I grew up thinking that my mother was a groupie who didn’t want me. It wasn’t much different that the home I grew up in where my rock star father and his wife didn’t want me either. At least they let me stick around, even if that’s all they managed. Everything I thought I knew about my mother was a lie. The rest was still true. After nearly dying, blowing up my family’s unsavory secrets in public, and running away to hang out with an up-and-coming band, you would think life couldn’t get more eventful for me. You’d be wrong. Life on the road was supposed to be about disappearing. Instead, I found myself and something else too. I found love and acceptance and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world. *NOTE: The Groupie Journal is a full-length rock star romance novel with some bonus material added!
First published in 1987, New York Times bestseller, I’m With The Band has been reprinted throughout the years, all over the world. This is the stylish, exuberant and sweetly innocent tale of one of the most famous groupies of the 1960s and 70s. Beginning with Pamela Des Barres’ early obsession with Elvis, her own Beatlemania madness, and her fierce determination to meet the musicians who rocked her world, I’m With The Band illuminates the glory days of scintillating encounters with musical gods including Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger and Keith Moon. A girl just wanting to have fun, Des Barres immersed herself in the drugs, danger and ecstasy of the freewheeling 1960s. As a member of The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), an all-female group masterminded by Frank Zappa, Des Barres was in the thick of the most revolutionary renaissance in the history of modern popular music. She travelled with Led Zeppelin; lived in sin with Don Johnson; turned down a date with Elvis Presley; and was close friends with Robert Plant, Gram Parsons and Ray Davies. She had affairs with Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Chris Hillman, Noel Redding, and Jim Morrison, among others. A woman in possession of her own destiny, Des Barres blazed a trail for women’s life-writing, standing up for female voices and experience everywhere. From original diaries, told with great warmth, chutzpah and joie de vivre, this is a frank memoir that wears its heart on its sleeve, and recalls one of rock ’n’ roll’s most thrilling eras. This edition contains new material from the author, including her response to the vitriolic shaming of groupies, and a foreword by Roisin O’Connor, rock journalist and music correspondent for the Independent.
I grew up thinking that my mother was a groupie who didn't want me. It wasn't much different that the home I grew up in where my rock star father and his wife didn't want me either. At least they let me stick around, even if that's all they managed. Everything I thought I knew about my mother was a lie. The rest was still true. After nearly dying, blowing up my family's unsavory secrets in public, and running away to hang out with an up-and-coming band, you would think life couldn't get more eventful for me. You would be wrong. Life on the road was supposed to be about disappearing. Instead, I found myself and something else too. I found love and acceptance and I wouldn't trade it for anything else in the world. *NOTE: The Groupie Journal was originally a Kindle Vella story and is now being published as a full-length rock star romance novel with some bonus material added!
"What a thrill it is to read Sarah Priscus’ 70s rock, California-dreaming Groupies. This shimmering debut is packed with tenderness and awe against a backdrop of drugs, sex, rock stars, and high drama. Faun is a lovable, believable, and wonderfully drawn character who will remain in my heart and mind for a very, very long time." — Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane In a debut perfect for fans of Daisy Jones & The Six, Mary Jane, and The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, Sarah Priscus shines a bright light on the grungy yet glittery world of 1970s rock 'n' roll and the women – the groupies – who unapologetically love too much in a world that doesn’t love them back. It’s 1977, and Faun Novak is in love with rock ‘n’ roll. After her mother’s death, Faun, a naïve college dropout, grabs her Polaroid and hops a Greyhound to Los Angeles. In the City of Angels, she reconnects with her charismatic childhood friend Josie, now an up-and-coming model and muse. To make their reunion even sweeter, Josie is now dating Cal Holiday, the frontman of the superstar rock band Holiday Sun, and Faun is positively mesmerized. Except it’s not just the band she can’t get enough of. It’s also the proud groupies who support them in myriad ways. Among the groupies are: a doting high school girl at war with her mother; a drug-dealing wife and new mom who longs to be a star herself; and a cynical mover-and-shaker with a soft spot for Holiday Sun’s bassist. Faun obsessively photographs every aspect of this dazzling new world, struggling to balance her artistic ambitions with the band’s expectations. As her confidence grows for the first time in her life, her priorities shift. She becomes reckless with friendship, romance, her ethics, and her bank account. But just as everything is going great and her boring, old life is falling away, Faun realizes just how blind she has been to the darkest corners of this glamorous musical dreamland as the summer heats up and everything spirals out of control . . . Equal parts an evocative coming-of-age and a cutting look at fame, desire, and the media, Groupies is a novel that will have you turning the pages until the music- and drug-fueled end.
This book is a timely examination of the tension between being a rock music fan and being a woman. From the media representation of women rock fans as groupies to the widely held belief that hard rock and metal is masculine music, being a music fan is an experience shaped by gender. Through a lively discussion of the idealised imaginary community created in the media and interviews with women fans in the UK, Rosemary Lucy Hill grapples with the controversial topics of groupies, sexism and male dominance in metal. She challenges the claim that the genre is inherently masculine, arguing that musical pleasure is much more sophisticated than simplistic enjoyments of aggression, violence and virtuosity. Listening to women’s experiences, she maintains, enables new thinking about hard rock and metal music, and about what it is like to be a women fan in a sexist environment.
Imagine the informed Thomas Friedman (of the The World is Flat), the provocative Christopher Hitchens (The Trial of Henry Kissinger) and the witty Maureen Dowd (Bush World) producing daily commentaries on international current events. And that is what Anthony Livingston Hall, author of the The iPINIONS Journal weblog, offers in this riveting review of the major events of 2005. So, if you're tired of partisan talking points masquerading as informed debate, this book is your refuge from those screaming pundits and political hacks. This book is your opportunity to be provoked into thinking about the important events of our time from an objective and rational perspective. Hall's refreshing world stems from his Caribbean heritage, American education and genuine compassion-all of which are reflected in his insightful articles.
“In this authoritative, unsparing history of the biggest rock group of the 1970s, Spitz delivers inside details and analysis with his well-known gift for storytelling.” —PEOPLE From the author of the iconic, bestselling history of The Beatles, the definitive account of arguable the greatest rock band of all time. Rock star. Whatever that term means to you, chances are it owes a debt to Led Zeppelin. No one before or since has lived the dream quite like Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. In Led Zeppelin, Bob Spitz takes their full measure, separating myth from reality with his trademark connoisseurship and storytelling flair. From the opening notes of their first album, the band announced itself as something different, a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force, of English folk music and African American blues. Spitz’s account of their artistic journey, amid the fascinating ecosystem of popular music, is irresistible. But the music is only part of the legend: Led Zeppelin is also the story of how the sixties became the seventies, of how innocence became decadence, of how rock took over. Led Zeppelin wasn’t the first band to let loose on the road, but as with everything else, they took it to an entirely new level. Not all the legends are true, but in Spitz’s careful accounting, what is true is astonishing and sometimes disturbing. Led Zeppelin gave no quarter, and neither has Bob Spitz. Led Zeppelin is the long-awaited full reckoning the band richly deserves.
Pamela Des Barres spent the sexual revolution on the ramparts as the celebrated "queen of the groupies" and chronicled her adventures with the high priests of rock in her best seller I'm With the Band. Affectionate, subversive, and funny, it was hailed by The New York Times as representing "something honorable and loving ... about the sexual honesty of modern women." It became an underground classic, an emblematic memoir of the 1960s generation.
