Flowers of Laurel Canyon

VIRGINIA SCHARFF: “The women of the sixties counterculture, who gave their bodies and minds to the cause of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, have never quite gotten their historical due. But there is plenty of historical material to tell us what we might want to know. We need do no more than turn on our car radios to know that hippie chicks and rock’n’roll women are still with us, in a visceral and moving way. Flower children, hippie chicks, sluts, groupies, and rock divas, they shocked the squares and even some of the hip with their bad loud mouths and their body-flaunting garments and their hollering and hitch-hiking and myriad comings and goings. Their search for self and for ecstasy terrified and fascinated a global public.”

BOBBY KEYS: “Back then, musicians just seemed to find each other. There was a lot of hanging out together, especially at these Sunday afternoon get-togethers. Everybody’d bring a guitar or harmonica or something to bang on, a tambourine. And there’d just be circles of people playing blues and stuff. I didn’t walk around with my saxophone because it was too heavy, but it was nice just to go out and roll up a big fat joint, man, and walk through the hills and see all these flower children.”

MISS PAMELA: “In 1965, I hitchhiked from Reseda to get to Hollywood. Sometimes I had a car, sometimes I didn’t. I went through Laurel Canyon to get to Sunset. That is how I found myself in what I call God’s golden backyard because it was so beautiful, and representative of what I thought the world should be. And the way I thought it was going to be. This beautiful, perfect place with little houses and music people.”

KIM FOWLEY: “You had Paris in the ‘20s, Hollywood in the ‘60s. And you really wanted to be there because those places had hope. All these chicks would hitchhike up to the Canyon Store from the Strip, girls from Kansas who’d heard about Laurel Canyon: ‘Hi! Folk-rock musicians! I’ll clean your house and fuck you and I’m a vegetarian and I can make you macrobiotic stuff as you’re shooting heroin.’"

MISS PAMELA: “I used to go up to Laurel Canyon and clean these guys’ houses. We were more than willing to be taken advantage of. I mean, it was just about being there, with the sun coming through the windows and the guys in the other room playing guitars.”

RAY MANZAREK: “The ladies – the flower children, the witches, the punkettes, the starlets. The fine and sweet and innocent chicks. Yes. The chicks. For that is what we called them in the ‘60s. All soft and bejeweled and feathered and wrapped in their soft garments from antique clothing stores. Clothes from another era, from a different place, from anywhere else than where we were at the moment. From a fantasyland of poets and knights and kings and queens of the realm. Ahh, the girls. How loving and supportive they were… and are to this very day. Taking care of their men; their jazz musicians, their hippie guitarists, their poets, the scribblers of tales.”

MISS PAMELA: “I used to park and gaze at the rock stars’ homes. When Chris Hillman would go on the road I would sleep on his front porch hammock. He had the most beautiful house in the Canyon, at the very top of Kirkwood on Magnolia. I was sixteen, seventeen years old. I used to go up there and sing ‘On the Street Where You Live.’ At that point I was so young I wanted to be immersed in it. And Laurel Canyon was where they all lived.”

 

RAY MANZAREK: “There was always some kind of magic afoot in that Canyon. The light and the sun infused that zone with a sense of joy. There was always something spiritual about that slice through the green earth, but never more so than in the ‘60s. A generation had opened the William Blake/Aldous Huxley ‘Doors of Perception.’ We had seen the oneness of all creation. We had left behind the strictures of organized religion. We had become the new tribe. Inter-racial, inter-generational, inter-national. And it felt as if we were spreading the message of ‘Love’ to a new world.”

ELLIOTT MINTZ: “So, you would walk into people’s houses and see them strumming electric guitars, constantly performing. If you drove around on a summer afternoon or evening, with your windows down, you would hear live music coming from endless households – from people who were well known and people who were just beginning. But Laurel Canyon always had its own soundtrack.”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “Miss Pamela. She was at Altamont with Mick, the Whiskey with the Lizard King, the Garden with Page… She was the embodiment of everything I had ever loved about the new world of America. She was Marilyn, she was Elvis, she was a 40s bathing suit; she swooned, she swayed, she was the Mary Magdalene of the Electric Church.”

