A 21-year-old woman in a beer-stained dress hitchhiked away from the Altamont Speedway an hour before her lover took the stage, fleeing the catastrophe that would define a generation. Pamela Des Barres, known to the rock world as Miss Pamela, had come expecting Woodstock reborn and found 300,000 strangers who cared for no one. When the Hells Angels hired as security began pitching beer cans at her, she cried and ran away.
Hours later, in the plush safety of a San Francisco hotel, she rang Mick Jagger’s room and a strained voice she barely recognized begged her to come at once because something horrible had happened.
That horrible event was the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter, a young man who had drawn a gun in front of the stage as the Rolling Stones played. The tarot had warned them days earlier in a house rented from a monkey in Laurel Canyon.
A friend had dealt the cards for the Stones and turned up the tower reversed, the card of catastrophe. Pamela Des Barres, now 76, has spent decades recounting that night and the wild rides that preceded it. Her story, told in her own words across multiple memoirs and a one-woman show, is a testament to an era when groupies were dismissed as trophies but she emerged as a chronicler of rock’s golden age.
Born Pamela Ann Miller on September 9, 1948, in Reseda, a flat sun-bleached grid of the San Fernando Valley, she found her religion early at age eight watching Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan. From Presley, it was an inevitable slide through Dion and into the British Invasion. She was a pearl girl at first, then upon hearing the sexed-up menace of the early Rolling Stones, a Mick girl.
Unlike most, she never regarded her idols as unreachable. A band even rehearsed across the street from her house in the valley. She thought Mick Jagger must be standing around somewhere, and it never seemed that impossible to her.
It was at Cleveland High School that the door to that world swung open. An acquaintance named Victor Hayden happened to be the cousin of Captain Beefheart, who introduced the starstruck teenager to Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones. She graduated in 1966 and took whatever jobs would fund a life on the Sunset Strip, in the noise and neon of the Whisky a Go Go, among the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.
Her first true love was Chris Hillman, the Byrds bassist, a romance she would hold dear for years and rank above almost all the famous ones to come.
For all her appetite, she guarded her virginity with a devout patience, determined to save it for love while showing her devotion by other means. She gave head to everybody, she said flatly decades later, because she wanted to be in love before she gave somebody her virginity.
Most girls seem to want to get it over with, but she never felt like that. When it finally happened, it was, by her own rueful verdict, with the wrong person, Nick St. Nicholas of Steppenwolf.
She once stopped at a house because she heard an unreleased Doors song leaking from it and found Jim Morrison standing next to his refrigerator in unzipped leather pants, no shirt, looking the epitome of rock god.
She made out with Jim Morrison backstage that night and pronounced him the most beautiful person next to Elvis. Jimi Hendrix propositioned her at 17 and she was too shy and too chaste to accept, which was one of her rare true regrets.
Instead, she went off with the Experience’s bassist Noel Redding. She was, she liked to say, the foxy lady. The scene had a pied piper, a wild bearded sculpture and dance teacher named Vito Paulekas, whose house drew the strip’s most beautiful freaks.
In that world, Pamela fell in with the girls who would make her famous. They danced for the crowds, called themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, and eventually caught the eye of Frank Zappa.
Zappa saw something useful in a troop of gorgeous uninhibited young women.
He saw some of his version of commercial potential in us and suggested we start writing songs, she said. And we were thrilled. All of a sudden we became a group and we had groupies.
They became the GTOs, Girls Together Outrageously, and in January 1969, Zappa’s Straight label released their only album, Permanent Damage, a chaotic curio produced with Lowell George and studded with drop-ins from Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, and Nicky Hopkins. They performed live only a handful of times. The band dissolved a month after the record appeared, undone by a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 arrest, but the GTOs mattered out of all proportion to their discography.
They were arguably the first all-girl group of their kind, and they dressed to gods. Alice Cooper and his band were made over like life-size Barbie dolls in the GTOs thrift store finery. The most singular of them was Miss Christine, born Christine Frka, a wraith-thin visionary whom Pamela likened to a figure escaped from a Dr.
Seuss book. It was Christine who peered out from the empty swimming pool on the cover of Zappa’s Hot Rats, Christine who was credited with inventing the look of Alice Cooper, and Christine who had been Zappa’s first live-in nanny before Pamela took the job. She was also quietly dying by inches, hobbled by a scoliosis that would put her in a body cast, and a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 habit that filled the gaps.
That nanny post, minding Moon Unit and Dweezil Zappa, kept Pamela close to the man who changed her life more than any lover did. Zappa was barely older than she was, but seemed to belong to another order of being. Whenever I was around him, I was nervous, she admitted.
