Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies

by Pamela Des Barres

  "It all happened so fast. Everything seems to merge together in a big mountain of Mounds Bars! A girl gave me LSD when I was fifteen, so everything's all one big spin. She said `Do you have lemons in your mouth?' 'cause she wanted to make sure the acid was working, making my mouth pucker. I could see her wicked smile in the car mirror and she cackled at the effect it had on me. Then she took me home and left me there. My parents were in the next room, fighting or fucking, then the walls started to breathe. All the gypsy bracelets turned into snakes and crawled up my chubby arms. I looked out the window and there was a huge circus going on in the carport with Ferris wheels, clowns, fireworks, and a fun house raging. I didn't know how to tell my parents what was happening, because I'd never heard of this stuff. I knew I'd lost my mind, but they didn't have to know. I was totally terrified by this external trip, but the unknown had captured me, and my internal vision would never regain consciousness. My mind was no longer a virgin and would lust for lunacy for many moons. I went right into the radio, sliding into the airwaves every time a song played. I crawled inside the radio, and never came out again."

  It was when she heard Don Covay's sultry "Have Mercy Baby" that our brave new worldly doll unloaded the dullsville "Judy" and never looked back. She discovered that the beatniks had fled touristy North Beach and taken over a coffeehouse across from "Panhandle Park" called the Blue Unicorn, where electricity brewed with the coffee. "My first screwing experience was with a beatnik, an older man, up in an attic with rows of mattresses. He ripped open my virginity and took it, and Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar, moaning contagious words of wisdom, and took the world's virginity too. And here came the hippies! I think I also fucked one of the members of the Sopwith Camel."

  Mercy soon ran into the multiethnic Bernardo, a breathtaking androgynous creature who inspired her to throw away the bellbottom jeans and become more multihued. She was gaga over the ringleted Romeo, but he had a penchant for the boys. Still, they recognized a similar madness and became quite an alarming team.

  Just like most parents of teenagers in that disorderly era, Mercy's hardworking mom didn't have a clue how to handle her suddenly unrecognizable daughter. "I didn't have a home life. My mother was at work all the time and my dad had already tried to commit suicide three times. The poor man had no idea what amphetamines were doing to him. He destroyed his liver and pancreas and couldn't drink. I never wanted to go home, and when I did they told me I couldn't go to Haight-Ashbury anymore. So I said, `Just take me to the juvenile authorities. I'd rather be locked up.' So they did."

  Mercy was in and out of juvie, and the worst part for her was when they confiscated her diet pills. She remembers arguing with fellow bad-girl inmates about what station to listen to. "We fought over the radio. The blacks had the radio on Sunday, which I didn't mind at all because I loved black music by that point." Strangely, despite her being incarcerated, some of Mercy's new friends spotted her out on the scene. "People would say they saw me at Fillmore when I was locked up because I was transcendentally meditating myself to places I wanted to be. I'm serious."

  One deep night something happened that briefly catapulted Mercy out of her teenage jail cell. "Juvenile hall was way up on a high hill and I woke up when this light started flashing in the playground-this thing spun down, a saucer, just like you see in the movies, a big silver disc-it hovered above and in color vibrations it said, `Walls cannot hold your soul,' then Star-Trekked down to the ground. I never forgot that. Walls cannot hold your soul." Soon after this extraordinary incident, a kindly probation officer from Youth Authority took pity on Mercy, giving her an afternoon to gather some belongings to bring back. Silly man. Instead, she flew the coop with Bernardo, splitting immediately for L.A.

  Mercy hadn't been in Hollyweird long before she found herself ensnared in Miss Christine's vault bedroom at the Zappa cabin with six GTO's. We madly scribbled nutty prose for the upcoming album, while our newest member crossed her arms and glowered. From somewhere under her zany layered ensemble, an embellished diary appeared, upon which was scrawled "Scarlet & Merry Gold." Astoundingly, she began to jot down some words of her own, then presented her offering, a startling little ditty entitled "Shock Treatment." A few days later she handed us our album title as well-Permanent Damage. A condition she was obviously quite familiar with.

