TMS Muse of the Week: Sally Mann Romano

(Henry Diltz)

If you’re a classic rock fan and have heard of the name ‘Sally Mann,’ you might know for decades she was always pushing the same insistence: “Don’t call me a groupie.” Today, Sally is on a farm in her native Texas with an ordinary life, but from the mid-1960s to early 1980s, Sally was one of the many lucky girls to be right in the middle of the prime of rock music. The dirty blonde first heard rock & roll as a second-grader when Elvis Presley played her hometown, Houston, in 1954; and ten years later she dropped out of college in Austin to jet over to California after the Beatles performed on “Ed Sullivan” in February 1964. Sally worked odd jobs from model to tour roadie and personal assistant to musicians, as well as moonlighting as a rather unconventional mother to a young son in the mid-20th century. At the same time as all this, she was experiencing some of the greatest pop, folk and psychedelic rock in music history as the significant other of legends including singer-songwriter-producer Frank Zappa, singer-pianist Richard Manual of the Band, guitarists Alvin Lee of Ten Years After and James Gurley of Big Brother & the Holding Company and most famously, her first husband, Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden. Two of Sally’s closest friends in the late 1960s were female rock icons, JA’s Grace Slick and BB&tHC’s Janis Joplin, and she got to witness both Woodstock and Altamont up front in person summer of 1969.

After spending a couple years in Hollywood where she mingled with the likes of Bob Dylan, the Dave Clark 5, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, the famous girlfriend discovered San Francisco was more her vibe. By 1967, she was a bonafide NorCal hippie alongside members of Airplane, Ten Years, Big Bro & the Holding Co, the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Life was a blissful, yet chaotic, mix of music, parties, traveling and romance for the Texan gal. But the world was introduced to Sally in what she considers a very unfortunate circumstance. In late 1968, the blonde was one of many young ladies who posed for a B&W photoshoot with popular magazine photographer Baron Wolman. During the shoot, Sally was under the impression she was modeling and being interviewed for an article about the growing hippie movement. That was, until she saw the January 1969 edition of Rolling Stone and learned she was featured in a whole issue on the rabid groupie phenomenon blowing up in major cities. While most of the girls profiled didn’t mind the label, Sally and now deceased fashion designer Jeannie/Genie Franklyn instantly rejected the association, claiming they were misled and insulted by how the articles were written. Genie personally sent a complaint to the Rolling Stone offices [which was unsurprisingly ignored], while Sally would rant about the way she was portrayed in most of her future interviews. Despite their disapprovals, both Sally and Genie were still included in the re-issued book versions titled Groupies and Other Girls in 1970 and Groupies and Other Electric Ladies in 2015.

(Henry Diltz)

As one might expect, Sally and Genie were offended by Rolling Stone’s groupie edition because the young women were portrayed as ditzy, promiscuous party girls just looking for a good time and wracking up a list of backstage sexual conquests. Sally has always insisted that she legitimately dated the male musicians she was associated with, and that she was personally involved with them beyond sex, as was the case with Genie according to both her friends and Baron himself. In Sally’s words, “You can’t be a groupie if you marry the musician.” Which she did, impressively, for a while. The flower child moved to San Fran right when Grace and Spencer were winding down their own personal relationship; and Grace would get involved with another JA bandmate, Paul Kantner, while Sally and Spencer met and fell in love. The two couples had their share of crazy adventures and turbulence, which included Sally gifting Spencer a boa-constrictor named National Velvet their first Christmas together; Sally almost losing Grace’s grandparents’ wedding rings; and Sally having to leave both Woodstock and Altamont early because of sudden nausea during the former and wisely getting a ‘bad feeling’ from the latter.

But as is usually the case with most of these rock stories, Sally became hooked on drugs and alcohol, and was divorced from Spencer in 1973. Her addictions unfortunately affected parenting her and Spencer’s son, Jesse, and her older son, Rory, from a previous relationship as well. Thankfully, Sally began turning her life around in 1985, when she decided to abandon sex, drugs and most of rock & roll for normalcy in Texas again. This included rekindling with her high school boyfriend-turned-second husband Rick Romano in 1987, reconnecting successfully with both of her grown sons, and becoming involved with law and animal rescuing by 1996. In 2018, Sally resurfaced publicly by writing and publishing a memoir on her wild youth cheekily called The Band’s with Me [with the addition of ‘Romano’ to her name to not be confused with the photographer also named Sally Mann] and occasionally participates on classic rock and 1960s themed interviews these days. As for the ‘G’ word, Sally was quoted as recently as a 2015 New York Times piece stating: “I never hated a word in the English language as much as I hated ‘groupie.’ The term is just stupid. I sounded like a complete moron in that article.” But nowadays on social media and during podcast appearances, Sally seems to have developed a sense of humor about the whole ordeal [i.e. life is too short to hold a grudge]. To conclude an interesting piece on a fascinating lady, I think Baron sums her up best: “Sally always considered herself one of the ‘Other Girls’, and I agree. There was a certain style about her, as there were with most of the women I photographed for that issue. But there was something else, too. Sally certainly didn’t behave like a groupie. She was reserved and confident and quiet. When she married Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane, she was a blushing, self-assured bride.”