He always made you feel a little intimidated, like he was scrutinizing you, and I’m sure he was. He was more of a mentor, and kind of an idol, and crucially, he understood what she was already doing in the diaries she had kept since high school. He was always trying to save moments, she said.
He wanted to get our lives on record, so he wrote about our lives. Those diaries were the seed of everything that followed.
They were never fuller than in 1969, the year of Jimmy Page.
Led Zeppelin’s guitarist became the grand passion of her young life, and the diary caught her tumbling in head first and wary all at once. Jimmy Page is coming to town today. I don’t know whether I want to be with him or not.
Who knows what diseases I’d get? she wrote. Such a sweet and lovely precious-looking cherub.
Why is it that he’s perverted? Maybe he’s not. Perhaps I’ll find out.
He courted her with an unnerving intensity, murmuring, Your insides are so sensitive. I knew you were different. And kissing her in a manner she could only describe as territorial.
He was like brand new. It was kind of like a dog pissing on a hydrant, she said. He was like making you his.
He was a wild lover. He also wrote himself a loophole, permitting himself to do things on the road because he got so bloody bored. And she adored him anyway.
I was exactly who I desired to be, she said of watching him from the side of a vast stage, the girlfriend of the lead guitar player in the world’s biggest rock and roll band. When Page fell madly in love with another woman, Charlotte Martin, just a few weeks later, she was gutted. She had thought, she said, that she was just in.
She might have got wind of his intentions in June 1973 when she accompanied him on a date to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, with Page promptly leaving with another groupie, the 15-year-old Lori Maddox.
She was still nominally Page’s girl when the Jagger 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 began. Word reached her along the groupie tom-toms that Page had strayed on tour, and she gave in at last to Mick’s long campaign.
It was as his companion that she traveled north to Altamont in December 1969. The tarot had warned them. Miss Mercy had thrown the cards for Keith Richards by the fireplace and drawn danger and a reversed tower.
Pamela fled to Speedway before the Stones played, but the omen found her anyway in that hotel corridor. The room she entered was a tableau of shock. Jagger sunk to the floor with his knees drawn up, holding his arms out to her like a frightened child.
Gram Parsons and Keith Richards entangled against a wall in matching smeared eye makeup. Charlie Watts, as ever, unnervingly serene.
I will never ever forget the woe, the gloom, the absolute anguish I encountered as I entered the Stones hotel room, she wrote.
In retrospect, I realize that horrible day grew me right the fuck up. In her rattled state, she mistook a whispered exchange between Jagger and Michelle Phillips for a proposition and fled the hotel entirely, a decision she came to regret. Years later, Phillips slid into a chair beside her at a club and said coolly, I was with Gram Parsons that night, not Mick Jagger, then vanished into the crowd.
The fairy tale had a comic full stop. When she rang Mick’s London number after a European trip, a heavily accented voice, Bianca’s, told her to never call there again. She never did.
She was honest about the difference between love and diversion. Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, and the country outlaw Waylon Jennings were flings she recognized as flings even at the time. She bedded Jennings without knowing he was married since he certainly wasn’t about to tell me.
Moon was a darker adventure of pills and vodka. He could be light and silly, but he had this terrible dark side, she remembered. The one who wounded her nearly as badly as Page was a broke unknown young actor named Don Johnson years before Miami Vice made him a household face.
Don Johnson broke my heart, she said. I was really in love with him.
By the early 1970s, she was chasing an acting career with a part in Zappa’s 200 Motels in 1971, a stint on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow in 1974, and a small role in Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley in 1978.
The work never quite caught fire and the decade’s glamour was turning sour around her. On the 5th of November, 1972, Miss Christine died of an overdose in a house in Cohasset, Massachusetts that was being rented by the Modern Lovers, not long out of the body cast that had caged her spine. Morrison was already gone, and Hendrix and Joplin, the beautiful people, were beginning to die on schedule.
And the girl from Reseda, who had never quite believed in her own mortality, was learning the price of the ticket.
Her own rescue for a while was Michael Des Barres, the English actor and singer of the glam band Silverhead, later of Detective and briefly The Power Station. They married on the 29th of October 1977, and from him she took the aristocratic name that made her sound like a marchioness.
Their son Nicholas arrived in 1978. The marriage would last through the ’80s and give her, she always insisted, a genuine partnership. He’s like my brother now, she said years after they parted, one of my best friends.
That book made her name mean something beyond the Strip. Encouraged by Stephen Davis, who had interviewed her for his Led Zeppelin history and told her plainly, You shouldn’t even be telling me this stuff. You should write your own book.
She mined her teenage diaries into I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, published in 1987 when she was 38.
It was frank in a way almost no woman had dared to be about her own desire, and it became a genuine phenomenon. Three months on the New York Times bestseller list, a book tour that ran through Oprah and Larry King.