MARLOWE BRIEN WEST: “Miss Pamela just took my breath away. She was the most beautiful girl you had ever seen in your life, flowers in her hair, gorgeous and sweet.”

DARYL HOOPER: “Girls out in Hollywood were different. They were freer. And crazier. And more fun. Girls might have grown up listening and seeing The Beach Boys or a local type of place, but now it’s evolved into these other types of music and they got a little crazier. The music was hypnotic and sexual. Absolutely. Then it further evolved.”

BARNEY HOSKYNS: “The Sunset Strip had been a major center of Hollywood nightlife long before the dawn of pop music. Back in the forties, celluloid heroes and villains filed into Ciro’s and the El Mocambo, caroused in Preston Sturges’ Players Club, and whored the night away at discreet establishments in the Hollywood Hills above. The Chateau Marmont hotel was a glitzy palace of sin, and Schwab’s drugstore was where every starlet perched in hopes of catching the eyes of movie scouts.”

MISS PAMELA: “I was a Byrds nut. The first time I went to the Strip was to see them at Ciro’s. I was too young to get in and had to get a fake ID. I knocked on the backstage door – it still faces the Strip, though it’s now the Comedy Store – and Roger McGuinn, just Jim then, opened it and handed me a joint. That’s how it was so easy to meet these bands.”

HENRY DILTZ: “There wasn’t an invitation [to the Love-In], there wasn’t a poster; you just got the word and knew where to go. I was happy to know there were more freaks and hippies like me. You’d see a lot of friends and a lot of beautiful ladies. Most everybody was smoking grass. Everybody was grooving on whatever their favorite drug was – whether it was grass or psychedelics. People would bring guitars. It was sort of like the Renaissance Faire without the booths.”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “The GTOS went over Laurel Canyon, which was the yellow brick motherfuckin’ road into Oz. It was almost like a conduit, a magical bridge from that world and the era of the beehive haircut into Zappa and the revolution of the streets. If it was a film, you would track it from the hot tarmac of Reseda into the luxurious foliage and feathers and flowers of Sunset Boulevard.”

MISS PAMELA: “We became a fivesome, attending all events, parties, concerts, love-ins, clubs, any kind of festivity, as a unit. The local girls started to copy our thrilling ensembles, complete with fifty-cent special effects: ribbons around wrists and ankles, tatty silk flowers, pieces of lace in strategic spots, antique pants worn over other garments, piano shawls, slinky teddies, hand-embroidered tablecloths, and the occasional silk umbrella.”

MISS PAMELA: “We were lounging on Christine’s ancient multipatterned quilt after a songwriting session, and we opened a box of crayons to write our rock star sex wish lists on the wall above her bed. Mick Jagger was my number one, and since Brian Jones was Miss Mercy’s pick to lick, we bonded in empathetic Rolling Stones awareness. Oddly enough, Mercy discovered she had a penchant for country music. This unlikely notion came through our pal Gram Parsons, cofounder of the very first country-rock band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram called this newfound genre ‘cosmic American music,’ and together Mercy and I glammed up in nutty gypsy feather lace chiffon cowpoke outfits to check out the Burritos in all sorts of seedy country-and-western dives. We somehow managed to dance our colorful asses off to original Burrito tunes and country ditties such as ‘Six Days on the Road’ and the tragic George Jones opus ‘She Thinks I Still Care.’”

MISS PAMELA: “When Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons split The Byrds and started The Burrito Brothers I never missed a show. I became tight with Gram, who lived in Nichols Canyon, off Woodrow Wilson Drive. I remember Gram asked me to babysit his daughter, Polly, for the very first time. ‘Oh my God, he trusts me. He respects and trusts me.’ I was always welcome there. Mercy and I were the only people at the ‘Wild Horses’ session. We sang on ‘Hippie Boy.’ Many times in my life I’ve thanked God for letting me be at that place and time to participate in something that so many people wished they could be part of. Mercy, myself, and Michele Myer knew it even then. Mercy was the only girl in the GTOs who didn’t think country music was lame.”

