groupie

A groupie is a person who, while he/she may be a fan at some level, seeks intimacy (most often physical, sometimes emotional) with a famous person.

Types of Groupies

Groupie is derived from group in reference to a musical band, but now has more general application. The term "groupie" is often used derogatorily but also used casually and sometimes interchangeably with another word with dual connotations - junkie. Eg."My husband's the football junkie but I'm a Houston Rockets groupie."

Female groupies in particular have a long-standing reputation of being available for sexual intercourse with celebrities, rock stars, professional athletes, politicians, and other public figures regardless of the fact that the objects of their obsession may already be married, have children, or otherwise already in a committed relationship.^{[citation needed]}

There are other male-dominated professions and occupations that attract groupies as well, such as law enforcement and firefighters (especially after 9/11),^[1] the military (these women are sometimes referred to as "Allotment Annies", "debs", and "badge bunnies" hence the sentiment "I love a man in a uniform," camp followers, or EIB's [Everyone In the Barracks]),^[2] preachers and ministers. Even convicted criminals sometimes have followers – see hybristophilia.

In the book Hammer of the Gods (Stephen Davis, 1985), Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant is quoted making a distinction between fans who wanted a brief sexual encounter with a musician, and "groupies" who adopted a musician for the duration of the tour, acting as a surrogate girlfriend or mother, often taking care of the musician's valuables, drugs, wardrobe, and social life. The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously) who were associated with Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention and other late 60s and 70s stars, and the Plaster Casters are probably the best known groupies of this type.

In the Nineties, a new breed of groupie emerged: those who worked within the industry in jobs from booking agent and club manager to publicist and label rep.

Motives of Groupies

Only a small number of groupies are truly promiscuous in that they are willing to trade sexual favors for attention (and often expensive gifts).^{[citation needed]} The techniques used by groupies to get close to their targets vary almost as much as the groupies themselves. Certainly, female groupies can wear clothing that highlights their physical attributes—or remove clothing, for that matter. Sometimes their availability and dogged persistence at pursuing their lust object are enough.^{[citation needed]}

Some groupies go so far as to create an imaginary world^{[citation needed]} wherein they would be the replacements for their targets’ primary relationships (marrying them, or at least becoming their "road wife"), with some making themselves available to any famous celebrity while others focus closely on one particular target (and becoming a "regular").^{[citation needed]} Yet, it is true that musicians marry groupies, as in Pamela Miller marrying Michael Des Barres of Silverhead and the Power Station, and Slash from Guns'n'Roses and Velvet Revolver marrying Perla Hudson.

"Old school" groupies from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties often distinguished themselves with long-term relationships with the bands that could last decades. These relationships were seldom sexual in nature over the long term but based on familiarity with each other. Journalist Margaret Moser and John Cale had a sexually-based groupie/musician relationship in the early Eighties that was replaced by a longtime friendship; two decades later, Moser wrote liner notes for the Sony CD reissue of his Vintage Violence album. At South by Southwest in 2005, Robert Plant interrupted a packed press conference to greet Pamela Des Barres in the audience.

In Film

• Perhaps the best-known work dealing with groupies is the 2000 Cameron Crowe movie, Almost Famous. The film's groupie character, Penny Lane, is modeled after 2 women that Crowe knew, one of whom was the model/singer turned super-groupie Bebe Buell and the other a West Coast-based groupie who actually called herself Pennie Lane. A groupie is defined in that movie as follows: "Groupies sleep with rock stars because they want to be near somebody famous"; the groupie characters insist that they are "Band Aides" instead, stopping short of sex. Later, the groupie called Sapphire (played by Fairuza Balk), looking at rival groupies backstage, observes: "They don't even know what it is to be a fan. You know, to truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts."^[3]

• Groupie Girl (US-title: "I am a Groupie") is a 1970 film by Derek Ford.

