The Lay Apostles: Groupies 1978

Groupie. The term itself has many definitions. Applied loosely, it encompasses anyone whose idol worship borders on the obsessive. Baseball players, ballerinas, authors, tennis stars, actors — all have groupies of one ilk or another. Anybody who’s anybody has groupies. But in rock & roll parlance, groupie is not just a synonym for fan. It’s one thing to wait outside the gates of Yankee Stadium hoping to snare an autograph from Reggie Jackson. It’s another altogether to give blow jobs at the backstage door to the local kid who works weekends at the civic center when the big bands come to town.

The ladies of the night: nearly every well-known band has sung of them, and today’s infatuation with the Sixties may make those women seem a whole lot more attractive than they really were. But even the most baked-brain punk would have trouble topping the Plaster Casters, three chubby girls from Chicago who collected hundreds of ceramic models of rock-star phalluses in the Sixties.

Former groupies, many of whom now work as record publicists, music critics and backup singers or are married to musicians, maintain that the world meant something different back then. The atmosphere was different. There was a whole new groundswell of ideas, a cultural revolution that manifested itself in the ethos of free love, communes, hallucinogens and strong anti-war sentiment. Somehow the whole feeling was contained in the radical sounds emanating from the electric weapons wielded by rock & roll musicians. To be a groupie then was to be on the inside of a scene that would change the world. To keep your position on the inner lining. You had to be as cool, bright and exciting as the people and sounds that served as the movement’s icons.

But the innocent rebelliousness of the Sixties gave way to the “me” generation of the Seventies, the “if it feels good, do it” movement. Executives grew long hair, smoked pot and listened to rock & roll and got into group sex. The war ended and a kind of complacency set in. Rock critics disparaged the dearth of anything that resembled the creativity of the Sixties. Underground heavy-metal music — with its strong male appeal — and schlock rock took over, interrupted briefly by quick-burn trends such as glitter rock. Superstars became more abundant than cancer warnings, Farrah Fawcett here, Peter Frampton there — all gone tomorrow and replaced by other instant celebrities. And groupies scurried about dizzily like a family of slugs whose rock had been displaced, looking for something or someone to hang on to. Today, all that’s left of the groupie cult is various mutations: macho groupies such as Richie, who plays out masturbatory fantasies with Deborah Harry (a.k.a. Blondie — her group is also called Blondie), male homosexuals who chase after Tom Robinson, bull dykes who slaver over all-girl bands like the Runaways, and punk groupies into the fashionable antics of S&M. Aspiring rock stars may still get into the business because, as Robbie Robertson said in The Last Waltz, they’ll get “more pussy than Frank Sinatra,” but once their record sales reach the break-even point, they seem untouchable, save for those who have something more interesting than kinky and abundant sex to offer.

Still, groupies are a sign of success, no matter how mutant they might be. Some people, such as Peter Leeds, manager for Blondie, don’t understand that. He fears (perhaps correctly) that any mention of the frustrated men who try to hit on Deborah Harry will somehow link her band to a nominal star status. He forgets that groupies buy records and concert tickets and T-shirts bearing band logos, that groupies are the best advertising there is, even if their infatuation with stardom can be obnoxious. As it is with Richie, who would give anything to meet Deborah Harry.

Richie

It was tropical hot in this place, this converted Long Island bowling alley known as My Father’s Place, and Richie, standing not a foot from the stage where in a few minutes he would be able to reach out and touch, actually touch, the woman who inspired his wet dreams, knew it was time to peel off his bleached, sleeveless denim jacket, the one inscribed with “WestyKills” across the back. Of course, the disrobing was all part of the plan: He figured Deborah Harry wouldn’t or couldn’t or just might not mind doing a double take at his giant, hairless chest and the beautiful pectorals he had spent years inflating at a Brooklyn PAL center. He had tried the same ploy the week before, when he followed Blondie and the band to Boston’s Palace Theatre. He thought it would be easy to penetrate the backstage scene there, impress Blondie with his simian muscularity (and his most recent cosmetic acquisition: a tiny, heart-shaped tattoo on his left shoulder, still raw from the pricking), then to ask for a date. But the security was tight — Christ, the bouncer was even bigger than he was. But he knew the layout of this bench-lined rock club: to get backstage he need only walk through the swinging doors at the side of the stage, strut with the self-importance of a roadie and run down the back stairs to where he could talk to Deborah, the most god-awful gorgeous girl in the whole expanding universe. And tonight, feeling the Methedrine-spiked beer coursing through his veins, Richie just knew that Deborah was hyped up for some groupie action.