Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (21 page)

Now that Dee Dee is making her way backstage again, I wonder if she's planning on embracing the music scene the way she once did. "Used to be I wouldn't sleep very much because I was afraid I was gonna miss out on something. It was like that one night I didn't go to the Whisky, that one guy was gonna be there-so I had to go. I'm not like that anymore, but sometimes I still feel like I'm gonna miss out on something. I love a good time, I love a good rock show, and I love a good musician."

Shock Treatment

t was the mind-blowing, heady summer of 1968, and I was happily floating around in my own private Laurel Canyon bliss-out with my wacky Hollywood girlfriends. Frank Zappa was fiddling about on the piano while his lovely wife Gail fetched tea for a kaleidoscopic assortment of humanity. Miss Christine, dressed in her outlandish Dr. Seuss garb, balanced baby Moon Unit on her scrawny hip, as Misses Lucy, Cynder- ella, Sandra, and Sparky pranced around the room showing off their infinitely small mini-mama getups. Alice Cooper was on hand, making goo-goo eyes at Christine, a few of the Mothers of Invention decorated the premises, along with Captain Beefheart and a couple Magic Band members, who were avidly listening to Frank's stellar composition.

Ahead of his time, as usual, Mr. Zappa had already decided that the teeming cadre of flagrant, dancing groupie girls should become a rock group and cut a record of our very own. He had already christened us the GTO's-Girls Together Outrageously-and the six of us were in the process of writing tunes for our stimulating upcoming stint in the studio.

Yes, we were in the midst of a rosy, harmonious joyfest when Mercy Fontenot plowed through the Zappa's open double doors like a carnival in progress. Her panache momentarily blotted out the sun, and a woozy cloud of patchouli oil wafted through the layers and layers of scarves, belts, skirts, vests, necklaces, and jangling bracelets that reached all the way to her elbows. She haughtily surveyed the scene in the log cabin, and with a sweep of her kohl-smudged, raccoon-painted Theda Bara eyelids, boldly entered the fray. I knew there had to be a pair of eyes in there somewhere-what were they seeing? Behind the zaftig gypsy girl loomed the caped Carl Franzoni, aka Captain Fuck, who loudly introduced her to all and sundry. "Hey, everybody, this is MERCY. She's from San Francisco."

Miss Christine, a true speedfreak of manners and grace, was the first to introduce herself to the audacious newcomer. And despite my trepidation, I, too, stuck out my hand to make her acquaintance. As Mercy from San Francisco slowly scanned my girly, pink chiffon presence, I noticed that both her earlobes had been split down the middle, still managing to accommodate loads of spangly coin earrings that drooped down to her shoulders. Her mouth was a brazen crimson slash, and her fierce eyes poked me like a pointy red fingernail to the solar plexus. Then Mercy briefly touched my hand, and merged into the commotion.

A few moments later, Frank made a stunning announcement. He declared that Mercy Fontenot would become the seventh GTO, proclaiming that she added "an imperative bizarre element" to the proceedings. Our hero had spoken. Mercy looked around at our thunderstruck faces and said, "Don't worry. I'm not a dancer. I'm not a singer. I'm a gypsy. I come from a long line of Fontenots out of New Orleans." Then she yanked a small shimmering bag from within her copious bosom and shook it at us. "And this is John the Conqueror root."

It took a little time, and some turbulent convincing from Mr. Zappa, but it wasn't long before the nomad neophyte became Miss Mercy, a proud member of the GTO's. If one of my many psychic soothsayers had taken me aside that day and told me that Mercy would become one of my closest, dearest, forever girlfriends, I would have checked her forehead for a fever.

Mercy Fontenot, aka Judith Peters, grew up all around the greater U.S. of A., carted hither and yon in finned American cars by her bigger-than-life gambling daddy. She remembers always seeing a racetrack from her bedroom window. "My dad was a car salesman, mother was a nurse, and they both gambled. We picked up and moved over and over because he was always in loads of trouble-they were gonna put cement shoes on him." Since she lived all around the country, Judy was treated to a wide variety of music. "I would hear all this stuff on the radio. Even as a little kid. Rhythm and blues, country and western, all the roots music. It shook me up. My mother listened to Jerry Lee Lewis, my dad played Sinatra." Little Judy lived in Seattle, Dallas, Oklahoma City, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, but the family kept returning to San Mateo, California-situated near the handy-dandy Bay Meadows racetrack.

