Trailblazing 'groupie feminist' Pamela Des Barres at 75: 'I still get called a slut'
As the author of the controversial memoir 'I'm with the Band' prepares to celebrate her big birthday, she opens up about how it's "so hard for women to age 'appropriately'" and why "people think I slept with 100 men each night."
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“I've been called a ‘slut’ a lot. I still get called a ‘slut’ and a ‘whore’ — and also now an ‘old bag.’ So, that's a new one! It's hard to be a slutty old bag! I do take it personally sometimes, but I shouldn't, because these people who call me those names don't know me. And I still have groupies writing to me all the time, thanking me for opening the doors for them: ‘I'm living my life freely because of your book.’ So, that makes up for the aging process and being called those names.”
So states Pamela Des Barres — arguably the most famous self-declared groupie of all time, and the author of one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most acclaimed memoirs, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie — as she looks ahead to her big 75th birthday. She’ll be celebrating at “An Enchanted Evening with Pamela Des Barres,” fulfilling her decades-long “dream to get up on stage and tell my stories at the Whisky a Go Go” — the world-famous Hollywood venue where in the ‘60s and ‘70s she canoodled in booths with Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page and performed with her freaky, Frank Zappa-curated girl group the GTOs. “To see my name on that marquee, just my name and ‘sold-out’ underneath, will be really a good thing. I'll probably make a poster of it.”
Thirty-six years ago, when Des Barres first told her juicy stories about her affairs and adventures with Jagger, Page, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Don Johnson, Waylon Jennings and other legends, those unrepentant tales of sexual liberation on the Sunset Strip raised many judgmental haters’ eyebrows and hackles. She recalls being “stunned by the sanctimonious vitriol that I’m with the Band received upon its publication,” as she found herself “defending my right as a female to do exactly what I’d always wanted to do.” For example, years before “slut-shaming” was even a term or the sex-positivity movement was in full swing, notorious shock-rock DJ Mancow once greeted Des Barres with “How does it feel to be the national slut?” during a live on-air interview.
“I said, ‘I’m sorry, but you're going to have to fill some airtime here. Goodbye.’ And I hung up,” Des Barres recalls of that rude — but unfortunately far from isolated — incident. “I got so much shit back then. I went on every talk show there was, from Oprah to The Today Show, where I was introduced as ‘queen of the groupies’ by Bryant Gumbel. And I had to deal with it on live, national TV.”
Des Barres recalls another time when she went on Sally Jessy Raphael to promote I’m with the Band, and one female audience member “was so aghast by my past that she stood up, spittle flying, outraged that I’d admit to such tawdry shenanigans. … Don Johnson had been one of my main squeezes, and at that time, Miami Vice had just come out and it was good timing for me. He was a big, big star. It had been several years since we were lovers, but this lady stood up in the audience and said, ‘I don't believe Don would even look at you! Don Johnson would never be with you!’ And so, I showed pictures of us together. She yelled, ‘Those photos are doctored! He would never go near you!’ Yep, I had to face those things, quite a bit.”
Des Barres has been “single-handedly trying to redeem the scurrilous ‘G-word’” ever since, and it has “taken three decades.” Even a recent otherwise glowing review in the Wall Street Journal, which ranked I’m with the Band at No. 4 on its list of the five best music memoirs of all time, backhandedly referenced her “truly staggering” number of conquests. (“What, exactly, is a ‘staggering’ number?” she laughs.) But Des Barres says she’s “finally making inroads, sometimes actually being called a ‘groupie feminist.’”
Des Barres points out that “‘groupie’ was an innocent word at first, meaning literally ‘someone who spends time with groups,’” but it “became a misunderstood term, synonymous with ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ and just a bad word” by 1987, a time when the Sunset Strip was even more debauched and sexually charged than it had been a decade or two earlier. “The perception of the term ‘groupie’ was far from positive. … I think it had a lot to do with the way women were exploited in the ‘80s, in those hard rock videos,” Des Barres muses. “But when I wrote my book, I thought about what ‘groupie’ really means. I was rereading all my old diaries, and I knew that living through that musical time was important — that my diaries would be important one day, and I'd want to share them. I saw this was an amazing lifestyle, that I was a woman against all odds doing exactly what I wanted to do. And isn't that what feminism is? I think so.”
