#omg this took so fucking long to research/write/edit/double check

[idasessions]

Famous Muses & Groupies in Rock Music Pt. 3

GROUPIE: Lori Mattix/Maddox (modeling name Lori Lightning)

Researching this woman is honestly such a headache that I almost wasn’t even sure where to start….So I guess we’ll begin with everything we know to be definite fact. Lori was born on November 11th, 1958, and raised in Los Angeles with her single mother and three sisters. By the time Lori was in middle school, her mom (supposedly a talent agent or a waitress depending on the source) started signing Lori up for photoshoots in music magazines like Creem and Star (a vintage groupie rag, not the modern tabloid). In these photos, Lori was usually posing in skimpy outfits with fellow teen models and friends Sable Starr, Shray Mecham and Karen Umphrey to appeal to the rock music scene. From these modeling gigs and her friendships with baby groupies Sable and Queenie Glam, Lori very quickly spent nearly all her free time at clubs on the Sunset Strip from about 1972-75. She’s possibly the most profiled and interviewed baby groupie from back then, and still lives in LA running her own clothing boutique when she isn’t glamorizing her groupie days as ‘the best time ever’ or whatever.

[Note: this entry ended up three pages long….Good luck following this mess]

Besides this, everything regarding Lori’s reputation as a teen rock groupie gets very muddled and confusing. During an interview in 1985 with writer Stephen Davis for the sensationalist Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, Lori states that she was with Jimmy Page from 1972 to ’75 and he was the only rockstar she was involved with. But in Pamela des Barres’ 2007 groupie compilation Let’s Spend the Night Together, Lori claims she lost her virginity to David Bowie and Sable in a threesome before she met Jimmy, and that she hooked up with a ton of musicians. In the 2010 filmed version of Pamela’s book, Lori makes no mention of Sable being involved in her alleged incident with Bowie. In the 2004 documentary A to Zeppelin, Lori sloppily says she was “a vir—I mean come on, I was like a baby then,” when she met Jimmy. In a 2015 interview with the publication Thrillist, Lori claims she originally turned down Bowie after he propositioned her and didn’t sleep with him until 1973, even though she occasionally suggested that the incident was more likely to be late 1971 or early 1972. She also claims in this article that she continued to keep in touch with Bowie intimately for the rest of the decade, when previously she suggested it was only a one-night stand.

The people over at Medium penned a rather informative expose in 2016 on how inaccurate her stories are on her alleged hook-up with Bowie based on date history. Though it should be noted the piece doesn’t include that in the 1997 punk scene biography Please Kill Me, Sable participated in a rare interview where she revealed she and Lori did meet Bowie in 1973. But Lori got cold feet at the last minute, and only Sable ended up fooling around with the musician. The journalist of the Medium article also gives Lori a little too much credit on the legitimacy of her affiliation with Jimmy Page, as there are a lot of contradictions there too.

As has been reported by multiple sources, Jimmy infamously left his main US groupie Pamela des Barres for Lori while the three of them were partying on the Strip when Zeppelin was in Hollywood. Pamela usually says this happened at the Whisky a Go-Go in either 1972 or 1973. There is photographic proof of Jimmy, Pamela and Lori together at the English Disco that was originally credited on Getty Images as John Bonham’s 24th birthday party on May 31st, 1972. But the only problem is that the band was not in California the week of his birthday, and only played in the state for the last week of June. Zeppelin was however in Los Angeles on his birthday the following year, and the band’s hair and wardrobe in the party pictures match closer to how they looked in summer ’73 rather than ’72. The incident also seems more likely to have happened in ’73 as Lori was Jimmy’s date to a press event at the Continental Hyatt House sometime in June 1973. Both Jimmy’s and Lori’s hairstyles there are identical to how they looked in the English Disco photos as well.

