“…after Jimmy Page and David Bowie, what was I going to do with a North Hollywood boy? I didn’t go to high school prom because I was too busy living the Hollywood prom.”
-Lori Mattix recalling her time as a “baby groupie,” 2015.
The Valley Girl1 of the 1950s and early 1960s was prim, predictable, and conformist. She was commercially crafted to sell a very specific, white, idealized version of traditional family that translated easily into modern consumerism. By the late 1960s and 1970s, however, her daughter was a very different Valley Girl.
Like a lot of straight-laced communities around this time, free love and drug culture captivated the youth, and drove a sizable wedge between them and their parents’ staunchly middle-class values. Much of this hyper-suburban, white picket fence Valley perfection was compromised in the later end of the 1960s and through the 1970s. The Valley’s foray into this period was a little more nuanced, though, in that the post-WWII families who were attracted to the safety of the San Fernando Valley didn’t account for their geography.
The sons and daughters who grew up in those idealized modern homes became teenagers and were lured over the hill to raucous and lurid places like West Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, and the Hollywood Bowl. Successfully embracing the growing culture of cool meant getting as far away from the Valley as possible and aligning yourself with the growing music and drug scene in Hollywood2.
Valley kids started creating ad hoc ways to flee their privileged homes; the documented “underground railroad” to Hollywood3 (essentially, a series of homes they could stay at inching them closer and closer to Hollywood), was growing. And a greater percentage of those kids were girls, according to juvenile officers at the time.
For the first time, the Valley Girl rejected the Valley.
It’s so easy to see in retrospect. Suddenly, with teenagers in the house, living 20 minutes from LA proper was not a selling point. My dad was one of those kids—a “valley boy” although, culturally that shorthand never took root. He was a musician and walked up and down the Sunset Strip looking for clubs to play and trouble to get into. He did every drug he could get his hands on and went surfing when the high died down.
My father wasn’t the exception; in a lot of ways, he was the rule. Drug use among teens in the San Fernando Valley went up, with a record number of them reported missing (many ran away from home). Valley Girls resurfaced as groupies, as musicians, as actress-hopefuls with a couple of headshots and a completely convincing way of saying that they were born and raised in Hollywood.
Among them were iconic women like the famous “baby groupie” Lori Mattix, a valley girl4 from North Hollywood, who started regularly visiting the Sunset Strip when she was 13 years old. She recounted what constitutes statutory rape at the hands of rock singers David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Jimmy Page5. Or self-proclaimed groupie Pamela Des Barres, another valley girl from Reseda, who also went on to be romantically involved with Jagger, Page, Jim Morrison and published the bestselling book I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie in 1987. Her memoir is an intimate record of white Los Angeles groupie culture circa the Rolling Stones, specifically from a middle-class, straight, female point of view. But I’m With the Band goes even further as a cultural document; Des Barres puts to record a pivotal shift in this next generation of valley girls and all the ways in which they were not their parents.
Des Barres describes the generational divide this way:
I graduated high school in a white-lace drop-waist dress and candy-apple-red flats alongside two Miss Americas wearing fabric pumps that were dyed to match their handbags…I grabbed my diploma and split the scene. I was now free to go to Hollywood any night of the week, and I did. My mom and dad wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. Didn't they know I was among those in the throes of a revolution? Couldn't they see the invisible peace sign tattooed on my forehead?6
It's around this time that the Valley Girl archetype was able to momentarily wrest free from the stiff, suburban image of the 1950s, particularly as youth culture was rebelling against institutions like religious doctrine, conventional academia, a government-mandated Vietnam War, and rigid gender roles for women. The Valley Girl defied. She went to parties. She ran away. She joined cults. She slept with people she had no intention of marrying. She engaged in many of the transgressions that the Valley was supposed to be free from.
For the first time, the Valley Girl rejected the Valley.
