Excerpts from Women of the Underground: Music
MISS MERCY - The GTOs
Are you a native San Franciscan? What were you doing early on?
MF: I was born in Burbank but I was raised in San Francisco. What happened was I had a beatnik girlfriend in ’65 about, and I went over to hang out in North Beach—City Lights bookstore, Kesey, all that whole thing. All the beatniks in North Beach at that time basically moved over to get away from the commercialism, oh, and the mob. Two things in there they didn’t like, really. So they moved over and they got a coffee shop called the Blue Unicorn in Haight Ashbury. So I started going to it, which was a coffee, beatnik hangout, poetry and all that. What kind of happened there is, this is the honest-to-God truth, that Bob Dylan plugged in his guitar and that’s when everything basically changed and the hippies started. With the electricity, everything changed. The beatniks were an influence, but they were introverted. Hippies were extroverted. I think what happened was Hollywood had movie stars, New York had Broadway, and San Francisco only had, like, Alcatraz and North Beach, and didn’t have a tourist trap. So the media came in and said, “Let’s use these flower people,” and totally blew it up into a tourist trap.
It’s too bad. Seems like that happens with every new scene. They move in, turn it into a commodity, and it becomes generic and mainstream.
MF: Yeah, I think that’s what happened. The media got ahold of the Haight Ashbury. It got overblown, just like North Beach became overblown from the beatniks. FM radio had come in with Tom Donahue. The exposure to music was growing. The beatniks were smaller, but after FM radio came in, it got bigger exposure for the hippies’ music. Where you didn’t before, now you had a format; they only played three-minute songs on AM radio. Then Tom Donahue brings in FM and you get the format changes and really there’s nobody owning the radio stations. They’re telling you what you can play and the music got longer, it got more bizarre, now that I think back. Hippies, I don’t even know where the word “hippie” came from. I know the beatniks used to say “I’m hip...”
So you were a hippie at one point?
MF: I was on the sixth cover of Rolling Stone as a hippie, and a year later I was on the back cover as a GTO. It happened just like that. I had to run away from the juvenile authorities, they were after me because I put myself in juvenile hall and was made a ward of the court. They were looking for me in San Francisco, so I had to run down here. That’s how I got back to LA. I couldn’t go home.
What was the catalyst?
MF: I was incorrigible. I went up to Haight Ashbury and I went home; I had taken LSD and had become incorrigible. I said, “Well, just take me to juvenile hall,” and my mother did. I got signed up to the courts because I thought I was so cute, and they don’t let you go. I had to get out of there, so I ran. They were going to send me to juvenile hall down here, to the youth authorities. I think I was about seventeen.
Your image was very different from the rest of the GTOs. Your image was darker, very..
MF: Gothic?
During an interview you said you were the Theda Bara in the group..
MF: Actually, I was like a gypsy. I also did a lot of speed, so I would put on ten dresses at one time. No, really. And fifteen belts, thirty-five bracelets, and whatever else. And I left the eye makeup on, that kohl black around my eyes. Like Vali, Vali Myers. They did a movie about her called The Witch of Positano. She’s dead now. When you see her you’ll flip. She’s got a tattooed face, it’s amazing. She’s so stunning, she’s like a Fellini character. She had all that gypsy stuff on and the heavy black kohl eye makeup. Tennessee Williams based one of his characters on her in the ’50s. She really was underground, really big in the ’60s underground. You know, I’ve got to say something about clothes: the hippies did not just wear one flower in their hair. We dressed in velvet dresses, mostly from thrift shops in the Fillmore district. Beautiful, beautiful long dresses in San Francisco. Down in LA they cut them all off and made miniskirts, it was fabulous. Everybody was fabulous. At first I didn’t like LA when I was in San Francisco ’cause I had this whole thing about LA, just like SF doesn’t like LA today. There were a lot of people that were influenced by us because we were in Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone was very popular at that time. I mean, with the underground. I can’t say it was with the overground because it wasn’t.
How did you meet up with the other GTOs?
MF: I followed a boyfriend down here [to LA]. He lived with some beautiful hookers that worked the street; they were beautiful girls. They happened to know some guy named Vito. Vito was famous in the ’60s here. He was like an artist, surrounded by people, actors and such. In the house where all these crazy beautiful girls were, there was a girl named Miss Christine who became one of the GTOs. She had become Zappa’s nanny. There was also the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company. That was a bunch of girls that would just crazy dance like Vito with Zappa, just show up at a club and dance. I went over to Frank’s house ’cause Christine lived there and we did speed together, something we loved to do. I went over to visit and there was Frank. I never really had a big thing for Frank at all. I didn’t like Frank. I’m into soul music, black soul music, and that kind of thing. Frank had the idea for the GTOs, I think he had got the name the GTOs at this point. There was also a boy named Jobriath, an underground star, he was in Hair. Velvet Goldmine was based on him and Paul Morrisey’s Crazy; I was running around with him. Frank said to him, “The only way this girl group is going to be put together is if you have Cynderella and Mercy.” So then he decides he’s going to cut an album with us, and that’s what he did. Very quickly we got well known. It happened very fast. It was all Frank’s idea to put this girl group together. We all had pretty individual ideas and stuff. He didn’t write any of the songs; we wrote them and we sang them. We tried to sing them, anyway. You know, it was mostly theatre art, like the Cockettes. I was friends with them, too. In other words, if you went to see the GTOs perform, it would not be straight singing, it would be dialogue running into songs. Almost like a play. We only did one show; it was at the Shrine. That was it. Then we folded after that.
When you had released your album, how did people hear about you?