  Gradually Mercy began to grow on us, like a garish barnacle with a screw loose, and the discovery of the obsessive groupie heart lurking under all those belts, vests, and scarves clinched the deal.

  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 Mercy's pick to lick, we bonded in empathetic Rolling Stones awareness. It turned out "Scarlet" was her secret name for the brazenly bisexual Bernardo, and "Merry Gold" was a reminder of Mr. Jones's cheeky wit and gleaming golden locks. Despite her eerie aura, I soon discovered Mercy was a chick after my own heart. We got sisterly close, but it was years before she revealed Judy Peters, the flip side of the fearsome Mercy Fontenot.

  Brian was the only white guy on Mercy's list. The rest were fine black soul brothers. I forget her entire list, but I do recall several old blues guys like Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, and Muddy Waters. Also Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett, along with a Temptation or two. I remember she adored David Ruffin, and that ingenious of sleazeball Chuck Berry. We all believed that our horny wishes would come true. I managed to merge with my entire hit list with the exception of Bob Dylan-but hey, I'm not dead yet, right?

  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." The rest of the GTO's snickered about our devotion to Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, but Mercy and I were proudly broadening our musical horizons. She certainly enhanced my appreciation of the blues and the steamy sexiness of R & B.

  Even though I was consuming plenty of illegal substances myself, I worried about Mercy's constant state of intoxication. She had already taken hundreds of acid trips, and was way too familiar with a cornucopia of pharmaceutical delights, thanks to her dad and his skinny model gal pal. She was always up, over, under, sideways, or down, to paraphrase the Yardbirds, but her special relationship with angel dust really freaked me out. She huffed that sickly sweet, minty joint and her mind conjured up all sorts of twisted out-of-the-question scenarios. When she started dabbling with heroin and needles, she was really breaking the rules. I was perpetually worried that our mentor, the oh-so-drug-free Mr. Zappa, would find out about her nasty illegal habits and bust up our groupie group. In fact, several of the GTO's were breaking that critical rule and becoming hard drug devotees. Even after a blotto Brian Jones drowned in his Winnie the Pooh swimming pool in the British countryside, Mercy kept on popping, dropping, and shooting up with alarming frequency.

  She was heart shattered about Brian "Merry Gold" Jones succumbing to his hellacious habits, the first rock star to hit the high road at age twenty-seven. And she was devastated when Otis Redding and most of his band, the BarKays, died in a plane crash soon after she saw them perform at the Monterey Pop Festival. She carried around a photo torn out of jet magazine-a chilling shot of the soul god, covered in icicles, frozen to his seat after being pulled from the cold, merciless sea.

  Sure enough, my frantic fears were realized when Mercy and Christine were caught crimson-handed with the bad goods. Christine's folks took her back to San Pedro, but Mercy spent a couple dismal months behind bars
at Sybil Brand. Meanwhile, Frank disbanded and disowned the GTO's, even threatening to shelve our treasured Permanent Damage.

  When Mercy got out of the clink, her newfound friend Chuck Wein was there to gather her up. Also known as the Wizard, Chuck was a cosmic director-protege of Andy Warhol embarking on his own feature film, Rainbow Bridge, to be shot in Hawaii. He gave Mercy the choice part of playing herself, and she was soon perched on the edge of a volcano with costar Jimi Hendrix. "Jimi broke down and did the movie when they gave him angel dust," she recalls. "I danced on stage with him. I was really high on pot and dust. It changed all the dimensions. I loved that horrifying drug." In one of Mercy's zonky visions, she saw the gloomy future. "Over this bridge comes Jimi and his manager, Michael Jeffries, and I'm looking at them and it's very Star-Trekkie. Suddenly they turn into little glimmering things and fall to the ground, like holograms. I saw them both disappear into thin air, and then they really did." True, Michael Jeffries soon died in a plane crash, and Jimi OD'd in London. "The first time I ever saw Jimi at the Monterey Pop Festival, I thought he was Mick Jagger in black face," Mercy suddenly remembers. "I was high on the STP they put in the punch, and he was at the top of the stairs with Brian Jones. I thought they were Brian and Mick."

