WCS 61: 'Get in the car, loser. We're goin' groupie-in'!'

w/: Sanctuary! + The coming US Filipinization + Bomb cyclone business

The groupie experience is inherently mysterious because so few people will ever see or partake of it. It’s a hidden trove of contraband history and storytelling. As the saying goes, those who know won’t say and and those who say can’t can’t know.

Until this fall, that is.

KCRW’s latest season of Lost Notes, “Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip from the Pill to Punk,” has distilled the lore of Sunset Boulevard nightclub life into a tangible, entertaining, and above-all-else relatable narrative. “Groupies” has been my favorite storytelling of any sort this season.

Despite deeply looking back, producer Jessica Hopper and host Dylan Tupper Rupert’s tape plays as precisely of our 2024 moment—a fuckin’ neat trick. The—white, straight—rock history explored this season all goes down between the dawn of The Pill and the arrival of AIDS. The rules were different from our Matt Gaetz Era in that “baby groupies” were hitting the scene as young as 13.

A committed band fan might allow her body to be gifted to a tertiary player, to get into a party.

A lot of the Sunset Strip rock groupie heyday was what we now call wrong. Independent of that judgment, it is undeniable that the girls were following their dreams, coloring outside the lines. Living out rock, in the nude. The sex could also be transactional in a way that too many convinced themselves stopped being a thing, until OnlyFans arrived.

(If you’re a star, a lot will let themselves be grabbed the pussy. Some wondered why that episode didn’t harm 4547. Honest people know, deep down.)

Understand that there’s voluminous magic mixed into Lost Notes’ carefully-arranged recollections. Groupies get to be muses and live as stylish chosen ones in Tinseltown. Some go on to business and creative success. (The retelling of Pamela Des Barres iconic journey still lends power.)

Necessarily, there is heartbreak.

As the 1970s march on, more hard drugs hit. In the season’s’ brilliant final installment, an awesome companion named Sable recounts the groupie gig that broke her, a romance with legendary junkie Thunders. The relationship turned into “a drugged-out nightmare,” said Sable.

“He tried to destroy my personality. He made me throw all of my diaries and all of my phone numbers down the incinerator. He tore up all of my scrapbook. After that, I just felt destroyed. That’s why I felt so bad, to have been such a hot shit and to be let down to such a low level.”

And there you have the range of this season. Power-balance battles relentlessly lurk beneath the all-woman yarns. At times there’s exuberance in the recollections of Miss Pamela and Lori Lightning and Sadie and all of the other daring young whores. The intimacy is magnetizing. Never overtly dirty, “Groupies” employees the power of euphemism to tell an essential American story.

Pillow talk is the realest talk. I just loved “Groupies.”

Before we do the week’s most West Coast news trips, feel free to tap into my teenage idea of what groupiedom might be about. One season it would play in the locker room whenever Sandusky’s boys high school basketball team won. Slaps a lil bit, even today.

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10 Sactown cannot be free until the last King is healed

Eleven NBA West teams have winning records. As this newsletter goes to press, Sacramento is right near the bottom of that list at 8-7. As explosively talented as the Kings are, it’s difficult to believe that next spring this squad might be struggling to make the league’s play-in tournament.

The return of key players from injury should make a difference tonight, when the Kings take on the Clippers.
Clutch Points

• Neither the critically-needed Domantas Sabonis or DeMar DeRozan are on the injury report for the LA game.

• De’Aaron Fox has gone on a scoring jag—throwing in a team record 60 points last Friday—since Malik Monk went out with an ankle injury.

• Monk has begun taking part in workouts.

Lil Hit

• CBD has been shown to have neuroprotective properties, but is that why boxers and MMA fighters are turning to it?
  San Jose Mercury News

9 Oregon locales banned psilocybin biz

Somehow I managed to miss the Election Day decisions of unincorporated Clackamas County, Portland, and about a dozen other Oregon jurisdictions to not allow psilocybin businesses.
Oregon Capital Chronicle