Photo evidence from the 1980s would suggest that I've been a Groupie for decades, as evidenced by the mandatory rock T-shirt to the bedroom walls covered in posters.
Truthfully, GROUPIE is a book that has been in the making since roughly 1979, when I first had my first celebrity crush. I was about nine years old when Cupid’s arrow hit from a console television set. That was when one of the local stations in Abilene, Texas fortuitously began playing reruns of The Monkees.
Of course, I didn’t understand the concept of a rerun back then. I wasn’t even convinced that singers weren’t actually showing up in the radio station to sing songs throughout the day. All I knew was that the guys in the band were cute and made me laugh.
One in particular looked especially young, with a baby face and deep brown eyes and an accent completely foreign to my West Texas ears.
I had fallen like a brick for Davy Jones.
Imagine my devastation when I learned that he was actually about twenty years older than I originally thought, and married on top of that. Needless to say, I was crushed.
Eventually I would move on thanks to a timely Christmas gift from my parents. My Bert & Ernie AM/FM radio allowed me the freedom to discover my own music. Because my nearest sibling was a decade older than I was, I spent most of my childhood as an “only child” – one that would have to come up with creative ways to pass the time, which we already covered with our first #TBT blogs.
So you all know now that by 1979, I had sold my soul to rock and roll.
One of my favorite songs that year was a tune called “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” by Journey. I loved the more primal beat, even though I was much too young to understand the overtones of the lyrics. It took me a good decade to understand the barrage of “nah nah nah nah nahs” at the end of the track were virtually the singer saying, “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah” to a cheating ex.
At the time I just loved the beat of the song and the pure vocal of the lead singer. I would belt it out with vigor every time it played on the radio.
A couple of years later I was staying up late waiting for my mom to come home from work, and much to my surprise (and delight) I found out Journey would perform said hit on a rerun of “The Midnight Special.” I perched in front of the TV in my jammies and waited with bated breath.
When I first laid eyes on the lead singer, I didn’t know quite what to think. He had long dark hair, something I wasn’t used to seeing around my military town. He had a prominent profile and a face full of character, an ethnicity I found exotic and strange. From the way he dressed to how he sang, I really didn’t know what to make of him. Then he went down into the first row of the crowd and sang directly to one of the girls, which tattooed itself immediately onto my 11-year-old brain and even eventually made its way into “Groupie.”
I still loved the song and couldn’t really get the lead singer out of my head, even though my initial response wasn’t the starry eyed infatuation I felt for Davy Jones.
I continued as a fan of the music mostly, but nothing could prepare me for that one summer night in 1983 when I would fall completely and hopelessly in love with a man I’d never met.
Back in the early 80s my mom was raising me as a single parent, and as such didn’t see much need for things like cable. I may have wanted my MTV like any other self-respecting teen of the decade, but I settled for Friday Night Videos.
When I saw that a Journey video for “Faithfully” was coming on, I remembered with a bit of a rush about the last time I had seen the band perform. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the lead singer’s hair was shorter and he now sported a mustache.
I never cared for mustaches for traumatic personal reasons, so I found the new look a bit jarring. Eventually he ditched the 'stache during the course of the video, and I found myself heave a sigh of relief that he looked more like the guy I remembered.
I listened as he sang about an undying, faithful love and after the second verse he turned to face the camera as he sang. A breeze lifted a tendril of his dark hair away from his face and his potent eyes stared deep into my soul as he sang, “I’m forever yours, faithfully.”
I was a goner. My heart fell down somewhere near my feet and I think for a brief second there I forgot to breathe. Forget getting struck by Cupid’s arrow – I had been leveled by a bolt of lightning. Within a week I had the Frontiers album in my hand and I showed my mom the man I knew I was going to marry.
These were big words for a thirteen year old. But I've always been a big dreamer.
Over the course of my teen years Steve Perry would come to define my ideal. I was kissing a lot of frogs in those days, so it was just easier to put all my hopelessly romantic fantasies onto a person safely at arm’s length.
He was a safe outlet to love until I met my first husband and fell in love “for real” when I was about 18.
But I can still feel my heart soar whenever I hear Steve sing, and I know down deep that this celebrity crush actually helped get me through some very painful and difficult years as an outcast, with nowhere to belong and no one to choose me.
I’m still a fan, although I’ve given up on the marrying part. (Those who know me did tease me about my second husband being a “Steve” though.)
Many years later I would meet another celebrity who would have the same sort of impact in a more significant way. It started rather innocently while watching VH1 in 2002, when I caught a series that featured various celebrities waxing nostalgic about the 1980s. Some of the celebrities I knew, but one in particular, the one that stood out the most, I had never seen before.
To my surprise, I found his comments were the funniest. It seemed like my best friend of 20-something years and my second husband were all rolled up into one cute, comedic package.
I found myself looking forward to comments from actor/comedian Hal Sparks the most, and over the course of the next few years (and several “I Love the” series) I became sort of what you would call a semi-fan.
I was pleasantly surprised when he showed up in Spider-man 2, and I never purposely sought out "Dude, Where's My Car" or "Queer as Folk." But it was undeniable... each time I saw him I liked him a little bit more. It took me a year or so to get on the computer and find information about him. At this time I was still fairly content to keep celebrities behind the velvet rope. In 1998 I had attempted to meet a couple of my teen idols and was treated very poorly by one of the members of a band I had loved throughout my adolescent years. This rejection was directly due to my larger size, and this individual made sure I knew that he wanted nothing to do with me because of it.
