Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pamela Des Barres is the author of Let's Spend the Night Together and Take Another Little Piece of My Heart. A spokesperson for her generation, she is an authority on classic rock and the freewheelin' rock 'n' roll lifestyle. She has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, and many other magazines.

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I'M WITH THE BAND

CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................7Foreword by Dave Navarro..............................................9Prelude...............................................................111. Let Me Put It In, It Feels All Right...............................132. The Time to Hesitate Is Through ...................................433. Have You Ever Been Experienced?....................................754. Sweetheart of the Rodeo............................................1055. Every Inch of My Love..............................................1376. It's a Gas Gas Gas.................................................1677. Dedicated Follower of Fashion......................................1998. I Met Him on a Monday and My Heart Stood Still.....................2299. Take My Hand, Take My Whole Life Too...............................259Epilogue..............................................................291Appendix: Last Will and Testament, 1965...............................301P.S...................................................................303Sound as Ever.........................................................307

Chapter One

I get shivers whenever I see those old black-and-white films of Elvis getting shorn for Uncle Sam. When he rubs his hand over the stubs of his former blue-black mane, I get a twinge in my temples. In the glorious year of 1960, I was at the Reseda Theater with my parents, and I saw the famous army footage before the onslaught of Psycho. I don't know which was more horrifying. I hung on to my daddy's neck and inhaled the comforting familiarity of his drugstore aftershave and peeked through my fingers as Norman Bates did his dirty work, and the army barber did his. I tried to believe that Elvis was doing his duty as an AMERICAN, but even at eleven years old, I realized his raunch had been considerably diminished. I tacked my five-and-dime calendar onto the dining-room wall and drew big X's as each day passed, knowing he would let his hair grow long when he came home from Germany. Being an adored only child, my mom let me keep the eyesore on the wall for two years. I was always allowed to carry out my fantasies to the tingling end, and I somehow survived several bouts of temporary omnipotence.

All my girlfriends had siblings they had to share with, and since I had two rooms of my own, my house was where everyone wanted to bring their Barbie dolls. I ruled the neighborhood until I entered Northridge Junior High. It turned out to be the real world, and was I surprised! My lack of breasts took precedence over my grades, and actual real-live boys loomed before me, loping around, too tall for their own good. I wanted to make my parents happy and get an A in Home Economics, but boys and rock and roll had altered my priorities.

I was always in awe of my big, gorgeous daddy. He looked just like Clark Gable, and disappeared on weekends to dig for gold way down deep in Mexico. He had always wanted to strike it rich, so right before I was born, he and my mom left Pond Creek, Kentucky, heading for gold country, which allowed me to come into the world as a California native. We lived right off Sunset and Vine, in a dinky little hut on Selma Avenue, and after a series of unilluminating vacuum-salesman-type jobs, my daddy made his way farther west into the wild shrubbery of the San Fernando Valley suburbs, to seek his meager fortune bottling Budweiser. He splurged out and bought his very own cream-colored Cadillac that he paid for in seventy-two monthly installments, and we lived in the same split-level for twelve years, so I felt very secure. I had two parents, a dog, a cat, a parakeet named Buttons, and three good meals a day. In my early years, my sweet mom made sure that my wild daddy came across as a tame, devoted father-figure, but no matter how much she buffered and suffered, it couldn't alter the fact that he was from the Old South, and I was from the New West.

Two incidents occurred when I was fourteen that had a profound effect on my life. The first was when my dad relented and let me remove the wisps of hair from my very thin legs (he did not, however, let me place the Lady Schick above the knee), and I had a moment of independence alone in the pink-tiled bathroom that will never be equalled for as long as I live, squirting a pool of Jergens into my palm and slathering it all over my hairless, shining Barbie-doll calves. Compared to getting my period, the first shave initiated me into the elementary stage of womanhood with a much more exciting sense of adventure ... going forth into the world with no hair on my calves-Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness! The second incident involved a stolen car, a bad boy, and the song "He's a Rebel." Dennis MacCorkell was the slump-shouldered, shuffling, cigarette-dangling, pit-faced bad boy found in most junior high schools in 1962. He would shout to me whenever we passed in the hall, "Hey! No Underwear!!" I took it as an endearment and blushed appropriately. He had the same seat in his homeroom that I had in Biology I, and one Friday morning I found "No Underwear" carved into the table. I hoped it was a secret message of adoration, even though he was going steady with a tough Chicano girl named Jackie. Over the weekend, Dennis and two other bad boys from another school stole a car and smashed it to pieces and they all went straight to Teen Angel heaven. Jackie came directly to school so we could all see her suffer. She was wearing a black tulle veil, and her friends held her up all day as she staggered from class to class. She broke down during Nutrition, and every girl in school secretly wished that Dennis MacCorkell had been her boyfriend. "He's a Rebel" became associated with Dennis, and rebellion turned into infamy in my teenage mind. Twenty years later, my mom was cleaning out her drawers and came across a little box with a dead rose tucked inside, and a slip of paper cut out of my 1962 yearbook: "Hey, No Underwear, good luck with the boys, Dennis MacCorkell."

Nobody ever forgot Dennis MacCorkell at Northridge Junior High.

"He's a rebel, and he'll never ever be any good, he's a rebel and he never ever does what he should ... and just because he doesn't do what everybody else does, that's no reason why I can't give him all my love."

I began to associate the Top 10 with events and boys of the moment. My transistor became an appendage, the goopy-haired heroes crooning in my ear became all the boys who ignored me during "I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag." Lyrics were taken seriously. I walked in the rain, crying, listening to "Crying in the Rain" by the perfect-haired Everly Brothers, imagining that I had just broken up with Phil "Caveman" Caruso, the Italian hunk in my Creative Writing class. When Vance Branco didn't show up for my backyard luau, I joined Leslie Gore for the chorus, "It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, DIE if I want to ..." I stood by the screen door in a real honest-to-God grass skirt that my daddy brought back from Okinawa, fiddling with my fake lei while all of my guests twisted the night away ... "You would cry too, if it happened to you."

Although I bought Bobby Vee records and wanted to put my head...