MISS PAMELA: “I met the Zappa’s when Moon Unit was six months old. They were at the cabin. They only lived there for six or seven months – on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain. It was Tom Mix’s old cabin. The doors were always open. That was just an amazing thing. It smelled like some sort of floral heaven. You felt like you were in the wilderness even though you were right in the middle of town. It had its own vibe. There was nothing like this place. You’d walk in this big room with a huge rock fireplace where everybody hung around. And Frank had a piano to the right of the fireplace and he would sit there and compose with all kinds of shit going on. All sorts of Mothers of Invention and artists. He was not into drugs and never did drugs. I was on reds and things when I was there and had to pretend I was ill and he never caught on. He really wanted to be clear-headed and in control.”

BARRY MILES: “The first hippies in Hollywood, perhaps the first hippies anywhere, were Vito, his wife Zsou, Captain Fuck and their group of about thirty-five dancers. Calling themselves Freaks, they lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could… Vito made a living of sorts by giving clay modeling lessons to Beverly Hills matrons who found the atmosphere in his studio exciting; the walls were painted like a Mayan tomb and one wall was covered with a collage of newspaper headlines. Vito had the first crash pad in LA, an open house to countless runaways where everyone was welcome for a night, particularly young women. The studio was in the basement of 303 North Laurel Street and could be reached through his wife Zsou’s dress shop on the ground floor. Vito had a little curtained alcove in the back of Zsou’s shop with a mattress in it, in case he was ever able to waylay one of her customers. His hand would often emerge and run up the leg of a surprised girl. Vito’s best buddy was Karl Franzoni, known as ‘Captain Fuck,’ who joined the troupe in 1963. Zsou was a forerunner of the thrift store look; her shop was filled with tatty lace and velvet from the 20s and 30s, frocks and scarves and sequined bags.”

KIM FOWLEY: “Vito was in his fifties, but he had four-way sex with goddesses. He held these clay-sculpting classes on Laurel Avenue, teaching rich Beverly Hills dowagers how to sculpt. And that was the Byrds’ rehearsal room. Then Jim Dickson had the idea to put them on at Ciro’s, on the basis that all the freaks would show up and the Byrds would be their Beatles. And the theory proved exactly right.”

FRANK ZAPPA: “They were this bohemian bizarre group, and every night they’d go out dancing. As soon as they arrived they would make things happen, because they were dancing in a way nobody had seen before, screaming and yelling out on the floor and doing all kinds of weird things. They were dressed in a way nobody could believe, and they gave life to everything that was going on.”

BARRY MILES: “Also playing on the Strip were the Mothers of Invention and, though Zappa’s music was never as danceable as the Byrds and required a lot more concentration, Vito and company began to show up at Mothers’ gigs to dance. They became so much part of the Mothers’ act that they got dubbed as ‘the Mothers Auxiliary’ and Karl Franzoni, in particular, was included in a lot of group photographs.”

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN: “[Vito was] not the most articulate of wizards, but he comes on booming like thunder. His theories make meager sense but they are expounded with a galactic joy.”

JAC HOLZMAN: “It was a scene from one of the amiable rings of Dante’s Inferno. Bodies crushing into each other, silken-clad girls with ironed blonde hair moving, the kind of shapes you didn’t see in New York, to a cadence part musical and all sexual.”

KIM FOWLEY: “You’d leap into the middle of the room and begin dancing like an Indian or something, virtually having sex on the dance floor. A band didn’t have to be good, as long as the dancers were there.”

KARL FRANZONI: “Szou became, in the 60s, the seller of elegant things for freaks to wear. They all bought their clothes from her and when we went out dancing you would see these bright colored people. Women all wore see-through, no panties, no bras – and that was it… We stepped on the dance floor and from then on it was music and dance for months and months! All right!”

JERRY HOPKINS: “Groupies in L.A. are extreme. The GTO’s epitomize an international groupie type, The Freak. It is fitting that these five young women record for a record company called ‘Bizarre,’ for that is what they really are, bizarre. They travel in a pack looking much like that section of The Goodwill store where clothing is sold by weight; worn cowboy boots, rotting thirty-year old blouses and acres-large skirts and dresses, limp boas, pink tights, 75 cent army belts, and on top of everything sartorial is an amazing display of the cosmetic arts – mascara and rouge looking as if it were applied from a toy sand bucket with a small shovel.”

