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I'M WITH THEBANDCONFESSIONS OF A GROUPIE
PAMELA DESBARRES
AcknowledgmentsHEARTFELT THANK YOUS to my sweet mom for having
the love and patience of a saint, and for not squelching my soul;
and tomy dear departed daddy for inspiring me always to dig for the
gold.Intense appreciation goes out to C. Thomas (my Cleveland High
School creative writing teacher), Don Van Vliet, VitoPaulekas, Bob
Dylan, The Fab Four, the late Gram Parsons, the late Brandon de
Wilde, Frank and Gail Zappa, and ChuckWein for altering my
priorities.Adoration abounds for my divine girlfriends who hold me
up and calm me down: Melanie Griffith, Joyce Hyser, CatherineJames,
Denise Kaye, Rona Levitan, Mercy, Sheri Rivera, Iva Turner, and the
ever-present Mrs. Zappa.
Merci beaucoup to my darling Patti D'Arbanville for the perfect
title.Special love to Michele Myer.Beyond space and time Danny
Goldberg.Thank you, Stephen Davis, for the encouragement; and
thanks to Ron Bernstein, Bill Dana, Ben Edmonds, and Mel Berger.A
massive and abundant thankyouthankyouthankyou to Jim Landis and
Jane Meara for "being here now."
Let Me Put It In, ItFeels All RightI GET SHIVERS whenever I see
those old black-and-white films of Elvis getting shorn for Uncle
Sam. When he rubshis hands over the stubs of his former blue-black
mane, I get a twinge in my temples. In the glorious year of 1960,I
was at the Reseda Theater with my parents, and I saw the famous
army footage before the onslaught of Psycho.I don't know which was
more horrifying. I hung on to my daddy's neck and inhaled the
comforting familiarity ofhis drugstore aftershave and peeked
through my fingers as Norman Bates did his dirty work, and the army
barberdid his. I tried to believe that Elvis was doing his duty as
an AMERICAN, but even at eleven years old, I realized hisraunch had
been considerably diminished. I tacked my five-and-dime calendar
onto the dining-room wall anddrew big X's as each day passed,
knowing he would let his hair grow when he came home from Germany.
Beingan adored only child, my mom let me keep the eyesore on the
wall for two years. I was always allowed to carryout my fantasies
to the tingling end, and I somehow survived several bouts of
temporary omnipotence.All my girlfriends had siblings they had to
share with, and since I had two rooms of my own, my house was
whereeveryone wanted to bring their Barbie dolls. I ruled the
neighborhood until I entered Northbridge Junior High. Itturned out
to be the real world, and was I surprised! My lack of breasts took
precedence over my grades, andactual real-live boys loomed before
me, loping around, too tall for their own good. I wanted to make my
parentshappy and get an A in Home Economics, but boys and rock and
roll had altered my priorities.I was always in awe of my big,
gorgeous daddy. He looked just like Clark Gable, and disappeared on
weekends todig for gold way down deep in Mexico. He had always
wanted to strike it rich, so right before I was born, he andmy mom
left Pond Creek, Kentucky, heading for gold country, which allowed
me to come into the world as aCalifornia native.
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We lived right off Sunset and Vine, in a dinky little hut on
Selma Avenue, and after a series of unilluminatingvacuumsalesman-
type jobs, my daddy made his way farther west into the wild
shrubbery of the San FernandoValley suburbs, to seek his meager
fortune bottling Budweiser. He splurged out and bought his very own
cream-colored Cadillac that he paid for in seventy-two monthly
installments, and we lived in the same split-level fortwelve years,
so I felt very secure. I had two parents, a dog, a cat, a parakeet
named Buttons, and three good
meals a day. In my early years, my sweet mom made sure that my
wild daddy came across as a tame, devotedfather-figure, but no
matter how much she buffered and suffered, it couldn't alter the
fact that he was from theOld South, and I was from the New West.Two
incidents occurred when I was fourteen that had a profound effect
on my life. The first was when my dadrelented and let me remove the
wisps of hair from my very thin legs (he did not, however, let me
place the LadySchick above the knee), and I had a moment of
independence alone in the pink-tiled bathroom that will never
beequalled for as long as I live, squirting a pool of Jergens into
my palm and slathering it all over my hairless, Barbie-doll calves.
Compared to getting my period, the first shave initiated me into
the elementary stage of womanhoodwith a much more exciting sense of
adventure . . . going forth into the world with no hair on my
calves Life,Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness! The second
incident involved a stolen car, a bad boy, and the song"He's a
Rebel." Dennis MacCorkell was the slump-shouldered, shuffling,
cigarette-dangling, pit-faced bad boy
found in most junior high schools in 1962. He would shout to me
whenever we passed in the hall, "Hey! NoUnderwear!!" I took it as
an endearment and blushed appropriately. He had the same seat in
his homeroom that Ihad in Biology I, and one Friday morning I found
"No Underwear" carved into the table. 1 hoped it was a
secretmessage of adoration, even though he was going steady with a
tough Chicano girl named Jackie. Over theweekend, Dennis and two
other bad boys from another school stole a car and smashed it to
pieces andthey all went straight to Teen Angel heaven. Jackie came
directly to school so we could all see her suffer. She waswearing a
black tulle veil, and her friends held her up all day as she
staggered from class to class. She broke downduring Nutrition, and
every girl in school secretly wished that Dennis MacCorkell had
been her boyfriend. "He's aRebel" became associated with Dennis,
and rebellion turned into infamy in my teenage mind. Twenty years
later,my mom was cleaning out her drawers and came across a little
box with a dead rose tucked inside, and a slip ofpaper cut out of
my 1962 yearbook: "Hey, No Underwear, good luck with the boys,
Dennis MacCorkell."Nobody ever forgot Dennis MacCorkell at
Northridge Junior High."He's a rebel, and he'll never be any good,
he's a rebel and he never does what he should . . . and just
because hedoesn't do what everybody else does, that's no reason why
I can't give him all my love."I began to associate the Top 10 with
events and boys of the moment. My transistor became an appendage,
thegoopyhaired heroes crooning in my ear became all the boys who
ignored me during "I Pledge Allegiance to theFlag." Lyrics were
taken seriously. I walked in the rain, crying, listening to "Crying
in the Rain" by the perfect-haired Everly Brothers, imagining that
I had just broken up with Phil "Caveman" Caruso, the Italian hunk
in myCreative Writing class. When Vance Branco didn't show up for
my backyard luau, I joined Leslie Gore for thechorus, "It's my
party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, DIE if I want to
. . . " I stood by the screen door in areal honest-to-God grass
skirt that my daddy brought back from Okinawa, fiddling with my
fake lei