MF: We just started getting a reputation, and people like the Stones and Zeppelin wanted to meet us. It wasn’t the album. It’s hard to answer this. When Pamela went over to London in ’69, our album was released all over; a whole store window was done in it. It got released in Europe, but we didn’t get airplay because there really was no airplay. We got advertising on Record World pick-of-the-week, something like that. It would be really very hard to put anything out as a single from that album. They tried to put mine out as a single, that’s me and Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck. We had such a reputation, it went from people that just wanted to meet us to all types. It was by word of mouth more than commercialism. People would come over, “Oh, you’re a GTO, I’ve gotta meet ya, gotta meet ya!” and all this. David Bowie did that, who I didn’t meet because I didn’t really care to meet him. When we met George Harrison, we got introduced to him on that Rolling Stone shoot, we were at A&M Records. Our secretary at the time took us over there and said, “Well, these are the GTOs,” and he said, “Oh, now I believe what I’ve heard,” something like that. It was all verbal reputation is what it was.
Did you go to London as promotion too?
MF: Instead of going to England, I went to Memphis. I was never big on London. I was really big on our music. I particularly didn’t care for English [music] except for a few of the Stones and Zeppelin and maybe the Yardbirds. I ended up married to Shuggie Otis, who was supposed to be the new Jimi Hendrix, and his father is Johnny Otis, he started rock and roll. So I met all the people that started rock and roll in my backyard, recording with Johnny Otis. This was in LA. I actually married into the real foundation of rock and roll.
What were you listening to back then?
MF: Basically, roots music, soul music. I was crazy about Stax, went to Memphis and went to Stax, where they cut a lot of Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, and all that. That’s where I met Al Green; I went out with him. The last performer that moved me was a couple of years back, the great Duke of Earl Gene Chandler, who at seventy-five is remarkable and still has the ladies reacting to “Rainbow,” one of the great R&B singles of all time. Gene was never given the credit he deserves.
Where did you meet Shuggie Otis?
MF: I met him in a dream, I really did. It was in Los Angeles. I met him in a dream and they said you’re gonna marry this person and I did. It was crazy. His father started rock and roll in the ’40s. He’s responsible for the hand jive. He discovered Jackie Wilson. The kid I married was half black, Shuggie Otis. You’ll really trip on him, he had a huge afro. They asked him to be in the Rolling Stones and he turned them down. He had his own things going. His album, his stuff that he did in ’69, came out again five years later. He’s the one Prince and a lot of these people base their stuff on. So I had everybody in my backyard: Johnny Otis, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, all the people that started rock and roll, but I didn’t know who these people were. This was 1970. I didn’t know that because they didn’t really let us know. Their stuff, by the time we hit the ’60s, had been taken off the radio, most of it. Because they were black artists, they had been removed. It’s just a real trip and Frank was very into that stuff, too. He had my husband at the time on Peaches en Regalia. He had brought Johnny Otis back out of retirement. I have a 33-year-old son, Lucky Otis, who has all their talent. My deepest love was for Shuggie, who gave me the most unique child, Lucky, who is traveling this planet with burdens and celestial gifts from his two parents. I did marry my dream, even though it didn’t survive the youthfulness of it all.
Did the GTOs or Frank ever intend for more than one album?
MF: We were going to be part of his whole roster until we got the drug thing started. Three of us were junkies.
Was this related to why the GTOs ended?
MF: We fell to pieces ’cause of drugs. I mean, like, Frank just flipped. The FBI was investigating Frank. He was in trouble for drug use and people affiliated with him. He was getting some heat from that so he folded the GTOs up.
What drug was prevalent with the group back then?
MF: Speed and some heroin. I got it through my doctors. I actually met the guy that was Kennedy’s doctor. He’s in a lot of books, you know Ciao Manhattan, Edie Sedgwick, and all that. It started out as vitamin shots that had methamphetamine in them. Speed was not really a big, popular drug like it is today. Drugs were very prevalent in LA back then, even in San Francisco. The CIA brought in all sorts of drugs. They put it in the punch backstage, that’s why that Monterey Pop Festival was so darn crazy, because the government had a drug called STP that they were lacing everything with. The footage from Monterey Pop Festival is much groovier than Woodstock, believe me. Everybody was just stoned out of their gourds. Hendrix, the Who, even Otis Redding was high.
How long did it take you to put together and record that album?
MF: That album, he said, “Go right to the songs,” and we did. I rehearsed with Lowell George and then we went into the studio. That was for “I Have a Paintbrush in My Hand to Color a Triangle,” that was Lowell George and me singing. “Shock Treatment” was actually Rod Stewart singing. We had Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins as musicians on it, and they were part of the Jeff Beck Group at the time, which was with Rod Stewart. So two of them were hired and Rod just happened to come along and ended up (we had never heard him sing) singing my song. Once he started singing, I said, “You know what? Just let this guy sing, this guy sounds great.”
Despite the end of the group, did you lay down any ideas for new songs, album concept, anything like that for a second album?
MF: No, nothing. The diaries were gonna come out. My husband Shuggie tore mine up, though. That’s how Pamela’s book I’m With the Band got written. They were gonna print our diaries but everything stopped.
That would have been interesting. Was that with a musical concept?
MF: Just as diaries, books. But my husband got very jealous of Al Green or Chuck Berry or something like that. He flipped out and tore it all up.
Would you talk about your friendship with the infamous Jobriath?
