How Things Work, Race and Culture

Groupies

(Newsbreak: Several groups, including some members of Congress, have called for the revocation of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to Bill Cosby in 2002.)

Definition: “A groupie is generally considered a devoted female fan of a band or musical performer.”

A few notes: Groupies usually run in packs, at least two, and as the definition states, are females. Guys are more often called “stalkers” so work alone. And their intentions are different from groupies, well almost.

Every American city has its local groupies, who show up at every pop performance,

groupies..this one from an early Beatles tour in New York in the 1960s. Sinatra had his groupies in the Swing era. It’s even said Franz Liszt had throngs of women who would get front row seats at performances in Paris and forget to wear any underwear or would clandestinely remove them then find all sorts of clever ways to give them to him, all because, I’m told, of his flowing locks of hair and fiery eyes. (All this without the miracle of television advertising.)

With the advent of “hard rock”, (some blame the Rolling Stones) where drugs and rock music were joined in wedded bliss, the make-up of groupies became more up-close and personal. While poorer young girls still stood in rope lines screaming their guts out, others, usually in twos-or-threes, would invade the hotels where the bands stayed, using every contrivance imaginable to gain access to the rock stars’ suite of rooms, where they could then offer their drawers personally.

By the late 70s it had become a competition, with counting coup involved. And trophies. Think of a string of scalps outside a young braves teepee, only the braves were women.

A lot of girls wanted to be able to go beyond that rope line, but only a few could, for it took quite a bit of dough to be able to pull that off; event tickets, cab fare, the local dealer, and bribes to bellhops. So, to finish off the profile of the groupie, she was also affluent, more specifically, a child of affluence, with nothing better to do with her time than to chase after the bands, trying to count coup with an autograph book, a clean change of underwear, at least a moderately attractive body, and a taste for LSD. There waiting were about-to-crash-and-burn members of the Stones, Steppenwolf, Guns n Roses,  Motley Crue, Pink Floyd, Megadeath, Black Sabbath, to name a few. But the kings of the fusion between groupies and sex, drugs and rock and roll were Grateful Dead and their Deadheads, a 30 year relationship, and 2300 concerts, where many of these acid rock molls could follow them around for months on end. I have no doubt that many Code Pink lezzies today were once deadheads, having later taken the vows of monastic lesbianism only after Jerry Garcia died.

I’ve profiled these now-aging groupies because, as a naturally curious former criminal defense lawyer, I’m wondering why so many women are in lock-step, timed sequence coming forward to claim that Bill Cosby, himself now nearly 80, raped or took illegal sexual liberties with them 15, 20, even 30 years ago …back in the heyday of groupie adventurism?

All of them.

How many are there…20? 30? What are the odds that they were all sexually assaulted, yet not one of them would have stepped forward even within a year of such a horrific event. Were they all born and raised in Stepford, the “town without pity”? Many towns have stories of a prominent man, or his son, having raped a young high school girl, then used his money and power to hush it up. But what if that kid had raped the entire cheerleading squad, plus all the majorettes, then throw in the entire 6th-period Home Economics class? And not one of them stepped forward? Or their families?

That’s the magnitude of what Bill Cosby stands charged with today. So, from my perspective, what defense counsel doesn’t want to put those ladies on the stand and ask all those step-by-step “why” questions, especially since there isn’t any physical evidence, just she-said, he-said two decades later, to back up their claim?

Seriously, what are the chances all of them would stay mum until their hair had turned gray, and they’d gone through the change, or maybe decided men are just no damned good, so finally entered the catacombs of the just-mentioned Cloister of Gertrude Stein. This is really inconceivable.

I don’t know the stories of all these women, but would love to be on the defense team and ask all the obvious “why” and “how” time-line questions. One of those girls was a presumably under-age unaccompanied female roaming the halls of the Playboy Mansion when she bumped into the Coz. If she wasn’t a groupie, what was she? If she wasn’t looking for a memorable liaison with a celebrity, why else was she there?

I’m not here to exonerate Bill Cosby, for I think he’s established himself as a lecher and serial adulterer. The lovable Bill Cosby of lore is no more. I’ve already ditched all my old Cosby reruns and comedy albums. But he’s charged with crimes here, not adultery, and unless these ladies, one-by-one, can show otherwise, all those liaisons were carried out by groupies who only changed their minds thirty years later because of some changes in their own lives. Or were they were hired, as the rent-a-hags sent to destroy Herman Cain in 2012, or Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, likely were hired?  If I can hear one bellhop or stage manager swear under oath that Bill Cosby surveyed a room and told him to “send her to my room” then I can see a plan of sexual predation, and a basis for conviction. Otherwise, such mass silence for two decades indicates something else altogether. Alice B Toklas, call your office.

All I see here, so far, is a horny lech who took advantage of the rope line. And we’ve seen that before.

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