Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (37 page)

y goddaughter, Polly Parsons, recently had her splashy nighttime wedding shower at a venerated Moroccan restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, where patrons gleefully dig into mounds of spicy chow with their bare hands. Polly's hungry guests were halfway through the tabbouleh and shawerma when mysterious, sensual music wafted through the mirrored curtains, and Princess Farhana undulated to the center of the room. I've always known this vibrant scenester as Miss Pleasant Gehman, infamous punk/singer/writer/hipper-than-hip journalist, and here she was in yet another incarnation, wriggling and shimmying to beat the band, decked out in sheer, sequined, coin-laden odalisque garb. Her curvy midriff bare, Pleasant began her dervish whirls, clanging her finger cymbals, seducing us one by one. Our jaws dropped as she performed outrageous belly rolls and provocative bumps, her exultant dark eyes sparkling like desert moondust.

Thanks to the musical savvy of various teenage babysitters, at the age of four and a half, precocious Pleasant Gehman was already obsessed with the Beatles. Pleasant and her baby brother performed "I Want to Hold Your Hand" for their parents while strumming badminton rackets and wearing fuzzy lamb hats as Beatle wigs. She remembers meticulously studying the black and white photo on the cover of Meet the Beatles. "One of the first things I said to my mom was `Where are their penises?' You can tell I was doomed from birth!"

After I enjoyed another evening of her dazzling hip swaying, the vivacious, va-va-voom Pleasant takes me into a velvetcurtained hideaway and regales me with tales of her tender years. "I had a thing with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I grew up with them, watching them on Ed Sullivan. I was obsessed with Ringo because of the way he dressed. I thought George was the cutest, but anytime I had the chance, I'd get these rings out of gumball machines, and my brother and I would put them all on. My father yelled at him, `You look like a fag!' which we misinterpreted as `tag: Obviously if Ringo was a `tag,' it had to be a great thing. So we put on every fucking piece of jewelry we could find, and in the middle of this big dinner party we came downstairs and said, `Look everybody! We're tags!"

Pleasant's mom taught theater at Wesleyan College and her dad was a jazz critic for Down Beat magazine. And although there was always music playing at their house in Middletown, Connecticut, a lot of Pleasant's basic training came from a glamobsessed babysitter, who just happened to be a "tag." "Gary Morris, who runs one of the most noted film Web sites, Bright Lights, and lectures all over the world, introduced me to `Liar, Liar' by the Castaways. I'd paint his toenails blue while we listened to all this crazy'60s pop. My mother's sheets became Grecian gowns and we acted out Supremes songs. When I was eleven he gave me my first copy of Andy Warhol's Interview: `Here's Candy Darling, she's fabulous, and this is Mamie Van Doren, she's amazing, look at Mick Jagger, look at Rudolph Nureyev.' I quickly started catching on to this insane outre aesthetic, and right about that same time I discovered Creem magazine. By age twelve I was getting stoned, but it was the '60s and early '70s. My mother screamed at Gary about statutory rape, and we both laughed because he was such an obvious `tag'!"

At the new local mall, Pleasant bought a T. Rex album because she had been "flabbergasted" after seeing glitter-god Marc Bolan on TV; then she spied David Bowie's Aladdin Sane. "That was the first time I shoplifted anything other than bubble gum, and I stole it just 'cause of the way the cover looked-then the next week I shoplifted Iggy's Raw Power, and those are still two of my favorite records on earth."

Well, if you're gonna steal, steal something worth stealing, right? When she ripped off a pair of white hot pants and wore them around the house, her mom was horrified. "Instead of asking where I got them, she said, `You look like Lolita.' I said, `Who's Lolita?' She told me to read the book so I went up to our guestroom and started reading. I apparently didn't hear when she called us to dinner, because I was in there, dumbstruck. I didn't think of Lolita in a pedophile way, instead, `Wow! A grown-up could be that excited over someone my age? Woo-hoo!' I started pondering this power I had, and in that same week I saw Cabaret with all those clothes and the crazy three-way. Forget it, I was never the same. I discovered Bowie and Lou Reed and it was an upward spiral into heaven. I knew what my path was. I wanted to be a completely glamorous creature-a'30s movie star mixed with a courtesan. Then I honed it to `I wanna go to L.A., get high, and fuck rock stars!' I spent most of my adolescence and twenties not thinking I was attractive, but when I look back at pictures I think, `Oh my God, I could have ruled the world!"'

Soon Pleasant and her friends were busy shoplifting outfits to wear at rock concerts, hiding the fishnets, Lurex tube tops, and platforms under tie-dyed jeans and puffy Snorkel Arctic parkas. Their first secret adventure was to see Alice Cooper. "We stole everything we wore, including green nail polish, and put all our normal clothes in the locker at the Greyhound station. We put on makeup, sparkles, and beauty marks, then walked five blocks to the New Haven Coliseum in hot pants and tube tops, uproariously drunk and stoned. The guards wouldn't let us backstage. Then I remembered reading in Rock Scene that Alice Cooper always stayed at Holiday Inns. I knew his manager's name and called the first Holiday Inn. `Hi, can I have Shep Gordon's room, please?' They just put me through, and I heard a raging party going on, so we hitchhiked over there. They let us party with them, but since we looked like fucking fetuses, nothing happened-even though we wanted it to."

