I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie

"Pamela Des Barres became the most famous of all groupies in the late sixties, early seventies. Like Ronnie Spector’s book, this is a kind of celebration. I think that now, because of #MeToo and everything, this kind of book wouldn’t get a publisher—because it’s joyous. She’s very, very happy being a groupie and she can obviously deal with herself. She’s not raped or anything. It’s all voluntary, from her point of view. And it is very funny. A lot of it is based on her diaries. I suppose she might have doctored them, but that diary element gives it a feeling of veracity. I use her quite a bit in my Beatles book because, at school, where the book starts, she’s mad on The Beatles. So, those are just simple fan diary entries about her and her best friends at school. It’s all about who loves John, who loves Paul, who loves George. I liked all that innocent stuff. And, in a way, even once she becomes a groupie, there is still an innocence to it, in that it’s innocent fun. She’s not really after anything other than enjoying sex with rock stars. Groupies are always seen rather as this underclass of people, but she shows that, at least in her case, she seems to be in control. Yes. There’s a very funny bit towards the end, when she’s at a party in LA—this is in an updated edition after the first edition of the book came out—and she sees Paul McCartney. I think she may have had a fling with Ringo Starr, but Paul McCartney was the first one she fantasised about as a school girl, before switching her interests to The Rolling Stones and getting off with Mick Jagger. “Even once she becomes a groupie, there is still an innocence to it” She goes up to him at this party, introduces herself and says that she’s written this book. I think she has a copy of it on her. She says a look of slight terror comes over Paul’s face and he says, ‘Did we ever, er, you know…’ He can’t remember if he’s meant to have known her like that, or not. She reassures him that they never did. She’s quite funny and cute. She did have an amazing list of affairs including, for instance, Woody Allen . Keith Moon was one of her long-term boyfriends. I think she says he was her fourth boyfriend and then she moved on to Jimmy Page. Well, with Jimmy Page she talks about how he has whips packed in his luggage, but she doesn’t go in for that. You’d have thought the lawyers would have stopped some of it. Maybe they did stop some of it. But you get quite a lot of information. Do you remember that very good film about a groupie with a sort-of Jimmy Page character in it, Almost Famous ? It’s a very good film. I recommend it. It’s about a young Rolling Stone magazine journalist. He’s hardly ever written for them, but he’s allowed to go on tour with the band. And then he rather falls in love with one of the groupies. There’s lots of drugs and driving cars into swimming pools and that kind of thing, but you get a sense of enjoyment, that, for the most part, for those who survived—and even for the ones who didn’t survive—it was good fun. Yes. And doing journalism of something, you can always say to yourself, “Well, perhaps it would have been absolutely ghastly. Lucky we weren’t rock stars.” But actually, I think her portrait shows it’s something we’ve missed out on. Weirdly, yes. And funnily enough, my daughter, who’s 30, is in a harmony group with a girl called Seraphina. And Seraphina gave me a bit of help transcribing stuff for my Beatles book. Seraphina lived in LA for some time as a child and she said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s my nanny,’ when she saw Pamela Des Barres’s picture. So, quite late on, presumably after she’d been a groupie, Pamela Des Barres was just being a nanny. Quite a glamorous person to have as your nanny!"