In addition to the famous song, this is also the name taken by the young groupie, aka band aide, played by Kate Hudson in the recent movie Almost Famous. I wondered, as I allowed (against my better judgement) my daughter to watch that movie yesterday, how many Penny Lanes in real life wound up jetting off to Morocco, with perfect hair and that unfiltered smile, after their stint as plaster casters?
I saw this whole movie happen in real life, and I can tell you that it is sanitized beyond belief. Not that I didn't enjoy either the movie or the real life, but I enjoyed the movie as Hollywood escapism with just a hint of a reality I used to know: Not as a representation of that reality. Lester Bangs was cool, but he wasn't that damn cool. Rolling Stone was crucial to the era, but it was being run neither that stupidly nor that efficiently. Most importantly, the groupies and the bands didn't wind up all shiny happy people at the end.
Did it all seem glamorous to you as you watched it? Even the drug overdoses somehow lead to a higher reality. No one dies. I can tell you for a fact, people died. Instead of following the Stillwater group, he should have had his little reporter follow a group called the Allman Joys.
Like Stillwater, they had a hot guitar player who was so far ahead of the rest of the group musically that it was like an inside joke. However, unlike Stillwater's lead guitarist who jumps from the roof and just gets . . . wet, the guitarist in the Joys could do something like, (I don't know), get addicted to heroin and cocaine and kill himself by slamming his motorcycle into a truck.