Muses with Dirty Faces: In Praise of the Groupie

 

Four of the GTOs looking fabulous and freaky in 1969
Photo by Ed Caraeff / Morgan Media / Getty Images

 

 

I. 

 

Are groupies still a thing in the era of #MeToo, or are they now an extinct species of young female fan who voluntarily performed sexual services in order to demonstrate their devotion to the rock gods they worshipped and followed on tour ...? [1]  

 

 

II.

 

Although the term originated in the music scene of the 1960s, the phenomenon itself was much older and wider. Indeed, some argue that Mary Magdalene was the mother of all groupies, travelling with Jesus and his gang of disciples known as the Apostles, happy to show her support in whatever way was asked of her [2]. 

 

But it's the groupies of the 1960s and '70s who are best remembered and who, in their day, were almost as famous as the musicians they fucked [3]. 

 

Girls such as Pamela Des Barres [4], 'Sweet' Connie Hamzy [5], Cynthia 'Plaster Caster' Albritton [6], and Barbara 'The Butter Queen' Cope [7], were certainly not regular girlfriends - although they were sometimes regarded as surrogates - but they were much more than ordinary fans; if they weren't expecting engagement rings, neither were they interested in simply collecting autographs or having a one night stand. 

 

The groupies wanted to be an integral part of the scene; as vital in their own way as roadies, able to access all areas and legitimately declare: I'm with the band and I kind of admire them for that - as well as their declaration of agency: these girls did not regard themselves as victims or as being exploited; they knew what they wanted, what they were doing, what the rewards and dangers of a rock 'n' roll lifestyle were. 

 

Having said that, there was a very obvious power imbalance (or inequality) built into the rock star-groupie relationship and so questions of agency and consent do arise and remain complex and problematic. 

 

And this is particularly so when it comes to the so-called baby groupies - i.e., underage girls such as Sable Starr [8] and Lori Mattix [9]. The latter was only fourteen when she (allegedly) lost her virginity to David Bowie and not much older when she began her illicit affair with Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page, the couple seen here at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in LA, in 1972:    

 

 

      

Notes

 

[1] I'm certainly not the first to ask this question; see, for example, Thea De Gallier's article 'I wouldn't want this for anybody's daughter': will #MeToo mean the end of the rock 'n' roll groupie?' in The Guardian (15 Mar 2018): click here. 

      It's hard to imagine in an age when allegations of inappropriate behaviour and sexual misconduct are made at the drop of a hat and issues around consent and male entitlement are widely discussed, that the wild Bacchanalian excesses of the 1960s and '70s would be tolerated now. 

 

[2] In the Gnostic texts, Mary Magdalene's uniquely close relationship with Jesus is often emphasised. In the Gospel of Philip, for example, she is described as a companion to the latter, whom he would openly kiss on the mouth. This has led some scholars to conclude that there was a sexual component to their relationship. 

      The portrayal of Mary as a promiscuous woman or prostitute began in 591 when Pope Gregory I conflated her with Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39) and the unnamed sinful woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke 7:36-50. This view of her has persisted in popular culture, giving rise to the idea of Mary as the original groupie. 

      See: Pamela Des Barres, Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon (1996), who develops the idea that a groupie is to a rock band as Mary Magdalene was to Jesus.

 

[3] This is evidenced by the fact that the February 1969 edition of Rolling Stone was devoted to the topic of groupies and that Time magazine also published an article on the girls of rock, discussing their manners and morals. The documentary film, Groupies (dir. Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard) was released the following year. 

 

[4] Pamela Des Barres (b. 1948) is an American groupie, writer, musician, and actress. She is best known for her 1987 memoir, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, which details her experiences in the Los Angeles rock music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. She was also a member of the experimental all-girl group - composed of groupies - the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously). 

