I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

by Pamela Des Barres

Women, try to keep your deep feelings of jealousy and hostility at bay . . . you know you wish this was your story.

If he turned this shit into me to foreword my book I would have told him to fuck off

Breathlessly excited, I said, “MOM!! Have you ever been French-kissed!!?”

lol

I was already on the verge of weirdness, and these types went for the perfectly bouffanted cover girls with little hair bows that matched their little shoe bows, and even if I found the bows that matched, they somehow always came out looking crooked.

Stevie was my Ringofriend, and no one understood the poor thing.

Honestly tho he was the best one so jokes on them . He seems like a joy to be around.

At night, we played all four people at the same time, when we would lie entwined in each other’s arms, pressing our four sets of lips together in an eternal expression of Beatle Love.

Ronny Lewis, age fifteen, was the son of Jerry Lewis, and I was not impressed.

On the way down the hill, a limousine passed by, and I saw John Lennon for an instant. He was wearing his John Lennon cap and he looked right at me. If I close my eyes this minute, I can still see the look he had on his face; it was full of sorrow and contempt.

Ouch

Victor began to hang around me during Nutrition, blowing my innocent mind with radical departures from the truth as I knew it. He thought it was absurd to try to “fit in” to a society that was chasing its own tail and going nowhere fast. This was big news to me, folks, and I pondered it profusely.

thought I knew you real well, you were always so enthusiastic about the Beatles and now you’re a Rolling Stones fan. I don’t see how you could pick them over The Beatles unless . . . you were being a phony all that time.

Teenagers, lol. Also ironic that soon the Beatles will shed the clean image… I wonder if these girls cried and burned their records or what.

I have not taken the Stones over The Beatles. I have just let them become a part of my life too. Is that so wrong? The Beatles can never be topped, but the Stones will never be topped either. Oh, you don’t understand. They play two different types of music. They cannot be compared.

Omg not black or white thinking?? 😱

I started writing porno things in my diary for the first time: “Someday I will touch and feel him, I know it. Mick, my dear, dear PENIS!” I brazenly created in pink and red oil colors my concept of what his balls might look like. I turned it in to Mr. Gifford as a modern-art project and got an A.

lol

I was thrown out of school for “looking absurd.”

I neglected to tell my diary that I let out a shriek and ran out into the same moonlight as the other daring girls had.

They only played for about half an hour in those days,

Damn

I had given up trying to impress people who didn’t impress me. What a relief.

Because of our splendid past, I felt I owed it to Bob to re-create our relationship. I’m sad to say it didn’t work. He didn’t understand Victor and his artistic tendencies; in fact, to my incredible embarrassment he attempted to beat him up on two separate occasions. This made me look unpeaceful, and I just couldn’t take the chance of blowing my new cool. That I had once considered this macho greaser anything but a passing acquaintance made Victor look at me very, very suspiciously.

All the boys in Hollywood had long hair and important eyes. They walked cool and talked cool, and my brain was clamoring to grasp any eloquent morsel of information bestowed upon me by one of these amazing creatures.

people trying to become what others call “nonconformists.” I want to be one of them. I am one of them. All we are trying to do, is become individuals, not one chaotic mess of human being.

He told me he would rather be married to me for forty-seven years than to fuck me for forty-seven minutes.

Sounds like something he said to lots of girls

I latched onto the Byrds as I had the Beatles, only this time they were local and I could obsess in person. I asked anyone who would listen for their addresses and sat outside their houses looking and listening for signs of life.

Even after that look on Lennon’s face eh?

I’m not digging his young, virile, stocky body too much

So this saying the opposite of what you mean is a thing, interesting

spending the occasional night in the hammock on his front porch.

I can’t even

Um

an embarrassing bohemian,

postbop, prepop culture,

Lenny Bruce,

We were on our way to celebrate the short life of a guy we didn’t know too much about, except for the indisputable fact that he’d been very, very HIP.

Frank Zappa

Dennis Hopper,

Something got into me that day, some kind of stand-up-straight pride about being a blond American girl, so ripe, I was about to pop off the tree.