MISS PAMELA: “A hippie was sort of the unwashed, unkempt kid. A freak was someone who put a lot of care and intention into their appearance, wanting to stand out instead of blend in. I was a combination flower child freak, because the former was all about love and sharing and adoring each other and having flowers in your hair, literally, and lace and feathers and all that. I never considered myself a hippie. She’d be wearing one of those Indian madras-type skirts with her hair split down the middle, no makeup, sandals, braless – of course, we were all braless. I would have on an old vintage lace tablecloth with ribbons woven through it, feathers in my hair, loads of makeup, sequins stuck all over my face, and spike heels.”

BARRY MILES: “Girls looked for old-fashioned, second-hand dresses in thrift stores, favoring worn, soft fabrics like lace and velvet and often opting for long granny dresses. If they felt like dressing up, then anything went – handmade clothes, often tie-dyed in earth colors or psychedelic rainbows, hand-strung beads and, if the climate was temperate, bare feet. Maybe even flowers in their hair. The dictatorial control over fashion once exerted by the fashion houses was broken – to the relief of all women, not just those in the counterculture. No longer were women told how high the hem of their skirt was to be that year. After the hippie movement it could be anywhere you wanted it to be.”

BARRY MILES: “When I first stayed with Zappa his current social anthropological project mostly concerned the fauna inhabiting the Landmark Motor Hotel – Groupie Central and home to many rock musicians as well as three of the GTOs. He was producing an album with the GTOs – ‘Permanent Damage,’ their only recording – so the house was filled with girls. Gail fought a losing battle to keep them in the kitchen… I went with Frank to some of the sessions for ‘Permanent Damage’ and was astonished at the contrast between his behavior with the girls, as opposed to the almost military discipline he imposed on the Mothers of Invention. The GTOs ran all over him and whenever he tried to impose order, the girls would life their T-shirts and lick each other’s breasts. Frank loved it. But the girls really wanted to make a record so they tried their best to do as he wanted.”

MISS PAMELA: “It was the mind-blowing, heady summer of 1968, and I was happily floating around in my own private Laurel Canyon bliss-out with my wacky Hollywood girlfriends. Frank Zappa was fiddling about on the piano while his lovely wife Gail fetched tea for a kaleidoscopic assortment of humanity. Miss Christine, dressed in her outlandish Dr. Seuss garb, balanced baby Moon Unit on her scrawny hip, as Misses Lucy, Cynderella, Sandra, and Sparky pranced around the room showing off their infinitely small mini-mama getups. Alice Cooper was on hand, making goo-goo eyes at Christine, a few of the Mothers of Invention decorated the premises, along with Captain Beefheart and a couple Magic Band members, who were avidly listening to Frank’s stellar composition. Ahead of his time, as usual, Mr. Zappa had already decided that the teeming cadre of flagrant, dancing groupie girls should become a rock group and cut a record of our very own.”

KIM FOWLEY: “By the time the 60s rolled around, the Tom Mix house was sort of an oddity. It looked like a Photoshop log cabin gone too dark. It was maroon bleeding into brown and black. It was the antithesis of Xanadu. But it was grandiose anyway, because one of the things to remember about the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century is they didn’t have modern lighting anyplace. So, if you look at the old buildings and residences, they are all very dark – because there was no sense of light on an Asian level.”

MISS PAMELA: “All the aspiring rock gods, especially the boys from England, couldn’t wait to meet Mr. Zappa, so the house was always full of velvet trousers and British accents. I no longer had to peer through imaginary binoculars into the land of aahs. Forever-memories were created every day. The hills were on fire with the sound of music.”

GAIL ZAPPA: “Around five all the girls, the GTOS and their friends, would get dressed. They’d bring out BOXES. I’m not talking about macramé or tie-dye or any of that crap, but things from the turn of the century up to maybe the ‘30s and ‘40s. A number of the girls decided they’d call themselves Klondykes, and they would dress like those women from the ‘40s suddenly smoking on-screen, with their fucking pumps and shoulder pads, kind of a Mae West type. There was a phase of that and then there were all the doilies and feathers. It was constantly evolving. The rule of thumb was: you couldn’t wear the same thing twice. Ever!”

