Sweet Connie: A Legendary Rock Groupie

If the roads leading to a 1971 Steppenwolf concert at Barton Coliseum in Arkansas weren’t so clogged, Connie Hamzy may have never taken the road to rock ‘n’ roll infamy.  To beat the heavy traffic, Connie’s mother dropped her fifteen-year-old daughter off at the Coliseum’s front doors hours before the concert began. Once inside, Connie charmed her way backstage and consensually “visited” drummer Jerry Edmonton.  Her innocent Arkansan days were over.

Once she had a taste of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, she no longer needed car rides from her mother; groups like Mountain and the Eagles paid for her plane fare. In 2010, when Howard Stern asked her if the flights were to offer sexual favors, the perpetually good-natured Connie replied, “Well, of course! They don’t mean for me to be a flight attendant.”  In the 2010 documentary, I’m with the Band, Connie recalled her mile-high fling with Eagle Don Henley:

“I had my eyes closed, because that’s what you do when you’re making love, before feeling another set of hands on me, and it was the pilot. Then I realized, ‘Who could be flying this thing?’ Don tells me not to worry, it’s on autopilot. My only complaint is that they didn’t ask me how I felt. I mean, it can’t be safe to put the plane on autopilot, can it?”

Her drive to lead a life of rubbing elbows (and other bodily parts) with musicians started as she attended North Little Rock High School.  As she nonchalantly explained on The Joan Rivers Show, “In high school, not everybody can be a cheerleader on the drill team or in the Honor Society, so I found my niche going to concerts. My goal was to be a famous groupie.  People who think it’s strange are the people who have a hard time getting tickets to their show.”

Her fixation on rockers was celebrated when Grand Funk Railroad’s drummer Don Brewer celebrated her in “We’re an American Band.”

“Last night in Little Rock put me in a haze,

Sweet, sweet Connie, doin’ her act,

She had the whole show, and that’s a natural fact.”

Before this 1973 tune was released, Andy Cavaliere, Grand Funk’s manager, told her she was going to be in a song.  A few months after Andy’s phone call, Connie stated:

“Right after I graduated high school, me and some gals were laying out by Lake Number One in North Little Rock in Lakewood. I was on the beach tanning, and they were on floats swimming, and I had my transistor radio on.  I heard the DJ announce, ‘Folks, you’re not going to believe what we just got into the studio. It’s the new release from Grand Funk Railroad. And you know that dark-haired girl we see backstage a lot? Listen to the first few lyrics.”

Connie also found herself name-checked in a Guess Who ditty by Burton Cummings, “Pleasin’ for Reason.”

“Workin’ so hard, just to pass the time away,
Connie, my love, our movie was great, and so was the taste.”

Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen detailed their short-lived relationship in 1985 with “Standing on the Edge.”

But her competition found that getting close to musicians had its pitfalls. Connie said, “When girls find out what they’re in for — group sex, kinky sex, sex with other women, and usually all of it in one night — they chicken out. I didn’t. I felt as though I had arrived. I thought I was somebody.”

Connie, who estimated she “bedded” 700 to 1,000 rockers and their road crew, clearly marched to the beat of a different drum, which could be why her favorite musicians were drummers. She noted, “The drummers gravitated to me because they wanted to hear about John Bonham and Keith Moon.” And out of all the rockers she temporarily called her own, drummer Alex Van Halen was her “all-time best.  He could be very warm and affectionate.”

Of her time with Mick Fleetwood, Hamzy said: “We drank a lot of beer and did a lot of blow, and then it was time to head back to Little Rock and teaching school.”

Yes, Connie worked as a substitute teacher for twelve years in the Little Rock School District. In an interview for Little Rock’s KTHV station, Hamzy stated, “I can show you papers from the principals who asked for me. But I think after a while, the heat was just too much for them.”

In Connie’s memoir,  Rock Groupie: The Intimate Adventures of Sweet Connie: From Little Rock, she shared some raunchy recollections.  Huey Lewis compared favorably to guitarist Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, who bragged he had an “armadillo in his trousers.”

Peter Frampton was “the smallest. He’s only around four feet tall anyway.”  She also claimed that then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton propositioned her, and she had a wild one-night stand with the Allman Brothers: “I was with 24 guys.”

Connie admitted, “I did get attached to some of them. I fell in love with some of them. You build attachments. But it’s pointless. They are here today, gone tomorrow.”

Two years before her death from cancer at the age of 66, she stated, “I loved all of it, to tell you the truth. I’ve had a great life. I really have.”  Her cousin, Rita Ann Lawrence, concurred, telling the Associated Press, “Connie was a character. She was just a wild child, and she was really of that era, of the bands and all of that. That was her life, and she loved it.”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Grand Funk Railroad (fair use)