The world’s most notorious rock muse grows up

Text by Emily Savage
Photography by Leonardo Céndamoas

A founding member of Frank Zappa’s psychedelic all-girl creation The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), Pamela Des Barres—later dubbed “Queen of the Groupies”—got her first taste of her own personal groupies. The bands and the boys were suddenly obsessed with her.

“Music became all-encompassing and I just wanted to be a part of it—that’s how the GTOs came about, I wanted to be in the middle of it, in the thick of it, and Frank Zappa, thank god, was there to make that happen with my nutty group of girls,” Des Barres says.

“We were originally backup dancers, go-go girls, and he thought we had something really interesting to say—he liked to capture moments in time, and that’s what he did with us.”
Prancing along LA’s Sunset Strip in the early 1960s, a fabulous, velvet-clad Des Barres was already garnering a different kind of attention from rapturous men folk, including the rock gods she adored: Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon and a whole lot more. Page even slipped her a note after a Led Zeppelin show to entice her back to his hotel. She sweetly resisted his advances that particular evening but became entangled with him in an up-and-down raucous relationship shortly thereafter.

While her heart was secretly exploding with nerves, Des Barres casually spent quality time in hotels and recording studios with the innovators of rock and roll and lived to tell about it in her multiple memoirs. The first of such memoirs, I’m With the Band, contains the salacious details of her first forays into rock fuckdom and the subsequent spiraling friendships and relationships that kept her with one ear to the rock and roll underground and one steady hand on the gods.

“As far as wanting to meet the guys, I just couldn’t sit in my room and get all horny over Mick Jagger,” Des Barres explains, “it was just inside me to see where all that amazing stuff was coming from, that music.”
On a recent book tour Des Barres came to San Francisco for a reading of her newly republished second memoir, Take Another Little Piece of My Heart. There she discovered, as she often does, that fans are still obsessed, still interested in her stories and still hanging on her every word.

“I think a lot of times the obsession people have with me is that they’re obsessed with the people I was obsessed with and got to hang out with. And that’s a big part of it, almost like they’re obsessed with me by proxy. And that’s okay. I lived that life. I was there and I wrote about it,” says Des Barres.

But Des Barres doesn’t mind as she also has fans that are strictly in it for her. One young hipster at the reading told Des Barres he truly loved her exquisite writing voice—a compliment she savors.
Over crab cakes Florentine the next morning at a Haight-Asbury café in her old hippie stomping grounds, Des Barres is talking sweet unadulterated love—and the undeniable appeal of the music that brought her here.

Des Barres’ beau, LA-based alt-country rocker, Mike Stinson, is the latest on a list of musicians who’ve immortalized Des Barres in song—he wrote a jam called “Counting My Lucky Stars.” Led Zeppelin wrote a song about her and a few select ladies called “Going to California” and Chris Hillman, her former lover from the Flying Burrito Brothers penned “The One That Got Away” with her in mind. “I’m sixty years old and I’m still a muse—it’s great!” she says.

Des Barres is in the middle of writing her fifth book, Wear Your Love Like Heaven, but also spends her free time teaching workshops to starry-eyed writers, performing rock and roll-inspired weddings as an ordained minister, and entertaining the prospect of an I’m With The Band film or television show.

She also has a monthly column with Italian Rolling Stone in which she interviews any damn musician she wants—next up, Jack White. Since the 1960s Des Barres has befriended every rock and alt-country star from Gram Parsons to Mark Mothersbaugh and now she gets paid to seek out new and interesting musicians to fulfill her sonic fetish. Baby’s on fire, better throw her in the water.
In the past few decades, Des Barres has battled the occasional disrespectful fellow groupie and the right wing, hell bent on chastising her for a perceived lack of morals. She’s appeared on talk shows, The Tonight Show, and even sat down with Larry King, all to defend her books, her life and her loves. Through it all, she’s kept a smile on her continuously-gorgeous face and swears she doesn’t regret a thing.