Those Who Lived Close to the Fire! / Chris Blog / Chris

An essay on groupies, after-parties, and our need to rewrite the past

There was a time when certain people were drawn to music the way others are drawn to an open fire. Not to stand at a safe distance and warm their hands, but to sit so close to the flames that the heat sometimes burned. Those who gathered there—around tour buses, hotel corridors, backstage rooms, and long nights—were not spectators. They were present.

They were called groupies. A word that today is almost always spoken with an explanation, an apology, or a moral disclaimer. Back then, it was none of that. It was a phenomenon, a social role, sometimes a way of life.

An analog ecosystem

In the 1970s and 1980s, the music world was physical. It smelled of sweat, beer, perfume, smoke. It was analog in the deepest sense—relationships formed through bodies in rooms, through glances, through proximity. Touring life was a moving micro-society, closer to seafaring or traveling theater than today’s carefully managed experience industry.

Within this ecosystem moved people—often women—who were not standing outside looking in, but stepping forward. Many were socially skilled, intellectually sharp, sometimes brutally perceptive. They read rooms better than most. They knew who carried substance and who only carried posture. They were not there to be rescued. They were there to live.

The stories they told were rarely polished. They were raw, sometimes absurd, sometimes dark—but often delivered with humor, irony, and clarity. These were not PR narratives. They were lives lived without filters.

Freedom without a manual

What unsettles people today is not what those stories contain, but that they refuse to be sorted. They hold desire and risk, power and counter-power, choice and consequence—at the same time. And most importantly, they come from people who do not want to be rewritten after the fact.

Many of these women never saw themselves as victims. They were acutely aware of the game. They knew the world was unfair, yet they chose to enter it anyway. Sometimes it went well. Sometimes it hurt. Often it was simply intense.

That is what freedom looked like then. Messy. Unclear. Sometimes brutal—but lived.

The after-party: then and now

I remember hotel after-parties following concerts. Late nights. Adrenaline refusing to let go. Bodies trying to land after total release. There was drinking. Laughter. Flirting. Someone crossed a line. Someone set one. It was human.

And here comes the uncomfortable truth:

They were no worse than the corporate Christmas parties I later worked with in my professional life.

The difference was not behavior.
The difference was the framing.

Back then, there were no HR departments drafting policies about how people were expected to behave after midnight. No phone cameras ready to freeze a moment and make it eternal. No retrospective moral process demanding that everything be analyzed legally years later.

Years later, standing in hotel bars during conferences, kick-offs, and corporate events, I saw the exact same dynamics. The same hierarchies. The same mix of power, insecurity, alcohol, and longing. The only difference was the thin layer of professionalism—a performance that often lasted until the open bar closed.

Rock after-parties have become symbols of excess. Corporate equivalents are labeled “unfortunate incidents.”
Same behaviors. Different narratives.

The age of retrospective morality

Our time has a strong urge to rewrite the past so it fits present-day categories. Everything must be labeled, classified, placed into clean boxes. Stories without clear heroes and victims are treated as dangerous.

In this logic, the groupie becomes a problem. Because she often says: “It was my life.” And there is no ready-made form for that answer.

Contemporary moral revisionism—often labeled woke, though it goes deeper than that—struggles with people who refuse to become symbols. It struggles with stories where freedom is not risk-free. So simplification, pathologizing, or silence becomes easier.

Anonymity as respect

Telling this story without naming names is not cowardice. It is respect. It shifts focus from scandal to phenomenon, from individuals to lived experience. It makes the story larger—and harder to dismiss.

Without names, there is nothing to cancel. No apologies to demand. No careers to destroy or protect. What remains is a single question:

Are we capable of hearing how life was actually lived?

What was really lost

What may have been lost is not the excess, but the closeness. Today everything is zoned. Backstage is controlled. Relationships are contractual. Everything is documented. Everything can become evidence.

In such a world, there is no room for the unpredictable human being. And perhaps that is why the groupie phenomenon still provokes irritation. Not because it was perfect—but because it was uncontainably free.

We claim to value individual rights, yet only accept stories that follow an approved script. We speak of freedom, but demand that it be risk-free. That paradox says more about us than about those we judge.

Remembering without rewriting

Writing about this is not romanticizing. It is refusing to lie. It is acknowledging that people lived differently, thought differently, took different risks—and that this does not automatically make them victims or villains.

They were there.
They chose.
They lived.
And they told their stories.

Listening without rewriting may be the greatest respect we can offer.

Because sometimes the most radical thing one can say in a moralizing age is:

This is how it was.
And the world was bigger than our labels.

Well-known voices who chose to speak publicly

While most people who lived this life remained anonymous, a few chose to step forward on their own terms—not to apologize, but to add nuance.

Pamela Des Barres
Often described as the most famous groupie. Her memoirs portray the scene with warmth, humor, and agency—far from victim narratives.
Bebe Buell
Model, musician, and mother. Always clear that she lived her life consciously and on her own terms.
Sable Starr
Frequently used as a cautionary tale in hindsight, yet rarely listened to as a person in her own time.
Cynthia Plaster Caster
An artist who turned the rock world itself into material, challenging both moral and artistic boundaries.
Roxana Shirazi
A later voice writing about proximity to music culture where fascination and critique coexist.