Sometimes it seemed as if “rock star,” as a description or a general term of praise, had left the genre itself behind. By the 2010s, the term “rock star” was commonly used to describe mildly quirky CEOs, faintly charismatic politicians, slightly unconventional athletes, and sometimes-although not so often-professional musicians. Rock stars outlived the Los Angeles scene that Des Barres chronicled, and they outlived the eighties, too. Even people with no interest in rock ’n’ roll had a pretty good idea by then of how rock stars were supposed to look and act. It was 1987, and MTV was thriving, fueled by a particularly glamorous and decadent form of rock ’n’ roll that came to be known as hair metal. As part of the arrangement, she was expected to savor the band’s forthcoming album:īy the time Des Barres published her book, the rules of this world had been codified.

“I wondered if I was going steady with the best guitar player in the world,” she thought while she was dating Jimmy Page, from Led Zeppelin. Still, she was clear-eyed about the seductive power of rock stardom, and about the corresponding imbalance of power in many of the relationships she had. After all, Des Barres was not just a fan but a minor celebrity, and also a recording artist: a member of the GTOs, or Girls Together Outrageously, a rock ’n’ roll performance-art troupe that released an album on an imprint owned by Frank Zappa, the rock eccentric who served as their mentor. Often in the book, Des Barres and her idols seem to be trying to figure out exactly how they are supposed to relate to each other. Few people have ever written as insightfully, or as sympathetically, about the peculiar enthusiasm that gives the genre of rock ’n’ roll its mythic reputation, or about the complicated bond that unites performers and fans-and, just as important, divides them. (Her Jagger prediction, for example, proved accurate soon enough.) But the true subject of her book was rock stardom itself.

The title is accurate enough: Des Barres was for years a leading light in the Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll scene, and her adult life turned out to be even more interesting than her girlhood diary. She is Pamela Des Barres, and in 1987 she included those diary entries in her first book, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. The young diarist eventually turned her passion for rock stars into a lifestyle, and then a literary career.

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