Permanent Damage – Memoirs Of An Outrageous Girl

Mercy Fontenot with Lyndsey Parker RARE BIRD

The late GTO’S deathbed confessions.

The late Mercy Fontenot tells the story of her life in the GTOs and her subsequent second act as a face on the US punk scene as if we’ve ended up stoned back at her place one night. Maybe that’s what ghost writer Lyndsey Parker did, and her account sometimes pinballs from place and time based on her subject’s digressions. At one point Fontenot is talking about meeting Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, then on the same page, as if it happened the next day, she talks about sampling the same heroin that killed Janis Joplin, in 1970.

But that kind of suits the unashamedly anarchic life she led. Her stories of hanging with Gram Parsons and Mick ’n’ Keef are reliably colourful, but there’s also a dark side to her story – she tells tales of rape, ODs, arrests and car wrecks as if they were everyday events. She passed away in July last year, but judging by this book she didn’t half live. ■■■■■■■■■■