The life of a groupie might sound super exciting and romantic. It often was,
but there was a definite dark side to groupiedom. So what's the real truth? It's complicated.
Understanding the 1970s-era groupie begins by coming to terms with an uncomfortable fact:
Age didn't matter, to the point where some were known as "baby
groupies." When she sat down to talk to Thrillist, groupie mainstay Lori Mattix
described being in junior high when a friend introduced her to Sable Starr,
who was already popular on the groupie scene by the time she was 14 years old. Mattix remembered,
"She was so glamorous, totally one-of-a-kind,
wearing scarves for shirts and going topless without hesitation. [...] I
had not yet turned 15 and [David Bowie] wanted to take me to his hotel room."
She says she wasn't ready then, but five months later Starr and her sister
were both involved with Iggy Pop yet lusting after Bowie, and this time, Mattix says that
when Bowie requested her presence at dinner — and afterward, in his bedroom — she agreed.
"David drops the kimono off and says, 'Can you wash my back?'"
As for Starr, by 14, she was a staple at the Whiskey A Go Go, and a favorite of Jimmy Page.
When Thrillist talked to Lori Mattix about being a sexually active groupie when she was
still a young teen, she stressed that she didn't see anything wrong with it, saying,
"I was an innocent girl, but the way it happened was so
beautiful. [...] Who wouldn't want to lose their virginity to David Bowie?"
Fellow groupie Pamela Des Barres said similar things in an interview with The Guardian,
saying that she was proud of Mattix for the way she handled all the negativity and explaining,
"Yeah, she was young. [...] But it was our reality, and everyone was OK with it."
Des Barres, too, says she has no regrets, and even considers herself a pioneering feminist.
"I took my birth control pill out of my purse and
took it in front of people on the Sunset Strip, which is feminism."
Others strongly disagree. Dr. Rosemary Lucy Hill of the Centre for Interdisciplinary
Gender Studies at the University of Leeds told The Guardian that even if young women
went into the world of the groupie with the mentality that all sex was consensual,
the power imbalance makes it difficult. She explains:
"Some people think it's never a free choice because of all the expectations. I think both
of these things are true at the same time — and that makes it really complicated."
Between groupies and the rock stars they followed back in the '70s,
perceptions likely differed. Speaking with Thrillist about Jimmy Page, Mattix said,
"He mesmerized me. I fell in love instantly. [...] At that point,
I was 15 and totally in love with this man. I put him on a pedestal."
On the other hand, Page told journalist Ellen Sander,
"Everybody knows what they come for, and when they get [there],
they act so special. I haven't got time to deal with it."
Page was far from the only one to think less than highly of groupies.
"It's kind of like being at a buffet where everything's laid out. And you don't have
to take this or this or this, but it's all there to be eaten if you want it."
Even '70s-era boy band The Bay City Rollers looked back on their groupies with a sort of
a shrug and a laugh. In a 2015 conversation with the Irish Mirror, Les McKeown shared
that he'd found his decades-past relationships with groupies ultimately unfulfilling, saying,
"You realize that all that stuff is a bit shallow,
compared to the depth of the relationship you have with your wife."
He joked that they'd had girls lined up in every city. According to bandmate Stuart Wood:
"One in every port, that was the expression."
Groupie Cherry Vanilla insists she never felt forced to do anything,
but not all 1970s-era groupies had the same experience.
Morgana Welch was one of the underage, LA-based groupies known as the LA Queens. In Legs McNeil
and Gillian McCain's punk oral history Please Kill Me, Welch talks about how incredible she
found the music scene of the time, but admitted that the musicians were surrounded by unknown
hangers-on who were looking for the same perks provided to the rich and famous. Welch said,
"A lot of girls buddied up. In a way, it felt a little safer,
because you had somebody. You didn't always want to go alone."
But that didn't always work: Welch and her friend,
Tyla, were kidnapped, arrested as sex workers, drugged, and sexually assaulted.
Groupie Bebe Buell famously became the mother of Steven Tyler's daughter, Liv. According to her
memoir, Rebel Heart, she was pregnant and torn between Tyler and her old flame, Todd Rundgren,
when Tyler's behavior became so erratic that it terrified her. She saw him have a massive seizure,
recover the following morning, and use cocaine again that evening, recalling,
"'I'm really scared,' I whispered to Todd over the
phone. 'Help me get out of here. I have to get away from this guy.'"
It makes sense that some of the most devoted groupies of the 1970s were artists themselves,
and perhaps the most famous was Cynthia "Plaster Caster" Albritton. Her decades-long
career of creating plaster casts of rock star genitalia started with an art class assignment
and continued with the realization that not only did having a gimmick get her noticed
but it got her interacting with the scene's biggest stars in a completely different way.
"My art teacher told me to make a plaster cast as my
homework assignment of something that could retain its shape."
That gimmick earned her Frank Zappa's patronage but not participation. While she initially relied
on the help of other groupies to prepare stars to have casts taken, she eventually moved along
to enlisting the help of significant others. Albritton says that the interaction that came
with the project was a unique insight into the perception of the groupie. She admitted,
"I was just doing it to get laid because I was goofy."
