Lost Notes: Groupies

A teen magazine so daring, so outrageous, so scandalizing and sexually suggestive that it only lasted…five issues. Star Magazine: from the publishing empire that brought you Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Guns & Ammo, and later in the 90s, Sassy, there was, in 1973, a red-hot new music rag that glamorized the teenage groupie lifestyle rampant on the Sunset Strip. Or did it? We asked the original staff who made the magazine: who, exactly, was a Star girl?

As a girl, Dee Dee Keel ditched the doldrums of Venice for the thrills of Hollywood. Just a few years later, she would soon become the woman behind the world-famous Whisky A Go-Go... as well as an infamously active groupie. Meanwhile, Morgana Welch, a scene-savvy Beverly Hills High Schooler, gets in with Rodney Bingenheimer, Led Zeppelin, and other powerful party boys and scene insiders, as she tries to chart her own path into the rock n roll lifestyle—Hollywood encounter by Hollywood encounter.

Venice Beach teen Dee Dee Keel was desperate to find out what was happening behind the scenes, in the clubs and hotel rooms of Hollywood: so she tracked an intriguing local rocker, Jim Morrison, on his way to the Strip. That’s where she first saw Miss Pamela in all her groupie glamour. By 1969, Pamela Des Barres was no longer a Valley teenybopper; she had transformed into a rock icon-in-the-making. Her freaky clique of Laurel Canyon sprites were ordained by Frank Zappa to become the world’s first all-girl band of all-girl groupies, the GTOs. Soon, they had the likes of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Who, and Led Zeppelin taking notice, just as Rolling Stone dedicated an entire issue to the groupie phenomenon and made the GTOs its centerfold.

The origin story of Miss Pamela Des Barres, the original queen of the groupies, author of the iconic memoir, I’m With the Band. From her mid-Sixties teenage bop room Beatlemania, to in a few short and sexy years, having Mick Jagger on the prowl looking for her – Pamela learned quickly, through friendships with Captain Beefhart and Frank Zappa, that she was something special.