• In Pink Floyd The Wall (the Young Lust and One of My Turns pieces), a team of groupies led by Jenny Wright's character infiltrates Pink's backstage. Jenny's character succeeds in getting to Pink's hotel room only to be driven out by his rage-filled breakdown.

• In the movie Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon played a character named after groupies called Baseball Annies.

• In the 2002 comedy movie, The Banger Sisters, Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn both play middle-aged women who were groupies on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s. Hawn's character, Suzette, is an unemployed bartender, still wild as ever and somewhat delusional about her importance as a groupie. Sarandon's character, Lavinia, had re-invented herself by marrying a wealthy lawyer with political ambitions. She's become a suburban housewife who doesn't want her family to know that she was a groupie as a youth. They meet up 30 years later in Phoenix, Arizona and the encounter forces them both to come to grips with their past. The Banger Sisters was originally slated for release around the same time as Almost Famous but held back.

• In The School of Rock, Summer adamantly refuses to be given the role of 'groupie' as she says: "I researched groupies on the Internet. They're sluts! They sleep with the band!" To which all she gets in reply from Dewey Finn: "No....they're like cheerleaders."

• In the biopic Sid and Nancy, Chloe Webb portrays Nancy Spungen, a punk and rock band groupie prior to becoming the girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious.

• Nell Campbell played a groupie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In the opening titles, she is credited as "Columbia: A Groupie," and fawns over the main character, a scientist.

• Shelley Plimpton' (mother of Martha Plimpton and former wife of Keith Carradine) played a sad little groupie hoping for sex with Arlo Guthrie in Alice's Restaurant.

In print

Carol Bedford wrote a book about her experiences as one of the Apple scruffs, an unusually dedicated group of fans who waited for the Beatles outside Abbey Road studio for several years during the late 60s and early 70s. These "groupies" did not seek a physical relationship with the Beatles; they just wished to be near them whenever possible, and to assist them in any way they could. Her book, "Waiting For The Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story" (1985) is now somewhat hard to find. George Harrison wrote a song for them, "Apple Scruffs", on his album, "All Things Must Pass", and some of the "scruffs" were even recruited to sing backup on Beatles songs such as "Across the Universe."

Pamela Des Barres wrote two books detailing her experiences as a groupie, I'm With The Band (1987) and Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (1993), as well as another non-fiction book, Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon. Her most recent book, Let's Spend the Night Together (2007), is a collection of wildly varied interviews with classic "old school" groupies including Catherine James, Connie Hamzy, Cherry Vanilla, Dee Dee Keel, Margaret Moser, and Patti Johnsen as well as modern groupies like Lexa Vonn and the Plastics. Des Barres, who married rock star-actor Michael Des Barres, scored a coup for the book when she got cult actress Tura Satana, rock muse Bebe Buell, actress Patti D'Arbanville, and Cassandra Peterson (better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) to talk about their relationships with musicians.

Bebe Buell wrote a book about her experiences entitled Rebel Heart. Buell has gone on record as saying she does not consider herself a groupie. However, she is still labelled as such and often associated with them in books like Pamela Des Barres' Let's Spend the Night Together. Buell prefers to be called a muse, a fair term given her serious relationships with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, Todd Rundgren, and Elvis Costello and her musical pursuits. Her daughter with Steven Tyler is actress Liv Tyler.

Karrine Steffans authored Diary of a Video Vixen. The book detailed her liaisons with famous hip-hop stars and athletes as well as the time she spent as a video girl and groupie. Steffans is the voice of a new breed of groupies, those that work within the industry and enjoy its perks with gusto.

Morgana Welch, an attractive privileged Los Angeles teen, had relationships with Randy California, Led Zeppelin, Roy Harper, and other artists in the early 1970s. Her exploits at the Whiskey A Go-Go and other L.A. hotspots during the Strip's glam glory days of the Seventies are recounted in Michael Walker's book Laurel Canyon and on her website Hollywood Diaries, as well as her upcoming book of the same name.

