So Just Who is Pennie
Lane Trumbull Really?
Is the real “Penny Lane”’s name even really that? The woman known as Pennie Lane Trumbull (or Pennie Ann Trumbull) has filled in many of the blanks of her time as a groupie in the seventies, but it still remains unclear whether or not her calling card was a nod to the Beatles’ ode to a Liverpool road or complete coincidence. She claims that the implied nickname emerged in her childhood, stemming from her flaming red hair, yet the one extant photo of her from those days, by Jack Luxon, shows a much more flaxen head, and it appears natural or bottle-blonde in most recent photos. Sometimes it is said to have been her birth name; some places, it’s spelled “Pennie Anne”.
Jack Luxon’s possibly legendary photo, sourced from Oregon Wine Press
Then again, the woman Cameron Crowe cites as the key inspiration for Kate Hudson’s character in his film Almost Famous feels no need to let loose about her wild-child so-called heyday. “She believes that her personal life is, well, personal,” reads her website. “She never believed in selling her memoirs, although she has been asked. She just doesn’t kiss and tell!” To this day, while Trumbull remains cited as one of the stadium-rock era’s most prolific groupies, the exact extent of her exploits remains deliberately shrouded — though we do know she did share a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin La Grande Dame with the blokes from Queen. Yet her name is deliberately absent from even the loosest rock memoirs. Everything that Trumbull does, it seems, is deliberate. And to her benefit: her personal success in life remains entirely her own to celebrate on her own terms, without the butting-in of tabloid rumor.
Too, Trumbull herself recognized the “mystique” that her past persona carried, what she calls “the illusion of Pennie Lane”: “The finality of a name contains an identity, but when you have a secret identity there is no certainty... anyone can be Pennie Lane.” There was, however, only one Trumbull.
Despite her involvement in a variety of sports — she had raised horses since the age of thirteen — Trumbull wasn’t a part of the popular crowd at Portland, Oregon’s Roosevelt High. In considering her virginity, she found it silly to lose it to “a guy from my high school” anyway: “I thought, ‘My virginity is important because I’m not going to wait until I get married. I’m not going to just throw it away.’ I want to make it memorable for myself.”
She found her opportunity as a result of a run-in with Hugh O’Sullivan, a keyboardist touring with Steppenwolf, at a Three Dog Night gig. Music was always a passion of Trumbull’s, for as long as AM radio flowed through the barn as she took care of her horses, so her being there was a natural occurrence. Her interaction with O’Sullivan, however, threw her into a life she could have never anticipated; it led to her house-sitting for a weekend — she told her folks she was attending a horse show — followed by her spending four weeks living with him in Los Angeles. Upon returning to Portland, her groupie lifestyle ignited following her failure to make the Olympic equestrian team, a means of keeping in contact with the many famous names who passed through O’Sullivan’s home. Though she may not have been perceived as anything special within the confines of her high school, “musicians didn’t care if we were prom queens,” says she — as juvenile as they could be in their behavior around women.
Thankfully, Trumbull didn’t have too many run ins with the “boorish... unpleasant... egotistical... condescending” types, and if someone wasn’t kind to her, she simply turned in the other direction; she steadfastly insists that she was no victim. Her natural business-savvy came into good use in her approach to groupie-dom, resulting in her spearheading her own groupie conglomerate, the Flying Garter Girls. “They came from totally different economic backgrounds,” she said of the four other teenagers who formed the group: “some of their parents were on welfare. They were from all parts of the city; I would’ve never met them, our paths would have never crossed. But we were the girls who were in front of the stage screaming our heads off because we were so into the music and that’s how I met every one of them.” Trumbull rocked vintage garb from the forties, while the others upkept more traditionally “glitter rock” styles: “We looked different and we looked together. And we were.” While one member of the group eventually developed a drug habit after entering a relationship with “a well-known American rock musician”, the Girls otherwise followed Trumbull’s abstinence from drugs and alcohol; she was a stickler against substances, owing to her athleticism. She also ensured they kept up good grades and graces in the ‘real world’: “we all did our homework before we went to concerts. I kind of had it under control because I knew if I didn’t it would fly so fast, it would go the other way and we would all be in trouble.”