MF: He was a real love of mine, aside from the sex we didn’t have. Clearly one of the most talented and unique people that lived on this planet. He was the first celebrity to die of AIDS, really. He was sick with it back when no one knew what it was, in the 1970s, way before Warhol was calling it the gay cancer. When he would get sores all over him from AIDS, he would think he was possessed by the devil, and that he was being punished by God for being gay. People were still very ignorant about homosexuality, even back then, that he would develop guilt about being gay. At one point he was so delusional, I witnessed him chopping up a grand piano with an axe. He died of AIDS in 1982.
In the Bay Area, until the late ’60s, it seemed like big name musicians sometimes performed free in the park—what happened to end it?
MF: The promoters and the record companies came in. It all became about making money, and heavy drug use. It was just bad. The record companies, boy, if you get on drugs they’ll come knockin’ and send the pusher right to your door. Because what they wanted to do was they give you your advance money and then they get it all back. Come on. You see what I’m saying. Not us but the big groups. No, seriously, I’m not kidding. Then they’d write about it when they got busted, then the records would sell more. They’d off them and the records would sell more. If you think about any artist that died, Hendrix and Janis (she died about a block away from me), Morrison or Brian, any of them, right before they died they all get busted. Everybody knows they’re on drugs, then they’re dead, and then the records sell a lot, they make a lot of money. Because the artists are so strung out at that point that they aren’t going to make or show up to their gigs anymore, so [the record companies] make more money by offing them. This is my conspiracy theory that I’ve had for years. It’s terrible. All the way up to Tupac, Biggie, Kurt Cobain. He’s made more money than anybody, but he would have never made that much money if he was alive. He made more money being dead than he would have alive because he was in no condition to go gig and he probably would have said “Fuck you” and never gigged anyway. They died in their heyday. The only one that isn’t is Dylan. You can’t kill Bob. Bob and Keith. You can’t off ’em.
Musicians are a type of creative genius, and genius often coincides with mental instability, and people who suffer often self-medicate with drugs.
MF: My ex-husband is a prime example of that. He’s an extreme genius and he’s gone underground for years. Right now he’s mixing his album down for the first time in years. Beyoncé said nice things about Shuggie Otis on this TV show I was watching. She did his song. One of the songs he wrote but she put her words to it. She’s brought him up. She did another one of his songs, too. I mean, the man lives off the royalties of the hit that he wrote called “Strawberry Letter 23” that the Brothers Johnson did. He is a genius and like you’re saying, he’s a recluse and he’s mentally challenged. My boyfriend that just died, Arthur Lee from the group Love, he’s a black guy that crossed over to the whites and he was another one. He just died of leukemia. He was doing Europe five years ago but got very, very sick. He was a strung-out, absolute genius, but mental problems beyond. Beyond, beyond.
Was Frank Zappa as appreciated back then as he is now?
MF: People idolized him. You know, he was there. It took me a long time to really respect him because I thought he was dingy. I found out his roots were in soul, R&B, and classical. He was very, very hip. I didn’t know that at the time with the Mothers of Invention. I didn’t know. He grew on me.
What was a typical day like at his house? Did you spend any time there?
MF: I went and stayed with him for three days with just me and my baby and the family. He was nice; he was really sweet. He was a great guy, he was a little dingy but a great guy. But really quite brilliant.
What was behind the Frank/Captain Beefheart scene?
MF: Oh, Captain Beefheart, he was dark, he was a beatnik, a jazz beatnik, that was before the GTOs. Frank, he had a sarcastic view towards everything. He was just sarcastic, even though he admired it all, he loved it, believe me. He was sarcastic like the Fugs from New York. Even though he was from here, he came out of New York as the Mothers of Invention. It was very odd. He had been married to a very straight woman from Pacoima, I think. But Pamela never went against the hippie movement. She loved Lenny Bruce during that period. I did a movie called Rainbow Bridge during that time. If you’ve seen Factory Girl, there’s a guy named Chuck in that movie; the guy was named Chuck Wein and he was with Andy Warhol, he had done the original Ciao Manhattan with Edie. When he got here, I met him and we went over to Hawaii and did the movie Rainbow Bridge with him and Hendrix. I introduced her to Chuck Wein, who was a very spiritual person. She called him “the wizard.” He did a movie called Arizona Slim after Rainbow Bridge. It was after that Pamela met her husband Michael Des Barres, he played the rock star in Arizona Slim.
How did all the artists end up in Laurel Canyon?
MF: Laurel Canyon was just a fun place to be. A lot of people lived in Laurel Canyon. It was a hip place to be, like Topanga Canyon, only it was right by Hollywood. It was fun, we used to just hang out there... and just sit on the road, crazy. It was that fun.
At the time you put out your album, did people see you as a feminist?
MF: I doubt it. Not really. We didn’t try and do that. We just wanted to say girls could hang out with each other. But we didn’t think that far ahead. I don’t think it was feminist. It was just an early version of the girl power. You know the only thing I can think of to compare it to were Spice Girls. Like a girl power trip, but two decades later. (Laughs again
The press reported that you were lesbians. Was that the case?
MF: We said we were lesbians. Most of us were bisexual. No one was really lesbian because we liked the guys. I’d say we were all, except for Sandy, a little bisexual, but we weren’t dykes. It’s hard to explain.
So you just fully enjoyed each other’s company?
MF: Oh yeah. Two of them were hanging out together like that. I had a couple girlfriends, but they weren’t GTOs.
Will you say something about each band member?
MF: All the girls except for Pamela, Sparky, and me, are all dead. Miss Christine killed herself in about ’74. The beautiful one with the big hair, on the cover of Hot Rats.
I had thought it was scoliosis-related.
MF: You know what? It may have been. She had gone to London and got her back done. She was in such great pain after the operation. They screwed her up. Well, Miss Christine, who I loved dearly, she was such an innovator. She’s on Hot Rats, that’s her on the cover. She found Iggy Pop before he became famous.