Margaret Moser, veteran rock journalist for the Austin Chronicle, has written extensively about her groupie experiences. The leader of a GTO's-like gaggle called the Texas Blondes, Moser was inspired by critic Ann Powers' 1993 New York Times story to initiate an acclaimed Groupies panel in 1993 at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, and repeated it at Carla DiSantis' Rockrgirl Conference in Seattle, Washington in 2000. She is the author of three books including Rock Stars Do The Dumbest Things.

Catherine James, actress and model, writes about her life as a throwaway teen who found adventure as a groupie in the upcoming Sixties memoir Dandelion. James was not only celebrated in life and song by such musicians as Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall, she and Moody Blues/Wings' Denny Laine had a son. After a career modeling with Wilhelmina agency in New York, James relocated to Los Angeles, sometimes working as stand-in for Diane Keaton.

Connie Hamzy, the Little Rock, Arkansas groupie immortalized in Grand Funk's "We're An American Band," unexpectedly found the spotlight back on her when it was revealed former President Bill Clinton dallied with her. Long known for her wild exploits with the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, and other bands, Hamzy still resides in Little Rock, keeping a reasonably low profile until the next group rolls into town. Hamzy's book Confessions of Rock Groups, co-written with Bob Andrews, is out of print but rumored to be available again soon.

Francie Schwartz's book Body Count describes her brief romance with Paul McCartney during the making of The Beatles ("White Album") in 1968.

Germaine Greer, the feminist writer and academic, told the New York Times in an 1971 interview that she had been a supergroupie. "Supergroupies don't have to hang around hotel corridors," she said. "When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren't possessive about their conquests.^[4]

In music

Michael Jackson's 1988 hit single Dirty Diana, which propelled him to the world record of five number-one hit singles from one album, with his revolutionary album Bad, is about a female groupie called Diana who is pursuing him.

Tone Loc's Wild Thing seems to describe a groupie in the last quatrain: "...at the local Discothèque... she wanted to come on stage, and do a little dance... when the show was finished, I took her around the way, and what'd you know, she was good to go, without a word to say....".

"The Mud Shark" by Frank Zappa was recorded live during a Fillmore East gig in June 1971. The song lyrics reference the infamous shark episode involving members of Led Zeppelin and a groupie that allegedly occurred at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle, Washington on July 28, 1969.

The song Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers briefly concerns over groupies.

Led Zeppelin's Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman) is about a groupie who annoyed the band early in their career.

Pink Floyd's Young Lust is about the protagonist seeking gratification from a "dirty woman", apparently a groupie, and One of My Turns describes the breakdown that follows.

"Superstar" is a pop song written by Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett. It is a love song about groupies, with the story told from the point of view of the groupie rather than from the opinion of the star. The song appears on the Joe Cocker album, Mad Dogs and Englishmen and is sung by Rita Coolidge. It was performed live by Bette Midler on The Tonight Show. In 1971, it was a #2 hit song and Grammy Award nominee for the Carpenters (some of the lyrics were changed to better fit their cleancut image). The song has also been successfully recorded by Luther Vandross and Sonic Youth.

Also in 1970, Tony Joe White's "Groupy Girl" was a minor hit on the British charts and elsewhere.

The Dr. Hook song "Roland the Roadie and Gertrude the Groupie" depicts and lampoons/celebrates the groupie stereotype in a tragic romance. "Cover of the Rolling Stone" also notes that the band has "a lot of little teenage, blue-eyed groupies who do anything we say."

"Apple Scruffs" (All Things Must Pass, 1970) by George Harrison was recorded in tribute to a highly dedicated group of teenaged girls who staked out the Beatles' Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row, Abbey Road Studios, and Paul McCartney's home on Cavendish Avenue. The girls often slept outside in rough weather, waiting for a glimpse of a Beatle. The Beatles' song "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" (Abbey Road, 1969) refers to the day that some of the Apple Scruffs climbed into Paul McCartney's house via an upstairs bathroom window and raided his closet for a pair of pants which they took turns wearing. They also took a framed photograph, which they later returned at Paul's request. A complete description is available in Carol Bedford's "Waiting For The Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story" (1985).