On the 2007 DVD Way Down Inside, Lori says she first met Jimmy randomly at a pool party on the roof of the Hyatt House. In the Let’s Spend the Night Together documentary, she says she met him backstage at the Hollywood Palladium. In the book version and in Thrillist, she claims he personally called her house to introduce himself—but in LSTNT she says they first physically met clubbing at the Whisky before hopping over to the Hyatt House, while in the 2015 interview she says she met him in person at the Hyatt House and then they left to party at the Rainbow. In A to Zeppelin, she claims that Jimmy contacted publicist Lee Childers to set up a date for her to meet the band after he saw one of her photoshoots, rather than call her personally. On Instagram, Lori posted one of the photos of herself with Jimmy and Pamela at the English Disco with a caption stating that was the night she was introduced to Jimmy. If the two did meet backstage, it would have had to have been on either May 31st or June 3rd, 1973 when the band played the LA Forum, as LZ never performed at the Palladium. If he did set up a supposed date, it was probably the night he dumped Pamela. The pool party claim would also make sense, as the week Jimmy and Lori met, the infamous episode where Bonzo threw George and Pattie Harrison into a pool during his birthday party also happened. Except apparently this party was in Laurel Canyon, not at the Hyatt House, and Lori has never been name dropped in retellings of that story.

Besides the month of June in 1973, the only other confirmed time Jimmy and Lori were together is the week of May 10th, 1974, when Jimmy ditched her at the Swan Song label opening party in LA for older groupie Bebe Buell. Bebe went into detail in her 2001 memoir Rebel Heart, of how Lori became hysterical when she realized Jimmy was leaving her for Bebe. The model recalled Lori jumping her and wildly pulling her hair in anger at Bebe ‘stealing’ Jimmy from Lori. Lori conveniently leaves this accusation out when she talks about the break-up. So this is about four to five weeks in Los Angeles when Lori could have socialized with Jimmy, and quite possibly the only times they saw each other in 11 months.

In Hammer of the Gods, Lori asserts she was secretly on tour with the band for two years. Except that between June 1973 and May 1974, the band was only on tour for a month in July. In the novelized Let’s Spend the Night Together, she insists Jimmy arranged to have her visit him in NYC whenever he wasn’t in LA. Lori would eventually completely backtrack ever traveling as a teen and claim she only saw Jimmy when the band was in LA. In the Thrillist piece, she claims that they would travel back to Hollywood after every show and spent the whole summer of 1973 in the city. Not only did the band reportedly spend the last week of touring staying at NYC’s Drake Hotel, but journalist Lisa Robinson tagged along on this tour, and remembers LZ spending nights in a lot of major US cities. Lori’s also infamously said numerous times that she had to be kept locked up (either on tour or in his LA hotel room depending on the interview) while she was with Jimmy because she was underage. Seeing as how there are three different sets of famous party pictures of the pair posing together, taken by professional photographers and originally published the years they were shot, that doesn’t make much sense.

In both Hammer of the Gods and Way Down Inside, Lori says she was kidnapped by LZ roadie Richard Cole, who allegedly yelled at her to get into his car before taking her to Jimmy’s hotel room. In the Thrillist piece, she says Zeppelin manager Peter Grant was the kidnapper and he tossed her into their limo. In a Q&A Lori participated in after the premiere of Let’s Spend the Night Together in 2010, she suggests Jimmy himself kidnapped her. (In the same Q&A, Lori also says that Jimmy broke up with her when she was ‘16’ right after the FBI got involved with the band’s hotel safe theft in NYC. But this obviously isn’t true, as the FBI incident was only two months after she met Jimmy in 1973.) In A to Zeppelin, she makes no mention of any kidnapping and says she just followed him back to his room. Lori has also continually asserted that she and Jimmy spent the rest of the night in his room ~falling madly in love.~ 🙄

Lori says in the Thrillist piece that she had to hide when Zeppelin went back to LA after the FBI got involved in a theft from the band’s hotel safe in NYC at the end of July 1973. In Let’s Spend the Night Together, she erroneously states that the theft happened in 1975, right after she was flown out to visit Jimmy, and then quickly forced to go back home. But many biographies, including A to Zeppelin, report that the band just went back to England after the FBI episode without any mention of Lori. There are photos of Lori partying with musicians after the theft, but most of them are with Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls in LA.

