I can still picture her. Long auburn hair, extremely 90s black velvet hat. The kind of raspy voice that indicates coolness.
Her name was Chloe. She was the requisite friend of the band on Poison’s Behind the Music, and she changed the trajectory of my life.
Chloe was my first introduction to the girls in the background: the ones whose presence helps keep the group going, the ones who have the stories, the ones who were lucky enough to say they were with the band, however fleeting that might be. Her chyron identified her as an adult film actress, but even as a teen, I found that too limiting. I wanted to know everything about her: how did she meet them, what was it like, what else did she do?
I’m far from the only person who has been fascinated by the groupies, muses and video vixens who orbit fame. Penny Lane and the “Band-Aids” from Almost Famous are still a cultural touchstone 25 years later. Writer and queen groupie Pamela Des Barres has made an entire career out of being with the band. In 2015, Uproxx released a three-part mini-docuseries about Guns N’ Roses; the episode devoted to the girls behind the band remains the most-viewed. The KCRW Lost Notes podcast even released an entire series about last year called Groupies: The Women of Sunset Strip, From the Pill to Punk.
What’s the pull of these stories? The women in the footnotes of fame can offer an insider’s glimpse into some of the most beloved artists of the 60s, 70s and 80s. They have a different vantage point than the rest of us, a different kind of access to the men who created enduring music, and a specific view of a bygone era.
And there’s the accessibility. That’s what Poison’s friend Chloe offered me. I loved music, but I definitely didn’t have the talent to make it myself. A high school girl who hitchhiked to West Hollywood on the weekend and brought band flyers back with her was no more realistic for me, but she represented another way to get close to the creation. As an awkward teenager, I found few things more alluring than being seen as special by someone who mattered.
A defining feature of the girls in the background, though, is that they’re ephemeral. Chloe drops out of Behind the Music less than halfway through. What happened to her after the band made it? The girls of Guns N’ Roses still talk about their time with the band, but what do the rest of their lives look like? What’s it like to stand so close to fame and then go on like normal?
These stories tend to only occupy the headline as much as they relate to the headliners. On the one hand, that makes sense. Unless someone has her own public career, like Marianne Faithfull, Bebe Buell, Pattie Boyd or Bobbie Jean Brown, what else is there to say?
For me: a lot. Success stories generally follow the same basic path, give or take; how does someone become adjacent to fame and deal with the fallout? That’s full of narrative potential. That’s worth a whole story.
I know now that too often, these footnotes that fascinated me so much as a teenager represent something inconvenient. They are safer left as marginalia, because that unique vantage point isn’t only of the good — it’s the bad and ugly too.
That’s particularly the case when the girls with the band were just that: girls. Penny Lane endures, but what about the part where she was fifteen?
Elizabeth Nelson recently wrote for the New York Times Sunday Magazine about the sanitized stories that have taken over rock and roll biopics and documentaries of late. “Once you’ve heard about enough toxic behavior, a certain tedium sets in,” she writes. “The familiar pileups of sex and drugs and narcissism start to feel less like a thrill ride and more like a dull narrative cul-de-sac.”
Yes, and the collateral damage to those pileups are people too.
This kind of thinking is one of the reasons why I wrote The Cover Girl. In the book, a teenage model named Birdie poses for a rock star’s album cover and finds herself pursued by him. He eventually petitions her parents for legal guardianship so he can take her on the road. The novel follows Birdie’s life through the present day, examining how her time with the rock star — while just a footnote to his larger story — fundamentally changes everything about her, from her career (which never rises to his) to her ability to relate to others, to her relationship with her agent.
Birdie’s story, like that of the fictional Penny Lane or the real-life girls known as “baby groupies,” is one of the inconvenient ones, the kind of thing brushed off with, “It was a different time” or “She knew what she was doing.” It’s easier not to talk about because it complicates the dominant narrative. Distill it down to a snippet and keep it digestible.
The girls with the band are often asked the same questions. Their relevance is tied to their ability to stay drenched in nostalgia, frozen in time, while the men in question keep getting older, accumulating new stories, adding layers to their legend. What happens if their contributions are acknowledged as just that and viewed through a more modern lens? What happens if their perspectives are allowed to age into something beyond talking points for someone’s beginning?
I don’t think these questions have one single answer — that’s why, to me, it’s worth exploring in fiction. I do think that going back to Elvis, to Beatlemania, and forward to the Backstreet Boys and One Direction, popular music owes so much to the girls who went all in, and their full stories are worth hearing, even if they complicate someone else’s.
After I watched that episode of Behind the Music, I went to my old second-hand desktop computer and opened up Microsoft Word. I started writing about a girl like Chloe, a girl who finds herself saying she’s with the band without ever planning to.
That story was never finished, but it was the start of something that has culminated in a very different character who is part of the same background of musical fame. In The Cover Girl, the girl with the band comes out of the footnotes and gets more than her say — she gets her beginning, middle and end.
