'Persepolis' meets Penny Lane in racy tell-all
The Last Living Slut: Born in Iran, Bred Backstage
By Roxana Shirazi
Igniter Publishing
336 Pages
The first rule of being a groupie is: Never fall in love with a rock star. Which is really contradictory, because the reason groupies become so in the first place is that they’re already in love with the whole rock star image, having swallowed it like the gallons of spunk unloaded down willing throats in backstage dressing rooms and trailers. Roxana Shirazi is one legendary rock enthusiast, following in the PVC-bootsteps of groupies-turned-memoirists like Catherine James, Morgana Welch and the original band aid, Pamela Des Barres, who penned I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. Unlike these women, who got caught up in the transitional, terrifying, and beautiful decade that was the ’60s — with the Pages, the Jaggers and the Morrissons of the era — Roxana hit her stride in the post-everything mid 2000s. While groupiedom will exist as long as there are dysfunctional families and tour buses, the rock stars of today tend to be yoga-practicing, poverty-eradicating humanitarians, or what Roxana would call effing wusses.
Still, there are the hairband holdovers and ’80s hangovers, aging Axls and their musically derivative descendants who stab at the glory days of bad old rock and roll with the ferociousness of an attack dog. Roxana’s first real band was a forgettable heavy metal punk group called Towers of London, but they were as tattooed, hairsprayed and drug-addled as any second-rate copycat band can be. While she claims to have gone on tour with Ratt, Whitesnake and Def Leppard, the closest she came to true rock royalty was when her ultimate teenage idol Axl Rose walked in on her in several compromising positions with Sebastian Bach and two of her groupie minions. She had always lusted after Nikki Sixx, but when she finally got around to having dinner with him, he was already all debauched out. The former Mötley Crüe lead singer wanted to enter his twilight years tending to his bushes — and by that we mean gardening.
But! What makes this sordid account of uncensured sexcapades really sizzle is Roxana’s writing. Beneath the hair extensions and corsets she purchases at Sluts R Us, the slivers of skirt and trite fishnet stockings, is an attuned, intelligent soul who just happens to have an unapologetically insatiable appetite. And, she’s Iranian.
Her early formative years were spent in a repressive and revolutionary Iran, with a deadbeat dad, an abusive stepfather and a neighbor or two who would molest the young and pretty Roxana. Even as a child she was sexually curious and would play doctor with the other male children in that still-innocent manner. She had a power over boys and she was aware of it, this Lolita in Tehran. Yet her memories of her homeland are warm and beautiful and full of love compared to the drab council flats of Manchester, where she was sent to when she was 10. In school, the racial slurs and bullying drove her to books and nerdiness. The exile to England irrevocably changed the dynamics of her family. Her mother, once an academic and activist, had to clean rich people’s homes, and her stepfather, who had owned a construction company, was forced to take on odd jobs.
After high school Roxana entered the underground as an exotic dancer, belly shimmying her way in strip clubs to support herself. She also went to university and studied English, and somewhere along the way she lost her virginity to a guy from Stereophonics. She was 24.
Vince Neil’s vice for the day is two bone-brittle blondes, the type whose eating disorders are just another accessory. It’s afternoon, high summer, and we’re indoors under the intestinal-tube fluorescent lights by Mötley Crüe’s dressing rooms at Download Festival. The reek of emo emanates from every corner as little boy bands slumber and lounge, all panda-eyed and girlie-haired. They are elfin boys with big ears and crayoned black liner proudly gunked on, who have scrawled angst and pain and I hate my parents on their striped tops. They pretend to be aloof on the steps of their porta-cabin dressing rooms, as if they don’t notice the detonating presence of rock royalty — Mötley Crüe.
By the time she was 30, Roxana was a scene queen, guaranteed all-access passes with her unflagging dedication to blustering glam rock and blistering eight-inch heels, as if the ’90s never happened. She had spread her legs for drummers, guitarists, singers, even roadies, and even — gak! — support bands. What makes her transgressive is that she is a total slag and she owns it, confronting the manwhores with their double standards and fake machismo. As a Foucault-reading graduate student who gives lectures on gender and identity, she coolly watches herself implode and degrade as she pushes herself even further over the edge. She’s the true rock star of the story, empowered in her sexuality, occasionally a victim of her own humanity, but ultimately the one who calls all the shots. Her vagina is an endless mawing beast, brutal as a drum beat, sinuous as a bass line and tireless as a Slash guitar solo. In a reversal of power, her boys, those poor musician boys are rendered helpless, worshipful, and spent. “I was too wild to just be a groupie,” Roxana says. “I’m too wild for the rules.”
