Groupies were a big part of rock ‘n’ roll culture. The term refers to young women who follow celebrities in hopes of having a sexual relationship with them. Lori Maddox would certainly fit that description with her apparent lifestyle of sex and drug addiction coupled with a strong obsession with celebrity rock and scooters. There was one issue that made it impossible for people to sweep her decision to be a groupie as her personal decision — she was only 14 at the time.
Despite the fact that she was incredibly young for the lifestyle, the rock ‘n’ rollers who ruled Las Vegas in the 1970s seemed just as obsessed with Lori Maddox. She loved the lifestyle of leaving home and living on buses to follow these stars and partake in their lavish lifestyle so well that she became almost as famous as the stars.
Who is Lori Maddox?
Lori Maddox was a young woman who knew nothing about Junior. It was in high school that she met Sable Starr, who was then considered the queen of the groupie scene. Starr was also an underage groupie, and she drew Lori Maddox into the world she had created for herself, one that included after-hours parties on the Sunset Strip. This is how Lori Maddox began her life as a groupie. She attended school like any other normal teenager on weekdays and afterwards met up with her sisters while they were still at home with their mother. However, on the weekends, she snuck out and went to clubs while her mother worked.
Relationship with David Bowie
She was a regular at seedy nightclubs run by much older men and it was in one of those nightclubs that she met David Bowie when she was only 15 years old. The name of the club where she met Bowie, who was eleven years her senior, was E-Club, which was notorious for ignoring underage girls’ use of hard substances. At first she wasn’t comfortable around Bowie, but five months later she lost her virginity to him.
Relationship with Jimmy Page
After David Bowie, she would get a call from Jimmy Page, the founder and guitarist of Led Zeppelin, the biggest rock band in the world, who was groupie gold. The rock star sent a limousine to pick her up after inviting her to his hotel. Page was twice Lori Maddox’s age, but she accepted his invitation and even fell in love further.
They had a mysterious and swirling relationship that was constantly cast in a negative light due to their age. The fact that she was underage also made it impossible to travel with the band, so Lori Maddox confined herself to Jimmy Page’s room and waited for him to return to her. This affected her life outside of the group and school, and her regular age-appropriate socialization suffered as a result.Jimmy Page eventually left Lori Maddox. One night she came back from a show to find him in bed with Bebe Buell. Discovering the rock star she fell in love with when she switched to another woman would change Lori’s entire attitude. Focusing on fun as the end point of her life as a groupie, she never sought love for rock and roller again.
With her new focus on fun, Lori Maddox would do drugs with Iggy Pop and then have sex with Mick Jagger in a bathroom, take photos with John Bonham, and even be in the middle of a fight between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. She had lost all previous restraint and the wild-eyed innocence she came onto the scene with. Despite the many negative views shared about Lori Maddox’s lifestyle, she has said she has no regrets and considers those years to be some of her best.
Lori Maddox and Sable Starr had documented their sexcapades with the rock ‘n’ roll legends of the 1970s in photographs that are a standard in rock ‘n’ roll history. 2000’s Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous both were immortalized, and though Sable Starr died of brain cancer at the age of 51, Lori Maddox is still alive and kicking during her groupie days.
