Book Review: Permanent Damage: Memoirs of an Outrageous Girl by Mercy Fontenot with Lyndsey Parker

 

Mercy  Fontenat, otherwise known as Miss Mercy of the GTOS, led an iterant rock ‘n’ roll life life. A butterfly of a music fan, Mercy’s travels took her from Haight Asbury to Laurel Canyon to Stax in Memphis to the punk rock scene in Hollywood. She befriended and worked with many rock icons and had trysts with others. That’s the good news. The bad news? She got caught up with drugs at a young age. Mercy (born Judith Peters) had a dysfunctional childhood. Her Dad was a gambler with a predilection for showgirls, and her family traveled across the country. Mercy ran away from cushy San Mateo, California to SF’s Haight Ashbury as a teenager, and soon took on the moniker Mercy, after the Don Covay song.

 Although Mercy spent her whole life around the music scene, she’s primarily remembered as a member of the GTOs, an avant-garde singing and performance art troupe.

The GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously) were a psychedelic combination of female Hollywood scenesters/groupies. They first got together as the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company and released one Frank Zappa produced album, Permanent Damage, in 1969. The group consisted of Miss Pamela (Pamela Des Barres)  Miss Sparky (Linda Sue Parker), Miss Lucy (Lucy McLaren), Miss Christine (Christine Frika),  Miss Sandra (Sandra Leano), Miss Cynderella (Cynthia Wells Cale-Binion) and Miss Mercy (Mercy Fontenat).  Fontenat, arguably the quirkiest member of the GTOs, passed away in July 2020 after a long illness. This leaves Pamela and Sparky as the last living members of the group.

Zappa recruited Fontenot to join the GTOs at the last minute, intrigued by her wild gypsy look. Pamela Des Barres remembers Mercy as a “threat to normalcy”. Mercy’s autobiography, Permanent Damage: Memoirs of an Outrageous Girl, was released posthumously in June 2020.  Yahoo music editor Lyndsey Parker interviewed Fontenot extensively for several years to unravel the tale of an unorthodox, colorful, (and sometimes dangerous) life.

Permanent Damage combines Mercy's overarching love of music, fashion, pop culture trends through the decades, unorthodox relationships with musicians, and sometimes unsettling side jaunts involving drugs and unsavory characters. Mercy has a sense of humor and no self-editing, which actually is good because you always knew she was telling the truth. She had no agenda.

Of the GTOs, Mercy says: “The ethos of punk was that you didn’t have to be a professional musician or be trained to play and read music…. You could do it yourself. The GTOs were like that. I guess we were punk rock in our own way.”

The GTOs played an infamous show at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium as the opening act on a bill with Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper. Their combination of comedy, theater, and singing was utterly unique and very much of its time.  Mercy remembers that she and Pamela got really stoned on pot while riding with Gram Parsons in his T-Bird before the show. Miss Christine admonished Mercy before the show, fearing the worst, but the show was a hit. Unfortunately, only a few photos of their performance exist, and there’s a short clip of the performance in Alex Winter’s Zappa documentary. 

The GTOs socialized with a lot of the movers and shakers of the music, underground and hippie movement. I never thought about it before, but could it be the “Miss” before the GTOs’ names were cadged from friend and fan Tiny Tim’s habit of addressing females with “Miss” before their first name.

Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, The Monkees’ Davy Jones and Nicky Hopkins provided musical backdrop for the GTOs album; Lowell George produced it. Rod Stewart, then a rock star-in-training, sang on Mercy’s song The Ghost Chained to the Past, Present, and Future (Shock Treatment) She also took Rod thrift store shopping and helped him develop his early look with The Faces. Decades later, when she was a homeless crack addict in Hollywood, she saw Stewart walk into the Pantages Theater before one of his concerts. She called to him, and he waved at her and moved on. Did she feel bad about it? “Shame isn’t a thing I do”, she says, “After all, I looked cute.”

Mercy doesn’t pull any punches about her fellow groupies, other scenesters, and her various sexual encounters. The ickiest moment involved Chuck Berry, a bucket, and bathroom function. Mercy said she later felt bad about it, but at least there were no pictures. Although she confessed to not liking sex that much, she had relationships with several musicians, including Arthur Lee of Love and Jobriath.  She actively pursued the funk musician Shuggie Otis and eventually married him. The couple had a son, Lucky, also a musician. 

The list of musicians in her orbit reads like a who’s who of rock –the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart, Gram Parsons, Al Green, Otis Redding, etc.