  While the GTO's waited around, hoping our personal opus would be released, Mercy decided to hitchhike to Memphis so she could be in close proximity to the remaining BarKays. She had just taken up with an extremely talented youngster, seventeenyear-old guitar whiz Shuggie Otis, son of legend Johnny Otis, and they were in the process of driving each other crazy. A few weeks earlier she had dreamed she would soon meet her future husband and described the boy pretty accurately. She moved in with the family and enjoyed being around blues masters like Big Joe Turner and Charles Brown, who recorded for Johnny's label, Blues Spectrum, but she was spun out on speed and too wrapped up in the troubled teenager. "I just wanted to get away from Shuggie because he was all I could think about. He dominated my whole life, and it wasn't going anywhere-and besides, I always had a crush on the BarKays."

  After a perilous cross-country hitchhike, Mercy and her friend Marquise found their way to mecca-the parking lot of Stax Records. But the vibrant white chicks weren't alone for long. "Yeah, I wanted to sleep with the BarKays," Mercy admits. "They were freaky looking, talented blacks." Instead of the BarKays, however, the girls were approached by legendary musician Teenie Hodges, who wondered if they'd like to check out another studio across town. "These were session guys-the Hodges boys from Hi Records. They took us out to the ghetto, to this little poverty-stricken Royal Studios, and cut some tracks really fast. They were amazing, and I said, `Oh my God, listen to these guys.'" After the tunes were recorded, Mercy and Marquise went along for the ride to meet the singer. "They took me over to a tract house to pick up this guy from Detroit. When he opened the door, he said, `My name is Al Green,' and I said, `Fine."'

  The singer's slick suit and trenchcoat seemed pretty square to Mercy, so when he asked if she'd like to share a little intimacy, she declined. "He didn't seem like my type. At that time he had a hit record, a cover of the Temptations' `I Can't Get Next To You,' and we ran around to the record stores looking for it." Then they all went back to the studio so Al could lay down his vocal tracks. "And then I said, `Oh my God! What is this?"

  After the mind-boggling session, the group headed for Hernando's Hideaway, a club partly owned by Elvis himself, on the outskirts of town. Everybody was smoking pot, and Mercy was kicking herself under her stratum of skirts for turning Al Green down. "Of course, if I had heard him sing I would have said yes right away."

  Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed a year before and civil unrest was raging, but Mercy was such a progressive misfit she didn't understand why she and Marquise had to duck down as they drove through certain parts of town. "I was an out-to-lunch hippie. I didn't know why I had to get out of the car in certain areas, and why whites and blacks were meeting at Hernando's Hideaway. The house band was Ronnie Milsap. A lot of black musicians were playing with Elvis at the time and they talked about how great he was. You had Steve Cropper, the BarKays, and Booker T. meeting on the outskirts of town."

  Mercy says being with Teenie Hodges in Memphis was like hanging out with God. "The BarKays started paying attention to us and we even got Ike Turner in that mix. We were the only white people in the place." I ask Mercy if she felt exotic. "What do you mean exotic? We were white! Ike Turner took us to the hotel where these crazy lesbians were eating each other out, and he asked me to stay, and I told him Marquise was my girlfriend." Poor cheatin' Ike, Mercy had her heart set on Al Green. "I tried to call Al from a phone booth and a girl answered, so I let it go."

  Back in L.A. Mercy got more hung up on Shuggie, but since he was running around with other girls, she decided to write Al Green a little note and included her phone number. "I walked in the door one night after a date with Shuggie and my roommate tells me Al Green called. In front of Shuggie! It was a few months after I met him, and Al was getting really huge, filling auditoriums." Turns out Al Green had called Mercy from Disneyland, where he was performing. The next time he called, Mercy was home. "I picked up the phone and he said, `Come on over here."

