Music & Sex - Part Two: Rock Star Sex Gods
By: Adam Bunch
February 9, 2010
Read Part One: Let's Start at the Beginning, Shall We? here.
After a quick glance over her Wikipedia page, you'd be forgiven for assuming that in 1832, Marie Catherine Sophie de Favligny would have been a perfectly happy 27 year-old. She had been born the daughter of a French aristocrat, enjoyed the privilege of a good, religious education, and ended up a Countess at the age of 22 when she married Charles, the Comte d'Agoult. They had two daughters, lived in Paris, and before long, Marie would be finding her own independent success as a writer.
But in truth, she wasn't happy. By the end of that year she was miserable in her marriage, contemplating suicide and, it seems, looking for something more. Something that she would soon find in the person of the greatest pianist of all-time.
By all accounts, Franz Liszt was charming and charitable and devilishly handsome. Even in his later years, when his looks had faded and he'd developed an enormous facial wart, the effect he had on women was legendary. They would swoon when he came out on stage, literally falling at his feet. Some sent him telegrams, others camped out for days, or appeared around Paris falsely claiming to be his wife. One even reportedly followed him across Europe disguised as a man. He himself would later describe his life as "orgiastic".
Marie d'Agoult fell in love with him at first sight. She divorced the Count and would spend five years living with Liszt before she grew tired of his constant affairs. He was, according to the Telegraph, "the greatest sex symbol classical music has ever produced". He may very well have been one of modern music's first true sex gods.
Lords knows he wasn't the last.
"Musicians get laid A LOT," admits raunchy American singer-songwriter Har Mar Superstar when I ask him about the connection between music and sex nearly two hundred years later. "People often portray the musician to be as beautiful as the music. I'm not good looking in any classic sense, but the fact that I can sing and write a song that moves people makes them want to open up to me."
Watching him perform live, it's easy to see why. He might be short and round with a receding hairline, but his music clearly taps into the sexual potential that can be unleashed with the right combination of rhythm, melody, lyrics and performance. He doesn't hesitate to strip down to his underwear and do a headstand with his legs and crotch in the air while a baseline that could be part of a porn soundtrack plays as a backdrop to lines like, "Baby do you like my clothes?/ Cause I sure don't like yours/ Unless they're lying on the floor/ With your body next to me baby."
More often that not, it seems, the audience responds to Har Mar Superstar's over-the-top sexual displays with abandon, even though—or maybe even partly because—he doesn't have the looks of an Elvis Presley or a Frank Sinatra. It's clear that his lack of inhibitions onstage make the people watching him comfortable shedding some of theirs.
"My whole show is about getting everyone in the audience to let go of their real lives and go wild for a night," he agrees. "I think people see me move with wild abandon and they feel like they should too. I'm more of a ringleader than anything at that point. I don't consciously go on stage thinking ‘I'm going to fuck this audience,' but most of the time it just naturally happens."
That sexual connection between audience and rock star is something Pamela Des Barres knows a thing or two about, too. Her first autobiographical book, I'm With The Band, recounts her days as a groupie in Los Angeles, detailing her sexual relationships with a list of artists that includes Mick Jagger, Jim Morrsion, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, Waylon Jennings, Captain Beefheart, Chris Hillman and Noel Redding among others. And she knows exactly what Har Mar Superstar is talking about.
"I have always understood the connection," she explains over email, fresh off the road filming a documentary about groupies for VH1. "It was innate. From a very tender age I dove into Dean Martin's suave sensuality and Elvis's lush bump and grind, Mick Jagger's come-hither boasting... I still feel it in Jack White's razor ear-splitting yowls... Rock music naturally evokes pent up simmering feelings, creates lust and a special connection between the musician and the listener."
In her opinion, that combination gives rock stars a unique roll as sexual icons. "The attention paid to politicians and sports figures is entirely different," she says. "Even actors, novelists, etc. don't expose their innermost personal feelings the way musicians expose themselves in lyrics. You feel like you know them already."
For most people, of course, it usually ends there—or at most with some musically accompanied masturbation at home later. Reading Des Barres' autobiography, however, you can see how exactly that musical intimacy can lead to the sexual kind. One of her first groupie experiences was with Iron Butterfly frontman Darryl DeRoach and she frankly describes the feelings that prompted it: "I had a desperate need to show him how much I appreciated his stage persona and his songwriting abilities," she writes. "I loved feeling his forbidden flesh and smelling his sweet skin; I could close my eyes and imagine him shimmering onstage, and for those few moments I gave him back some of the intense pleasure he had given me so many times."
Sex, then, gave her a way to become more closely involved with the music and musicians that she loved. It was a supportive role she's still proud to have played.
"There have always been and will always be groupies," she says. "Many musicians admit they got into music for the chicks. Every man wants and needs attention and respect no matter what his chosen profession, but for the most part, musicians are extremely sensitive, wild and creative people. Groupies/muses provide that respect, honoring them for what they do and who they are. It's truly a give and take."
And that brings us all the way back to 19th century Paris.
Marie d'Agoult's relationship with Liszt went beyond that of your typical groupie and rock star—not only did they live together for five years, but they had three children as well—but the way she saw her role in his life wasn't a far cry from the way Des Barres describes her relationship with DeRoach. As Rupert Hughes wrote in The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, "[Marie d'Agoult] believed in the autocracy of genius, and felt that she recognised her mission in the world-to follow and aid this maker of music." She saw him as more than just an extraordinary pianist, encouraging him to spend his time composing. His experimental work with atonality and other unconventional techniques didn't win him as much critical respect from his contemporaries as his playing, but-in part thanks to his lover's encouragement-he wrote some of the most visionary compositions of his time.
Now, that kind of male-female relationship—one where a woman plays a sexually supportive role to a famous man—sounds like the kind of thing that would raise plenty of gender-equality-related red flags. In fact, it sounds like the kind of thing that would have modern feminists unanimously appalled. But, in fact, it's not that simple. And that's where we'll start in part three.
Continue with Part Three: Why Don't We Do it in the Road?. Or find more from Sex Week here.
Video: "Body Request" by Har Mar Superstar