Here are just a few examples of Mercy’s rock ‘n’ roll adventures:

• She read the Stones’ tarot cards before Altamont
• Popped out of a cake at Alice Cooper’s birthday party at the Ambassador East while on LSD. She also helped Alice devise his initial look.
• Dropped out of beauty school but became a hairdresser anyway, hung out with the Gears and other punk rock bands in Hollywood, went to the famous punk club the Masque
•  A pre-fame Courtney Love meet Mercy on a Hollywood bus and gave Mercy her phone number 

Many of Mercy’s cast of rock ‘roll characters disappeared from the scene, or died from drug abuse or violence.  She kept in contact with her parents and her sister throughout the years, but her family of origin didn’t provide much comfort. Music and her friends kept her positive. Finally off drugs for good, she turned her life around. Her son Lucky and job at Goodwill Industries kept her grounded.

For all her bravado, there are a few times Mercy expresses remorse about how her drug use affected others, and about glitches in her relationships with ex-husband Shuggie Otis and their son Lucky. 

Near the end of her life, Mercy once again appeared in the public eye.  She appeared in photos for the Starcrawler song “She Gets Around”, co-starred in an internet fashion promo, and often appeared at many readings with her BFF Miss Pamela.

Fontenot's story reveals the seedy underbelly to the peace and flower power generation. There’s as much drugs and violence here as rock ‘n’ roll, much of it pretty intense. There is a dizzying array of arrests, rapes, physical and emotional abuse, bad decisions, and all the other dangers lurking to people way out on the fringes. No wonder Parker asked Fontenot several times during interviews for book, “How are you even alive?” Mercy persevered and slayed most of her demons. Despite her hardships, Mercy’s wisecracking persona and love of music remained intact. She is regarded, along with rest of the GTOs, as a rock trailblazer for her outrageousness and style. Marianne Faithful, John and Exene of X, Shirley Manson, Alice Cooper, Dave Davies and other rockers laud Mercy for her contributions to rock music culture.

Permanent Damage: Memoirs of an Outrageous Girl revisits a wild roller coaster of a life with honesty and humor. 

                                            The GTOs (From Straight to  Bizarre documentary)

Circus, Creem and Hit Parader - Three Great Rock Magazines of the '70s and '80s

                    The first copy of Creem I ever bought, August 1973

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," Frank Zappa once said. Or was it Martin Mull –or maybe Elvis Costello? Internet pundits have varying opinions on this matter. However, we do know that Frank told a journalist ,"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."

Frank’s quote may actually apply more to current Interweb music news items on Yahoo and AOL than the old-style print mags that inspired his comment. Do we really need constant blog posts about X Factor contestants and American Idol losers flubbing the National Anthem at football games?  It makes me pine for the heyday of my three favorite rock magazines- Circus, Creem, and Hit Parader. 

Circus

Circus combined mainstream newspaper-type journalism with behind-the-scenes interviews and reportage about rock bands. They weren’t gossipy or dirty. They gave fans straightforward news without much pontificating. The magazine was first published in 1966 under the name Hullabalo, but most people equate it with 1970s and 1980s hard rock and new wave. The weekly magazine covered everything Kiss, Aerosmith, Queen, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin oriented in the 1970s. Of course, the aforementioned bands shared column inches with any band that had a buzz at a given time. Circus didn’t discriminate based on genre. They were an equal opportunity mag. The March 16, 1978 cover featured Ted Nugent, but prominent articles on the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were also included. It wasn’t unusual to find an eclectic pop culture mish-mash edition with articles  about Dan Fogelberg or Linda Ronstadt, popular comedians and TV shows (Steve Martin, Mork and Mindy, etc.) and controversial movies du jour like The China Syndrome sharing space with the obligatory Kiss article. And this mag had the best posters and full-page photos. After I finished scavenging my favorite articles for pin-ups, there was barely anything left in the mag. This explains why I don’t have any intact copies left to sell on eBay. The magazine folded in 2006 after focusing exclusively on heavy metal and hard rock since the mid-1980s.

Creem

Creem was a great magazine for suburban teens in the 1970s  It looked like a music magazine, but  it had a lot more than pretty pictures and music reviews. It had dirty words, sexual terms you hadn’t learned yet, semi-nudity, Lester Bangs and drug references. The music reviews read like a combo of Naked Lunch, a pulp men’s mag  and Roget’s Thesaurus. You had to be intellectual and perverted to understand what was going on – a perfect combo for me.  Also, what was that exactly on the June 1976 cover, hmmm? (See above pic.) I don’t think the proprietors of  the local drugstore in Hometown, Ill. where I bought it even noticed it. I hardly knew what it was, but pot and peppermint schnapps were the hardest stuff for a junior high kid in the ‘burbs back then. I learned a lot from Creem, and not all of it music-related. I first discovered  the existence of absinthe, cock rings and bondage gear from Creem. But I first read about the Runaways, Patti Smith, the New York Dolls and T-Rex from Creem while everyone in the neighborhood was listening to Donny and Marie. I read Pamela Des Barres’ column, Miss Eleganza, Creem Profiles, Confessions of a Film Fox and learned all about Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. (Even at 12, I was the resident neighborhood weirdo.) I convinced my babysitter to watch the New York Dolls on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert one Friday, after reading about them in Creem. When I saw her again Monday morning, she was thoroughly befuddled by the performance. “When you said “New York Dolls”, I thought you were talking about a bunch of weird ladies.”