Trumbull was also very wary of the potential for heartbreak, becoming extremely against the prospect of seeking long-term relationships with musicians; one can only wonder how much of this outlook was influenced by O’Sullivan’s telling her that “if I was going to be part of this rock and roll world, I couldn’t sleep with the promoters or the guys in the band. I needed to respect myself first and then everyone else would respect me too.” In many interviews, she slyly thumbs her nose at those girls who dreamed of getting hitched to a rock star — or, hell, even just merely finding love at all in the scene’s dredges. The goal, Trumbull insists, was to “have a great time for a few years — and then we’re gonna go off and get married to somebody normal and have a white picket fence” — an ideology one step removed from the sneers of (oftentimes female) tour insiders towards what they perceived as teenaged dreams of castles in England. Unlike her Texan spiritual successor, Margaret Moser, Trumbull has kept her lips zipped as to any struggle she may have experienced in upkeeping such supposed professionalism — though given her eventual personal success, comparable to the institutional status Moser acquired in the Austin music scene, it appears that regardless of what she may have experienced, her inner strength and authentic soul kept her all in one piece.
The business mentality also manifested in more literal ways among the Garter Girls: in lieu of business cards, they passed on gold satin matchbooks with their logo and contact information. Trumbull even hosted sit-downs with promoters, promoting to them the benefits of having “the finest women” backstage at a given show: “we would look good, we would not be drunk or high, we would stay out of their way and the way of the crews... We shook hands. It worked.” (The negotiations always included a reserved parking space: “it rains a lot in Oregon and we had our hair to worry about.”)
Three pages of journalist-turned-screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s memoir are dedicated to his interaction with Trumbull after a Lee Michaels show; they’d first met through rock photographer Neal Preston. He describes her as “extremely personable... A whiff of sadness was mixed with her infectious confidence.” The scarves-a-flying implied-orgy scene in his film Almost Famous would take inspiration from when two other Garter Girls, who he names as Theresa and Annette — Trumbull’s website names the others as Meg, Sandy, Camille, and Julia — overtook his hotel room (“One of them leaned over. ‘Wanna get seduced?’… Pennie herself left the room before participating in any of this, but she was clearly the ringleader who blessed their endeavor. She had exited with a trace of laughter and a little mystery”). He does not mention, however, that Trumbull herself was “taking Journalism 101 at Portland Community College” at the time: “he really did look like that little boy in the movie,” she told Vice. “He was totally in over his head, and my heart burst for him. We were both in Seattle to meet up with the Led Zeppelin tour, but they were delayed and I only had two days before I had to go home. So I spent it with Cameron running around town and having fun. We went up the Space Needle one-hundred times, and talked endlessly about music and life. I knew then that he was very special, and he was going to go far. And I told him so.”
By the time Trumbull was twenty, she had “met everyone that I totally admired” and the satisfaction she and her friends felt naturally dissolved the Garter Girls after a good three years. She moved to San Diego to attend college at Cal State Northridge on a fencing scholarship, working her way up to a masters degree in business and marketing, which she earned at Alliant International University. She’d form a marketing company of her own, citing her groupie experiences, such as watching the music business from afar through friendships with managers and promoters, with priming her for the “old boy’s club” of business. Private jets and “egotistical bosses” left her nonplussed: “You just realize that they’re only men. They get up in the morning and put their pants on like everybody else and I just was not impressed. I was impressed if they were ethical in business and they were leaders and they were fair, there were things like that that totally impressed me... But a lot of them were really squirrelly.”
She would eventually marry one Mink Stavenga, who has served as the dean of numerous California colleges’ business schools over the past few decades, though they divorced after ten years together. She would move back to Portland to take care of her ill parents, eventually starting life anew on Sauvie Island, where they had past carved out a homestead. She would build a ranch there in the nineties, hosting business conferences and parties for accomplished friends tucked away in the Rocky Mountains; one particularly stellar photo taken for the Oregon Wine Press’s profile of her shows her taking a call and browsing her laptop in front of her ranch, seated in business clothes at a full desk. In the backdrop one can spy her “staff: horses Andy and Ellie, and Milo the leaping dog — compliments of friend and film director Gus Van Sant.”
