Pamela Des Barres reveals how Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page rank as lovers

If the wisdom of retrospect makes books like Patti Smith’s Just Kids a moving portrait of an era, then it’s the naivety of the present moment that makes Pamela Des Barres’s I’m With the Band equally profound.

Based on the diaries she kept throughout the 60s and 70s while in the inner circles (and beds) of rockers like Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, and Jimmy Page, Pamela’s 1987 memoir about the rock scene cemented her as the most well-known groupie in the world. 

She followed the success of her first memoir with more best-selling books, and its even widely believed that Cameron Crowe drew from her memoirs to create the groupie character Penny Lane in his film Almost Famous.

But before all that, Pamela was just another 18-year-old in a mini skirt hanging out on the Sunset Strip trying to meet the stars she idolised. It’s this sense of wide-eyed giddiness that makes her – and her writing – so appealing. 

In fact, as Pamela tells me, she was a groupie before groupie’s existed – and she’s happy to continue to carry the moniker that made her famous.

‘Being a groupie always only meant the love of music and the people who make it,’ she insists on a video call from her California flat. 

‘That’s all it’s ever meant. I was doing this long before the word – the G-word, I call it – came into being. It was a British journalist who first called us groupies, and I had already been hanging out with The Doors and the Byrds for years.’ 

Now 78 years old and as free-spirited as ever, Pamela talks as easily about her love for rock music as she does about her love for sleeping with the men who made it. 

‘I’m very brutally honest in it,’ she says of her speaking events, which blend stories from her book with off-the-cuff reminiscences. ‘There’s a Q and A after and I’ll answer anything. The only thing I don’t ever say is who was the best in bed, or who is the biggest...people want to know that. Everyone. Well, usually it’s a man who asks,’ she says, laughing. 

Beyond that one hard line, she’s happy to discuss the nitty gritty details of her famous lovers, claiming that she remembers them all with equal warmth.

‘Nick St. Nicholas [Steppenwolf bassist]was my first, and him I was in love with, but all of them, through Jimmy [Page] and Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Moon] all these people. They were the best in bed, because I was with them at that time. I was there for it in the moment. I was immersed right? I’m immersed in whatever I do.’

Her other most asked question, she says, is, ‘What was Jim Morrison really like?’ She laughs when she reads on my face how badly I want to know the answer. 

‘He was a poet. I knew him early on,’ she says, indulging me. ‘Actually, I knew him the whole time, yeah, but he changed. You know, he was this exquisite Adonis poet to begin with. And rock and roll ate him up. He was a he was very – not fragile – but sensitive. He carried his poetry book around and he thought being a rock star was funny. It’s not what he intended ever.’

A natural storyteller, audience members can expect Pamela to go even deeper into questions like these, as well as stories of doing Mescalin and making love to Jimmy Page after seeing Elvis in Vegas, her raunchy fling with Mick Jagger, her close friendship with Gram Parsons, and all of the debauchery she got into with Keith Moon. 

After a sold-out show during her last visit to London, Pamela is returning on May 2 to the West Hampstead Arts Club to meet fan demand. People keep buying tickets to her shows, as she puts it, ‘because of the mythology around these people, whether they’re alive or dead. I bring them back to life in a way.’

But Pamela – who was also a member of the GTOs, one of the world’s first girl rock groups –  isn’t just a groupie. She (rightfully) positions herself as just as much a part of rock history as any of the men she dated. 

‘It wasn’t just sex,’ she explains, ‘at that age, there’s a lot of sex involved, but it was a whole scene, you know, and I felt that I was equal to these people.’

She gives a lot of credit for that feeling to the legendary Frank Zappa, who first formed the GTOs and ‘who put us girls as equals to him. You know, he never, I mean… we saw him as our mentor and everything. But he treated us as equals. So that helped me realize I’m as important as anyone else.’

Still, it’s not lost on her that her free-love take on sex is received very differently because she is a woman, in a way it wasn’t for her male counterparts – I’m With The Band was originally met with quite a lot of pearl-clutching from the wider public. 

