CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

GET ON THE LOVE TRAIN

I’M WITH THE BAMD: COMFESSIONS OF A GROUPIE by Pamela Des Barres (Beech Tree Books)

John Mendelssohn

“I’d always thought I’d lived in a real important, interesting, fascinating place and time on the Sunset Strip in the ’60s, so I’d always known I was going to write this thing.”

The speaker’s (Miss) Pamela (Miller) Des Barres, and the “thing” she was so certain she’d write is I’m With The Band, a memoir about her adventures as Hollywood’s most avid (and best-liked) groupie between the early days of Led Zeppelin and the waning days of glitter, wherein the reader learns what it’s like to be eaten by Mick Jagger, gently tricked into conferring a hand job to Captain Beefheart, rescued from Trimar abuse by Jim Morrison, and seduced and abandoned by Jimmy Page, to give just a few of the more luscious examples.

“I’d kept a diary the whole time, and English had been my best subject in high school, so I’d always thought I could do it,” she says, making short work of a tall shrimp sandwich in the cocktail lounge of the posh Nob Hill hotel her publisher doesn’t think is too good for her. "What really inspired me was Stephen Davis telling me, when he interviewed me for Hammer Of The Gods, ‘Don’t even tell me any more of these great stories—save them for your own book. You can sell it.’ The idea that I could sell it had never even entered my mind. Within a month or so of that interview I’d started writing.”

For a year, it appeared as though Steve didn’t have his fingertips as firmly on the publishing industry’s pulse as he might have imagined—everyone in sight nixed her manuscript. But then, after Des Barres’s agent sadly pronounced himself out of options, the extremely unlikely Bill Dana (whose racist comic invention, Jose Jiminez, made him one of the most prosperous American comedians of the Kennedy years) “read it and said, ‘Oh, I know someone who would love this.’ ” The someone was an editor who’d already turned it down—but before Davis’s book made the New York Times bestseller list and revived interest in rock books.

The next thing Des Barres knew, she was a published media darling.

You might imagine that as loving a daughter as Des Barres might have fretted about embarrassing her parents with her admissions to having been eaten by Mick Jagger, gently tricked into conferring a hand job to Captain Beefheart, rescued from Trimar abuse by Jim Morrison, and seduced and abandoned by Jimmy Page, among other things. And you’d be right, but “when my father died, my mom said, ‘Go ahead and write that book now.’ She’d always wanted to spare him, but she’d lived through all of it with me. She d told me the facts of life when I was real young, so I’d always felt comfortable telling her about all my affairs. Even though she disapproved of all the crazy, wild, ridiculous things I did, we stayed close—I was her only child, so it was real important for her to keep our friendship. Qf course, all moms in the ’60s had to go through agony, especially moms of teenage daughters.

“What upset her most in the book was the extent of my drug-taking—she’d known that I was experimenting with them, but not how much.”

She crosses her stretch-pant-encased legs, thought by many to be the best in rock ’n’ roll, pushes her ’50s starlet sunglasses back on her nose, keeping one from noting what tricks time may have played on the northern half of her face, and explains why she thinks her book’s appeal is universal. “It was real important for me to hang onto my virginity until I was in love, even though I obviously did lots of other things. When I finally did it for the first time, with Nick St. Nicholas of Steppenwolf, I was 19-and-ahalf, which was very late for that time. I was miserable and mortified and horrified and in agony when he didn’t want to sleep with me again the next night. But I was no different from most girls that way. In fact, I think most girls have probably gone through the same experiences I wrote about, except not with famous rock stars.”

A slut though she may have quickly become, Des Barres comes across as never having lost her fundamental sweetness. She gives the impression of having been at least a little in love with all of her seven million or so famous (and obscure) musician, actor, and boutique co-owner lovers, including, in addition to Jagger and Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings (I), Don Johnson and the bass guitarists of groups as famous as the Byrds, Steppenwolf and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and as obscure as the Pink Fairies. And you get the impression that, unlike groupies of less stern stuff, she never offered her heart to a musician whose music she didn’t enjoy.

