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

by Pamela Des Barres

  Lori says that for the next few months she went through a "little guilt period," and attempted to walk a semistraight line by spending more time at home and at school. But during this interim, Michael Des Barres showed Jimmy Page her photos, and the rock and roll tom-toms were loudly pounding out the message that Zeppelin's guitar god wanted to meet Lori Lightning. Much to Sable's chagrin, Lori once again beat her to the pop star punch. Lori turned up at the Whisky that fateful night and was whisked back to the Hyatt House with the rock and roll master of romance. "I met him that night; he had called from Texas and told me he had to meet me and I hung up on him. I think he was obsessed with me because he loved that I looked kinda like him: eighty pounds, hair down to here, skinny as can be." Yeah, and I remind her that it might have helped that Jimmy also knew she was an infant. "Yeah, well, I didn't know that then!" Lori laughs loudly. "The obvious factor! That night turned out to be so beautiful though, because I fell in love with him," she sighs. "He was the first man I ever loved, in the sense that he was on this huge pedestal. I loved the way he moved. He was so gentle in bed, and that face. He was like this whimsical celluloid creature-I don't know how to explain it. In my whole life I've never met anybody like him."

  Their torrid affair went on for more than two years. Except for those rare occasions when he was with Charlotte in London, Lori actually believed that her knight in shining satin was being true to her. "I was so naive. I had no concept of it being any other way. I was a baby! He was this god to me-it was like being in love with Elvis Presley. I mean, I'd go to the Forum and there were thirty thousand people, all there for him, and he was with me. He was twenty-nine when I was thirteen," Lori adds. "And you know how old his wife is now? Twenty-nine!"

  How did it feel to be caught up in that particular web? "It was like being with the pope. You don't get concerts like that anymore, massive stadium concerts with a hundred thousand people. And you don't see that kind of magic anymore, that great rock era-three nights at the Forum, thirty thousand people with candles shining. .

  To prove that she was the one he loved, Jimmy encouraged Lori to listen in on phone conversations he had with Charlotte. "He told me it was over with Charlotte and that it had been for years. He'd call her and let me listen so I wouldn't worry. He'd go, `Charlotte, can you go get a number upstairs for me?' and instead of picking up the phone by the bed, she'd go all the way upstairs and take twenty-five minutes, and come all the way down and go, `I can't find the number,' and he'd say, `Why the fuck didn't you pick up the phone up there? Are you stupid?"

  In between Zeppelin jaunts, Lori continued her in-demand teen model career. "I made a few hundred dollars on a job and that would buy my little outfits-I needed money for platforms after all! I didn't even know what money was when I was dating Jimmy. Once he sent me out to buy a dress and gave me $300. I said, `I can't spend that much money!' Once I wanted this beautiful scarab necklace and he got it for me. He liked me in long, flowy skirts. He wanted me to look like a gypsy all the time; an innocent gypsy." With so much time together, what did they talk about? "Love," Lori gushes. "I didn't have much else to talk about at that age! We fucked all the time, you know? I'm kidding; we talked about everything! He was so romantic and wonderful. I never thought of him as crazy-he was so possessive and protective over me. He wouldn't let me drink, and one time I was smoking cigarettes and he went crazy. He made me smoke a whole pack of Salems until I was gagging. I never smoked again. He was like a dad sometimes." For a few moments we marvel over the many sides of James Patrick Page. "And then, one day I found a picture of this transsexual she-male and I'm like, `What's this?' and he said, `I wonder how that got there. I don't know where that came from."'

  Lori says Jimmy called her every day when he got back to England, and in 1975 when Zeppelin played Madison Square Garden, he flew her to New York to stay with him at the Drake Hotel. "That was when their gig money got stolen and the FBI was investigating. Everybody was paranoid about me being around because I was underage. Zeppelin's manager was flipping out. He said, `You've gotta send her home. She can't be at the hotel with the FBI sniffing around.' We had been up all night in the studio. Jimmy was hanging out with Joe Walsh because his daughter was killed in a car accident. They were writing a song for her, and Jimmy was so affected by Joe's sadness that he couldn't sleep. He'd been awake for two days, and that's when I went home."