The first copy of Creem I ever bought in 1973 had articles about Androgeny In Rock, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Jeff Beck and plenty of pics of glam-era David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Marc Bolan and Iggy Pop. One of the first record reviews I read was by Patti Smith. I couldn’t tell you what band she reviewed, but I sure did like the way she wrote about them. A few years ago, one of my friends showed me an old stack of Creems from the ‘70s and ‘80s. I looked through ‘em, but somehow they didn’t pack the same forbidden punch as they did when I was twelve. By the late ‘70s Debbie Harry ,the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were common subjects, along with lesser-known punk bands that Circus and Hit Parader neglected. (Destroy All Monsters, the Dictators, etc.) Creem may or may not exist today. This New York Times article details the struggle to revive the magazine. Creem’s archives, however, are up and running.

Hit Parader

Hit Parader, first published in 1942, printed popular song lyrics of the day. Even when pop music styles changed to rock, punk and new wave, the mag still published lyrics. Alice Cooper lyrics were far removed from “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”, but fans still wanted to sing along. One of the first  Hit Paraders I bought –in ’74 or ’75, had a great interview with John Lennon conducted by Lisa Robinson, one of the most prolific rock scribes of the time.

The photos weren’t as glossy as the ones in Circus, but I still plastered the walls with them, especially in the early ‘80s, when the magazine’s articles seemed to get shorter-only a page or two-with short to non-existent interviews. Like Circus, Hit Parader didn’t take musical sides back then- one month Van Halen was on the cover; the next month, the Clash. It wasn’t a “punk” versus “metal” culture then. It was all good. Once the mid-1980s rolled around, the magazine changed format to heavy metal/hard rock exclusively. It’s the only one of the three mags  that still exists today, with a “none more black” website design and cover stories on Slipknot and similar bands.

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of L.A.’s Legendary Rock and Roll Neighborhood - Book Review

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of L.A.'s Legendary Rock 'and Roll Neighborhood by Michael Walker Haight Ashbury, Greenwich Village, Carnaby Street and Sunset Strip immediately evoke memories of the 1960s counterculture. Laurel Canyon remains a secondary point on L.A.’s musical roadmap as far as mainstream observers are concerned. Ironically, Laurel Canyon had more of a verifiable creative community than the more famous Sunset Strip, as evidenced by Michael Walker’s history, Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of L.A.’s Legendary Rock ‘N’ Roll Neighborhood Walker deconstructs the history of the Canyon from its beginning as a playground for silent film stars like Tom Mix to the folkie era to the Canyon’s days as a gathering place for the crème de la crème of L.A.s 60s’ era rock ‘n’ rollers.

Morgana Welch

"Young Girls are coming to the Canyon", the Mama and Papas sang in 12:30 and they are indeed a part of the story here. Mama Cass is drawn as the earth mother of the scene, (Nash even says he doesn’t known what his life would be like if he hadn’t met her), while Michelle Phillips was the disruptive muse. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell, and the Byrds were some of the enclaves’s most famous residents. Frank Zappa’s abode, a cabin that once belonged to silent film star Tom Mix, became the epicenter of Laurel Canyon’s social and creative community. An endless cast of characters visited the Zappa’s, from Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull to the ubiquitous GTOs, and Walker recounts their exploits. Pamela and Michael Des Barres, Kim Fowley and early 70s groupie Morgana Welch, who have probably been interviewed by most L.A. journalists and documentarians about the city’s rock and glam heyday, provide most of the background. Aside from Graham Nash, most of the interview subjects are record execs and scenesters like the Des Barres and Fowley, Crosby has only a few quotes. The Canyon's famous residents pose in front of the Country Store

Still, the book provides a nice overview of Laurel Canyon’s rise and fall. Not surprisingly, the community based on idealism and incense and hippie free love began to flounder after the Manson murders. The soulless, cocaine fueled excesses that followed in the mid-70s sent the artistic community into oblivion. While Laurel Canyon doesn’t deliver much in the way of new or startling information, it does serve as a good reference point for younger readers and those unfamiliar with the inner machinations of L.A. rock history.