I heard she discovered Alice Cooper.
MF: Well, he copied my makeup. We influenced him a great deal. His name was Vince when we met him. She dressed him and he copied my eye makeup, you know. He changed his whole thing from when we met him. He came out here from Arizona. But that was her boyfriend and she influenced him. She lived with Todd Rundgren. One strange memory was I went out to Woodstock with her and Todd, and I was there, I was sitting with The Band, some of the greatest musicians who ever lived. She was a beautiful thing. She was just too frail to be here. Couldn’t take it. Very inventive person. She was a young girl when she died, at twenty-five.
What was the average age of the GTOs?
MF: Eighteen was the average age. I was about nineteen. The youngest one was Cynderella, she was eighteen. Miss Sandy died of cancer when she was very young. She got married, had a couple of children. Miss Pamela has been my mainstay on this planet. I’ve been the closest with Pam. Anytime that I’ve been through all of my problems, she’s been there. She’s always kept me in some kind of limelight with her. She’s always shared stuff with me, like, “Okay, Mercy, come along. Let me put you in my book and make you well-known that way.” When we do interviews, she makes sure I am there. When we did the E! True Story, she made sure I was in it. Pamela and I are still really close, I just lived with her for a year. I left my husband, so I moved in with her and now I’m over here working. She’s just too much, she’s an amazing woman.Miss Cynderella, I loved her. I loved all of them. We had a lot of good times together, we shot a lot of dope together. She was married to John Cale of The Velvet Underground. She was with him after the band. He was an established artist, but all I saw was a junkie. When Pamela was with Michael, the GTOs were guests on this Silverhead bill, that was his group, it was at the Palladium. I couldn’t go because I was married to Shuggie and he didn’t want me to go. I was living at Johnny Otis’s house. I snuck out, I was doing heroin with Cynderella and I snuck out the door. I looked really great at the time, I was really skinny, I had this black Puerto Rican wig on and this cinched waist, you know, this whole look going. We hadn’t rehearsed, we were doing “Mr. Sandman,” the old song, and they were doing “Jailhouse Rock” with Michael. The Dolls were on the bill and a whole bunch of people. I’m really, really stoned when we get on the stage. At the end of the night I threw up, I was so loaded. When I went home, Johnny Otis meets me at the door and says, “How could you do that to us, go on stage like that?!”
We were on the news, and I had told him we were going to a movie. He was really embarrassed. I remember that, a Cynderella trip. It was a GTOs reunion. We weren’t supposed to, but we came anyway. She said at one time, “Have you heard of this actor called Robert DeNiro?” I said, “No.” She goes, “That’s the only person I cheated on my husband with.” Later in New York, I thought, oh my God. She lied all the time, first she had a London accent, then she got this New Orleans accent later which I thought was funny because nobody knows a New Orleans accent better than me since my mother was from outside New Orleans and I’m a Fontenot. I guess Cynderella wanted to be, too. She had these fake accents and she made up these insane stories; it was great. Both Pamela and I love her, we really loved her. Cynderella died around ’98. Miss Sparky, she was a nice girl. She doesn’t talk to Pamela anymore. She’s fine, she’s still alive. She’s got a kid named Santa, married to an actor, Alan Bronstein. I always got along with her. She was a pretty little thing. She was not a junkie. She became a Disney artist. She broke away from us. She really doesn’t relate to this whole thing. Miss Lucy, Lucy is very dead, she died from HIV. She died about ten years ago, when I was going out with Arthur Lee. She was wonderful. She was a hooker, too. She was a great chick, a Puerto Rican. Her and I had the same boyfriend, Bernardo. That’s how we met each other. Throughout the years, we were friends. She’s just a real strong personality. She’s in 200 Motels, if you want to see her. She’s really cool, the pretty one with black hair. We were friends up until she died.
When did you start using the “Miss” in front of your names?
MF: I think Tiny Tim did that. He started the “Miss” stuff. He was going out with Cynderella. I mean, they just had a platonic relationship. He called her “Miss Cynderella” and we just all picked it up. We got called “Miss Christine,” “Miss Mercy.”
How did you get your name?
MF: I had that name since I was about fifteen. I just heard it one day and I loved it. It kind of related to “Have Mercy” by Don Covay, and a Stones song later. It’s just a black name and I related to black people. I heard it and wanted to be that person. I took it and I never looked back.
Because the GTOs were named for being outrageous, are there any specific memories that made the news back then?
MF: I got mentioned in Rolling Stone a lot. That was the news of the day because I kept getting in trouble and busted. Even when I worked. I worked for a lady manager for the Stax people like the BarKays and Rufus Thomas and all that. Everything I did basically ended up in Rolling Stone. They picked me as their favorite girl that year. What I did always ended up in the random notes. I made the Times down here when I popped out of a cake for Alice Cooper’s birthday in ’69. The Cockettes were the waitresses at this party. From a big cake, I was supposed to pop out nude. I took some angel dust and was in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel and I thought, this is where Bobby Kennedy was shot. Then I just flipped out, I was so high. Then when I popped out of the cake, I had all my clothes on. I took the cake and threw it. I hit people like Richard Chamberlain and some writer. But he wrote a letter thanking me, and that showed up on the front page of the calendar in the Times.
What are you doing now?
MF: I work with a charity thrift store as a production lead for one of the stores. You have to know antiques. I deal with vintage stuff and pop culture and stuff like that. Because I know what’s worth money from when I was homeless. I learned how to make money from the trash. I was homeless and a drug addict. You know, I went through all that. I learned how to turn things out. So I got my knowledge there.