For detractors who might read I’m with the Band through today’s #MeToo lens, Des Barres stresses, “It's impossible to explain that era to someone who didn't participate in it.” Coming out of the strait-laced 1950s, her generation was experiencing an unprecedented era of love-ins and overall sexual freedom, an era when Des Barres would “take my birth control pill in public on the Strip” and “everybody was half-naked.” With the advent of the Pill and Roe v. Wade, no incurable or deadly STDs to worry about, and Des Barres growing up just minutes from Hollywood, where she eventually landed a job as the Zappa family’s nanny, “everything conspired for me to have a blast — right place, right time, right everything. Everything felt possible.
“I just want to reiterate that I was a woman doing what I wanted to do. And there was nothing wrong with it. That was the thing,” Des Barres continues. “I knew I wasn't going to marry Mick Jagger. I just wanted to have a ball with him — and it was OK in those days. You could do that. You could share whatever you wanted to share with people in that scene, without getting condemned. Everyone was having sex. And I just wanted to be around the music. I wanted to be a part of the scene. I wanted to feel that. And all my dreams, all of my imaginings of what it would be like to be in the center of that third eye of the storm, all manifested. Everything I wanted to happen, happened — and a lot of people can't say that. I had an amazing time. It was unforgettable. It is just a timeframe that will never come again. I want people to know that I was in the thick of it. I was a woman, too — there are not enough women's stories from that time. So, I told one — and it is still in print, 36 years later.”
Still, Des Barres feels the need to clear up a few misconceptions regarding her racy reputation. She never “did the deed” with Jane’s Addiction/Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro, even though he implied that they had in his own book. (She was “not very happy” with that passage and “called him on it,” and Navarro was so contrite that he made it up to her by penning the foreword for the current edition of I’m with the Band.) She also never contracted an STD from a rock star or engaged in a one-night stand.
“People think I slept with 100 men each night,” Des Barres laughs. “I remember when some guy walked up to [Rattlesnake Shake frontman] Jimmy Quill, who was my boyfriend at the time, and said, ‘So, is it true your girlfriend slept with all of Led Zeppelin at once?’ People think I did orgies and stuff. None of that ever happened.” In fact, she says she was “very careful never to sleep with the same two members of the same band or get involved with them … The closest I came was with Robert Plant. After Jimmy [Page] and I had totally broken up, we discussed it a little bit. We had this kind of crush. But we never acted on it. Most people would not believe that, though...”
Another fallacy, Des Barres says, is that “groupies were submissive, pathetic creatures under the thumb of these famous men. It was the opposite of that. … My relationships were an equal exchange of yummy, sometimes sexy, sometimes friendly energy between two like-minded souls.” And unlike the “baby groupies” of L.A.’s glam-rock scene — like Lori Mattix, who shockingly dated Jimmy Page when she was 13 years old — Des Barres never felt unsafe or like she didn’t have agency. She may have been just 17 when, as mentioned in an early I’m with the Band chapter, her 23-year-old rock-scene mentor, Captain Beefheart, “pulled out his you-know-what and put my hand on it.” But she says she was “already doing stuff like that when I was 17, and I thought, ‘OK, this is interesting.’ It didn't bother me. I didn't go, ‘Oh God, I'm so scared!’ I thought, ‘OK, I'm going to do this for him. This'll be fun. I won't mind this.’ I knew how to do it. It wasn't a big deal.” Des Barres does stress that she was “fully of age,” 19 and a half, when she finally lost her virginity — to Steppenwolf’s Nick St. Nicholas, who, incidentally, will actually be at her big Whisky birthday show on Sept. 10.
Another former love that will be present at the Whisky will be Pamela’s ex-husband, actor, SiriusXM personality, and Silverhead/Detective/Power Station rocker Michael Des Barres, who will actually conduct her onstage Q&A. Pamela says Michael, to whom she was married from 1977 to 1991, “never had any qualms” about her sexy past, is “the best ex-husband anyone could ever have,” and is like a “brother” to her now. A self-described “lover not a fighter,” she tends to stay surprisingly chummy with all of her exes, even laughingly recalling one time when she and her then-boyfriend, singer-songwriter Mike Stinson, vacationed with Michael and Michael’s current wife Britta at her ex-boyfriend Quill’s ranch in Austin, Texas.
Pamela tries to stay in touch with all of her former paramours, but says one, Mick Jagger, is “impossible to get to. He's like the f***ing Pope. His daughter bought one of my photographs, a Baron Wolman photograph on my website, for her dad's office, and she said, ‘He talks so fondly of you, all the time.’ I'd love to be able to see him again — but him and others in his age group prefer people about 40 years younger than me. And that's just how it goes,” she shrugs.
