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LIFE'S ODD, isn't it? On a rainy June morning, I find myself sitting in a house in Walthamstow with Pamela Des Barres, the world's most famous and beautiful groupie. As a sexual athlete she was, in her Sixties and Seventies heyday, first-class, and that sporting prowess has stood her in fine stead. Though her unlined, alabaster face has probably had help, her body is supple as a young cheetah's, rippling with toned muscles probably inside and out. It has come unscathed through her years of combat. If slivers of DNA still linger, though, I'm also in a room with Mick Jagger, Don Johnson, Jimmy Page, Waylon Jennings, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison ... Phew, it's getting crowded. And with almost all of her conquests, the romantic and perversely innocent Des Barres fell headlong in love. She was 16 when she started, remember (she's 54 now, looks 30), and 16's an impressionable age.
I'm here because a) one of Pam's best friends from back then, a gentle hippy-esque astrologer, lives in E17 and it's where our heroine likes to stay when she's not on the California coast and b) her extremely frank memoir, I'm With The Band, is about to be republished. Originally published in 1987, it has been out of print since the late Eighties. As a result it became one of the most sought-after music books ever and original copies have been known to change hands for $250. Heavy with euphoric or tear- stained diary extracts, it tells of young Pamela Miller, who grew up in the Valley area of Los Angeles with nice, normal parents, a dog, a cat and a parakeet named Buttons. And everything was charming until, at eight, she heard Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, "and it was like BOIIINNNG!" Pamela's thing for rock musicians started right there. At first, she just had a crush on Paul McCartney ("I love you my precious precious Paully Waully Paul Paul!"). A few years later, she met Don van Vliet, soon to be Captain Beefheart, and he got her into the new "hip". She became politicised, joining marches on Sunset and hanging with Frank Zappa (well, it's easier if you're in the area). Recalling Zappa's philanthropic idealism - "his whole purpose...