She was on her way to Disneyland when she answered her car phone, and said, “I have been coming here forever. I came here in 1968 and I was on acid. That was something. But I have been coming here a lot over the decades. I have what I call Disney-mania.”
Her name then was Pamela Ann Miller, and she was a California high schooler from nearby Reseda bewitched by the music of the ‘60s and drawn in freewheeling and intimate fashion to the bands and the young men who made it and the lifestyle they lived.
Her name is now Pamela Des Barres and her home in Los Angeles is filled with dozens (or more like hundreds) of things she has collected from Disneyland. But that’s just one of the passions in a life filled with dozens (or more like hundreds) of them. The one that shadows and defines them all is rock ‘n’ roll, because that is what drew her into the music business and allowed for relationships with such musicians as Jimmy Page, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and so many others that she would be known as the Queen of the Groupies.
It is a title that she now, at 76 years old, still wears proudly.
“I have no regrets in my life part because I don’t believe in regret,“ she says. “I do wonder what if I hadn’t done so many drugs, but I don’t wish I had followed another path.”
She’s too busy for regrets, very much alive and lively. She is also quite a talented and honest writer and performer. That stems from the diaries she’s kept since her mother gave her her first one on Christmas when she was 9. Those are what she used as the foundation for her first book, “I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,” which launched her fame in 1987.
It was a controversial sensation. As the Tribune’s Clarence Petersen put it in a review, “This is an often touching book about a teenage girl with crushes and with an intense desire to be a unique individual even as she took part in the movements of the 1960s. … Some readers no doubt will find the book offensive; those with young daughters may find it terrifying. But it strikes me as honest and revealing.”
Other books followed, including “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies.” Actress Kate Hudson used these in preparation for her role as the young groupie Penny Lane in the 2000 movie “Almost Famous.”
In addition to her writing, Des Barres has been an actress, historian and consultant and tours nationally and internationally with a one-woman show and a series of writing workshops.
She will be here this week, staying with her friend, the writer Linda Beckstrom, and conducting two writing workshops for groups of about a dozen women and performing her one-woman show at the Constellation.
She does not like to detail what goes on in the three hour workshops because there is a spontaneity to them. But Beckstrom, who has participated in more than most anyone, tells me, “Pam has a way of making people feel very comfortable about expressing themselves. She creates a safe space.”
She and Des Barres met through Angalia Bianca, a convicted felon with whom Beckstrom wrote a spectacular book, “In Deep: How I Survived Gangs, Heroin, and Prison to Become a Chicago Violence Interrupter” (Chicago Review Press). I called it “powerful and important” it won the Chicago Writers Association’s 2020 Book of the Year award for traditional nonfiction.
As for Des Barres and her one-woman shows, Beckstrom says, “She is great on stage, very engaging and her stories. … Well, she’ll read a bit from her books and tell stories that take the audience into the golden age of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Des Barres does say this: “Most of those who attend the workshops have read books or know a little about me, my love of music, my free-spiritedness.”
Part of the three hour writing sessions involve giving the women writing prompts and 12 minutes to write and then read them. “It can get pretty outrageous because they are writing about things that they have never written about before,” she says.
Though there may be some who consider Des Barres a relic of a bygone time or a slap in the face of our collective morality and decorum, some of those same people likely fill stadiums to hear gray-haired bands, devour a Keith Richards biography or have deified Hendricks or Morrison.
“I want to redeem the word ‘groupie,’” Des Barres says. “Anyone who doesn’t like that word, gets upset by it, seems to me just jealous or sexist.”
Des Barres is a thoughtful, smart and sophisticated woman. When one considers how many of her former contemporaries did not survive the 1960s, she is easy to admire for such qualities as her durability, focus and determination. And talent.
At her show or her seminars, you will hear many stories. You might hear about one musician with whom she did not sleep, Frank Zappa. He helped Pam and some of her friends form a performance art and music troupe he called the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), produced their only studio release (1969’s “Permanent Damage”), and had them open for his band The Mothers of Invention. She was a nanny for the Zappa kids and found time to perform handstands in Morrison’s living room and accompany Mick Jagger to Altamont.
She might her her talk about her old rock ‘n’ roll friend, Cynthia Albritton, who was born and died in Chicago and who was better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, an artist who fashioned sculptures of rock stars’ private parts, starting with Jimi Hendrix’s after his 1968 show at the Civic Opera House.
Maybe she’ll talk about 1974, when she fell in love with musician Michael Des Barres. They lived together and married in 1978. The wild times continued, even as a child was born, a boy named Nicholas. But Michael was grabbed by drugs and the pair divorced in 1991. She might tell you that he has since kicked drugs and lives in Great Britain. They talk often and she hopes to see him in May, when she’ll be performing at the West Hampstead Arts Club in London.
“An Intimate Evening with Pamela Des Barres” is 8:30 p.m. April 23 at Constellation, 3111 N. Western Ave.; tickets $35-$50 at constellation-chicago.com. The Women’s Writing Workshop will be 7 p.m. April 22-23; tickets ($175) and more information at www.pameladesbarresofficial.com
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