What made Pleasant believe she could just sashay into Alice Cooper's hotel room in the first place? "I just didn't feel separate from them. I listened to the records over and over and always felt we would become friends if we met. I did feel like a fan but I also thought they would love me. I just thought we'd get along like gangbusters."

Due to a wild array of circumstances, including red-handed sex and drugs, Pleasant was sent off to boarding school in Massachusetts. "I got a full scholarship. My mom thought it was going to be good for me, but little did she know I was fucking out of control, having sex with everybody and taking drugs, which was opening new realms for me. Then she told me we were moving, but didn't tell me where, and I cried for four hours because I finally had a bunch of friends that didn't think I was crazy."

She wasn't bummed for long because her mom had gotten a job at 20th Century Fox in the City of Angels-mecca for any rock fiend. "I thought it was going to be Somewhere Horrifying, Iowa, and when she told me, `We're moving to Los Angeles,' I dropped the phone. I finished that term and got to Hollywood in the middle of my junior year. I had my first date with Rodney."

That would, of course, be Rodney Bingenheimer, L.A.'s finest late-night DJ, Mayor of the Sunset Strip, who was always on the lookout for new girls in town. "He showed up at my door in his Cadillac and a pink Granny Takes a Trip suit, a la Rod Stewart. I was a foot and a half taller in my giant silver platforms. He was like an octopus." I tell Pleasant that dear Rodney also tried to feel me up the night I met him long ago, but you can't blame a fellow for trying. Rodney introduced Pleasant around town, and she was instantly welcomed into the budding prepunk scene.

After sharing a welcome-to-Hollywood joint with "hot old man" Tony Curtis at a Tubes concert, she met a couple of soonto-be punk heroes. "A few rows in front of me, I saw George and Paul, who later turned into Pat Smear and Darby Crash. Georgie was dressed like Alice Cooper, and Paul was all in white with an Aladdin Sane lightning bolt and red hair. I threw them a note with my phone number: `Aladdin Sane, you cosmic orgasm, call me.'" The next day, Pleasant spent the afternoon slumming around vivid Hollywood Boulevard with her new pals. "Two or three days later they asked, `Do you like Iggy?' They knew where he lived and asked if I wanted to go. `Oh my God, yeah! Are you kidding? Am I breathing?' So we took the bus over to Flores Street. I'm so naive, I thought we were going to a Jed and Granny Clampett Beverly Hillbillies-type mansion, but it was a 1920s apartment. I'm thinking he must be in the penthouse, but no, he's in this hellish tiny, dark basement hovel up to your knees in clothes and fast food containers, beer bottles and open guitars with glasses full of cigarette butts on them, just horror."

Hellish hovel, yes, but Pleasant was about to meet her very first rock god in the glistening flesh. "Iggy comes out of the bathroom in tiny cutoff shorts with the fly open, and that was it. I was in dumbfounded amazement'cause he looked so beautiful. His hair was all platinum and he was tan and healthy looking. He was completely incoherent, but had the most beautiful body, and that platinum hair, and it was Iggy POP!"

Despite Pleasant's rather sophisticated upbringing, she had never even been in a man's apartment, let alone nestled amid the squalor of one of her heroes. "This is what was going through my mind: I had this $99 Sears plastic stereo and I would play Raw Power incessantly, and I'm sitting there thinking, `I can't believe I'm meeting the person who made that record.' I was just being quiet and he said, `Hey, nice to meet you,' acting like a lounge singer or someone's dad, shaking my hand with two hands. In hindsight, I think he may have been in the throes of meth-mania. I thought he was gonna be real mean and tough, but he was all nice with a big, pretty smile. `Come on in! Here, sit down,' clearing shit off the bed, cups from Taco Bell flying. So we're sitting down and there's kind of a lull in the conversation. I was trying to take this all in and he asked if anyone had a cigarette, so I gave him one and we smoked. I was all nervous and he said, `Anybody got any drugs?' I had a joint in my purse, so I said, `I do.' I'm sitting there thinking, 'OK, I'm gonna try to keep this roach forever.' I couldn't believe I was giving Iggy Pop drugs."

Pleasant now lived on the outskirts of Beverly Hills and went periodically to Beverly Hills High. "I would wear my bathing suit under my clothes. I'd cut the first period or two, arriving in time for nutrition, long enough to get salads thrown at me and get called a faggot `like David Bowie.' I'd drop in on my art class because I liked to draw pictures of dominatrixes, then I'd walk across the street with my girlfriend to the Beverly Hilton. We'd go through the back door, take off our clothes in the ladies' room, grab towels from the maid cart, go out to the pool, and wait for people from Bad Company or whoever to buy us drinks-because they always would, you know."

From the moment she arrived in L.A., Pleasant knew she wanted to write about rock and roll, and when she finished high school in 1977, she did just that. "I loved all the writers at Creem. Lester Bangs was amazing, but most of the stuff I saw in local publications was so dry and stupid. I thought, `I can write about music better than these people can.'" She submitted samples and wound up working for several local rags, which helped get her right where she wanted to be-backstage. "I was at all those early underground punk shows and crazy parties at people's houses, so I decided to start my own magazine, having no idea how to do it." She called the fanzine Lobotomy. "I copied the Frederick's of Hollywood bag and added, `Where Glamour Is a Way of Life.' The first issue had the Mumps on the cover. Lance Loud was the first person I ever interviewed and he knew it, and said, `You're doing great!"