As long as there have been rock stars, there have been women who love them. Don’t even try to deny that you love a man who breaks the rules. There’s something in the creativity, something about a man who can stand above a crowd, that sets them apart from all other guys in the world. There’s nothing wrong with bankers or salesmen or trades workers, but none of them have the power to conjure those seductively sinister feelings in our loins with the snarl of a guitar. Rockers are a different breed, that’s all there is to it.
Pamela Des Barres had a visceral understanding of that when she was a teenager in the 1960’s. She contracted terminal Beatlemania in her youth, which led her to the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. She was never satisfied with the nobodies in the local scene, but those panties got drenched when big acts like Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, and Rolling Stones bowled on through. So drenched that she couldn’t let them go, and I’m With the Band describes in colorful, bean-flicking detail all the encounters she had with the biggest stars from the golden age of rock n’ roll.
I like to think of this book as a kind of guide. Not just in the bedroom details, but the lifestyle around it. Pamela was one of the original groupies. A groupie is not just a slut, like Miranda Cosgrove’s character puts it in School of Rock; she was involved in the LA music scene. She was part of a Zappa produced girl-group called the GTOs. She made and sold western clothes around town. All of her guy fiends were in local bands, but local types never quite got her engine hot.
The only guys she slept with were names you would recognize 50 years later. Even her one-night-stands were famous. She even kept the padlock on until she was 20 years old. Who did she finally give it away to? Well, Miss Pamela is a practiced tease, and hides that little bit of gossip until halfway through the book. (I don’t dare spoil it for you 😉 That’s not slut behavior, that’s a girl who knows what she’s worth.
Pamela gives us plenty of stories to get excited about. I’m not kidding when I say she saved herself for the best. She describes giving guys head while they played on stage. Getting ravaged by Noel Redding. Traveling with Led Zepplin as the only “Page girl” the band approved of. Getting eaten out by Mick Jagger. But it’s the stories between those stories that make the whole thing inspiring. She never gave it away for free. She goes into a lot of detail of her long-distance relationship with Jimmy Page, which in 1969 meant writing letters. She even bought and shipped an Alastair Crowley book to him at his request- knowing full well he was out bulldozing the world with his cock. That’s how madly in love she was.
I’m With the Band reminds us that the puritans who plague our society have always been there. In the 60s, the church ladies came after Pamela and her groupie friends for being whores. They came after her band The GTOs for behaving like a bunch of dykes, just like they’ll come after me for using the word “dyke.” Same religion, different generation. They came after her in 1987 when the book was published, too.
The author’s groupie philosophy is wildly different from the independent-woman-who-don’t-need-no-man brand of feminism that we’ve all had shoveled into our ears since birth. She spends the whole story so smitten with men that she was in physical pain when they didn’t love her back. She talks about how delighted she was to cook or clean for the rock stars that made her favorite music. In my 2005 edition, she uses the forward to fire back at the “uptight women on talk shows” who “didn’t get to sleep with Mick Jagger” so expertly that I’d rather not paraphrase it:
“I still considered myself a true feminist in the early days of women’s rights because I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I loved music and the men who made it. The twang of an electric guitar and the sexy thump of a deep dark bass opened me up and wreaked sensual havoc on my teenage hormones. I wanted to be close with the men who made me feel so damn good, and nothing was going to stop me. I wanted to treat a rock star… nice.”
Pamela Des Barres
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