 

[5] 'Sweet' Connie Hamzy, aka Connie Flowers (1955-2021), was an American groupie who claimed to have had sex with numerous rock musicians and that she was propositioned by Bill Clinton in 1984, when he was the governor of Arkansas. 

 

[6] Cynthia Plaster Caster, born Cynthia Albritton (1947-2022), was an American groupie and visual artist notorious for creating plaster casts of the erect penises belonging to her famous lovers. She began this unusual practice with the assistance of rock stars in 1968, but later included the cocks of filmmakers and other artists, producing 50 phallic works in all. 

 

[7] Barbara Cope (1950-2018) was an American groupie, known in the late 1960s and early 1970s as The Butter Queen, due to her penchant for using butter as lubricant during her sexual encounters with rock stars. Cope claimed to have visited 52 major cities in the United States while following bands, and travelled to 11 different countries with them. She retired from groupie life in 1972, having had sex (again according to her own account) with around 2,000 musicians. 

 

[8] Sable Starr (1957-2009), often described as the queen of the groupie scene in LA during the early 1970s, was also (due to her age) one of the so-called baby groupies; she lost her virginity to a guitarist when she was twelve. In an interview in 1973, she claimed to be acquainted with many famous rock stars, including Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Marc Bolan. At 16 she met Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and went to live with him in NYC. This did not turn out well. Later, she had a affair with Richard Hell, befriended Nancy Spungen, and participated in the local punk rock scene, but by the early 1980s her groupie days were over.    

 

[9] Lori Mattix (b. 1958), sometimes known as Lori Maddox, or Lori Lightning, is a former American child model and baby groupie of the 1970s. In an interview in 2015, she claimed to have been fucked by Bowie, Jagger, and Jimmy Page whilst she was underage. True or not, she had begun frequenting clubs on Sunset Strip with her friend Sable Starr whe she was 13 and her story has been widely discussed by commentators keen to highlight the sexual exploitation of minors within the music industry.   

 

Further reading (for those who are interested): 

Kathryn Bromwich, 'Groupies revisited: the women with triple-A access to the 60s', The Observer (15 Nov 2015): click here. 

 

Craig McLean, 'Good time girl: memories of super groupie Pamela Des Barres', The Observer (6 May 2018): click here. 

 

 

And for a follow up post to this one, on Nancy Spungen - last of the great American groupies - click here.

The Filth and the Fury (Or Never Mind the Sex Pistols - Here's the Borborites)

O fangeuse grandeur! sublime ignominie!

 

 

I. 

 

I've always been fond of a bit of base materialism, thus my fascination with the works of Georges Bataille who knew a thing or two about constructing a down and dirty philosophy of excess and excrement (or muck and mysticism as one critic described it) and seeking some kind of transcendent limit-experience via the transgression of social and sexual norms. 

 

But of course, torpedophiles are likely to know all this; there's been shitloads of stuff written on Bataille over the last thirty years - not to mention loads of shit stuff - beginning with Nick Land's classic (if fittingly unorthodox) study The Thirst for Annihilation (1992). 

 

And so my interest here is in not in Bataille, but members of a Gnostic sect who might be said to prefigure the modern writers with whom we are more familiar. Known as the Borborites (or Borborians), their name derived from the Greek word βόρβορος, meaning dirt, muck, or sewage. 

 

It is thanks to this etymology that the term Borborites can probably best be translated as the filthy ones ...

 

 

II.

Like other early Christian sects, there's not a great deal known about the Borborites and what details we do possess were often written by their opponents (so must be read with a degree of scepticism). 

 

It seems that the Borborites based their creed on a number of texts which they deemed sacred, but which would later be branded as heretical; these include, for example, the Gospel of Eve, the Gospel of Philip, and The Apocalypse of Adam. 

 

The figure who most captured their religious imagination, however, was Mary Magdalene and they produced a body of literature revolving around the question of her status and significance, as well as the precise nature of her relationship with Jesus, whom they acknowledged as a teacher, whilst rejecting his Father as an imposter deity [1]. 