Des Barres hasn’t “gotten involved with anyone in a long time now, 13 or 14 years” since her breakup with Stinson — who, like Quill, was 20 years her junior. But ever since the first time she boldly knocked on a rock star’s dressing room door — at a Byrds show at West Hollywood’s now-defunct Ciro’s nightclub — she has always been “searching for love, always on the lookout for love, love, love. I wanted to take care of somebody. I wanted to pamper him. I watched my mom take care of my dad, and I liked that.” So, she’s “not closed off” to idea of finding romance again and says her “heart is still wide open,” but she hopes her next boyfriend will be closer to her in age — even if that’s unlikely when Boomer rockers seem to be dating increasingly younger women.
“It would make a difference to me now if there was a 20-year gap. You start getting older in all kinds of ways,” Pamela sighs. (She then remembers with a chuckle when she was dating a man who was 13 years younger and “he gave me one of the best lines that I've ever had. This guy said, ‘I got so deep in there, I think I saw Jimmy Page!' And of course I had to laugh. It was hysterical.” But perhaps she has outgrown that sort of sophomoric humor by now.)
Now, as she hits the big 7-5, Des Barres still has to contend with ageism as well as sexism, but she is as unapologetic and free-spirited as ever, optimistically declaring, “Some people say your seventies are the new forties!” She admits that aging is “scary, in a way — like, when I first turned 70, the ‘seven’ really freaked me out,” and as she reflects on her groupie heyday, she laments, “I was very desired way back then, and I took it for granted, of course.” But while Des Barres — who has outlived many of her peers, including all but one of her six GTOs bandmates — gripes that “it is so, so hard for women to age ‘appropriately,’ which so unfair,” she’s writing her own book, so to speak, on how to age in rock ‘n’ roll.
Des Barres says she takes “very good care” of herself; has had a bit of work done (“I’ve tweaked things and I'm happy about it, because I haven't gone so far that I look like some space alien”); and “never pays attention” to supposed “age-appropriate” fashion do's and don'ts. “I break every rule,” she laughs. “I have a certain taste. I still dress like I am at a love-in, or like I'm sashaying down the Sunset Strip to see the Doors. I still dress that way — except maybe not too short or too tight anymore. And I always have the long sleeves.”
Looking back, the author doesn’t have many regrets (“because regrets hold you down”) — other than wishing she “hadn't taken as many drugs” because she has “lost memories about certain things that I wish I had more detail on,” and a sad night when she refused to go to Mick Jagger's hotel room after the Rolling Stones’ 1970 Altamont concert disaster, because she’d mistakenly thought Jagger was proposing a threesome with the Mamas & the Papas’ Michelle Phillips and she wasn’t interested. “I still regret that heartily. He was pulling me down the hall. I can still see it. He was pulling me: ‘Please stay!’ He needed someone that night in a very, very big way. He was in a really bad state of mind, and I left him. So, that was awful. And… I could’ve had another night with Mick!”
Whatever the future holds for Pamela in the romance department, her career is busier than ever. She has been teaching women's writing workshops around the country for the past 14 years (a side hustle-turned-full-fledged business venture suggested in a “lightbulb moment” by Des Barres’s former nanny client, Moon Zappa, that Pamela now describes as “the best thing I've ever done”). She also conducts rock ‘n' roll tours of L.A. landmarks, shares rock tales on her podcast, and is working on her next memoir, which will chronicle her spiritual journey. (One of her earliest “crushes” — after Mickey Mouse, but before James Dean, Elvis Presley, or the Beatles — was Jesus.) She is determined to leave as many stories behind while she “still has a few years left.”
“Soon, people who live this life I did are not going to be here anymore. I remember my teacher, Light, who I loved so much — I still do, even though she's not on this plane anymore — she said my real fame is going to happen after I'm gone. So, I guess my spirit can look forward to that,” says Des Barres. “But I lived such a life, in such an incredible time, that people are always going to know about it from me. I don't live in the past. I don't want it ever to seem that way just because I talk about it. I have so much going on in the present. But people are curious and want to know, so I'm going to tell them. And I think that's going to keep me relevant.
“I have made a niche for myself in this world where age isn't going to matter. Age doesn't matter — and it's incredible to be able to say that,” says Des Barres. “And this is actually the first time that I've ever said that.”
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