From left to right: Miss Cinderella, Miss Pamela, Miss Sparky and Miss Christine of the pioneering “groupie” collective, the “Girls Together Outrageously”.[1] Source: Permanent Damage via Alta Journal, Credit: Getty Images.
Since I was on the border of tween- and teenagerhood the figure of the “groupie” has had me spellbound. As a sheltered child I was unaware of the intense antagonism that trailed behind my “groupie” in the 20th century, but as my adolescent years progressed, I became acutely aware – from personal testimony – just how maligned that identity in both mainstream society and the rock counterculture had become. Over the course of the next three blog posts I will chart the journey of the “groupie” figure from her origins as an empowered and honoured “muse”,[2] to the disgraced and ridiculed “starfucker” she is thought of as in the early 2020s.[3] In the mid 1960s the “groupie” developed (in the U.S.) as a gendered referent for a woman or girl that was “with” – supported, shared a relationship with, inspired – a rock group,[4] but in the early 1970s as the media framed “groupies” essentially as women/girls who have intimate – said or hinted to be sexual – relationships with rock groups society maligned and the counterculture condemned her.[5] Through to the end of the 1970s the “groupie” became established as requiring pathologizing and deserving of punishment by society and (ab)use from the counterculture.[6]
When discussing the gender relations of the rock counterculture of the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, a consideration of two preceding music cultures that (re)produced particular ideas about gender is grounding: the girl group pop of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. The girl group pop culture was constructed by male record authorities and female artists and understood by society as a world of women and (on the surface) hegemonic femininity.[7] Music and performance kept to traditional national ideas about gender, reproducing the centrality of the union between man and woman, purity and white ideals of beauty – therefore, that women were primary participants in the culture was unproblematic.[8]
The Ronettes’ music (on the surface) explored themes associated with 1950s and early 1960s hegemonic femininity, therefore that their fan base was comprised predominantly of girls and women was not problematic.[9] Source: The Big T.N.T. Show via YouTube, Credit: American International Pictures.
In the folk revival counterculture, women were understood as artists themselves or inspirations for art.[10] Though dominated by male voices, in the 1950s-1960s folk space the contributions of women had the opportunity to be as valued as those made by men, and the “private” inspiration work of women was recognized as the reason for all of the art of many significant male folk artists.[11]
Internal the folk revival counterculture Joan Baez was celebrated as an artist and a political and artistic inspiration to Bob Dylan.[12] Source: Festival via YouTube, Credit: Murray Lerner.
The foundation of the gender and artist/supporter dynamics of the American rock counterculture of the last half of the 1960s and 1970s was the intercontinental culture of the Beatles: where a predominantly young female fan base and the significance of the male musician’s “muse” erected specific rules and spaces for women’s allotment in the structure of the culture.
In the early years of the mid-1960s and 1970s rock counterculture, female fans were generally regarded with respect,[13] as can be discerned from this magazine clipping about the band The Monkees from 1966. Source: Tiger Beat via Google Images, Credit: Tiger Beat.
The Village Voice was the first published source of the term “groupie”: a referent to a female fan of the Beatles whose passion for the band’s John Lennon motivated her to act in transgression of the sociopolitical limitations of “acceptable” girlhood.[14] “Beatlemania”, as a social movement, provided girls/women with a space and a discourse to explore thoughts of sexuality and pleasure, and behave in transgression of the historically enforced forms of control – silence and propriety.[15]
“Beatlemania” in America. As a social movement, “Beatlemania” gave girls and (particularly young) women a space and a discourse to transgress the restrictions of “acceptable” girl/womanhood.[16] Source: New York Times via AARP, Credit: New York Times.
There were girls/women that supported the Beatles’ artistically/ideologically, girls/women that had one-time, casual or serious (but not externally or legally recognized) relationships with the band and there were the women the band were married or “officially” partnered with.[17] Each form of support was perceived internal and external the culture as differently transgressive and respectable; for the purpose of my examination of the “groupie” identity in the rock counterculture of the mid-1960s/1970s, that the support as sexual acts was so valuable it became, though hidden, systemic but was detached from the values associated with “wives” and “mothers” is the key point extracted.[18]
Like The Beatles’, the partners of the Rolling Stones, among them Mick Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithful (right) and Keith Richards’ long-term partner Anita Pallenberg (left), were greatly admired.[19] Source: Getty Images via Google Images, Credit: Dove.
