Category: Gratuitous Chick Pics

This one’s named Monica Barbaro (no, never heard of her either), but she plays Jan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic.

That ol’ Commie Joan Baez can only dream of ever looking this good.

Before anyone gets all moralistic and sniffy on me, let me preface this post by stating that what I’m going to be talking about took place in the 1970s.  For those unfamiliar with the decade, it was a time when we did all sorts of strange stuff, and in those pre-AIDS days there was a lot of sex going on.

Having once been a rock musician, let’s just say that I’m somewhat familiar with groupies, both the term and its membership (so to speak), although I was not an enthusiastic user of same.  The ones I knew back then (in Johannesburg, principally) were kinda sad, really:  we all knew who they were (hi, Charmaine and Bev!), we knew where they were to be found, we knew them as pass-arounds, but none of us really despised them.  (I know that sounds strange, but it’s nevertheless true.)  You see, everybody was promiscuous — college students, musicians, secretaries, supermarket check-out clerks, opticians’ receptionists (hi, Jen!);  whether male or female, there were high jinks a-plenty.  That a few girls happened to prefer hanging out with musicians, pretty much any musicians, was little different from the girls who hung around outside the College of Medicine at any university.

But then there were the Celebrity Groupies, who will feature prominently from now on.  Many were from “good families” and not just low-class no-hopers (like so many were).  What they did was hang around the famous bands and musicians, and what they liked was the rock musician lifestyle:  the touring, the limos, the parties and being with famous people (in this case musicians).

As I’ve written before:  yes, they were young — in some cases scandalously so — but then again, so were many of the musicians.  Today, there’d be a series of prosecutions (like this one) and much censorious finger-wagging;  back then it was just something that happened.

The difference is that most of the girls below ended up writing about their experiences as groupies, and making more than a little money thereby, too.  And people bought those anthologies because, well, a huge number of people are fame-groupies as well — little different, in my opinion, from the groupies themselves — as the success of magazines like People  and Us  can attest.  Anyway, here are the girls:

Audrey Hamilton

Bebe Buell

Cherry Vanilla

(unlike the others, Cherry was actually a well-known rock musician herself — her backing band back then was The Police, FFS)

Chris O’Dell

(she actually became a well-known tour manager after a while)

Cleo Odzer

Connie Hamzy

Cynthia Albritton

(Also known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, for the plaster molds she made of her various lovers’ penises)

Sable Starr and Lori Mattix (l-r)
(both lost their virginity in their very early teens, Sable to David Bowie and Lori to Jimmy Page;  here with Slade’s bassist Dave Hill)

Sable

Lori

Morgana Welch

Pamela De Barres

Roxana Shirazi

Tawny Kitaen

Tura Satana

Uschi Obermayer

After the Seventies, they went on to have careers as actresses, singers or entrepreneurs, or lives as wives and mothers to “ordinary” men.

What I find interesting is that almost without exception, none of these women actually expressed regret for their groupie activities, but just shrugged it off as a life experience and some even looked back on it all with fondness.  And why not?  It was the Seventies.