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Cock rock: Dig the groovy, sleazy sounds of The Plaster Caster Blues Band
02.12.2018
04:02 pm
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I’m sure that many readers of this blog are familiar with the legendary Plaster Casters, the Chicago groupies who made Plaster of Paris molds of rock star cocks, starting in the late 60s with Jimi Hendrix and later the likes of Jello Biafra and Ariel Pink. There’s even a KISS song about them. But did you know that Cynthia Plaster Caster and her friend Dianne (“the designated giver of blowjobs”) also had an album?

Well they did. Kinda. Sort of. Well not really… Apparently only their name is on it, not their actual voices. I doubt they even got paid for it. It’s a groupie-themed novelty record where unsurprisingly the actual music (a competent group of session players jamming on some highly enjoyable blues-rock) takes a backseat to the album cover and the nudge-nudge-wink-wink song titles which tend to promise a whole lot more than they actually deliver on.
 

 
For instance there’s “Lanoola Goes Limp” (referencing, apparently, an in-joke among the members of Paul Revere & The Raiders) or “Seven Foot Drummer From Fleetwood Mac.” And who wouldn’t want to listen to “Joint Venture” or “You Didn’t Try To Ball Me (For Frank Zappa)”? What about the intriguingly titled “Diane’s Blue Plate Special” (“plating” = “fluffing” in the Plaster Caster vernacular) or “Blues For Big Jimi”?

By the way, it’s almost entirely instrumental. Don’t get me wrong, it’s actually pretty good! If you like “groovy” sounds, I don’t want to scare you off, this might be for you.

The album was produced by music business veteran Bob Thiele and released on his newly launched New York-based Flying Dutchman record label, which mostly released jazz and blues, including important albums by Gil Scott-Heron, Gato Barbieri, Oliver Nelson, Lonnie Liston Smith and Thiele’s wife, pop singer Teresa Brewer. Flying Dutchman also released albums of speeches by Black radicals H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis and cultural critic Stanley Crouch, but nothing else that I am aware of quite like The Plaster Casters Blue Band.

The Girls Together Outrageously this is not. And who would have retailed something like this in 1969? Dirty bookstores? How anyone thought they would make a buck on such a product—I remind you that these are not songs with “dirty” lyrics, but instrumentals—is mystifying, but I applaud this misguided, weirdo effort.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.12.2018
04:02 pm
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‘The Groupies’: Bizarre album from 1969 features confessionals on the art of ‘making piggies’ (sex)
11.28.2017
08:26 am
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Among the many elements of popular culture that the Beatles can be said to have invented, one might add the development of the possibility of women, in numbers, showing acute sexual interest in music stars. Yes, there was Frank Sinatra, and Rudy Vallée before him, but the advent of Beatlemania was an essentially new phenomenon. One of the staples of the mid-1960s is footage of dozens of teenage girls screaming/fainting because they happen to find themselves in the vicinity of Ringo Starr. The general trope of sneaking up to a hotel room in order to kiss a Beatle was surely one of the factors that convinced so many young men to try their hand at the music business.

They came to be called groupies, and some of them even became famous, such as Pamela Des Barres and the Plaster Casters. Des Barres and a few other women briefly became the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), a kind of groupie band in their own right under the tutelage of Frank Zappa, releasing their only album Permanent Damage in 1969.

That was the same year that another groupie-related album came out. It was prosaically called The Groupies and featured no music at all, merely the recorded musings of a few (unidentified) groupies in a tell-all confessional. It was released by Alan Lorber Productions, one of the few releases put out by the label put together by Lorber, who was a well-known arranger at the time.

The GTOs were an L.A. act, but judging by their accents (and the tales they tell), the women on The Groupies are pure New York City, reminiscing about learning to hook up with pop stars at the Brooklyn Fox Theater or discos like Cheetah or Ondine. The women on the album sound pretty young, which can be seen in their primary choice of euphemism for sex, which is “making piggies.”

It’s a curious album and may make the perfect backdrop for your next key party.

Amusingly, the makers of the album tried to immortalize the ladies’ banter by featuring a “groupie glossary” on the back cover, which is simply a listing of the terms they use, almost invariably in an ad-hoc manner, on the album. In other words, it’s too much to call this the widespread accepted terminology of a subculture but it is at least an accurate rendering of typical vocabulary.
 

 

Groupie glossary:

poxie: physically repulsive
plaster caster (The Plaster Casters): girls who cast plaster molds of the genital organs of male pop stars.
kinky: attractively weird
randy: horny, sexually obsessed
puny: small as in male genitals
piggies (making piggies): sexual intercourse
The Fox (The Brooklyn Fox Theater): scene of early sixties rock shows usually m.c.‘d by Murray the “K”
Goof: an event that occurs contrary to normal social behavior; sometimes just for the fun of it.
slaggy: low-life groupie
pop star: the artist with the hit record; major recording artist with international popularity
head (gave him, to give): oral copulation
whank-off: to masturbate
dosed-up: having contracted a venereal disease
creamies: reference to the physical properties of venereal disease
downs: pills with mental and physical depressant qualities
ups: opposite effect of downs
messed-up: a state resulting from excessive drug involvement
fling-on (to fling-on someone): a groupie who physically throws herself at a pop star.
stoned: mental and physical state of being resulting from the intake of mind-expanding drugs
gross: ugly, repulsive person or scene
rock-geisha: an elite groupie
hang on the wall: wait around in a rock club for the action
freak scene: sexual orgy
Prince Charming: as in “Cinderella”
up-sexed: Freudian slip for “upset”
leader: lead singer or the star of a pop group
roadys: road managers who accompany pop groups
out of it: stoned to the point of being out of it
pop people: those people involved in the music scene including recording, producing and all related fields

 
Here’s the full album. For some reason the people who made the album made the choice to introduce each side with a curious echo effect that may dupe you into thinking you’ve opened two instances of the same recording—you probably haven’t.

