ELEGANZA

ELEGANZA

Great Moments In Spandex

John Mendelssohn

In I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie, her juicy memoirs of her days as Hollywood’s premiere groupie, M(is)s(.) Pamela (Miller) Des Barres, a gal after this column’s own heart, rarely neglects to tell the reader what she was wearing while she enjoyed this or that sexual or other activity with this or that late-’60s or early-’70s superstar.

As a devoted mother and wife of close to 40, Ms. Pam remains as stylish as they come. To teli this column all about her juicy memoir recently (see this month's Creemedia—Ed.), for instance, she wore brightly colored stretchpants, Frederick’s of Hollywood spiked heel clogs, lipstick of no diffident redness, and a black leather motorcycle jacket-inspired blouson.

The great panache with which she wore the stretch-pants put this column in mind of its favorite date in the history of rock ’n’ roll fashion—that in 1978, on which spandex ceased to be made into swimsuits and dancers’ leotards alone, and began to be made into garments intended to be worn to even the snootiest restaurants.

Some may imagine that no rock ’n’ roller ever wore spandex more becomingly than the young Pat Benatar, and some that the distinction rightfully belongs to Wendy O. Williams, and others ihat it’s Lita Ford’s, but this column’s here today to tell you that it belongs to the lead singer of the mostly Filipino Top 40 group that was booked into the El Torito (Mexican) restaurant in Woodland Hills On the San Fernando Valley), California, during the second week of April, 1980. So becomingly did this young woman, who in fact did a lot more tambourine-tapping than actual singing, wear her gleaming black catsuit that this column was inspired to dash off an Aramis-soaked personal letter to her speculating that we probably had lots in common and ought to have lunch, or dinner, or a drink together.

Now that we’re between iove interests again, we’ve resumed looking forward to the pleasure of her reply.

But back to our column. If the introduction of spandex for non-dance or swimwear was one of the most salubrious events in the history of pop fashion, the introduction of spandex clothing for fellows was one of its sorriest, for fellows don’t wear it at all becomingly. It would be one thing if they could wear high heels, which serve to make the leg look longer and the foot smaller, but of course they cannot. There is no more embarrassing a spectacle than a big tug with size 101/2 feet, like the lead singer in Giuffria, in tigerskin-print spandex pants.

The exception to the rule having been Jim (Dandy) Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, who was pouring himself into white spandex britches four years and more before women started showing up at discos in it, of whom the early David Lee Roth was a shameless ripoff, and whom we pause now to award his due.

Never in pop history has a performer’s surname evoked his personality as vividly as Mangrum did Jim’s. (It is, in fact, to surnames what Oxnard—the woeful Southern California coastal city—is to place names.) Say it slowly a couple of times—Mangrum. Mangrum. Mangrum. There’s something ineffably lascivious about those two syllables—it sounds like something a particular kind of guy might call his penis.

His band, at least the originals from actual Arkansas, had great visual style too, resembling Al (“L’il Abner”) Capp cartoons of filthy hippies come to life. One of them, rhythm guitarist Ricky Reynolds, would have his microphone set up about six inches above his head so that he had to tilt his lavishly bewhiskered chin heavenward to sing into it. Watching him, one was reminded of a coyote baying at the moon.

As headliners in the wake of their sole semi-hit, a remake of LaVerne Baker’s “Jim Dandy,” they opened with an a cappella version of “Battle Hymm Of The Republic.” If ever there was a group that wasn’t cut out for an a cappella version of anything—Jim couldn’t sing at all, you see, not really, but was content to growl the most lecherous growl in rock—BOA was that band. You’ve heard more tuneful catfights.

Later, for their big finale, two of the three guitarists would converge on Dandy and swing their guitars at his head. When he’d duck, the instruments would smash one another to smithereens. Now that’s entertainment! Or at least was.

I interviewed them once for Rolling Stone. I’d hardly driven across the threshold of their rented West San Fernando Valley ranch when members of their huge extended “family” started sticking zucchini-sized joints in my mouth. By the time I was shown into their rehearsal room, I could barely remember how to blink. Boy, did they sound great! And, boy, did I yearn for a snack! I conducted the interview with about two percent of my hearing—the rehearsal room had been approximately the size of the closet you and Sis used to share back on Maple Street, and they’d had their amplifiers turned up to about 23. What we talked about mostly were the deep feelings of brotherhood that would unite them forever. Within about 18 months, half of them had been fired, and the remaining two quarters were suing one another.

Rock-a-Ramist Richard Riegel, a distinguished contributor to these pages, is only the best-known of countless hundreds of loyal readers who’ve written to urge this column to celebrate the return of the miniskirt, as heralded already in People and Vanity Fair, and as is delightfully manifest in the shopping malls of our bigger cities. Well, first this call for restraint: let’s not get carried away, as in the very late ’60s, when to go to any even slightly swinging nightspot was to have to avert one’s eyes over and over again in order not to glimpse young women’s most personal undergarments.

That said, WHOOPEE!!!