Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (24 page)

was twirling all over the dance floor at the Palomino club as the Flying Burrito Brothers played their cosmic American music to a handful of devoted diehards. Lost in the final notes of the strum and twang, I was pleasantly brought back to the smokefilled honky-tonk by a blonde sweet-teen who had noticed the sparkly cross around my neck. "I know you're wearing that cross because you love Jesus," she purred. The chiffon-clad sylph soon joined Miss Mercy and me on the floor, and as the evening progressed, she and I fell in love the way only hippie-chick flower children could back in the intoxicating spring of 1969.

I immediately wanted to touch her, and she returned the favor, stroking me with babysoft intensity, her huge aqua eyes brimming with delight. After a couple more tunes, we rushed to the ladies room to find out more about each other, and it was quickly revealed that she was there to see the Burritos' front man, Gram Parsons. They had recently spent a romance-filled four days in New York, and Michele was taking a chance tonight, hoping for a reunion. Alas, it wasn't to be, as Gram had just gotten back together with his ladylove Nancy, but Michele put on a brave, beautiful face and took it in stride. My adored Chris Hillman wasn't giving me the time of night either, so Michele and I kissed each other's rock and roll wounds and found wistful solace in our instant camaraderie. The impish newcomer from Manhattan and I quickly discovered we were soul sisters, simpatico spiritual seekers, and, eventually, roommates.

In spite of our full-plate lifestyles, Michele and I have remained close friends, and I hop a jet to Portland to hang with her for a few days. When she throws open the door of the apartment she shares with her (much younger) boyfriend Evan, I marvel once again at how childlike she is. Michele has retained all the qualities I was mad for the day we met-open-hearted innocence, wide-eyed expectancy, and an innate sweetness that lights her up like a candle in the moonlight.

After a couple of days catching up, Michele takes me to a vividly green park where we spread out on a blanket and reminisce. She has amazing recall. "I remember very well the first time we saw Zeppelin together," she laughs. "We hitchhiked out to the Long Beach Arena, which was our typical mode of transportation in those days. You knew Jimmy was interested in you because everybody kept sending you messages telling you so. Robert and I were together already and he told me, `Jimmy really wants Miss Pamela,' and to pass the message along. Ah, yes, I remember it well."

Before young Michele danced with me at the Palomino, she had already dallied with Zeppelin's twenty-year-old singer during their debut American tour. "When I first met Robert, they were staying at this second-tier hotel, the Gorham, and every groupie in New York was after him. He was unbelievably gorgeous.

On both coasts, word was out that the four lads in Led Zeppelin were way too risky. "I saw them at the Scene and everybody said, `This guy Robert really likes you,' but I was intimidated by him because I knew every groupie, including the really hardcore chicks like Devon Wilson, was after him, and I didn't want to get involved. The night of their concert we were at Ratner's, a Jewish dairy restaurant next door, and Robert saw me and came over. `Oh, there you are. Would you like to come up and see my etchings?' He literally said that to me. He was just a boy, a man-boy, and I was slightly intrigued, but then they played, and after that. .." Yes indeed. When you saw Led Zeppelin play, it was all over but the orgasm.

"I was standing in the back of the theater, and I could not believe my eyes. He was wearing a green velvet suit and he threw the microphone up in the air and introduced himself-'My name is Robert Plant.' I thought, `If this guy likes me the way everybody says he does, he's gonna get me because he's totally IT!"

Long before she attracted the Golden God, Michele had already led quite an unorthodox life, raised by her bohemian maverick mother in a tiny Greenwich Village walk-up, surrounded by hipness. "My mother, Gina, was definitely one of a kind, way ahead of her time, and took a lot of flack for her beliefs. In those days, it took a lot of guts to be different. She was absolutely gorgeous. I think she was just born weird. But as nutty as she was, her kids came before everything, so I always felt loved and cherished."

She was adored but free as an uncaged canary, haunting coffee bars and rock clubs while her mother worked nights as a waitress. "When I was very young I wanted to live like Ozzie and Harriet," Michele admits. "I wanted stairs with carpeting and a pool in the backyard, a dad in the house and a kitchen where we'd all have breakfast around the dining table in the morning."

Michele and her older sister, Franny, never saw their missingin-action father, however, and Gina served up dishes that Beaver Cleaver couldn't even imagine. "My mother was a spiritual seeker. She got into Zen Buddhism and was one of the first people in New York on the macrobiotic diet. When I was eleven, she became a vegetarian, and I grew up on brown rice."

Living with an eccentric mother sometimes took its toll on the girls. "When you're a kid and your mother is weird, walking around barefoot, even in the Village, people made fun of her and it was embarrassing. But she was true to herself and brought us up the best way she knew how."