She had chosen her disclosures with care. I only left things out that would hurt somebody. I’m not into hurting people, she said, though she came to regret one passage she kept, a scene of Page crawling across a floor toward a bag of drugs.
He didn’t like that, even though it was so true. What she refused to apologize for was the joy. To me, great 𝒔𝒆𝒙 is like touching God, she said, and I was lucky enough to have experienced it to the hilt and wrote about it freely, openly, and joyously when not many other women had.
In March 1989, she posed 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 for Playboy alongside an article she wrote herself and supplied a characteristic caption. I wanted to be in Playboy when I was younger, but my breasts did not precede me. But now I have semi-celebrity tits, so they don’t have to be as big.
The ’90s asked harder questions. She followed her debut with Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, a groupie grows up in 1992, a sequel whose very subtitle admitted that the party had an aftermath. Her marriage to Michael ended in the summer of 1991, and the woman who had defined herself through youth and desire now had to reckon with middle age, a young son, and a shrinking bank account.
In 1996 came Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon, in which she turned her chronicler’s eye onto the genre’s grim ledger of overdoses and early graves, the flip side of the glamour she had helped to sell.
Then Hollywood came for a story, and she did not care for the version it told. In 2000, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous gave the world Penny Lane, a luminous doomed groupie played by Kate Hudson, who admitted to reading I’m With the Band for research and to hang in Pamela’s photographs in her dressing room.
Pamela was, she said, dumbstruck. That character was basically more me than BB Buell or Penny Trumble, she complained. She looked way more like me.
Two things about the film enraged her. The first was the celebrated line in which Penny insists she is not a groupie, but a band aid who is only there for the music. It’s a fucking line, Pamela said, and fucking in a bad way.
She was not owning herself, not owning groupiedom and what it actually means.
The second and worse was the plot turn in which Penny nearly dies of an overdose after a man rejects her. This character, the groupie like she’s portrayed, is pathetic, she said.
I knew all the main groupies in the heyday of groupiedom. None of them would have done that. There was always someone else coming to town.
No actual music-loving goddess groupie would do such a thing. When she confronted Crowe, she said, he brushed her off. Though years later he softened and asked what he could do to make amends.
Her answer was the only one that mattered to her. I should have been a consultant. She had by then found the work that would carry her into elder stateswoman status, teaching.
For years she has led women’s writing workshops across the country and abroad, coaxing ordinary people to excavate their own lives the way Zappa once coaxed her. She calls her students her dolls. She published a third groupie chronicle, Let’s Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies in 2007, putting her sisterhood into the historical record.
And she writes a column for the punk oral history site, Please 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Me. Above all, she has waged a decades-long campaign to reclaim a single word. All it means is someone hanging around with groups, she says of groupie, but it quickly became a slur because mainly it was women, and women weren’t allowed to express themselves sexually.
Any woman who gets out there, looks on stage and goes after someone who inspires her, that is the ultimate feminist act, surely?
The fight is not finished, and she knows it. I’ve had to fight that battle like I’ve been out in a boxing ring, she says, and I still get called a whore.
She is still at it. Well into her 70s, she tours a one-woman show of memory and music, produced by her manager Polly Parsons, the daughter of her late friend Gram. And in February 2025, she brought it home to the Whisky a Go Go, the very club where she once reigned.
New readers keep finding the book, and she remains gloriously certain of the one authority no one can revoke. People weren’t there, she says of the era she survived and recorded. They like to say they were there, but they weren’t.
Pamela Des Barres’ real revolution was one of authorship. For most of rock history, the women at the edge of the stage were written about, gossiped over, painted as trophies or cautionary tales. She picked up a pen and wrote first, turning the diary of a valley teenager into a primary source that scholars and filmmakers still raid.
She reframed the groupie from a passive appendage into a participant and chronicler, insisting devotion to art could be agency rather than surrender. The sensibility she pioneered, 𝒔𝒆𝒙-positive, unashamed, and generous, prefigured arguments about desire and slut-shaming that would not reach the mainstream for another 40 years. She also became, almost by accident, the keeper of her generation’s ghosts.
In her books and on her tour, she carries the memory of Miss Christine and the other muses who did not make it out of the Babylon she describes, refusing to let them dwindle into footnotes to the men they loved. That may be her most lasting service, not the famous beds, but the record she kept of a scene she adored, written down while it was still happening in a young woman’s own giddy, unrepentant hand. As the world marks the 55th anniversary of Altamont, Pamela Des Barres remains a living archive, a woman who fled the speedway and then spent a lifetime ensuring that no one would forget what she saw, what she loved, and what she lost.
