Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies (39 page)

The Dexters moved into a cockroach- and pop-star-infested apartment house that Pleasant called "Disgraceland." Unfortunately, the powder blue wedding turned out to be the best part of the turbulent two-year punkified marriage.

"As soon as we got married he started with the domestic violence. He'd wake me up punching me. He stayed home smoking pot all day while I took a forty-five-minute bus to Century City with a huge hangover to work as a secretary in clothes I borrowed from my mother. Finally I said, `You have to get up.' He gave me a black eye and shoved me against a concrete wall, trying to rub off a tattoo I had just gotten. I said, `Get out of my fucking house!' but he wouldn't." To make sure Levi vacated the premises, Pleasant ran off with a gorgeous skateboard champion and had a ragingly naughty fling in San Francisco. "When I got back, Levi said, `Were you fucking him?' I said, `Yeah, of course-that was the whole point! We're over. You have to get out.' And he finally realized it."

In the mid-'80s, Pleasant made one of her far-flung dreams come true by fronting the Screamin' Sirens, then the Ringling Sisters. "I decided I wanted to sing, because ever since high school I wrote poems and songs. I could make the noise of every guitar solo, but never learned how to play anything. But everyone said I was so flamboyant and outgoing, I thought, 'OK, I'll sing.' I totally sucked at first. I have the kind of voice that's popular now-a girly Phil Spector voice. But in those days you had to be a punk screamer or sing like Aretha Franklin. I wanted the band to be all girls because it was working out really well for my friends, the Runaways and the Go-Go's. I thought, `I'm gonna have an all-girl gang band and I want us to be a cross between Old West saloon girls and bikers. And we're gonna play country music!" The band toured a lot, and besides delighting fans with her trilling, Pleasant threw her entire body into the mix. "Through the whole set I was dancing and shaking, nonstop for forty-five minutes."

Pleasant had long been fascinated with anything to do with the Middle East. So when a woman at Club Lingerie asked if she was a belly dancer, it was a serendipitous meeting. "Ever since I was little I was obsessed with the Crusades and those Sinbad movies. Playing hopscotch I'd say, `Please, merciful Allah, let it land on square eleven.' All my favorite rock songs sounded like Arabic music-`Venus in Furs' or `Paint It Black,' all the Jajouka Stones' music. I was wearing crazy Indian clothes, coin belts, and bindis before Gwen Stefani was even out of grade school!"

The prescient girl who recognized Pleasant's inner sultanteaser was a belly dancer herself. "I started stalking her at parties. Everyone thought we were locked in the bedroom doing drugs, but she'd be showing me hip figure eights. People would bang on the door, `Can I have some?"

I ask Pleasant if she felt belly dancing was her "calling," already knowing the answer because I've seen her dance. "Completely! I could do it immediately, and I looked like a belly dancer-I have dark eyes, I'm curvy. I started dancing at thirty-two just for fun, and within six months people were paying me, saying, `You're the best belly dancer I've ever seen!' Anytime I danced I had a huge smile on my face. I've been doing it for fourteen years now-I'm forty-six. Who starts a dance career at the age of thirty-two?"

In 1997, one of Pleasant's writing assignments brought an old fair-haired boy into her workplace: she interviewed Iggy Pop for Request magazine. They were discussing a book project Iggy was considering when things got romantic.

"I'm being Miss Professional, and since I had two books out he was asking me about publishers. He wanted to write a book called 52 Girls, because there are fifty-two weeks in a year and fifty-two cards in a deck. All of a sudden he starts kissing me. And we kissed for a pretty long time." Iggy wanted to take Pleasant to see Metallica that night, but she declined because she had to work. When he found out Pleasant was a belly dancer, Iggy flipped. "Arabic music has so much soul,' he said. `It has so much passion. I wanna come see you!"'

Pleasant neglected to tell Iggy about the very strict dress code, so of course he arrived in classic shredded Iggy regalia. "I hear this commotion at the door but didn't see what it was because we were in the middle of a number." Balancing a sword on her head, Pleasant spotted Iggy's platinum locks. "He was the only person with white hair in the whole place. Later, the leader of the troupe screams, `Oh my fucking God, Pleasant. What is Iggy Pop doing in here? I know this has to be your fault!"

Afterward, Pleasant had a glass of wine at Iggy's hotel, and he wanted her to spend the night. "I said no because I had a boyfriend. He was also living with someone so I just didn't feel right about it. He walked me to the car and kissed me goodbye. My thing with Iggy spanned, like, two decades."

Princess Farhana got another kind of satisfaction when one of her long-ago rock gods came to see her dance not once, but twice. "It was slow that night-only one party with a reservation and they kept calling, saying they were gonna be late. My boss knew I had a lot of friends in bands and he said, `Chili Pepper Red Hot came here!' We were talking about music, and because he's Tunisian, I told him about how the Stones were into the whole Marrakesh Jajouka thing; expounding on it." After waiting another twenty minutes, Pleasant's boss told her she might as well go to her next dance job. "I was backstage getting ready and got a phone call from my boss. `Oh, my God, I cannot believe it. Michael Jagger, he is at the restaurant right now!' and I say, `Shut up! Oh, my God, you're serious!' I was going to dance for the man I'd been crazy about since I was four. Mick Jagger has been a constant in my life, like the Empire State Building. I thought `What could I possibly give back to someone who has given me so many hours of pleasure?'"

