Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll Part I: Sex by Stevie Adamek

Sex was a strategic part of the touring experience in the late 1970s when my band, Bighorn, was touring with Van Halen, Journey, Boston, Triumph, and the J. Geils Band. It was after birth control and before AIDs, and the sheer amount of consensual sex that went on between groupies and bands was perhaps the most it’s ever been either before or since. There was an unspoken deal between female fans and guys like me in rock and roll. To mitigate the boredom, loneliness and the adrenaline high of performing, we both used sex to soothe our souls and keep ourselves occupied. It filled a variety of roles for both parties: sleep aid, tension releaser and comfort for the men, power and proximity to fame for the women.

The Number One Enemy: Boredom

Being on tour was a life of extremes. You’d have an hour, maybe an hour a half max of an 18,000 person party, and then 22 hours of trying to sleep, riding in planes and cars, and being bored, trying to stay out of trouble. Except we didn’t try very hard. There were no cellphones, no internet. All we had was a VCR and Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor movies in the hotel room that we memorized line for line. For a bunch of high strung, neurotic young guys, this was bound to be trouble. It was a very bipolar lifestyle. Most of the time you were nobody. You were uncomfortable and you didn’t have much to keep you busy, because everything was taken care of for you by management and the roadies. Then, for a few hours, you were expected to ramp up and be “on” at top speed – high energy, intense interaction, and screaming fans all around you. It was awesome for that short period of time you were on stage, and then it was boring and depressing the rest of the time. We got in a lot of trouble. When we showed up to a venue, and the opening band was soundchecking, we knew they would be spending an hour and a half on their guitar tone (like Boston). So we would immediately hunt for girls to hang out with. Nobody thought, “Oh, let’s go read a book.” We were like amped up animals. Sex and drugs were readily available to deal with that young male energy. There were always girls waiting, hanging around the venues when we got off the plane at the hotels. We looked like rock guys: long hair, strange clothes, swagger. The girls knew who we were the minute they saw us, and they made a beeline for us.  Often it was a situation where the girls wanted something: Tshirts, back stage passes, drugs, alchohol… and they gave us what we wanted in return.

David Lee Roth’s Room of Girls

If you’re a Van Halen fan, you’ve probably heard about David Lee Roth’s “Girl Room.” Certain members of the road crew were assigned to pick out the most voluptuous, tantalizing girls they could find in the crowd and give them a backstage pass, inviting them to the post show festivities. This room did exist; it was usually a dressing room in which Roth would host a number of these beautiful women. He’d be there talking to them, chatting them up. Everyone in the opening band, like ours, would be there, too. (We rarely saw Eddie or Alex, they had their own parties going on.) But David always had the best girls, and he was generous enough to let us hang out and socialize with his “cast-offs.” We were as happy to be invited to “The Room” as the girls were.   It was like a version of speed dating. The goal was not a group orgy, it was to winnow down the choices. We would talk to a bunch of prospective partners to figure out who was the most willing, and then pick out 3-5 girls to come back to our own hotel rooms. It was like a series of mini-parties for each band member and the girls he picked out, smoking, talking and drinking, trying to figure out which one (or two) was going to be willing to actually end the evening having sex with us.

Furry

There was a small group (4 or 5) of women who followed Bighorn and Van Halen around the Pacific Northwest: Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They had the resources to travel and get tickets to every show. One of the more memorable groupies was a girl who introduced herself as “Furry.” She must have had the condition called hypertrichosis, where a very fine layer of hair covers your entire body. She looked tan because of this layer of light brown hair. It covered every inch of her exposed skin – face, arms, hands. She was a Van Halen follower who had appeared in the front row of every single one of our shows, and she was quite memorable. Finally, after three or four shows, she and her girlfriend came back up the hotel room I shared with Michael, our bass player. She introduced herself with a pronounced Southern drawl, and said “Haaah, mah name is Furry.” I will leave to your imagination the second question she asked. Suffice to say, she played on our curiosity about what the rest of her body looked like. I never learned her real name. But I still remember her.

Satisfaction And The Bottom Line

During that time, I have to be honest that I had sex with a lot of women. I was in my late 20s, and it was like going into a candy shop and eating all the chocolate you could lay your hands on. The sex wasn’t without consequences emotionally and physically, though. You had to be cautious or you would become a road dog – someone who stops feeling much of anything and is just on the road like an animal. There was also a lot of deception and lying to your wife or girlfriend back home over the pay phone about what was going on. In the end there were a lot of broken hearts and broken marriages, my own first marriage included. It was also very lonely. Relationships lasted all of 20 minutes, and you never really got close to anyone. Despite being every male’s wet dream in theory, in practice it sucked out your soul, and you eventually realized that you were just playing a fantasy role. It was a game, it was like playing dress up. People who do this are often manic depressive or bi-polar, because this lifestyle feels normal. I thought a lot about this later when I was diagnosed as bipolar myself. I often think that this lifestyle was almost something that found me, because it was a great way to cover up my underlying issues. I am thankful I got out alive, because a lot of other musicians didn’t. Looking back on it, I think it was fun in the moment, but we didn’t think about the long term consequences. Like the excesses of drugs, which have been written about extensively in many band biographies, the excesses of sex were often glorified and misunderstood. They also really could distract you from paying attention to the business aspects of your career. Now that I’m older, I think I should have been asking more questions of my manager and paying more attention to the bottom line, understanding where the money was going. I don’t think management deliberately encouraged any of these excesses, because they could see all of our brain power exiting through our groins and up our noses. But that’s the way it was. They probably couldn’t have done much to stop it, even if they tried, and it served a purpose, meeting a variety of different needs for a variety of the players. Ultimately, it was my dissatisfaction with the reality of the rock star lifestyle that inspired me to get off the road and go back behind the scenes doing production. There was more money, less boredom, you could sleep in your own bed, and it was a less exhausting and more stable lifestyle. It was better to be at home. The food was better, life was better, and honestly, that two hours of pleasure didn’t balance out the loneliness and boredom of the remaining 22 hours in a day of being on the road.