Book review published in Venus Zine, Winter 2005 I’m with the Band
By: Pamela Des Barres
Pamela Des Barres embraced her “ultimate groupie” moniker with the 1987 publication of I’m with the Band— a merry recounting of her friendships and trysts with some of rock’s elite, including Captain Beefheart, Jim Morrison, and Frank Zappa. This new reprint includes an epilogue by Des Barres and an affectionate forward by Dave Navarro, who calls her “one of the most unique and important rock historians of our time.”
After graduating in 1966 from high school in Reseda, California, Des Barres hung out with bands nightly in Hollywood. Bestowing oral sex to rock musicians testified to her belief that these musicians were on earth to do great things and that she was here to cater to them. Although written when Des Barres was 39, the book maintains an adolescent tone replete with cringe-worthy puns and lifted song lyrics. For example, several chapters after she recounts fainting while seeing Jim Morrison perform, she muses about Michael Des Barres, the rocker she will eventually marry; “I kept him all to myself and tried to set the night on fire. Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” Seriously. Or: “I soon found out that the answer to any and all questions was blowing in the wind.”
Her visceral, high school obsession with the Beatles, Paul Anka, Rolling Stones, and the Byrds became lust and lifestyle by her late teens. Her perspective might be easier to comprehend if she were a sex-positive, 1960s free-love explorer and adventuress, but she wasn’t — she states repeatedly that all she really wanted was to be the wife of a rock star. Des Barres was trying to be part of music in the best way she knew how — offering her body to it, and this makes her story a sad one. In one poignant scenario, Des Barres trespasses and is forcibly removed from Beatles property, and while being driven away in a police car she notes a contemptuous, sorrowful look on John Lennon’s face.
Des Barres’ deference to “her” musicians is, for lack of a better word, icky. Although claiming lack of any regret, the updated epilogue of the new edition reads, “I have spent so much time wistfully flitting about, caring for creative souls and — wonder of wonders — I have finally come to recognize the potency of my very own creative soul.”
--Gretchen Kalwinski
