PAMELA DES BARRES reads from I’m With The Band at Analogue Gallery (673 Queen West), Thursday (July 16), $30 (includes a copy of the book), and hosts a writing workshop on Friday (July 17), 7:30 pm, at 84 Carlton.
I discovered them at a rainy Warped Tour in Barrie. Their voices were nasally and their pop punk lyrics trite, but none of this matters when you’re 14. As I stood glued to the railing in the front row, Count the Stars became my favourite band.
That night, my dad picked me up outside the front gates and I cradled their CD and T-shirt in my arms. When I got home, I began daydreaming about the inevitable long-distance relationship I would have with the New York City bassist as soon as he caught wind of his number-one fan up in Canada, how I would surely become the subject of their next hit single, wondering out loud to myself, why do no words rhyme with Samantha?
By the time Warped Tour rolled around the next summer, the Albany-based band had broken up. But there was always a new band – with heart-wrenching lyrics and moppy hair – to gush over.
I was boy-crazy, yes, but I was not alone. I had Pamela Des Barres’s I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie as my sidekick. Published in 1987, I’m With The Band was her debut memoir about her years as a “super groupie” – her words, not mine – during the 60s and 70s.
Culled from the diary she kept at the time, Des Barres detailed her sex- and drug-fuelled trysts with everyone from Jim Morrison and Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and Keith Moon. She wrote the kind of flowery, adjective-riddled prose that high school students in Writer’s Craft classes treat as gospel. On making out with Morrison: “I melted in his mouth like honey, my whole body became a sticky liquid, and his fingers on my face pushed holes through my cheeks like they were on fire.”
I lived vicariously through her escapades. More importantly, though, Des Barres helped me realize that it was OK to be completely obsessed with a band – that these emotions don’t deserve ridicule or mockery. The feelings of teenage girls are so rarely taken seriously – just look at how the internet was so quick to make fun of the girls devastated by Zayn leaving One Direction.
Here was a woman who not only validated my crazy, hormonal obsessions – she became a best-selling author because of her own.
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In a recent interview with the New York Times, Kim Gordon cited I’m With The Band as her favourite book about music. But when the book was first published, the backlash was swift. Feminists viewed it as demeaning to women, and the straight-laced called her a slut.
“People saw the word ‘groupie’ [in the title] and assumed it meant I was some subservient, kowtowing, adoring slave, which is not the case,” Des Barres says over the phone from New York ahead of her reading of the book at Analogue Gallery on Thursday (July 18). “Real groupies are women who do what they want, go after what they want and have a great time doing it. To me, that is a feminist.
“I put myself exactly where I wanted to be. No one coerced me, and I didn’t have to beg and plead,” Des Barres says. “It was a mutual admiration.”
But when I revisit I’m With The Band for the first time in 10 years, certain passages make me cringe. She writes about her love affair with Jimmy Page and how she turned into a “quivering heap curled up on the floor in the fetal position” when he failed to send her a plane ticket to come meet him on tour. Then, a beat later, she is reborn. The plane ticket arrives and she’s in New York City in a jiffy. “I was exactly what I aspired to be,” Des Barres wrote, “the girlfriend of the lead guitar player in the world’s biggest and best rock and roll band.”
I hate to think that when I was reading her memoir for the first time as a teenager, my greatest aspiration was to be someone’s girlfriend.
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Since that memoir, Des Barres, now 66, has become a sort of wise mother hen to aspiring groupies. She hears from women every day asking for advice about their rock star woes and she still has that groupie mentality of her youth. She talks about winning the affection of men by feeding their egos.
“A man really is his career, a man is what he does, more than a woman, I think sometimes,” Des Barres muses. “They identify with [their work] so much, and if you can identify with that and make him feel good about what he’s doing, you’re in,” she says, before breaking into huge laughter.
In her memoir, she recalls listening to a test pressing of Led Zeppelin II with Page over and over again in her bedroom and how she had to praise every solo. “Even though I believed the drum solo in Moby Dick went on endlessly, I held my tongue and went on pressing his velvet trousers and sewing buttons onto his satin jacket.”
Anecdotes like the above don’t portray her as an especially empowered woman, but her willingness to fearlessly share her candid writing in a time when women’s sexuality was (and still is) under immense scrutiny strikes me as a feminist act. I might not relate to her writing as closely nowadays – I’ve outgrown my boy-crazy fanaticism and have a rewarding career writing about the music I love – but I still see her as a revolutionary.
When people look back at her legacy, Des Barres says they’re quick to forget she was in one of the first all-girl bands, The GTOs, and that she’s written three books since her salacious debut, and currently working on her fifth. And for the past 15 years, she’s taught writing workshops to women writing their own memoirs. (In addition to her reading, she hosts a workshop on Friday, July 17, 7:30 pm, at 84 Carlton. See her website for details.)
Des Barres doesn’t want to be remembered just as “that groupie,” but if she is going to be, it has to be on her own terms.
“The word groupie has unfortunately become very tarnished over the years and one of my goals in life is to redeem it,” she says. “Once people meet me and realize who I am, I think it changes their idea of a groupie.”
music@nowtoronto.com | @SamEdwardsTO