“It was always the music that attracted me,” she happily affirms. For which reason she can’t picture herself being caught dead waiting backstage for such avidly groupied moderners as Motley Crue or Ratt. “Heavy metal never really got to me,” she reveals. “It annoyed me. I always found it too strident (this from early Led Zeppelin’s biggest fan!). If I were 20 years old, I’d probably move to Minneapolis and chase after Prince, who drives me crazy.” She’s also big on the Boss, and not only because he (or his minions) didn’t charge her a dime to quote some of his lyrics. (By way of contrast, she had she had to shell out $150 to Allen Klein to use a few lines of Jagger’s.) "I’m the eternal fan. I’ll always, always, always be a fan of somebody.”

Good egg that she is, Des Barres hardly has a bad thing to say about anyone, a notable exception being Sable Starr, the English Disco glitterslut queen bee who went on to become Mrs. Johnny Thunders, or something like it. “Sable was mean to me,” Des Barres dolefully affirms. “I was always a very nice girl, but she would call me awful names right out in public. And she was copying the exact way I dressed, ripping me off blind while she was calling me names!”

What Starr called her, those who can’t afford the book or simply can’t imagine finding the time in their busy schedules to read it may be interested to know, was an “old bag.” Des Barres was 25 at the time.

Decrepit old thing though she may have been, Des Barres not long thereafter dated Woody Allen, but didn’t play hide-the-sausage with him because she’d already met the minor glam-rock sensation she’d later wed. (Michael’s since gone on to replace Robert Palmer in Power Station, among lesser exploits.) “I’d already had to stop seeing WayIon Jennings, who was real pleased for me because I’d found Mr. Right, and Keith Moon, who flipped out and never spoke to me again.” She describes her husband of 13 years, whom the author knows to be another good egg, as “a very eccentric, wild lunatic, but a great father (to their nine-yearold son, Nicky). Oh, God, he is the best\ Who knew this guy would be a wonderful dad?” She describes her little boy, whose giftedness showed itself most dramatically when he taught himself to read at age three, as “smarter than Michael or I, so we have to put up with a lot. It’s a constant job.”

Considering the text’s juiciness, you might imagine that Des Barres herself, or at least her publisher’s lawyers, would have had severe misgivings about spilling a great many of the beans of which I’m With The Band is made. But the shysters forbade only an anecdote about the notoriously limber Jeff Beck giving himself head on Frank Zappa’s kitchen table (because Des Barres didn’t witness it personally). And “the part about Jimmy Page crawling across the floor to reach a bag of drugs was the one thing / really agonized about keeping in. For days I asked myself, ‘Oh, God, is this necessary?’ It had nothing to do with our relationship, after all, but I wound up leaving it in because it was true, and it was hideous.” Pressed, and hard, she’ll concede that she also had fleeting second thoughts about relating the immensity of Don Johnson’s cock and Mick Jagger’s attempt to get her into bed with him and Michelle Phillips.

“No one’s mad at me for writing about them," she claims, “and I’m glad about that—it’s real important for me to maintain my relationships with as many of the people I wrote about as I can, whether they were lovers or just friends.” And yet Don Johnson was the only person she allowed to look at the book before publication. “He’s such a close friend that I didn’t want any problems,” she explains. “He liked it.” (We pause to wonder what his reaction would have been had Des Barres described his pecker as unusually slender or stubby.)

Asked why she imagines Page, who’d have seemed to have everything, allowed himself to degenerate so appallingly, Des Barres notes, “It was a very slow progression for him. When I first met him, he was very into his looks and his health and everything. I think he just fell into addiction. I think you can either become addicted or not— it’s a disease that you either catch or don’t catch. We heard very recently from (Zeppelin behind-the-scenes guy) Richard Cole, who obviously knows what’s going on, that Jimmy had been dean for six months. I really pray that’s true, since we’re talking brilliance here.”

She wishes the co-hosts of morning talk shows would quit asking her if she isn’t worried about impressionable teens dying of AIDS as a result of reading her book and thinking it all sounds like great fun. She does concede, though, that “I really feel now like I left something out, but when I finished the book, AIDS wasn’t nearly as enormous as it is now. This book is just the story of my life—it isn’t a guide or a manual. I never say, ‘Gee, you all should do this.’ In fact, at the end I say that I was really burning out on it, and how happy I was to meet my husband, and that I haven’t had drugs in 12 or 13 years. I almost feel like writing something in the epilogue like, ‘Please don’t try this yourself.’ If I can do that in the second printing, I will.”

