Telling all with no regret

PAMELA DES BARRES has made a cottage industry out of kissing and telling in her memoirs, “I’m With the Band” and “Take Another Little Piece of My Heart,” and in “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” a greatest hits anthology of groupie trysts.

I can’t actually defend these scandalous chronicles, churned out from the periphery of rock history, at least not from a literary standpoint.

Not art? You got me.

But books like Des Barres’, written by women with some fringy relation to the rock world -- and I would include in that category other memoirs by girls-with-the-band such as Patti Boyd’s recent “Wonderful Tonight” -- are real chick lit, written by chicks with gloriously questionable morality, a flair not only for relationship drama but also shrugging it off, and a knack for respecting fellow females.

These books can range wildly in tone, from giggly to dark, dark, dark. But they’re all, in some weird way, honestly girlie.

Some may insist on pigeonholing Des Barres as a mere appendage or throwback. I’ll leave ‘60s nostalgia to my forebears, and the bands she beds (Led Zeppelin?) are, to me, so beside the point. She charms me every time she refuses to regret. And she regrets nothing.

Des Barres revels in celebrating the poppiest of culture. No ironic distancing from her Don Johnson obsession. Not even the time spent with eventual ex-husband, momentary Power Station front man Michael Des Barres, who also spent the last half of the ‘80s making villainous reoccurrences on “MacGyver.” Me, I’m embarrassed just to admit my brother watched that show.

If she constructed fiction rather than memoir, it wouldn’t work. It’s trash, but not trash as it is cynically concocted, rather as it is exuberantly lived.

-- Mindy Farabee