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Chicago Tribune
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Pamela Des Barres, proud to be the Queen of the Groupies, talks about life, love and Disneyland
She was on her way to Disneyland when she answered her car phone, and said, 'I have been coming here forever. I came here in 1968 and I was on acid. That was something. But I have been coming here a lot over the decades. I have what I call Disney-mania.' Her name then was Pamela Ann Miller, and she was a California high schooler from nearby Reseda bewitched by the music of the '60s and drawn in freewheeling and intimate fashion to the bands and the young men who made it and the lifestyle they lived. Her name is now Pamela Des Barres and her home in Los Angeles is filled with dozens (or more like hundreds) of things she has collected from Disneyland. But that's just one of the passions in a life filled with dozens (or more like hundreds) of them. The one that shadows and defines them all is rock 'n' roll, because that is what drew her into the music business and allowed for relationships with such musicians as Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and so many others that she would be known as the Queen of the Groupies. It is a title that she now, at 76 years old, still wears proudly. 'I have no regrets in my life part because I don't believe in regret,' she says. 'I do wonder what if I hadn't done so many drugs, but I don't wish I had followed another path.' She's too busy for regrets, very much alive and lively. She is also quite a talented and honest writer and performer. That stems from the diaries she's kept since her mother gave her her first one on Christmas when she was 9. Those are what she used as the foundation for her first book, 'I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,' which launched her fame in 1987. It was a controversial sensation. As the Tribune's Clarence Petersen put it in a review, 'This is an often touching book about a teenage girl with crushes and with an intense desire to be a unique individual even as she took part in the movements of the 1960s. … Some readers no doubt will find the book offensive; those with young daughters may find it terrifying. But it strikes me as honest and revealing.' Other books followed, including 'Take Another Little Piece of My Heart' and 'Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies.' Actress Kate Hudson used these in preparation for her role as the young groupie Penny Lane in the 2000 movie 'Almost Famous.' In addition to her writing, Des Barres has been an actress, historian and consultant and tours nationally and internationally with a one-woman show and a series of writing workshops. She will be here this week, staying with her friend, the writer Linda Beckstrom, and conducting two writing workshops for groups of about a dozen women and performing her one-woman show at the Constellation. She does not like to detail what goes on in the three hour workshops because there is a spontaneity to them. But Beckstrom, who has participated in more than most anyone, tells me, 'Pam has a way of making people feel very comfortable about expressing themselves. She creates a safe space.' She and Des Barres met through Angalia Bianca, a convicted felon with whom Beckstrom wrote a spectacular book, 'In Deep: How I Survived Gangs, Heroin, and Prison to Become a Chicago Violence Interrupter' (Chicago Review Press). I called it 'powerful and important' it won the Chicago Writers Association's 2020 Book of the Year award for traditional nonfiction. As for Des Barres and her one-woman shows, Beckstrom says, 'She is great on stage, very engaging and her stories. … Well, she'll read a bit from her books and tell stories that take the audience into the golden age of rock 'n' roll.' Des Barres does say this: 'Most of those who attend the workshops have read books or know a little about me, my love of music, my free-spiritedness.' Part of the three hour writing sessions involve giving the women writing prompts and 12 minutes to write and then read them. 'It can get pretty outrageous because they are writing about things that they have never written about before,' she says. Though there may be some who consider Des Barres a relic of a bygone time or a slap in the face of our collective morality and decorum, some of those same people likely fill stadiums to hear gray-haired bands, devour a Keith Richards biography or have deified Hendricks or Morrison. 'I want to redeem the word 'groupie,'' Des Barres says. 'Anyone who doesn't like that word, gets upset by it, seems to me just jealous or sexist.' Des Barres is a thoughtful, smart and sophisticated woman. When one considers how many of her former contemporaries did not survive the 1960s, she is easy to admire for such qualities as her durability, focus and determination. And talent. At her show or her seminars, you will hear many stories. You might hear about one musician with whom she did not sleep, Frank Zappa. He helped Pam and some of her friends form a performance art and music troupe he called the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), produced their only studio release (1969's 'Permanent Damage'), and had them open for his band The Mothers of Invention. She was a nanny for the Zappa kids and found time to perform handstands in Morrison's living room and accompany Mick Jagger to Altamont. She might her her talk about her old rock 'n' roll friend, Cynthia Albritton, who was born and died in Chicago and who was better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, an artist who fashioned sculptures of rock stars' private parts, starting with Jimi Hendrix's after his 1968 show at the Civic Opera House. Maybe she'll talk about 1974, when she fell in love with musician Michael Des Barres. They lived together and married in 1978. The wild times continued, even as a child was born, a boy named Nicholas. But Michael was grabbed by drugs and the pair divorced in 1991. She might tell you that he has since kicked drugs and lives in Great Britain. They talk often and she hopes to see him in May, when she'll be performing at the West Hampstead Arts Club in London.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Pamela Des Barres Finally Transcended 'The Band'