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Girls Together Outrageously: Contract signed by the GTOs, Frank Zappa’s all groupie group

Posted by Martin Schneider
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11.28.2017
08:26 am
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Cynthia Plaster Caster, Pamela Des Barres & others in the fascinating 1970 doc ‘Groupies’
08.10.2015
11:38 am
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The lovely Miss Cynthia Plaster Caster
 
The 1970 documentary Groupies does not portray the lives of its subjects as particularly appealing. There are some famous faces—namely Pamela Des Barres (billed as “Miss Pamela”), and Cynthia Plaster Caster (listed as “Cynthia P. Caster”), but the most interesting people on screen aren’t the rock stars of the groupie world, as it were. From the very start of the film, testimonies from young, bleary-eyed, often chemically altered girls express at least as much ambivalence and regret as revelry. The girls often look a little haggard, arguing among themselves, gossiping about this or that groupie’s age or laughing off some rock star’s wife or serious girlfriend. The sexual competition produces no culture of sisterhood, that’s for sure.

With artists like Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Terry Reid, Spooky Tooth, and Cat Mother, you’re not looking at the most “elite” of their class, which frankly makes for a more interesting documentary. A girl recounts the tale of being grabbed by the throat by a random bar patron who was under the impression that she was for the taking—luckily, she had mace on hand. In another scene, a musician asks a girl if she has the clap. Plainly, she says that she did, but recently cleared it up with penicillin. Unflappable, her potential partner asks if she has any more left. Adventure is never without risk, but both groupies and musicians are fearless.

Fascinatingly, the doc also covers male groupies—about whom there is very little discourse out there. Chaz, a young gay man, is desperate to get to Terry Reid, but he’s out of his mind on drugs, barely able to speak or stay awake. This doesn’t stop him from throwing himself at musicians, but it’s utterly tragic, even when everyone manages to let him down easy. In a less merciful scene, a runaway named Iris calls home—she’s terrified of her father’s response, even though she’s only a teenager. Later, Ten Years After (with whom she’d been traveling) drop her, while other artists try to get her to join their own caravan. It’s as if she’s being shuffled around by the men of the scene.

The film is truly brutal, but well worth a watch—an intense look at the seedy underbelly of an often-glamorized scene.
 

Posted by Amber Frost
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08.10.2015
11:38 am
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Let’s Spend The Night Together: Confessions of Rock’s Greatest Groupies, live in Los Angeles
12.13.2010
11:46 am
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“Miss Pamela” AKA Pamela Des Barres
 
Tonight’s gourmet fare at Cinefamily (and temperatures in the mid-70s!) once again sees me in my “Los Angeles civic booster” mode. Where else would you be able to watch a new documentary about the great groupies of the Sixties and Seventies, featuring Miss Pamela (Des Barres) of the GTOs and then hang out for a reception afterwards to meet several of the film’s subjects, the director and the still very divine Miss Pamela, too?

Take an emotional journey back to the early Seventies, the Golden Age of Groupies! Some were in it for love, some for the music, and some for their art—and four decades later, these passionate women share their stories of sexual conquest and bitter heartbreak, and finally reveal whether it was all worth it. Told through the eyes of rock and roll historian and super groupie Pamela Des Barres (author of the famous 1987 tell-all “I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie” and the brand-new book “Let’s Spend the Night Together”) this ninety-minute documentary offers memories of her sexual exploits and longtime escapades with such notorious rockers as Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison and Jimmy Page—and chronicles her cross-country journey to reconnect with the iconic women who loved and inspired the great rock stars of our time. Join moderator Michael Des Barres as he Q&As (schedule permitting) with Pamela Des Barres, Lori Mattix, Michele Overman, Catherine James and the film’s director Jenna Rosher on the Cinefamily stage after the film—and stick around for a reception on our Spanish patio after the show! Plus, DJ Andrew Sandoval will be spinning tunes both before and after the show!

The Cinefamily / 611 N Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, 90036, 8pm, $10
 

 
Let’s Spend The Night Together: Confessions of Rock’s Greatest Groupies premieres Wednesday December 15 on Vh1.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.13.2010
11:46 am
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Dennis Hopper: American Dreamer (NSFW)

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In 2006, the late Dennis Hopper confessed to Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that he thought his career was a failure. This despite revolutionizing American cinema by directing Easy Rider, and becoming an icon via characters like the lost American photojournalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the sinister Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. He likely wasn’t otherwise convinced by the star he received on the Hollywood Walk of Fame a couple of months before he died.
 
These clips from Lawrence Schiller-directed 1971 documentary The American Dreamer find the Dodge City, KS-born Hopper in a reflective and quietly desperate place. Shot while he completed post-production on The Last Movie—Hopper’s convoluted, Peruvian-filmed follow-up to Easy RiderDreamer follows the scraggly and bearded director as he wanders,  parties and babbles around his Taos, NM ranch.
 
You’d think that triumph of Easy Rider would somewhat make up for Hopper’s emotionally damaged childhood, career troubles, two divorces, and the trauma of his good friend James Dean’s death. But Hopper here is deep inside his alcoholism, musing on his alienation, and treating the filming as a sort of therapy. As you’ll find in the second clip below, part of that therapy involves what he termed a “sensitivity encounter” with about a dozen variously undressed groupies who the mad director harangues with some group-psych babble before disrobing himself. Hopper would eventually hit bottom, wandering literally naked in a South American jungle, before being hospitalized, rehabilitated, and eventually redeemed in the later phase of an enviable “failure” of a career.
 

 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.07.2010
07:42 pm
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