Judy's pop, Donald W. Peters, a flamboyant, swarthy dreamer with a penchant for crooners and cocktails, often disappeared, once returning home with an angular Vogue model. "I was about twelve when my dad brought the model home," Mercy recalls, raspy words spewing out of her mouth like chewed-up Red Hots. "Her name was Janis and she was a very famous Vogue cover girl. My dad started taking speed with her because she was desperate to stay thin. Dad and the model took me for a ride in the car, while Mom waited in the house." This troubling incident, and too many more like it, shredded the already troubled marriage, so Susan Fontenot Peters finally snatched Judy and hightailed it to another part of town. For a while, her bickering parents tried to make the shaky marriage work. "I didn't see my parents fight. But they did argue a lot about the pope. Dad was Protestant and Mom was Catholic. I've always had a crush on my dad, but I didn't know him very well. He was a gambling cowboy groupie drug-taking guy."

Since Judy's mom was a nurse, Judy had no problem getting fistfuls of diet pills, but still couldn't seem to lose weight. She didn't have many friends in junior high, so music became her saving grace. "I was a pudgy girl and I think fatness made me feel like an outsider, but I did win a twist contest in eighth grade with One-Eyed Jack 0' Rourke!" Mercy suddenly recalls. "But mostly I had to live outside my realm. The uppers helped intensify the radio waves that called me, so I started chasing bands. It just fell into place, you know? I came alive in '65. The first group I met was the Beau Brummels. I saw them on Ed Sullivan and thought they were cute. Then it was the Stones. We followed their car to the hotel and Mick was pacing, you could see his shadow. We listened to him scream about Keith, who had just gotten arrested. The door was open and Brian was sitting there with his suitcase, and Charlie Watts-or maybe Bill Wyman, they seemed the same to me-had been locked out of his room, and Brian was showing us his psychedelic shirts. I was attracted to the powerful fame frequency early."

What made little Judy Peters from San Mateo think she could meet the Rolling Stones? "Well, first of all, at fifteen I changed my name to Mercy, so Judy Peters wasn't about to do anything! And how can you answer why? I wanted to know the people who made the music," she says simply. "For some odd reason, music was the most important thing to me. You have to meditate on what you want. That's the main thing."

Luckily, San Mateo is very close to the show-stopping heart of San Francisco, where a vivid music scene was burgeoning. "From where I was living near North Beach, I started getting into the blues. The beatniks were blasting Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters in the local record shops." She was barely in her teens and getting into big trouble at school, but Mercy's musical taste was coming together beautifully.

"It all happened so fast. Everything seems to merge together in a big mountain of Mounds Bars! A girl gave me LSD when I was fifteen, so everything's all one big spin. She said `Do you have lemons in your mouth?' 'cause she wanted to make sure the acid was working, making my mouth pucker. I could see her wicked smile in the car mirror and she cackled at the effect it had on me. Then she took me home and left me there. My parents were in the next room, fighting or fucking, then the walls started to breathe. All the gypsy bracelets turned into snakes and crawled up my chubby arms. I looked out the window and there was a huge circus going on in the carport with Ferris wheels, clowns, fireworks, and a fun house raging. I didn't know how to tell my parents what was happening, because I'd never heard of this stuff. I knew I'd lost my mind, but they didn't have to know. I was totally terrified by this external trip, but the unknown had captured me, and my internal vision would never regain consciousness. My mind was no longer a virgin and would lust for lunacy for many moons. I went right into the radio, sliding into the airwaves every time a song played. I crawled inside the radio, and never came out again."

It was when she heard Don Covay's sultry "Have Mercy Baby" that our brave new worldly doll unloaded the dullsville "Judy" and never looked back. She discovered that the beatniks had fled touristy North Beach and taken over a coffeehouse across from "Panhandle Park" called the Blue Unicorn, where electricity brewed with the coffee. "My first screwing experience was with a beatnik, an older man, up in an attic with rows of mattresses. He ripped open my virginity and took it, and Bob Dylan plugged in an electric guitar, moaning contagious words of wisdom, and took the world's virginity too. And here came the hippies! I think I also fucked one of the members of the Sopwith Camel."