CATHERINE JAMES: “They would all waft into the Whiskey in their GTO regalia, which, at the time, was patchwork and feathers and lace, and I would think, my God, what’s this? They wrote some pretty good songs but they were dreadful performers, no one could sing or play instruments.”

MISS PAMELA: “I’d stay at the Zappa’s house, especially when I had a broken heart. I’d got there and Gail would help me recover my heart and make me see the humorous side of things. She was great at that. She’s so brilliant. And we would drink tea all night long in the kitchen and talk. We were creating. We wanted to write a book together, a children’s book. We were working on that. I was there for the births of all their kids, even going to the hospital with her. I lived in the guesthouse in the back and made breakfast for the kids and took care of them.”

MOON UNIT ZAPPA: “I remember her as an angel, I remember the sun coming through her hair in a soft-focused lens kind of porn imagery… and I remember her smile.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “And then I saw the movie ‘Groupies,’ and at last I had a name and a vision for the role I’d been dying to play for so long, along with an awareness of a sisterhood of like-minded role models. The girls in the film were so open and honest about their motives and desires, and most of them, especially the West Coast girls, seemed so sweet and so proud of what they were into. I’d heard of the GTOs and Cynthia Plaster Caster from my friend Barry dePrendergast who was living in LA and knew them. But until seeing ‘Groupies,’ I had no idea how inspirational these audacious young women would prove to be for me. Of course, I realized that most people equated the term groupie with slut and sycophant. But, like Miss Pamela, Miss Sandra, and the rest of the girls in the film, I didn’t give a shit what people thought.”

MISS PAMELA: “I danced in one of the very first rock videos, ‘Foxy Lady,’ wriggling around in skimpy blue velvet to the nihilistic sound oozing from this wild man’s guitar. From my vantage point behind the stage I watched the eyeball on Jimi’s handpainted jacket contort and wink, but when he wanted my phone number I just couldn’t bring myself to give it to him. ‘Pam, dear, there’s someone on the phone for you. It’s Jimi Hendrix.’ ‘Thanks, Mom!’ I tried to melt into the psychedelic walls when I wasn’t perched on top of the plastic Greek column go-go-ing hard and fast... ‘Here I come baby, I’m comin’ to GETCHA.”

MISS PAMELA: “The Doors lived in Laurel Canyon. Jim Morrison lived right above the Canyon Store. I saw them at the Whisky many times and at Bido Lido’s. Jim was a one-woman man. When Jim and Pamela Courson fought, I could see him a little bit… I was up at my friend’s house with a couple of the GTOs and my friend Iva. We were floating around and heard this Doors record being played which hadn’t even come out yet. ‘Who is cool enough to have that?’ So I was high enough to go down the stairs and try and see who had the record. I peeked in the door and it was Jim Morrison playing his own record. He had no shirt on. He had his leather pants on that were half way unzipped. One of the most beautiful things you had ever seen. Next to Elvis, his face was the most beautiful face ever. I just walked in because I was so stoned. In those days he was a man of few words. He’d say, ‘Get it on’ and ‘suck my mama.’ Those were the phrases he would enjoy saying. I got on the middle of this rug and did a back bend. I just learned how to do them. I was going to show off my purple vintage dress. And I tipped over and I was upside down and when I looked up there was Pamela, his girlfriend, staring down at me. And she booted me out of the house. He was coming up the stairs after me. He wanted to know what I was on to be in that condition. As he came up the stairs, I heard all this noise. She was throwing The Doors demos at him. And they were breaking all around him on the ground. But he would not be stopped, inhaling Trimar with all of us girls, laughing and having a blast.”

RAY MANZAREK: “Pure serendipity. It was the energy of the time. Morrison had a great line, ‘in that year we had an intense visitation of energy.’ Those years lasted from approximately 1965 to 1970. The psychedelic generation had come of age. The young people had come of age. We were the fruit of the American dream. We had everything – all the education and all the pampering. Lo and behold, we are all one with everything. Everything is one with us. We, especially the hippies, are all each other’s brothers and sisters. Now let’s become artists and let’s see if we can change the world. Let’s see if we can take love and make love and change the world.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “The queens of the LA groupie scene were the GTOs, the groupie clique loosely affiliated with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. And the most beautiful of the GTOS was an 18 year old seamstress named Miss Pamela, who sewed beautiful shirts for boys in bands and caught Jimmy Page’s gimlet eye one night on tour, in a trashy Hollywood nightclub called Thee Experience.”

