The “phallic man” must be a really splendid fellow if he wants to feel like a man at all. However, as soon as he has to be something specific and is not allowed to be what he really is, he loses, understandably, his sense of self. He then tries to blow up his self-esteem, which again leads to narcissistic weakening, and so on, ad infinitum. . . . The grandiose person is never really free, first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from the object, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualifications, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.
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Pamela Des Barres’s journey from teenage fan to groupie to rock star’s wife to media celebrity is remarkable, if only for the extraordinary speed with which she climbs the ladder. One moment it seems she’s Pamela Miller, a southern California high school kid with a thing for the Beatles and the Stones–yet in no time at all she actually meets Mick Jagger; within another chapter or two she not only beds him, but appears onstage with him, as a member of the GTOs, Frank Zappa’s Girls Together Outrageously. As a teenage Beatles fan she manages to look directly into John Lennon’s eyes and, albeit with the benefit of hindsight, see this: “On the way down the hill, a limousine passed by, and I saw John Lennon for an instant. He was wearing his John Lennon cap and he looked right at me. If I close my eyes this minute, I can still see the look he had on his face; it was full of sorrow and contempt.” Perhaps he saw a disillusioned fan called Albert Goldman coming his way.
In Pamela Des Barres’s groupie world, “obsess” is an important verb. When her beloved Chris Hillman starts playing with the Byrds in Los Angeles, she writes: “I latched onto the Byrds as I had the Beatles, only this time they were local and I could obsess in person.” By now, we’re reconsidering the caricature of pop fans as mindless victims of music-industry greed. What’s so fascinating about pop fandom is that to be a real fan it takes an active, and sometimes creative, engagement with pop culture. Fans produce newsletters, run fan clubs, organize trips to concerts, write poems and letters to their heroes and heroines, analyze lyrics, swap interpretations, argue about critical judgments, and–perhaps–replace “everyday” life with an alternative reality that’s more exciting than the one that the world says is their own. Fandom can be a form of creativity, an attempt to muscle in on the act. When one of her idols catches a glimpse of Des Barres, causing him to make a mistake onstage, she is thrilled rather than upset. Obsessing is an activity; it’s something that you do, not something that is done to you.
