The legacy of the GTOs: the history of the band Frank Zappa started
Picture the scene: It’s the late 1960s, and Laurel Canyon is bustling with musicians who would become legends. In garages across the hills, songs are being written that would land in history books, while girls forgotten in those stories sit there and listen. Faces like Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Page, Gram Parsons, and more are wandering around, crafting their artistic identity and looks with the help of the endlessly cool women on their arms. Over at Frank Zappa’s Log Cabin, the various figures of the era gathered to jam or crash out. A Penny Lane type would come in, racing after little Moon Zappa as the family’s nanny.
The women in these stories, the ones who heard their albums first and suggested tracklist changes or picked out iconic outfits from vintage rails, are all too often forgotten. Brushed off as nothing more than accessories to legends or labelled groupies but in a derogatory, diminishing way, their position in the scene is shrugged off as unimportant. However, music would be nothing without fans, and idols would be nothing without their disciples. Groupies make the music world go round, and Zappa saw that well, transforming the girls of Laurel Canyon from rockstar worshippers into rockstars themself.
“I am now in my very own group, The GTOs, with my idol, Frank Zappa, at the helm,” Pamela Des Barres, known as Miss Pamela, writes in her now infamous diary, July 21st, 1968. She states her intentions for a new phase in her life; “Ready, willing and able to LIVE LIFE AT THE FULLES! TAKE ME I’M YOURS!!!” By this point, Miss Pamela had already lived a life of note. She’d been linked with some of the biggest names in music and had cemented herself in the music scene as she buzzed around the Sunset Strip and nannied for Zappa. Along with Miss Mercy, Miss Cynderella, Miss Christine, Miss Lucy, Miss Sandra and Miss Sparky, the girls were regular features in whom Zappa saw real promise.
Seeing them as more than just girlfriends to the stars, the musician seemed to see the talent and star power in the crowd. They were the life and soul of any party or gig, so why should they be up on stage? They knew the music scene like the back of their hand, so why should they make it themselves? “Frank got his own label, and he thought we were so interesting and so clever and so funny and so amusing and so of the moment that he wanted to capture us on vinyl,” Miss Pamela recalls. “He said, ‘You guys, please write some songs about your life experiences, and we’ll do a record. It was just unbelievable.”
Zappa appeared as an encouraging figure, believing that the girls should be heard, not just seen. “He made us feel like we had very important ideas,” she said, writing on July 30th, 1969, “He really started me thinking, inhibitions are the fear to live, love and just reach out to life.”
As they were named The GTOs, the band became an exercise in empowerment. Girls Together Only. Girls Together Orally. Girls Together Often. Girls Together Opinionatedly. Girls Together Outrageously. “The O could stand for whatever we wanted it to,” Pamela explained, and that was the spirit of the group: doing whatever they wanted but doing it with real passion and fearlessness.
For that young 19-year-old Pamela, her hopes for the band were simply; “I pray for The GTOs, perhaps we can open a few minds.” This feels so apt, but I can see how someone looking in with fresh eyes, learning about the band or its members for the first time, might misunderstand. The GTOs’ music is little more than garbled nonsense. The songs sound like bad trips as the girls’ voices come together like psychedelic nursery rhymes with a demonic streak. It’s hard to even follow what they’re on about, but that was never the point.
Instead, the point seemed to be twofold. On the one hand, it was bringing these overlooked figures up to the level of their rockstar peers as a message that whatever they could do, girls could do too. It was a reminder that they weren’t just pretty faces but were genuinely fascinating and creative people. Throughout music history, so much has been born out of conversations with girlfriends or girls like this or stolen like little breadcrumb pieces of their personalities. It’s really a curse all cool girls know well as men come along and take bits of who they are for their own.
Over time, Miss Pamela and the rest of The GTOs have become cult figures for female music fans especially. As she hosts writing workshops, talks and tours, Pamela’s presence in culture is still a vital reminder that women’s stories matter and that fan girls really do make the music industry go round. “I think The GTOs can help humanity,” she writes at 19, “really help them see there is another way to exist.” Hers is a message of living as your boldest self and remembering that you matter; the band was perhaps her most in-your-face statement of that.
On the other side, you can see that the GTOs are a grounding force in the 1960s Laurel Canyon scene. There’s something both humbling and beautifully communal about the image of The Mothers Of Invention playing back up as they did for the band. Or the idea of Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck scrambling to play on their album like they did when they recorded their one and only LP, Permanent Damage. It seems like The GTOs were a beacon for music at its simplest, somehow reminding the professional players that surrounded them that this was all supposed to be fun.
It was a fire that burned bright and burned briefly. The band only ever played one official show under the name, sharing the bill with the Mothers of Invention, Alice Cooper, Wild Man Fischer and Easy Chair. They’d only record one album that can now only be found in the depths of the internet or hard-to-find records. All in all, they’d only last a few months after recording their album as a few members were arrested for drug charges, annoying straight-laced Zappa. But the band’s legacy is a unique and tenderly held one.
As a 1974 one-off concert brought together the likes of The New York Dolls and Iggy Pop as a celebration of the era, The GTOs returned as a vital part of that, recognised for the roles they played in so many people’s lives and the way that the band demanded attention for that. When I spoke to Miss Pamela, she had hope for a rerelease of their only album. “The Zappa people are going through the archive, and I get to hear all the stuff that wasn’t on the record.” Talking about her lost friends, with Des Barres being only one of three surviving members, her face lit up with love. “One of the outtakes is an interview Frank did with all us girls; it’s gonna be amazing to hear those voices again.”
Remembered by rockstars as their favourite girls, remembered by their fans as a necessary voice for boldness and remembered by Miss Pamela as her best friends and most beloved memories, The GTOs were a phenomenon.
