“In the early 1970s, rock n roll mythology was being built in real time. In Hollywood. It was on the Sunset Strip where the whole rock star cliche was being formed out of its raw material: drugs, sex, private planes, limousines, trashed hotel rooms… And though this legend has been regaled over and over in the decades since, all that hedonism and excess – it wasn’t a myth.
At age fourteen, one girl found herself in the very middle of that rock n roll reality. And that girl was Lori Mattix. Or as she was known back then, Lori Lightning.
– EPISODE 1, LOST NOTES: GROUPIES, “LORI LIGHTNING & THE BABY GROUPIES”
KCRW’s celebrated music history podcast LOST NOTES returns for a raucous and ribald Season 5: GROUPIES: WOMEN OF THE SUNSET STRIP FROM THE PILL TO PUNK, an 8-part docu-series/podcast that digs deep into the teenage groupie scene of the Sunset Strip in the 1960’s and 70’s.
“As a former music-obsessed teenage girl, who threw myself into my own local scene at age 12 and never looked back – no historical creatures in rock lore had ever captivated my imagination as much as teenage groupies of Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s,” states host Dylan Tupper Rupert (Bandsplain, 33 ⅓ Podcast). “Reading I’m With the Band in college and discovering Lori Lightning and Sable Starr on Tumblr-era blogs captured my curiosity not through voyeurism, but a sense of kinship and perhaps even uncharted lineage. For as much as this is a music history reframe, GROUPIES is a series of intersecting party girl coming-of-age stories, investigating the role of not just women but girls in the very evolution of rock music as they complicate its own self-inscribed legend.”
Over eight episodes, Rupert takes listeners through both the literal, and figurative, intersections where these ambitious, music-obsessed young women and teenage girls met their real life destinies on the Strip; or right off it at Frank Zappa’s studio, or Lenny Bruce’s funeral, or Led Zeppelin’s pool party at the Riot House. The series plays host to a panoply of candid interviews including Lori Lightning, one of the infamous, so-called “Baby Groupies,” of the glam-era, best known for her association with Jimmy Page, and her best friend Sable Starr; Queen of the Groupies, best selling author, Pamela Des Barres; CREEM’s founding editor and pioneering rock journalist Jaan Uhlhelski, who talks about being the first journalist to cover Led Zeppelin’s consorts. The show also unveils the real, and real weird story of STAR – the short lived “groupie magazine” headquartered on the Sunset Strip and the unintended impacts of creating “Cosmo, but for 14-year-olds in Ohio,” in 1974.
“To finally get to hear these women's stories, of seeking liberation and self-definition through music and groupiedom, and having no regrets, now, in the 60s and 70’s – it was just continual revelation,” says GROUPIES executive producer and co-writer, Jessica Hopper. “Groupies have largely been left out of canonical music histories because they were seen as disposable, or only valuable for what they could reveal about the great-man rock star. So, of course, in telling the story of The Strip, and centering groupies – we get more than a corrective, we get a stunning redraft of music history.”
“Having come up in music media under co-creator Jessica Hopper’s tutelage at feminist teen mag Rookie, this project feels cosmically full-circle in theme and scope, as a way to re-interrogate the importance of girls to culture, starting with the territory we both know most intimately: rock music.,” continues Rupert. “We chose to focus on the Sunset Strip, specifically, as each American groupie scene really had its own dynamic. As we began to focus on Hollywood, we realized the parallels between many of LA’s own myths about itself were made evident in the lives and self-perceptions of these rock n roll girls, too. That Hollywood wasn’t just where the groupies were, it’s where the image of who a groupie was projected out into mass culture.”
Groupies had a profound and lasting impact on The Strip becoming The Strip, music media, breaking marquee name bands, policing policy in West Hollywood, the birth of LA paparazzi, and most especially– the birth of punk in Los Angeles. Punk icons who witnessed it all round out the Groupies cast: Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club, The Cramps); Alice Bag (The Bags); Theresa Kerakes (Lobotomy zine) and Pleasant Gehman (Ringling Sisters).
It is sex, drugs, rock n’ roll and hijinx to the hilt.
LISTEN TO THE TRAILER https://shows.audiocdn.com/s/kcrw/lost-notes-groupies/coming-soon-groupies-wom-a0a891
LISTEN/SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/lost-notes
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment