A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 184: “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes” by the GTOs

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

This episode took longer than normal to come up because, as you’ll see from the episode itself, I’m releasing it simultaneously with the next episode, on Frank Zappa. These two make up two parts of a three-part story, and I’m hoping to have part three, on Captain Beefheart, up before the end of the month. There will also be, between this and the next episode on the feed, a trailer for an exciting project I’m a minor part of. This episode is on “The Captain’s Fat Theresa Shoes” by the GTOs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on “My Pal Foot-Foot” by the Shaggs. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by editing, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music and 500 songs By Andre Hig Song 184 The Captain's Pat Teresa Shoes By the GTO's Before we begin This episode contains far more content warnings than most It contains discussion of underage sex

Sexual abuse Drug use and overdose racism Homophobia Misogy Basically every single single topic that might upset someone. I have, of course, tried to deal with these subjects as sensitively as possible, but not all the material I cover in it does. I will also, quite early on,

be quoting a comparison that some Christians may find to be offensive and blasphemous. I want to make clear that when I do so, I am not making that comparison myself, but quoting a subject of the episode doing so. And before I start the episode proper, I have to address something about my podcast itself, which is something I try to refrain from doing, but very occasionally I have to, and I know I will need to head some things off with the portion of my audience. You see, this podcast is primarily a history, a narrative, and the songs I choose to cover in these main episodes are chosen not because of musical merit, or because the songs themselves are important, though many are both great and important records, but because they are the best song for me to

focus on in order to tell the next part of the story. But there is a vocal contingent of my listeners who, whenever I cover a song either that they have not heard of before, or which they've heard and don't like, complain vociferously, saying, why does that deserve to get a main episode when this record I think is more important only got a Patreon bonus or didn't get covered at all? Now this fundamentally misunderstands the whole process of making these episodes. I have never once thought about whether a record deserves its place in the narrative. But any time I get a gigantic surge of these complaints, it meaningfully saps my will to continue with this project. And today's episode is on a record that I absolutely know those people will complain about me covering at all,

even though it's a crucial one for telling the story. Happily, though, when I planned these episodes, I planned this as part of an interrelated trilogy of episodes that would tie together in various ways. And the other two episodes are on records that make all the canonical lists of great albums. So what I've done is I've released one of those two. the next episode on Peaches and Regalia by Frank Zappa, simultaneously with this one. This is why there's been such a long delay between main episodes,

because I had to get multiple episodes created at the same time. So if anyone doesn't want to listen to an episode on a record that you think shouldn't be here on its own merit, just go and listen to that. Part three of this interrelated trilogy on Captain Beefheart will be out in a couple of weeks. Now for the rest of you, let's have a little listen to what will be, I am sure the strangest record ever to become a main episode of this podcast

and learn all about Captain Beefheart's shoes. Fandum has, porcelainte's Fondon, found to the catam's Fondon's coined, been very contentious. My understanding, which I've not so far been able to confirm

in any standard reference texts, so I might be very wrong here, is that the word fandom itself was coined in the 1930s, and originally referred to a specific subculture, the group of fans of science fiction magazines who went to conventions like WorldCon. But almost from the beginning, even in that first fandom to be given the name,

they developed two very different and often incompatible modes of being a fan, and those two modes are, broadly, gendered. Note here that I'm not saying that there's any intrinsic reason why these things are gendered, and I'm certainly not saying that people of one gender don't partake in the other mode of fandom, or even that people don't move between the two modes at different times. This is a very, very broad-level generalisation, and I'm not trying to say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and anyone who looks like they're using the wrong toilet must be imprisoned,

no matter how much the current government wants to impose gender essentialism on everyone. I'm also, importantly, talking about fandom as an identity here. There are many people who, if they're asked, are you a fan of this band or TV show, would say yes. I mean they'll watch the TV show if they notice it's on, or have a copy of the band's greatest hits, or would maybe go and see them live if they were in town. Those aren't the people I'm talking about.

I'm talking about people for whom fan is a core part of their identity. The kind of people who write letters to TV stations to bring back cancelled shows, who write books on their favourite band, who join forums devoted to their favourites, who write fanfic, who go to conventions. People who develop lifelong friendships and enmities, based on participation in a community around the subject of their fandom. People for whom that community eventually becomes more important than the topic in many cases. And there are roughly two ways of participating in that kind of fandom, and those two ways are very gendered.

The more masculine way is what gets called curatorial fandom. This is a way of doing fandom that involves trying to pin all the details down, collect everything, learn everything. It tends to attach to objects rather than people. These fans will want to know the type of amplifier the guitarist users, or to create a technical manual for the USS Enterprise, or collect original vinyl copies of every variant mix of a song. They want to pin down times and dates and numbers.

How many takes did it take before the band got the basic track down? And then how many overdubs did they do to get the vocals? Was it recorded in Studio A or Studio B? And we all know who the engineer was, but who was the tape-op? Analysis of the work will be based around either technical aspect. This is a really innovative use of a split diopter shot. Did you know that this is the very first album released in stereo? Or about how it relates to other work?

That's Lennon imitating Dylan, but of course Dylan was imitating Woody Guthrie, was rewriting an old folk song. The more feminine way is what gets referred to as transformative fandom. This is often about using the original work as inspiration for creative work of one's own. Fanfiction, making up songs about characters, fan art, cosplay, dressing up as characters. It treats the work as raw material to be reshaped into a personal expression. But also the reason for using that work as raw material is because of having a strong emotional connection to it in the first place. And that emotional connection is not, as in the male,

to a rhetorial way of doing fandom, to objects and things, but to people. Sometimes those people are characters in the work, if it's a book or a TV series or similar, and this is where you get things like fan fiction about Kirk and Spock being lovers, and sometimes it's the performers, and you get people being excited about actors, comedians, footballers or musicians. Now, to my mind at least, neither of those two ways of doing fandom is superior or inferior to the other, but there is one pattern that we see over and again, which is that the female fandom, usually teenage female fandom, comes first and creates fandom spaces and modes of discourse, usually while the subject of the fandom is considered trivial and juvenile. Then the male fandom enters those spaces

and takes over, dismissing the women who've put in the work to create the fandom spaces for not being serious enough and caring about matrix numbers. The history of the topic often gets written by these people, usually men, and the contributions of the women get marginalised in those histories. And this matters because, in rock music, a big chunk of early fandom was created by the people we now call groupies. And in the male-dominated history of the music, the reputation of groupies is something like this. Now listen, it's just so happens. Tonight, me and my girlfriends, I mean, we've all come here for one thing tonight, looking

for a guy. And we're looking for a guy from a group. But he's got to have a dick. And he's got to have a dick that's a monster! That's Frank Zappa's groupie routine from 1971. And as we'll hear in this episode, that's a routine written by someone who was more sympathetic than most towards the groupies. But here's the thing.

Everyone knows that groupies existed. And there is no way for me to tell the story of rock music without at least one episode talking about them as a subculture. But almost everything we hear about them is not from the groupies themselves, but from the rock stars they knew and were fans of. And if you start to think about this for more than a few minutes, you realise that all we hear about groupies

is that they were or are women, or, to be frank, a lot of the time, girls, underage girls far more often than anyone should really be comfortable with, who wanted strings-free sex with rock stars, and that was the beginning and end of who they were. Now, thinking about this logically, what is actually more likely, that there were a group of young women

who built their whole identity around providing rock stars with sexual gratification and nothing else, or that rock stars, especially in the 70s, tend to have been a bunch of self-absorbed, arrogant, misogynistic, entitled young men who talk about groupies that way because they didn't care about anything other than getting laid. I mean, we could always ask the groupies themselves. Pamela DeBar, for example, in one of her several books on the subject of groupiedom, talks about Mary Magdalene in the Bible. Mary Magdalene is widely regarded in the popular culture as being a sex worker. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that about her, and she seems in fact to have been a close confidant of Jesus. De Barr quotes Patty Smith

is saying Mary Magdalene was the first groupie. And while it's not a comparison I would have made, for a variety of reasons, the parallel is rather striking. This is a woman who, for thousands of years, has been sexually scandalised because of her closeness to a prominent man, based on nothing in the actual documented events. which is not to say that groupies did not have sex with rock stars of course most of them did though as we'll see far from all of them just that that was not to them the point it wasn't all they were

several groupies have written memoirs and I've used those for researching this episode and the ones I quote or link in the show notes are all well worth searching out but there are also memoirs written from the perspective of decades later and with the knowledge that the men with whom they had had relationships are now considered legends, and their own experiences are history. But there's one artifact created by late 60s groupies at the time, showing their own views of their own lives.

You see, as we'll learn in the next episode, the one released simultaneously with this, when Frank Zapper and Herb Cohen started up their two record labels, bizarre and straight, they wanted to put out a wide range of material. Some of the recordings released on those labels are Not exactly completely mainstream music But music that at least fit with the normal counterculture of the time

Records like Judy Hensky and Jerry Eester's Farewell Alderberin St Nicholas Hall sends greetings to all of the lambs who have strayed from the phone A message sent from sister or content. You remember her as your dean. She is mean and incredibly old. Or the first few Alice Cooper records.

They also released less commercial music, like the Persuasion's Acapella album, or Captain B Farts Trout mask replica. My smile is stuck, I cannot go back to your brown land. Spears made up of the ocean, Stand-up comedy and the sun in the moon In all I can see

Back to your land of you. Stand-up comedy by Lenny Bruce, the first ever album of a full show by Bruce released after his death, and the hipster comedian Lord Buckley. While Lala, a while, Moschita Seed, both dug the same scene. Mosquity Sard or Sade, a Sade or Sade or Sade, as you like it. He was the kind of cat believing

having a good time in and joined himself, gone all the cats in, and everybody enjoy having nice time Unstanding me and the chicks dancing and the music playing and the juice going and the goodies here and there

and they line and fish tobacco and one thing and a car on real crazy and cool and the neighbors get green-eyed report the cat and bad rap and most significantly for our purposes here recordings that could only be considered anthropological field recordings

but of the LA scene and the people around it the most extreme example of this is a double album by Wildman Fisher, a mentally ill homeless man who would accost people on the street and offer to sing them a new kind of song for a dime. But another of these anthropological albums

was one that captured a group of teenage girls who had originally called themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, but who by the time the album came out had renamed themselves the GTOs, which stood for girls together and then whatever word beginning with O they felt like at the time, usually outrageously, but also orally, only or often, among other words. The girls in question were, at various times, Miss Pamela, Miss Mercy, Miss Cinderella,

Miss Christine, Miss Lucy, Miss Sandra, and Miss Sparky. They referred to themselves that way in imitation of Tiny Tim, the eccentric falsetto singer, who would refer to any woman as Miss and her first name, and any man as Mr and his surname. Some of Miss Pamela's diaries excerpted in her later memoir and with the band, show her also copying Tim in referring to men as Mr, especially Frank Zappa. Miss Pamela, who was born Pamela Miller, but is now better known by her married name, Pamela de Bar, is by far the best known and best documented of the GTOs.

She has written a couple of best-selling memoirs about her exploits with rock stars, as well as other books about the music scenes she was part of, so it makes sense to start with her. She has also regularly kept a diary since she was a teenager, excerpts of which are a major part of her memoirs, and so we know, for example, that the first musician on whom she had an adolescent crush was Dion. Though I should note that in other books she has also claimed that her first crush was Elvis. And that at the end of 1963 her New Year's resolutions were, 1. Don't Hang on Boys.

2. Be serious when it's called for. 3. Try harder on my complexion. 4. Get better grades. 5. Concentrate on my figure looking better. 6. Don't wrap my hair so much. 7. Try to be more feminine. 8. Be cute every day. 9. Don't use vulgar language.

10. Let nails stay long and polished. 11. Pluck eyebrows every 4 days. 12. Shave legs and underarms every week. 13. Deodrant every day. 14. 15. Don't waste money on trash. don't ruin boys. In other words, she was a typical teenage girl of the time, and like every teenage girl of the time, she became obsessed with the Beatles as soon as they hit America. But she became more obsessed than most, especially with Paul McCartney.

She got a group of three other friends, each of whom were obsessed with a different beetle, and she would try to talk in a Liverpool-Dian accent. The girls would role-play, pretending to be the other girl's favourite beetle, and act out little love stories, and would write fanfiction in which they would end up with their favourite beetle, or in Pamela's case also, stories in which Paul McCarty's then-girlfriend Jane Asher died in hideous ways. She would also write a poem about Paul every day and send it to him by airmail. Her George friend had a father who knew someone at the Hollywood Bowl, and so she and her three Beatle friends got fifth row tickets to the Beatles show there in August 1964, the show which made

up the bulk of the later Live at the Hollywood Bowl album. They were seeing you learn so far And I'll be a thing we said to wait They also managed to persuade a Bel Air resident Actually Ronnie Lewis, the son of Jerry Lewis To get them close enough to where the Beatles were staying That they could see them They managed to get a look at the swimming pool

In the house that the group were staying in But Neil Aspinall saw them, the police were called And the girls were escorted away In I'm with the band, Pamela says On the way down the hill a limousine passed by and I saw John Lennon for an instant he was wearing his John Lennon cap and he looked right at me If I close my eyes this minute

I can still see the look he had on his face It was full of sorrow and contempt The other girls were pooling tears in the eyes and didn't notice But that look on John Lennon's face stopped my heart And I never said a word Pamela would remain a Beatles fan But she was soon made an outcast by her other Beatles friends When she started to become interested in other musicians as well

particularly Mick Jagger. She was so interested in Jagger, in fact, that she created an oil painting of what she imagined his testicles would look like, and handed it in as an art project at school. She got an A. She was introduced to the music of the Stones and Bob Dylan in early 1965 by a new friend, Victor Hayden.

Hayden also told her that he had a cousin, Don Fleet, who was a Stones fan and who was a singer himself in a real live rock band. She went to see the group in question, Captain B. Fartner's Magic Band, at a teenage fair at the Hollywood Palladium. That show would turn out to be a hugely important one for the Magic Band, as we'll hear in two episodes' time.

But to Pamela, it was her first opportunity to meet a local musician who was interested in the kind of music she was into. Don Vleet was another massive Rolling Stones fan, and suggested they all go and see the Stones live. Vliet also claimed to Pamela that he had met Charlie Watts in the UK, and though I can find no other evidence of Vleet ever having been to the UK, at that time, he does seem to have had some sort of connection with the group, because after Pamela and Victor managed to find out where the Stones were staying in town the night

before the gig, and briefly bump into Mick and Keith, Vlique came along and got them to be able to hang out with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts all night, listening to Muddy Waters' records, though Pamela was lusting after Mick Jagger, rather than the rhythm section. The next night, after the gig, Pamela went back to the hotel and looked through Jagger's window, but he told her, it's time to go home, pretty girl. As she was only at the time, this was undoubtedly a good decision on his part. She started hanging around the Sunset Strip Clubs and became very familiar with the scene there. Unsurprisingly, as she was an underage girl, the two people she first got to know on the scene

were Rodney Bingenheimer, who was Davy Jones' stand-in on the Monkees TV series, and later a very prominent DJ in L.A., and Kim Fowley, who we've talked about in previous episodes. I say it is unsurprising that these two were the first two people she got to know, as both men have reputations for preferring very young girls. Bingenheimer is currently fighting legal action for multiple women who have accused both him and the late Fowley of sexually assaulting them as minors in the 70s. As that is still working its way through the courts,

and given the state of libel laws in the UK, I won't comment further on whether those allegations are true, or use any words stronger than those I just used. Instead, I'll include a little clip of the track Rodney from the GTO's album, attract Bingenheimer guests on himself. Rod and Adney. We see you at Wallachs and down at the ranch market, waiting for pop stars to casually stroll by.

Oh, Rodney, if you introduce me to Mick Jagger, I'll let you meet my little sister. She's only 12 years old. You can decide for yourself whether the man who that song is about sexually assaulted miners or not, and what kind of man that makes him. Mr. Bingenheimer will undoubtedly turn up in other episodes. Thankfully, neither Fowley or Bingenheimer seemed to have done anything to Pamela that she

considered worth mentioning in her autobiography, and nor did Carl Franzoni or Vito Palakas, though Franzoni in particular apparently tried a lot with her, and with every other underage girl around. She did, though, start attending dance lessons given by Vito, and became part of a group of girls who would all go to clubs with Vita and Franzoni and the other freaks and dance, who became known as the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company. Pamela at this point got a new favorite group, the house band at the Galaxy, a small club next to the Whiskey go-go. Iron butterfly. Around this time,

Pamela started to have sexual relationships with the men in bands. But for her, this was not about sexual gratification. In fact, for a long time, she insisted on only performing oral sex on them. As she put it in, I'm with the band. I tried not to think of myself as being cheap or easy or any of those other terms that were used to describe loose, free, peace-loving girls. I just wanted to show my appreciation for their music, for their tasting clothes, for their heads, hands and hearts.

I found myself in many broom closets and back seats with my head buried in many pairs of satin trousers. but I held onto my virginity like it contained the secrets of Tootan Carmen. She also befriended Jim Morrison, though unlike many of the other musicians she idolised, they didn't have a sexual relationship past one night of heavy petting. As far as she was aware, he was faithful to his girlfriend. Morrison did, though, help her get over an early drug problem she had.

She had been sniffing the sedative trichloroethylene on the basis that if it was used in hospitals, it was probably okay for you, and had shared it with Morrison. but Morrison threw her bottle out of a car, saying that he thought it might be harming them. She assumed that he knew more about drugs than she did and gave it up. Pamela was at this time half considering becoming an actor. She'd actually been cast as a lead in the film Candy, based on Terry Sutheran's novel, after Sutheran had seen her at Lenny Bruce's funeral.

She hadn't known Bruce of his work, but knew that he was hip, and therefore hip people would be at his funeral. And Sutheran had decided that she was exactly who he had imagined his heroine being. Unfortunately for her, Southerns' decision was overruled by the director, who wanted a European to play the role, much to Southerns disgust. But she was still considering her career while hanging out with the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company and trying to avoid the roving hands of Vito and Franzoni. Soon she was spending a lot of time around a log cabin in the canyon

which had previously been owned by the film star Tom Mix, but had now become something of a commune with separate living areas. Franzoni lived in one, two other Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, members, Miss Lucy and Miss Sandra, lived in another, and another Miss Christine, lived in a third. And to emphasise how far this groupie culture was from just being about sex, Miss Christine was always part of this group of groupies, even though she was what we would now refer to as as asexual, to the point of being repulsed by sex. Pamela lived away from the cabin, with the other member of the five-some, Miss Sparky. Soon, however, someone else would move into

that cabin. Frank Zapper, who knew Vita and Franzoni, decided to be that. he wanted the cabin for himself, and Franzoni and the girls moved out, so Zappa and his wife Gail and their baby Moon unit could move in. However, Miss Lucy knew Zappa and still loved the house and its surroundings, so she decided to take her friends round to the cabin to visit the Zappers. Pamela, in particular, was amazed at the contrast between Zappa's musical imagination and the seemingly idyllic nature of his domestic life. She says, in I'm with the band, Gail came out of the kitchen and I tried not to stare. She asked all of us if we would like a cup of tea. Oh, it was so civilised. The whole setup instantly changed my mind about domesticity.

You could be a rebel, a profound thinker, and a rock and roll maniac, and still eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, have a baby, and drink a nice cup of tea with your friends. Gail Zapper herself was in fact an ex-groupie, who, before getting together with Frank had had relationships with the Who's co-manager Chris Stamp and the fashion photographer Terence Donovan when living in London. And after coming back to L.A., where she'd shared an apartment with another groupie who shortly became Chris Hillman's second wife, she'd got together with both Joe Butler and Zaliyanofsky of the loving Spoonful. She had also impressed Al Cooper enough that, according to her, he had decided she was his girlfriend and went around telling people so, without bothering to consult her on the matter.

Gail had got together with Frank. Their first actual date was, coincidentally, the same Lenny Bruce Memorial, where Pamela had been headhunted for a brief non-starting film career, and given up the groupy life for a marriage that was, on her part at least, monogamous. But she still shared an attitude and a way of thinking with many of the groupies on the scene. Gail Zapper would take Pamela under her wing and be a mentor for her, but on this visit it was Miss Christine who made the greatest impression. She decided to tidy round the house for her hosts, and when Baby Moon crawled up to her,

Christine picked the baby up and held her in one hand while continuing to tidy with the other. The Zappers had been looking for a nanny, and Miss Christine was offered the job right then and there. Christine's asexuality was likely a plus point to Gail, who understood that her husband was a woman. and would sleep with other women on the road, but wasn't hugely keen on the idea and didn't want it happening under her own roof. The girl's main creative mode of expression at this point was to dance and to be seen. They were dress as outrageously as possible, and dancing clubs to their favourite

artists. Pamela's latest obsession was Steppenwolf and their new bass player, Nick St Nicholas. One day the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company all turned up to the Zappa residents ready to go to a show by the mothers, and they were dressed identically as babies in giant nappies with plastic bibs and oversized lollipops. Zappa insisted that the girls were going to go on stage with the mothers that night and dance. That was going to be the performing debut of the GTOs, as Zappa renamed the former Laurel Canyon Ballet Company with their enthusiastic consent, but it was not to be. One of the staff at the venue saw part of Pamela's nipple peeking out from under her plastic bib, and forbade any of the girls from going on

stage because of this obscenity. But the GTOs were regularly causing mini-riots, in Pamela's words, in nightclubs every night because of their dancing, and they would occasionally get up on stage with the mothers. They were becoming popular enough in their own right that they fell out with Vito, who was jealous of their popularity, though this was at this point something of a relief to the girls, as it meant they didn't have to keep dodging as advances. The girls also started singing as well as dancing,

and they would sing a couple of songs during their performances with the mothers. They had, as their theme song, Getting to Know You from the King and I, which they would sing en masse when they entered a room together. Oh, you getting to know all about you, getting to like you, getting to hope you like me. Getting to know you, putting it my way, but nicely. They would perform that in one or two other songs with the mothers, and Pamela wrote in her diary about their initial performance. Our coming out was superb.

We did two numbers and danced for a while and received a standing ovation. As Rodney says, you just scream success, and we do. The GTOs are on our way. Everyone said Mick Jagger was there. Can you imagine? Mick watching me? I didn't see him. I wish, wish, wish I did.

