More importantly, though, Des Barres helped me realize that it was OK to be completely obsessed with a band – that these emotions don’t deserve ridicule or mockery. I lived vicariously through her escapades. On making out with Morrison: “I melted in his mouth like honey, my whole body became a sticky liquid, and his fingers on my face pushed holes through my cheeks like they were on fire.” She wrote the kind of flowery, adjective-riddled prose that high school students in Writer’s Craft classes treat as gospel. Published in 1987, I’m With The Band was her debut memoir about her years as a “super groupie” – her words, not mine – during the 60s and 70s.Ĭulled from the diary she kept at the time, Des Barres detailed her sex- and drug-fuelled trysts with everyone from Jim Morrison and Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and Keith Moon. I had Pamela Des Barres’s I’m With The Band: Confessions Of A Groupie as my sidekick. I was boy-crazy, yes, but I was not alone.
But there was always a new band – with heart-wrenching lyrics and moppy hair – to gush over. When I got home, I began daydreaming about the inevitable long-distance relationship I would have with the New York City bassist as soon as he caught wind of his number-one fan up in Canada, how I would surely become the subject of their next hit single, wondering out loud to myself, why do no words rhyme with Samantha?īy the time Warped Tour rolled around the next summer, the Albany-based band had broken up. That night, my dad picked me up outside the front gates and I cradled their CD and T-shirt in my arms. As I stood glued to the railing in the front row, Count the Stars became my favourite band. Their voices were nasally and their pop punk lyrics trite, but none of this matters when you’re 14. I discovered them at a rainy Warped Tour in Barrie. PAMELA DES BARRES reads from I’m With The Band at Analogue Gallery (673 Queen West), Thursday (July 16), $30 (includes a copy of the book), and hosts a writing workshop on Friday (July 17), 7:30 pm, at 84 Carlton.
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