Groupies by Sarah Priscus

 Are we all groupies one way or another?

With Groupies, Sarah Priscus has produced a fine first novel with an engaging story and a handful of believably human characters.

It is a period piece set in the late 1970s mostly in Los Angeles. This is the world of young women orbiting around the male power center of a famous, very successful, rock band.
How successful? There is a scene in which the band, Holiday Sun, flies to NYC to appear on a TV show modeled after Saturday Night Live, so THAT successful and high profile. 

The story is told in first person by Faun, a young woman from Massachusetts who has just arrived in LA to live with a childhood friend. 

This old friend has been out there for a while and has become the girlfriend of the lead guy in Holiday Sun, a British musician Cal. Faun is a photographer who shoots polaroid instant image film. She intends to use the association with the band to help launch herself into a successful photography career.

Given the time/place setting in high profile showbiz the novel could attract readers interested in the music business and this LA period in particular. In that way, it could find readers who look at the story closely, search for clues, and speculate on historic models of the characters and band.
Perhaps the novel is better viewed in the wide angle of American culture beyond the music biz; seeing it as a story of people attracted to power and attempting to get something for themselves from it. This gives the whole story and greater meaning and a significance beyond a rock or showbiz novel.

Much of the dynamics of the theme could be shifted to a story about cults or political power. In the story the rock dudes find themselves in power. That offers them via female fans. In this way the novel looks into the world of male stars who feel entitled to “grab them by the pussy”. Priscus tells us that the women, the groupies are primarily there for a type of supportive loyalty that can be assumed and relied upon by the power males. They pump the boys up.

The men/boys are at core needy, insecure in their precarious power positions. They need the backup of these attractive young women. The women are expected to be “true fans”, sincere and loyal. They need them in a way similar to a Keith Raniere, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, or back to the LA music scene, Phil Specter, who was so needy he would repeatedly, for decades, put a pistol to the heads of women who wanted to leave to make them stay with the ultimate result of that.

In a way it is a crime fiction novel.
Who is the perp?
USA cultural and political life as we have it and must deal with it.

The time setting of 45 years ago is not more innocent, merely less equipped. The technology of social media and continuing media business consolidation/centralization with algorithmic personalized diffraction and separation, empowers marketing, powermen and corporations. The boys in the band are not all that bright and don’t have the power of certain tools of control. No one in the novel is super villain sinister and about to build a multl-level marketing system of branded sex slaves, but at core is all sadly the same. None of this takes anything away from this interesting and entertaining novel and story.

Is this a hero's journey type of tale? It’s better than that. Maybe a more realistic anti-hero novel. The groupies provide support for the band but every one of them has their own angle, their own wish for transcendence and immortality by their sucking up to glory. If they do THIS, they can maneuver themselves to THAT. The novel provides a clear view of a culture gone wild with need, greed, and lust for some kind of meaningful life within the atmospheric chaos of the marketplace. .  

Are we all groupies one way or another?

Page 348

“It was a study in groupiedom. In pain. In joy. In good. In evil.

In life.”