She danced at a club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. A hulking guy came up to her, almost two meters tall, almost 40 years old, and said to her: “You’re coming with me, young lady”. And she came with me. Maybe it was him who took her to the Hyatt hotel suite, maybe it was a roadie. Some call it so, others so. But what is certain is that Jimmy Page was waiting for her there. He had his hat pulled low over his face and a walking stick in his hand. “He looked like a gangster,” she recalls. “Great.” It was there, in the suite at the Hyatt, that Jimmy Page and Lori Maddox began their relationship. He is the then 28-year-old guitarist for the band “Led Zeppelin”, on tour through North America for the eighth time, she will be 14 in five months. The media call Lori Maddox a baby groupie.
Today, almost exactly 51 years after Lori Maddox was brought to Jimmy Page, it’s back to the hotel rooms of rock stars, to managers with very special tasks and of course it’s back to groupies. However, one thing is different: six years after the start of the MeToo movement, when the word groupies is mentioned, it is also about terms that were only of limited interest half a century ago: terms such as voluntariness, harassment and abuse of power.
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