As a little girl, Pamela Des Barres fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. While in high school, her friend introduced her to the psychedelic pioneer Captain Beefheart. At eighteen years old, she packed her bags for Hollywood. She spent the rest of the 1960s in rock’s cradle of civilization, meeting, befriending, or dating all of her musical heroes—The Byrds, the Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and countless others.
Once Frank Zappa got to know Pamela and her girlfriends, he helped hone them into a performance art and music troupe he called the GTOs. Throughout her time opening for The Mothers of Invention with the GTOs, doing handstands in Jim Morrison’s living room, sitting in at protests, accompanying Mick Jagger to Altamont, and nannying for the Zappas, Pamela kept detailed diaries, resulting in her best-selling memoir, I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, and several subsequent tell-all publications. Today, Pamela is a respected author, journalist, creative writing instructor, podcaster, and rock historian and has earned the distinction of being recognized as the world’s most famous Groupie and she joins Vivian to tell us all about it.