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