MISS MERCY - The GTOs
Are you a native San Franciscan? What were you doing early on?
MF: I was born in Burbank but I was raised in San Francisco. What happened was I had a beatnik girlfriend in ’65 about, and I went over to hang out in North Beach—City Lights bookstore, Kesey, all that whole thing. All the beatniks in North Beach at that time basically moved over to get away from the commercialism, oh, and the mob. Two things in there they didn’t like, really. So they moved over and they got a coffee shop called the Blue Unicorn in Haight Ashbury. So I started going to it, which was a coffee, beatnik hangout, poetry and all that. What kind of happened there is, this is the honest-to-God truth, that Bob Dylan plugged in his guitar and that’s when everything basically changed and the hippies started. With the electricity, everything changed. The beatniks were an influence, but they were introverted. Hippies were extroverted. I think what happened was Hollywood had movie stars, New York had Broadway, and San Francisco only had, like, Alcatraz and North Beach, and didn’t have a tourist trap. So the media came in and said, “Let’s use these flower people,” and totally blew it up into a tourist trap.
It’s too bad. Seems like that happens with every new scene. They move in, turn it into a commodity, and it becomes generic and mainstream.
MF: Yeah, I think that’s what happened. The media got ahold of the Haight Ashbury. It got overblown, just like North Beach became overblown from the beatniks. FM radio had come in with Tom Donahue. The exposure to music was growing. The beatniks were smaller, but after FM radio came in, it got bigger exposure for the hippies’ music. Where you didn’t before, now you had a format; they only played three-minute songs on AM radio. Then Tom Donahue brings in FM and you get the format changes and really there’s nobody owning the radio stations. They’re telling you what you can play and the music got longer, it got more bizarre, now that I think back. Hippies, I don’t even know where the word “hippie” came from. I know the beatniks used to say “I’m hip...”
So you were a hippie at one point?
MF: I was on the sixth cover of Rolling Stone as a hippie, and a year later I was on the back cover as a GTO. It happened just like that. I had to run away from the juvenile authorities, they were after me because I put myself in juvenile hall and was made a ward of the court. They were looking for me in San Francisco, so I had to run down here. That’s how I got back to LA. I couldn’t go home.
What was the catalyst?
MF: I was incorrigible. I went up to Haight Ashbury and I went home; I had taken LSD and had become incorrigible. I said, “Well, just take me to juvenile hall,” and my mother did. I got signed up to the courts because I thought I was so cute, and they don’t let you go. I had to get out of there, so I ran. They were going to send me to juvenile hall down here, to the youth authorities. I think I was about seventeen.
Your image was very different from the rest of the GTOs. Your image was darker, very..
MF: Gothic?
During an interview you said you were the Theda Bara in the group..
MF: Actually, I was like a gypsy. I also did a lot of speed, so I would put on ten dresses at one time. No, really. And fifteen belts, thirty-five bracelets, and whatever else. And I left the eye makeup on, that kohl black around my eyes. Like Vali, Vali Myers. They did a movie about her called The Witch of Positano. She’s dead now. When you see her you’ll flip. She’s got a tattooed face, it’s amazing. She’s so stunning, she’s like a Fellini character. She had all that gypsy stuff on and the heavy black kohl eye makeup. Tennessee Williams based one of his characters on her in the ’50s. She really was underground, really big in the ’60s underground. You know, I’ve got to say something about clothes: the hippies did not just wear one flower in their hair. We dressed in velvet dresses, mostly from thrift shops in the Fillmore district. Beautiful, beautiful long dresses in San Francisco. Down in LA they cut them all off and made miniskirts, it was fabulous. Everybody was fabulous. At first I didn’t like LA when I was in San Francisco ’cause I had this whole thing about LA, just like SF doesn’t like LA today. There were a lot of people that were influenced by us because we were in Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone was very popular at that time. I mean, with the underground. I can’t say it was with the overground because it wasn’t.
How did you meet up with the other GTOs?
MF: I followed a boyfriend down here [to LA]. He lived with some beautiful hookers that worked the street; they were beautiful girls. They happened to know some guy named Vito. Vito was famous in the ’60s here. He was like an artist, surrounded by people, actors and such. In the house where all these crazy beautiful girls were, there was a girl named Miss Christine who became one of the GTOs. She had become Zappa’s nanny. There was also the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company. That was a bunch of girls that would just crazy dance like Vito with Zappa, just show up at a club and dance. I went over to Frank’s house ’cause Christine lived there and we did speed together, something we loved to do. I went over to visit and there was Frank. I never really had a big thing for Frank at all. I didn’t like Frank. I’m into soul music, black soul music, and that kind of thing. Frank had the idea for the GTOs, I think he had got the name the GTOs at this point. There was also a boy named Jobriath, an underground star, he was in Hair. Velvet Goldmine was based on him and Paul Morrisey’s Crazy; I was running around with him. Frank said to him, “The only way this girl group is going to be put together is if you have Cynderella and Mercy.” So then he decides he’s going to cut an album with us, and that’s what he did. Very quickly we got well known. It happened very fast. It was all Frank’s idea to put this girl group together. We all had pretty individual ideas and stuff. He didn’t write any of the songs; we wrote them and we sang them. We tried to sing them, anyway. You know, it was mostly theatre art, like the Cockettes. I was friends with them, too. In other words, if you went to see the GTOs perform, it would not be straight singing, it would be dialogue running into songs. Almost like a play. We only did one show; it was at the Shrine. That was it. Then we folded after that.
When you had released your album, how did people hear about you?