According to Epiphanius of Salamis, a 4th-century saint who assembled a compendium of heresies known as the Panarion [2], one Borborite work, known as The Greater Questions of Mary, contained a shocking episode in which Jesus took Magdalene for a walk to the top of a mountain, whereupon he pulled a fully-formed woman from out of his side and engaged in sexual intercourse with her.   

 

As if this weren't enough, Jesus then proceeded to eat his own ejaculate and, turning to Mary, told her: Thus we must do, that we may live. At this point, Mary fainted and had to be helped to her feet by Jesus who chastised her for being of little faith. 

I'm not quite sure what to make of this cum-eating Christ, but it's an amusing narrative to consider. As are the other elements of sexual sacramentalism which, according to Epiphanius, formed an important role in Borborite ritual. He informs us, for example, that the Borborites performed their own obscene version of the eucharist (i.e. what would become known as a black mass), in which - scorning the use of wine and wafers - they would consume menstrual blood and semen. 

 

Epiphanius also insists that the Boborites had a penchant for eating aborted foetuses obtained from women who became pregnant during religious sex rituals, but I find such hard to swallow (even when mixed with honey and various spices) [3].       

 

In conclusion: unlike most other Gnostics who, because of their belief that the flesh was evil and formed a prison for the spirit, practised celibacy, fasting, and various other forms of self-denial, the Borborites were more cheerfully libertine than grimly ascetic and that makes them rather more attractive in my book. 

 

To paraphrase Dick Emery, ooh, they were awful ... but I like them.   

 

Notes

 

[1] According to Borborite theo-cosmology, there were eight heavens, each under a separate archon (ruler). In the seventh, reigned Sabaoth, creator of heaven and earth and the God of the Jews, believed by some Borborites to take the form of an ass or pig. Jesus - whom they considered a celestial being and not born of Mary (in accordance with the doctrine docetiem) - belonged to the eighth heaven, reigned over by Barbeloth, the supreme deity and Father of All.   

 

[2] Epiphanius was a 4th-century bishop considered a saint and a true defender of the faith by both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. He is best remembered as the man who assembled a compendium of heresies known as the Panarion (c. 375-78), a work which discusses numerous religious sects and philosophies from the time of Adam onwards, detailing their histories and condemning their unorthodox beliefs and practices. According to Epiphanius, when he was a young man, he had dealings with the Borborites, but declined their invitation to join them, instead informing the local Church authorities of what they were up to and therby ensuring they were excommunicated and exiled. 

[3] Similar accusations of ritual child abuse and eating babies etc. would continue to be made by the Church against those it feared and hated or regarded as heretics; not just Gnostics, but Jews, pagans, witches, Satanists, et al. For Christians, this blood libel is the worst of all conceivable charges you can lay against those regarded as non-believers.     

Holy Trichophilia! It's Hairy Mary Magdalene!

 Detail from an illustration in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493),

depicting the assumption of a hirsute Mary Magdalene

 

 

I. 

 

Hair fetishism - or trichophilia as it is known by aficianados - is an erotic partialism in which an individual finds hair sexually arousing to look at, touch, smell, or lick. Whilst usually head hair is the object of fascination, some trichophiles express a preference for underarm hair, pubic hair, or hair on other areas of the body. 

 

Similarly, whilst some trichophiles have a penchant for dry hair, others insist it's only sexy when wet; some like long, straight blonde hair, carefully styled and groomed, others are excited by short, curly dark hair left to grow in a wild, natural state.  

 

Ultimately, like other members of the kinky community, hair lovers subscribe to a libertine philosophy of live and let live. Or as one trichophile joked: 'When it comes to hair fetishism, the only rule is hirsute yourself.'             

 

 

II. 

 

One of the defining characteristics of mammals, hair - a biomaterial primarily composed of the protein alpha-keratin - doesn't have any inherent value or sexual significance; these things are ascribed to it culturally.