While Albritton says her work was largely positive, she saw the dark
side of being a groupie, too. Describing her encounter with Led Zeppelin, she said,
"It was a horrible experience. They had a condescending attitude to some of the girls,
coupled with a violent streak. Most bands have been humble,
feet on the ground, and not blatant megalomaniacs."
While fans see only the image rock stars project, groupies see way more, for better or worse. Gail
Sloatman Zappa was a 1960s groupie turned 1970s rock star wife. When she was interviewed by fellow
groupie Pamela Des Barres for her book, Let's Spend the Night Together, Zappa spoke about what
she called "the groupie state of mind," in which girls were in it for the lifestyle. She explained,
"They took groupiedom to a whole other level that you might call 'professional'. Groupies
who just got lucky — girls servicing the band. Then there were the desperate
ones servicing the crew or anyone near the band — cousins, road managers, whatever."
But Gail Zappa felt something else. She'd always felt like an outsider, until a party
for the up-and-coming Rolling Stones introduced her to an entirely different scene than what she'd
grown up with. She said that it was the idea of being understood, breaking free of constraints,
and making her own way in the world that really attracted her to the life of a groupie.
In her autobiography, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, Pamela Des Barres wrote
about the discovery that it wasn't always about sex. She recalled Mick Jagger inviting her back
to the hotel after the ill-fated concert at Altamont. She hadn't realized that
he wanted to talk about the concert and his thoughts of walking away from music.
"Who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting?"
Des Barres also wrote of her experiences with Keith Moon, who was haunted by a January 1970
accident in which he hit and killed his driver in escaping from angry pub-goers.
She told Louder Sound that after the accident, Moon had become deeply unhappy, recalling,
"He said a lot of times, 'I don't deserve to live. I'm a murderous f---.' Screaming
and wailing in the middle of the night. You'd have to comfort him
and give him [lots of] placidyls to make him go back to sleep."
She's been candid, too, about the fact that the life of a groupie isn't all glitz, glamour,
and limousines. Toward the end of her memoir, she wrote of the friends she'd lost: A beloved
companion and confidant named Beverly, to a heroin overdose. Rock gods she considered friends
included Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, and Gram Parsons. She wrote about almost ruining her
own health worrying about others, saying that, in the end, she'd come to a heartbreaking conclusion:
"There was nothing I could do."
Some groupies were invited into the perfectly ordinary,
everyday lives of the rock stars with whom they hit it off. In her memoir, I'm With the Band,
Pamela Des Barres wrote about meeting Gail Zappa and being fascinated with the idea
that even rock stars like Frank Zappa could have families, drink tea, and eat breakfast in their
own kitchens. Gail offered her friend a job as nanny for their daughter, Moon, and son, Dweezil.
Remembering how she moved in with the Zappas
in Laurel Canyon to take care of the kids, Des Barres wrote,
"The love I felt for them was different from any other kind. I didn't want a
single thing from those munchkins, and it was a refreshing relief. I hung out
with them because I had to but found out real soon that I also wanted to."
Morgana Welch has also spoken about the ordinary side of being a groupie.
Speaking with Please Kill Me, she said groupies' contributions to the music scene
were never appreciated. She recounted cooking for countless bands, saying:
"I had certain recipes, like these massive stir-frys,
where I could feed the band and the roadies for five bucks. They were always so grateful,
because they were broke and starving. So in a way,
a lot of groupies were [...] doing things to help these guys stay alive while they did their music."
Being a groupie in the 1970s meant trying to get noticed by one's rock star of choice,
which meant getting creative with fashion. Morgana Welch explained to Please Kill Me that:
"Our art was fashion. Ambient art."
Thrift stores were a groupie's go-to, as it allowed them to
piece together outfits with complete control and no limit to creativity.
Pamela Des Barres spoke with Vogue about the groupie fashion sense, saying,
"I just wanted to be understood by the way I looked."
She recalled spending hours putting on makeup and decorating herself with sequins, saying,
"I wanted to express myself along with all these people I admired so much."
She added that part of what she did as a groupie was take bands shopping and even make them some of
the clothes that ultimately shaped their style. At the forefront of that was Anita Pallenberg,
who's widely credited with changing the entire look of the Rolling Stones as they stepped into
the 1970s. Keith Richards even gave her a shout-out in his memoir, Life, saying,
"I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady's clothes."
It's impossible to talk about what it was like to be a groupie in the 1970s without
talking about Cameron Crowe's iconic Almost Famous. The film was based on his experiences
as a music journalist at the time, but Des Barres told Vulture that's its problem. She
explained that being a groupie was all about feminism and the female agenda, and the fact
that the movie is told from the perspective of a male journalist omits that whole side of it.
"We are not groupies."
"This is Penny Lane, man, show some respect."
Des Barres says,
"[The film is a] horribly misogynistic look at what a groupie-muse is. [...] This character,
the groupie like she's portrayed, is pathetic."
