I'M WITH THE

BAND
CONFESSIONS OF A GROUPIE
PAMELA DESBARRES

Acknowledgments

HEARTFELT THANK YOUS to my sweet mom for having the love and patience of a saint, and for not squelching my soul; and to
my dear departed daddy for inspiring me always to dig for the gold.
Intense appreciation goes out to C. Thomas (my Cleveland High School creative writing teacher), Don Van Vliet, Vito
Paulekas, Bob Dylan, The Fab Four, the late Gram Parsons, the late Brandon de Wilde, Frank and Gail Zappa, and Chuck
Weinfor altering my priorities.
Adoration abounds for my divine girlfriends who hold me up and calm me down: Melanie Griffith, Joyce Hyser, Catherine
James, Denise Kaye, Rona Levitan, Mercy, Sheri Rivera, Iva Turner, and the ever-present Mrs. Zappa.
Merci beaucoup to my darling Patti D'Arbanville for the perfect title.
Special love to Michele Myer.
Beyond space and timeDanny Goldberg.
Thank you, Stephen Davis, for the encouragement; and thanks to Ron Bernstein, Bill Dana, Ben Edmonds, and Mel Berger.
A massive and abundant thankyouthankyouthankyou to Jim Landis and Jane Meara for "being here now."


Let Me Put It In, It
Feels All Right
I GET SHIVERS whenever I see those old black-and-white films of Elvis getting shorn for Uncle Sam. When he rubs
his hands over the stubs of his former blue-black mane, I get a twinge in my temples. In the glorious year of 1960,
I was at the Reseda Theater with my parents, and I saw the famous army footage before the onslaught of Psycho.
I don't know which was more horrifying. I hung on to my daddy's neck and inhaled the comforting familiarity of
his drugstore aftershave and peeked through my fingers as Norman Bates did his dirty work, and the army barber
did his. I tried to believe that Elvis was doing his duty as an AMERICAN, but even at eleven years old, I realized his
raunch had been considerably diminished. I tacked my five-and-dime calendar onto the dining-room wall and
drew big X's as each day passed, knowing he would let his hair grow when he came home from Germany. Being
an adored only child, my mom let me keep the eyesore on the wall for two years. I was always allowed to carry
out my fantasies to the tingling end, and I somehow survived several bouts of temporary omnipotence.
All my girlfriends had siblings they had to share with, and since I had two rooms of my own, my house was where
everyone wanted to bring their Barbie dolls. I ruled the neighborhood until I entered Northbridge Junior High. It
turned out to be the real world, and was I surprised! My lack of breasts took precedence over my grades, and
actual real-live boys loomed before me, loping around, too tall for their own good. I wanted to make my parents
happy and get an A in Home Economics, but boys and rock and roll had altered my priorities.
I was always in awe of my big, gorgeous daddy. He looked just like Clark Gable, and disappeared on weekends to
dig for gold way down deep in Mexico. He had always wanted to strike it rich, so right before I was born, he and
my mom left Pond Creek, Kentucky, heading for gold country, which allowed me to come into the world as a
California native.
We lived right off Sunset and Vine, in a dinky little hut on Selma Avenue, and after a series of unilluminating
vacuumsalesman- type jobs, my daddy made his way farther west into the wild shrubbery of the San Fernando
Valley suburbs, to seek his meager fortune bottling Budweiser. He splurged out and bought his very own cream-
colored Cadillac that he paid for in seventy-two monthly installments, and we lived in the same split-level for
twelve years, so I felt very secure. I had two parents, a dog, a cat, a parakeet named Buttons, and three good
meals a day. In my early years, my sweet mom made sure that my wild daddy came across as a tame, devoted
father-figure, but no matter how much she buffered and suffered, it couldn't alter the fact that he was from the
Old South, and I was from the New West.
Two incidents occurred when I was fourteen that had a profound effect on my life. The first was when my dad
relented and let me remove the wisps of hair from my very thin legs (he did not, however, let me place the Lady
Schick above the knee), and I had a moment of independence alone in the pink-tiled bathroom that will never be
equalled for as long as I live, squirting a pool of Jergens into my palm and slathering it all over my hairless, Barbie-
doll calves. Compared to getting my period, the first shave initiated me into the elementary stage of womanhood
with a much more exciting sense of adventure . . . going forth into the world with no hair on my calvesLife,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness! The second incident involved a stolen car, a bad boy, and the song
"He's a Rebel." Dennis MacCorkell was the slump-shouldered, shuffling, cigarette-dangling, pit-faced bad boy
found in most junior high schools in 1962. He would shout to me whenever we passed in the hall, "Hey! No
Underwear!!" I took it as an endearment and blushed appropriately. He had the same seat in his homeroom that I
had in Biology I, and one Friday morning I found "No Underwear" carved into the table. 1 hoped it was a secret
message of adoration, even though he was going steady with a tough Chicano girl named Jackie. Over the
weekend, Dennis and two other bad boys from another school stole a car and smashed it to pieces and
they all went straight to Teen Angel heaven. Jackie came directly to school so we could all see her suffer. She was
wearing a black tulle veil, and her friends held her up all day as she staggered from class to class. She broke down
during Nutrition, and every girl in school secretly wished that Dennis MacCorkell had been her boyfriend. "He's a
Rebel" became associated with Dennis, and rebellion turned into infamy in my teenage mind. Twenty years later,
my mom was cleaning out her drawers and came across a little box with a dead rose tucked inside, and a slip of
paper cut out of my 1962 yearbook: "Hey, No Underwear, good luck with the boys, Dennis MacCorkell."
Nobody ever forgot Dennis MacCorkell at Northridge Junior High.
"He's a rebel, and he'll never be any good, he's a rebel and he never does what he should . . . and just because he
doesn't do what everybody else does, that's no reason why I can't give him all my love."
I began to associate the Top 10 with events and boys of the moment. My transistor became an appendage, the
goopyhaired heroes crooning in my ear became all the boys who ignored me during "I Pledge Allegiance to the
Flag." Lyrics were taken seriously. I walked in the rain, crying, listening to "Crying in the Rain" by the perfect-
haired Everly Brothers, imagining that I had just broken up with Phil "Caveman" Caruso, the Italian hunk in my
Creative Writing class. When Vance Branco didn't show up for my backyard luau, I joined Leslie Gore for the
chorus, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, DIE if I want to . . . " I stood by the screen door in a
real honest-to-God grass skirt that my daddy brought back from Okinawa, fiddling with my fake lei