Even though she was quaking inside, Pleasant must have pleased Sir Jagger, because he beamed, his dimples prominently on display, then politely tipped her a hundred dollars. She admits saving the bill for six months, until she "was pretty sure the DNA had worn off."

Pleasant Gehman, aka Princess Farhana, "Flower of the Desert," is at the tip-top of her field, delighting rapt audiences with her dancing almost every night of the week. She's currently happily ensconced in a long-term relationship with a talented artist, James Packard. Walking back to our cars in the baking SoCal sunbeams, Pleasant is indignant when I mention that despite its seven letters, groupie is still considered a four-letter word.

"I've always loved behind-the-scenes people, but groupies were the most glamorous. I compared them to artists' models in the '20s because I knew about Man Ray and Kiki, his muse. Groupies were the complement to rock stars. When they walked into a room, everyone would gasp. They were beautiful, smart, well versed, and could handle any situation. They were the seventeenth-century definition of a courtesan: intelligent, wellspoken, worldly women who were looked up to-and just let everybody eat cake. My mother said, `Why do you wanna be a groupie and not the star?' A groupie is a star! There were groupies who were film stars and music stars. Marianne Faithfull was a groupie. Pat Smear was a groupie for Queen, Darby Crash was a boy groupie, and they went on to become stars. Angie Bowie was every goddamned bit as important as David Bowie. She was the person who had songs written about her. Angle's art was just to exist. Her husband wrote great songs, but Angie was the belle of the ball. And that's a huge talent in itself. Being a groupie doesn't mean you're backstage doing something sleazy. Being a groupie is like worshipping at the church of rock and roll-and you're the high priestess."

C~~ pe- C~4)odp

A Chat Regarding the Infamous G Word

here have been a scant handful of groupie books published by the muses of rock. The first, I believe, was jenny Fabian's Groupie, in 1969, which lightly disguises flings she had all over London with Pink Floyd, the Nice, and the Animals. In 1993 Angela Bowie told tales on the Thin White Duke with bitter aplomb in Backstage Passes, and the same year the late Cyrinda Foxe-Tyler alternately savaged and adored her rock hubby in Dream On: Livin' on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith. Marianne Faithfull bravely showed how low she could go and still be the coolest chick who ever held a ciggie or a Stone in 1994's Faithfull. Cynthia Plaster Caster is currently working on her spectacular art-cum-sex memoir, Catherine James has just sold her bio to St. Martin's Press, and my own rollicking contribution, I'm with the Band, has been republished and is selling briskly, I'm delighted to say.

The most recently published fresh groupie tome was 2001's Rebel Heart by Bebe Buell. Our books are frequently referred to in the same hot breath, and if you take a look at Amazon's listing for Band, you may find a suggestion that you purchase Rebel Heart as well. It's a small groupie world, after all!

Bebe has had issues with the G word for years, so I felt it was appropriate to include her highly educated opinion on the subject.

Pamela: I want to get a few words from you about the word "groupie." I know you prefer "muse."

Bebe: But if you say that, you get misunderstood. Because the word muse immediately sounds narcissistic if you use it about yourself. But I think it's OK to acknowledge that there's a difference.

Pamela: It all depends on who is using the word.

Bebe: I suppose if Picasso said, "She's my muse," it would have a lot more impact. Perhaps one of his many mistresses, whose initials he had to hide in his paintings so he could pay tribute to her without his wife finding out. If she said, "I was the muse for that painting," society would immediately ostracize her.

Pamela: But you have publicly said that you prefer that word to the G word.

Bebe: Muse is a much more beautiful word. It just sounds nicer. It's a lot more romantic. I'm going to read you something I wrote. It's one paragraph, and it kind of sums it up.

"As far as the groupie tag, I don't believe the word means now what it did in the '60s and '70s. Much like other misused terms, such as punk and grunge, the term groupie is used to describe almost anyone associated with musicians today. Because of that, I have disassociated myself with the label. The innocence that once surrounded the word has been replaced by an almost "anything goes" mentality. I'm sure it is an insult to girls like Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and the GTO's-who coined it-to be lumped in the same category as women who sleep with anyone associated with a band or crew. That is not what a groupie is, in the old-fashioned sense.... The music was, and is, the most important thing to a true groupie of days gone past. The modern sense of the term, I find degrading and false. It gets my back up."

Pamela: I suppose a lot of people perceive the word as a slur.

Bebe: Or a mud wrestling harpie on meth!

Pamela: But I met these girls called the Beatle BandAides and the Rock N' Dolls. They go around in troupes and are claiming the word again.

Bebe: If they can clean it up and get people appreciating real art again, I would love that. I'm sick and tired of it being associated with scantily clad girls with no eyebrows and silicone breasts.