We last encountered sixteen-year-old Pamela Miller1 in 1964, when she saw the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. In her diary, she wondered if fate had brought Paul to America ‘for I am here too’. But within a year she had met a boy called Bob, who converted her to the Rolling Stones. When Pamela told her old Beatle friends Kathy and Stevie of her new passion, they reacted badly:
5–9–65
Dear Pam, I suppose you are wondering why Linda, Stevie and I acted the way we did after school yesterday. The main reason is because you are a phony person. You better watch out before you become completely friendless. Why on earth could you even start to like Mick over Paul? … Pam, you try to be strange, but you aren’t. You are just being a loser. Nobody likes you when you act the way you do … You were always so enthusiastic about the Beatles and now you’re a Rolling Stones fan. I don’t see how you could pick them over the Beatles unless … you were being a phony all that time. The Stones are dirty and sloppy and they repugnate me. When I think back to how you used to sign your name ‘Paul n Pam’, I can’t believe you’re the same girl. I don’t hate you, but frankly, I don’t like you much.
Kathy ’n’ Stevie
1 From this point on she would style herself Pamela, not Pam. Her tastes broadened still further: her future conquests were to include, in alphabetical order, Woody Allen, Chris Hillman, Mick Jagger, Waylon Jennings, Don Johnson, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Gram Parsons and Noel Redding. Under her married name, Pamela Des Barres, she wrote two entertaining memoirs, I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie (1987), from which this letter is taken, and Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up (1992).