Tellingly, Des Barres’s account of escaping the boring confines of her Valley upbringing is expressed through a contrast in romantic interests. “Important” guys were over the hill and “boys” in the Valley just didn’t compare:
After I made that first trek into Hollywood to see Captain Beefheart at the Teen Fair, I was like a ravenous rat heading for the cheese. Everything seemed to gleam and glow and the Sunset Strip loomed in the foreground like a promise of greatness. Cleveland High7 became just a place to graduate from and the boys in Reseda were squalling infants, dribbling into their bibs. All the boys in Hollywood had long hair and important eyes. They walked cool and talked cool, and my brain was clamoring to grasp any eloquent morsel of information bestowed upon me by one of these amazing creatures.8
Aggressive, unbridled heterosexuality would become an enduring marker of the Valley Girl groupie: both what distinguished her from the Valley’s normative mores but also what facilitated her access to a glamorous life beyond the Valley. Transactional sex with men, whether for her own sexual experience or for access, would literally get her places: on tour buses across the country, on transatlantic flights to Europe, and to countries and cities she could never hope to see as some Valley guy’s wife. Groupie status offered a vast mobility and a creative-focused adventure that was more rare for young women of this time.
It would be this generation of girls—groupies, artists, and unconventional thinkers—that would first solidify the Valley Girl reputation as promiscuous and “easy.”
Des Barres describes a camaraderie with other valley girl groupies forged over sex tips, band recommendations, and strategies for getting backstage. Valley girls helping valley girls:
Besides my delicious, insane Hollywood girlfriends, I made some Valley girlfriends who were a couple years younger than me so I could show off some of my newfound incredible hipness. I taught them how to give head on an Oscar Mayer weenie, and turned them on to Love, the Byrds, and the Doors. I told them what it was like to be backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, on a bass player's arm.9
In response, a bevy of pop and rock songs soon immortalized the Southern “California Girl” as an ethereal, gorgeous muse who wore bikinis all day and liked to grow her hair out long. Some of them were from Orange County or Marina Del Ray or Santa Monica. But a lot of them were Valley Girls, too. It would be this generation of girls—groupies, artists, and unconventional thinkers—that would first solidify the Valley Girl reputation as promiscuous and “easy.”
Given the enduring misogynistic dismissal of groupies as disposable, the creation of a lasting record by Des Barres is particularly subversive. Her memoir has gone on to shape depictions of groupie culture, albeit not exactly to her liking.
Her experiences informed the character of Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous. Actress Kate Hudson, who played Penny Lane, reportedly read I’m With the Band to prepare for the role and hung pictures of Des Barres in her dressing room during production. To that end, Des Barres described Penny’s climatic plot point of overdosing following rejection from a male singer as “a horribly misogynistic look at what a groupie-muse is.” She corrected the depiction accordingly in 2020:
“That made me so angry,” she continued. “This character, the groupie like she’s portrayed, is pathetic. I knew all the main groupies in the heyday of groupiedom. None of them would have done that. There was always someone else coming to town. That really turned me off. No actual music-loving goddess-groupie would do such a thing.”10
Her criticisms of the character are a stark reminder of how, through patriarchal lenses, the relative sexual accessibility of the female groupie eclipsed all other noteworthy characteristics. Without a gender literate comprehension of her cultural landscape, the groupie was reduced to one identifying measure: sex.
Predators would come to see the groupie—and the Valley Girl broadly—as just that.
Next week: the beasts over the hill.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Ironically, it would be this very counterculture that would deem the Valley Girl deeply boring, unfashionable, and take her down simply on account of geography.
Hansen, Kenneth. “Teen Runaways Catch ‘Underground Railway.’” Los Angeles Times, 20 Apr. 1969, p. SF_A1.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.
Mattix, Lori. “I Lost My Virginity to David Bowie.” Thrillist, 2 Nov. 2015, https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/i-lost-my-virginity-to-david-bowie. Accessed 25 June 2025.
Des Barres, Pamela. I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Beech Tree Books, 1987. Pg. 53.
Cleveland High School was one of my rival high schools growing up.
Des Barres, Pamela. I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Beech Tree Books, 1987.Pg. 44.
Des Barres, Pamela. I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Beech Tree Books, 1987. Pg. 83.
Sharf, Zac. “The Groupie Who Inspired Penny Lane Gets Angry Over ‘Almost Famous’: ‘This Character Is Pathetic.’” IndieWire, 14 Sept. 2020, www.indiewire.com/features/general/almost-famous-woman-inspired-penny-lane-criticizes-film-1234586196/.