  Lori had invited an attractive new acquaintance, model Bebe Buell, to hang out with her and the band in New York. "She was my friend, so she brought her pet monkey and got an adjoining suite with Jimmy and me. This is where the whole thing gets all screwed up-Bebe was my guest." Oops. Lori went back to L.A. for a few days until the FBI cleared out, then hightailed it back to Pagey paradise. She had her own key to the suite, and when she strutted in, expecting to fall into his slim, waiting arms, she was horrified to discover Jimmy in bed with her pal Bebe. At least the monkey was nowhere to be seen.

  "I was never supposed to walk in and see that!" Lori fumes. "When I saw him in bed with her, I couldn't deal with it. It destroyed me. I don't know about him, but for me it would never be the same because I trusted him. I thought we had this perfect love and my man on the pedestal had turned into a pig. How dare he be with my girlfriend! It was so disgusting to me."

  Brokenhearted Lori never darkened Jimmy's bed again. "My innocence was shattered and that's what he loved about me. Once my innocence was gone, what was left to love?" When I ask why she thinks Jimmy left her for Bebe, Lori becomes incensed. "I don't think he left me for her! I don't think he ever planned on leaving me. I think he was gonna fool around with Bebe on the side. Yeah, he could have been cheating the whole time, and was gonna keep his little innocent thing put away. I think it tore him apart too, because I was so young, and he knew my heart was pure. It took me years to trust a man again-years! Especially because of the cold and callous way Jimmy did things-he told me he was loyal the whole time and I believed him!"

  After experiencing adult heartache at such a tender age, she was determined not to fall for another musician anytime soon. "I had to grow up all of a sudden. I went from this golden heart full of love to a crushed bubble. I shut myself down emotionally, physically, everything."

  As her heart healed, Lori found she was still crazy about rock and roll and was soon cavorting rampantly with her favorite willing rockers. "Music was in my soul. I was with everybody from David Bowie to Mick Jagger to Jeff Beck to Ronnie Wood to Mickey Finn of T. Rex. I saw Mickey on and off for years; there's another bad-boy lunatic. I went after bad boys because Jimmy had been so sweet and gentle with me, and I had to get him out of my system. Once I had a three-way with Mickey Finn and Angela Bowie. I remember he was slapping her ass so hard, then picked her up and threw her into the air conditioner. I was hiding in the closet because I was so scared. I had Angie's kimono on and was trying on her shoes. They came in and got me and said, `Okay, come out now!' I was wearing her shoes with pom-poms on them, and she gave them to me. I also saw David Bowie on and off for years. I was in that whole circle-you could either fuck a roadie or you could fuck a rock star. I mean, sitting in a room with Ronnie Wood, why would you want to fuck the roadie? How do you turn that down? Ahh, Emerson, Lake & Palmer. I was with Keith Emerson, of course. He was fun because he used to take me riding on his motorcycle. Then later on I had a little thing with Carl Palmer, too! He was so good looking; he was a fucking god. I definitely had flings, but it was all playful, I didn't have another boyfriend for a long time because I couldn't get emotionally involved."

  How had she caught Mick Jagger's roving eye? "He was an accident," Lori smiles. "I used to go the Record Plant every Monday night for Jimmy Keltner's fan club sessions, with incredible musicians like Jesse Ed Davis, Tom Scott, Stevie Wonder, Bobby Keys. One night three Beatles were recording there, and Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger, all at once! Mick was having ego problems with John Lennon: they both wanted to sing and they were both Leos or something." I remind Lori that John Lennon was a Libra. "W
ell, Mick was having an ego problem, so he was pouting in this back room that had beds and shackles. I was there too, escaping from the studio for a while and my friend said, `There's somebody you need to meet.' She took me to the room where Mick was pouting." And how was her frolic with Mr. Jagger? "It was very interesting. I think he was high; he had a little trouble getting a hard-on and coming, but it was fun. We rolled around and kissed and fondled each other and had a blast. After that, I didn't see him for years until I went to New York to stay with Freddie, the drug dealer. Mick was there and we had another little fling. The third time I saw him was at Keith Moon's birthday party at the Beverly Wilshire. Mick came up to the bedroom and that's when we had the best wild sex-he fucked me on the bathroom floor while Keith Moon and everybody were in another room celebrating Keith's birthday! While we were on the marble floor in the bathroom, Bianca was downstairs. It was after she'd had surgery or something; she was recovering at the Beverly Wilshire. People have always told me I resemble her, which I found very flattering. But I was never in love or serious until I met Jimmy Bain, who played in Rainbow; he was probably the most serious boyfriend I had after that awful Jimmy Page nightmare."