But people misunderstood what she was looking for in the first place. ‘I was chasing my highest self, like we all are. Everybody wants to touch the divine,’ she claims. 

‘And of course, you know, sex – in this world – is the closest we’re going to get. La petite mort. You know that French statement? An orgasm is total bliss, right? So we’re all searching for that.’

Did she ever find what she was looking for? Yes and no.

Reflecting on her famous fling with Jimmy Page, she says: ‘I thought we were in love and that he was going to take me to England and all that, because he said so. And I tended to believe my Prince Charmings back then. But, you know, we were off and on for a couple of years, and we had a great time. Same with Keith Moon, same with all my early rock stars, I didn’t live with them, sure. 

‘You know, I’m not Anita Pallenberg, though I could have been. But I mean I’m glad I wasn’t, because I’m still here. I met Michael [Des Barres] when I was 25 and we were together 14 years. So I guess I did find love. You can say I found what I was looking for.’

While Pamela remains relentlessly positive about the rock scene – a time when many women later spoke out about being victimized and exploited (‘I was never mistreated or hurt in any way’) – even she is willing to acknowledge the shadows that began to creep in as the 70s unfolded.

‘Believe me, I was ready to meet Michael and settle down when the young groupies came along, the real young girls, because there was no way to compete with that,’ she says, referring to the infamous ‘baby groupies’of the 70s and 80s, underage girls who became a fixture of the rock scene. 

‘That was the thing on the scene at the time, these girls in these giant platforms were presenting themselves, and they didn’t know any better. They were kids really. So they didn’t know what they were getting into. But I didn’t like it, it didn’t feel right to me,’ she explains. 

As quick as Pamela is to agree that some young vulnerable groupies were mistreated throughout this time, she also can’t repress her unfaltering loyalty to the religion of rock and roll for long.

‘They were so bored. People think it’s an exciting, thrilling ride, and sometimes it is. Other times it’s very lonely and hard,’ she says of touring rock stars. ‘So, so they’re looking for outside pleasures, you know? And, yeah, that’s just the way it was.

‘It was a time of freedom and free love. And, you know, there was good and bad in that. There was, you know, just like everything. But for me, the good of that era outweighed the bad in a huge way. I was never harmed, right? I mean, my heart was broken, but that happens in any walk of life.’

Reminiscing on how drugs began to change the scene, Pam says that while she ‘took a lot of drugs over the years,’ she was ‘never addictive.’ Others, like Graham Parson (‘my beloved Graham’) weren’t so lucky. 

But Pam is quick to change the subject, ‘It was tragic, that side of things. But I don’t focus on that in my shows, because everyone knows about that, right? It was a magnificent time, certainly for women. I carried my birth control pill around with me and just took it in front of people proudly, you know. That was revolutionary.’

When you listen to it told from Pamela’s perspective, being a rock groupie was nothing short of a divine calling, even a feminist accomplishment. But her positivity doesn’t feel like ignorance, it feels like hard-won belief in the goodness of people and the magic of music, and one can’t help but want to take a peek through her rose-coloured glasses.

While most recountings of the early days of rock and roll take for granted that audiences are after acknowledgement of – and even repentance for – the gritty, seedy realities behind the guitar riffs, Pamela is stubbornly insistent on painting a picture of the era’s most defining characteristic: Hope. And she refuses to be anything but proud of believing in that hope enough to spend her youth hanging around dressing rooms and tour buses.

She describes the mid 1960s on the Sunset Strip so vividly you can almost see the amber light shining on the Whiskey-a-go-go: ‘The rockers all lived in these incredible fairy tale homes in the canyon. All the doors and windows were left open. People would go on the road and leave their homes unlocked. It was just a different time,’ she says wistfully. 

She continues:‘Yeah, even though, you know, the drugs came along and kind of f***ed a lot of stuff up, there was so much innocence in that time, incredible hope and belief in oneself, which is really dissipated right now. People are feeling lower right now. Like, lower than humanity has felt in a very long time, right? But at that time, there was, “Wow, we could do anything.”’

Buy a ticket to An Intimate Evening With Pamela Des Barres on May 2 at West Hampstead Arts Club here.

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