The Truth Behind Groupies

In the summer of 1996, as part of my job, I was asked to fly down to El Paso to get on the tourbus of the band Sponge, who were part of the last traveling Lollapalooza tour. Yes, I was actually getting paid to do this.

My mission was to school the band in digital cameras and laptop computers. Mind you it was 1996, and the cameras involved were something called a QuickTake camera, a pretty terrible (only in retrospect) Apple product and some Toshiba laptops which weighed 32 pounds. This was all for their website which was promoting their new release "Wax Ecstatic", which I had an advance copy of months before it came out and would literally listen to multiple times a day. It was just a great, solid record of songs which were all over the place. They had a new manager onboard, a woman named Susan Silver, who managed two of my favorite bands in the world, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. There was a sense that this record could break them big and Susan would help do it, not to mention a good spot on the Lollapalooza tour, playing near Metallica and Soundgarden, the latter of which I ate ice cream with at a truck spot outside El Paso. But unlike their first record, which had some rock-radio hits, it eventually didn't go anywhere commercially, but I was thrilled to meet and hang with this band who's album I dug. And sit on a real rockband's tourbus for a week!

I took a taxi out to meet the bus, almost missing them. They were very kind and friendly to me, never treated me like the evil guy from the label. The strangest thing that happened on that trip, other than the below, was when the band Rancid went around the hotel where all the bands and me were staying, and urinated on all the doorknobs.

There was a gig in Tuscon, I believe and then we headed off to Phoenix. Now, this was all happening real time, but let me explain what can happen when a band visits a venue hours earlier than their showtime... basically, they're bored, and one thing that fills the time are girls. Young girls. Girls with stars in their eyes. Either one of the crew or security goes into the crowd with passes to meet the band and brings them back on the bus. I saw this all go down.

So I'm sitting there fiddling with geek stuff, when I see these two, young, skinny blondes get on the bus with smiles. They shake hands with everybody and start making small talk. I notice a kid who probably looked fifteen hanging just outside the fence near the bus. The girls point to him and ask if he can come on since he's a friend of theirs. Reluctantly, someone goes to grab him.

Eventually the girls disappear to the back of the bus along with two band members who they paired off with. So I've got this bored kid with me not knowing what to do, really. Eventually he looks at me and the non-band members and says, "Hey, where's my mom?" My jaw drops. The other guys jaws drop. The kid then says, "Oh, is she in the back getting some?" You kinda wanted to either cry or cry.

For the 22 year old sitting on a rock band's tourbus, I was growing up very quickly about the realities of the world... the world of rock.