At least Michele didn't have to sneak out to smoke her first joint. "It was kind of cool, I smoked pot with my mom one time and she said, `You know, this is very nice, but I'm like this all the time anyway.' It was true."

Even though I know Michele grew up with music all around her, I ask why she started falling for musicians. "My very first love, my first crush in kindergarten, was Elvis Presley." I should have known since I also discovered Elvis at a very young, loveme-tender age and never got over it. "I had fantasies that he would come pick me up from class and wheel me away on a cot. I actually got as far as lying down on this portable bed with Elvis. Pretty precocious, huh?"

As a young teen, Michele was free to roam the world's trendiest streets. "My mom knew a lot of jazz musicians and artsy people, so it wasn't a foreign milieu to me. In those days there were folk singers in the park every weekend, and I was always around people playing music, so it was normal. The first job I had after school was at the Night Owl Cafe, where a lot of groups got started: the Lovin' Spoonful, Dylan, the Mamas and Papas, the Doors."

Even a freewheeling hippie chick had to make a buck, and Michele's second job had her modeling in the window at Betsey Johnson's original Greenwich Village boutique, Paraphernalia. "It was so much fun. All the gay guys would come up to me and say, `We just want to tell you how fab-u-lous you are; we love watching you dance in the window!' I have this incredible photograph, a double exposure of me on my little platformand an old couple, a man and a woman, looking in the window, smiling at me."

It made perfect sense that Michele's first love would be a musician. Ralph Scala was eighteen and Michele only fourteen when they began their passion fest. "When you're first in love, the whole world revolves around this person-all your happiness hinges on them." Ralph's band, the Blues McGoos, had a hit song, "Ain't Seen Nothing Yet," and he took Michele on the road with her mother's blessing.

The band moved into the au courant residential Hotel Albert, home to a plethora of struggling rockers, and Michele moved in with them. "I was literally getting fucked during lunch break, then I'd trot back to high school. And sexually, I had no idea how lucky I was. I didn't know yet that all guys weren't so considerate of their partner's feelings. He was an incredible lover, and I remember my first orgasm. I wasn't trying to have one, when all of a sudden, spontaneously, it felt like my insides were rushing out my body, and I thought, `So that's what everybody's talking about!' I was fifteen years old."

Despite the divine orgasms, Michele was getting antsy, thinking about other rock guys while gamboling in the sack with Ralph. The young couple broke up, and she soon came across another sexy fledgling musician, Steven Tallarico. "In '68 there was a club in the Village called Stone the Crows, where this wild guy sang with his band, Chain Reaction. He was oh-so-cute with his exaggerated Beatles mop top." Steven Tallarico later altered his Italian moniker somewhat, formed Aerosmith, and became Steven Tyler. And he still makes the little girls swoon. But back in 1968, the beloved only child still lived with his folks in Yonkers.

Steven's upbringing mirrored Michele's, and the two renegades were soon crazy about each other. "His dad was a jazz musician and his parents were away a lot, so Steven had the house, just north of New York City, and it became an essential hangout. We did so many drugs-not anything really serious, we took a lot of acid, smoked tons of pot. The one and only time I did chloroform was with Steven. You put it on a cloth, inhale, and get really fucked up."

Seventeen-yearold Michele and nineteen-year-old Steven had a chaotic fling that lasted almost a year. "Steven was a maniac, he was just nuts," she marvels. "He had so much personality-just one of those people with no brakes, no filter, just total id. He used to freak me out, doing things like squashing a banana through his teeth. He had this huge mouth and the goop would come squirting out everywhere!"

I think Steven Tyler is one of the hottest men ever, so I ask about their amorous adventures. "He was the best lover. I mean, he was the absolute best," she assures me. "He lived in the attic on the top floor of the house. He had speakers on either side of his pillows, and when you laid in bed, you were immersed in this wall of sound. He used to make this sexy blowing noise in my ear," she says, demonstrating with a gentle whooshing sound. "Yeah, I gotta give him all the credit for being a wonderful lover. He was very uninhibited, physically and sexually free, and in touch with his body." Does she remember any of the music coming out of those pillowside speakers? "He used to play an album by the Hollies all the time, and now, whenever I hear that song `Hey, Carrie Ann,' I think of making love with Steven Tyler."

Chain Reaction played the coolest clubs in New York, and Michele enjoyed watching Steven take over a room. "One night they played Salvation, a circular club with a dance floor in the middle. Steven was the front man, but he played all the instruments: the keyboard, the lead guitar, the bass, and he got behind the drums. You knew he was gonna be famous because he was such a madman. You had to be that kind of brave, brilliant, and over the top to make it."