GOOD ANIMALS

I USED TO BE AN ANIMAL, BUT I’M ALL RIGHT NOW by Eric Burdon (Faber and Faber)

Richard Riegel

I love this guy, but maybe I’m as odd as he is. I’ve often written of how rock ’n’ roll really began for me in that long hot summer of 1964, when the dark chords of the Animals’ “House Of The Rising Sun” spewed out of a dirty old garage radio and ignited my soul for good. You know that story already, but now it’s Eric Burdon’s turn to give us his version of the Animals’ saga, in the autobiographical volume he’s been promising us ever since he was immersed in the hyper-1960s events which dominate this narrative.

As Burdonian product goes, / Used To Be An Animal, But I’m All Right Now is vintage Burdon, and then some. Both detractors and idolators of Burdon will be pleased to find their wreckless Eric still running amuck, within the first few pages: ”... I had instilled in me, and still carry, an enduring obsession with guns... It does seem at odds with the repulsion I felt when faced with the spectre of war, but I have had to live with this contradiction all my life.” Ah Eric, our beloved pistol-fetishist-cum-peace-&-lovenik! Would Mick Jagger ever confess to such an embarrassingly Freudian contradiction? Would the #1 Stone ever confess that guns even exist, in a universe already filled to the rim with his lips?

Burdon’s apparently permanent sense of wonder and enthusiasm is what makes / Used To Be An Animal such an entertaining history. Burdon confesses in his introduction that he didn’t keep a diary during his tumultuous times: “Everything you read happened, although not always in the right chronological order.” The book is rambling but the always propulsive narrative gives the impression that both Burdon’s chronology and his concept of U.S. geography were imprinted during one of his fabled acid-flash excursions. And as editors go, I could’ve done a better job on Burdon’s text than the official Peter Townsend did, as I’ve identified a number of factual errors, from the insignificant (your first car was a Triumph TR4, not a TR6; I have a yellowed clipping of you at the wheel of the TR4) to the relatively major (the Animals’ first British record label was EMI-Columbia, not Decca).

But none of those quibbles really matter in the context of Burdon’s rich description of his first-hand experiences as one of the biggest stars (for an even-briefer season) of the British Invasion, who was privileged to discover America and the 1960s simultaneously. At times, Burdon’s prose attains a haunted, almost Kerouacian sense of awe, especially in his anecdotes of the Animals’ first explorations of America’s mythic South and West in 1965. Elsewhere in his narrative, Burdon indulges the goofy self-parody we’ve come to love in the guy; in his account of his visit to the Fillmore in 1966, Burdon surrenders to his name-dropping demon one more time. Within a few minutes, Eric meets a reverent Janis Joplin and then shares a toke with a ghostly Jim Morrison, who implores him to come on down to L.A.

Burdon’s book is also enlivened by his boldstroke, paint-it-black illustrations, and by his spicy sexual adventures, in which he’s often the conquestee. Burdon the lover confesses all, even to the point of admitting to premature ejaculation with a lovely darkskinned lady of the evening at the original House of the Rising Sun in New Orleans. That humbling confession makes it seem all the more odd that Burdon the writer passes through all 221 pages of his book without being able to recall the original name of the Animals (he actually goes to some syntactical pains to avoid doing so); here it is, kids & Eric, say it three times real fast: “The Alan Price Combo!” But that’s Our Eric, once more, sometimes even his name-dropping prowess lets him down at crucial moments.

I Used To Be An Animal trails off into bittersweet gloominess with the end of the 1960s; 1970 marked both the death of Jimi Hendrix and of Eric Burdon’s last significant commerical popularity in his adopted, beloved America. Burdon skips over most of the subsequent events of his life, including the semi-comic Animals reunion tour of 1983, to land back in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, virtually penniless and dependent upon his family once more. Odd, I was just reading an account of Maggie Thatcher’s re-election last week, which mentioned that some sections of Newcastle-upon-Tyne are suffering an 80-90 percent unemployment rate now. Is Burdon included in those statistics? Burdon’s always loved to survive at the exact epicenter of current history, but this might be going too far even for the instantaneous Burdon.