Des Barres takes particular issue with Penny Lane's suicide attempt,
saying that no true groupie would have been so tied up in the idea of the man. Instead,
she says it was always about the music.
Among the problems Des Barres had with Cameron Crowe's Almost
Famous were the bus scenes. She explained,
"I was a groupie before there were bus trips. I was on jets. But that was too
cutesy and too clean for what really would have happened in that bus had I been on it."
For many, touring with the band meant getting a ride on the Boeing 720B dubbed Starship I. The
jet was first chartered by Led Zeppelin in 1973, and it retired just four years
later after hosting Peter Frampton. Those years in between, though? It saw a lot.
The general vibe of the plane could be summed up by the image of band names spelled out on the bar
in lines of cocaine and a bedroom complete with a well-used waterbed. When Alice Cooper
leased the plane, nightly activities would be recounted in the form of "ball scores."
Deep Purple chartered the plane, too, and according to what manager Bruce Payne saw,
it was one of the band's go-to methods for courting groupies. Payne said,
"Fathers two states over were calling the cops."
Parties went on 24/7 no matter what the city,
and drummer Ian Paice of Deep Purple loved every minute, remembering:
"The Starship was a great place to join the mile-high club."
Pamela Des Barres told Fashion that she's been on a quest to take back the
word "groupie" from anyone who might use it to paint a picture of one-dimensional,
sex-obsessed women throwing themselves at rock stars. And even though Des Barres might condemn
Almost Famous as a shallow depiction of what their lives were like, it's not entirely wrong.
"Don't you think you could be doing something else?"
"This is what I want to do. This is what I've always wanted to do."
"Just sleep with rock stars?"
"And their crews."
In fact, Crowe's film depicts precisely what Des Barres has been saying: Penny Lane
starts talking to the young journalist character inspired by Cameron Crowe,
and gets him access to the band. According to Dr. Paula Harper, a postdoctoral fellow in musicology
at the University of Washington in St. Louis, that was pretty regularly a part of the groupie's life.
Harper went on to explain that groupies knew all the places to be seen, and who
was going to be having the best parties. When out-of-town bands showed up for a few shows,
it was the groupies who made connections. Harper goes as far as to suggest that not only were they
acting as adept and experienced PR people, but that if their work had been carried out by a man,
they would have gotten paid. Take Gail Zappa: She hadn't yet married her famous husband
when she and her groupie friend traveled to California, taking The Who's My Generation
to one radio station after another. She said that although it was all in fun, they ended up
breaking the record into radio play — and that's the sort of thing people normally get paid for.
Des Barres believes that there's absolutely nothing wrong with the
type of groupie who's just out to add notches to their bedpost, stating,
"You're not hurting anyone. If that's what you want to do, do it."
"We'd wander around in the backstage area, and then one thing would lead to another."
But here's the thing: Some of the wives and girlfriends of rock stars
have spoken out about the harm that the groupie lifestyle has done to them.
When Des Barres interviewed groupie-turned-wife Gail Zappa for her book, Let's Spend the Night
Together, Zappa confirmed that yes, her husband was a huge fan of the groupie
sex scene even after they were married, and it absolutely bothered her. Zappa recalled,
"Well, everyone had groupies. I mean, you couldn't get around them. There
are aspects that were not easy and not fun, and it's not like you could be consoled or
cry on his shoulder over it. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
"Girls that will readily admit that they're groupies have a very special sort of mentality,
you know. They aspire to that position."
Franka Wright shared her heartbreaking story to The Daily Mail. Longtime wife of Pink Floyd
keyboardist Rick Wright, she confronted her husband and his groupie-of-choice,
only to learn that the groupie was expecting his child. The news came
immediately on the heels of Franka's fourth miscarriage. Those miscarriages,
she said, came because she flew along with him when he toured. Wright said,
"If I wasn't there when he wanted me, then he would find another woman to put in his bed."
According to Morgana Welch, she would go back to the days of free love and
baby groupies in a heartbeat. It's an era that could never be replicated,
and she explained that the reason for the change was twofold:
After the AIDS crisis and the emergence of cocaine as a drug of choice, Welch says,
"[We] went from expressing yourself to feeding the ego."
She added that she had gotten clean, saying:
"I don't want to be out of it. I want to be there for it."
It's something that other groupies grew into feeling as well. Pamela Des Barres told Big
Issue that if she had any advice for her younger self, it would be to lay off the drugs, saying,
"The early drugs were fine, pot and acid, mescaline and all. [...] Then
it sort of denigrated into cocaine and pills and stuff. I'd tell her to avoid some of that,
because there are things I don't remember because I was so high."
In Rebel Heart, Bebe Buell also told some terrifying stories about drug use. In one, another
groupie who was dating Alice Cooper at the time had given her elephant tranquilizers. She writes,
"I called Todd [Rundgren] on the phone as I was starting to die."
She told another story of swearing off heroin for life, writing that it was
such a bad experience that she had no doubts that she was never going to touch it again.