When my friend tried to get a picture of me and this person, he made sure he grabbed a random stranger passing by to put right in the middle of us so he wouldn’t have stand next to me.
Needless to say I was ready to keep all the celebrities I *really* liked under glass so I wouldn’t risk this type of painful rejection in the future. I never went to see Davy Jones in concert, I didn't stalk Steve Perry (much) and I was content just to catch Hal's appearances on random VH1 specials.
The more I read about Hal, however, the more I thought about going to one of his comedy shows. Everyone who had gone to see him had nothing but glowing comments about how wonderfully he treated his fans. Still, I was unsure and stayed mainly on the fringe of the fandom.
So I missed out on things like Hal’s Sparksvision, where about 80 of his fans convened on Los Angeles to enjoy a movie premiere, a comedy show and a chance to see his band play live.
I was way too gun-shy to even think about participating in such an event in September of 2004.
But a mere few months later I would get another big surprise. In November, just days before my birthday, I opened up my email inbox to find an email from Hal himself. Initially I thought it was an auto-reply to let me know I had successfully joined the mailing list for his website. But when I opened it, it read, “A little birdy, and by little birdy I mean that big birdy you’re married to, said that it was your birthday!” He wished me a happy birthday and a great year and I sat thunderstruck at my computer desk that this person I hadn’t even tried to meet could reach out to contact me, this (figuratively speaking) little nobody from small town Texas.
I would come later to learn that was just the kind of guy Hal was. Even at his Sparksvision event he would go seek out those fans too shy to meet him so he could connect with them in some way.
I met Hal for the first time eight months later, when I made sort of a pilgrimage to see one of his comedy shows in San Francisco. I was still nervous that I would be rejected, especially since Hal is a good looking guy who makes no bones about appreciating good looking women. This is an equation that has NEVER really worked out in my favor. So I even shied away from going up to meet him in between the two comedy shows because I thought just seeing him perform in person was enough to make me happy.
Eventually, thanks mostly to the two-drink minimum (times 2,) I was able to go up and meet him for the first time. When he looked at me I didn’t feel rejected, if anything I felt completely “seen” for the first time ever. He has these dark, soulful eyes that reach right down into your core and immediately put you at ease. I nervously teased that I had driven through a tornado to meet him (true story) and therefore I deserved a hug. He gave me one freely, and not one of those wimpy side hugs but a full body head-to-toe hug.
Then he pulled me close for a picture, where he smiled big as though he were happy to do it, and made sure to give me another hug before I left.
I was hooked from that moment on. He didn't just treat me well as a fan, he made me feel valued as a person. There is NO ONE I've ever seen that has this much consideration for his fans, who will stand in line for two hours straight and still be as genuine with the last of the group as he was with the first.
I've always been a PR machine for those people/things I like, so needless to say I've done my fair share of time in certain fandoms. I’ve seen quite a cast of characters come through, which has both been extremely gratifying and tremendously heartbreaking. I've learned that Like truly does attract Like, but not everyone who calls you friend has your best interests at heart.
Sometimes you're nothing more than a stepping stone to what they really want... and I figured out (quickly) who those people were as I've broken apart from the group and made a name for myself. The easy litmus test is if you're still my friend now, you were my true friend then, and I'm extraordinarily lucky to call several people my friend to this day, even when I'm a lot older and wiser about the other kind.
It was during the most painful and confusing times that I wrote the GROUPIE trilogy, working out a lot of my own disappointments and frustrations along the way. When I decided to write a story from the fan point of view of that fantasy relationship with her favorite rock star, there was a lot of fertile ground to toil.
I think this is a common fantasy that many of the women I’ve known have had a time or two. It was fascinating to write it from the perspective as the groupie who gets the star because I myself have never experienced this phenomenon, nor do I think I ever would even if I were single. The fantasy is a fantasy because real life can never creep in with all its disappointments and heartbreak, and I got sideswiped by a lot of that shrapnel just as an onlooker and - a time or two, an unwitting accomplice.
The groupie experience from what I’ve seen is quite similar to the experiences I’ve had as the “fat girl,” who had the good looking guy give her attention behind closed doors but never had the opportunity to be the gal on his arm, and it is that emotional integrity I brought to the book.
Essentially I took everything I’ve seen and learned and turned it up to “11,” both good and bad.
THE GROUPIE TRILOGY is not for everyone. I pull no punches when I explore the darker side of fame and obsession, excess and entitlement. I wanted to dig under the idea, "Be careful what you wish for." This isn't about bedding some hot rock star. This is about loving the inaccessible. You WILL want to throttle her. You WILL want to knee him in the groin. You WILL want to slap me with your Kindle. BUT... if you're up for it, the entire trilogy will be available on sale for the 4th of July at almost 50% off, dropping the price from $4.99 to $2.99 for one day only. (That's three books in one volume for about a buck a book. You're welcome.)
Not only that, but ALL THREE books in the spinoff series are my #FridayFreebies on July 4th as well. That means you could get caught up on 6 books in the Groupie universe for only $2.99, just in time for your three day weekend.
Who loves ya, baby?
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