“It started with Elvis, she said, when Elvis went ‘off to war’ and she marked the days off one-by-one for two years on a calendar hanging in her bedroom.” So begins “Pamela’s Story”, a subsection of the 1969 Rolling Stone cover feature “Groupies and Other Girls”. It’s a short section in a sprawling article of interviews with dozens of women who identified as “groupies”, as well as with musicians such as Frank Zappa, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, showing how artistic appreciation and sexual desire define music fan bases. “Later,” the passage continues, Pamela “sent Paul McCartney a poem every day for several months. She also fell in love with Chris Hillman (the Byrds), and once took him some soup.”
The Pamela in question happens to be Pamela Des Barres, one of a few rock ’n’ roll groupies who would become legendary in their own right. Now, Des Barres is something of a spokesperson for groupiedom. At the time of the Rolling Stone cover piece, though, she was 20-year-old Pamela Ann Miller. She had moved on from showing her devotion through poems and food. Soon enough, she was outside Mick Jagger’s hotel room (“He said he was in the shower,” the magazine story explains, “and she kept on banging, so he came to the door and opened it and he was nude”), before taking her place as a stalwart of LA’s Sunset Strip, romantically embroiled with musicians including Page, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison and Jagger himself.
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