Mercy Fontenot

Mercy Fontenot ran away to the Haight-Ashbury at sixteen in 1965. In 1967, citing that the Haight was getting boring and she couldn’t stay a hippie forever, Fontenot moved to Los Angeles, where she met Frank Zappa and Pamela Des Barres and fell in with the GTOs, an all-female band whose album Permanent Damage was released in 1969. The two songs she wrote for the band were eventually recorded by Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, and Lowell George. In the late-70s, after marrying and divorcing Shuggie Otis, she reinvented herself, doing punk hair and styling for bands like the Rockats and Gears and then influencing the roots-rock scene. After falling on hard times, she finally got sober and wrote her story. Permanent Damage is her memoir, published posthumously in 2021.