actresses were interested in playing the teenage me on the big screen, but Ally Sheedy was serious about it. I had met her a few times at various show-biz functions and saw something shining in her eyes that I recognized. Despite her brat-pack, youthful yuppie image, she was definitely leaning over the edge, peeking wildly into the abyss. Over lunch she told me she was enthralled with the sixties and had just started a rocky relationship with Richie Sambora from Bon Jovi. The whole music world was eating her up. I think she was also looking to break free of the cutesie image that had her trapped in long skirts and high necklines. And since she had just started her own production company, Nice to Mice, she was interested in producing. Ally bought the screen rights and started “taking meetings.” I packed my bags and hit the road.

  III

  My very first big-deal TV interview was for the Today show. I wore a black leather jacket and told the world what Mick Jagger was really like (fun-loving, self-confident, hot). My mom’s reaction to the book. (She was mortified at first, having to relive my tumultuous past, then proud of me.) What did my son think? (He’s too young to care about what I did in 1969; he may never care about what I did in 1969.) How did my husband deal with it? (He was happy I finally wrote the damn thing after talking about it for so many years.) I got through that one—gigantic national TV. How many millions? Those pounding bright lights making me break out in a leather-sweat, seven fun-filled minutes over in a blink, wink of an eye. Michael sent me a telegram: CONGRATULATIONS YOU WERE WONDERFUL, RELAXED AND BEAUTIFUL. I didn’t remember an instant of it. I had to fly straight from New York to Washington, D.C. for Larry King Live on CNN. I was on the second half of the show and found I had to follow Jesse Jackson. The big man got up, shook my hand, and I sat down in his place. From the sublime to the ridiculous, or was it the other way around? Larry King was very fatherly and gentle with me. I took calls about Led Zeppelin, Don Johnson, Mr. Miami Vice. Did I really cross-dress with Keith Moon of the Who? one irate lady who probably never had an orgasm raged at me from Middle America. Poor thing.

  On some of the local talk shows I had to fill an entire hour by myself. Did Don Johnson really have a huge you-know-what? How huge was the thing, anyway? Did Jimmy Page use his whips on you? Why not? Was Mick Jagger a good kisser? Just how big were those things, anyway? Once in awhile I even got to go deep, explaining how girls from my generation felt caught between the fifties and sixties, confused as to which way to go. I popped the Pill on the Sunset Strip and searched for my identity through rock and roll—a women’s libber in my own right. As brave, new, liberated females, we were supposed to go out and claim what we wanted, right? What I wanted was to take care of a man who played music, someone who might even be able to yank out my lurking creativity.

  June 18—Paul McCartney’s Birthday—Oh me oh my, I’m reliving my past four or five times every day. It’s so outrageous to be divulging my personal stuff on national TV. Strangers are coming up to me telling me they love the book, can’t put it down—for all the right reasons. Rolling Stone gave me a rave, but heavy on the sleazy tidbits. Out of context they sound horrific. Oh well. Almost all of the interviews have been positive so far. I love being alive every second of every single day.

  Sometimes there were excited yelling matches with the ladies who wore polyester pantsuits, then I would continue on into the day and do two or three live radio shows, a couple of newspapers, and a magazine or two—pin-eyed with exhaustion, get some dead-to-the-world, hard-won sleep, then back up at the crrraaack of dawn, starting the whole thing over in another city.

  The week I got to Boston, bedraggled but in high spirits, I was greeted with the best review ever: Under the headline WHAM BAM THANK YOU, PAM, the Boston Phoenix spewed a full page of glory: “As a chronicle of the 60’s and 70’s L.A. rock scene, an unofficial history of female fandom, a sexual memoir of a girl coming of age at the height of 60’s Love-Power, and the voice of a misunderstood and maligned rock subculture, I’m with the Band is one of the most important, revealing and unabashedly honest books about rock ever written.”

  After devouring a lobster and a huge slug of Boston cream pie, I climbed under the heavy brocade bed covers, comatose with fatigued accomplishment and ripe with gratitude, and slept for thirteen hours.

  IV

  When I was whizzing through New York I found that my very first dream-doll, Dion, was performing with the Belmonts at Radio City Music Hall. What could possibly have kept me out of the building?