When I phoned KDAY, Tom Clay was so thrilled to hear from me that we had our conversation right on the air! He told me this fairytale news: Terry Southern, the tall, disheveled British gentleman who was with Dennis Hopper at the eulogy, was dying to meet me. His new book was going to be made into a movie, and he thought I was the spitting image of his title character, Candy.

My mom and dad wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. Didn’t they know I was among those in the throes of a revolution? Couldn’t they see the invisible peace sign tattooed on my forehead?

I took Rickaewy to Reseda to spend the weekend in the spare room, and when my mom saw that he had half a beard on one side and half a moustache on the other, the evaporated milk curdled in her coffee.

Some would walk with me down the crowded boulevard, spewing their newfound wisdom into my newly opened ears, and I would expound to them, and we would nod in perfect agreement. It was such a relief to know you weren’t alone with those humongous unprecedented ideas.

She was the first girl I was ever attracted to and the concept was astonishing.

She was gaspingly gorgeous, a combination of baby-doll innocence and hard-core tragedy, and she fluctuated between the two with uncertain irregularity. She was haunted by some sorrowful thing that followed her around like the Grim Reaper, and I tried desperately to keep the thing at bay.

We hid in a rustic garage, imagining horny men cruising the canyon until dawn, looking for the naked ghost girls, and laughed our asses off.

Our barks were infinitely more blatant than our bites, so all he got besides a few powdery kisses was a very large eyeful.

Vito’s exquisite little puppet child, Godot, fell through a skylight during a wacky photo session on the roof and died at age three and a half. I was beside myself with sorrow, but Vito and Szou insisted on continuing with our plans for the evening.

Yeah I got a bad vibe from them

I showed my affection for the opposite sex in those days by giving them head, and I was very popular indeed.

I was of two minds about my behavior, but I could not, would not, stop myself.

What makes me walk up to the stage and boldly touch Daryl’s private parts? What am I trying to prove to whom?

I was dismayed with the hippie look. The girls had straight stringy hair with lots of split ends, and had their bodies covered up with long sacky peasant dresses and shawls. Makeup was a no-no, but the natural look was much too natural for me;

LA

Everyone seemed to panhandle from everyone else, so we asked a bespectacled, pimply blond guy for some spare change just to see how it felt. It was our cosmic luck that we chose this particular guy, because he asked us to come to his commune, Kerista House, and share dinner with “the family.”

“The hippies had families” - Dorian Corey

The way I imagined communal living was a far cry from what greeted me after our journey across the bridge into Oakland. In the living room were about six or seven funky sheetless mattresses and a couple of ripped-up chairs, and people were lolling around, dressed in those hand-painted Indian bedspreads that should have been on the bare beds.

the guys looked us up and down just like regular guys in L.A. always did, which was disconcerting; I thought there might be another level of communication in the land of peace and love.

I tried to avoid looking at the little piles of pubic hair adorning the once-white sink, and concentrated on the true meaning of communal living. These people had deeper things on their minds than Mr. Clean and Spic and Span.

Sound similar to punk houses I’ve been in in Oakland lol

Linda chose to stay behind and become one with the pimply guy and the rest of the family. She had recently been traumatized when her air-force father burst out of the closet, where he had been lurking for many years behind his collegiate crew cut. He totally shattered his large family’s foregone conclusion that Daddy would love Mommy forever. Linda wanted to believe that it was OK for him to be gay, since we were all one anyway, but she was having trouble convincing herself. At this moment, all she wanted was to feel like she belonged somewhere, and to create another family to merge with.

I imagined he was Keats or Byron, a doomed beauty from another realm, and I was the only one on earth who understood him. Years later I saw him on TV being interviewed by Truman Capote; he was Bobby Beausoleil, Charles Manson’s cupid-faced killer.

At home, in my warm, cozy, clean childhood bed, with all four Beatles grinning down at me from all four walls, I thought of Linda and tried to imagine her picking pubic hair from gritty tiles and poking through garbage cans for wilted green beans, and I was glad to be snug as a bourgeois bug in a rug.

Doesn’t that make you basically a poser?