Hearing wild tales of rock n' roll's past will always have appeal because, as Pamela Des Barres says, "people weren't there. They like to say they were there, but they weren't." The New York Times best selling author of I'm With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, and Let It Bleed: How To Write a Rockin' Memoir was not only there, she's been chronicling it all for most of her life. She's one of the most inspiring storytellers in L.A., a woman who's frank, honest and real retelling and sharing of her mind-blowing memories evokes a magical time in Southern while the word "groupie" may ever shed its carnal connotations, the author, performer and feminist cult figure has helped us all understand that devotion to rockstars, especially in her day, was so much more than sexual."We inspired these people," she asserts. "They wanted us around. Some people think of groupies as hangers on, or you know, as submissive. I've had to fight that battle like I've been out in a boxing ring— with the the public and the press... and I still get called a slut." Her books, recent speaking engagements and stage appearances serve up plenty of backstage debauchery, but they also delve into music's evolution and how its magnetic personalities, inter-personal relationships and power shifts reflect political and social changes in our world. "We have photos up in the huge screen behind me," Des Barres says of her new stage show, which comes to the Whisky a Go Go on Feb. 9. "And I use music clips from throughout my life, ones that inspired me, like Dylan and Dion and Elvis, of course. Also people I dated and the GTOs, Zappa and all kinds of stuff." Of Frank Zappa's influence she says: "He was my mentor. He we produced our album, but he kind of helped invent my persona because I was developing it as a teenager, 18 years old, and we became dancers for him— the Laurel Canyon ballet company. But he saw something in each one of us and it gave me some kind of confidence I never would have had. He was always trying to save moments. He wanted to get our lives on record, so we wrote about our lives." If Zappa put Des Barres on her path as a cultural chronicler, she had to find her own voice and inner strength to share many of her stories — including relationships and trysts with Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger, to name a couple— in a shameless way. She pioneered a sex-positive perspective long before younger generations advocated for sex workers and against slut-shaming. She opened minds about life choices and going for what one wants and it clearly resonated. She was just celebrated by revered music journalist Jessica Hopper and producer Dylan Tupper Rupert on the KCRW Lost Notes podcast Groupies: The Women of Sunset Strip, From the Pill to Punk. Reframing Des Barres and the women who came after her as empowered figures and muses in a male-dominated world, it explores how these young women paved the way for females to take agency over their bodies and to make their own music (which she did with the Frank Zappa produced group, Girls Together Outrageously aka The GTO's). Especially in the punk scene that followed, L.A.'s early groupies provided a daring DIY blueprint for making an impact, pursuing and partying with one's idols, which led to fanzines, friendships and ultimately, its own kind of notoriety. Produced by her manager Polly Parsons (Gram's daughter) her latest presentation sold out shows in NYC, Portland and Seattle. She's planning on making the Sunset Strip event special— after all it's where she reigned. She'll have special guests join her and she'll be selling a rack of her "top notch" vintage clothes, plus new merch including "long lost wood nymph shots for Playboy 55 years ago." The effortlessly chic look of the iconic 60's and 70's groupie has become, once again, in vogue especially for today's rock chicks. The platforms, the sparkle, the faux furs and the little dresses... it's a combination that's become timeless, recreated in films like Almost Famous (yes, Kate Hudson's Penny Lane was based on her) and TV's Daisy Jones and the Sixx."It was hippie child, gypsy chic," she describes of her style. "We were wearing 20's and 30's clothes, turn of the century stuff... I love dressing people up. That's part of my whole thing selling the vintage clothes. I like to style them." Beyond the alluring aesthetic, admiration has come from younger followers and music "stans" who view fandom differently (ie, the Swifties, Beyhive, the Beliebers). Still, Des Barres acknowledges that the stigma of the "groupie" may never be banished. All she can do is continue to share, provide context and encourage others to tell their own stories, which she does in a hands-on way via writing workshops. "All it means is someone hanging around with groups," she says of the "G" word. "But it quickly became a slur, because mainly, it was women. There are male groupies, of course, but mainly it was women and women weren't allowed to express themselves sexually.""Every generation gets a hold of I'm With The Band, so I get all these new young fans," she continues. "It's so great. They definitely see me as an empowered woman doing what she wanted to do against a lot of odds at that time. And by the way, there was no word "groupie," then. There was always more to it, because in the earlier days, people would wait around to get Elvis's autograph. We wanted more than that but it wasn't just sex. We just liked hanging out with them. We just liked being with the people that made us feel the music. Because that art was and is transferable... You know, it goes right into your being, as any great art does. So I always wanted to show my appreciation any way I could." More info on "An Intimate Evening with Pamela Des Barres" at the Whisky here.
