Glam Rock, Los Angeles, Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco and Star Magazine – The Magazine for the Hollywood Groupie scene

I’ve recently discovered a new guilty pleasure – pretty much all of it is listed in the headline. Frankly it all makes a bit of sense if you follow the Warhol scene and go west. Going west being the penultimate thing that americans do.

Would I call it art? No, but I’d call it “Relational Aesthetics”.

The short lived Star Magazine (not to be confused with the current Star Magazine) was the most subversively notorious of all of it. Found in the grocery store next to magazines like Teen, Tiger Beat, Teen Beat and all the rest, Star would openly discuss the whole groupie scene – but would be able to stay on the PG-13 side of it. No easy feat.

The downside that Star gave the LA “groupie scene” was a new shot of youth – probably the last thing the existing girls wanted was a bunch of desperate, attention starved, thirteen year old girls who relished in the fact that they were jail-bait – and could care less. The most common knock against the “older” girls was exactly that – being called old. Star’s greatest moment was the “Sunset Strip Groupies” article in which Sable Star and Queenie call the other girls old – the other girls were all of 23.

“You couldn’t trust the new LA groupies, who were desperate, discouraged, groveling ego seekers. The love of music had become secondary to preening in Star magazine, standing next to Anybody In A Band. It was scary out there. It was fictitious and haunted.”

– Pamela Des Barres

Star magazine despite it’s over use of the word foxy is an amazing time capsule. Routinely featuring it’s own comic called Groupies, monthly columns; The Beauty and the Fox, an always amazing letters page, record reviews, etc. Great articles like: Chain Gang High School, Guys Who’ll Use You, Get Him Back- On His Knees!, Olga Korbut Goes Foxy, Nose-Job Diary, The Black Foxy Lady Look, will certainly keep you reading.

You might be wondering were you can find issues of this rare and short lived magazine. Go here: star1973.com. Ryan Richardson has turned his appreciation into a great web site with all 5 issues of Star.

Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco was pretty much the ground zero of the LA glam world and there are enough stories floating around to keep anyone amused for at least a few days. I’ll let you do some research on that one.