On the day after Valentine’s Day, 1969—an auspicious date in the annals of romance—Rolling Stone launched “a special super-duper neat issue” dedicated to unveiling, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, “The Groupies and Other Girls”: women tangential to the creation of rock and roll but crucial to its mythology. To advertise the occasion, Jann Wenner, the magazine’s publisher and editor-in-chief, paid seven thousand dollars to command a full-page advertisement in the Times, which asked, “If we tell you what a Groupie is, will you really understand?”
The question itself is perplexing—dripping with the patronizing confidence available only to the very hip and turned on—but the idea of what a groupie is and does has been a fairly fluid one. This fall, “Groupies and Other Electric Ladies,” a collection of striking black-and-white portraits culled from the special issue—all shot by Baron Wolman, Rolling Stone’s first chief photographer—was released as an imposing hardcover book. (Some of the images are also on display at the Morrison Hotel Gallery, in SoHo.) Collectively, these portraits suggest that “groupie” implies not just a woman who readily sleeps with rock stars but a vital progenitor of countercultural style—a purveyor of the sort of sartorial eclecticism (dexterously mixing incongruous pieces from different eras; inhabiting those pieces with beatific self-assurance) that continues to pervade high fashion even a half-century later.
Wolman’s photographs, for the most part, sidestep the potential sorrows of groupie life and focus, instead, on his subjects’ extraordinary presence before a lens. The women of “Groupies” are composed and sensual but also keenly aware that they are being gazed upon; their vamping seems centered upon a kind of defiant, come-at-this stare.
Still, we’re all grownups here! Let's not pretend that sex was not at the forefront of this scene, and a particular kind of sex, too: physically adventurous but emotionally lopsided. In Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical movie “Almost Famous,” one of the more salient onscreen depictions of groupies at work, William, the movie’s young, pie-eyed protagonist, encounters a small cabal of girls loitering outside the stage door after a Black Sabbath show. “I’m a journalist. I’m not a—you know,” he tells them. The squad’s de facto leader, Penny Lane, insists that he’s got it all wrong: “We don’t have intercourse with these guys. We support the music! We inspire the music!” But later in the film it is suggested that Penny Lane does, actually, have intercourse with them (she is also ultimately traded to Humble Pie “for fifty bucks and a case of beer”), and moments after Penny delivers her statement of purpose, a limousine rolls past, honking, and her cohorts appear to temporarily lose their minds.
The word “groupie,” once a pejorative—implying, at its worst, a kind of mindless, sycophantic allegiance to famous men—has since been reclaimed by the women it was intended to shame, although it remains unclear whether those women ever actually resisted the characterization in the first place. Pamela Des Barres called her 1987 memoir “I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie,” and she writes frequently of fandom as an essentially symbiotic relationship in which intimacy and inspiration are exchanged freely, peaceably, like a joint being passed around at a party.
Sex, of course, is not a parasitic transaction by default, and superannuated tropes about women needing to be coerced, via nefarious forces, into a kind of stunted submission are neither useful nor true. If, in 1969, an adult woman wanted to bed rock stars like it was her job, fine. Get it, girl.
Some feminists might wish to decry this kind of live-and-let-live ethos as witless and naïve. There is, of course, a more troubling presumption embedded in these relationships—that, at least in the earliest days of rock and roll, “groupie” was the only viable position open to a woman who wanted to participate, in some way, in the creation and dissemination of the music she loved. The logic goes like this: women became groupies because what else could they possibly do to mediate or amplify the sublime experience of reacting to these songs?
While this is at least partially true—even the staunchest rock apologists will admit to rampant sexism within the scene—it’s also incomplete, because it inadvertently discounts the work of now-canonical artists like Grace Slick and Janis Joplin (who were both active and successful rock performers in the late nineteen-sixties), and the many unknown garage bands started by enterprising women around the same time. In 1968, a young writer named Ellen Willis—who had previously published just one piece on pop music, an essay titled “Dylan,” which appeared in the brash, countercultural rag Cheetah—became this magazine’s first pop critic. In 1969, a journalist named Lillian Roxon, once the New York correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, published “Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia,” the first compendium of its kind. To say that sex was the only way into music for a woman is careless; these other roads were not easy, but they were also not untrodden.
For me, the most interesting question that “Groupies” raises has less to do with cultural pathways and more to do with old-fashioned carnality and the places within us that it comes from. Perhaps it’s not so much that sex was the only option for these women, but that it was their preferred option. Fandom operates differently than a creative or critical impulse—and it wants for different things, too. People find all sorts of ways to manage the magnificent, sometimes paralyzing feelings a true communion with art incites: as long as there have been humans making beautiful things, there have been other humans who wish to subsume or harness that energy via sexual congress. Sex is a method (and an effective one) for achieving a kind of transcendental closeness to another person and, by inevitable extension, to the work that they make.
Consequently, "Groupies" can be understood as an unapologetic celebration of how a coterie of self-liberated women ultimately chose to explore that complex, ancient idea—to see what happens when a person comes at beauty with beauty, when she gives herself over, entirely, to an abstraction. Here, in these photos, plain on each of their faces, is all the determination of a true seeker.