 

Those brought up within the three main Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - seem to find hair - particularly female hair - problematic and associate various moral, magical, and erotic properties with it. 

 

Thus, Muslim women, for example, are expected to wear a hijab whilst in the presence of any male outside of their immediate family and Christian women in the West were also, until fairly recently, expected to cover their heads in church, thereby retaining modesty whilst at prayer.         

 

And speaking of Christian women ...

 

 

III.

 

Apart from the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene is arguably the most important woman in the Bible [1] and the subject of great controversy (and confusion) amongst the Church Fathers. For according to some sources, she was not only a woman of independent means, but also a former prostitute who had been possessed by seven demons [2]. 

 

In addition, she was also abnormally hairy, as depicted in numerous works of European art from the 15th-century onwards.

 

Just to be clear on this latter point: Mary didn't just have long luscious locks like Rapunzel; this gal was covered in thick hair - some might even call it fur - like some kind of wild woman of the woods or sideshow freak. Only her hands, breasts, face, knees and feet were free of hair.  

 

Whilst this might just be an artistic metaphor of some kind [3], it's also possible that Mary suffered from some form of hypertrichosis. And, if so, what does this tell us about Jesus; was his obvious affection for Mary - something that used to aggrieve his male disciples - a sign of his trichophilia? 

 

Maybe: that would certainly help explain, for example, the time he allowed his feet to be dried by a sinful woman using her long hair [4].   

 

Of course, it could be that Mary's condition only manifested itself after her time with Jesus. Some believe, for example, that in her later life she became a religious recluse and cared nothing for possessions - not even clothes which gradually fell away, and that her hair grew in order to protect her modesty [5].

 

Ultimately, who knows what the truth is in Mary's case? She is thought to be an actual historical figure, but very little is known about her life and she seems to have left behind no writings of her own. So let's just close this post with another fantastic image showing Mary in all her hairy glory ...

 

 

Mary Magdalene carried by Angels

(c. 1490-1500)

Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen

Notes

 

[1] Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name twelve times in the canonical gospels, which is more than any other woman apart from the Virgin Mary. She was an important follower of Jesus and was not only present at the crucifixion, but at the resurrection also. Indeed, according to some accounts, she it was who discovered the empty tomb and she it was whom the newly risen Jesus instructed not to touch him (on the grounds that he had not yet ascended unto his Father). She is also a favourite amongst the Gnostic authors, some of whom imagine that she and Jesus eventually married. See for example the non-canonical 3rd-century text known as the Gospel of Philip: click here.   

 

[2] The portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentent prostitute began after a series of Easter sermons delivered in 591, when Pope Gregory I conflated her with Mary of Bethany (sister to Martha and the zombie-like Lazarus) and the unnamed hussy who anoints Jesus's feet in Luke 7:36-50. This resulted in a widespread belief that she was a former bad girl; a belief which has persisted within the popular imagination to this day, despite the attempt by Pope Paul VI in 1969 to quash it once and for all.

      As for the demon possession, see Luke 8:1-3 and/or Mark 16:9. Luckily, Jesus was an excellent exorcist and soon put the girl right in mind and body. Consequently, she was completely devoted to him.

 

[3] That is to say, Mary Magdalene's hair suit is an iconographic feature - not the result of any medical condition - whose depiction borrows from religious drama and legend. 

 

[4] See Luke 7:36-50 in the New Testament. Lines 36-38 in the New International Version read:  

 

"When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 

      A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume.       

      As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them."

 

So touched is Jesus by this (rather kinky) act of love, that he immediately forgives the woman her sins. 

 

[5] Unfortunately, this is another mistaken belief which is again due to the conflating of Mary Magdalene's life with that of another Mary, namely, Saint Mary of Egypt, a 4th-century prostitute who did indeed become a Christian ascetic and is venerated within the Orthodox and Coptic tradition as a Desert Mother.