It is also interesting to note that of all the pictures of Lori with musicians from 1973-75, the rockstar she was photographed with the most is Sylvain Sylvain of the NY Dolls. The two of them are even featured in the documentary All Dolled Up (2005) partaking in PDA in vintage 1973 footage. But funny enough, she’s never talked about Sylvain in interviews. Probably because all the photos and footage of them together were at the same time frame she knew Jimmy, and that disputes her story of how she and Jimmy were committed to each other the whole time they were together.

Other things that are likely fake/made up by Lori:

In most interviews, Lori claims that her mom gave Jimmy her blessing to go out with her teenage daughter because he didn’t have a criminal record and ‘wasn’t a terrorist.’ I mean…I guess this could be true, but it has to be the worst excuse I’ve ever heard of a parent letting her 14-year-old child date a man pushing 30.

In the Let’s Spend the Night Together book, Lori has a story of how Jimmy once saw her smoking a cigarette, then forced her to smoke a whole pack, and that made her never smoke again. Three months after Jimmy dumped Lori, she was photographed smoking at Keith Moon’s 28th birthday party, as well as in a personal picture from the early 1980s.

Lori likes to brag about how Robert Plant and Jimmy would dedicate concerts to her while she was with Jimmy, but within the 11 months they were familiar with each other, there were only two shows in LA. Both at the Forum on May 31st and June 3rd, and neither known bootleg recordings of either show feature any shout outs to her.

Lori has gone as far as to say that when she was in LA and Jimmy was back in the UK, he would call or write her every day. Seeing as how in 1973-74, Jimmy was in another country writing, recording and producing songs on the album ‘Physical Graffiti;’ living with model Charlotte Martin and their daughter Scarlet; and having an additional affair with Krissy Wood, he might have been a bit too busy to include some teen halfway across the world. Lori also claims that Jimmy had to choose Charlotte over her because they had a toddler together, and that he would be a jerk to Charlotte to prove he loved Lori. (Never mind the fact that Lori simultaneously calls Jimmy the ‘sweetest’ man ever.)

Some articles and blog posts state Lori and Jimmy got back together for a while in the ‘80s, but this conflicts with Jimmy’s own relationship history as there were only two years in between his separation from Charlotte in 1983 and the meeting of his first wife Patricia Ecker in 1985. On top of that, whenever he would visit the US in the ‘80s when he wasn’t with Charlotte or Patricia, he was usually with a photographer named Ashley Hamm. (Could this man be anymore promiscuous.) A few times, including in Thrillist, Lori has said she still keeps in touch with Jimmy. Yet he has never mentioned her publicly and there have never been any personal photos of them together, such as on Lori’s social media, where she’s posted photos of herself reuniting with Pamela, Rodney Bingenheimer, Robert and Sylvain in modern times.

A lot of LZ books and posts state that the song ‘Sick Again’ is about Lori and her fellow baby groupie friends. This…actually is true, but the tone of the lyrics is intentionally sarcastic as Robert was known to be one of the few rockstars that era not interested in teen girls. He even said in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview that he felt sorry for the Star girls revolving their lives around how many celebrities they could meet.

TL;DR: Lori was a real, legit groupie in the mid-1970s. There are enough pictures of her with dozens of celebs and other groupies to vouch for that. Feel free to judge these adult men for getting involved with teenagers, they mostly deserve it. But it’s also pretty obvious this woman was not in serious, long-lasting, or romantic relationships with any of these rockstars and just likes being famous, no matter what context. (And she is a terrible, terrible storyteller).