The term “groupie” was used in local communities belonging to the mid-1960s rock counterculture to mean in theory, anyone, but in praxis, a woman, that was closely associated to – “came with” – rock groups.[20] To examine the specificities and intricacies of the “groupie” referent, I turn now to the 1968 testimonies of Pamela Des Barres and Cynthia “Plaster Caster”. Des Barres’ “groupie” and any of its kin terms in denotation is a supporter of a rock group: she applies it to both female and male groups of supporters – for instance, she and her friends/band of artistic/ideological and sexual supporters are the “Girls Together Outrageously (GTOs)” and their male equivalents are the “Boys Together Outrageously”.[21]
Miss Christine, a member of the “Girls Together Outrageously” and an artistic/ideological supporter of Frank Zappa, inspired and featured on the cover art of his 1969 record Hot Rats.[22] Source: Hot Rats via Google Images, Credit: Bizarre Records.
The artist/writer documents how the term is used (in Southern California) by musicians and supporters alike: both groups recognize the value of all forms of support from artistic/ideological to economic to sexual to domestic.[23]
Pamela Des Barres describes how sexual supporters in the rock music counterculture of late 1960s Los Angeles were celebrated for but not confined to their sexuality. Source: Muses on Listen Notes, Credit: Muses.
Wives and “official” partners (“domestic supporters”) of musicians identify and are identified as “groupies”, just as artistic/ideological (“traditional”) and sexual supporters do and are.[24]
Pamela Courson, the long-term girlfriend of The Doors’ Jim Morrison, self-identified as a sexual and “domestic” supporter of Morrison.[25] Source: Themis press release via Elle, Credit: Raeanne Rubenstein.
In connotation is where the “groupie” referent diversifies depending on which kind of supporter the “groupie” is. “Domestic supporters” are the least transgressive and most respectable and are linked to values of fertility, loyalty and heteronormativity, while sexual supporters are the most transgressive, linked to countercultural values of liberation, sexuality and protest.[26]
Gail Zappa, the wife of musician Frank Zappa and mother of his children, self-identified as a “groupie”, acted as a mentor to younger “groupies” and advocated the value of the identity to the rock music counterculture.[27] Source: Rolling Stone via Pinterest, Credit: Julian Wasser.
The inspiration provided from the erotic, emotional and aesthetic dimensions of the sex acts, as well as from the emotional, ideological and political dimensions of the relationship between artist and the latter strand of “groupie”, is recognized as so valuable it is integral to the music-making of this period of the counterculture.[28] In her sexual support this “groupie” is empowered: “Caster’s” giving oral sex gives her sexual and material fulfillment, a way to protest the State’s legal and ideological restrictions on female sexuality, and her creating molds of musicians’ members, creative expression, motivation and identity.[29]
Cynthia (left) and her associate Dianne “Plaster Caster” (right) were praised by musicians and all forms of “groupies” alike for their empowerment and sculptural prowess.[30] Source: Rolling Stone via Google Images, Credit: Baron Wolman.
Moreover, this “groupie’s” identity is not restricted to her sexuality/her sexual relationships: Des Barres and “Caster” are understood by their artist sexual partners and artists generally, as artists themselves; Des Barres, a performer, writer and designer and “Caster”, a sculptor; and agents internal and external the rock counterculture.[31], [32].
Pamela Des Barres was recognized as an artist – the GTOs wrote and performed their own music – by the musicians she provided sexual support to, as well as a sexual supporter.[33] Source: Permanent Damage via YouTube, Credit: Straight Records.
Endnotes
1. Pamela Des Barres, I’m With the Band, read by the author (Newark: Audible Studios, 2011), Audible audio ed., 11 hr., 9 min.
2. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
3. Norma Coates, “From the Vaults: Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 31, no. 3 (2019): 44, https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2019.313005.
4. Lisa L. Rhodes, “Groupies,” in American Countercultures: An Encyclopedia of Nonconformists, Alternative Lifestyles, and Radical Ideas in U.S. History, ed. Gina Misiroglu (Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 342.
5. Coates, “Teenyboppers, Groupies, Other Grotesques,” 44.
6. Lisa L. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 229-231.
7. Laurie Stras, She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 93-94.
8. Stras, She's So Fine, 93-96.
9. Stras, She's So Fine, 93-94.
10. John Dean, “The Importance of the Folk Singer in the American Sixties: A Case Study of Bob Dylan,” Études Anglaises 64, no. 3 (2011): 343, https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.643.0339.
11. Dean, “Importance of Folk Singer,” 343-344.
12. Dean, “Importance of Folk Singer,” 343-344.
13. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Huss, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Rowe (London: Routledge, 1992), 87-90.
14. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 140-141.
15. Ehrenreich, Huss, and Jacobs, “Beatlemania,” 86-90.
16. Ehrenreich, Huss, and Jacobs, “Beatlemania,” 86-90.
17. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 139-141.
18. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 139-142.
19. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
20. Rhodes, “Groupies,” 342.
21. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
22. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
23. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
24. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
25. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 144-145.
26. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
27. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
28. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 144-145.
29. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 145.
30. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.
31. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.’
32. Rhodes, Electric Ladyland, 144-145.
33. Des Barres, I’m With the Band.