‘Lost Notes: Groupies’ Unearths An Alternate History of '70s Rock

JH: She really is. There was also a book, Let’s Spend the Night Together, that Pamela did, that was interviews with groupies. And so we knew parts of people’s stories from that. But then we found more through her self-published book, which had been, like, a MySpace blog. I think I found screenshots of it on like, for real, a Geocities site that was dedicated to girls who had been go-go dancers at a club in the very early days of the Strip. I mean, all of us were rabbit-holing this stuff to the Nth degree.

DTR: Literally to the end of the world. Then Jessica came in with a bunch of names of people who I identified later as the “baby punks,” who come in and are, like, looking at and witnessing the groupies. Not only do they give us this other dimension and this other perspective of the story, but they’re the connective tissue between the mid to the late ‘70s. That was a revelation for us to piece together. The answers that they gave us about what groupies signified to them make 100% complete sense in my mind. And it’s almost as if I’ve known this all along but had never heard it before.

JH: They’re the groupies’ groupies, the punks.

How do you think the term “groupie” itself has evolved, and what does it mean right now?

JH: I think it’s one of those things where whether or not it’s, like, a slur is kind of in the eye of the beholder, the speaker, or whoever’s getting called one, too. As we allude to, whether or not you are a groupie [depends on] whether or not you identify as one. Somebody else doesn’t get to call you that. But I don’t know the evolution of the term where it is today. I don’t know if there’s a true groupie culture like there used to be.

DTR: It feels like a word from the past, to me. And I don’t have a moral-victorious read on that where it’s like, we evolved past it, or we reclaimed it.

Was there an amazing story that you wish could have made it into the podcast?

DTR: So Dee Dee Keel of the Whisky a Go Go had, like, married the guy from the Stooges’ road crew by this point. And she was pregnant with her second child with him. So she’s like, pregnant as fuck upstairs at the Whisky answering her phones, and her and Elmer [Valentine, the Whisky’s co-founder] had booked Patti Smith’s first shows in LA — and this is before Horses comes out. So [Patti] comes upstairs and is, like, milling around the office, says hi to Elmer and Dee Dee. And she stops, and she’s like, “Oh my God, you’re so pregnant.” And she goes down and starts talking to her pregnant belly, and giving the baby advice and stuff about how to make it in the world. And then she stands up and she talks to Dee Dee and she was like, “You are so brave for having a child.” And Patti Smith lifts up her shirt and shows her her stretch marks. And she was like, “I had a baby, and I had to give my baby away. Because I couldn’t take this baby on me with this path of life that I was on.” And this was before it was public knowledge that Patti Smith had ever had a child. And we asked Dee Dee—Jessica and I were sitting there—“Was that the only time you ever saw, like, another mom in the rock music business?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah. Of course.”