HARVEY KUBERNIK: “Marshall Brevitz opened Thee Experience at 7551 Sunset on the corner of the more centrally located Curson Avenue, as a relaxed hangout where musicians and patrons were all treated like family. Janis Joplin liked to drink at a table in the back while Jimi Hendrix played. Catherine James worked at the ticket booth. While Bo Diddley commandeered the dance floor at the end of an extra-long amp cord, Miss Pamela and Jimmy Page met at the club… The Rolling Stones came in when guitarist Albert Collins did his instrumental set. Mick and Keith jammed with Bo Diddley on ‘Mona’ and ‘Bo Diddley’s a Gun Slinger.’ There were times when Jim Morrison visited Thee Experience and became drunk and incapacitated, and Brevitz was said to have driven him home more than once.”

CATHERINE JAMES: “The Led Zeppelin debut at the Whisky a Go Go wasn’t that big of a deal – they were complete unknowns. But when the played… wow! That was when things really changed. That was a turnaround for music in Los Angeles. It was incredibly loud. I went to see Alice Cooper, who was the headliner, and there were only three people in the audience, including me. After the Zeppelin gig, you saw the beginnings of a whole different lifestyle. That’s when the groupies started coming out of the woodwork. And that turned it into a whole new thing. They started coming from the Valley. It was very mellow at first; then, all of a sudden, an agenda started happening.”

MISS PAMELA: “Led Zeppelin at the Whisky. Well, the rumblings about that band preceded them. The first time I heard about them, I was in Chicago with Cynthia Plaster Caster. She had a big poster of them on the wall. I didn’t know who they were. She said, ‘You’re gonna be hearing these guys. Stay away from them. They’re very dangerous.’ And groupies all knew these were scary guys. It all stemmed from Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult, probably. But seeing them at the Whisky was massive. They obviously tore the place up with this massive amount of sound in that small place. I don’t know how it contained it. Jimmy hit on me at Thee Experience the first time. He passed me a note through Richard Cole: ‘Meet me at the Riot House.’ And I didn’t do it. That’s always intriguing to them.”

MICK WALL: “When Zeppelin returned to L.A. to perform at the Whisky A Go Go on 29 April, Miss Pamela was there. She later recalled how her friend and fellow groupie, Cynthia Plastercaster (of the Plastercasters of Chicago, famous for casting rock stars’ penises in plaster), had warned her that ‘the music was supposed to be fantastic, but they were supposed to be really dangerous guys, and you’d better stay away from them.’ But she went anyway with fellow GTO Miss Mercy. Page looked frail and helpless, she thought, ‘like Sarah Bernhardt.’ She was instantly smitten by what she perceived to be the guitarist’s ‘demure, almost feminine’ persona. She breathlessly recalls Page wearing a pink velvet suit on stage, ‘his long black curls stuck damply to his pink velvet cheeks. At the end of the set he collapsed to the floor, and was carried up the stairs by two roadies, one of them stopping to retrieve Jimmy’s cherry-red patent-leather slipper.’”

MISS PAMELA: “When I was Jimmy Page’s dollface of the moment, I got real chummy with the rest of the band, and one night before Led Zeppelin swept majestically onto the stage, one by one they slipped their big, hunky turquoise bracelets on my arm for safekeeping. I stood by the side of the stage touching the trendy, treasured Indian silver, watching my friends make rock’n’roll history, feeling honored and blessed. Gotta whole lotta love.”

RODNEY BINGENHEIMER: “Keith Moon arrived at the English Disco with Miss Pamela wearing a woman’s outfit. And, another time, Keith once came in wearing a German Gestapo uniform and we all went to Canter’s Deli. Keith loved to shock people. He loved surf music and would play it on my turntable including Dick Dale and The Beach Boys. Miss Pamela later announced her marriage to Michael Des Barres at my club.”

MISS PAMELA: “Somehow they always chose me, those guys with the eyes like the laughing demento in the old werewolf movies.”

