![]() Johnny Thunders is remembered as the legendary New York Dolls guitarist, not the jealous boyfriend who mercilessly beat her up when she was not even 16. She’d grown up to live the straight life, raising two children, but she remains publicly defined by her past as one of rock’s super groupies. Sable Starr died three years ago, aged 51. We view them through Savile’s famous rose-tinted spectacles. We love them as rogues for living the untamed life that most of us never will. While it’s true that the early 1970s was a sexually freer, more liberal time, and that Pamela Des Barres was never anyone’s victim, our fascination with the bad boys of rock remains undimmed. Savile, though, wasn’t on stage – unlike the stars he introduced to the world, many of whom were probably indulging in behaviour no less reprehensible. And, like Iggy Pop, those surrounding Savile found it easiest to look away. A man knighted for his charity work and widely loved for his carefully cultivated persona as a benign English eccentric has now been revealed as one of the country’s worst sexual predators. Many of them played for him and his attendant, adoring teenage crowds on Top Of The Pops. I’d wager that some of our heroes are watching the gruesome revelations surrounding the life of Jimmy Savile with considerable discomfort. But the imprisonment of Berry and the blacklisting of Lewis happened in the early 1960s, when the surrounding opprobrium had as much to do with the moral panic attached to rock & roll itself than any concerns about paedophilia. The reputation of another originator, Jerry Lee Lewis, never recovered after his third marriage – to his 13-year-old first cousin – was revealed. ![]() Chuck Berry, without whom we may never have had rock & roll at all, served 18 months in prison after transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. Not everyone got away with it, of course. When you’re a male rock star, conquests come naturally with territory, no matter how gross the underlying misogyny. Their exploits are regarded with awe more often than revulsion. In the case of Mötley Crüe especially, The Dirt has done more to rejuvenate their fortunes than any of their unremittingly awful albums ever could. The mystique surrounding both bands was only enhanced by the publications of these two bestsellers. We called her that because she had a face like a moose.”) (Well, perhaps just the first line: “Her name was Bullwinkle. Each page contains an unforgettable anecdote, not one fit to be reprinted here. That was until the appearance of Mötley Crüe’s stupendously vulgar The Dirt which, as one critic put it, made I’m With The Band read like a nun’s diary. Led Zeppelin’s brutish manners were later laid bare in curdling detail by Stephen Davis, whose book Hammer Of The Gods set the bar at an all-time low for the rock-stars-behaving-badly genre. Page laughed sadistically from the bedroom as his two girlfriends fought over him. Buell answered it, and although she kept the chain on, it didn’t stop an enraged Maddox from trying to drag the older woman out by her hair. ![]() A devastated Maddox later knocked on the door to Page’s LA hotel room. ![]() Page dated Maddox for about a year before leaving her in turn for Buell, who was at the time dating Todd Rundgren (as well as Iggy Pop). After losing her virginity at 13 – to, legend has it, David and then-wife Angie Bowie – Maddox was a precocious 14-year-old when Jimmy Page left his LA girlfriend Pamela Des Barres, author of the classic self-proclaimed groupie memoir I’m With The Band, to be with her. Starr’s best friend at the time was Lori Maddox, another veteran of Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco, the notorious Sunset Strip club where strict ID checks at the door ensured the girls were under 18. Iggy Pop confesses baldly in the opening line of his song Look Away: “I slept with Sable when she was 13.” That was rather too polite: pleasantries weren’t all that were exchanged between Starr and Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Robert Plant, Marc Bolan, David Bowie and scores of others. ![]() “Every rock star who came to Los Angeles wanted to meet her,” model Bebe Buell remembers. She was barely a teenager when she began attending shows in the early 1970s, quickly making her reputation as one of the leading groupies on Sunset Boulevarde. ![]()
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