Groupie Girl !FULL!
Groupie Girl is a 1970 British drama film about the rock music scene, directed by Derek Ford and starring Esme Johns, Donald Sumpter and the band Opal Butterfly. The film was written by Ford and former groupie Suzanne Mercer.
Groupie Girl
The term groupie is a slang word that refers to a fan of a particular musical group who follows the band around while they are on tour or who attends as many of their public appearances as possible, with the hope of meeting them. The term is usually derogatory, describing young women who follow these individuals aiming to initiate a sexual encounter with them or to offer them sex. The term is also used to describe fans of sports, and admirers of public figures in other high-profile professions.
The word groupie originated around 1965 to describe teen-aged girls or young women who began following a particular group or band of musicians on a regular basis. The phenomenon was much older; Mary McCarthy had earlier described it in her novel The Company She Keeps (1942).[1] Some sources have attributed the coining of the word to The Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman during the group's 1965 Australian tour;[2] but Wyman said he and his bandmates used other "code words" for women on tour.[3]
A prominent explanation of the groupie concept came from Rolling Stone magazine, which published an issue devoted to the topic, Groupies: The Girls of Rock (February 1969), which emphasized the sexual behavior of rock musicians and groupies.[4] Time magazine published an article, "Manners And Morals: The Groupies", later that month. Also that year, journalists Jenny Fabian and Johnny Byrne released a largely autobiographical novel called Groupie (1969). The following year, a documentary film titled Groupies (1970) was released.
Female groupies in particular have a long-standing reputation of being available to celebrities, pop stars, rock stars, and other public figures. Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant is quoted as distinguishing between fans who wanted brief sexual encounters, and "groupies" who traveled with musicians for extended periods of time, acting as a surrogate girlfriend, and often taking care of the musician's wardrobe and social life.[5] Women who adopt this role are sometimes referred to as "road wives". Cynthia Plaster Caster, Cleo Odzer, Barbara Cope (The Butter Queen) and The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), with Pamela Des Barres, in particular, as de facto spokeswoman, are probably the best known groupies of this type.
Also according to Des Barres' book,[which?] there is at least one male groupie, Pleather, who followed female celebrities such as Courtney Love and members of the 1980s pop group The Bangles.[citation needed]
The term is somewhat analogous to the term "groupie" as it relates to rock and roll musicians. Sociological studies of the phenomenon in minor league hockey indicate that self-proclaimed "puck bunnies" are "'proud as punch' to have sex with the [players]", as it confers social status on them. However, these transitory relationships are often contrasted with those of girlfriends, with whom players have more stable, long-term relationships.[14]
Soon, the rock stars heard of this girl with an art project in mind, and it intrigued more than one, including the great Jimi Hendrix. The rock stars of the world saw their chance to confirm their spot in infamy.
For the second time in five months, I took my fifteen year old daughter and her friend to a Fall Out Boy concert, this time at Ohio State. It was a memorable (and late) night. Having learned last time that Dads, daughters, and mosh pits do not mix, I came prepared this time with work and my Treo. A friend had gotten us spectacular tickets and passes to meet the band, who were incredibly generous and friendly to the awestruck girls. After escorting the girls to their seats, I left the arena and whiled away the hours at a nearby sports bar working, nursing a glass of wine, and silently rooting on my Red Sox in the midst of burly OSU Indians fans. The best part of the evening was meeting my daughter in the concourse after the concert, seeing the kind of unbridled joy in her face that is common when kids are younger but that the world chips away as they get older. There are few things in life sweeter than driving home late at night with your teenage daughter sprawled out beside you sleeping, reminiscent of those days not so long ago when she would sleep in the car strapped into her infant, child, and booster seats.
Mosh pits and dads do mix, depending on the crowd. If I had not been at a Fall Out Boy concert, a lot more teenage girls would have fallen on the ground while trying to crowd surf. But I think I'm a little burlier than you. :-)
1. "I will sell this house today!": American Beauty for Best Picture, 1999Annette Bening doing her best Faye Dunaway impression stands out in our minds as the most blatantly horrendous thing about American Beauty, but there's so much to hate about the debut film from Sam Mendes, who has gone on to terrorize moviegoers with a succession of misogynistic, idiotic treatises on that fallow place called America. A real Alexis de Tocqueville, that one. Mendes's crassness never fails to astonish, but never more so than in Alan Ball's glibly scripted Beauty, which was so "subversive" about contemporary American values and mores that it ends up making a savior of . . . a wealthy, straight, white American male. One whose regression into pot-smoking, responsibility-shirking infantilism is honored as transgressive. One whose real estate-hawking materialist demon wife (who slaps herself in the face over and over when she doesn't excel at work) and sullen daughter hamper his happiness from every side. One who gets to die in a perfect moment of shotgun-assisted bliss, spiritually cleansed after deciding not to fuck the nubile, willing teenage girl on his couch (because she's a virgin), and while staring at a framed photo of his baby girl. One whose death is manipulated into a distasteful faux murder mystery in which everyone who's not him (a nonsensically gun-wielding shrew wife, a self-loathing gay neighbor, his black-cloaked outsider son) just might be a killer. To the unending blood-boiling of the smart few who at the time saw through this vacuous, perhaps unintentional upstander of traditional values, American Beauty is maybe the single most hateful Best Picture winner, outdoing even the insipid Crash due to its Hollywood polish and sheen, which only make its transparencies all the clearer.
The Academy Awards become such an inextricable part of a film's legacy that Cecil B. DeMille's three-hour advertisement for Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey is now generally considered a "classic" due to its win. But to put it in perspective, imagine a Best Picture Oscar going to, say, Nine, and you'll understand why this film's win is so mind-boggling: it's a parade of stars in search of a story, flaunting their attributes with all the pomp and circumstance usually afforded to Celine Dion Vegas spectaculars. It's all an excuse for show: for Cornel Wilde's athletic physique, for Betty Hutton's squinty brassiness, for James Stewart in full clown regalia, for monkeys, for trampolines, for peanuts and popcorn and crackerjack. Love triangles with showgirls, trapeze artists, and strongmen. Train crashes. A checklist of spangly stuff rather than a coherent or engaging narrative, The Greatest Show on Earth suffers from elephantiasis throughout its 152 unbearable minutes. Minus points for making a movie about the fucking circus.
It took Elizabethtown for most moviegoers to finally see the sham that is Cameron Crowe's career, but when Almost Famous came out and charmed the pants and brains off of audiences, the chosen few could see that Mr. Show Me the Money was hardly the latter-day Billy Wilder he seems to want to be known as. Prime evidence was this bald-faced paean to his own coolness disguised as . . . well, it wasn't really disguised at all. Does Crowe get points for honesty in his look back at his early years as a teen music journalist whose school of hard knocks includes getting seduced by hot groupie girls and doing a lot of reefer? Not when every scene is so insufferably mounted, so artificially realized, so certain of its own devilish charm. "It's all about the music," Kate Hudson's Penny Lane intones, speaking for Crowe, it would seem, but then how come, in between the coming-of-age clichés, we get some of the worst rock songs ever written ("Fever Dog . . . scratchin' at your back door . . . "), whether intended as kitsch or not? Crowe's dreadful follow-ups to his Oscar winner (including the hilarious Vanilla Sky) have made this one of the most embarrassing awards in what would turn out to be a very embarrassing decade for the Academy Awards indeed (A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, and a certain Los Angeles character tapestry that ripped open the festering wound that is American racism). 041b061a72