Buy this man’s bluesed-up book today. An old, white-Negro bluesman’II never let you down.

MOTHERS

RAISING PG KIDS IN AN X-RATED SOCIETY by Tipper Gore (Abingdon)

Richard C. Walls

I always thought that the attempts to portray Tipper Gore as an arch-villainess dedicated to suppressing free expression were themselves an expression of how twitchy and smothered progressive types were feeling after five, six, seven years of Reagan & Co. And though it’s a feeling I can relate to, I also feel that one must resist the urge to pounce heavily on what, in the final analysis, is very small game. Besides, Ms. Gore’s basic concern—which she has reiterated in plain language many times over, and again in this book—is simple and unalarmist and worthy of consideration be ye enlightened humanist or creationist cretin: that given the fact that we now have a freedom of explicitness in some areas of art and entertainment hitherto unknown in the history of this country, how do parents who are at least dubious, at most terrified of the possible effects of this explicitness on young minds, go about monitoring their children’s consumption of same? A reasonable issue to raise and it seems to me that there’s an obvious solution. Since there’s no consensus on this— specifically whether rock/pop lyrics are actually harmful—then it behooves the true believers (the PMRC) to gather and distribute the information (e.g., what are this month’s most dangerous records) they wish to share in a manner akin to the Catholic Church’s erstwhile Legion Of Decency (though I’m sure they can come up with a hipper name). Like-minded others could partake of this info, the PMRC’s charter as delineated by Tipper Gore would be fulfilled, and restless progressives could concentrate on the more important task of rolling back Reaganism (go team!).

Unfortunately' this will never happen because, from the start, the rock/pop lyrics controversy has manifested itself as a battle of wills—many of those who favor unrestrained lyrics cannot concede to a request that, on the face of it, looks like incipient repression. And many of the people on Ms. Gore’s side of the argument see explicitness as an intrusion diminishing their power over their children and not to be abided (for some attracted to the issue, it’s just one of many perceived intrusions eating at their powerpower being the ability to project one’s will in the world). This is why it’s essential that the believers in harmful lyrics force the record companies (if not the recording artists) to label themselves and by doing so acknowledge that the PMRC’s premises are the right and true ones—ultimate effect and effectiveness are beside the point; what is important is that one side acquiesce to the other.

Ms. Gore has to take some of the responsibility for this deadlock situation. Although her book confirms my impression that she is (by herself?) the moderate/liberal wing of her not wholly rational movement, she seems to have trouble keeping her original goals in view; possibly due to having had to suffer the cruel and unusual punishment of being harangued by Wendy O. Williams in public, her judiciousness comes and goes, to be replaced by the paranoid disposition that one associates with some of her shadier cohorts. It’s as though having to deal with this issue for the last few years has made her a little crazy. Or maybe she’s just fallen in with a bad lot—folks with axes to grind, literal-minded religionists traumatized by modernity, reprehensible mountebanks like Jeff Ling, people who see satanism not as a psychological problem, but as a competing franchise. None of these characters help her case. Nor do the sad anecdotes where much is suggested but nothing is shown to be true.

Another explanation for Ms. Gore’s bent may be found in her milieu, which is the world of politics—there, explicitness of any kind is a taboo; its suppression keeps politicians safely distanced from the pain and suffering they routinely cause. It’s life among the rhetoricians which may explain why Ms. Gore, at times so rational as to correctly chide the record industry for its profitgreedy machinations, can come up with a bizarrely hyperbolic phrase like “the twisted tyranny of explicitness in the public domain.’’ Lady, you gotta be kidding.

Anyway, it’s an issue—the effects of “explicit material” on children—deserving of serious analysis and discussion. Unfortunately, few people seem interested in that sort of thing—they’re more concerned with protecting their turf and honing their preconceptions. Meanwhile, you might want to read PG Kids; you may find the hysterical/anecdotal/sensationalistic approach unpersuasive, but there’s a lot of calmer, more serious considerations of the problems young people face here too. And that, at least, should help in de-demonizing the beleaguered Tipper Gore.