I really had a gala time with Victor. For the first time in my entire life I finally feel on his level. We communicate 100% better and I have so much to thank Mr. Zappapur. Such a lovely man, so where it's at, so concerned, and involved in it all. And me, I'm a part of it. The Rodney there is Rodney Bingenheimer, while the Victor is Pamela's old friend Victor Hayden, by this time a member of his cousin's band under the name The Mascara Snake. They would also sometimes dance on stage with other performers on the scene, including Three Dog Night, a new band that had just been started up by session

singer Danny Hutton, and who had been unsuccessfully signed to the Beach Boys' brother records, and were about to become very big with tracks like their version of Harry Nilsons One. Zappas number that you'll ever do, Two Niest number since the number one. Zappas started suggesting to the GTOs that they should be an actual group, rather than just dancers, and they started to warm to the idea. But Zappa took it on himself to shape the new group in various ways. One of those was that he decided they needed an extra member,

Miss Mercy, who Miss Pamela later described as such a threat to normal. that I thought of her as a human facsimile, and would nod in agreement rather than tell she ought to put her brain in an industrial-sized washing machine, ring it out real good, and hang it up to dry. She always seemed on the verge of saying something very profound, and would catch herself just in time to leave you hanging in suspense until you realised she had left the room. Miss Mercy, Mercy Fontenow, was not born with that name. According to her autobiography, she decided to change her name aged 15, and named herself after the Don Covey song, Mercy Mercy.

where Pamela had had a relatively stable childhood, Mercy, the other one of the GTOs to write an autobiography, and so the one about whom most information is available, had, by her own account, been dragged around between different states for most of her childhood because her father was a gambling addict and an addict of several other things, who kept moving to outrun the debt collectors who were after him.

Mercy had, from an early age, become addicted to amphetamins in an unsuccessful attempt to lose weight, and like the other GTOs, she had, He'd also become obsessed with famous musicians, figuring out where the Rolling Stones were staying after a gig in Sacramento and managing to get into Brian Jones's hotel room, though apparently Jones was, for once, a gentleman. But as Mercy later said, and as most of the GTOs would have agreed, it wasn't that I wanted to go to bed with everybody, I wanted to know and be with the people I thought were making the best music and see it from behind the scenes, I just wanted to know how they did it

and what was going on. She'd run away from home aged 15, and moved to Hate Ashbury with her. friend Ricky, where, as she put it in her autobiography, our neighbours there were incredible. I mean, we'd be in a house with Giles Joplin literally rehearsing downstairs. Most of her stories about her time in San Francisco, and even after, are about bad experiences with drugs, like taking LSD cut with strychnine and thinking she was going to die while listening to the 13th floor elevators playing It's All Over Now Baby Blue. She had also started seeing a man named Bernardo Saldano, of whom she later wrote, Bernardo wasn't a musician, but he was one of the biggest rock stars I ever knew.

He wasn't an actor or a model, or anything like that, either. He never did anything but looked beautiful. But that was enough. She and Bernardo didn't have a sexual relationship, but they had a profound platonic one, and the two of them even ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone, the sixth issue, when they were photographed together at the human being.

She was in and out of juvenile hall and spent some time in a psychiatric ward, before moving to L.A. after skipping out on her probation officer. For a long time she had been very dismissive of L.A., comparing it unfavourably to San Francisco, but she'd changed her mind after seeing Jim Morrison and thinking, Oh my God, if people from Hollywood look like that, then I'm going to have to change my mind about going there. Mercy and her friend Miss Cinderella, who was dating Tiny Tim at the time,

started hanging out first with Miss Christine, who bonded with Mercy over their shared speed addiction, which at this point was still being hidden from Zappa, and then with Pamela, who quickly became Mercy's closest friend. Mercy, like the rest of the girls, was unimpressed with Vito, and like the rest of the girls she still went over to his home because that was where all the coolest people hung out. She was also, initially, unimpressed with Frank Zappa,

but she started to appreciate him more once she realised his deep debt to the black music she loved, especially when she came into a mothers of invention session and found a black blues musician, Don Sugarcane Harris, playing electric violin. Mercy's musical tastes were very different from those of the rest of the GTOs. While they liked the music that was big in Hollywood at the time, the birds, iron butterfly, three dog night and the rest,

she was a particular fan of soul, blues and R&B. And where they were fans of the various British bands that came over in the wake of the Beatles, she idolised Otis Redding and resented the British bands for taking the focus away from the black American inventors of rock music. Mercy was at the time dating Jobriath, an actor and singer who was then appearing in the West Coast production of the legendary rock musical hair. Gibriath would later go on to a career as a glam rocker,

being unsuccessfully promoted as an American answer to David Bowie. Apparently his song City Freak, written after the two split up, was about mercy. ...is a city freak. You would laugh at the colors of her head and when she walked up a love, blah, Joe Breyer's career never went far, and he would also, sadly, later become known as one of the first famous people to die of AIDS. As that might suggest, he was gay, but this didn't seem to bother Miss Mercy much. A large number of the men she dated were either gay, or by men who far preferred men to women, and she described herself as being more physically interested in women than in men.

While they hadn't been part of the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company early on, Cinderella, and especially Mercy, fit right in with the group that had become the GTOs. And it was Mercy who came up with the title of their only album, Permanent Damage, which she chose because in her words, being permanently damaged is what created our craziness, and our album was Scroby. Let's face it, we were all permanently damaged. We all had stuff in our life to make us the way we were, independent, wacky soloists. Frank Zappa was not the only one who saw potential in the group, and indeed he had to, in a way, fight for them. Tiny Tim had been blown away by the group's performances of Getting to Know You, and he had got in touch with his manager, who had in turn got in touch with the Smothers Brothers TV show, and Rowan

and Martin's laugh-in. Tim's manager was planning the same sort of novelty success for them that Tim had himself, and the girls were excited, until Frank Zapper and Herb Cohen sat them down and had a talk with them. Yes, they could do what Tiny Tim and his management were suggesting, go on TV, take the opportunity, sing Getting to Know You and have a hit. Nothing wrong with that. It could be fun. Forget Zappa's plans. They could be as big as Tiny Tim and have a hit like Tiptoe through the Chulips. Very good, but what happens next?

Herb Cohen explained to them that being a one-hit wonder was nothing, and that Zappa was offering them an actual career. Did they want to just go on TV and have a novelty hit? Really? Or did they want to make an actual album and go on tour with the Mothers of Invention? and have professional management from Herb Cohen. Cohen had his brother Mutt to draw up proper contracts for the girls, and Zappa suggested that Pauline Butcher, his living secretary,

could take charge of supervising the group while the mothers of invention were on tour, as Butcher had been both a model and a modelling teacher when she'd lived in London. Butcher, who was a fairly conservative person in her behaviour, only knew Miss Christine, as at the time both of them lived in Zappa's house, and she was at first rather put off by the group. but as she writes in her autobiography Frank had been right and I had been wrong whereas before I had seen a disheveled immoral bunch

now when they swore like troopers fell into squabbles with each other or confess that they were too drunk to work I would shake my head and smile indulgently I learned that just as Christine had said so long ago in her interview there were not infamaniacs as their lifestyle and skimpy see-through clothes

seemed to imply Pamela and Sparky at 19 were still virgins though that would soon change. Christine led a life of sexual abstinence. Lucy had a camp boyfriend who dressed like Bob Rummel, while Cinderella still hung out with Tiny Tim, who did not believe in sex before marriage. Even Mercy, for all her flamboyance and eyes like a raccoon,

did not attempt to attract boys. Only Sandra, who looked 12 years old with a small cameo face, showed any sexual appetite. She and Calvin convorted in the treehouse, proof of which was her daily nausea and a burgeoning tummy on which the other girls painted their designs for public view, a happy face, or a black star to match Lucy's on her cheek. The camp boyfriend who dressed like Bob Rummel there is Bernardo Saldano,

who was by this time in a complicated triadic and platonic relationship with Mercy and Lucy. He was by this point considered a BTO, the boys together outrageously, and these boys, about whom there's less information available, seem mostly to have been gay men who hung around with the GTOs. The Calvin also mentioned is Calvian. who designed many of the mother's album covers. Rehearsals started out disorganized, but the group soon started writing their own songs about the experiences they had both as groupies and as normal teenage girls.