MF: We just started getting a reputation, and people like the Stones and Zeppelin wanted to meet us. It wasn’t the album. It’s hard to answer this. When Pamela went over to London in ’69, our album was released all over; a whole store window was done in it. It got released in Europe, but we didn’t get airplay because there really was no airplay. We got advertising on Record World pick-of-the-week, something like that. It would be really very hard to put anything out as a single from that album. They tried to put mine out as a single, that’s me and Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck. We had such a reputation, it went from people that just wanted to meet us to all types. It was by word of mouth more than commercialism. People would come over, “Oh, you’re a GTO, I’ve gotta meet ya, gotta meet ya!” and all this. David Bowie did that, who I didn’t meet because I didn’t really care to meet him. When we met George Harrison, we got introduced to him on that Rolling Stone shoot, we were at A&M Records. Our secretary at the time took us over there and said, “Well, these are the GTOs,” and he said, “Oh, now I believe what I’ve heard,” something like that. It was all verbal reputation is what it was.
Did you go to London as promotion too?
MF: Instead of going to England, I went to Memphis. I was never big on London. I was really big on our music. I particularly didn’t care for English [music] except for a few of the Stones and Zeppelin and maybe the Yardbirds. I ended up married to Shuggie Otis, who was supposed to be the new Jimi Hendrix, and his father is Johnny Otis, he started rock and roll. So I met all the people that started rock and roll in my backyard, recording with Johnny Otis. This was in LA. I actually married into the real foundation of rock and roll.
What were you listening to back then?
MF: Basically, roots music, soul music. I was crazy about Stax, went to Memphis and went to Stax, where they cut a lot of Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, and all that. That’s where I met Al Green; I went out with him. The last performer that moved me was a couple of years back, the great Duke of Earl Gene Chandler, who at seventy-five is remarkable and still has the ladies reacting to “Rainbow,” one of the great R&B singles of all time. Gene was never given the credit he deserves.
Where did you meet Shuggie Otis?
MF: I met him in a dream, I really did. It was in Los Angeles. I met him in a dream and they said you’re gonna marry this person and I did. It was crazy. His father started rock and roll in the ’40s. He’s responsible for the hand jive. He discovered Jackie Wilson. The kid I married was half black, Shuggie Otis. You’ll really trip on him, he had a huge afro. They asked him to be in the Rolling Stones and he turned them down. He had his own things going. His album, his stuff that he did in ’69, came out again five years later. He’s the one Prince and a lot of these people base their stuff on. So I had everybody in my backyard: Johnny Otis, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, all the people that started rock and roll, but I didn’t know who these people were. This was 1970. I didn’t know that because they didn’t really let us know. Their stuff, by the time we hit the ’60s, had been taken off the radio, most of it. Because they were black artists, they had been removed. It’s just a real trip and Frank was very into that stuff, too. He had my husband at the time on Peaches en Regalia. He had brought Johnny Otis back out of retirement. I have a 33-year-old son, Lucky Otis, who has all their talent. My deepest love was for Shuggie, who gave me the most unique child, Lucky, who is traveling this planet with burdens and celestial gifts from his two parents. I did marry my dream, even though it didn’t survive the youthfulness of it all.
Did the GTOs or Frank ever intend for more than one album?
MF: We were going to be part of his whole roster until we got the drug thing started. Three of us were junkies.
Was this related to why the GTOs ended?
MF: We fell to pieces ’cause of drugs. I mean, like, Frank just flipped. The FBI was investigating Frank. He was in trouble for drug use and people affiliated with him. He was getting some heat from that so he folded the GTOs up.
What drug was prevalent with the group back then?
MF: Speed and some heroin. I got it through my doctors. I actually met the guy that was Kennedy’s doctor. He’s in a lot of books, you know Ciao Manhattan, Edie Sedgwick, and all that. It started out as vitamin shots that had methamphetamine in them. Speed was not really a big, popular drug like it is today. Drugs were very prevalent in LA back then, even in San Francisco. The CIA brought in all sorts of drugs. They put it in the punch backstage, that’s why that Monterey Pop Festival was so darn crazy, because the government had a drug called STP that they were lacing everything with. The footage from Monterey Pop Festival is much groovier than Woodstock, believe me. Everybody was just stoned out of their gourds. Hendrix, the Who, even Otis Redding was high.
How long did it take you to put together and record that album?
MF: That album, he said, “Go right to the songs,” and we did. I rehearsed with Lowell George and then we went into the studio. That was for “I Have a Paintbrush in My Hand to Color a Triangle,” that was Lowell George and me singing. “Shock Treatment” was actually Rod Stewart singing. We had Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins as musicians on it, and they were part of the Jeff Beck Group at the time, which was with Rod Stewart. So two of them were hired and Rod just happened to come along and ended up (we had never heard him sing) singing my song. Once he started singing, I said, “You know what? Just let this guy sing, this guy sounds great.”
Despite the end of the group, did you lay down any ideas for new songs, album concept, anything like that for a second album?
MF: No, nothing. The diaries were gonna come out. My husband Shuggie tore mine up, though. That’s how Pamela’s book I’m With the Band got written. They were gonna print our diaries but everything stopped.
That would have been interesting. Was that with a musical concept?
MF: Just as diaries, books. But my husband got very jealous of Al Green or Chuck Berry or something like that. He flipped out and tore it all up.
Would you talk about your friendship with the infamous Jobriath?
MF: He was a real love of mine, aside from the sex we didn’t have. Clearly one of the most talented and unique people that lived on this planet. He was the first celebrity to die of AIDS, really. He was sick with it back when no one knew what it was, in the 1970s, way before Warhol was calling it the gay cancer. When he would get sores all over him from AIDS, he would think he was possessed by the devil, and that he was being punished by God for being gay. People were still very ignorant about homosexuality, even back then, that he would develop guilt about being gay. At one point he was so delusional, I witnessed him chopping up a grand piano with an axe. He died of AIDS in 1982.