Trumbull was and still is very protective of her privacy. In regards to her decision to withhold her surname from her interview for the 2005 book Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture, she wanted “to maintain a good relationship with her neighbors and their children and [believed] that her groupie past would interfere with that,” wrote author Lisa L. Rhodes. Trumbull was further concerned about her Greatest Generation parents learning of her exploits. Her choice was not all positive — she was quite nonplussed when Bebe Buell, another woman Crowe ran into on the road, “had the balls to go CBS’ Good Morning and say she was the real Pennie Lane” while promoting her memoir, Rebel Heart, which infamously surpasses pure salaciousness and enters the realm of the fantastical.
Trumbull was the opposite; she didn’t like the idea of being open about interactions that meant to much to her, that were grounded in “admiration” over anything else: “that guy wrote a song that you listen to those words over and over and you relate to them so much and you think, ‘God, he’s just like me, we have something in common. I want to talk to him about it.’”
Her real identity would appear, in part, in Crowe’s film. When he called her to reconnect during the filming of Almost Famous, she permitted the use of her surname in the title of one of the instrumentals written for the film — if it were misspelled. But when she eventually bought the soundtrack and “realized the song ‘Lucky Trumble’ was named for me, and I saw my last name misspelled, I had a pang of sadness in my heart.” Listening to the song on repeat while taking a walk, however, affirmed to her her deeply-rooted gratitude in being able to leave such a cultural impact: “[The song] was written with love, but also with amazing generosity. I remembered what it was really all about and then I was humbled for being given such a priceless gift.”
Sourced from PDXMonthly.com
Trumbull has become more open about her groupie past in recent years, crediting Crowe’s film with helping ease social stigmas surrounding such activities. Having always been so secretive about her activities even during her groupie heyday, she was surprised to receive emails of young women who admired her character. She has since fleshed out some un-salacious aspects of her story in interviews and privately joined her Garter Girls for a twenty-year reunion: “Some [of the Girls] started businesses, others had families... Special friends like the Doors’ manager flew in to join us, bands sent telegrams, champagne and gifts. It was a three day celebration.” (A few of them brought along their current partners, not that they knew of the full extent of their past lives.)
Trumbull has also remained on the outskirts of Almost Famous’s orbit, participating in a Q&A after a 2014 screening of the film’s director’s cut and a late 2020 charity discussion with Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres; both were held in Portland. She also attended the opening night of the film’s musical adaptation at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater in 2019, hanging with not just Crowe but Joni Mitchell. Actress Solea Pfeiffer, preparing for the role of Penny Lane upon the show’s transfer to Broadway, even visited Trumbull on Sauvie Island for chat about “music, gender and power, and the difference between a hanger-on and a muse,” claimed the New York Times.
How droll! How serious! How correspondent with the film’s use of the term ‘groupie’ as a slur in contrast with the virtuous, superior ‘band-aid’! But any interview with Trumbull proves that she never lost her sense of humor. In an interview from around the time of Almost Famous’s release, she calls her farm — which is currently for sale following a move to California’s Balboa Island — a “rock and roll ranch”, quipping that she sought to transform it into “a retirement home called the Raisin Ranch for aging rock stars and wayward groupies. We’re all gonna be deaf because we didn’t wear earplugs.” The name presumably derives from her support of the island’s wine industry; now a bonafide wine buff, she was first introduced to the spirit upon her move to Los Angeles by the father of her best friend, future Garter Girl Meg — “His theory was that if we got used to fine dining, we would expect the best from the men we were dating!” She maintained the private wine label Swallows, using her connections to lobby for local growers and participating in the Sauvie Island Community Association. When asked about “what rock song best sums up wine” in 2011, she replied, “Well, perhaps it sums up what happens when you drink an especially good wine: ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin.” And as for the name of her label? “What do you do when you taste wine? The most basic answer is that you either spit or swallow. We have all reached that moment of indecision, when we are holding that wine in our mouths — tasting, examining, wondering. Then a little voice asks, is it worth it? And if you can’t resist, you swallow.”
Sources: PennieLane.com; OregonMusicNews.com; Time via TheUncool.com; Chicago Tribune; Michael Walker’s What You Want is in the Limo; Vice.com; PDXMonthly.com; Oregon Wine Press.