Books »I’m With the Band Confessions of a Groupie

i'm with the band pamela des barresI'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie has been on my list of must reads for a while and my only regret is not reading it sooner. What a fantastic summer read! A read full of sex, drugs and rock and roll. But unlike my other favorite autobiography on the same subjects, The Dirt this one has a feminine heart made of pure gold.

Her crushes are genuine and earth shattering, and are described often in excerpts from her actual teenage diary like this (about Nick St. Nicholas):

“I can't believe I saw him. So near me. I touched him and felt his nearness to me and saw the green greenness of his fantastic eyes… I loved him so much when he slept. I got to touch him everywhere, listen to heart beating, kiss his hair”

and this about Jimmy Page:

“Oh my sweet blonde head is forever in fluffy pink clouds of make believe. God help me as I go though another empty month of trying too hard to forget his beautiful black-as-night hair and his incomparable loveliness created in God's finest hand…”

She even makes giving blow jobs sound kind of fairly innocent:

“I showed my affection for the opposite sex in those days by giving them head, and I as very popular indeed. I tried not to think of myself as being cheap or easy or any of those other terms that were used to describe loose, free, peace-loving girls; I just wanted to show my appreciation for their music, for their taste in clothes, for their heads, hands, and hearts. I found myself in many broom closets and backseats with my head buried in many pairs of satin trousers”

Her teeny bop, hippie dippy speak is infectious and charming and I could read her silly googly eyed praise for the likes of Mick Jagger, Waylon Jennings, Frank Zappa, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, Gram Parsons, Don Johnson, Keith Moon, Jimmy Page and Jim Morrison forever.

Yes, it was quite a scene she got mixed up in as a kid in California, living often at the Zappa's house, where she and her gang of Groupies called the GTO's nearly made it themselves to super stardom. It's almost unbelievable how many now legendary men she encountered, inspired, or merely drooled over.

And lucky for us, she gives us all the dirt, though “dirt” is perhaps the wrong word for a book so optimistic, girlish, wide eyed, glittery and fantastically fun as this book is.


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Posted on July 14, 2008

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