In the Bay Area, until the late ’60s, it seemed like big name musicians sometimes performed free in the park—what happened to end it?
MF: The promoters and the record companies came in. It all became about making money, and heavy drug use. It was just bad. The record companies, boy, if you get on drugs they’ll come knockin’ and send the pusher right to your door. Because what they wanted to do was they give you your advance money and then they get it all back. Come on. You see what I’m saying. Not us but the big groups. No, seriously, I’m not kidding. Then they’d write about it when they got busted, then the records would sell more. They’d off them and the records would sell more. If you think about any artist that died, Hendrix and Janis (she died about a block away from me), Morrison or Brian, any of them, right before they died they all get busted. Everybody knows they’re on drugs, then they’re dead, and then the records sell a lot, they make a lot of money. Because the artists are so strung out at that point that they aren’t going to make or show up to their gigs anymore, so [the record companies] make more money by offing them. This is my conspiracy theory that I’ve had for years. It’s terrible. All the way up to Tupac, Biggie, Kurt Cobain. He’s made more money than anybody, but he would have never made that much money if he was alive. He made more money being dead than he would have alive because he was in no condition to go gig and he probably would have said “Fuck you” and never gigged anyway. They died in their heyday. The only one that isn’t is Dylan. You can’t kill Bob. Bob and Keith. You can’t off ’em.
Musicians are a type of creative genius, and genius often coincides with mental instability, and people who suffer often self-medicate with drugs.
MF: My ex-husband is a prime example of that. He’s an extreme genius and he’s gone underground for years. Right now he’s mixing his album down for the first time in years. Beyoncé said nice things about Shuggie Otis on this TV show I was watching. She did his song. One of the songs he wrote but she put her words to it. She’s brought him up. She did another one of his songs, too. I mean, the man lives off the royalties of the hit that he wrote called “Strawberry Letter 23” that the Brothers Johnson did. He is a genius and like you’re saying, he’s a recluse and he’s mentally challenged. My boyfriend that just died, Arthur Lee from the group Love, he’s a black guy that crossed over to the whites and he was another one. He just died of leukemia. He was doing Europe five years ago but got very, very sick. He was a strung-out, absolute genius, but mental problems beyond. Beyond, beyond.
Was Frank Zappa as appreciated back then as he is now?
MF: People idolized him. You know, he was there. It took me a long time to really respect him because I thought he was dingy. I found out his roots were in soul, R&B, and classical. He was very, very hip. I didn’t know that at the time with the Mothers of Invention. I didn’t know. He grew on me.
What was a typical day like at his house? Did you spend any time there?
MF: I went and stayed with him for three days with just me and my baby and the family. He was nice; he was really sweet. He was a great guy, he was a little dingy but a great guy. But really quite brilliant.
What was behind the Frank/Captain Beefheart scene?
MF: Oh, Captain Beefheart, he was dark, he was a beatnik, a jazz beatnik, that was before the GTOs. Frank, he had a sarcastic view towards everything. He was just sarcastic, even though he admired it all, he loved it, believe me. He was sarcastic like the Fugs from New York. Even though he was from here, he came out of New York as the Mothers of Invention. It was very odd. He had been married to a very straight woman from Pacoima, I think. But Pamela never went against the hippie movement. She loved Lenny Bruce during that period. I did a movie called Rainbow Bridge during that time. If you’ve seen Factory Girl, there’s a guy named Chuck in that movie; the guy was named Chuck Wein and he was with Andy Warhol, he had done the original Ciao Manhattan with Edie. When he got here, I met him and we went over to Hawaii and did the movie Rainbow Bridge with him and Hendrix. I introduced her to Chuck Wein, who was a very spiritual person. She called him “the wizard.” He did a movie called Arizona Slim after Rainbow Bridge. It was after that Pamela met her husband Michael Des Barres, he played the rock star in Arizona Slim.
How did all the artists end up in Laurel Canyon?
MF: Laurel Canyon was just a fun place to be. A lot of people lived in Laurel Canyon. It was a hip place to be, like Topanga Canyon, only it was right by Hollywood. It was fun, we used to just hang out there... and just sit on the road, crazy. It was that fun.
At the time you put out your album, did people see you as a feminist?
MF: I doubt it. Not really. We didn’t try and do that. We just wanted to say girls could hang out with each other. But we didn’t think that far ahead. I don’t think it was feminist. It was just an early version of the girl power. You know the only thing I can think of to compare it to were Spice Girls. Like a girl power trip, but two decades later. (Laughs again
The press reported that you were lesbians. Was that the case?
MF: We said we were lesbians. Most of us were bisexual. No one was really lesbian because we liked the guys. I’d say we were all, except for Sandy, a little bisexual, but we weren’t dykes. It’s hard to explain.
So you just fully enjoyed each other’s company?
MF: Oh yeah. Two of them were hanging out together like that. I had a couple girlfriends, but they weren’t GTOs.
Will you say something about each band member?
MF: All the girls except for Pamela, Sparky, and me, are all dead. Miss Christine killed herself in about ’74. The beautiful one with the big hair, on the cover of Hot Rats.
I had thought it was scoliosis-related.
MF: You know what? It may have been. She had gone to London and got her back done. She was in such great pain after the operation. They screwed her up. Well, Miss Christine, who I loved dearly, she was such an innovator. She’s on Hot Rats, that’s her on the cover. She found Iggy Pop before he became famous.
