positivelyBLEAK Grinning back into the abyss.

HATERS GONNA HATE: Groupies

Don’t hate, appreciate!

Go ahead and roll your eyes; if you’re not in a band, then you prob­ably don’t like groupies. They’re up there on the stage in their tiny skirts while you’re down with the groundlings in the mosh pit. They get back­stage, sup­pos­edly purely on the merits of their appear­ances, and get to sip away at free booze until the head­lining act decides that they want to break off a piece of that. You might grumble about it under your breath when some huge guy knocks into you and dumps your $8 cup of Budweiser down the front of your shirt.

You know what? Half the bands you see onstage wouldn’t even be there if they hadn’t ini­tially been moti­vated to get into music by the exis­tence of groupies. Money and stardom are obvi­ously on the list, too, but I’ll be damned if I’ve met a musi­cian who doesn’t care about using their fame to get an in to some action. Plenty of songs are written about groupies — we wouldn’t have Plaster Caster by KISS if Cynthia Plaster Caster hadn’t had the ded­i­ca­tion to track down Jimi Hendrix and stick his dick in a dental mold.

Some groupies are dubbed the “band wives;” they travel in the tour bus and keep everyone alive. This could be con­sid­ered closer to a hybrid lover-​slash-​personal assis­tant, hon­estly, but I am thankful for groupies to step in when a beloved musi­cian is lying face-​down in their own vomit or guarding vans full of gear from thieves.

I’m not going to go into the his­tory of groupies here, nor am I going to argue for or against their exis­tence — this is a blog about met­al­heads, not about fem­i­nist pol­i­tics — I am going to drive home fem­i­nist aca­d­emic and artist Germaine Greer’s famous reflec­tion on her time as a self-​proclaimed supergroupie:

“Groupies are impor­tant because they demys­tify sex; they accept it as phys­ical, and they aren’t pos­ses­sive about their conquests.”

Johnny Thunders, Sable Starr and Iggy Pop

While they’ve been around for­ever, groupies really came into their own and gained fame during the sexual rev­o­lu­tion, where they embodied much of the spirit of the move­ment (for better, in the case of Greer, or for worse, if I might name­drop a cer­tain Nancy) and brought star­fucking into the spot­light. Many women raced back­stage because they believed that it would earn them brag­ging rights, gifts, or fame-​by-​proxy, but the majority, it seems, just want to fuck around and have fun, and who are we to tell them not to? Who are you to point at someone and tell them that they shouldn’t dress that way or they shouldn’t have sex with that person? Puritanical atti­tudes and metal just don’t mesh, for obvious reasons.

And, while my focus here has mainly been on female groupies (as they are gen­er­ally the most vil­i­fied — in the eyes of US media, a woman who wants to bang a rock star is often branded a slut, while a guy who wants to bang a super­model is pegged as nothing out of the ordi­nary, and this is not a new double stan­dard by any means), I believe that my friend Danielle put it best:

“It’s simply biased to think that boys can’t be groupies. Christ, what do you think chick rock stars do at the end of the night? Courtney Love sure as hell isn’t going home after the show to rub one out.”