Here's the first song they wrote together. Fifty push-ups multiplied by 200 girls, the cracks of backs hitting cement floors as we strained our bodies into womanhood. Room 323, stagnant socks, sweaty girls, broken locks, two by two. to the opposite gym, our nylans rolled under our socks, today is the day of heavy socialising, heavy socialising, heavy socialising, finally getting to the BTO. Perhaps I should reiterate that these were white teenage girls in the 1960s being encouraged to express themselves in an unfiltered manner. You will probably be unsurprised to discover

that many of their songs contain attitudes that we would now consider, and that some would have considered then, to be racist, or, as in a part of that song I didn't excerpt, homophobic. While I wouldn't want to excuse those attitudes, I will also know that they are not significantly worse than the things half the children at my school when I was growing up would say 20 to 30 years later. The clips I share in this episode will generally be free of that material, but I should warn anyone who seeks out the tracks themselves. Some of them have dated very badly, and some of them were already offensive at the time. And a lot of the the album should be taken as a document of historical attitudes. Pauline Butcher was put in charge of the

girls, and in particular paying them a per DM, $35 a week each. She also had to find accommodation for Mrs Christine, Mercy and Cinderella, all of whom were currently homeless. Miss Christine stopped being the Zappa's Living Child Minder when they moved out of the log cabin, and later Miss Pamela would actually take on that role in her stead. She put them up at the landmark hotel, where Janice Joplin would die a couple of years later, with bizarre. our records paying the bills. Miss Christine was particularly happy about that because one of the other people staying there was her boyfriend, Vincent Fernier, the lead singer of the band Alice Cooper. Christine Infernié, who soon took his band's name as his own, had a very strong relationship

although it was platonic. She was, as mentioned earlier, asexual, and would at best consider sex something to endure. This was compounded by her scoliosis, with which she suffered throughout her life, and which meant she was often in agony and didn't find much of anything physically pleasurable. But despite this, they were extremely close, and Christine was in fact one of the most important people to the success of Alice Cooper, the band, and the man. Dennis Dunaway, the bass player for Alice Cooper the group, says of Christine in his autobiography, Alice, in fact, got in deep with Miss Christine. They became hand-holding fashion clones.

They not only wore each other's clothes, but you might say they wore each other. Miss Christine meticulously primped Alice's hairdo so it fluffed out like a black poodles. Now their hair matched. Both had the same sort of slumping posture, and from behind you saw these two question marks and you had to figure out who was who. This is said of Christine by everyone who knew her. The famous Alice Cooper look with the big black hair and black mascara, the image that made Alice Cooper stand out from all the other hard rockers of his era

was created entirely by Miss Christine, and if you compare photos of her from the time to photos of Cooper, you can see the influence. Christine and Cooper apparently had a very sweet, platonic romance, largely involving handholding. Dunaway says of them, their romance was as simple as Mickey and Minis. And as well as designing Cooper's image,

it was also Christine who got the group signed to straight records. Cooper kept asking her if she could get Zappa to listen to his group, and a couple of times it almost happened, but Zappa was always too busy to stick around for a show. Eventually, the group asked her to get Zapper to listen to them at his home. There were various different versions of the story. In Dunaway's autobiography, she says she'll ask him, and Cooper interprets that as a definite yes. In other versions, she gets Zapper to agree, but they turn up at 7 in the morning rather than 7 in the evening. Either way, the group turned up at Zappa's house while Christine was living there first thing in the morning,

and started playing no longer umpire at full volume in the hallway outside Zappa's bedroom. Zappa came out of his bedroom and calmly said, Just let me get some coffee and then I'll listen. Christine got him a mug of coffee, he drank it, and then the group played again for him. At the end of the song, supposedly Zappa told the group, You guys play things that I couldn't get the mothers to play, which seems very unlikely given the relative levels of instrumental competence of the two bands,

and offered to sign them to Bizarre Straight. He also told them to get a manager and said, If you can't, then my manager might do it, but it would be better if you found your own. Advice which was probably very useful, given that Zappa's manager was Herb Cohen, who also co-owned the label with Zappa, a significant conflict of interest. ended up getting Shep Gordon and Joe Greenberg to manage them. Frank Zapper and the mother's keyboard player Ian Underwood produced the group's first album.

And so Miss Christine, as well as giving Alice Cooper a look, also gave them a career. Alice Cooper would still be on straight records when they released their third album and had their first big hit. Meanwhile, Pauline Butcher's attempts to make the GTOs a little more professional were somewhat derailed when Zappa got back from his European tour and started contradicting her, as much out of a sense of mischief as anything else. If Butcher would tell Miss Mercy not to pick her nose in public, Zapper would tell her,

No, you pick your nose if you want to, Mercy. Zappa booked the group in as a support act for the Mother's Christmas show at the Shrine Auditorium on the same bill as Alice Cooper and Wildman Fisher, and the rehearsals went into overdrive. The girls were booked into the same suite of rehearsal rooms as Alice Cooper, though Miss Christine started to tease her boyfriend by flirting with Arthur Brown, who was also rehearsing in the same building. and who would be another major influence on Cooper.

Several of the girls, including Christine, were also starting to develop addictions, and having to hire them from Zappa, who not only disapproved of drug use in general, but was very worried that his house was under surveillance, and that he would get busted if anyone used illegal substances around him, and this made it difficult to get them all to concentrate on the dance steps and songs. Indeed, all the work of rehearsal got too much for Miss Lucy, who decided that the group had sold out and gone all commercial with all this, writing songs and rehearsing and quit,

though she would continue to be associated with Zapper. She appeared in his 1971 film, 200 motels, playing a group he named Lucy. Janet, did you see those guys with the hair? It's those guys from the fake stage across the street from my house. Ew, on the pillows. But I like the drummer with the rivets on his clothes. He's not bad.

Yeah, I've seen him too. He just screams Englishness with that little haircut and the rings. And the binoculars? Binoculars. Didn't you notice his binoculars? No, he's got binoculars? He watches us through him. He's a pervert.

I get so hot just thinking about her. Sadly, she died of AIDS in 1991. The group, now minus Lucy, appeared at the show and went down extremely well, winning the audience around after Wildman Fish's eccentric set threatened to turn them against the group. Jimmy Carl Black apparently loudly said

that they sang flat and couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, it, something that was then reported on by Rolling Stone when they did a feature on the group, but they went down well enough that Zappa committed to actually making an album with them. The most detailed description of the actual show I've read is the one in Mercy's autobiography, in which she describes how she nearly derailed it by going off with Grand Parsons and getting extremely stoned, and Christine, fearing for the group's career if she messed it up, threatened to kill her if she did. Mercy goes on, I do remember we were excellent that night.

Christine's threat got my head right. It was good that she'd said that. Otherwise, I might have been flying higher not able to even find the stage. The show at the Shrine had a lot of dialogue. It was much more like coquettes-esque performance art than a regular concert, with bizarre theatre pieces leading into each song.

There was a skip with us shopping and looking through bras and throwing them up in the air, burlesque sequences. Rodney Bingenheimer playing Santa Claus. It wasn't some sloppy amateur hour, which a lot of people who weren't there might assume. Every moment of that show was meticulously choreographed and scripted, And after what felt like 10,000 hours of rehearsing, we had it down.