  Al was tantalized by Mercy's letter, asking if she had written it by herself. "I told him I didn't have anybody write it for me and he was amazed. I was on speed and the whole thing was very dramatic." Mercy was much thinner and wore a long, white, clingy Moroccan robe to seduce America's foremost soul singer. "I was kinda cute then and he said, `Oh my God, you've lost a lot of weight.' He smoked pot you know," she adds conspiratorially. "Here was the greatest sex star on the planet and there I was, getting high with him." Mercy remembers that Al had an elaborate tape deck system, and as they made love he played his own songs over and over, the entire time. "It was all set up," she recalls. "I remember thinking he was ego ridden. All through the sex, he listened to himself, one tape after another."

  Mercy didn't know whether to be offended or grateful the next morning when Al opened a suitcase full of money. "The finishing touch was when he gave me five dollars. His entire suitcase was full of cash, because he got paid the night before at the Forum. He opened it up and gave me five dollars. Thanks, Al, yeah. .." When Mercy opened the hotel room door to leave, she says two of Al's female employees had their ears pressed so tight to the door, they literally fell at her feet. "I read later they were blackmailing him," she says. "I didn't see him again because soon after that, I moved in with Shuggie."

  When she hears Al's music, does Mercy think about that long ago night? "Always. It trips me out. I go back to being there with him. He was an extremely funny guy. I don't know why I didn't pursue that one."

  As the GTO's came to an end, Mercy's lovefest with the teenage guitar genius and her dangerous liason with speed consumed her life. Shuggie was high on coke and often on the road with his dad. He was also dallying with the daughter of a blues great as well as one of the Otisettes. Because Mercy was jealous and wanted to make Shuggie green-eyed too, she had an encounter of the strangest kind at the Happiest Place on Earth the night Johnny Otis opened for edgy legend Chuck Berry. "I had my uppers and downers and Valiums and everything, and I took a handful of meds and got really loaded. Shuggie was with this girl, Terry, and they just disappeared together."

  Mercy had always been intrigued by Mr. Berry, so when he rolled down the road at Disneyland, she was ready for him. "This Cadillac comes creeping along and Chuck gets out and I say, `Oh, man, I've been waiting for you all my life,' and he says, `Well, come on!' So we go into his trailer and I have two things going in my brain at the same time: I really want to go home with Chuck because I want to see what his life's all about, and the second thing is I'm gonna try to make Shuggie Jealous. I had this dueling banjo in my head, and like I said, I was so loaded that I cannot remember what took place in that trailer. I think I went to bed with Chuck because his wife showed up, mad. And he had this fascination with people going number two, so he had me
go to the bathroom in this bucket-I do remember that-and he took a photo of me and said, `I have a collection of everybody that I have sex with.' There's a knock at the door and someone says, `You're on, Chuck.' So I get up and I walk out of the trailer with him, and he lets me carry his guitar. I'm thinking, `Oh, man, this is it. This is really it; I am gonna make Shuggie so jealous!' But I look around and there's nobody backstage to witness this."

  In spite of the pie-eyed chaos and constant tribulation, months later, when Mercy got pregnant, the only recourse was for her and nineteen-year-old Shuggie to tie the knot. "I'm sorry, but I don't really remember my pregnancy. Here I am, getting fat again, after I got skinny-but I thought I was happy at that point."

  During her pregnancy, Mercy's father finally managed to kill himself-sitting at a table in her mother's apartment, dressed up in a suit and tie. Always a fan of celebrities (he kept a snapshot of himself posing with Ann-Margret in his wallet), he addressed his suicide note to a couple of stars of current TV commercials: "I've had a good life here, don't be sad. I want to say goodbye to Rodney Allen Rippey and Morris the Cat."

  Mercy did stop taking speed while she was pregnant, and I remember visiting her in the hospital. Originally she was going to call her baby boy "Jinx," but thought better of it and finally settled on "Lucky." But even the precious bundle couldn't change the misery around him. Once Mercy came home to find that Lucky's daddy had hacked off all his divine blond ringlets. "Shuggie had a violent, violent, violent, violent, violent temper. They were giving him antidepressants-he was chemically imbalanced. One time he tried to choke me and his dad came in and hit him. He said, `I've never hit you before in your life, but you cannot choke your wife.'" The raucous marriage lasted three years.