  When I had been a mere colt-girl of thirteen, my itsy-bitsy breasts blooming and budding under one of those growing bras that allowed for many inches of expanding promise, Dion DiMucci crooned directly to my barely teenage heart, making it spill over with sapling desire. His first solo album was called Alone with Dion, and as if the steamy look on his face wasn’t enough, a pair of arms wearing long, pink gloves encircled his body tenderly, causing a near-riot in the lush pit of my pubescence. I wanted to put my arms around Dion, I wanted Dion to put his arms around me—sigh—but he lived far, far away on the exotic, dangerous East Coast, and even in that pulsating state I realized I was much too young for Mr. DiMucci. Besides, Sixteen magazine told me that he went and married his longtime love-button, Sue Butterfield. This big news caused so much baby-girl grief that it put a big, fat lid on the dewy incandescence of my near-perfect (or so I thought at the time) adolescence. Oh well, these things happen.

  It took me twenty-seven years to get to this point, but where there’s a will, there’s a wangle, an angle, a WAY. After checking into the situation, I found that Dion’s manager, Zach Glickman, used to work with Herbie Cohen and Frank Zappa in the old Bizarre-Straight days, so I called my agent, who called someone else, who called another guy, who put me in touch with Zach. We reminisced, I told him about the book and how I had written about my adoration for Dion in the first few pages, and he invited me down to the show to meet his client, Mr. DiMucci. Oh boy.

  After sitting in a formidable threesome on the Geraldo show with Roxanne Pulitzer and a torch-haired sixty-year-old lady who had romped in the hay with JFK and Elvis, I sat seventh row center at Radio City Music Hall, surrounded by bouffants and quiffs, double-swooning while Dion did all his hits. As the audience swayed, singing all the words to “Runaround Sue,” I clutched the book I had brought for my teen hero, rapturous tears in my eyes, anticipating the moment when I might be Alone With Dion, minus the pink gloves. It was one of those peak rock-and-roll experiences that make me want to shout loud and hard with the sheer joy of being on the planet the same time as Dion, Elvis, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Etta James, Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, Pete Town-send, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Prince.

  After Dion’s show I waited in the outer-inner sanctum until Zach took me by the hand and led me over to a cute, fluffy-haired lady and introduced me to Sue Butterfield DiMucci. Real live Runaround Sue! I showed her all the Dion parts in the book and regaled her with ridiculous anecdotes about my teen-angst obsession with her husband. “Dion had groupies, you know,” she said in an adorably humble way, “only they had a less flattering name for the girls back then.” My peaking interest shot through the ceiling. What, what, WHAT were my brave predecessors called? “TFFs,” she whispered, looking around to make sure no one was listening, “Top Forty Fuckers.” Top Forty Fuckers. It was almost too much.

  The twenty-seven years were up and it was time to meet Dion. Zach led me through the crowded corridors, full of an incredible number of Italian relatives that Dion probably hadn’t seen in a
dozen years, and into the inner-INNER sanctum, where he was perched on top of a desk, rhapsodizing about a huge mound of mozzarella cheese someone had just given him. While I sat on the couch, Zach tried to get the room cleared for my private moment with Dion, and as I gazed at the man who had made life in 1960 worth living, I felt like I was about to meet all four Beatles.

  Introductions were made, handshakes, smiles. I tried to be cool and casual, but I blathered and stammered as I handed him the book, pointing out the photo of me wearing a locket that said, DION FOREVER, showing him the passages where he was adored and idolized. I knew he was born again and I hoped he didn’t think I was a brash, breathless piglet. I just wanted him to know he had inspired me beyond the breaking point of no return. Zach brought in a photographer, Dion put his arms around me, and the flashbulbs popped. If someone had told me when I was that gangly colt-girl of thirteen that when I reached the magic age of thirty-nine, Dion would put his arms around me, I would have marked off the days on my calendar. Time stopped and the flashbulbs popped. Oh yes.

  V

  June 20—Several cities later in Detroit, and majorly pooped out—revved up at the same time—can hardly believe I met Dion! I called Mom to tell her, and we talked about the times I dribbled all over the TV set when he was on American Bandstand. It’s all swell out here. Philadelphia was a great city, but the travel aspects are sooo tiring. USA Today came out today, a big L.A. Times ”Calendar” piece on Sunday. As my dear, sweet Shelly would say, “It’s all happening!!” I hope she knows what’s going on, watching over me from the happy hunting ground. Hard work, wacky gut-spilling—struggle with suitcases—but have met some cool people. I don’t know what will happen, I’m waiting for sky-rocketing sales!