MISS PAMELA: “The word ‘groupie’ started out innocently enough. I remember the first time I heard it spoken at the Continental Riot House on the Sunset Strip. I was standing by Led Zeppelin’s shiny black limo, smoothing my pink feather boa, reapplying my gooey Yardley Slicker lip gloss, preparing to slide in next to Jimmy Page for a hot night on the town. As the car door slammed, I heard a shrill voice from the gathered throng behind the roped-off area: ‘Look at that girl, she must be a groupie.’ Hmmm. The word made sense. It’s true I spent a lot of time hanging out with groups, so I wore the new moniker proudly for a brief spell.”

MISS PAMELA: “The unabashed freedom and soul of the musicians just shines through. Like Emerson or Walt Whitman or any of my people I worship. They are there with you. Listening to a record you feel you are there with them. I’ve been in rooms with people like Mick and Keith, Gram and Chris, Robert and Jimmy playing music. Sitting in with them, creating these things.”

RICHARD COLE: “I don’t think you’ll ever find an English musician who would ever put down those girls who were called groupies. Cos those girls were not sluts or slags or whatever. They fucking saved my arse as far as patience goes, cos you’re talking about twenty year old guys away from home. The girls took care of them and were like a second home. You could trust them. They wouldn’t steal from you. Most of them are dead now.”

MISS PAMELA: “We inspired the guys as much as we were inspired by them. It was very equal. They loved us because we dared to have a blast. We looked after them, picked their clothes and showed them the best restaurants to go to.”

JENNY FABIAN: “You see, from a groupie’s point of view, she was getting what she wanted, not giving him what he wanted. All the groupies wanted this or that pop star – ‘Let’s see who can get him’ – it was like winning a race, that was the preoccupation of the sixties. It was a severe competition, spiced with jealousy. ‘Look at that bitch – she is having drinks with the drummer.’ It was a status thing, so it wasn’t demeaning, because it elevated you in the eyes of other women, who all wanted to get in the bed that you had gotten into, and be sitting there with that drummer. So if you can get in the bed of your choice, you don’t feel demeaned – you may have got there by demeaning methods, but the end justifies the means, or the means justifies the end; we’d do anything to get the pop guy we wanted, or I would, just about, and when you’d done it, you had achieved something – it was hard enough to get them to notice you, much less get in bed with you. The pop guys could afford to be very, very choosy.”

JAN HENDERSON: “[By the 70s] the Sunset Strip was a pale ghost of its former self. Club attendance was down, and the happy hippies, brimming with optimism, were replaced by wayward children from all parts of the country, with lost eyes and lost souls, vainly looking for a Mecca that no longer existed. The drugs in the Canyon went from happy-time fun stuff to the rhinestone cocaine cowboys’ fodder. The earthy mellowness was replaced by a nostril-numbing emigration out of the Canyon Laurel, and was presided over by the mellow mafia, who weren’t what they appeared to be… The coca snowstorm blew through the canyon in the 1970s. Gone was the sense of community and cooperation, replaced by selfishness, greed, narcissism, and frustration. There were a few happy hippies who clung to the canyon walls, but they quickly faded. The dream was over – but nothing lasts forever.”

MISS PAMELA: “Wearing silver lame cut down to the belly button, a fake, tatty leopard coat, ladies’ white patent flats and with a chiseled face full of yesterday’s makeup, Michael Des Barres watched me walk toward him with a lion’s den grin full of chipped British teeth… He was a combination of exotic, aristocratic, angular royalty and debauched, street-rat, riotous self-indulgence.”

MICHAEL DES BARRES: “She has this incredible, infectious, sexy innocence that is just irresistible.”

MISS PAMELA: “When I married Michael, I could finally let go of the magical Fab Four and Paul McCartney’s dreamy thighs, Jimmy Page’s ebony, velvet curls, Gram Parsons’ haunted, anguished sob, Mick Jagger’s haughty, prancing majesty, the wild and free Utopian love-ins, the Sunset Strip, shredding crushed velvet and rotting silk flowers, my rose-colored Mr. Tambourine Man sunglasses, hazy, stoned-out moments with people long gone: Keith Moon, John Bonham, Gram, Brandon DeWilde, Jim Morrison, Miss Christine.”