Permanent Damage: Memoirs Of An Outrageous Girl

★★★★

Mercy Fontenot with Lyndsey Parker RARE BIRD. £19

Memoir from Miss Mercy of Zappa’s GTOs, written just before her death in 2020.

Great writing; wild stories, but very dark. None of the sweetness of fellow GTO/best friend Pamela Des Barres’ I’m With The Band. But Miss Pamela loved sex and rock’n’roll, while Miss Mercy loved drugs. Leaving home for San Francisco in the ’60s, aged 15, she was on acid when she overheard Charles Manson talk about a “race war”. She was with Janis’s heroin dealer on the day that Joplin died. The (pervy) night she spent with Chuck Berry, she was so high she didn’t know if they’d had sex; they did. Moving to Los Angeles, she encountered many of the greats of rock, soul and R&B. She was married for a while to Shuggie Otis and they had a son. Her second husband, a fellow crackhead, broke every bone in her face. She details other beatings from other men and a slew of rapes. But through all of it Mercy emerged undaunted. “We were one of the first female groups to break through the barriers,” she says. “We hung with rock stars on their turf, and it was our turf too.”