Nothing was going to screw this up for us, not even Gram's Weed. We nailed all our lines and did everything we were supposed to, and for the grand finale we were all paired off for a dance contest. Miss Sandra and I did the tango, and we totally killed it. The show, having been a success, it was time to actually record their album. Most of the backing would be played by members of the Mothers of Invention, but there would also be some special guests. The girls, especially Miss Pamela, were big fans of the Jeff Beck group

whose album Truth had just come out. The girls went to see the group performing live and got themselves backstage by saying they were Frank Zappa's new girl group. Beck and Nikki Hopkins had always wanted to meet Zapper, and so the girls took them back to Zappa's home where they all hung out together, and the girls made Beck and Hopkins laugh delightedly with some of the lyrics to their songs. Zappa asked if the two of them wanted to play on the GTO's album and the next day the entire Jeff Beck Group turned up to the session.

Ronnie Wood and drummer Tony Newman didn't play on the track they started recording, though coincidentally the Jeff Beck Group's earlier drummer Ainsley Dunbar would join a later lineup of the mothers. But Beck and Hopkins are very prominent on the opening track, The Areca Springs Garbage Lady. According to Miss Mercer, in her autobiography. We were cutting Christine's track, Eureka Springs Garbage Lady, and Christine could not sing Worth a Dam. It was downright embarrassing. And here came in Jeff Beck

with the wah-wah guitar, and I was looking at Frank going, excuse me, but you have one of the greatest guitar players around, and you're putting him on this stupid little novelty song. What in the hell are you doing? Frank countered, what do you want him to play on Mercy? On your song? And I said yes, of course. So Beck and Hopkins also played on Mercy's song. The ghost chained to the past, present and future, shock treatment. But there was a problem. Rod Stewart had come along with his bandmates and was sulking because nobody was paying any attention to him and he wasn't involved. Eventually, Miss Mercy, who apparently hadn't been at the show and didn't know his voice, shouted at him that he should grow up and nobody cared about

and nobody like him, and the audiences were there for Jeff Beck, not him, and he should get over himself. Rod went off in a sulk, and after a while Miss Pamela came out and comforted him, and persuaded him back into the studio. And Mercy let him sing backing vocals on her song just to keep him quiet. Mercy wrote in her autobiography, I immediately backed away from the microphone and told Frank, You know what? Just let Rod sing the rest of this. Forget my lyrics.

This guy's voice is incredible. That track ended up being all about Rod, which I am sure made him happy. But I didn't even mind, because I was always about promoting, discovering and encouraging true talent. and I knew this guy was special. Rod may have had a gigantic ego, but I couldn't blame him once I heard him sing. Later, Mercy and Rod became friends,

and according to Mercy they once spent the night together, sleeping in the same bed non-sexually, and Rod kept playing, Please Return Your Love to Me by the Temptations, which she credits to its lead singer David Ruffin in error, over and over. Return your love to me, girl, forgive me for the... And all the sleep is your mom.

Not only did Mercy write the song that Rod Stewart sang, she also wrote one that another major rock star recorded, at least as a demo. Rather than produce the whole album himself, Zappa handed over a large chunk of the production work to two other people. One was Russ Titleman, who we've met before a few times. He was the Shindig house guitarist, he'd co-written Guess I'm Dumb for Glenn Campbell with Brian Wilson, and he would go on to become a major record producer, starting out as part of the Warner Brothers Brains Trust that also included Randite Parks, Lenny Warenker, Rycuda and Mandy Newman, and later producing records like Steve Winwood's Higher Love and Eric Clapton's

unplugged album. The other producer, though, was not best known for his production. Lowell George was a guitarist who Frank Zappa had discovered in a band he produced called The Factory, and he had joined the Mothers of Invention as a rhythm guitarist. He was only in the mothers for a short time before the group split up, but he would then go on to form another band, Little Feet. with the mother's bass player Roy Estrada. George played most of the guitar on the album, and he was also involved in helping Mercy with her songwriting, and the two co-wrote a song called

I Have a Paintbrush in My Hand to Color a Triangle, about Mercy's imaginary polyamorous triad with Brian Jones and Bernardo Saldana, and George's demo of it has since leaked out. With dark-skinned eyes of hot coals, hair of raven black, dancing in the darkness, singing in clouds, I call your scarlet, dressed in black, You are the first of the tube

The cobra studded words you speak Changing all your lovers into orphans Red brooks are pretty I wanted to touch and what my hand held you The thorns prove my heart For with either skin Eyes of sea green hair of face When sung by Mercy on the record

That song became this There seems to have been, if not an actual conflict within the group a certain amount of disagreement as to what they were trying to do. Mercy talks in her autobiography about how she's proud that her songs on the album are actual songs, while many of the other girls' tracks were more like spoken word vignettes or comedy skits. Reading up on the actual creation of the album, though, it seems like most of the group were interested in writing actual songs, especially Miss Sparky. Sparky, by all accounts, did the bulk of the composition,

with the help of a piano player named Davy Jones. This Davy Jones was assumed to be the Davy Jones from the Monkeys until just a year or two ago. Every book and article said it was, and I said so myself in my own book, California Dreaming, because that was what every reliable source said. Now we know better. In 2024, Miss Sparky gave a rare interview

and said it was, A piano instructor, very conservative, lived in Laurel Canyon, unamused with us. But it made sense that people believed that the Davy Jones credited on the album was the same Davy Jones from the monkeys. Much of the music has the sort of song and dance feel of a lot of Jones's own music, and Rodney Bingenheimer, who appears on the album, was Jones' standing on the Monkees' TV show.

Not only that, but Zappa appeared with Michael Nesmith on their TV show, and with Jones, in the group's film Head. This song was pretty white. Well, so am I, what can I tell you? You've been working on your dancing, though. Oh, yeah, yeah, well, I've been rehearsing it. Glad you noticed there. Yeah, it doesn't leave much time for your music. You should spend more time on it because the youth of a music. America depends on you to show the way.

Yeah? Yeah. Monkeys is the craziest people. Little has been heard from Miss Sparky, and so her contributions to the album tended to be downplayed. This is because between the recording and release of the album, she quit the group. In Sparky's words, she wanted nothing to do with groupies

or heroin addicts, Sandra and Pamela aside. And so she doesn't get included in the group photo. But most of the album recitations are by her and Miss Pamela, and she said that, Pamela and I wrote 90% of the lyrics from our experiences on the strip and our jobs in the candy section at a large discount store. Sparky later dated the sax player for Rubin and the Jets, a group that named themselves after a fake group

the Mothers of Invention had pretended to be for a pastige doo-wop album. And the song Sparky on their debut album For Real is for and about her. Most of the instrumental parts on permanent damage, where they weren't by the Jeff Beck group, were performed by the core members of the Mothers of Invention, Roy Estrada on bass, Jimmy Carl Black on drums, Don Preston and Ian Underwood on keyboards, with Lowell George and a guesting Rycuda adding guitar. While the album had been Zappa's idea and he's accredited co-producer,

and according to Sparky helped compose the songs uncredited, he seems to have largely been hands-off, and his only instrumental contribution is tambourine. Several of the tracks on the album were, rather than being songs, spoken word pieces of various types. Right from the start Zappa intended for the album to be as much documentary as it was musical performance and also some of the girls didn't think of themselves as being songwriters. Not all of these spoken word pieces were just by the GTOs either.

Groupy culture was by this point at the very least a US-wide phenomenon, if not worldwide, and it manifested in different ways in different cities. Most famously there were a group called the Plastercasters of Chicago and one of the tracks on permanent damage is Miss Pamela talking to Cynthia Plaster He's coming here and just dying. I know you're dying. Oh, did you see him this time? The Plastercasters were a small group, usually only two or three women at a time,

led by the artist Cynthia Alverton, better known as Cynthia Plaster. As her pseudonym would suggest, Alverton's art consisted of making plaster casts of erect penises, usually, but not always, those of musicians. As with many groupies, Albertan's reputation in the public eye is of someone with an insatiable sexual appetite for all rock stars and that's how she appears, for example, in the lyrics to plastercaster by Kiss, a band she did not cast.