"Famous Groupies" (London Town, 1978) is an undistinguished song by Paul McCartney & Wings.

Ian Hunter's "Once Bitten, Twice Shy", (later a hit for the band Great White) is about groupies and musicians. Sample lyric: "You didn't know how rock-n-roll looked/Until you saw your sister with a guy from the group/Halfway home in the parking lot/From the look in her eyes she was giving what she got".

In the 1973 rock song by Grand Funk Railroad, We're an American Band, the band sings about the groupies they encountered while touring. In one verse, the women were referred to as "chiquitas". In another part of the lyrics one famous groupie, Connie Hamzy, was mentioned by her nickname. "Sweet sweet Connie/was doing her act/she had the whole show/and that's a natural fact."

"What's Your Name" by Lynyrd Skynyrd, about a one night stand with a nameless groupie, reached #13 on the single airplay charts in January 1978.

The AC/DC song "The Jack" describes the aftermath of one of Bon Scott's many sexual encounters, this time with one of the band's groupies -- through playing-card metaphors, the song attempts to portray Scott's gonorrhea the following morning. Later, a much more direct version was released, with the metaphors replaced by contemporary English and Australian colloquialisms.

In the AC/DC song "Whole Lotta Rosie" is about a large groupie that singer Bon Scott encountered. It is said that "Rosie" is one of the best lovers he's encountered

The Guns N' Roses song "It's So Easy", from their debut album Appetite for Destruction is largely about groupies and the fact that getting signed suddenly increased their interest in the band.

The Japanese band Pizzicato Five paid homage to the groupie lifestyle in 1994 on a track from their Japan-only album Overdose called "If I Were A Groupie". The song originally featured vocalist Maki Nomiya singing in Japanese over a documentary recording of an American groupie recounting her exploits with glee ("The Groupies", c.1969, produced by Alan Lorber), while a serious Japanese voice delivered a simultaneous translation. The following year the song was re-recorded (presumably for copyright reasons) for the band's second U.S. album release The Sound of Music by Pizzicato Five, with one of the band's U.S. management team providing the "groupie's" spoken words.

Mark Knopfler sings "Well, them groupie girls ain't what they're cracked up to be..." on the song "There'll Be Some Changes Made" from the album Neck & Neck with Chet Atkins.^[5]

Alternative metal band System of a Down have a song about groupies in their second album Toxicity. The song is called "Psycho" and here is a characteristic part of the lyrics: "Psycho, groupie, cocaine, crazy/So you want to see the show/You really don't have to be a ho"

In 1992, Juliana Hatfield released the album I See You, which included the track "Rider" with the lyrics: "She has no brain at all/Her head's about to fall/People always laughing/In her face and behind her back...You stupid groupie/You stupid slut/By the time you're bruised and bloody/Have you had enough?/Or is there any blood left in you/Or are you really just a whore?/Do you think about what you've been doing/Or don't you wanna know?"

In 1971, King Crimson released the album Islands, which included the track "Ladies of the Road", which is supposedly about groupies, although fans have suggested that the song might be a joke.

Snoop Dogg has recorded a song "Groupie Love" 213 with Nate Dogg and Warren G.

Chamillionaire has recorded the track "Industry Groupie" which features in his second album "Ultimate Victory".

References

External links

• Let's Spend the Night Together
• [1]
• Lust for Life: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Groupie by Margaret Moser, Austin Chronicle.
• Songs About Groupies
• "What Is A Groupie, Exactly?"
• Deadspin - Sports Groupies
• Groupies: The Good, The Bad and The Nauseauting
• USA Today Article about firefighter and police groupies after 9/11/01
• "Story of a French groupie" - in French

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