Jo Jo Laine, nee Joanne Lapatrie

I recently downloaded a song from 1964 on I Tunes.  It led me down a rabbit hole, or perhaps through the looking glass, searching for a woman who died eight years ago.

Here’s how it happened.

The song that launched this research project was the Moody Blues’ “Go Now.” I’ll never forget Denny Laine’s performance on national TV when “Go Now” was a Top 40 hit. In the middle of the song, he suddenly used one finger to jerk his eyebrow up and down with a quick vibrato-like movement.  It was bizarre and quirky, and I wondered at the time why he did it. I still wonder.

Jo Jo Laine, nee Joanne Lapatrie

I fell to musing on Denny Laine’s brief tenure with the band which went on to such success without him. That led me to research him on Wikipedia. There I learned he’d married someone named Jo Jo Laine. She has her own Wikipedia article. So I clicked on over to it.

Jo Jo, nee Joanne Lapatrie, is variously described as a model, singer and actress. She's also described as a groupie in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1952 or 1953, she was of my generation, only a year or two older than I. That was intriguing, so I ventured on, plodding through many web pages on various sites.

I’ve now invested an appalling amount of my precious time researching this woman’s life and likeness. I have gone so far as to purchase The McCartney Files by Bill Harry (Virgin Books Ltd, 1986, 192 pages). It contains information on Jo Jo because of her link with Wings through Denny Laine’s tenure with that band. According to The McCartney Files, Jo Jo sold her memoirs to the British tabloid Sunday People.  They include titles such as “My Galaxy of Pop Star Lovers” and “Lust at First Sight” and were published on April 17, April 18 and May 1, 1983. 

Oddly enough, one of those Sunday People articles was published on the day my daughter was born. As a father, it saddens me to read of Jo Jo losing her virginity to Jimi Hendrix at the tender age of 17, and cavorting with the swinish Jim Morrison when she probably wasn't much older. That’s just a sample of what you’ll find if you read through the links below.

I don’t like to think of her three children reading these things about their mother on the Internet. But by today’s standards, what she and other groupies did in those days isn’t so bad. True, they had one-night stands with musicians. That isn’t much worse than the casual sex and naked photo messaging that seems so widespread among young people today.  My guess is plenty of today’s girls don’t wait until age 17 to lose their virginity. Certainly 1960s groupie behavior pales in comparison to what porn stars do for money. And it seems porn is almost everywhere these days, even on DirectTV.

After all this research, I have to wonder how much of what I’ve read about Jo Jo Laine on the Internet is rumor, exaggeration, or simply made up. The 1983 Sunday People articles are probably the source for much of what one finds about her online. If I could only get my hands on those articles... At the rate I’m going, no doubt I’ll do that soon. 

Of the links below, the Daily Telegraph obituary is probably the most reliable.  Only Jo Jo knows the truth, but she left this mortal coil in 2006. Her accidental death from falling down a flight of stairs is strangely similar to that of Sandy Denny, a woman of the same times with the same weakness for drink. Here is yet another person of my generation, done in by substance abuse. It’s very sad. 

Links:

• Obituary - Daily Telegraph, November 4, 2006
• "Queen of the rock chicks" - Daily Mail, October  30, 2006 
• "Jo Jo Laine: original rock chick and super-groupie" - The Scotsman, November 2, 2006 
• " 'Rock chick' Jo Jo Laine dies after falling down the stairs" -  Daily Mail,October 31, 2006
• Jo Jo Laine - Wikipedia