But in fact her work was always an art project. As she explained in the 90s, what happened was I got this class assignment for my college art teacher on the same weekend that a bunch of rock bands were due to come into town for a big Dick Clark Caravan show. Back then I was just a teen and a kid. age virgin dying to meet rock stars, when the teachers suggested we go out and make a plaster cast of something hard, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The first attempt Cynthia made was with Mark Lindsay,

the lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders. However, her in expert attempt failed to produce a result, with Peter Talk of the Monkeys, was also a let down. She cut herself opening the can of alginate that was intended to become the mould. Gary Brooker of Procol Haram got badly mixed gunk and no mould. But eventually she succeeded with the Jimmy Hendricks experience. Despite her reputation as casting the fallacies of every rock star around, her initial run of casts, made up until 1971, only consisted of around 30 sculptures,

and while some of these were of the canonical rock stars one would expect, like Jimmy Hendricks, whose cast is now on display at the Iceland phallological museum in Reckievich, or Eric Burden, whose mould failed. Many were far more obscure or idiosyncratic choices, like Ricky Fittar, who at the time was drumming for the Beach Boys but went on to be in the Ruttles and Bonnie Rates Band,

Anthony Newley, Lee Mallory from Kurt Becher's band, The Millennium, and Fritz Richmond, who was the wash-tub bass player for the Jim Queskin Jug band. She met Zapper for the first time through Eric Clapton, who, when approached to be immortalised, turned her down, but suggested that Zappa, who was supporting cream that night, might find her interesting.

Given Zappa's interests in the extremes of human behaviour and art, it's unsurprising that he became fascinated with the plastercasters, and he would eventually become Cynthia's patron, and had her move to L.A. and helped her plan and fund what was intended to be her first exhibition. Nothing came of that, however, as after Cynthia's house was burgled in 1971, she handed over a collection to Herb Cohen for temporary safekeeping until the exhibition could happen. Shortly after that, she got in a car accident, moved back to Chicago, and gave up on her work

for a few years. And then, in the mid-70s, Zappa and Cohen got into a series of legal disputes, which led to Cohen refusing to give Cynthia back her casts, because as part of Zappa funding her, she had signed as an artist to bizarre productions, and Cohen claimed that his settlement with Zappa meant that Cohen now legally owned all of Albertan's art. Many years later, in 1993, Albertan successfully sued Cohen and regained ownership of all but three of her artworks, which she subsequently exhibited to much acclaim,

as well as restarting her casting, this time mostly of people in alternative or punk bands, and including breasts as well as fallacies. Alverton told the L.A. Times at the time of the lawsuit, What's going on here isn't just a fight over art, it's more like a child custody battle. These things aren't just pieces of plaster to me, they're like my children.

Each one holds precious memories for me. This man has no right whatsoever to them. They're mine and he knows it. Miss Pamela concurred, saying, What Cynthia did as much a part of rock law as what any record producer or engineer or manager did. Cynthia came up with an idea that no artist before her had ever considered. Herb Cohen didn't create these casts and they don't belong to him.

A hundred years from now when people look back on the 60s, Cynthia will be remembered as an important pop artist. Zappa would have concurred. It was Zappa who actually gave Cynthia the awareness that what she was doing was art. She later told Pamela, first I did it to meet the bands. Secondly, it satisfied my collector's impulse.

I used to collect stamps before that. It was Frank Zappa who told me it was an art form. I said, you are telling me it's an art form, so it must be an art form. Indeed, one of the things that seems to be consistent in the stories of the women I talk about in this episode, the GTOs, the plastercasters, butcher, is that while Zappa has a reputation for treating women primarily as sex objects, he was one of the few people they encountered, who encouraged them and their creativity, took them seriously,

and gave them actual practical help, including financial help, in achieving their goals. Cynthia and Pamela became very good friends, though there was a bit of tension between them as both women were very interested in Noel Redding. Pamela was, though, still more interested in Nick St. Nicholas, and her principal songwriting credit on the album is for a song about him which she co-wrote with piano teacher Davy Jones. That was the closing track of the album, while the opening track, the Eureka Springs Garbage Lady, was actually co-written by St Nicholas himself. As befit her less sexual attitude towards the rock stars they were associating with, Miss Christine's main songwriting contribution to permanent damage, was a track she co-wrote with Don Preston of the Mothers called TV Lives,

not about rock stars, but about having been raised by the TV rather than her parents. I'm a television baby, my father's a knob and my mother's a tooth. Went dips and my vertical skin. The highlight of the album for many listeners was one of the few songs to actually name a rock performer and talk about him in detail, and it's a song that perfectly illustrates the way that these girls did not idolize the musicians they associated with. The captain's fat Teresa shoes is about Captain Beefheart, who was known for being very fussy about his appearance

and spending a lot of time on his clothes, and his shoes. ...shadowed a plastic key, and which they could... Shuffle on the floor and do so very much more than other shoes, than other shoes,

than other shoes ever could the tea of his tea That's who tippy toes His tippy toes Spitted into a tea Oh, see me do a tent and for me That's who the musicians they fraternised with were to these women

Not gods or legends Men who wore silly pointed shoes They were too proud of And that's the perspective they brought to their album The group members were very excited About their upcoming album release And they were getting a reputation On the L.A. scene as,

if not the most talented singers, at least interesting performers. Mercy and Pamela even performed backing vocals on Hippie Boy by the Flying Burrito Brothers, a group which contained two of their favourite performers, Grand Parsons and Chris Hillman. Mercy and Pamela were the only members of the GTOs who would listen to the Barito brothers. The others mocked them as Hillbilly music, but they both became particularly close to Grand Parsons. Mercy also claims in her autobiography that because of the connection with Parsons,

she ended up giving both the burritos and the Stones tarot readings at Peter Talks' house three days before Altamont. where both bands played, and consistently getting portents of doom. She and Pamela were backstage at the show itself, though they're left before its tragic ending, having found the atmosphere unpleasant. According to Mercy, Graham Parsons begged to be on the GTO's album in some capacity, even playing tambourine, but Zappa point-blank refused to let him. The burritos also recorded a song titled Christine's tune, which, according to at least some sources, is about Miss Christine,

and specifically about how she wouldn't sleep with rock stars, even if they really wanted her to, which was by their reckoning deeply unfair, and, again, rather belies the usual portrayal of these people as being deeply invested in sex with rock stars. Miss Christine also appeared on the cover of Frank Zappa's solo album Hot Rats. It's her head popping up out of the empty swimming pool on that front cover. Rolling Stone did a two-page article on the GTOs as part of an issue devoted to groupies. Mercy got the cover and there were several photos of the other girls

inside the magazine. But then everything fell apart for them. Christine, Cinderella and Mercy were all heavy users of hard drugs although they had managed to keep this information from Zappa and they'd become more so after they'd all moved into the landmark hotel together and then even more so

when Christine and Mercy moved into a shared bungalow. Christine became seriously ill from her drug use developing delusional parasitosis and Christine and Mercy were arrested together when out trying to score Speed and Morphine. Christine was let off without being charged, but Mercy was in jail for three weeks before being let out on probation. This was partly because,

while Mercy's boyfriend, Jobraeith had given Christine Bale money to get her out, Christine had spent it on drugs on the way. This was the end of the GTOs. Mercy couldn't make a planned promotional trip to the UK for the album, and Zappa had no desire whatsoever to be associated with users of hard drugs. He didn't even approve of use of cannabis, and he wasn't going to put any more of his money into a group of people who could get themselves arrested at any time, and who, more to the point, would attract police attention to his home and family. He stopped his financial support of the group and put only minimal promotion into the album, though a track did appear on the compilation Zapade, a promotional collection consisting of tracks from Bazaar and Straight Albums. The group split up soon after.