  The spangly, glam-slam glitter scene was suddenly history, and Lori settled in with Mr. Bain and got a job working for Deep Purple's Ritchie Blackmore as his assistant. "The English Disco was what kept everybody together and I think it all fell apart when Rodney's closed-everybody went in different directions. Times changed, Star magazine closed, Peterson Publishing folded, punk started coming in. That was when Sable moved to New York with Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls. I bailed 'cause I was more into the rock scene. I never got into punk, like Stiv Bators. I thought it was all dirty and ugly-I was never into that heroin chic. It was also tragic for me because during that period Jimmy got into heroin, which killed me."

  When Sable got back from New York, Lori went to visit her at an apartment in Huntington Beach. "The last time I saw her, she'd had a baby, and I think she was doing a little bit of heroin. She told me she'd gotten pregnant by some skateboarder or lumberjack guy and had named her son Denay. This is the honest-to-God truth: her sister, Corel, played tennis, and this was classic Sable. She said, `Yeah, I named the baby after Corel's tennis racquet.'" This absurd story reminds me of the time I ran into Sable after I had my son Nick, and she suggested that I have another baby "just in case something happens to this one." I hear Sable now has two kids and deals blackjack at a casino in Reno.

  Through her modeling connections, Lori started working in the fashion industry and slowly got caught in an upscale Beverly Hills nightmare. "Everybody was doing disco drugs and getting high in the '80s. I was going to the Daisy, Pip's, and the Candy Store. O. J. Simpson was hanging out every night; it was disco hell. Cocaine creates insanity after all." In her early twenties, Lori says she finally became "responsible" after several friends died. "I ran in to John Bonham at the Rainbow one night and it was the turning point for me. In that teddy-bear voice of his, he said, `Lori, I've been coming here for fifteen years. I don't want to come back in fifteen years and find you still here.' Something rang very true in Bonzo's statement, and I looked around and saw all the same girls-they'd been on the Strip forever. I remember leaving that night and I went out and got a job and got my life together."

  Lori has had several long-term relationships, one of which produced her son Sean, who is now nineteen. "He's a great kid. He surfs every day and wants to be a pro surfer. I raised him and he didn't need his dad around. When I found out I was pregnant, my AA sponsor said, `You have to turn your will and your life over to the care of God, and this is God's will for you.' I had to finally grow up, and that's what changed my life."

  Thankfully, Lori also has a good relationship with her mother. "She knew I was seeing Jimmy because he asked her permission. I think because she had three other daughters getting into so much trouble, my trouble seemed lightweight to her. My sisters were dating low riders and getting arrested for grand theft auto, while I was dating a rock star. I mean, what could be so bad?"

  We've been gabbing for hours and Lori has to get to Pilates class. As she takes her last sip of tea, and gathers up the gypsy skirts she still wears, I ask how she feels about the sadly tarnished G word. "I feel like it's been degraded somewhere along the way, and it was never meant to be negative. Groupies in the old days were girlfriends of the band. They were classy and sophisticated, but now you hear the word groupie and you think of hookers and strippers. In the grand rock days, the groupies were Pattie Harrison, Marianne Faithfull, Linda McCartney, Anita Pallen- berg. They didn't give blow jobs to get backstage-and neither did we!"

  As turbulent as it was, Lori wouldn't have missed a moment of her impassioned past. "I had such a monumental time. I don't regret one second of it. It was such a different time-there was no AIDS-and you were free to experiment. I always asked, `Why me? Why did this incredible person choose me?' It was all so random, and I felt so blessed to be there. I'm on stage, watching Led Zeppelin play in front of thirty thousand people-why me? Or I'm sitting in the studio with three of the Beatles thinking, `Wow, this is pretty incredible-why me?"

  ~wPP~ G°nL~ce.

  There's Only One Way to Rock

  ifteen years ago, while promoting my second book, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, I subjected myself to the slings and arrows of jenny Jones's envious TV audience, adroitly ducking the verbal blows like the pro I had become. One disgruntled middle-ager in Bermuda shorts refused to believe that her sockless hero, Don Johnson, had cavorted with the likes of me. She insisted that the photos of us in my book had been doctored, "touched up," she smugly proclaimed.