I heard she discovered Alice Cooper.
MF: Well, he copied my makeup. We influenced him a great deal. His name was Vince when we met him. She dressed him and he copied my eye makeup, you know. He changed his whole thing from when we met him. He came out here from Arizona. But that was her boyfriend and she influenced him. She lived with Todd Rundgren. One strange memory was I went out to Woodstock with her and Todd, and I was there, I was sitting with The Band, some of the greatest musicians who ever lived. She was a beautiful thing. She was just too frail to be here. Couldn’t take it. Very inventive person. She was a young girl when she died, at twenty-five.
What was the average age of the GTOs?
MF: Eighteen was the average age. I was about nineteen. The youngest one was Cynderella, she was eighteen. Miss Sandy died of cancer when she was very young. She got married, had a couple of children. Miss Pamela has been my mainstay on this planet. I’ve been the closest with Pam. Anytime that I’ve been through all of my problems, she’s been there. She’s always kept me in some kind of limelight with her. She’s always shared stuff with me, like, “Okay, Mercy, come along. Let me put you in my book and make you well-known that way.” When we do interviews, she makes sure I am there. When we did the E! True Story, she made sure I was in it. Pamela and I are still really close, I just lived with her for a year. I left my husband, so I moved in with her and now I’m over here working. She’s just too much, she’s an amazing woman.Miss Cynderella, I loved her. I loved all of them. We had a lot of good times together, we shot a lot of dope together. She was married to John Cale of The Velvet Underground. She was with him after the band. He was an established artist, but all I saw was a junkie. When Pamela was with Michael, the GTOs were guests on this Silverhead bill, that was his group, it was at the Palladium. I couldn’t go because I was married to Shuggie and he didn’t want me to go. I was living at Johnny Otis’s house. I snuck out, I was doing heroin with Cynderella and I snuck out the door. I looked really great at the time, I was really skinny, I had this black Puerto Rican wig on and this cinched waist, you know, this whole look going. We hadn’t rehearsed, we were doing “Mr. Sandman,” the old song, and they were doing “Jailhouse Rock” with Michael. The Dolls were on the bill and a whole bunch of people. I’m really, really stoned when we get on the stage. At the end of the night I threw up, I was so loaded. When I went home, Johnny Otis meets me at the door and says, “How could you do that to us, go on stage like that?!”
We were on the news, and I had told him we were going to a movie. He was really embarrassed. I remember that, a Cynderella trip. It was a GTOs reunion. We weren’t supposed to, but we came anyway. She said at one time, “Have you heard of this actor called Robert DeNiro?” I said, “No.” She goes, “That’s the only person I cheated on my husband with.” Later in New York, I thought, oh my God. She lied all the time, first she had a London accent, then she got this New Orleans accent later which I thought was funny because nobody knows a New Orleans accent better than me since my mother was from outside New Orleans and I’m a Fontenot. I guess Cynderella wanted to be, too. She had these fake accents and she made up these insane stories; it was great. Both Pamela and I love her, we really loved her. Cynderella died around ’98. Miss Sparky, she was a nice girl. She doesn’t talk to Pamela anymore. She’s fine, she’s still alive. She’s got a kid named Santa, married to an actor, Alan Bronstein. I always got along with her. She was a pretty little thing. She was not a junkie. She became a Disney artist. She broke away from us. She really doesn’t relate to this whole thing. Miss Lucy, Lucy is very dead, she died from HIV. She died about ten years ago, when I was going out with Arthur Lee. She was wonderful. She was a hooker, too. She was a great chick, a Puerto Rican. Her and I had the same boyfriend, Bernardo. That’s how we met each other. Throughout the years, we were friends. She’s just a real strong personality. She’s in 200 Motels, if you want to see her. She’s really cool, the pretty one with black hair. We were friends up until she died.
When did you start using the “Miss” in front of your names?
MF: I think Tiny Tim did that. He started the “Miss” stuff. He was going out with Cynderella. I mean, they just had a platonic relationship. He called her “Miss Cynderella” and we just all picked it up. We got called “Miss Christine,” “Miss Mercy.”
How did you get your name?
MF: I had that name since I was about fifteen. I just heard it one day and I loved it. It kind of related to “Have Mercy” by Don Covay, and a Stones song later. It’s just a black name and I related to black people. I heard it and wanted to be that person. I took it and I never looked back.
Because the GTOs were named for being outrageous, are there any specific memories that made the news back then?
MF: I got mentioned in Rolling Stone a lot. That was the news of the day because I kept getting in trouble and busted. Even when I worked. I worked for a lady manager for the Stax people like the BarKays and Rufus Thomas and all that. Everything I did basically ended up in Rolling Stone. They picked me as their favorite girl that year. What I did always ended up in the random notes. I made the Times down here when I popped out of a cake for Alice Cooper’s birthday in ’69. The Cockettes were the waitresses at this party. From a big cake, I was supposed to pop out nude. I took some angel dust and was in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel and I thought, this is where Bobby Kennedy was shot. Then I just flipped out, I was so high. Then when I popped out of the cake, I had all my clothes on. I took the cake and threw it. I hit people like Richard Chamberlain and some writer. But he wrote a letter thanking me, and that showed up on the front page of the calendar in the Times.
What are you doing now?
MF: I work with a charity thrift store as a production lead for one of the stores. You have to know antiques. I deal with vintage stuff and pop culture and stuff like that. Because I know what’s worth money from when I was homeless. I learned how to make money from the trash. I was homeless and a drug addict. You know, I went through all that. I learned how to turn things out. So I got my knowledge there.