Miss Mercy had a part in the film Rainbow Bridge, widely regarded as one of the worst films of all time, and primarily known for featuring some of the last concert footage of Jimmy Hendricks. She then married Shuggy Otis, Johnny Otis's son, who had coincidentally played on Zappa's Hot Rats album, though she didn't meet him until after her association with Zappa ended, and who had a very successful career himself with tracks like Strawberry Letter 23. Mercy claimed she'd had a premonition that the two would meet years earlier

when she saw Otis' photo on a super-session album he played on. She'd apparently dreamed about him, and she mentioned this to Mike Kowalski, who was playing drums with the beach boys at the time, and Kowalski told her he was actually playing on a session with Otis the next day, if she wanted to come along. The two had a son, lucky Otis, who had later play bass in his grandfather Johnny's band, but their marriage didn't last very long.

She later became a hairstylist. through the 80s and early 90s she was addicted to crack and she spent some time in a relationship with Arthur Lee who was also on crack at the time but she cleaned herself up in the mid-90s and spent the last couple of decades of her life working in obscurity at her Goodwill store some of that time she spent living with Miss Pamela

after she got herself clean but her partner had a relapse and the two women would remain close for the rest of their lives she wrote an autobiography titled Permanent Damage but died in 2020 before it was released On her death, Alice Cooper said of her, She was a super survivor, she knew the street and how to work the street, Mercy had a life force inside her that didn't burn out. Miss Sparky has mostly led a private life since the group split up,

though she did add backing vocals to Zappa's late 70s song, Disco Boy. Of all the GTOs, Miss Pamela has been the most successful. She had a few acting roles, first appearing in Zappers' film 200 Motels, where she was reunited with Miss Lucy and finally got to meet Keith Moon and Mingo Starr, who disappointed her by telling her that Paul McCartney was suing the other three Beatles,

shattering some of her youthful illusions about her idol. She made some other appearances in low-budget films and in the soap-op for Search for Tomorrow, before marrying the musician Michael DeBarre, who she divorced in 1991, but whose surname she still goes by, and who she refers to in the acknowledgments for the 2018 edition of her memoir as

my perfect ex-husband. They remained close. She has released multiple successful volumes of memoirs, most notably her first, I'm with the band, as well as other books about the music scene and its denizens, and she was apparently, along with Penny Lane Trumbull, another famous groupie of the period, a major inspiration for the composite groupie character Penny Lane

in Cameron Crow's film, Almost Famous. In particular, as well as writing books about her own experiences, She is the author of Let's Spend the Night Together, Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies, a book of interviews with women including Miss Mercy, Cynthia Plasteraster and Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, about their experiences with rock stars.

Miss Cinderella also married a rock musician, John Cale, though their marriage was short-lived and is now best remembered because of the opening line of Cale's song Gutt, where he sings, in words which I can't use and keep this podcast's clean-rate, about discovering her in flagrante delicto with the singer Kevin Ayres the night before Kale and Ayers played a famous gig together. Their divorce came not long after that event. Little else is publicly known about her. Like Miss Sparky, she mostly shunned publicity after the group split up, and according to Miss Pamela, she died in 1997, in mysterious circumstances.

Miss Sandra likewise largely disappeared off the radar, and died far too young of cancer in 1991. The GTO's only did one impromptu reunion show in 1974 at a glam rock show promoted by Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley. But sadly, Miss Christine wasn't there. After the group had split up, she had got together with Todd Rundgren and was with him when he recorded his first solo album, Runt, including his first hit single, We've Got to Get You a Woman. The patchwork belt Rungrin wears on the album cover was created by Miss Christine as a present for him.

Once again, she was putting her creative skills into shaping the early image of a rock star she loved. She was important enough to that album that the inner sleeve showed photos of five people. Rungren himself, the rhythm section Tony and Hunt sales, engineer Jim Lowe, and Miss Christine. Miss Christine's photo was larger than those of the four men. Very soon after that though the two split up. Rungren, like Zapper, disapproved of hard drug use and Christine was by this point seriously addicted to multiple drugs and this apparently led to their split,

though Rungrin hasn't talked much about what happened. Given her addiction issues though, it was probably a bad move for her to start training as a nurse, which gave her more access to drugs and to needles. Miss Christine's next boyfriend, David Robinson, has certainly stated in the past that he thinks that her problems started to become really, serious because of that training. She made several attempts to get clean, but none of them stuck.

Robinson would later go on to fame as a member of the cars, but at this point he was in the original lineup of the modern lovers, led by Jonathan Richmond and also featuring Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads. At this point, the band members were all utterly opposed to drugs, with Harrison later saying, we were straight-edged 10 or 20 years before it started. Richmond had even written a song which the band would soon record titled I'm Straight about how he didn't approve of people being stoned. I've watched you walk around here. I've watched you meet boyfriends, I know, and you tell me how they're deep.

Look, but I think if these guys, if they're really so great, tell me why can't they at least take this place? So when Take it straight Why always stoned Like hippie johnies? So when Christine turned up at the house That the modern lovers all shared,

Both as a living space and as a rehearsal room, She promised them that she had got off drugs And definitely hadn't brought any of them into their home. Then at 4 a.m., she woke Robinson up asking him if he had an ice cube To put on the site where she'd just injected herself. Robinson got furious with her Because she promised him she wouldn't be taking any drugs

while she was there. But the two soon made up, with Christine telling him not to worry about her to go back to sleep, she'd be fine and they'd discuss it in the morning. The next morning, Jonathan Mitchman discovered her dead. She'd accidentally overdosed, forgetting that she had already taken something. The autopsy reported that she died of an overdose of pentobarbital and another drug, probably metacolone. She was only 22. According to books by both Pamela and Mercy, though this detail doesn't seem to be corroborated in other sources she had spent nearly a year in a full body cast to fix her scoliosis after splitting with Rungren and had finally been free of the pain for only two months when she died.

The GTOs and Cynthia Plasteraster and many of the other women and teenage girls who they associated with at this time have been written into the history books entirely through the male gaze and with little attention paid to their own words described purely as sex objects even though in many cases they were uninterested in sex at all. Yet these were young women who in some cases were serious creative artists in their own right, creating conceptual work that was intended for art galleries or the stage,

and who in all cases saw themselves as something between muses and collaborators. Women who created sculptures and mocking songs. Women who sang backing vocals and appeared on album covers. Women who designed iconic looks that rock stars would use for decades to come and wrote books about their experiences. women who were there fundamentally for the music. Some of them sometimes had sex with rock stars, but they weren't just there for the pleasure of the musicians,

but to get as close to the music they were making as possible. And, like with all female-dom subcultures, while the music was always the primary point, it was never the only point. And I'll give the last words here to Miss Mercy, in a quote from her autobiography. I honestly don't think the GTO's appeal, or our reputation,

about the sex thing, other than maybe for Pamela. We weren't just after men. There was a female bond as well. It was a women's movement, and at the end of the day we had each other's backs. We were having adventures together. A history of rock music in 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. With every episode, and sometimes between episodes, Patreon backers will get a short bonus podcast. This episode is on My Pal Footfoot by The Shags. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. Two books based on the first 100 episodes of the podcast are now available, with a third coming soon. Search Andrew Hickey 500

songs in your favorite online bookstore. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tiltarizer. No generative AI has been or ever will be used in the writing, research or recording of this podcast. Visit 500Songs.com, that's 500Songs.0, the numbers not the letters, songs.com, to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you like this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves.

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