  I may not have had too many fans in jenny's peanut gallery, but I certainly had one on stage. Beside me that harrowing afternoon was another defiant groupie, the renowned Sweet, Sweet Connie from Little Rock, Arkansas. When she told me on camera, in front of technicolor America, that I was her hero and she had followed in my footsteps, I was mortified. After all, Connie Hamzy proudly admitted to having sex with no less than thirty music men in one lustful night. What could that kind of behavior have to do with me? I was a one-at-a-time rock star gal, looking for long-term love and romance.

  After recently spending twenty-four hours with Sweet Connie, I'm mortified about being mortified that day. This straighttalking Southerner makes no apologies for her still wildly wanton lifestyle, and I greatly respect her for it. Her beautiful smile is genuine as she reverently offers herself up on a self-designed, sequin-splattered platter to musicians and their compatriots: roadies, soundmen, lighting guys, guitar techs, managers, and promoters. Y'all come! These travelin' men keep Connie's seemingly out-of-control world spinning sweetly on its phallic axis.

  Her list of conquests is quite astonishing. Members of the Who, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, KISS. She made naughty videos with clean-cut Rick Springfield, and got it on with a willing girl in the tour bus while Huey Lewis and the News (and their entire crew) cheered. From all of the Allman Brothers and Van Halen, two of Led Zeppelin, and a threesome with two Eagles to heated cunnilingus with Johnny Carson's bandleader Doc Severinson (!) and a salacious encounter with then governor Bill Clinton, Connie's horny history is unequalled in the annals of groupiedom. She was eternally immortalized in 1973 when Grand Funk Railroad celebrated her expertise in the classic song "We're an American Band": "Out on the road for forty days/Last night in Little Rock put me in a haze/Sweet, Sweet Connie doin' her act/She had the whole show and that's a natural fact." These four lines enhanced Connie's burgeoning reputation and made sure Little Rock was on tour itineraries. Notice that she "had the whole show" and not just the band. Most groupies believed it was beneath them to extend favors to the crew, but from the very beginning Connie spread the love to everyone involved in the creation of the rock and roll spectacle.

  Back in swinging 1974, an intrepid journalist from Cosmopolitan magazine ventured into a broken-down part of Little Rock known as "Dogtown" to have a discussion with
nineteen-year-old Connie at her parents' humble one-story house. As her weary mom, Joetta, hovered uncomfortably nearby, Connie happily admitted to already "taking care of two to three hundred people in the industry." This interview took place thirty-one years ago, and she still hasn't come up for air. The writer describes the shabbiness of Connie's teenage room, the rag dolls on the bed, the hamster rattling around in its cage. It all started when she was fifteen, Connie said, when she was invited backstage at a Steppenwolf concert. She made eyes with the band and paid strict attention to the lyrics of the song, "Hey, Lawdy Mama," all about "cock-teasing girls" who didn't "put out."

  "I kept thinking, gee, they're probably on a plane somewhere thinking, `That Connie, she's just a C.T.' And I decided that I would put out to the next group that came to town."

  I couldn't imagine writing this book without including the most notorious groupie of them all, and I've been looking forward to some hometown hang time with Connie. But I've had to change my Little Rock travel schedule a couple of times, and it's made Connie nervous. Her distinctive rasp has eaten up quite a chunk of my voice mail by the time I finalize the flight and wing my way south. Her house is a mess, she says, warning me about her four twitchy felines and less-than-stellar housekeeping skills. She isn't quite convinced I'm coming anyway, insisting, "I'll believe you when I see you, Paaamela." Up in the sky, I open a recent Spin magazine to peruse a story entitled "Oldest Living Confederate Groupie Tells All."

  The second paragraph reveals an encounter Connie had with a certain American icon: "So I'm out on the tour bus, smokin' dope and blowing roadies ... and who comes into the back lounge? Neil fucking Diamond. Neil looks me up and down and nods his approval, then he gets high with us, and disappears backstage. A few minutes later, his manager says he wants to see me in his dressing room. So I knock on the door, and there's Neil waiting for me in a blue robe. And I didn't just suck him, there was fucking, too." I decide to stop here and get the whole story from the practiced mouth of the muse.