“They treated us like goddesses.”
That’s how one groupie from the golden age of rock hedonism remembers the devotion lavished on the young women and girls who chased and caught their idols, if only for a moment.
The hyper-romanticism and erotic heat of that era were conjured on Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Room, where the singer and actress Lauren Fox unveiled her haunting, thoroughly researched and deeply personal cabaret show, “Groupies — The Muses Behind the Legends of Rock & and Roll.”
The show interspersed excerpts from interviews and memoirs with hushed low-key performances of rock classics inspired in part by these liaisons. Anyone might question the degree to which this headstrong female tribe, many of whose members knew one another, confused “goddesses” with “conveniences,” but Ms. Fox withheld judgment. She occupied a middle ground between star and fan, speaking for both. An unabashed admirer of these adventurers, she sees them as hardy pioneers in the sexual revolution.
We hear the story of Lori Maddox, who had an affair with Jimmy Page while in her teens, and the British model Pattie Boyd, who married George Harrison and later Eric Clapton. Ms. Fox untangles the romantic histories of the Rolling Stones and their women, and the internecine hookups among members of Fleetwood Mac.
Ms. Fox is best known for her show “Love, Lust, Fear, & Freedom: The Songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen,” which tells the history of their affair mostly through their songs. And in “Groupies,” she brings the same gravity and insight to Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California,” Stevie Nicks’s “After the Glitter Fades” and “Storms,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses.” Barefoot, in a hippie gown, she exuded a smoldering charisma while singing the material in a reflective folk-pop style that occasionally broke out into a cry.
The most surprising musical moment was her rendition of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” accompanied only by bass. In the show’s most beautiful moments — “Wild Horses,” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” — Ms. Fox and her musicians harmonized in the style of Crosby, Stills & Nash. The lean, finely sculpted arrangements of Ms. Fox’s drumless band (Jon Weber on piano, Ritt Henn on bass and Peter Calo on guitar) added to the evening’s hushed elegiac air. It was all so long ago.
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