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.
Lyndsey Parker is the music editor at Yahoo Entertainment and co-host of the daily SiriusXM Volume show
Volume West. Considered an expert in music and pop culture, Parker is an Online Journalism Award nominee and has written for
Elle,
MOJO,
Rolling Stone,
NME, and
Guitar. She has appeared as a commentator for the ABC special
The Show Must Go On: The Queen + Adam Lambert Story, AXS TV's
The Top Ten Revealed, and the documentary
I Want My MTV, as well as for VH1's
Behind the Music, CNN, MTV, The Insider, and Good Day L.A.. She is the author of
Careless Memories of Strange Behavior: My Notorious Life as a Duran Duran Fan (one of the first e-books published as part of Rhino Records' all-digital music book series, which went to #1 on the iTunes Music Books chart).