I think I was stumbling on the weird side of youtube (you know, that one), when I discovered the GTO's. The tone deaf voices, weird-ass lyrics about talking cones with fluorescent lime green pants, the music was just so enchantingly gaudy and whimsically campy. Yet despite the strangeness, The GTO's were also innocent and naive. It sounds like a bunch of teenage girls at a sleepover founded their dad's tape recorder and decided to make a 30 minute album. Needless to say I fell in love with the band immediately.
To give a little background, The GTO's (Girls Together Outrageously) was a project created by Frank Zappa that involved putting a bunch of well known groupies from the Sunset Strip, with basically no musical training or skills (I mean that in a loving way), into a recording studio and recording their stoned ad-libbed conversations and songs. There debut album was called "Permanent Damage".
The peasant skirts, feathers, ruffles, psychedelic floral patterns, flower crowns, this is basically 60's fashion porn for me. Their style seemed to always walk that line between random shit they found at a thrift store and theatrical costumes meant for fairies.
The most famous member of The GTO's is Pamela Des Barres, mostly due to her books such as "I'm with the Band" in which she recounted her youth as a groupie in the late sixties. It's not hard to see why she why she had such a successful career.
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| She also has a tendency to spread her legs in photo shoots |
I highly recommend checking them out and reading about them, the whole album is available on youtube.
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