GROUPIES: Women of Sunset Strip, From the Pill to Punk

This season, on Lost Notes...

Hello gentle buds,

Some five or six years ago, Dylan Tupper Rupert and I started dreaming up a way to tell the stories of groupies. You may know Dylan from her time at Rookie mag or as “Producer Dylan” from The Ringer podcast Bandsplain. We had both been fascinated by groupies like Lori Lightning and her BFF Sable Starr, the iconic Miss Pamela and her band The GTOs — seeing their pictures in rock books, old magazines, Dylan built a whole style dossier of them on Tumblr — we wondered Who were these women, really? What did they want from groupiedom? How did they get in the picture?

Those questions and more have yielded Groupies: The Women of Sunset Strip from the Pill To Punk, as season 5 of KCRW’s Lost Notes. Available where ever you find yr pods.

Episode 1: Lori Lightning and the Baby Groupies

Episode 2: The Fairytale of Miss Pamela

Episode 3: Girls Together Outrageously

Episode 4: Hollywood Encounters

Episode 4 dropped last week and since Lost Notes: Groupies began airing it’s routinely peaked up in the top ten on the various music podcast charts. The music pod charts are rarefied airspace for women…speaking aloud. Do I delight that the untold stories of teenage groupies, who are now ages 66-78, are moving ahead of dude perma-ensconced in the upper echelons of music podistry? I DO, dear reader, I DO VERY MUCH DELIGHT.

The point of Lost Notes: Groupies is to center the stories of these women, of their own teen ambitions, and their dreams of having a place in the music they loved and lived for. Sometimes, when we would tell folks the title of the show, they would go “Oooh, so it’s like a #metoo thing?” or assume Groupies is an expose on predatory gatekeepers. They show up, we do not ignore them, they are known knowns 'round these episodes -- but those bold name men have had enough airtime.

And books.

And docu-serieses.

And RNRHOF inductions.

ANYHOW.

GROUPIES is not about them.

GROUPIES about the girls. Who they were, what they wanted, how they got it, the dreams they dreamed, how they came to the Strip, what they wanted from music, how they saw themselves, how they wanted to be seen, how they made their way into the scene, who inspired them, who helped them, who they helped, who made them famous, the microcosm of clubs on the Strip, how they wound up in LZ's white limo aka "the slutmobile", how Bonzo is the only man who could truly rock a scarf, how the pill and the sexual revolution trickle down to tenth graders in 1973, micro-generations of Groupies, the whole story of the "last supper" photo of Groupies that was the shot heard (and printed) around the world, how crowded competition in teen girl fan magazines birthed STAR Magazine the short-lived "Cosmo for 13 year-old-girl" exported the idea that the Strip was ruled by teenage girls and groupies around the world, what it felt like to be closeted, queer, 14, and Chicano dancing to Bowie at Rodneys, how those glam teens were inspired by Groupie gumption to... invent punk in Los Angeles.

Also, we detour through: how changes in policing in West Hollywood in the ‘60s radicalized rock n’ roll teens, gave us the Sunset Strip Riots, and sent the serious hippies to SF, which birthed the Summer of Love and some sundry details about zoning, city council, how the Manson murders impacted what hotels rockstars stayed in, the incorporation of WeHo and the Sheriff's department, how the ebbs and flow of Mob power shaped the club scene, and a quick explainer on what a "Hollywood Encounter" is. These women are ribald, hilarious, and self-possessed; you, too, will soon be as obsessed by them as... well, everyone was. 

All of which is to say, we fully murder board this whole thing out. We FOIA’d the fuck out. Jessica C, our research producer read the entire LA Free Press archive so we could get context on how birth control and abortion was regarded over time in the LA scene. I read 12 books on Led Zeppelin, guys. We dug all the way in.

LASTLY -- what we aimed to do with this season is pace through the contradictions that often keep discussion of groupiedom static, parked at, merely, “It was another time.” Or that either these women were empowered, precocious teens OR were victims of these men's power and Dionysian appetites. The starkness of those binaries flattens these women’s lived experiences and makes them more easily digestible for the rest of us. But it's 2024, y'all and guess what -- we are not in the business of making women's stories smaller! We will further erase these vital women! Their lives are braided into these dazzling flashpoints in music and LA’s social history. Groupie lore IS music-cultural sociological insight. These women’s self-creation and personal mythologies deserve the light!

Plus — as we all know — unless you talk to the girls who were there, you are not getting the whole story. AND?! These girls? They merely wanted all that rock n’ roll was promising them. As critic/DJ Doug Mosorock said of episodes 1 and 2 of Groupies:

“It’s about women who had a better time than maybe anyone in the 20th century, and how perceptive they were.”

Also, this is the first podcast produced by Golden Teapot, which is my production company with my actual sister, Lauren Redding, who was the publisher of the late great Rookie Mag and an Exec Producer on this fine, fine show. We wanted to build something for our selves, our friends, to make the sorts of music and culture docs we wanna see. It’s a means of feminist production.

We got to work with some old friends — aside from Producer Dylan, the self-described “Rick Rubin of Podcast Producing” — Groupies Sr. Producer Michael Catano also produced the Rookie podcast. He also produced the legendary Hanif/Cat Power episode from my previous season on Lost Notes. And a CBC podcast about online incel culture that is fucking terrifying. Carmen Elle, who did all the original music and score for Groupies, also did the score for the docu-series I directed Women Who Rock (Amazon/MGM+ in US, Crave in Canada etc), though maybe you know them from Diana, or Austra, or their award winning original score for my fave Sort Of. All the shredding is them. A lot of our music directives were like “Ok, the vibe is like LedZ “Going to California,” but sound is Rod/Faces w/ Keith, but like they are wasted and jamming in the hotel hours after the show ended and the drugs are BAD.” And they were like “I GOTCHU” — I mean, it was a kind of symbiotic heaven.

No one pulls off a banana-colored satin suit like Rod. Maybe no one should:

New buds who made the show the diamond it is — Jessica Calvanico, our research producer, who filed FOIA after FOIA, and is writing a book about the carcerality of teen girlhood; her recent paper will flip yr wig “Arson Girls, Match-Strikers, and Firestarters: A Reflection on Rage, Racialization, and the Carcerality of Girlhood”. SHE HAS SPECIAL EXPERTISE ON TEEN GIRLS WHO BURN DOWN THEIR FAMILIES HOME; she is the Mike Davis-like titan us gently aging riot grrrls have been waiting for. And she plays in KIM, the metal band, who are SCAReeeeey.

Also, we were graced by two massive talents that Yasi passed our way from Bandsplain, our supervising producer and super-competent Virgo, Alexandra Nelson. I affectionately call her the Human Steering Wheel. She is a director and producer in her own right, and has the Emmy to show for it! And the immersive sound design in these episodes that will have you smelling the beer stench coming out of the club carpet, well, that’s Michael Hardman, whose work you might recognize from the gone-but-not-forgotten 33.3 pod. It was a real collective effort and all hands on deck, sprinting with belief in these women and eagerness to elevate their stories.

ALSO? I think it’s the best thing I have ever worked on, helped make, in my whole entire career, and the last 3 episodes stand to change our collective understanding of music history. So, catch up, buckle up, take your anxiety-puncturing power walk with Groupies on yr ear buds. (And press frenz, if you need embargoed episodes for the rest of the season, that Trevor/Biz3.)

yrs,

JH